One Final Season (12 page)

‘I said all along it was a mistake for Miranda and Kit not to find you a new governess when Charlotte married Ben, for you’ve obviously been spending far too much time minding my business for me and too little on your lessons these last three years. I’m sure that I never got left to my own devices in London far too much when
I
wasn’t even out. You must have been given far too much liberty to know so much about eligible bachelors now and you’re only just making your début and should therefore be innocent and sweetly naïve, not a budding fishwife who thinks she knows everything there is to know about other people’s private business,’ Kate snapped.

‘Heaven forbid I should ever be as innocent as Miranda evidently was when that worm lied and wheedled and seduced her into eloping with him in that scrambling fashion,’ Isabella said with an expression in her eyes that made Kate’s heart sink.

She’d fought so hard to shelter her little sister from the full impact of their elder sister innocently believing Nevin Braxton’s self-serving, cynical lies. Even now she shuddered to think of the terrible consequences of what should have been just a silly youthful infatuation, when Miranda eloped with a villain before being abandoned by him, after being stripped of her innocence, her pride and even her health while he gaily spent the quarter-day rents for the whole Wychwood estate he’d somehow managed to steal away with her on wine, women and more unspeakable pleasures that Miranda would never dream of discussing with her little sisters.

‘Both of us have her example in front of us to make us wary, Izzie, but you only need to watch Miranda with Kit, or Charlotte with her Ben, to know that not all men are lying villains.’ With incredulity Kate heard herself defend that overwrought emotion some called love, the very one she’d spent so long avoiding and refusing to truly believe in.

Only yesterday she would have probably applauded Isabella’s hard-headed refusal to be taken in by passions that threatened to fog the intellect and blind a person to all the faults the object of that passion might possess.

‘Suddenly you’re singing a very different tune,’ Isabella confirmed with some satisfaction and Kate wondered if her devious sister had manufactured this whole scene to get her to do just that. ‘About time, too,’ she added and smiled smugly.

‘I’m just making observations,’ she excused herself lamely.

‘Liar.’

‘At least I’m not a precocious brat who thinks she knows far more about other people’s business than they do themselves,’ Kate retorted, infuriated that her sister was right. The moral high ground she’d thought so settled and immutable under her feet shifted every time Edmund gave her one of those hotly assessing looks, or a provoking smile that promptly sent her wits to the four winds.

‘Neither am I,’ Isabella replied with annoying, very conscious calm in the face of the childish provocation Kate had just resorted to in order to change the subject.

‘Neither are you what?’ Kate asked shortly, already having had her temper severely tested by her betrothed this morning and deciding she’d had enough.

‘A precocious brat,’ Izzie replied coolly and proved it.

Arrested by the truth of that declaration, Kate finally took in the absolute certainty that her whole life was about to change for ever. Isabella was a beautiful and composed young woman, almost guaranteed to become the toast of London society as soon as she stuck her nose inside the first ballroom and Kate was going to marry a man who’d thought himself in love with her what seemed like for ever ago, just when he seemed to have decided he didn’t want to wed, or perhaps even like, the woman who’d cost him so much wasted time and frustration. Edmund had certainly cooled towards her during those three years of absence and, before last night, had seemed more intent on watching her with cynical amusement and a lazy smile than begging for her closest attention and her hand in marriage.

He’d obviously found little enough to like about her when he was subjecting her to that mocking scrutiny these last few weeks and it was obvious even to her that he’d been hunting for a wife whose greatest virtue would very likely have been
not
resembling Miss Katherine Alstone. Apparently he’d learnt to distrust her since they’d parted on his last passionate offer to love her and her refusal of that offer. She recalled a few more heated memories from last night and decided he’d managed to overcome it long enough to kiss her senseless and want her almost ravenously all the time he was doing it. The whole topsy-turvy situation was enough to give any female the urge to fall into hysterics, she decided, and met her little sister’s gaze with some of her confusion probably all too evident in her own.

‘Edmund’s clearly no longer a besotted youth, eager for any kind word I care to offer or a duty dance or two when I’m not otherwise engaged, and you obviously don’t need me, either,’ Kate admitted hollowly. ‘Nothing about my life or that of most of the people I care about is as I thought when I came to town this year.’

