Regency: Courtship And Candlelight: One Final Season. Elizabeth Beacon

       Regency

       Courtship & Candlelight

       One Final Season

      Elizabeth Beacon

       The Gentleman’s Quest

      Deborah Simmons

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

One Final Season

      About the Author

      ELIZABETH BEACON lives in the beautiful English west country and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, become a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the inexhaustible lurcher can finagle. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines work, and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

       Chapter One

      ‘Lord Shuttleworth!’ Eiliane, the Marchioness of Pemberley and formerly Lady Rhys, exclaimed as she recognised with unaffected delight the vigorous young gentleman strolling towards them across Lady Finchley’s ballroom. ‘What a pleasure to see you again; it seems such an age since I saw you that I hardly recognised you.’

      ‘I would have known you anywhere, my lady, and must offer my belated congratulations on your remarriage,’ the most desirable viscount currently on the marriage mart replied easily, whilst briefly eyeing the lady at Eiliane Pemberley’s side as if trying to place her. ‘Miss Alstone, I trust you are well?’

      ‘Very well indeed, I thank you, my lord,’ Kate Alstone replied coolly, for if he hoped to fluster her by watching her with frost and mockery in his grey-green eyes he was doomed to disappointment.

      ‘Nonsense,’ Eiliane swept on, as if she had no idea Kate and Lord Shuttleworth had the least reason to be awkward together and were being over-polite out of sheer perversity. ‘You sent a very proper letter and a handsome present, one I didn’t have to consign to the back parlour for my own peace of mind, either, in case it gave me nightmares. You should see the epergne my new sister-in-law chose, probably for that purpose! Kate saw it—isn’t it a horror, my dear?’

      ‘Indeed it is, but perhaps we’d better not let her know we said so.’

      ‘Shuttleworth won’t tell her, and he’s sure to agree with me when he finally sees it anyway; such a pity you couldn’t attend our wedding, my boy, although it was a very quiet affair as Pemberley and I were both married before.’

      ‘Aye, a very quiet affair for about two hundred of your closest friends,’ Kate muttered darkly, casting her far-too-innocent-looking friend and mentor a sharp look as she realised she’d invited Lord Shuttleworth to her wedding last summer and not told her chief bridesmaid.

      Not that he’d condescended to accept, she added to her silent displeasure with both of them, because he doubtless knew she would be included in Eiliane’s vast adoptive family and obviously had no desire to meet or converse with her. That much had become very clear when she’d glimpsed him exiting the first evening party she’d attended this Season very shortly after she had arrived with a group of friends. Then there had been a trip to the theatre when he’d chosen to visit a box no lady could dream of drifting into by design or accident and she wasn’t fool enough to think he hadn’t noticed her sitting in the one opposite. Watching him enjoy the company of one of the highest steppers of the demimonde and her current keeper had, Kate told herself, been almost amusing. If his lordship wanted it to make it perfectly plain he hadn’t been wearing the willow for Kate these last three years, he was quite welcome to do so. At the very least it would provide an antidote to the ennui yet another Season might have held for her without his antics enlivening it.

      ‘And you know perfectly well that keeping it to even that number took the wisdom of Solomon and the tact of a whole diplomatic corps,’ Eiliane reminded her friend, with a reminiscent shudder at the very thought of arranging her own wedding to her and her new lord’s satisfaction.

      ‘Oh, I do,’ Kate agreed fervently, since she’d been caught up in trying to defuse far too many arguments once the Marquis’s relatives realised their twenty or thirty closest friends would not be added to the guest list so they could boast of attending the most exclusive and fiercely anticipated society wedding of the year.

      ‘Still, it’s done now,’ Eiliane said of her triumphant second marriage to a man who adored her as fervently as she did him.

      Kate wondered how anyone could begrudge them such happiness and was secretly pleased that Edmund Worth obviously did not, at least if the warmth of his smile as he eyed her rather smug-looking friend was anything to go by.

      ‘Again, I congratulate you on that fact very sincerely,’ he said as a prelude to moving on, but Eiliane wasn’t going to let him escape so lightly.

      ‘We will see you later, no doubt, as nobody could describe this affair as a crush and it’ll be impossible to avoid bumping into one’s friends all night, don’t you think?’ she said artlessly.

      ‘I do my best to avoid anything so unfashionable,’ he returned blandly, but Kate could see the tension about his firm mouth and the hunted expression in those silvery-green eyes even if her most partisan supporter wouldn’t.

      Eiliane deployed her most unexpected weapon, an awkward silence she quite failed to fill in her usual easy manner.

      ‘I think I see Julia Deben over there, Eiliane; perhaps we should join her before someone else annexes the best seats in the room and you’re left with a mere rout chair,’ Kate managed in the hope of filling that horrible quietness and giving his lordship an excuse to go.

      ‘Will you do me the honour of promising me a dance tonight, Miss Alstone?’ The wretched man seemed to take perverse pleasure in asking her after all.

      She silently handed over her dance card, refusing to gush or let him know the idea of dancing with him filled her with far more dismay than he could ever be allowed to know. Once they’d danced together so easily, their steps so harmonious there was no need to think about it. It had been the one thing they agreed on without any effort at all, and now even that would be blighted by his profound dislike of her. He handed the card back and she saw he’d put his initials beside two dances with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now she must endure two cold and indifferent waltzes with him—the very prospect made her shiver.

      ‘Until later then, Miss Alstone, Lady Pemberley,’ he said with an elegant bow and a social smile that made Kate’s heart ache for some odd reason.

      She managed to curtsy with equal elegance and flash just as bland and indifferent a smile. ‘Later, Lord Shuttleworth,’ she managed to agree airily and kept that mere upturn of her lips in place for several moments after he walked away, lest anyone see her flinch at how her formerly impassioned suitor had grown so cold and distant towards her.

      ‘Are you actually going to find yourself a husband this Season or not, Katherine Alstone?’ Eiliane demanded with would-be carelessness that didn’t deceive Kate one iota about which particular one she had in mind, despite Viscount Shuttleworth’s obvious antipathy to the very idea.

      They strolled across the room to greet friends and acquaintances, whilst Kate considered her answer and tried to tease Edmund Worth out of her errant thoughts. How very like Eiliane to ask the question nobody else dared, just when she didn’t