If only Rowan didn’t find it soendearing. “You called?”
“Lavinia wants you married.”
He’d been right. He’d been summoned because he refused to be leg-shackled. “I do not want to be married.”
“You will be thirty next month. It’s about damn time you choose a wife.”
“I have a hotel.”
“You can’t provide grandchildren with a hotel, Rowan.” The admiral slammed back the whisky. “Lavinia wants grandchildren. All her friends have them.”
“Tell her to go to a shop and buy one.”
The admiral’s eyes narrowed.
And Rowan discovered he could still feel fear. He tugged at this cravat. “A joke. I’d never tell Aunt Lavinia anything of the sort.”
“That’s right you wouldn’t.” The admiral snorted, eyed the amber decanter at the center of the gutted globe. Instead of pouring more into his empty cup, he snapped the crystal down on the table next to him. “At least meet the girls she’s befriending for you. She says you’ve failed to show up every single time she’s arranged a meeting. Every damn time, Rowan. It’s beginning to feel like insubordination. Disrespect. Foryour aunt.”
Not his aunt. Not by blood. Though Rowan loved her well enough for one. The admiral had taken him in after his father’s death when he’d had nowhere to go but into the deep, unforgiving sea. He’d been motherless from the age of ten and found himself four years later in the arms of an admiral’s wife who treated him like a son. She had no other, after all.
“I would never disrespect her.” But he had been stubborn these last months. “Courtship is a distraction.”
“Then get it over with, get a wife, and get back to work.”
“I’m in the middle of acquiring several different locations, inns along the Great North Road and along all major roads leading out of London in all directions. I’m too busy to woo anyone but an innkeeper by the name of Barlow who’s proving particularly stubborn about selling.”
The admiral rose to his feet, chin somehow leading the way as he snapped his jacket edges straight when they’d already been perfectexamples of the geometrical precision of a military man. “Find time. Please your aunt. When she’s happy—”
“We’re all happy.” Rowan stood, too, and didn’t even stiffen when the admiral’s bayonet-straight posture softened, and he wrapped Rowan in a hug.
Sometimes, the sun didn’t blind him. And sometimes, hugs weren’t preferable only to torture. He slapped the admiral’s back and stepped out of the embrace.
“I’ll consider it.”
“You do that. Think of it as one of your tasks to be ticked off a list. Go about it like business, boy, and secure a union. Your aunt will not steer you toward an unpalatable lady. Trust her. She wants love for you, naturally, but… I don’t think it necessary. Yet.” He hunched his shoulders as he fell back into the chair behind his desk. “I know well how easy it is to love Rowan Trent once he lets you.” He pretended to tidy the already pristine desktop.
And Rowan sped for the door. “I’ll consider it.”
“Say hello to your aunt before you leave. She’s in her sitting room.”
Rowan shrugged off the emotion as thick as the sunlight in the admiral’s study and made for Aunt Lavinia’s sitting room. Before he reached the door, he heard the voices. His aunt’s and another woman’s, muffled but rich and sweet like honey.
Honey was too much like sunshine. He’d visit Aunt Lavinia later. Right now, he needed to return to Hestia. He expected a letter from the owner of the Blue Sheep Inn today. Hopefully, Rowan’s last epistle would prove more convincing than the two before it.
The letter was waiting for him on his desk when he returned. His study was part of a suite of rooms that spanned the entire top floor of Hestia. Every curtain remained tightly closed, blocking out even the hope of a bright outline around the green velvet. Candles lined the walls, just enough to give off light, not enough to banish the shadows.
His study boasted the low light of a constant fire in the grate and a single candle on his desk for reading. And the letter he’d been waiting for, stark in the small pool of candlelight, wasn’t alone. Another winked at him from the uncluttered top of his desk. One on the creamiest, thickest parchment, its dark ink elegant and even. Theother on thin, rough paper with sharp, scratchy figures and blots in the margins.
He sat with a small grin, recognizing the seal smudged into the thick parchment first. Aunt Lavinia. He should have stopped to chat with her. Whatever she’d written here would likely pinch at the smallest speck of guilt lodged between his ribs. But he opened, and he read, and he rubbed at his ribs when the guilt pinched before tossing the letter aside and opening the other. Just as he’d thought. From Mr. Barlow, the owner of the Blue Sheep.
Curiously, and despite their differences, both letters asked the same thing of him.
Marry.
The same thing the admiral wanted him to do. Three calls to the same task in a single hour.
And now he knew accepting that call might well serve a purpose after all. He reread the second letter. Mr. Barlow saw himself in a complicated position. He wished to retire. He wished to sell his inn. He had a buyer willing to pay what he asked and more. In gold. Not in marriage. But marriage was what the man wanted. His inn to go to a family man who would run it as he’d run it the past several decades. There was another potential buyer. Married with children.
