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

keep a strict eye on him.

      Suddenly Edmund’s sense of the ridiculous reawakened and he made up his mind to distract himself with the heady task of confusing the lovely Miss Alstone, whilst searching for his true quarry. It would do the redhaired witch good, he assured the doubter within. He wouldn’t be cruel, heaven forbid, but someone should make her realise she existed in the same world as the rest of faulty humanity, not on a higher plane where everything was ordered to her convenience.

       Chapter Three

      ‘How is everyone at Wychwood, Miss Alstone?’ he asked in a tone even he knew was insufferably indifferent to her answer, although he liked the Earl of Carnwood and his spectacularly lovely wife. Now he came to think of it, if Miss Kate Alstone resembled her fiery sister as strongly in character as she did in outward beauty, he couldn’t walk away from her to wed a less unique woman. Thank you for not being made in your elder sister’s extraordinary image, he silently praised the beauty at his side, but even he wasn’t yet a bitter enough man to say it out loud.

      ‘All very well,’ she replied stiffly, as if she could read his thoughts, and he made himself look into her intriguing indigo eyes to make sure he was mistaken.

      No, he informed himself sternly, he refused to cave at the hint of wistfulness in her gaze, the faint droop of discontent and perhaps a hint of longing in the curve of her rosy-lipped mouth. It was an illusion, he reminded himself. She might look as if she longed for a tithe of her sister’s passionate and mutually loving marriage for herself, but she didn’t have the least intention of following Miranda Alstone’s stormy path through life. After enduring her chilly lack of attention for a whole Season, he’d concluded Kate had no heart to lose. Trust her to decide to feel piqued that she’d finally lost his adoration tonight, just when he was starting his hunt for a very different female.

      ‘My sister is expecting to present Lord Carnwood with another pledge of her affection very shortly,’ she added to her terse assessment, again with that hint of wistful longing in her voice he wished she’d learn to conceal a little better.

      To anyone else he supposed it might seem a tone of rueful irony, a discreet nod towards the fact that her sister and brother-in-law were deeply in love and therefore made insufferable company for a rational human being. Too many months spent learning her moods and interests from avid observation, he thought crossly. What an irony if she so longed to carry brats of her own that she was prepared to take him as her husband after all, just when he’d realised he couldn’t tolerate such a marriage to a wife he’d once longed to adore until his dying day. Compassion threatened as he wondered why she thought it safe to love her children and not her husband, who could be her equal and her passion. No, Carnwood and his countess were unique and he was done with dreams; Kate was not the wife for him.

      ‘Ah, well,’ he replied carelessly, ‘your brother-in-law is sadly in need of an heir.’

      ‘Kit will feel the need for whomever my sister presents him with, my lord. Not even the most cynical and uncaring spectator could deny that.’

      Now he’d really offended her, just as he’d intended to. What a shame, then, that the fleeting vulnerability of hurt he glimpsed in her eyes, the not-quite-hidden wince as he pretended indifference to two people he liked and envied, pained him as well. Better this way, he reminded himself and smiled encouragingly at a certain Miss Transome he’d been introduced to earlier and her hovering swain. With any luck, they would join them at supper and break up any suggestion of a tête-à-tête between himself and the beauty at his side before too many people recalled that he’d once been mad, deluded and desperate for her.

      ‘La, my dear Miss Alstone,’ Miss Transome spouted so fulsomely so that Edmund almost regretted encouraging her, even to save himself an intimate supper with a woman he couldn’t have and didn’t want. ‘How finely you two do dance together. It quite put us off our own feeble attempts, did it not, Mr Cromer?’

      ‘Yes, quite,’ poor Cromer replied as if his throat was parched after all the monosyllabic replies he’d made this evening to his voluble companion. ‘Get supper for the ladies, eh, Shuttleworth?’ he managed in a magnificent feat of oratory.

      ‘Quite,’ he replied, apeing his old school friend’s sparse conversational style and they resorted to the groaning supper table to procure enough refreshments to silence even Miss Transome for a few idyllic moments.

      Edmund decided both he and his taciturn friend had been rash to attend a party so obviously organised for the benefit of single ladies who’d survived too many Seasons unwed, before fresh débutantes arrived to outdo and outflank them. It was perhaps the last chance for such ladies to catch the eye of a potential husband before open season was declared on them. One glance at their hostess for the evening and her superannuated eldest daughter should have any sane bachelor saying a hasty farewell and dashing off to his club in order to survive and fight another day. He, of course, had a reason to attend any party where he might meet his elusive future viscountess, but what on earth had led Cromer to risk it?

      ‘She’s m’aunt,’ Cromer explained obscurely and Ed mund must have looked almost as puzzled as he felt, because his friend added a brief explanation. ‘Lady Finchley, she’s m’aunt.’

      ‘That accounts for it then,’ he conceded.

      ‘Your excuse?’ Cromer asked morosely.

      ‘Idiocy,’ Edmund replied, borrowing some of his friend’s abruptness.

      ‘Must be,’ Cromer commiserated as they turned back with their booty. ‘Though the Alstone icicle’s a beauty,’ he conceded generously.

      ‘Aye, but is she worth enduring the frostbite for, I wonder?’ Edmund asked in a thoughtful undertone as he watched her nod regally to an acquaintance.

      ‘M’father wants me to wed. Always liked Amelia Transome, but the thing is that she will talk. Much better tempered than my cousin Finchley, though,’ Cromer risked waxing lyrical.

      Scanning the room and finally spotting Miss Finchley seated at a flimsy table with a widower of at least five and forty, who still looked hunted and not very willing, Edmund sympathised. Miss Transome was open and amiable, but the thought of being fluttered at over the breakfast table for the rest of his life must make the strongest man hesitate. Neither female bore the slightest resemblance to his dream wife, so he turned his attention back to Kate Alstone with a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t stand in Cromer’s shoes and could at least please himself whom he brought to supper, so long as she wasn’t the woman who pleased him all the way to the altar.

      ‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ Miss Transome gushed at the loaded plates.

      ‘Quite,’ Kate said with much less enthusiasm, and Edmund wondered if she’d been talked into a headache by Miss Transome’s busy tongue and dreaded carrying the burden of conversation with her on his own.

      Kate nibbled unenthusiastically at her supper, despite poor Lady Finchley having pushed out every boat she could launch in the hope of netting her daughter a husband at long last by hiring an excellent chef. To be fair, the headache she felt tightening her hairpins and nagging at her temples had nothing to do with Miss Transome’s prattle, so the blame for that must lie at Lord Shuttleworth’s door. Wretched man, she decided, as she surreptitiously surveyed him with a disillusioned gaze.

      Once upon a time he would have fallen at her daintily shod feet given the slightest hint of encouragement, but now that she’d finally steeled herself to accept a husband, he certainly wouldn’t be one of her suitors.

      She hoped she was too proud to wilfully mistake his indifference to her tonight for a fleeting headache or a black mood on his part. There was too much distance about him to lay his behaviour at such a random and socially convenient cause and gaily expect tomorrow to bring amendment. He no longer desired her, now she finally wanted to become a wife and mother, and it was the frustration of it all that had caused her headache. It wasn’t as if she cared for him, other than as she might for any man she’d once known and come to value for his integrity and the dry sense