Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways #5)(35)

For the duration of the season, Christopher sought out Prudence, meeting her at dances and dinners, taking her and Mrs. Mercer on carriage drives, scenic walks, and to art and museum exhibits.

There was little that Christopher could fault in Prudence. She was beautiful and charming. She didn’t ask uncomfortable questions. In fact, she rarely asked personal questions of him at all. She evinced no interest in the war or the battles he had fought, only in his medals. He wondered if she thought of them as anything more than shiny decorations.

They had the same bland and pleasant conversations, spiced with gossip, that Christopher had had a thousand times before, with other women, during other seasons in London. And that had always been enough for him.

He wished to hell it were enough now.

He had thought . . . hoped . . . that Prudence cared for him in some way. But there was no sign of that now, no tenderness, no trace of the woman who had written “I carry thoughts of you like my own personal constellation . . .”

And he loved her so desperately, the Prudence of the letters. Where was she? Why was she hiding from him?

His dreams led him into dark forests, where he searched through bramble and bracken, pushing through the narrow spaces between the trees as he followed the pale form of a woman. She was always just ahead of him, always out of reach. He woke gasping and enraged, his hands clutching on emptiness.

During the days, Christopher kept his business appointments and social engagements. So many tiny, overstuffed, overdecorated rooms. So much pointless conversation. So many events of no consequence. He could not fathom that he had once enjoyed it all. And he was appalled to find himself remembering moments in the Crimea with something like nostalgia, actually yearning for the brief times when he had felt fully alive.

Even with the enemy in battle he had felt some form of connection, in their efforts to understand and reach and kill each other. But with these patricians trussed in elegant clothes and brittle sophistication, he no longer felt kinship or liking. He knew himself to be different. And he knew they sensed it as well.

Christopher comprehended just how desperate he was for something or someone familiar, when the prospect of visiting his grandfather was actually appealing.

Lord Annandale had always been a stern and intimidating grandparent, never one to spare his withering comments. None of Annandale’s grandchildren, including the cousin who would someday inherit the earldom, had ever pleased the demanding old bastard. Except for John, of course. Christopher had deliberately gone the other way.

Christopher approached his grandfather with a mixture of dread and reluctant compassion, knowing that the old man must have been devastated by John’s death.

Upon arriving at Annandale’s luxuriously appointed London house, Christopher was shown to the library, where a fire had been lit in the hearth despite the fact that it was the height of summer.

“Good God, Grandfather,” he said, nearly recoiling at the blast of heat as he entered the library. “You’ll have us braised like a pair of game hens.” Striding to the window, he flung it open and drew in a breath of outside air. “You could easily heat yourself with a walk out-of-doors.”

His grandfather scowled at him from a chair beside the hearth. “The doctor has advised against outside air. I would advise you to negotiate your inheritance before you try to finish me off.”

“There’s nothing to negotiate. Leave me whatever you wish—or nothing, if it pleases you.”

“Manipulative as always,” Annandale muttered. “You assume I’ll do the reverse of whatever you say.”

Christopher smiled and shrugged out of his coat. He tossed it to a nearby chair as he approached his grandfather. He went to shake his hand, enclosing the frail and cold fingers in his own warm grasp. “Hello, sir. You’re looking well.”

“I am not well,” Annandale retorted. “I’m old. Navigating life with this body is like trying to sail a shipwreck.”

Taking the other chair, Christopher studied his grandfather. There was a new delicacy about Annandale, his skin like swaths of crumpled silk laid over an iron frame. The eyes, however, were the same, bright and piercing. And his brows, in defiance of the snowy whiteness of his hair, were the same thick black as ever.

“I’ve missed you,” Christopher commented in a tone of mild surprise. “Though I can’t decide why. It must be the glare—it brings me back to my childhood.”

“You were ever a hellion,” Annandale informed him, “and selfish to the bone. When I read Russell’s reports of your battlefield heroics, I was certain they had mistaken you for someone else.”

Christopher grinned. “If I was heroic, it was purely accidental. I was only trying to save my own skin.”

A rumble of amusement came from the old man’s throat before he could prevent it. His brows lowered again. “You conducted yourself with honor, it seems. There is talk of a knighthood being bestowed on you. To that end, you might try being receptive to the queen’s invitations. Your refusal to stay in London upon your return from the Crimea was not well regarded.”

Christopher gave him a baleful glance. “I don’t want to entertain people like some trained monkey. I’m no different from thousands of other men who did what they were supposed to do.”

“Such modesty is new for you,” his grandfather observed idly. “Is it genuine, or merely for my benefit?”