Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

I zzie could not believe her luck. Not only would she get to marry Archibald, but she would also get to live in this marvelous house. She had begged her father for years to let her add some Gothic touches to her bedroom, but he had always refused, on the grounds that they were “gauche” and “melodramatic.”

Well, “gauche and melodramatic” more or less described her personality. And as far as she was concerned, the Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy manse was perfect .

All the rooms were tawdry in the best possible way, and Izzie exclaimed over each and every one. The dining room was in the style of a medieval great hall, complete with tapestries and a huge fireplace, and the parlor Archibald showed her could have passed for the interior of a cathedral but for the plush velvet sofas.

The only room that was a disappointment was the library, not because of the design, but because it didn’t contain a single Gothic novel. It was all expensive antiques and first editions. As Izzie remarked to Archibald, they were, “the type of books that everyone admires but no one actually reads.”

Archibald frowned, studying her face. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you copies of all your favorites. You can build your own collection.”

Izzie eyed the packed shelves. “I don’t think there’s room.”

“There will be,” he muttered.

“There will? How?”

Suddenly, his brown eyes were bright with excitement. “An idea just came to me. It’ll be better if I show you. Come, the room is on the first floor.”

He led her toward the stairs. As they passed through the foyer, Izzie was distracted by the black stone statue at the foot of the stairs. She paused to peer at it. Was it possible that she was mistaken? Or did the Nettlethorpe-Ogilvys have a statue of a man’s rear end adorning their entryway?

Archibald cleared his throat. “Please pardon the statue of the, er…”

“Man’s fundament,” she supplied. He seemed so horrified she couldn’t resist teasing him. “You should see your ears. They’ve gone crimson. Why are you so embarrassed? Did you perchance serve as the model?”

“No.” He ran a hand over his eyes. “It’s Egyptian and predates me by a few millennia. It’s of Anubis.”

“The Arse of Anubis,” Izzie breathed.

Archibald glanced at her, surprised. “That’s how I think of it as well.”

“Naturally.”

His face was pinched. “It’s tasteless and absurd.”

“Yes,” Izzie agreed solemnly, circling the statue to examine it from another angle. “I do believe that’s what I love about it.”

A smile broke over his face. He studied her for a beat, his eyes warm. “Come. There’s something I should probably show you.”

He led her not up the stairs but toward the back of the ground floor. He glanced around as if to make sure they were alone, then dropped his voice low. “My parents are the ones who purchased the Arse of Anubis. They paid more than a thousand pounds for it. If you’re going to be living under the same roof as them, you should be forewarned.”

“Forewarned? They seem kindhearted,” Izzie noted as he led her into the music room.

“They are,” he agreed. “I don’t mean to complain, but, well. The easiest way for me to explain is by showing you this.”

He pulled out a huge case in dark brown leather. It was almost as long as Izzie was tall. It looked heavy and exceptionally unwieldy to Izzie’s eyes, but he placed it on a glossy rosewood table as easily as if it were a flute or violin.

“This,” he said, snapping open the metal buckles, “is a contrabassoon.”

The instrument was enormous. Gleaming brown wood covered with delicate silver keys curved around in loop after loop.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a contrabassoon,” Izzie noted, gently pressing a key.

“And that is why they purchased it,” Archibald noted cheerlessly. “Not because any of our guests might wish to play it. Trust me, they don’t know how. But because nobody else has one, and it’s as expensive as one of our carriages. They had this notion that having such an instrument in our music room would be a good way to show off how very wealthy we are.”

Izzie cringed. “It seems a shame. To have such a beautiful instrument, and for nobody to play it.”

“Exactly.” Relief flooded his eyes. “That’s actually why I decided to learn to play it myself. Because it seemed like such a waste. But then…”

She nudged him with her elbow. “But then?”

He cringed. “That was around the time my parents started urging me to start looking for a wife. And they had this idea that my serenading young ladies on the contrabassoon would be the perfect means to subtly show off how wealthy we are.”

Izzie bit her lip at the image because, as absurd as the idea of a romantic bassoon serenade seemed, she didn’t want Archibald to feel that she was laughing at him.

He noticed her struggle. “It’s all right. You can laugh. Goodness knows everyone else did. What made it even more ridiculous was the fact that I’d just started to play, and I was absolutely atrocious. But they thought it a marvelous idea, and I couldn’t find a way to tell them they were wrong without hurting their feelings. And I would never want to do that.”

Izzie’s heart squeezed. This man who was to be her husband, who had beaten a swarm of attackers senseless as easily as she might lift her teacup, had a heart as squishy as a sponge cake inside his hulking exterior. This, she decided, was a good thing.

Something else occurred to her. “I also noticed that your parents call you Archie.” She might be mistaken, but she thought she had detected a pained look in his eyes when they’d used the nickname.

He grimaced, confirming her suspicions. “Yes. They do.”

She gave him a speaking look. “I take it that you do not wish for me to call you Archie, too?”

