One Final Season (2 page)

‘Which is precisely why they’re so unsuited to make a so-called convenient husband, although, given the way you treat them, I can’t but wish the lot of them would come to their senses and teach you a lesson or two in humility.’

‘I’m always perfectly civil,’ Kate said defensively.

‘When you don’t happen to be busy, or would like a personable gentleman to squire you about a ballroom while you flirt and gossip with no fear of comeback. That’s not civility; it’s cynical exploitation.’

A strong sense of justice forced Kate to reluctantly agree that she took her admirers for granted. Only one of them had ever tempted her to yield to his urgent wooing and marry him and she’d treated Edmund Worth, Lord Shuttleworth, so abominably in order to fend off his increasingly passionate demands that he’d left London before the end of her first Season and not indulged in another until now. Let Eiliane know that particular dark secret and she’d throw Kate at the unfortunate man’s head and embarrass both of them beyond bearing.

Not that he fitted any description of an unfortunate man she’d ever come across. He was noble, wealthy and an unusually intelligent gentleman of wit and character. Three years ago his youthful intensity and fiery devotion had frightened Kate into insulting brusqueness, borne of an irrational fear that he could too easily steal her heart, just as her elder sister’s treacherous first husband had cynically taken hers and then trampled on it ruthlessly and even gleefully, before callously deserting her in the most appalling circumstances.

Now she was one and twenty and still unwed, even if that was by her own choice. With the added disadvantage of flaming red hair she still found annoying after twenty-one years of living with it, even possessed as she was of the famous dark blue Alstone eyes and just enough height to render her graceful, Kate thought of herself as an oddity. She formed part of a close circle of family and friends who only wanted her to be happy, yet perhaps she just didn’t deserve to be so after breaking a young man’s heart so callously once upon a time?

Watching Shuttleworth avoid a matchmaking mama with a preoccupied nod, she wondered where her wits had gone wandering off to three years ago. If she’d only seen a hasty, impulsively passionate and rather callow youth in the man he’d been then, didn’t that make her almost as headstrong and foolish as her sister Miranda had been at seventeen when she’d fallen in ‘love’ with a man so unworthy of her he wasn’t fit to kiss the hem of her gown after a muddy walk? If she had been wilfully blind in her determination not to follow Miranda’s example, could that mean Lord Shuttleworth might have been the love of her life and her ideal husband, if only she’d had the courage to say yes to him three years ago? Indeed, had the passionate sincerity of his youthful determination to wed her been the real reason her suitors ever since had seemed so colourless and interchangeable that she felt not a single qualm about refusing any of them?

His lordship had clearly got over any lingering infatuation he’d ever felt for her while he was away, since it had taken him two evening parties and a night at the play to find time to reintroduce himself to her after three years of absence. Tonight it would have been rude beyond anything his gentlemanly instincts could endure to ignore her in Eiliane’s company, but all the time they’d been together he’d watched her with cynical grey eyes, their irises rayed with a silvery jade green that she couldn’t recall studying quite so diligently in the past. Her heart had actually fluttered under his steely scrutiny; she’d felt it and cursed it for being so susceptible as she curtsied and observed his elegant bow and finely tuned indifference to whatever she might feel upon meeting him again.

‘Perhaps I became useful to some of the eligible bachelors somewhere along the way,’ she mused absently to Eiliane now. ‘A safe habit we have fallen into on either side without noting it. They know I shall turn down their suit, so they feel safe declaring themselves my slaves and proposing to me in the certainty I’ll refuse.’

‘And you truly think that sort of habit would make a suitable basis for a lifetime commitment to love and honour a man if you broke it and shocked and perhaps horrified him by accepting him at last, Kate? It sounds a nightmare to me when you’re young and full of promise and would do so much better if you’d only look for happiness within this theoretical marriage you’re contemplating so coolly,’ Eiliane retorted.

‘Love can’t always be a bolt of lightning.’ Kate defended herself rather uncomfortably, because all of a sudden it seemed rather a sterile scheme to marry for less even to her. ‘Sometimes I dare say it needs time to grow into something much more comfortable and this year I might meet a man I can respect for his integrity and honour as well as his sense of duty. Mama and Papa made a marriage of convenience, don’t forget, and they seemed happy enough together.’

‘They made the best they could of second-best, my girl, being people of wit and character. It was their love for their children that gradually bound them together, rather than any great passion for each other, and I know for a fact that your mother loved a man her family deemed unsuitable for her until the end of her days.’

