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

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

      ‘What 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