Belinda, the eldest, led the small procession. At sixteen she was already taller than Sybil and bade fair to turn men’s heads with her lustrous light brown hair and long, long legs. But if the expression on her heart-shaped face was any guide, any man would have his hands full with her. Defiant determination oozed from every pore and flashed in her hazel eyes.
She lifted her chin as she halted behind the chaise, facing Gervase, meeting his hard gaze with her own Tregarth stubbornness.
Annabel, fairer in coloring, with almost blond hair and blue eyes, ranged alongside Belinda. There was less than a year between them, and barely an inch; while Belinda had started to wear her hair up, Annabel was content to let her long pale tresses ripple over her shoulders in a romantic veil.
Gervase met Annabel’s eyes, and saw the same trenchant purpose infusing Belinda repeated there.
Increasingly wary, he shifted his gaze to the third and youngest of the three, lowering it to her sweet, delicate face, still very much that of a child. Jane was barely ten, and had always been devoted to him. Confined in neat plaits on either side of her small face, her hair was a darker brown than the others’, more his coloring, but her eyes were Sybil’s blue.
Meeting those usually innocent orbs, Gervase was faintly stunned to encounter unwavering, resolute determination—further accentuated by the set of her little chin.
Keeping his own expression impassive, he glanced again at the other two, mentally at sea. What on earth had changed them? Why…why had they lost faith in him?
He suddenly comprehended that he was treading on ground that wasn’t as firm as he’d thought. He had to go carefully.
Where to start?
He let the silence stretch, but while Sybil fidgeted, her daughters were made of sterner stuff. They just waited for him to speak, their gazes locked on him.
“I’ve just heard from Gregson that the three of you were caught leaving the mill last night, apparently after sabotaging it. The mill is still out of action, and John Miller is in danger of losing what little hair he has left. I’ll admit I’m having trouble believing that the three of you could be so unthinking as to deliberately cause Miller and all those who rely on the mill so much unnecessary trouble for no good reason. So I assume you have an excellent reason for what you’ve done—I hope you’ll share it with me, so I can explain your actions to the rest of the neighborhood.”
Belinda’s chin tilted a fraction higher. “We do have an excellent reason—for the mill and all the rest.” She briefly scanned his eyes, confirming that he had, indeed, guessed about “all the rest.” “However,” she continued, “you might not wish to make that reason public. We had to find ways to bring you back from London, and preferably keep you here, although as of yet we haven’t managed the latter.”
“We thought we’d be able to make you stay by creating a mystery by ringing the bells,” Annabel said, “but you just took away the ropes. So we had to think of something else.”
“None of the other things we did kept you at home.” Jane looked at him severely, as if that were his fault. “You just came home and fixed them, and then left again—back to London.”
It was, apparently, his fault.
He was starting to feel a little disoriented. “Why do you want me to stay at home?”
Belinda shifted, lips pressing together; he could see she was hunting not for just words but for how to explain. The other two looked at her, deferring to her. Eventually she met his eyes. “We asked you to stay, each of us every time, but you always just smiled and insisted that you had to go back to town. We suspected—well, everyone in the neighborhood knew—that you were going there to find a wife. We didn’t want you to do that, but we couldn’t just say so, could we? You wouldn’t have listened to us, that was obvious. So we had to find some other way of stopping you.”
He stared at her. “You don’t want me to find a wife?”
“We don’t want you to find a wife in London.” Belinda capped the statement with a definite nod—repeated by the other two, one after the other.
It was, indeed, as Sybil had guessed. Compressing his lips, he battled to shore up a patience that six months of mayhem—let alone all the futile racing back and forth—had worn wafer-thin. “Sybil has just told me about the situation with the Hardestys.” He managed to keep his tone even, his diction not so clipped that it would cut. He was still very fond of them, even if they’d temporarily turned into bedlamites. “You can’t seriously imagine that I would marry a lady who I would subsequently allow to send you away.”
Yes, they could. Yes, they did.
They didn’t say the words. They didn’t have to; the truth was writ large in their eyes, in their expressions.
He felt positively insulted, and didn’t know what to say—how to defend himself. The idea that he needed to was irritation enough.
“I’m older, and wiser, and far more experienced than Robert Hardesty. Just because he’s married unwisely is no reason whatever to imagine I’ll do the same.”
The look Belinda bent on him was as contemptuously pitying as only a younger sister could manage; it was mirrored to an unsettling degree by Annabel and Jane.
“Gentlemen,” Belinda stated, “always think they know what they’re doing when it comes to ladies, and they never do. They think they’re in charge, but they’re blind. Any lady worth the title knows that gentlemen, once hooked, can be led by the nose if the lady is so minded. So if an attractive London lady gets her hooks into you, and decides like Lady Hardesty that having girls like us to puff-off isn’t a proposition she wants to take on, where will that leave us?”
“Living in the North Riding with Great-Aunt Agatha,” Annabel supplied.
“So it was obvious we had to take action,” Jane concluded. Her eyes narrowed on Gervase. “Drastic action—whatever was necessary.”
Before he could even think of a reply, Belinda went on, “And there’s no use citing your age as any indication of your wisdom in such matters. You’ve spent the last twelve years out of society—it’s not a case of your skills in this regard being rusty so much as you’ve never developed the relevant skills at all.”
“It’s not the same as if you’d spent those years in London,” Annabel informed him, “watching and learning about choosing a wife.”