“Yes, Grandmama,” he said mildly. “As you have told me for time out of mind, the business of the estate should be my first priority. I knew you’d want to know how everything is faring.”
She compressed her lips and glared at him. “Family shouldalwayscome first.”
“You being its sole representative in London?”
“Exactly,” she said, slightly mollified. “I don’t know what would happen to this family if it weren’t for my vigilance and care. But,” she said, rallying, “I wouldn’t be the sole representative if you would only do your duty and take a wife!”
Julian smiled. “I thought we’d come to that, and there it is, only”—he glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece—“four minutes since I arrived. That might well be a record.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Foxton. Taking a wife is a serious business.”
Julian picked an invisible bit of fluff off the immaculate sleeve of his coat.
“Well?” she prompted after a minute. “Have you done anything about it in the months since I last saw you?”
He toyed with the idea of telling her he’d found the only woman he’d ever wanted to marry—a beautiful French maidservant he’d known for just over a week who painted like a dream and was full of life. And who had stolen from him.
But as entertaining as the notion was, if he did, she’d probably explode, and he’d never hear the end of it. Besides, Vita’s betrayal and disappearance were still rather…painful.
In his saner moments, he told himself he’d had a lucky escape. The rest of the time, he missed her. Ached for her.
“No, Grandmama, no prospective brides on the horizon. But I’m in no hurry. I’m not yet thirty.”
“Your father married your mother when he was just four-and-twenty.”
“I know.” The estate being in a mess, and with crushing debts, his father had been forced to marry Mama, who was an heiress. And thus Grandmama had come into their lives, since she was the one who held and controlled the majority of the wealth Mama was heiress to. Ambitious and autocratic, she held it still and didn’t hesitate to wield her power. Or try to. She hadn’t yet found the way to rule Julian. Money didn’t motivate him.
“And your brother married at five-and-twenty.”
“Yes, he fell madly in love with Celia.” His sister-in-law had soon revealed herself as nothing more than a pretty face with a rapacious nature beneath. She was the bane of Julian’s existence—well, one of them.
“Love! Pah! What nonsense! Your brother was a fool. He fell out of love with her fast enough, and then he was off frittering money on opera dancers and the like!”
“Grandmama, I’m shocked to hear you speak of such things,” he said, amused.
She snorted. “I didn’t come down in the last shower. I know what’s what! But my point is, your brother did the right thing in marrying young. He did his best to secure the succession. It was that feckless wife of his who failed in her duty and only gave him girls. So now that duty is yours—you must marry soon and get yourself a son.”
Julian smoothed a wrinkle from his breeches. He’d heard this refrain a hundred times, but he had no intention of dancing to his grandmother’s tune.
It was funny—she’d come from a mercantile background herself. Both her father and her late husband had been wealthy millowners, and she’d poured all her efforts into first securing a knighthood for her husband and then moving heaven and earth to get her only daughter married into the nobility.
Now, with husband and daughter dead, she considered the Foxton earldom and all it entailed to be her business, and she was relentless in her effort to rule Julian as well,attempting to mold him into what she considered to be a proper lord.
But he was fond of the old despot, so he didn’t quarrel with her. He simply let her ring a peal over his head from time to time and then quietly went his own way, doing his duty asheconsidered it to be and pleasing himself as well.
No one had expected Julian to become the earl—least of all himself. His brother, the heir, had died of an infection from what he’d considered to be a trifling cut. Shortly afterward his father had died of a rage-induced apoplexy at the realization that his despised second son, having survived numerous battles and taken a number of wounds that failed to fester, was now the heir.
His grandmother eyed him beadily, the unsatisfactory second son who, through some huge cosmic error—he had no doubt she’d had words with the Almighty about that—had become the seventh Earl of Foxton. She was determined to lick him into shape. “I’ve put you in the Chinese room. Purvis will have taken your bags up.”
“No, he won’t. I left my bags in my lodgings in St. James’s.”
She swelled up. “Lodgings?The Earl of Foxton inlodgings!”
“Your hearing is excellent.”
“But your place is here! This is Foxton House, the town house of the Earls of Foxton.”
“I know. Nevertheless, I have taken bachelor lodgings in St. James’s.”
