The Bridal Season by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online Page B

enough.
    He’d returned to his seat and was lowering himself into it
when he found his arm being supported. With his usual unobtrusive manner,
Elliot eased him into the chair.
    “I was just thinking of having a whiskey and soda, Father,”
Elliot said. “Can I tempt you into joining me?”
    “I’d like that,” Atticus replied.
    Elliot moved to a small credenza and busied himself with
decanter and soda bottle. The problem, thought Atticus, watching his son, is
that Elliot made having problems so easy. He simply shouldered any
difficulties, whether or not they were his own. The result was that little was
required of a person in Elliot’s care, except to graciously cede his troubles.
    Had Elliot always been so bound by duty? Atticus
wondered, watching his last surviving child. He thought not. Oh, Elliot had
always been attentive and conscientious, but it was only after Terry’s death
that he’d acquired that genteel polish, a polish so smooth that one could not
easily see past its brilliant surface to the man beneath. It was an insidious
sort of thing, Elliot’s gentility.
    After Terry had died, Elliot, filled with misplaced guilt, had
abandoned his budding legal practice and joined the army. He’d returned wounded
and covered in honors—not the least being a knighthood.
    Since then, he’d not once deviated from the course on which
circumstance and fate had set him. He’d funneled all his considerable energies
into judicial reformation. Then, a few weeks ago, word had arrived that the
Prime Minister had recommended that Elliot be made a baron. Which meant that
Elliot would be able to take a seat in the House of Lords and eventually win
his way into the appeals court.
    Anxiety over the new pressures his son would face had given
Atticus sleepless nights. Not that Elliot resented the burden; he considered it
an honor and his duty to accept that honor. Atticus was vastly proud of his son.
It made no sense, this feeling of dissatisfaction that arose when he thought of
Elliot’s future.
    There was no reason for it. Elliot was well liked and
respected, and though some would say he was too private and self-possessed,
Elliot himself seemed content. Nothing wrong with contentment. Atticus
considered it a fair compensation for a long life. And perhaps that was the
problem. He was seventy and Elliot was thirty-three, far too young to have
abdicated passion for contentment.
    Elliot’s appearance at his side postponed Atticus’s troubled
musing. He handed Atticus a whiskey and took the seat opposite, stretching his
long legs out before him. He scowled slightly, his expression distracted, his
thoughts filled no doubt with the demands of the day.
    Atticus remembered that Elliot had fetched Eglantyne’s wedding
planner from the train station. He hoped Angela understood the difficulties
she’d be shouldering upon wedding a marquis, with a termagant like his mother
for an in-law. She was so young, barely eighteen. At church last Sunday she’d
looked pale and fatigued.
    “How is she, do you think?” Atticus broke the silence.
    Elliot looked up, his expression baffled. “Who can say?” he
said slowly.
    “One could ask her, I imagine,” Atticus answered in surprise.
    “I barely know her,” Elliot muttered. His gaze fixed inward on
some image he alone could see, one that amused as well as troubled him, for his
mouth softened into a grudging smile.
    Atticus watched him, puzzled until he realized he was speaking
of the wedding planner.
    “She’s not at all what one would expect,” Elliot said.
    “No?” Atticus asked, feeling his way.
    “She’s too young and too—” Elliot lifted his hand in a gesture
of frustration, looked for a word, failed to find it, and repeated, “She’s not
what one would expect.”
    “She’s young?” Atticus prompted, intrigued by the emotion this
young woman who was “not what one would expect” had inspired in his son.
“And... beautiful?”
    Elliot shot him a frustrated glance. “No,” he said. “Yes. No.
I don’t know. Not