"What is going on?" Nicola asked as she ventured down for breakfast the next day and the furore in the house was caused by frantic servants. She almost knocked over a poor man who was dashing towards the parlour room with a massive vase of white roses.

The dining room was just as frantic, food was already being cleared and she had to leap out of the way of a line of servants carrying silver platters of eggs, bacon, toast, sausages- everything that made her mouth water. Just as the last poor harried man swerved past her, Nicola managed to grab an apple from a tray of fruit, realising that it may have to tide her over until the next time food was served or when she arrived back in London later that day.

"Ah, Nicola dear," Lady Blackwood said from the other side of the room where she had been officiously delegating instructions to the household. She came forward and gave Nicola a once over, her expression blanching slightly. "Perhaps you had better run upstairs and change into something less bright."

She glanced down at the green gown she had chosen to wear for the day, frowning. "Is there something amiss with my attire?"

"Assuredly not," Jason mumbled, coming round from behind her as he, too, snatched an apple from the beleaguered footman rushing out the room. He grinned, taking a large bite. "You look wonderful."

Kathleen threw her son a strained glance just as Blanche came round the door, now joining them all in the dining room. "Where is the food going?" she demanded, yawning like a behemoth as she rubbed her stomach for emphasis. "I am starved."

Her mother blasted a sigh and agitatedly straightened her skirts. "Never mind, we don't have time for any of that," she said, directing her words at Nicola. "You will all have to wait for tea, I am afraid. The dowager is visiting us again."

"So soon?" Blanche almost choked, her eyes wide and pained.

Nicola turned on her heel and began to exit the room. "Well, it's a good thing I am needed in London today," she trilled happily, waving over her shoulder as she took a satisfied bite out of her apple. After the last few days, her mind was plagued with thoughts of one sordid and incorrigible Blackwood. She didn't need the insults of another to add to the confusion of her distraught mind.

Blanche dove for her. "Take me with you," she beseeched. "Jason and mother can handle the old bat themselves."

"The both of you would make excellent thespians," Lady Blackwood intoned from behind them, "but the dowager has requested to visit with you specifically, Nicola." Kathleen gave her son, who was munching an apple with a curious expression on his face as he studied the scene unfolding before him, a pointed look. "And you, Jason." He stopped chewing.

"Me?" Nicola squeaked, shaking Blanche off her arm. "Why me?"

Kathleen pursed her lips and they all had to step back for another line of servants, carrying and array of vases of flowers, feather dusters, and other ornamental furnishings to 'spruce up the place' for the impending dowager's visit. "Who knows?" Kathleen made a moue with her hand, indicative that she was just as clueless as the two of them. "I imagine it could be due to the fact that people talk and Wilhelmina has heard something about what transpired here at the picnic." Lady Blackwood rolled her eyes heavenward, almost beseeching the almighty to grant her stamina to endure the next for hours, or patience to not murder her wayward children.

"So that means," Blanche said slowly, a smile dawning on her face, "I am free to leave?"

"Traitor," Nicola grumbled, "to think of all the times I have suffered through her visits for you."

"Hush, I would never leave you alone to face off that wrinkly crone alone," Blanche teased, linking her arm with her friend's for emphasis.

"You are not to go anywhere," Lady Blackwood told her youngest daughter imperiously. "No doubt where Nicola is involved, so are you. This conversation will intrinsically be linked to you, even if it is indirectly so." She sighed then, checked the time by looking at the clock on the patterned walls, and then made to hurry off. "You have thirty minutes to make yourselves more presentable, then you best make sure you are inside that parlour room, and if one of you so much as giggles or coughs today I will make sure London doesn't see you in another ballroom for the next year and a half."

"I should have stayed in London after the opera last night," Nicola reflected with a tinge of misery, watching as Lady Blackwood disappeared up the stairs.

"Why are you returning anyway?" Blanche asked curiously. "There are only a couple of days yet to the masquerade, and you will be accompanying us."

