One Final Season (6 page)

‘I suppose you know what they say about faint heart not winning fair lady?’

‘All very well, but three years ago my doglike devotion did nothing to win her affection or convince her she can trust me. I hope you don’t expect me to sit at her feet for another three, risking being kicked aside every time she wonders if another pet might not suit her better.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want a pet in the first place, then.’

‘What does she want then, man? I’m damned if I know any more.’

‘Just that—she wants a man and not a lapdog. She’s a sensible female and finds them pettish and yappy and who can blame her? I’m relieved my wife has never shown any sign of falling for the breed.’

‘From what I can tell she just adopts strays, and the larger and uglier the better.’

Edmund recalled his visit to their eccentric household last week with a reminiscent grin. Mrs Shaw had lately taken in a hound of very mixed breeding and huge size, who bayed at all her visitors and buried his bones under her best furniture, whilst protecting her and hers from all and sundry, even though she didn’t actually stand in need of any protection so far as he could see.

‘My point exactly,’ the lady’s husband agreed smugly.

Edmund wondered what the
ton
would make of the son of a marquis, even one born the wrong side of the blanket, who smugly claimed kinship with a mongrel of the most mixed variety and dubious origins. Possibly Ben’s very indifference to his own blue blood, and most of his father’s peers along with it, explained why he wasn’t just tolerated, but lionised by all but the most stiff-necked of them. It seemed to him that there was nothing quite so intriguing to most of the
ton
as someone so genuinely unimpressed by their elegant show and lofty traditions as Ben Shaw appeared to be.

‘So next time I call on Miss Alstone, you think I should growl menacingly at all other visitors who dare to enter Lady Pemberley’s drawing room?’ Edmund asked with a rueful grin. ‘Then perhaps I could pin any gentlemen I don’t like the look of up against the wall with teeth bared, whilst I attempt to bay loudly at the same time and dribble down their shirt fronts or all over their precious Hessians while I’m doing it?’

‘If you could leave out the drooling, that will probably go down better,’ Ben said with a reminiscent shudder and Edmund almost pitied him that aspect of the overenthusiastic Prometheus, as Charlotte had christened her latest waif.

‘Maybe, but I am what I am, Ben, and have never been good at pretending to be otherwise, I’m afraid,’ Edmund admitted ruefully, almost ashamed of himself for lacking the guile to storm and bluster sufficiently to gain Kate’s attention at last.

‘No need, you’re rich, titled and personable, Shuttleworth, so why would you need to be other than what you are? Just show Kate how much you’ve grown up since you fell all of an adoring heap at her feet three years ago. Make her see that you’ve become your own man while she wasn’t paying attention before you give up on her, that’s all I’m suggesting.’

‘All?’ Edmund echoed faintly, but he grinned at his unexpected mentor just the same and left after an interesting as well as an enlightening morning in a thoughtful frame of mind.

It might have been possible to set his face against the very idea of loving Kate and abhor her inability to see what was in front of her pert nose when he was a hundred miles from her and spare her incendiary presence, Edmund admitted to himself as he walked away from Stone & Shaw’s neat offices. He might even have found a sweet and biddable wife to put in her place if only she’d stayed away this Season. Kate was too near now; too real and right in front of him night after night, proving how much less life with that sweet little wife would be than one with her. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair to offer another woman so little when she might find an untainted young spark to make little paragons with instead. And how could less ever be good enough, despite his three-year-old resolution never to let Kate Alstone trample roughshod over his dreams again?

Despite the vow he’d made to himself to forget her, he still yearned for her in his bed and at his board night after night in his dreams and in his deepest, darkest fantasies. If he couldn’t beat his obsession with her, why not use it to trap her with her own scheming? He’d seen her summing up the young bloods and even the personable widowers in search of a wife to look after their restless and motherless broods and had wanted to strangle her for looking about her for a suitable, coldly selected, unloved husband. Still, he might be able to use her stubborn misreading of her own character and get her up the aisle before she realised they could never be so little to each other if they both lived to be ninety.

