“From the looks of it,” Hughes said to Mrs. Arnaud, “you will be visiting for a while.”
“Indefinitely.” Marietta looped her arm through her guest’s and pulled her a step away from Hughes. “I’m afraid that since she and Stephen married in secret, she has been living all this time in a part of town of which my brother would disapprove. We are going to remedy that and welcome her to the family properly.”
Though Hughes’s smile stretched, it looked no more welcoming. “How good of you.” His gaze tracked the servants disappearing up the side staircase. “Where have you put her?”
“The suite of rooms on the third floor, above the ballroom. They will be most to her liking and provide her the privacy to which she is accustomed.” Marietta, unlike her suitor, beamed with pleasure at the prospect.
Odd indeed. Slade had seen her flock of friends several times now, and they were all the same. Women of means, of important families. Women who arranged their faces in masks and whose eyes always snapped with calculation. Like Marietta’s so often did.
This one was different. The kind of different that made him wonder not just about Barbara Arnaud, but about Marietta. Because had anyone asked, he would have said she never would have invited someone like this sister-in-law of hers into her house. Not for an hour, much less indefinitely. And she sure wouldn’t have looked so pleased about it.
Curious indeed.
Hughes found it more distasteful than intriguing, given that glint in his eye. Perhaps he didn’t like the idea of someone living right above the entrance to his castle. “How lovely. Why don’t you let Mother show her to her rooms, darling? It has been too long since she had the pleasure of welcoming a guest properly.”
Because he kept his gaze on the women, Slade saw the shift. Calculation reentered Marietta’s eyes, and questions sprang to life in Mrs. Arnaud’s at that darling. Questions colored with shadows. Sorrow, perhaps. Suspicion. Maybe a splash of disappointment.
Mrs. Arnaud, it would appear, was no fonder of Devereaux Hughes than he was of her.
Well. This ought to make things interesting in the Hughes house.
Mrs. Hughes took her cue to come down the last step, her sugary smile pasted into place. Marietta slowly released her friend’s arm. “Of course. Barbara dear, I’ll be right up to help you settle in.”
The guest’s smile wavered around the edges. “All right.” Obviously too polite to argue, Mrs. Arnaud turned to Hughes’s mother.
The son took Marietta by the arm. “A word, darling.”
Slade’s fingers curled into his palm. Not at the endearment, which he had grown used to hearing—mostly—but at the tone. And the grip. It mollified him only slightly when Marietta’s chin came up. When her lips turned in a flinty smile.
She glanced at Slade over her shoulder as Hughes pulled her toward the parlor. “I put a new book out for you, Mr. Osborne.”
“Thanks.” But he made no move toward the library. Not with Hughes’s face blurring in his mind with his own brother-in-law’s. Marietta and his sister didn’t seem like the same type of woman. He wanted to think this one before him now wouldn’t suffer a man striking her.
But then, he hadn’t thought Jane would either.
Neither noticed him trailing behind them, pausing outside the parlor door.
Marietta pulled her arm free of Hughes’s grip the moment they were inside. “Is something the matter, Dev?”
Planting his hands on his hips, he glared at her. “What is going on with you, Marietta? You despise her, you always have. Yet now you invite her to share your home?”
Her chin went up another notch, her eyes glinting more. She shifted away from the door. If he didn’t know better, Slade would have thought for sure she was drawing Hughes’s attention toward the opposite direction, away from him. Nonsense, of course.
“Stephen loved her enough to marry her. Enough to marry her in secret, which would have been a hard decision for him. If he loved her so much, then obviously I misjudged her.”
“Mari, you know your brother…”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. Cat eyes, no question. “I know my brother what?”
Hughes’s hands came up in surrender. Apparently Stephen Arnaud was sacred ground that even he respected. “Nothing. But you are not one to change your mind once you have made it. I don’t understand—”
“I don’t expect you to understand. I just expect you to be civil.”
Hughes folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t like her. And I don’t want her in my house.”
Those cat eyes threw sparks. Slade half expected her to hiss and bare her claws. “She isn’t in your house, Devereaux. She’s in mine.”
He took a step closer to her. Did it look as menacing from her angle as it did from the hall? Perhaps not, given that she didn’t so much as flinch.