‘Oh, so it’s all her fault then, is it?’ Kate asked impetuously, finding someone to blame for the streak of passionate recklessness that ran through the Alstone sisters like a fault line in a mining seam, then she realised what she’d given away and could have kicked herself. Give Eiliane such a promising bone to worry at and she wouldn’t rest until it was stripped bare of all sorts of possibilities.

‘I knew it!’ Eiliane exclaimed, as Kate winced. But at least her so-called friend’s shrewd gaze had slewed away from Lord Shuttleworth, which was some consolation, for it now being centred so mercilessly on her instead, she supposed ruefully. ‘You’re terrified of falling in love with a handsome face, then bitterly regretting it, just as your sister did so disastrously, aren’t you?’ Lady Pemberley accused her triumphantly, as if she’d won a significant battle and Kate must now admit love was vital to a happy marriage after all.

‘Of course not,’ she lied hotly, but felt her cheeks flush and cursed her telltale redhead’s complexion.

‘You are, my girl, and you wouldn’t be prattling to me about marriages of so-called sense if you were not cravenly terrified of letting your heart rule your head. What you should do if you possess even a sliver of good sense is use this Season to find the man you’ll love and respect for the rest of your days together, before it’s too late. If you meet that man after you’ve contracted some hollow alliance with another, you’ll condemn both him and your unfortunate lover to a lifetime of suspicion and misery, as well as putting your very soul in jeopardy into the bargain!’

‘Stop overdramatising everything. I possess a much colder nature than my mother or either of my sisters,’ Kate insisted and Eiliane just raised her darkened eyebrows sceptically and refused to be drawn. ‘Because I was born with this unfortunate-coloured hair, everyone thinks I’ve got fiery passions to go with it, and you’re all quite mistaken!’ Kate told her crossly, wishing even her nearest and dearest would stop falling back on the ridiculous cliché that redheads always had temperaments to match their fiery colouring.

‘Having watched you grow from a babe in arms into an intelligent, beautiful and often exasperating young woman, Katherine Alstone, I do believe I know your true nature far better than you do yourself,’ Eiliane said slowly, as if she’d just discovered the key to a conundrum that had long been puzzling her.

‘Then you’ll also know how much I don’t
want
to be engulfed by a grand passion, or become pale and interesting as I pine uselessly for a man who might well pass me by without a second glance,’ Kate defended herself uncomfortably.

‘I suppose we
might
find a gentleman who’s either too preoccupied with another woman, or too blind or daft to be knocked all of a heap by your youth, beauty and usually shining intelligence and wit, if we searched the whole kingdom for him diligently enough, my love, but very few men will ever pass you by without a glance, I can assure you,’ Eiliane said with a knowing smile. ‘And love won’t kill you, you know, Kate. I’ve endured it twice now and found it quite breathtakingly wonderful both times. Indeed, I consider myself exceptionally blessed to find it twice, even if I am rather a superannuated wife for poor Pemberley to lay claim to.’

‘Nonsense, he was lucky indeed to win you and well he knows it,’ Kate responded hotly, ready to argue black was white in order to see someone she loved as much as Eiliane happy again. ‘It’s just that I can’t bear the idea of depending on someone else for my happiness, Eiliane, not that I don’t believe in the possibility of love for anyone else.’

‘Which is ridiculous if you’ll only think about it a little harder, Kate. Indeed, it’s totally illogical if we’re going to go about this in the cool way you seem to favour.’

‘I know, but I can’t seem to change my mind, even with so many examples of wedded bliss in front of me to form a corrective,’ she told Eiliane ruefully.

‘I blame myself,’ her friend replied gloomily, ‘I should have insisted on wrenching the two of you from your grandfather’s custody as soon as your sister Miranda turned up on my doorstep one morning with such woe and misery in her poor sad eyes that I knew he wasn’t fit to look after a couple of kittens, let alone three vulnerable and lively young girls.’

‘Don’t do that to yourself, love, for none of it was your fault and how could you have removed us from Wychwood without kidnapping us? Once someone eventually noticed we were gone there would have been a fearsome uproar and my aunt would have insisted we return to even less freedom than we had to start with. Don’t ever blame yourself for any of what happened when we were children, dearest Eiliane. And if not for you, we would never have been sent to school, so just think what we would have missed in dear Charlotte Wells, as we all thought she was then.’