‘Shuttleworth’s certainly not a youth, and whether or not he’s besotted with you largely depends how you treat him, I suspect, but I’ll always need you, Kate. Perhaps in a different way now I’m not the vulnerable little girl you fought so hard to protect, although just a child yourself. We’re both women now and all three of us Alstone sisters could be closer than ever, if you’ll let yourself need us as deeply as we’ll always love and need you.’

‘Whatever do you mean, Izzie? I’ve always loved you both so much.’

‘Only that you did what you had to do when Miranda ran off with that awful Nevin Braxton and Grandfather refused to even hear her name mentioned again, let alone allowing her any contact with us at all, despite you being so very young yourself. When our dear brother, Jack, died, it left us at Wychwood, grief-stricken and lost as we were, and you stood up to Aunt Ennersley and Cousin Cecelia’s bullying and carping and even somehow persuaded Grandfather to send us to school to get us away from them. Both Miranda and I needed you to be far more grown up than anyone had the right to ask you to be at such an age then, but I’m a woman now, Kate, and Miranda is so blissfully married neither of us need worry about her happiness ever again, with Kit there to see to it so ably.

‘You can stop worrying about me, and it’s plain as the nose on your face that Miranda is almost insufferably delighted with her earl. Maybe one day she’ll even stop feeling guilty that such a youthful folly took her away when we needed her most. What I’m trying to say, and probably making a ham-fist of it, is we love you deeply and heaven knows you’ve proved you love us, but you don’t need to fight the rest of the world any more. Miranda and I want you to be
happy
, Kate, so please let Edmund Worth love you as ardently as he’s wanted to from the first moment he laid eyes on you, and make sure you are just that for the rest of your days.’

‘It’s too late,’ Kate said bleakly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re about to marry the man.’

‘Only because he thinks he compromised me beyond repairing while rescuing me from my folly. He’s been doing a very good job of ignoring me all Season whilst he flirted and danced with the prettiest of the current batch of débutantes. He was obviously trying to make up his mind which one to marry and it certainly wasn’t me he expected to walk up the aisle towards him at the end of the festivities, Izzie.’

‘Yet he gained
your
attention by proving himself not to be an eager young puppy to be kicked away or taken for granted any longer, if he was ever as tame as you thought him to be in the first place, of course, which I doubt.’

‘I really don’t think that was what he was trying to do, Izzie. Indeed, Edmund made it very plain to me from the instant he set eyes on me again this year that he no longer cared one way or the other
what
I thought of him. He was seeking a pretty and conformable wife, and he certainly wasn’t looking in my direction to find her since I am patently neither pretty nor conformable.’

‘No, you’re beautiful and spirited, which makes you far more interesting and exciting to be around, but did you really care what he thought of you, Kate? You didn’t seem to during that first Season when he followed you about like an overenthusiastic dog guarding a bone.’

‘I’ve missed him,’ she admitted rather grudgingly.

‘And if you’d been caught behaving improperly with any other man than Edmund, you’d have meekly married him instead?’ Isabella demanded ruthlessly.

‘Perhaps,’ Kate mumbled as if she were the younger of the sisters by several years and didn’t want to own up to some iniquitous deed she was ashamed of, even while her mind screamed an unequivocal ‘No!’ So apparently she’d rather face disgrace and social exclusion for the rest of her days than wed anyone but Edmund, Viscount Shuttleworth, which seemed close to disastrous when he could put her out of the room with such breathtaking arrogance, then go back to discussing details of their wedding with Eiliane as if they didn’t concern her in the least.

‘Then you’re an idiot.’

‘Well and so I am. Eiliane thinks me one, you obviously agree and Edmund hasn’t stopped glowering at me since I was stupid enough to agree we have no choice but to marry each other after all.’

‘And you’re just meekly accepting the majority decision on your sanity, are you, sister mine? That really doesn’t sound at all like you.’

‘It’s not, but I don’t
feel
at all like me at the moment, Izzie,’ Kate admitted her confusion at last and surprised herself by feeling considerably better for doing so.

‘Good, then there’s clearly hope for you yet.’

‘I fail to see why my feeling confused about it could mean my marriage to Edmund is any more likely to succeed.’

