nt the last few months preparing, as Hermione’s mother likes to call it, attending house parties and small gatherings.”
“Polishing yourselves?” he asked with a smile.
Her lips curved in answer. “Exactly that. I should make an excellent candlestick by now.”
He found himself amused. “A mere candlestick, Lady Lucinda? Pray, do not understate your value. At the very least you are one of those extravagant silver urns everyone seems to need in their sitting rooms lately.”
“I am an urn, then,” she said, almost appearing to consider the idea. “What would that make Hermione, I wonder?”
A jewel. A diamond. A diamond set in gold. A diamond set in gold surrounded by . . .
He forcibly halted the direction of his thoughts. He could perform his poetic gymnastics later, when he wasn’t expected to keep up one end of a conversation. A conversation with a different young lady. “I’m sure I do not know,” he said lightly, offering her a plate. “I have only barely made Miss Watson’s acquaintance, after all.”
She said nothing, but her eyebrows rose ever so slightly. And that, of course, was when Gregory realized he was glancing over her shoulder to get a better look at Miss Watson.
Lady Lucinda let out a small sigh. “You should probably know that she is in love with someone else.”
Gregory dragged his gaze back to the woman he was meant to be paying attention to. “I beg your pardon?”
She shrugged delicately as she placed a few small sandwiches on her plate. “Hermione. She is in love with someone else. I thought you would like to know.”
Gregory gaped at her, and then, against every last drop of his good judgment, looked back at Miss Watson. It was the most obvious, pathetic gesture, but he couldn’t help himself. He just . . . Dear God, he just wanted to look at her and look at her and never stop. If this wasn’t love, he could not imagine what was.
“Ham?”
“What?”
“Ham.” Lady Lucinda was holding out a little strip of sandwich with a pair of serving tongs. Her face was annoyingly serene. “Would you care for one?” she asked.
He grunted and held out his plate. And then, because he couldn’t leave the matter as it was, he said stiffly, “I’m sure it is none of my business.”
“About the sandwich?”
“About Miss Watson,” he ground out.
Even though, of course, he meant no such thing. As far as he was concerned, Hermione Watson was very much his business, or at least she would be, very soon.
It was somewhat disconcerting that she had apparently not been hit by the same thunderbolt that had struck him. It had never occurred to him that when he did fall in love, his intended might not feel the same, and with equal immediacy, too. But at least this explanation—her thinking she was in love with someone else—assuaged his pride. It was much more palatable to think her infatuated with someone else than completely indifferent to him.
All that was left to do was make her realize that whoever the other man was, he was not the one for her.
Gregory was not so filled with conceit that he thought he could win any woman upon whom he set his sights, but he certainly had never had difficulties with the fairer sex, and given the nature of his reaction to Miss Watson, it was simply inconceivable that his feelings could go unrequited for very long. He might have to work to win her heart and hand, but that would simply make victory all the sweeter.
Or so he told himself. Truth was, a mutual thunderbolt would have been far less trouble.
“Don’t feel badly,” Lady Lucinda said, craning her neck slightly as she surveyed the sandwiches, looking, presumably, for something more exotic than British pig.
“I don’t,” he bit off, then waited for her to actually return her attention to him. When she didn’t, he said again, “I don’t.”
She turned, gazed at him frankly, and blinked. “Well, that’s refreshing, I must say. Most men are crushed.”
He scowled. “What do you mean, most men are crushed?”
“Exactly what I said,” she replied, giving him an impatient glance. “Or if they’re not crushed, they become rather unaccountably angry.” She let out a ladylike snort. “As if any of it could be considered her fault.”
“Fault?” Gregory echoed, because in truth, he was having a devil of a time following her.
“You are not the first gentleman to imagine himself in love with Hermione,” she said, her expression quite jaded. “It happens all the time.”