‘Aye, that’s true, Charlotte is a darling girl and exactly the right wife for my new son, for all Ben wouldn’t thank me for naming him so, since he’s far too big and self-sufficient to stand in the least need of even an unofficial stepmother, but Charlotte couldn’t make up for the neglect of your entire family, Kate. You have such a vast capacity for love, my dear, it seems an appalling waste that it might be lost or misplaced in some insipid and bloodless marriage when you could have so much more if you let yourself believe you could safely fall in love.’

If all three Alstone sisters had been born plain as porridge and wall-eyed, they’d still be beautiful to the Marchioness of Pemberley, and only the finest gentlemen in the land good enough for any one of them, Kate thought, affection overcoming exasperation as she acknowledged to herself how lucky they all were to have her. Eiliane was wrong, though, and if Kate wasn’t to die an old maid, then she’d have to find a man she could respect in order to have the children she longed for, and what point was there in regretting what might have been?

Chapter Two

H
er bridges could fairly be considered irrevocably burnt so far as Edmund, Viscount Shuttleworth, was concerned and Kate would have to look elsewhere for a convenient husband. Which was just as well, she reassured herself, considering she’d always sensed a huge capacity for passion and melodrama in herself and curbed it as sternly as she could, lest it lead her into some terrible tangle of love and fury and wanting that would damage all concerned beyond mending.

‘I intend to make a list and, when I’m sure my choice of husband is quite suitable, I’ll just have to find some way of making sure that gentleman agrees with me,’ she asserted stalwartly, not quite able to meet Eiliane’s eyes as her scheme sounded cold and rather depressing even to her when she said it out loud.

‘Why wait?’ Eiliane prompted sardonically, obviously at the end of her patience with such an implacably self-deluded idiot. ‘If you’re so very determined to go against your very nature, and God help the poor man you settle upon if you are, then why not begin straight away? Tonight’s entertainment should make an ideal opportunity for you to start such a search—considering that most of the débutantes haven’t yet arrived and those who have are still too overawed to offer you much competition. Why, you will almost have the field to yourself, my dear, apart from all the other not-so-young ladies who’ve been out too long and are desperate to catch a suitable husband, of course.’

‘I’m only one and twenty,’ Kate protested feebly, unable to keep a still tongue in her head in the face of what she knew perfectly well was deliberate provocation.

Eiliane gave an airy wave of her exquisite fan. ‘No longer a sparkling young débutante, nor yet quite a faded quiz at her last prayers. How some of those vibrant young girls just out of their schoolrooms will pity you,’ she went on relentlessly, seeming determined to provoke Kate into an argument that would disprove her claim to be chilly and passionless. ‘To be so sought after initially, then left unwed three years on argues either that you’re ridiculously finicky and far too high in the instep, or that the gentlemen have stopped asking you.’

‘Then why do they still do so in such numbers, I wonder?’ Kate defended herself absently, her eyes once again on Lord Shuttleworth as he seemed almost as if he’d felt her gaze on him and decided to allow her a closer look.

‘Because the unattainable is always so very alluring,’ Lady Pemberley replied, a little too seriously for Kate’s taste, ‘and I don’t want you to become a target for the less scrupulous rakes of the
ton
, my love. Better if only you’d accepted Shuttleworth years ago rather than take that primrose path to misery, I suppose. At least marriage to him would put the predators off until you presented him with a couple of heirs. Not that he’d make anyone a complacent husband,’ she ended with a warning nod at the fascinating masculine figure they’d both been watching.

‘Please don’t turn all intense and Celtic on me just now, Eiliane dear,’ Kate said absently, most of her attention on the nobleman forging a path towards them. She wondered fleetingly if he still felt more for her than he’d have her and the rest of the world believe—which only went to show what happened when she listened to her friend’s ridiculous ideas about love.

‘No, my love,’ Lady Pemberley replied meekly and Kate shot her a rueful, exasperated glance, before going back to surreptitiously watching his lordship.

If only Shuttleworth had still been inclined to fall at her feet and beg her to marry him, they could be wed by the end of the Season and then nobody would be able to lecture her on the subject of love matches ever again. Except this older, grimmer Edmund Worth looked very unlikely to agree to an affectionate alliance with her, based as it would have to be on mutual interests and polite friendship instead of the flash and burn of love he’d once promised her. It seemed impossible to picture living at his side in such a temperate style, but was she capable of offering more even to him?

