Briefly his thoughts strayed into lustful fantasy. He’d never been one for flirtatious behavior when it came to women, particularly those beneath his own station, and the idea that he may have flirted with Eugenie just now surprised him. He was not a rake, not by any stretch of the imagination. He was never easy in the company of women. Even during his youth, when suddenly he’d found himself with a surfeit of female bodies in his bed, he’d been uncomfortably shy once the lovemaking was over. Conversing with women did not come easily to him, and often made him seem stiff.
The last thing he needed was a liaison with Eugenie Belmont and her appalling family. His future, he thought with blind arrogance, lay in other areas.
Chapter 2
Belmont Hall, Gloucestershire, England
Present time
As usual the eggs were overcooked, the sausages blackened, while the toast was soggy and barely browned. Eugenie viewed the table with resignation as she sipped her tea. Nothing had changed since she’d been away being finished at Miss Debenham’s. Breakfast was always the liveliest meal at Belmont Hall, and she could see the strain on her mother’s face as she sought to regain some control over the most boisterous of her brood while her father seemed to positively encourage them in more and more outrageous behavior.
To her cries of “Speak to them, dear Sir Peter, please!” he answered “Good morning, children.”
They loved it, as Eugenie well knew, but she pitied her mother. Now that she was home it would be expected of her to take over some of the burden of caring for the family. The Belmonts were not wealthy, they could not afford more than two house servants, and as she was the only girl, Eugenie sometimes felt that the extra work fell upon her more than was fair.
“Genie, are we going to see Erik today?” Jack asked for the tenth time.
“Yes, we are,” Eugenie answered patiently, while her insides were all aquiver as she considered the claims she’d made to her friends that last night at Miss Debenham’s. Olivia and Marissa had already written. Although Eugenie managed to forget about her foolish words sometimes for an hour at a time they always returned. Like Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, Eugenie saw no way out of her situation.
Her father’s chuckle brought her out of her gloomy thoughts. There was a suspiciously satisfied gleam in his eye. “I separated His Grace from ten guineas, thanks to that goat,” he said.
“What do you mean? Why would he pay you ten guineas?”
“Father went to visit the duke,” one of the twins piped up. “Tell her what you said, Father!”
“Tell her how you fleeced the duke!” the other twin added, bouncing up and down on his chair with excitement.
Sir Peter Belmont was nothing loath to share his triumph. “I explained to His Grace that I was giving up my finest billy goat, and that if he wanted to keep Erik then I’d need to be compensated.”
Eugenie set down her teacup with shaking hands; a sick feeling was growing in her stomach. “Father, how could you? You know he was only taking Erik to be kind. And after the wretched goat butted him
! I hope he refused to pay.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” her father retorted, barely ruffled by her criticism. “I admit he could have said no, in which case we would have had to come to some other arrangement, but he agreed that ten guineas was cheap at the price.”
“Cheap at the price!” the twins echoed.
“Do sit still, boys!” their mother wailed.
Eugenie had the depressing feeling that she was the only member of this family who cared that a wrong had been done. How could she face the duke after her father’s scheming? How could the most eligible man in England look favorably upon a woman whose own background was so obviously and completely ineligible?
“I will have to apologize,” she said grimly.
“Oh, please don’t purse your mouth up like that, Eugenie,” her mother said in her long-suffering voice. “There was a time when you found your father’s little tricks amusing. My sister Beatrix may have paid for you to go to finishing school, but how do you think we afforded the extras? Evening gloves, for heaven’s sake. And the boys are always in need of new boots. They grow so quickly!”
“Speaking of which, Eugenie, my girl, I expect you to put to use some of those fine finishing school manners,” her father interrupted. “Next time I go to the Torringham horse market you can come with me and bedazzle the customers.”
“I’m sure I’ll be far too busy to go to the horse market.”
Eugenie’s father had a not undeserved reputation as a shyster and a rapscallion—a man not to be trusted. She wasn’t going to assist him in perpetrating one of his dishonest schemes.
Sir Peter found it easy to blur the lines between what was lawful and what was useful to him. After being thrown out of school he went on to gamble away most of his inheritance, apart from his title, and then marry a local heiress so that he could pay his debts—only now he was beholden to the heiress’s hardnosed sister. He was charming, however, and it was charm that had carried him through life so far—much as it carried his grandmother into the king’s bed. Terrence, the brother closest in age to Eugenie, was a great deal like their father when it came to that charm, and she worried that he would end up just the same.
She spent a lot of time worrying about her brothers.
When she wasn’t worrying about the mess her wretched tongue had gotten her into and how she was going to get out of it. Apart from doing as she’d said she would and pursuing the most eligible man in the county in an effort to make him her husband.
Breakfast over, she led the younger boys outside to the stables. The twins were tumbling around like puppies as she loaded them into the old coach. It was like something out of the ark, and Eugenie tried not to notice how desperately the vehicle needed a new coat of paint or the alarming crick in one of the wheels.