To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(94)
“Dear Grandmama,” he said, stooping down to kiss her cheek before taking an enormous bite out of his tart. “How delightful to see you.”
“Do not play stupid with me, young man,” she said, lowering her lorgnette and fixing him with a beady-eyed stare. Braver men than he had quailed before such a look, but he stood his ground, shoving the other half of his tart into his mouth, which had the advantage of momentarily preventing him from answering.
As he’d expected, she did not hesitate to fill the silence. “You and Lady Templeton could barely keep your eyes off of each other a few days ago—made me deucedly uncomfortable, if you must know. It felt as though we were interrupting something, merely by being in the same room with you. It was positively indecent.” Jeremy noted absently that he distinctly did not enjoy hearing Diana being called by her late husband’s title, despite the fact that it was, of course, her name, and the only one by which she could reasonably expect to be called. “Now she won’t even look at you. So I repeat”—and here the dowager marchioness reached out a bony but deceptively strong hand, extended her index finger, and jabbed him in the chest with each word—“what. Have. You. Done?”
“A difference of opinion on a trifling matter, no more,” Jeremy said dismissively, plastering his face with his best devil-may-care smile. “I expect we will be right as rain in no time.” He expected nothing of the sort, of course, and in fact considered it a minor miracle that Diana hadn’t yet seized one of the serving knives and used it to pin him to the wall for target practice.
“You think that addlepated smile works to fool everyone around you, and perhaps it does, but please understand that it has no effect on me whatsoever,” his grandmother said crisply. “If you think that drinking and smiling and whoring your way through society will make me forget that you are the most intelligent man in your family, or possibly of my acquaintance, then you are very wrong indeed.”
“David was the most intelligent man in the family,” Jeremy said automatically. He felt as though he had some sort of mental registry of comments about his brother on which he could rely at any necessary moment. All of them true, all of them accurate representations of his feelings for and memories of David, but all of them by now so rote that he could utter them without having to actually think about David, about the fact that he was no longer alive and that he, Jeremy, was standing here in his shoes instead.
“What utter nonsense,” his grandmother said, drawing him out of his thoughts rather effectively. His eyes flicked to her face and held there, startled by the fervent gleam he saw in her gaze. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself?”
“I… well…” He wasn’t at all sure how to respond to such an inquiry, and settled on a feeble “Yes?”
“The man got himself killed in a curricle accident,” she said, clearly enunciating each word. “He was hardly a staggering intellectual giant.”
“West was in the same accident, and I think he’s quite intelligent,” Jeremy said, nodding across the room to where Audley’s brother stood deep in conversation with Lady Emily. His cane was in one hand, as always, though Jeremy thought he didn’t seem to be leaning upon it very heavily. As Jeremy watched, West’s eyes flicked to the side and landed on Sophie, who was chatting animatedly with Violet and Audley. A look of great tenderness mixed with great pain flickered across West’s face in an instant, vanishing before Jeremy could even properly register what he was seeing.
“And young Weston is still alive, is he not?” the dowager marchioness said, effectively bringing Jeremy’s attention back to the conversation at hand. He recoiled—he actually physically recoiled—at this verbal blow, and his grandmother’s face softened. “It was a terrible accident, Jeremy, there’s no way around it. I’ve no doubt Weston regrets it every day of his life, and I’m certain that had your brother survived it, he would feel the same way. It was a mistake, and he should have known better, but he was human. He miscalculated, and he paid with his life. He was reckless, and he left a younger brother in possession of a title he never wanted, and a whole host of financial burdens that should never have been his.”
This was, Jeremy reflected, uncannily similar to something Diana had said when he’d discussed his brother with her; at the time, he hadn’t thought much of it, and yet now he realized, all at once, how well she knew him. The fact that he had spoken to her of his brother, of his complicated grief and guilt and other, darker emotions—this meant something. He’d already realized he loved her—but now, thinking back on that conversation, on the dark, vulnerable side of himself he’d allowed her to see, he reflected on the fact that she loved him, too.
She’d seen the real Jeremy, the man behind the flirtation and good cheer and reckless charm, and she loved him anyway. She hadn’t spoken the words lightly—it must have taken her enormous courage, in fact. But she had spoken them with full knowledge of the real Jeremy Overington, and of the complicated well of grief and guilt and anger that he held within him. She knew of that, and she loved him still.
And he’d thrown it all away.
Even as the thought flitted across his mind, he saw Diana herself murmur something in Violet’s ear and begin to make her way to the corner of the room. His eyes followed her movements without any conscious thought on his part; after a moment, his grandmother noticed his attention was fixed elsewhere and glanced over her shoulder.