‘I know, that’s what makes the whole situation so irresistibly amusing,’ Isabella said annoyingly and refused to expand on her cryptic statement any further.

Chapter Twelve

‘T
he Earl of Carnwood and Viscount Shuttleworth, your ladyship,’ the Pemberleys’ butler announced solemnly six days later, then he reluctantly shut the door after that noble pair before he could observe the full effect of his announcement on the ladies.

‘Good heavens, whatever are
you
doing here?’ Kate demanded of her brother-in-law as soon as he stepped into the room. She noted that, even though he was as tall and powerful and full of life as ever, the Earl of Carnwood quite failed to overshadow Edmund as he should have done just with his impressive physical presence.

It wasn’t much for her to ask of a brother-in-law and ex-guardian, she chided him silently. All he’d needed to do to make her feel a lot better about her seesawing emotions and uncertain temper was to put a pampered young aristocrat in the shade for her with his effortless poise and that air of barely contained energy Miranda obviously found so irresistible. Not that she had the least desire to lust after her sister’s husband, of course, especially now he was no longer her guardian and she’d come to regard him as an elder brother, but Kit could at least have done her the favour of putting her betrothed back into the Edmund-shaped slot she’d once managed to make him fit into so neatly.

‘Where else did you expect me to be at a time like this?’ Kit replied harshly, as if only just restraining himself from shaking her, which might well be the case since he’d probably hated travelling every last mile that now separated him from Miranda and their children, both born and still just about unborn.

‘We were managing perfectly well without you,’ she defended herself, unable to conceal the fact that her gaze was locked on Edmund as if she was waiting for whatever danger he posed to reveal itself so she could jump the other way.

Except he was her affianced husband now and shortly she’d no longer have the luxury of avoiding anything about him. The delicious shiver that accompanied that inescapable truth distracted her so shockingly that she heard Kit’s impatient reply as if from a vast distance.

‘So well that you got trapped in such a deep hole by drifting about someone else’s house as if you owned it, that Edmund was forced to dig you out of it at the cost of his own freedom,’ Kit accused her crossly.

‘I take it you both had an unpleasant journey then,’ Eiliane finally managed to say with the manic cheerfulness of a hostess doing her best to cope with an impossible social situation and two travel-stained noblemen.

Both evidently thought their business too important to go to their respective homes so they could bathe and change before they strolled into a lady’s private sitting room. Which made Kate’s heart leap with apprehension for what they thought so urgent it couldn’t wait just an hour to be dealt with in a more leisurely fashion.

‘Indeed we did, Lady Pemberley. It was infernally damp and ridiculously hasty and I’d very much prefer to be at home with my wife, not caught up in some ridiculous bumble-broth of my sister-in-law’s making,’ Kit told Eiliane with only a slight softening of the formidable frown knitting his dark brows.

He continued to watch Kate as if she was about to add something equally silly and dangerous to the misadventure that had forced Edmund to pay him a hasty visit in the first place. She squirmed under his condemning gaze, despite feeling Kit was being ungracious and unfair, and that she’d done nothing particularly awful. It wasn’t as if she’d gone into that room for any other reason than to avoid an importunate suitor and a nasty public scene when she would have been forced to repulse his obnoxious advances in no uncertain terms. Kit wouldn’t have liked it if he’d been forced to gallop south to extricate her from Bestholme’s predatory clutches and bear her home in disgrace, instead of agreeing for her to wed Edmund as he’d always wanted her to.

‘Pray come and sit by the fire,’ Eiliane invited soothingly and Kate knew she owed her friend fervent thanks for trying to deflect Kit’s rarely aroused temper, before he gave her the full benefit of his pent-up frustrations. ‘I allowed myself the luxury of ordering one lit today, despite it being springtide according to the calendar, so you can both enjoy my extravagance and I won’t have any standing on ceremony from you, dear Edmund, now that you’re almost a member of the family.’

