Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] Read Online Free PDF

conversation turned to politics. She sat at his right hand tonight and he could feel her delicate air of triumph at having this knowledge to contribute. “Unless there’s more than one Major Barclay, recently created baron, he’s the younger brother of the Marquess of Astley.”
    Perhaps he took a small fortifying breath before turning to face her directly. Even after three years of acquaintance, with all the accompanying disillusion, with witnessing the mundane flaws and pettiness to which any mortal must be prone, the sight of her could still hit him like strong sunlight after a day spent in windowless rooms.
    Of course they were a handsome family altogether, the Westbrooks. Handsome parents did generally tend to produce handsome children. The middle three—Viola, Sebastian, Beatrice; such was the consequence of marriage to an actress—took after their mother, fair-skinned and auburn-haired with heart-shaped, piquant faces. The youngest, Miss Rosalind, had her father’s pale hair and expressive blue eyes. But in the eldest, Katherina, mother’s and father’s looks had mingled to downrightalchemical effect: her beauty somehow exceeded what she’d gotten from both parents combined.
    He couldn’t much blame himself for the folly of three years since. Probably every man who met her fell a little in love, at least in the beginning.
    “What have you done, committed all of
Debrett’s
to memory?” He teased her because everyone in the family teased her. And because teasing required a certain nimbleness of his brain, and prevented him from sinking into a languid contemplation of her eyes, or her hair, or the precise curve and color of her lips.
    “Not all of it, I’ll wager.” Her brother, seated on her other side, leaned forward to speak past her. “Our Kate is particular. She confines her notice to earls and above.”
    “My interests are not so narrow as that.” She spoke with a playful, arch quality, presenting Nick with her profile as she went back to carving tiny bites of her own meal. “I also take note of new creations, and of second sons in the case where the first has produced no heirs. Your Lord Barclay happens to be both of those. His brother the marquess has been married over a dozen years and hasn’t any children at all.”
    Mrs. Westbrook frowned across the table at her daughter. “I know you speak flippantly, dear, and mostly in jest.” For all the scandal of her former profession, she had an air of moral authority that would do any jurist proud. “But we oughtn’t to take pleasure in a childless marriage. I’m sure there’s a deal of sorrow behind what you see on that page of
Debrett’s
.”
    “Must there be sorrow?” Miss Viola seized at this point like a terrier snatching a veal chop from an unattended plate. “Is it not possible that Lord and Lady Astley themselves take pleasure in their childless marriage? I can well imagine that the lady, at least, might welcome the freedom to pursue other interests and occupations.”
    The first time he’d dined at this house, and witnessedthis style of conversation, his jaw had nearly hit the tabletop. If either of his sisters had ever dared to address their mother the way Miss Viola spoke to hers … well, there’d really been scant opportunity for that. Mother had so seldom felt well enough to appear at the dinner table, and was gone altogether by the time Kitty reached the age of sixteen, and Martha eight.
    Score a point for Miss Viola, by the way. Mother might have been better off, and might even be alive today, without the dubious blessing of fecundity.
    “It’s possible.” Mrs. Westbrook answered her daughter with the graciousness of a barrister who held better arguments up her sleeve. “However, I think it unlikely that a husband and wife would both have wished for childlessness, particularly in the case where there’s a title and estate and the consequent need for an heir.”
    “I hope my husband would wish for childlessness, for