Hadn’t apparent indifference got him a lot further already than devotion ever had? He recalled the feel of the sway and dip of her lush but streamlined body against his in the dance and gave a reminiscent grin. If she was to be lured out of her ivory tower, wasn’t he already halfway to tumbling her into his arms instead? With such a promising start he’d be a fool if he failed to draw the real Kate even further out from behind those defensive barriers of hers.

The prospect of a future he’d resigned himself never to achieve was heady, but the last thing he wanted to do was risk more humiliation at Kate’s hands. Next time he asked her to marry him he’d make quite certain the skittish redheaded torment was ready to say yes at last. So there had to be a very long way to go before he could be sure his last offer was met with eagerness, rather than the absent-minded kindness she might show a boot-boy who’d spilled lamp oil on the furniture and was being tiresomely emotional about the whole tedious business of clearing it up.

Edmund had walked through the City and into Mayfair, probably only escaping being robbed because he’d dressed plainly for his trip round Ben’s empire. Potential thieves took one look at such a distracted gentleman and decided he was either mad and too much trouble to bother with, or a poet or an artist caught up by his muse and therefore too poor to be worthwhile. He’d experienced such a revolution of feelings since he’d set out from it this morning that he got back to Worth House in Grosvenor Square only to find he couldn’t settle to anything, so he took his favourite hack out in an attempt to calm his seesawing feelings instead.

Did he really love Kate Alstone? That was the question that trumped all the others, he decided, as the black gelding finally won free of the mêlée and Edmund allowed him a little more freedom. Deciding it wasn’t too late to ride into the countryside to avoid the curious and the sociable when the evenings were drawing out and there was a moon tonight anyway, he set the powerful animal on the road to Richmond and tried to keep at least half his mind on their going.

When he’d first met her, perhaps he’d still felt less than other men, because he was the last of his line and couldn’t join one of Wellington’s regiments to fight Bonaparte, or follow Ben Shaw and the Earl of Carnwood’s example and forge his way by his own efforts. Even as a boy he’d known he couldn’t leave his land and his people masterless and abandoned to the uncaring hands of the Crown as the Prince Regent, with his voracious appetites and gargantuan debts, would strip every asset the Worths had built up so diligently over centuries, then sell it piecemeal to whoever offered the most money.

Had his secret insecurity, when he’d been forced to turn his back on the army he’d once longed to join and dutifully go to Oxford instead, made him doubt himself, until he’d felt Kate’s rejections were all he really deserved? If it had led him astray about himself and the woman he wanted to love for life, then he cursed it. Ben Shaw’s shrewd summary of Kate’s well-hidden fears and insecurities had made him see at last why she might hold back from love, or any other emotion that would leave her vulnerable to hurt. He raged against the very thought of how badly hurt she had been and fervently wished he’d been the one to punish those two she-devils instead of Kit Alstone. Everyone knew he’d banished the old earl’s daughter to a remote estate and ordered her to stay there on pain of losing even that, and the lady’s daughter had been told to live abroad with the secret husband she’d apparently been wed to ever since her seventeenth birthday, despite her subsequent and bigamous marriage to another man.

So why hadn’t Edmund had the confidence to see through Kate’s almost absent-minded tolerance of her eager court and him in particular when they’d first met? What excuse did that young sprig have for not looking into her dark blue Alstone eyes and finding the real Kate she still hadn’t dared to fully become lurking under all that wary indifference? That Kate was lion-hearted and passionate and he wanted her fierce protection and all that pent-up love she was so wary of giving for his children, and a share of that last commodity for himself as well, or he’d end up envying them and that would never do.

Well, he could see her now and had her firmly in his sights at last. He was his own man now, too, and if not the dashing hero he’d once dreamt of being, he was strong enough to shoulder his responsibilities and even enjoy them most of the time. He’d got his estates running at a healthy profit and restored the depleted fortune managed, or mismanaged, by his various trustees until his majority, so if he could take on all that and succeed, why not have one last, reckless throw at winning the woman he’s always wanted above all others as well? He grinned at the memory of how he’d managed to confuse Kate recently without even trying; now he was in earnest, keeping her off balance and paying attention long enough to claim her heart and her hand suddenly didn’t seem so unlikely after all.