"I have an appointment," Nicola mumbled, switching her gaze from Blanche to Jason's. If he was unnerved by the dowager's visit, or anything that had happened between them last night, his outward appearance would not speak of it. He was unreadable, but then he pressed that red apple to his lips and took a large, slow bite, an action that was so deliberately provoking of a something he did last night to the top of her breast, her heart flipped. Oh, he was affected. She recalled so easily his kiss, how it felt to have his body pressed up against hers, her legs wrapped around his thighs. A visible shiver went through her. It would plague her the entire day, recollecting the evening before, and then the painting... It was the only piece from him she could display. Outwardly, the subject matter was innocent enough. He had painted her from the opera, slightly turned away from him, looking back at someone – him – with a smile. Tendrils of hair curled prettily off the back of her neck, she curved sheen of the red neckline of her dress a clear reminder of the places his fingers had touched and tortured.

Yes, the painting was innocent enough... but the memories it would evoke whenever she looked at it were definitely not.

"Well that will just have to wait," Blanche was saying, absently tucking a flyaway piece of Nicola's mane back into a pin- an ineffective gesture. The curl simply popped right back out.

"Perhaps she only wishes to chitchat," Nicola wondered aloud, but that was as likely as Blanche suddenly finding a dislike for custard tartlets. The Dowager Marchioness of Northwick simply did not chitchat. When she called upon her family, it was normally with news or the intent to berate one of them for something she heard or saw them do. Normally, this would fall to Jason or Blanche. Luckily for him, Jason's coveted title had earned him a reprieve of sort in the years since his father's death, but his continued unmarried state was cause for concern and, as for Blanche, she was almost as hopeless as Nicola in the dowager's eyes.

Which is why the prospect of being asked directly to be present today was unnerving. Nicola racked her brain for something, anything, that could warrant Wilhelmina's unwaveringly disapproving eye, but she was sure that her actions had been proper (when she had been in public) and when she had not been, Jason had done his best to ensure the utmost of discretion. Nicola glanced over Blanche's head, meeting Jason's gaze, and gave him a questioning look. Perhaps she had missed something, perhaps they had been seen and someone was talking, which could be very, very bad. Catching the meaning behind her look, he sucked his lips and shrugged, equally as perplexed.

Well, he was no use.

When Lady Wilhelmina arrived with aplomb once more, they received her in the same parlour room as before, yet this time Lady Blackwood insisted that Jason sit on the opposite chair to Nicola, while Blanche occupied the settee which, unfortunately for her, would also be occupied by the dowager herself, keeping the three of them as separate from each other as possible. A deliberate and effective strategy.

Wilhelmina flounced into the room in a cloud of lace, cast a stony eye at all of them and, without so much as a greeting, speared Nicola with a finger. "I need to have words with you, child," she announced, her diction a hollow throb of imperious doom as they echoed resoundingly through the stunned silence of the chamber.

"Good morning, my lady," Kathleen said calmly as she came forward to greet her late husband's mother. "Perhaps you'd care for some tea?"

Wilhelmina turned her head sharply to the other woman, notching her angular chin high. "I'd care for a household of a marquis to be managed with a modicum of propriety, my dear, and clearly you are incapable of the role."

"Grandmother," Jason said, his voice low with warning. "Perhaps you should take some tea and sit down, lest I need to remind whose household you are indeed standing in."

At that, Wilhelmina scowled. Nicola barely controlled the neutral expression on her face, unused to the authoritative air of the man opposite her as he addressed the aged matriarch of the family. He had risen to bow to her when she first entered, but now he lounged back idly in the chair, a cool simmer of anger radiating from every pore of his body despite the casual pose he adopted.

Something must have registered in the elderly woman, for she suddenly accepted Kathleen's assistance and a cup of tea. Then she resumed her original tirade, but her words were not directed solely to Nicola alone.