Now one storm at least had been averted, Kate almost caused another by nervously giggling at the contrary effect Eiliane’s invitation had on her two visitors. Kit relaxed enough to mutter something about all his dirt and had the very idea of him going across the square to change before he could sit down and recover from his hasty journey summarily dismissed. He shrugged wearily and subsided into the comfortable chair by the fire before gratefully stretching his long legs towards the warmth with a long sigh of relief. Would that Edmund followed his example, Kate decided wistfully, as he stood aloof instead. He was watching her like a cat at a mouse hole, which seemed rather harsh of him when she was still trying to conceal the rush of pleasure her first sight of him after several days apart had provoked in her fast-beating heart and very confused mind.

How very unfair of the fates to allow her immunity to his looks and charm three years ago and now make her so ridiculously sensitive to his every look and gesture, when he was far less charming, if even more formidably handsome, than he’d been then. The fates had a great deal to answer for, she decided bitterly, and pretended to be absorbed in the list in front of her. Unfortunately it was one of Eiliane’s interminable ones concerning their hasty wedding and she blushed foolishly at the very thought of the future looming inexorably nearer with every day that passed. It really wasn’t ladylike to feel so wickedly curious about becoming a wife in every sense of the word.

A little maidenly shrinking at the unthinkable intimacies ahead of her would be far more proper, then she could forgive herself for being such a fool as to turn him down so often and so emphatically in the past. She shivered at the very thought of such incredible closeness between a man and his new wife entering the marriage bed together and wondered if it was possible to conceal her innermost thoughts and secret hopes from an intelligent and observant husband. She’d have her answer to that question all too soon and tried to look inscrutable when she glanced at him.

Edmund seemed more concerned with trying to read her deepest secrets in her face than with his own comfort, even after the hard ride he and Kit must have endured to get here so quickly. Kate squirmed under his examining gaze, just managing to meet it with more of an effort than she liked and she tightened her betraying fingers on her notebook lest he see how they were trembling.

‘Was the journey so very bad?’ she finally managed to ask.

‘It was cold and wet as well as unpleasantly muddy,’ he admitted at last and Kate couldn’t dismiss the idea he might have enjoyed it far more if he’d been bound for Wychwood on any other errand.

‘I’m sorry,’ she offered stiffly.

‘I really have no idea why,’ he said with a ghost of a smile, ‘even you can hardly be responsible for the vagaries of the weather.’

Oh dear, none of this was going according to plan and how would they ever get on as man and wife if even a conversation about the state of the roads and the weather could turn from innocuous to personal in such a stilted, unpromising way?

‘I was being polite,’ she informed him crossly and had to control her temper when the contrary man evidently found the notion amusing and actually managed to look as if he might like to know her after all.

‘Forgive me for not recognising the effort it cost you,’ he teased with such a warm smile she couldn’t resist a ridiculous need to grin back at him, just as if she’d been sitting here twiddling her thumbs since he’d gone and waiting for him to get back so she could simper at him like a besotted milkmaid.

‘I’m not really so ill mannered, am I?’ she asked.

‘No, I recall being crushed by your exquisite manners on more than one occasion.’

‘Then I shall endeavour to treat you with excessive rudeness from now on.’

‘I’d certainly prefer that to the impenetrable politeness you once used to depress my pretences,’ he said wryly.

‘Then for goodness’ sake sit down, you’re giving me a crick in the neck as well as keeping the warmth of the fire from the rest of us.’

‘Much better,’ he murmured as he sat down cautiously on the sofa beside her with an apparent docility that no longer deceived her in the least.

Quite aware that very little about their supposedly private interaction had escaped either Kit or Eiliane, Kate decided a front of apparent serenity would serve her best against their rampant curiosity about her relationship with Edmund.

‘So how is my sister?’ she asked Kit as she handed him a cup of tea while Welland rounded up his acolytes and left the room once more, surprised not to have it thrust back at her while he demanded something more potent after such a journey. The Earl of Carnwood was in danger of becoming civilised, she decided wryly, and met his self-conscious glare with an innocently enquiring look.

‘Well enough,’ he admitted gruffly and sipped the fragrant Chinese blend Eiliane always insisted on having served with carefully concealed appreciation. ‘It’s quite refreshing after a long ride,’ he defended himself and Kate saw Edmund grin at Kit’s discomfiture with an openness that told her they’d reached a new equality on the road somewhere between here and Wychwood.

‘Never having been overburdened with female relatives nagging me to forsake my wicked ways, I’ve always had the liberty of choosing which ways to pursue for myself, until now of course,’ Edmund said with a polite bow and a bland look Kate didn’t altogether trust.