Chapter Six

‘W
hat
a brilliant catch Lord Shuttleworth will make some lucky girl, now he’s obviously looking out for a more
suitable
wife,’ Kate heard one of the chaperons behind her whisper rather loudly to her crony a week or so later and knew perfectly well that she was meant to hear every word. After all, she had refused to marry the lady’s impecunious elder son in no uncertain terms at the end of last Season and that did put a doting mama off a girl rather badly.

It was true, of course, that she’d watched Edmund dance with all the prettiest and most eligible débutantes the Season rejoiced in night after night and could vouch for the fact that, while all seemed to agree he was a very fine gentleman and would make an even finer husband, some were shamelessly eager to march him up the aisle of St George’s, Hanover Square, at the double.

‘Indeed, my dear—he’s so rich, so well born and
so
handsome that he’s without a doubt the finest catch to be had this Season,’ another lady, who persisted in thinking Kate had deliberately eclipsed her elder daughter’s début, and blamed her for that poor girl having to marry a mere mister with only two large country estates and a town house to his name, asserted. ‘The Tedinton woman seems quite set on cuckolding her poor husband with him, but that won’t bar him from marrying well. My dear little Felicity is too young yet, but your girl hasn’t made enough effort to captivate such an eligible young lord up to now, my dear; you should remind her of her duty to her family.’

‘Darling Charity is quite determined on her Mr Holt and he on her, so Henry will agree to the match in the end, I dare say, and Lord Shuttleworth can marry where he pleases so far as I’m concerned,’ the first lady replied placidly enough, since Mr Holt was commonly held to be a very wealthy man and she was obviously a realist.

‘It’s a well enough match, I suppose, but Shuttleworth would make a very fine feather in any mama’s cap,’ the second said wistfully.

‘Especially Lady Tedinton’s,’ the first lady said with a shrewd and significant nod in the languorous and lovely Countess of Tedinton’s direction.

‘That, my dear, rather depends on whether she’s intent on wearing him on her bonnet or her sleeve,’ her friend replied with heavy significance.

‘Surely not even she would do that, especially during her daughter’s come-out Season when it would be more fitting if he caught the chit rather than the mother?’

‘The girl’s only her stepdaughter, don’t forget, and not ten years younger than the painted hussy her father married in some fit of madness. Tedinton should have known it would end in disaster once he’d made such a ridiculous second marriage.’

‘That woman can’t pull the wool over the ladies’ eyes, even if the gentlemen hang on every word that falls from her painted lips. She’s little more than a strumpet and not a very well-bred one at that.’

‘I pride myself on always being able to read a person’s true nature, despite any shoddy façades they may care to throw up to confuse people. Even Tedinton won’t be able to fool himself her affairs and her low appetites don’t exist for ever, for all that she’s a beauty.’

‘True, but she’s nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is. The woman has risen too high and now thinks she can have whatever, or whomever, she wants. Such arrogance will prove her downfall one fine day and it won’t be a moment too soon for me when she tried to condescend to me last time we crossed each other’s paths.’

‘Well, I doubt she’ll try it twice, my dear, but there’s no mistaking exactly what, or rather whom, she wants right now,’ the other lady replied meaningfully. Lady Tedinton was watching her stepdaughter chatter animatedly with Lord Shuttleworth whilst reclining on a nearby sofa and eyeing him as if she’d like to pounce and never mind how many spectators saw her do it.

‘Her thoughts are written all over her face, for all she thinks we’re too stupid to read them, yet he looks more entranced by the girl. Tedinton would be a fool to turn down such a match on the say-so of a wife who wants Shuttleworth herself. So that match would put the cat among the pigeons, and set others with their eye on him in their place once and for all,’ the first lady said sweetly.

Kate did her best to look serenely unconscious of their spite while she fervently hoped they were wrong. She wasn’t well acquainted with the girl, but she was pretty enough and might be charming as well for all she knew. However, she was clearly no equal match for Edmund Worth. He deserved a woman who wouldn’t bore him before the honeymoon was over and, if he met that lady, Kate supposed she’d have to shrug her shoulders and look about her for that perfect husband a little more diligently than she was doing at the moment.