"I have been told," she drawled, each word a long cord of discontent, "that there is a courtship transpiring in this household." Kathleen shared a speaking glance with her son then, but Jason merely shook his head, as if to say not him, and his mother resumed listening politely to the other woman. "This news irks me. Now you may ask why-" Beside her grandmother, Blanche rolled her eyes. "- and I would inform you that I had already lined up appropriate prospects for my grandchildren, men and women of fine stock and quality." Wilhelmina paused and swivelled, turning in her seat so that she could direct a look of such scathing reproach on Nicola she felt her skin crawl with it. "Imagine my surprise-" the sneer attached to the word suggested that surprise was the last thing Wilhelmina felt- "when I learnt just this morning that my grandson was witnessed to have none other than a common little strumpet on his arm last night at the opera."

Nicola frowned, feeling herself bristle at the slur, at the judgement, but she tamped it down, praying for calm. "I beg your pardon?" she asked quietly, allowing the dowager the opportunity to correct herself, to rectify the obvious implication that she was directing her words to Nicola.

"Do not act like you misheard, child," Wilhelmina continued. "It has been remarked several times in my morning correspondence by my companions who witnessed the two of you. I could only endure so much when they said that Jason favoured your company-"

"Grandmother," Jason clipped again, a warning, but Wilhelmina was irate now, worked up by her own misbegotten thoughts and harshness.

"Quite preposterous!" she snapped. "The Maquis of Northwick, favouring you? Courting you?"

"Lady Wilhelmina," Kathleen urged, a tightness in her voice now.

"I endured your acquaintance with the family well enough, but if I had known your clever little ploy to marry your way into a title, I would have put an end to it the moment your dirty mouth stepped foot onto the estate." Wilhelmina slashed her hand across the air emphatically. "You have a lofty opinion of your charms, indeed, if you believe you can catch yourself a young and handsome marquis, my girl. Perhaps you should set your cap for a gentleman who would not baulk at that absurd hair and mouth of yours."

"You go too far, Wilhelmina." Jason was standing now, as was Kathleen.

Nicola, on the other hand, was in shock. Had she just been called ugly? Or at least insinuated that she was?

"You will not marry her," the next words were directed at Jason, Nicola sufficiently dismissed. "I forbid it. The girl will not, absolutely not ever, be part of our family. If she remains on at Northwick, in your favours, there will be consequences."

Family... the word swirled through her mind, made her chest ache with realisation. She had always been on the outskirts of the Blackwood's family, always watching, always involved, but she had felt as if she belonged to them, with them. Wilhelmina's barb landed sharp and true because even if she felt it, she wasn't really part of it. She was a guest, a friend, a confidante and, of late, a co-conspirator to what appeared to be an idle marquis. Other than her father, she didn't have a family, and it resonated with a peculiar hollowness that the Blackwood's would never be, too, if Wilhelmina had her odious way.

"Apologise," Jason was saying, glaring down at his grandmother where she remained seated and poised on her settee.

"Whatever for?" Wilhelmina scoffed, a bitter laugh of a sound. "For telling Miss Eversley the truth? Better she learn now before it is too late."

"Apologise or get out."

"Jason," Nicola said, and she realised she had stood yet she had no recollection of doing so. Every head in the room turned to her, but Jason's was the only gaze she held- so hard, like iron and lightning, and this was a side to him she had not been privy to before, the side he did not show anyone unless he had to. He was the Marquis of Northwick and he would protect and manage his own, the power radiating from his body spoke volumes of how he could exact that sentiment, but she wouldn't be the cause of it, a rift between them- not today. "I do not want her apology." The calmness in Nicola's voice belied the turmoil and hurt warring within her. "She is right, there is nothing to apologise for." To the smug look on Wilhelmina's harsh countenance, Nicola addressed her next words. "I am not courting your grandson, despite what you may have heard, and I am not engaged to be married to him. But," she paused, allowing some of the anger and insult to slip out her tone as she levelled the dowager with a baleful look, "if I chose to do so, he would lucky to have me."