Despite not believing she’d ever be allowed much say with regard to his behaviour, it occurred to her that she’d never seen him drunk, nor heard it whispered that he indulged in private debauchery even the gossips dared not be specific about, for fear of polluting their own tongues and reputations. Well, apart from that annoyingly persistent murmur about him and Lady Tedinton that she didn’t believe for a moment, of course. Unfortunately she didn’t have much faith in Edmund’s implication that she alone would have permission to plague him about his foibles in future, let alone believing she’d be listened to once he’d made his mind up on any course of action he considered important.

‘Lucky you,’ Kit responded and Kate wondered how much difference even Miranda’s opinions made to him once he had determined on something.

Since Kit’s two sisters must have been responsible for any feminine nagging done before he and Miranda married, and her elder sister was a very decided female under all that serene beauty of hers, Kate supposed it was therefore just about possible for a strong woman to influence a masculine force of nature like Kit. The question being, of course, whether she had any chance of altering a course of action the equally stubborn male she was to marry might choose to embark on.

‘One thing I’m not going to be moved so much as an inch upon, though, is the subject of your marriage,’ Kit declared with the rock-hard set to his chin indicating a state of mind Miranda had learnt to circumvent rather than try to change.

‘Then you disapprove?’ Kate heard herself ask squeakily, even desperately, as if marrying Edmund had become the be all and end all of her entire existence.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he replied and Kate wondered if she was the only one who heard the unsaid aside that she was an idiot to even suggest he might.

‘What about our marriage, then?’ she asked, and had to physically stop herself reaching for Edmund’s hand as if she needed his strength and support to face her brother-in-law’s weary irritation with cool self-command.

‘It won’t take place in London,’ Kit informed her bluntly.

Kate annoyed herself intensely once more by looking to Edmund for his opinion of that ultimatum before expressing her own. ‘But what about Isabella?’ she managed to say, unable to read his silver-green gaze and having to do all the work on her own after all.

‘What about her?’ Kit asked.

‘It’s her début Season and she’s been late enough beginning it already, without her being dragged north to see me married and make it even shorter for her.’

‘I propose that we ask her opinion of the idea before we start galloping off on wild-goose chases in either direction,’ Eiliane suggested with the exquisitely breakable serenity of a lady who’d just spent the last few days hastily planning a fashionable wedding at St George’s in Hanover Square that now looked very unlikely to take place.

‘Well, where is she then?’ Kit asked impatiently, as if Isabella had been deliberately obstructive in not refusing to stir an inch outside the front door until he reached town, especially when she hadn’t known he was coming in the first place.

‘Shopping—the Mausley family arrived in town the day before yesterday and you know very well that Fanny Mausley has always been Izzie’s bosom-bow, Kit,’ Kate said as pacifically as she could manage when she was beginning to feel rather impatient with her brother-in-law’s weary irritability herself.

‘And if only she wasn’t such a breathy, overeager female, I’d be a lot more ready to forgive her for carrying my ward off on a hunt for fripperies when all I want is to get all this nonsense settled and go back home as fast as a pack of hired nags can carry me now I’ve worn out my own, and that won’t be nigh fast enough for my taste,’ Kit grumbled.

‘It’s not nonsense, it’s my
wedding
and you sound just like the crabby guardian out of some Drury Lane comedy, overeager to get back to your acres and forsake the hurly-burly of the town for ever.’ She managed to swallow her own annoyance to tease him and won a reluctant smile and a self-deprecating shrug.

‘That’s what the love of a good woman can do to a man, Shuttleworth, so be warned by my example and start
your
married life as you mean to go on,’ Kit warned.

‘Oh, I’ll do that, never fret,’ Edmund replied with a mocking glance at her that jolted Kate out of her mood of half-contented acceptance of her new lot in life and left her struggling to control her temper again. ‘And
I
shall be forewarned,’ she pronounced haughtily and had to conceal her ridiculously oscillating feelings for a very different reason when Edmund’s smile turned openly sceptical. He seemed more intent on challenging her on every front than wooing her into accepting this marriage with good grace and it was just stupid to feel the least bit tearful about it.