“I do now.”
“Hyde Park will be packed. It’s the ideal place for some early reconnaissance.”
He’d told Lu and Freddie that he’d take them for an outing on Sunday afternoon, so why not the Park? He supposed it couldn’t hurt to mix business with pleasure.
Although upon further consideration, he wasn’t sure either his siblings or his incipient entrance onto the Marriage Mart really deserved the label ofpleasure.
Business with business, maybe? Family with business? Alarming familial responsibility of overwhelming magnitude with additional alarming responsibility slightly offset by the possibility of regular tupping?
“How about a picnic?” he said. “I’ll have someone pack us something.”
“Even better,” said Selina.
She rose, and he was quite certain now that he was dismissed.
Chapter 6
… The truth of it is—I love the children. I don’t know how else to say it. I love Stanhope’s brother and sister. I want the three of them to be a family. Why does love have such a way of leading one into trouble? (And don’t think I don’t mean you!)
—from Selina to Faiza, again
He lured Freddie with the picnic basket and Lu with the promise of more Selina Ravenscroft.
“Are there cream cakes?” Freddie asked, trying unsuccessfully to peek into the basket.
“I have no idea,” Peter said. “But there’s a cake house in the Park if you’re unsatisfied by my cook’s offering.”
“I still don’t understand why I couldn’t bring my rapier,” Lu said sulkily.
“Because it doesn’t go with your dress.”
She scowled up at him. “Then I should have worn breeches.”
“When we get to Rowland House, we’ll ask Lady Selina how she dressed when her fencing master attended her.”
Lu sat back, accepting the suggestion with unexpected equanimity.
They all jumped down when the carriage reached Rowland House—Lu disdaining the hand he offered her, of course—and crowded up under the white portico at the front of the residence.
Freddie was blinking at the honey-colored brick and gridded Palladian windows with no little amazement. “This is someone’s house?” he said. “Not a church?”
Lu rolled her eyes. “It’s just a house, Freddie.”
“Can we go inside? I want to see what it looks like inside.”
“I suspect we can,” Peter told him.
Rowland’s liveried butler was at the door then, and his sober expression cracked into a hint of a smile when he saw the children with Peter.
“Your Grace,” he said. “And how may I introduce your companions?”
Peter gave his siblings’ names as they entered the house, but before the butler could retreat to find Selina, she was coming around the corner, dressed in blue and flanked by members of her family.
“Oh,” she said as she glanced down at the children, and then she looked back up at him, tawny eyes bright with amusement. “I see we’ve both brought company. We’re going to need another carriage.”
Had he not mentioned that he was bringing his siblings? Perhaps he hadn’t.
Peter presented Lu and Freddie to Selina’s terrifying dragon of an aunt, Lady Judith, and her longtime companion, ThomasinDandridge. Thomasin was a small, round woman with a cloud of sandy ringlets that bobbed about her face like cheerful springs.