‘Certain ladies need to realise that it’s never wise to be too finicky and risk coming back Season after Season, don’t you agree, dear?’ the second of her detractors continued relentlessly, with a significant nod in Kate’s direction she pretended not to see.

‘Luckily our darling girls are in no danger of finding out that pert opinions and overweening vanity will almost certainly land them on the shelf for good.’

‘Quite—I never could abide such precocious chits myself,’ her friend agreed while Kate planned their imminent demise in minute and purely theoretical detail, to keep from verbally grinding them under her chariot wheels as her restless temper demanded she must.

‘Our dance,’ pronounced Mr Cromer concisely at just the right moment to stop her leaping to her own defence in a reckless fashion.

‘Indeed,’ Kate replied gratefully, having come to value his sparse conversation over the last weeks, as he began to court Miss Transome in earnest.

Who would have dreamt a few years ago that Amelia Transome and Kate Alstone would ever come to enjoy each other’s company so much, when each had eyed the other during their début and decided they had little in common? Now Kate valued Amelia’s kind heart and generous nature and wondered at herself for not seeing past her chatter and fluttery manner before. And at least Amelia regarded Mr Cromer dancing with Kate as the lesser of two evils, since she couldn’t dance every dance with him herself. In her company at least he wasn’t being giggled over or eyed speculatively by one of the eager newcomers or their husband-hunting mamas, and Kate felt at ease with at least one of her dancing partners, so all three were content. Yet Mr Cromer had a good friend in Lord Shuttleworth and every now and then Kate would glance up and find him standing by the other gentleman’s side and watching her, as unreadable as he was unsmiling while he did so. His lordship hadn’t asked her to dance again and she told herself that she was relieved.

‘Shuttleworth ain’t serious about that chit, y’know?’ Mr Cromer informed her during one of the country dances.

‘He gives a very good impression of it, then,’ she replied, just as if she had every right to feel bitter, which she most certainly did not.

‘Chivalrous to a fault, always was. Easing her path into society quiets his conscience, I suppose.’

Then it was true. Edmund
had
been Lady Tedinton’s lover and evidently he still felt guilty about that and, considering the wretched woman was another man’s wife, so he should. How could he have fallen for that heartless female’s overblown charms? No, there was no need to wonder about
that
; Kate only had to flick a look at the sultry beauty doing her best to look faintly amused by her stepdaughter and his lordship to know exactly why a gentleman would find such lazy sensuality irresistible.

Yet Kate thought from the downward curve of her pouting lips that the lady was secretly furious at his defection. Turning the situation over in her mind, Kate shivered as she contemplated the sort of marriage she’d fooled herself she wanted. The very idea of casually following in the footsteps of Lady Tedinton and taking lovers once she’d borne Edmund’s heirs made her want to weep now. Then, imagining how she’d feel if they’d actually wed and she’d found out about the exotic Lady Tedinton afterwards, she felt a strong temptation to go into strong hysterics. So maybe it was as well this was neither the time nor place to consider what her revulsion at the very idea said about her own feelings toward Edmund Worth.

‘Bestholme,’ Mr Cromer remarked obscurely after they’d finished their dance and he was escorting her back to where Eiliane and Miss Transome were sitting.

‘Yes?’ Kate said encouragingly.

‘Fortune hunter,’ he warned with a shake of his head for emphasis.

‘Ah, I thought so,’ she said with a grateful smile.

It set the cap on a hateful evening that Mr Bestholme seemed even more desperate to corner her attention when she refused to take to the dance floor with him. He besieged her with sly comments and overfamiliar touches whenever he could force himself closer to her by using the crush of guests as an excuse and if she didn’t get away from his damp, cruel hands and hungry eyes soon she was going to be sick. Eventually she disgusted herself by taking to her heels and fleeing his far-too-persistent and public pursuit, even resorting to the ladies’ withdrawing room where even he wouldn’t have the gall to follow her.

Sure the man would think nothing of compromising her into marriage if that was the only way he could get his repellent hands on her fortune, she quit her temporary sanctuary and trespassed into the private part of the house to plan a rapid retreat to Derbyshire and the safety of Kit’s fearsome protection, if her determined evasion of Mr Bestholme didn’t persuade the human leech she wasn’t going to be tricked, pressured or just plain forced into marriage.

