“Cream? Sugar?”
“Cream and—no sugar, thank you.” In fact, Ellen enjoyed quite a bit of sugar in her tea. She wasn’t certain elegant ladies of London took sugar in their tea, though.
As Lady Dorrington prepared the tea then brought it back to her, Lady Vegas said, “I am quite pleased that the three of us have this time together. I have questions for you, Miss Garrett.”
“Questions, my lady?” Ellen asked. She smiled at Lady Dorrington when she was handed her tea, but when she took a sip, it was everything she could do not to grimace. Without sugar, the tea was bitter indeed.
“Yes,” Lady Vegas went on. “Let us begin with the most important question of all. What are your intentions toward my son?”
Ellen nearly sputtered her tea. That was the sort of question she would have expected her father to ask Joseph.
“I intend to marry him, your ladyship,” she said, startled into honestly.
Lady Dorrington hummed and smiled and said, “At least she isn’t being coy or dishonest.”
Ellen swallowed another gulp of tea awkwardly. Should she have been coy? Was forwardness frowned upon by the aristocracy?
Of course it was. She should have known better. But then, everyone on both sides of the Atlantic knew she intended to marry Joseph.
“What about your family, Miss Garrett?” Lady Vegas asked on. “Is it filled with cowboys and gunslingers? I have heard they exist in great numbers in Wyoming.”
Heat and anxiety slithered down Ellen’s spine. She took another horrible sip of tea, then put her cup down.
“My father is a cattle baron,” she explained. “He moved to Haskell from Cincinnati before I was born. He was one of the early barons and bought up a great deal of land before the value increased.”
She left out the part about how her father had been a professional gambler before buying the land, and about how he’d won her mother in a high-stakes poker game. Or about how she herself had been playing cards, often for money, sometimes in the saloon, since she was a girl.
“So your father is a land speculator as well as a rancher?” Lady Dorrington asked.
“He was in the early days,” Ellen explained. “He and Mama are quite settled on the land now, and my twin brother, Allen, is learning to manage the ranch.”
“You have a twin?” Lady Dorrington seemed interested, but not in a way that made Ellen feel as though she were on trial.
“I do, my lady,” Ellen said. “Allen and I are very much alike.”
“He is not going to come to London to see you wearing spurs and…I believe they are called ‘chaps’, and wielding rifles, is he?” Lady Vegas asked.
It occurred to Ellen that she should be offended by the characterization of men from Wyoming…but she also had a faint inkling that Lady Vegas was purposely attempting to rile her up.
Ellen smiled as though Joseph’s mother had asked about her own mother’s garden. “Allen is a bit of a dandy,” she said. “He enjoys his work on the ranch, but he would rather die than be caught wearing chaps. He carries a rifle when he is on the range, both to fend off predators and because—” Ellen paused, uncertain she wanted to get into a discussion about the range wars with her potential future mother-in-law, a marchioness. “Because of interlopers,” she finished, figuring it was safer. “I’m certain he will enjoy London society and all its finery when he comes to visit me someday.”
“And does your father plan to settle a sum of money on you when you marry?” Lady Vegas asked.
Ellen flushed. Again, she found the question just a bit rude, but it was also clear now that she was being interrogated. Lady Vegas was watching out for her son, her baby. For all she knew, Ellen was just another American buccaneer trying to wedge her way into the British aristocracy, like so many other heiresses were doing. Ellen wanted to find a way to explain to Lady Vegas that she was not like those women at all.
Which struck her with a pinch of irony, considering she was attempting to move heaven and earth specifically so that she could be like those women.
“Father does have some money put aside for me, yes,” she said with honesty and, she hoped, grace. “I have a bit of my own as well that I bring with me.” Money that she’d earned in those poker games, then invested with her father’s guidance. More than she thought Lady Vegas would believe—or approve of—if she mentioned it.
“How much would you say your father is willing to settle on you?” Lady Vegas asked.
Ellen’s jaw dropped at Lady Vegas’s audacious question, and she was at a loss to know how to answer it.
Fortunately, salvation came as Joseph spoke from the doorway, where Ellen hadn’t seen him enter, “Mama, you cannot ask Miss Garrett questions like that.”
Ellen breathed a huge sigh of relief and burst into a decidedly unladylike smile. It wasn’t part of the image she was attempting to present, but she was so overjoyed to see Joseph in that moment that she could only be herself.
Chapter Seven