‘Lord Shuttleworth,’ she greeted him, oddly chagrined when his expression became more guarded rather than less so.

She smiled awkwardly in the hope of establishing a polite sort of acquaintance between them, since nothing else seemed likely, and he eyed her cautiously, as if she might launch into a mad jig at any moment and embarrass him in front of the assembled company.

‘Is it time for our waltz already then, my lord?’ she asked clumsily and groaned inwardly at her own ineptitude. Obviously she wasn’t very good at actually
encouraging
gentlemen, even if it was only to be a little more civil.

‘And if only this next dance were to be one, how delightful that would make my evening,’ he replied with an unforgivable glint of amusement in his grey-green eyes. He pointed helpfully to her dance card, which stated unambiguously that she was to honour another gentleman with the quadrille. Lord Shuttleworth must have been merely passing when she had made it impossible for him to do so without snubbing her even more crushingly than even he seemed prepared to do.

There was no point in stuttering and apologising, so she sent him a weak parody of a smile and stood silent and embarrassed, wishing she could think of a way to banish the suggestion of mockery playing about his mouth. It wasn’t quite a sneer or altogether a smile and she found it flustered her ridiculously in a man who had once been her devoted cavalier. Anyway, she really didn’t want him to kiss her—well, not that much—and, even if she did, it was probably out of sheer, perverse curiosity. He’d grown into a much more formidable man than she’d ever dreamt he would. What a shame if he’d cooled toward her just when her interest in him had sharpened, she decided, with an odd jar of panic in her stomach. And where had that ridiculous idea come from in the first place? Why on earth would she want this man-icicle to kiss her, ever? She must have run mad without anyone noticing if she thought being kissed by Edmund Worth would bring her anything but confusion and distaste, swiftly followed by their mutual embarrassment and an even chillier estrangement between them than there was now.

If only she hadn’t had to leave him enjoying the company of her devious duenna far more than he did that of her charge, Kate might have found her dance perfectly agreeable. Her partner was an excellent dancer in direct defiance of the air of world-weary cynicism he seemed to think marked him out as a pink of the
ton
. Instead, she missed steps in her attempts to watch Eiliane and Lord Shuttleworth having a comfortable coze and silently dreaded what that unconventional lady might be saying to his lordship.

‘Come now, Miss Alstone,’ the gentleman beside her chided, finally losing patience with such an inattentive partner, ‘either dance with me or pretend to be overcome by the heat, so we may be quit of each other and this dance without causing a scandal.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir; I must be a little distracted by all this noise and bustle after so many months in the country, but I shall do better from now on,’ she excused herself rather feebly.

‘Good, for it does nothing for a fellow’s good opinion of himself to dance with a lady whose attention is so patently on another man,’ he told her with a frankness she found surprising in one she’d always thought dandified and affected.

Kate was very careful to mind her steps for the rest of the dance while she wondered if she had truly seen
any
of the gentlemen who had habitually sought her out at the balls and parties of the London Season. Until tonight she’d been able to flatter herself she was a reasonably intelligent and well-educated female who was also independently wealthy and up to snuff. So what hope was there of her finding that perfect husband for herself when she’d clearly misjudged herself so very badly?

‘Thank you, Miss Alstone,’ her partner said as the music faded and he bowed to her with jaded grace, ‘you know how to depress a gentleman’s pretensions most effectively,’ he told her quietly and calmly. ‘I shall not be troubling you with them again after tonight.’

‘Sir, I have no idea of your meaning,’ she protested rather faintly as that sense of nothing being quite what it seemed tonight haunted her again.

Was she asleep and in the grip of a nightmare where everything seemed normal, but in truth nothing was quite as it should be? Unfortunately not, for her dance partner was continuing and she doubted she’d allow him such an air of disillusioned cynicism in her dreams.

‘Not your fault, Miss Alstone. I should have had the sense to listen to fair warnings when they were given me. Had I done so, doubtless I wouldn’t feel so disenchanted now I’ve discovered they were correct.’

As they’d reached the sofa Lady Pemberley had annexed by the end of that crushing speech, the disillusioned gentleman bowed and took himself off to the card room to join his cronies, no doubt to confirm that Miss Alstone was a shameless flirt who lacked the courtesy to keep her attention on her conquests once she’d made them in order to eye up her next one. Kate’s mind reeled. How odd that she’d got up this morning believing that she was a pleasant enough person to be with. ‘Now
this
is our dance, is it not, Miss Alstone?’ the cause of it all informed her suavely, getting to his feet as she approached and looking as if exchanging Eiliane’s lively company for her own was a sacrifice he was most unwilling to make.

