Free The Proposal by Mary Balogh Page A

am quite determined to be as little of a nuisance while I must remain here as I possibly can be. Please feel free to join the others in the dining room.”
    He still stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind his back.
    “You would have me thwart the will of my host, then?” he asked her. “I will not do it, ma’am. I will remain here.”
    Lord Trentham. He could be anything from a baron on up to a marquess, Gwen thought, though she had never heard of him before today. And if what Viscount Ponsonby had said was correct, he was also extremely wealthy. Yet he did not have the manners of a thick plank.
    She inclined her head to him and resolved not to utter another word before he did, though she would thereby be lowering her manners to the level of his. So be it.
    But before the silence could become uncomfortable again, the door opened to admit two servants, who proceeded to move a table closer to the sofa and set it for one diner. Before those servants had time to leave the room, two others entered bearing laden trays. One was set across Gwen’s lap while the other was carried to the table, where the various dishes were set out for Lord Trentham’s dinner.
    The servants left as silently as they had come. Gwen looked down at her soup and picked up her spoon as Lord Trentham took his place at the table.
    “I beg your pardon,” Lord Trentham said, “for the embarrassment a seemingly harmless joke has caused you, Lady Muir. It is one thing to be teased by friends. It is another to be humiliated by strangers.”
    She looked at him in surprise.
    “I daresay,” she said, “I will survive the ordeal.”
    He returned her look, saw that she was smiling, and nodded curtly before addressing himself to his dinner.
    The Duke of Stanbrook had an excellent chef, Gwen thought, if the oxtail soup was anything to judge by.
    “You are in search of a wife, Lord Trentham?” she said. “Do you have any particular lady in mind?”
    “No,” he said. “But I want someone of my own sort. A practical, capable woman.”
    She looked up at him. Someone of my own sort.
    “I was not born a gentleman,” he explained. “My title was awarded to me during the wars, as a result of something I did. My father was probably one of the wealthiest men in England. He was a very successful businessman. But he was not a gentleman, and he had no desire to be one. He had no social ambitions for his children either. He despised the upper classes as idle wastrels, if the truth were told. He wanted us to fit in where we belonged. I have not always honored his wishes, but in that particular one I concur with him. It would suit me best to find a wife of my own class.”
    Much had been explained, Gwen thought.
    “What did you do?” she asked as she pushed back her empty soup bowl and drew forward her plate of roast beef and vegetables.
    He looked back at her, his eyebrows raised.
    “It must have been something extraordinary,” she said, “if the reward was a title.”
    He shrugged.
    “I led a Forlorn Hope,” he said.
    “A Forlorn Hope ?” Her knife and fork remained suspended above her plate. “And you survived it?”
    “As you see,” he said.
    She gazed at him in wonder and admiration. A Forlorn Hope was almost always suicidal and almost always a failure. He could not have failed if he had been so rewarded. And good heavens, he was not even a gentleman. There were not many officers who were not.
    “I do not talk about it,” he said, cutting into his meat. “Ever.”
    Gwen continued to stare for a few moments before resuming her meal. Were the memories so painful, then, that they were not even tempered by the reward? Was it there that he had been so horribly wounded that he had spent a long time here recovering his health?
    But his title, she realized, sat uneasily upon his shoulders.
    “How long have you been widowed?” he asked her in what, she guessed, was a determined effort to change the subject.
    “Seven years,” she