It seemed a coward’s way out even to her, but it sounded so tempting after the last few weeks of disappointed hopes and mistaken dreams. To be in Derbyshire with spring softening even the starkly beautiful peaks with its lovely bounty, to breathe in good clean air and be able to ride all day without having to be civil to a soul if she didn’t choose to meet one, seemed like heaven just at the moment. And what a relief it would be to escape the nagging feeling that three years ago she’d turned away the one man who could have made leaving her beloved Wychwood for a new life as his wife and mother of his children a wonderful adventure, rather than an impossible sacrifice.

Yet even while she was searching through possible excuses for running away, mentally planning her journey and thinking up a story that would convince Kit and Miranda when she got home that she was perfectly well and happy, just jaded with London and the social Season, she knew she couldn’t do it. There were her detractors to outface and, more important than any of them, there was Izzie, who would be here very soon—how could Kate not be here to witness her little sister’s social triumphs and enjoy her lively company once more? It might hurt far too much that Edmund had decided to look elsewhere for a bride and a lover, but she was an Alstone and would not turn tail and run at the first setback put in her path by unkind fate.

There was Eiliane to consider as well, of course, and, come to think of it, she was oddly distracted tonight and unlike her usual sharp-eyed self for some reason. Her chaperon had hardly seemed to notice Bestholme’s increasingly bizarre behaviour tonight and Kate frowned as she wondered belatedly if there was something seriously wrong with her dear friend and mentor. Then she had her two newest friends to see safely wed, of course, and Amelia Transome had gallantly deployed her most determined chatter on Kate’s behalf tonight in a selfless way that commanded equal loyalty. Even Mr Cromer had put his stalwart silence between her and Mr Bestholme as often as he could without seeming too particular himself, but nothing had put the awful man off his single-minded pursuit of her fortune.

Kate could practically hear the ill-natured gossip breaking out all around her if she went back into the ballroom to make sure her chaperon wasn’t sickening for something. Awarding herself five minutes of peace and quiet would do no harm, she assured herself cravenly, and stole on through the half darkness of the private rooms of their host and hostess’s town house with a guilty sense of playing truant from reality and fortune hunters, as well as intruding on their privacy.

Edmund eyed the assembled company and almost wished he’d stayed in Herefordshire this Season after all. Yet the fine hairs on the nape of his neck were prickling as if trying to warn him of some danger the rest of him was slow to pick up. Lady Tedinton, with her silly pretence that he had already been her lover and would shortly be so again, was a damnably inconvenient complication he’d certainly not bargained for and he’d had to waste far too much time tonight avoiding her very obvious lures and any hint he might be susceptible to them. He did his best not to meet
her
gaze as he searched the room in vain for a glimpse of Kate’s glorious red curls, but something told him he’d soon have to take the time and trouble to convince Selene Tedinton once and for all that she meant nothing to him and never would, in terms even she couldn’t misinterpret as part of the game she so loved to play.

‘Something’s amiss,’ Cromer informed him brusquely as he joined him with a worried frown on his face.

‘There’s always scheming afoot at affairs like this one,’ Edmund responded coolly, even if his friend’s unease only added to his own.

‘Miss Transome claims that Lady T. and Bestholme are up to something,’ Cromer said with resigned acceptance that Amelia’s sayings and doings were more important to him than he’d dreamed they could be until recently.

‘Any idea what?’ Edmund asked, suddenly very interested in them as well.

‘Don’t know. Unholy pair at the best of times. Welcome to each other, except the Tedinton woman keeps looking at Miss Alstone as if she’d like to kill her slowly, then stamp on her grave. Miss Transome’s convinced the woman’s hatching a scheme to put Miss Alstone out of the picture for good so far as you’re concerned.’

‘She’s mistaken her adversary then,’ Edmund said curtly.

‘Or her quarry.’

‘Yes, she couldn’t be more wrong there,’ Edmund replied softly.

‘Going to stand here gossiping all night, then?’ Cromer prompted.