How did this confounded man ever delude himself he wanted to marry me so desperately when he’s clearly revolted by the idea of spending half an hour in my company nowadays?
Kate asked herself wordlessly as they joined the couples on the dance floor for a waltz that seemed more in the nature of a penance to him rather than a pleasure. ‘So why
did
you keep asking me?’ she finally questioned aloud, startling herself and shocking him into actually looking at her. His arm went across her back to take her other hand and a cool shiver of something untamed with an edge of warning ran through her like wildfire.

For an instant she felt strangely shaken by the intimacy of their locked gaze and the fluid, familiar movements of their bodies as his warmth engulfed her, taking the sense of chill and alienation out of her evening for a blissful moment as their bodies at least recalled how well they’d always danced together. She was strongly tempted to lean into his arms and let him guide her expertly around the floor without making much effort on her own part. Instead she made herself whirl and turn and glide as actively as he did himself, partly because he was a superb dancer and it seemed a waste not to, and partly because it gave each of them time to think of all the changes three years had made in the other whilst he considered that appallingly crass question she couldn’t believe she’d actually asked him out loud.

‘Maybe because you dance superbly,’ he finally said with a faintly mocking smile, taking her remark at its lightest value and lobbing it back at her with a neatness that made her heart skip a beat in what felt oddly like panic.

Not because he’d once wanted to be with her above any other female then, or had dreamt of holding her in his arms from one waltz to the next, one ball to another? Not because he’d missed her sadly through all the long weary summers and winters since the last time he’d held her so close and danced with her, so superbly matched to every step as they had been so very long ago and ironically still seemed to be now when everything else was different between them?

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she replied a little stiffly. ‘Luckily I can return your compliment without the least risk of flattery. Lord Shuttleworth has always been rated one of the finest dancers to grace the
ton
.’

‘Now
isn’t
that fortunate for him?’ he parried sardonically, but his only response to her implied challenge was to make their dance even more energetic, perhaps to stop her finding breath to ask him any more inconvenient questions.

‘Very,’ she gasped and decided to wait for anything more until they stopped spinning about the room in this dizzying whirl.

He moved with a poise and latent strength she couldn’t recall noticing before and a tingle of awareness shot through her when he tightened his grip on her to guide her past a dab of candle wax on the highly polished floor. Kate had to remind herself she was looking for a courteous and undemanding husband, not a disdainful and probably very demanding lover, and that Shuttleworth clearly didn’t want to occupy either position in her life anyway. Her body remained unconvinced by such logic and troubled her with the most outrageous fantasies which her mind shied away from while they waltzed in apparent harmony. Kate did her best to ignore her own baser instincts and Shuttleworth’s unspoken disdain while she smiled at nothing in particular as if her life depended on it.

Edmund George Francis St Erith Standon-Worth, keep your head, that gentleman silently demanded of himself as he held the ravishingly lovely Miss Katherine Alstone in the crook of his arm and tried not to think her being naked and passionately willing as she danced in his arms to an even more intimate tune, preferably without the interested gaze of the cream of fashionable society upon them, of course.

What on earth did the copper-haired torment mean by staring at him across the ballroom as if she’d never set eyes on him before, as if he’d finally come to her attention as something more than a dancing, talking marionette and she was intent on beckoning him to her side by sheer force of will? Could anything good be flying about her busy brain? he wondered, as he tried his best to pretend she was merely a polite acquaintance, despite the fact that his disobliging body and most of society knew he’d been besotted with her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her three years ago. Unfortunately she knew it as well and, try as he might, he couldn’t relax and just enjoy this dance with a graceful and accomplished partner who should now mean absolutely nothing to him.

He’d been far too boyish and silly to hide his infatuation with her three years ago. When she’d carelessly turned him down that last time as if she was waving away an annoying fly or a brash young puppy pestering her with unwanted adoration, he’d told himself his stupid obsession with her had been a youthful folly he would very soon grow out of, and that one day he’d look back on it with astonishment that he’d ever been so young and gullible. Well, he’d made it so at last by cutting her and all the dreams he’d had of her painfully and painstakingly out of his heart so he could come here again to find the woman he could marry and live with for the rest of his days, and that woman was
not
Katherine Alstone.