He sighed. “I must confess, I’ve never felt like much of an Archie . Not even when I was six years old. But Archie is”—he waved a hand, struggling to explain—“the son they want. A young Corinthian. A man-about-town.”

“ Archie is a fashionable nickname,” she mused. “And your parents seem to like things that are fashionable.”

“Lord, is that the truth,” he muttered.

She tapped a slender finger against her lip. “What if we could come up with something even more fashionable?”

He chuckled but looked down. “I don’t think anyone would describe me as fashionable.”

Fashionable probably wasn’t the right word. Archibald was never going to be one of those men who spent hours practicing the art of handling their walking stick in the mirror so that everyone would exclaim over the way he sauntered down St. James’s Street on the way to his club.

But he had a timeless masculine appeal that Izzie preferred.

Much preferred, if she was being honest.

She circled him, studying his profile. “I think you’re right about Archie , in any case. As an author, I can say that if I was writing you as a character in my book, I would never call you Archie .”

He snorted. “I doubt very much that any author would name a character Archibald Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy.”

“Indeed, what sort of idiotic author would give their character such a name? Only imagine how her hand would cramp each time she had to write out Mister Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy for the simplest piece of dialogue attribution. No”—she tapped her lip, considering—“were I to give you a nickname, I think it would be… Thorpe.”

“Thorpe?” He looked up, startled.

“Thorpe,” she repeated. It was simple. Unpretentious.

Masculine .

Just like him.

“Thorpe,” he said again as if testing the way it felt on his tongue. “Thorpe. I… I like that. Quite a lot, actually. I doubt my parents would use it, though. I don’t even know how I would go about asking them. They’ve been calling me Archie my whole life, and as I said”—he dropped his voice low—“I would never want to hurt their feelings.”

Her lips twisted into a wry smile. Already a plan was forming in her mind. “Leave everything to me. That is, if you’re sure you like it. If we’re going to convince your parents to call you something else, it’s important that it feels like the real you.”

“No, I’m sure. Thorpe feels much more like the real me.”

Izzie nudged him with her elbow. “Speaking of the real you, I know shockingly little about you, especially considering that we’re to be married tomorrow. Won’t you tell me more about yourself? Perhaps about your work at Nettlethorpe Iron?”

Izzie had asked some shocking questions in her day, but she hadn’t thought this was one of them. Yet Archibald flinched as if she’d delivered a withering set-down.

“Archibald?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course,” he said hastily. “I, uh… Why don’t I show you the upstairs?”

He was already towing her through the door and toward the red-carpeted stairs.

“Are you certain nothing is the matter?” It was a good thing she was wearing boots and trousers. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to keep up with his brisk stride. “I have an appalling tendency to say precisely what springs into my mind. I hope I did not speak out of turn.” Although, thinking about what she had just said, Izzie was struggling to grasp how she might have given offense…

“You didn’t.” His eyes were sincere. Beseeching, even. He gestured toward the upper floors, seeming eager to change the subject. “You remarked upon the lack of Gothic novels in the library. It occurred to me that you might like to choose a room for yourself. Not as your bedroom. I mean”—his ears turned red—“you’ll have one of those t-too, of course, but… um…”

She squeezed his arm, unable to resist teasing him. “Will I be needing my own bedroom? Perhaps we’ll want to share.”

Now his entire face was scarlet. “I, uh… I wouldn’t mind. But maybe you would. We’ll figure that out after the… the wedding.” He cleared his throat. “But I thought you might like to have a study. Or a library, or office… whatever you want to call it. You can keep all your books in there, and we’ll also get you a nice desk, so you’ll have a place to work on your writing.”

A place to work on her writing! An image sprang to mind of the library of her daydreams, with tall windows and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering every wall...

She tamped down her excitement. Archibald probably had something much more modest in mind. And really, it would be such a luxury to have any room for her own use. The notion of a snug writing nook held tremendous appeal.

“I would love that, Archibald.” She felt tears pricking. “What a thoughtful suggestion.”

“There’s a particular room I have in mind,” Archibald said as they reached the top of the stairs. “Let’s see what you think of it.”

He led her halfway down the red-carpeted corridor. The door he tried proved to be locked, so he asked the footman positioned at the top of the stairs to run and fetch the key from the butler, Giddings.

While they waited, Izzie looked around. She noticed that the wall at the end of the hallway was curved and recalled that from the outside, the house had had round towers on each corner. “Oh! Is this one of the towers?”

“It is,” he confirmed.

“I thought they were just a fa?ade. I didn’t realize there were tower rooms!”

The footman had returned with a ring of keys. Archibald was flipping through them, looking for the right one.

Izzie gazed longingly at the arched wooden door that led into the tower room. She wondered what it looked like on the inside. A castle tower—the very notion seemed inherently romantic!

Archibald was still busy with the keys. Maybe she would just have a quick peek…

She was just poking her head through the door when Archibald hissed, “Izzie! Wait!”