She didn't care if it was unforgivably rude, she didn't care if the dowager denounced her in every ballroom across the country, Nicola left, but at least she had her head held proud and her dignity in tack. Most of it, anyway. Well... maybe a tiny slither.

"Jason, don't you dare leave this room!" Wilhelmina hissed once Nicola had left.

She heard it and knew he was following her, but she didn't care. She wanted to run, to leave the estate, to go back to London. Just for a little while at least, to scrub herself of all the ugly words she had heard about herself today.

She was almost to the stairs in the entrance hall when Jason caught her, turning her to him. "Do not go," he said simply, as if he could read her mind or her every feeling. Perhaps it was so eloquently displayed on her face or perhaps he had come to know her well enough now.

Nicola shook her head. "Please."

There was a muscle in his jaw that tightened as his eyes switched over her face, interpreting everything he saw there, the flinch as more voices were raised from the parlour room she had just fled, and Jason made a decision. Without a word, he took her hand and lead her into the library, the closest room, shutting the door behind them. "Don't go," he said again, turning to her, clasping her hand gently in his, "to London. Not now."

The controlled fury was gone, leaving only the Jason she knew so well in its stead. His eyes were soft and concerned, and she looked up into his face, heart aching. "I have an appointment," she said, shaking her head again. "Besides, your grandmother-"

"Never repeat her words to me again, Nicki." A flash of anger as he spoke of it, then he softened again, touching her chin. "I'll put her in a cottage far away from us- in Scotland if I have to- before I choose her over you. She does not know you, who you are and what you mean to this family."

"She's your family, Jason." There were no tears that fell over her cheeks, but she felt them pricking and burning her eyes. It was a combination of the poignancy from him and the confrontation she had to endure. Nicola had never been put in a position where she needed to defend herself, was unfamiliar with the abrasive and raw emotions that could accumulate. She didn't like it. "You can't choose her over me. You can't choose your family."

A strange look furrowed his brows. "You can be daft at times. You truly can't see how you are more a part of this family than that miserable old toenail?"

She laughed, and because it was so ridiculous and because she was feeling so vulnerable, Nicki threw her arms around him and buried her face against his chest, just as her laugh turned into a quiet sob. His arms banded around her wordlessly, holding her tightly against him. The library doors opened, but Jason shifted, and mutely they closed again, obviously whoever it was thinking better of interrupting. "She will never like me," Nicola sniffled, rubbing her damp cheek against the velvet of his coat. He surrounded her, his body, his scent, lulling her into a safe haven. She didn't want to leave Northwick to never return, she didn't want to leave her best friend, or Kathleen, or him. It was an ugly ultimatum.

"Do you need her to like you?" The words were a low rumble in his chest, his chin and lips against her temple.

"She won't like my staying here anymore. You heard what she said."

"Would you like me to tell you about how many other things I could concern myself with before I concern myself with caring about what Wilhelmina does or does not like?"

Another sniffle, but she felt herself smile at his words. "Maybe."

A pained sigh from him, his hands stroking her back soothingly. "I could watch grass grow," he began, "I could count how many strawberry tarts Blanche would eat in one day; I could listen to Grace tell me about the latest fashionable styles of fabrics she found in her modiste just last week, I could speculate for hours on the reasons why you would gift me a suggestively provocative flower-"

"I think I understand," she murmured, chuckling.

"Good." She felt his fingers flex slightly at her back as if wanting to draw her closer. "Do not allow her words to hurt you anymore, darling. But, God, did I enjoy watching you stand up for yourself. You were marvellous, Nicki."

It was easier said than done, and some barbs still clutched at her with bitter tenacity, making her tense. "When someone compares you to a beetle and then proceeds to imply you can only attract unfortunate-looking husbands, let me know if you are not affected."