How to Woo a Spinster. Kasey Michaels

Please forgive me for attempting to delay delivery of this very sad news. I’m trying to keep my wits about me. Unfortunately, I believe I’m sadly failing at the effort. I’m imagining all sorts of things, none of them very palatable.”

      “Then please allow me to say this as quickly as I can, and I apologize now for being so abbreviated. Lady Emmaline, it is my sad duty to inform you that your brother and his sons were lost at sea last evening off Shoreham-by-Sea. My own ship arrived on the scene just as the yacht was disappearing beneath the waves with all save one soul still onboard. I’m…I’m profoundly sorry we could not save them.”

      Emmaline sat very still. She may have breathed, but she couldn’t be sure. Her mind objected in the most ridiculous way: But it’s my birthday. Isn’t it just like them to do this to me on my birthday?

      She twisted her hands in her lap, and then pinched herself, just to be sure she was awake, and not in the middle of a nightmare that incongruously somehow included a man best described as the perfect lover of her more pleasant dreams.

      “Lady Emmaline? May I please summon someone now?”

      She shook her head, unable to speak. She waited for the tears, but they didn’t come. In all, she felt rather numb. What had been the last words Charlton had said to her five days ago before climbing into his traveling coach behind George and Harold? Oh yes, she remembered. Make me a happy man, sister mine. Run off with one of the grooms before we get back!

      Her nephews had laughed hard and long at their father’s joke. She could still hear them laughing as the coach moved off down the drive.

      Emmaline snapped herself back to the moment at hand.

      “Was…um, was there a storm?” She didn’t know why she asked this. But she felt it was something at least halfway sensible to say, something to break the oppressive silence.

      “No, ma’am. Not anything I’d call a storm, at least. As I understand the thing from speaking with the survivor, a Mr. Hugh Hobart, the captain was intoxicated and belowdecks at the time, and one of your nephews was at the helm. Waves are powerful things, ma’am, even on a day that could only be called choppy from the wind along the Channel. Ride with the waves and you fly across the water. Hit one of them wrong, and even a sturdy ship can crack like an egg.”

      He looked at her, wincing. “I’m sorry. That was stupidly clumsy of me. I shouldn’t say that the tragedy could be laid at your nephew’s door.”

      “The yacht was a recent…acquisition. I can’t imagine what either George or Harold could have been thinking, to attempt to take the wheel like that. But that’s what this Mr. Hobart told you?”

      The captain nodded. “The man was rather overset and unintelligible. But, yes, he said his friend Harold was at the helm. That is—was—one of your nephews, correct?”

      Emmaline nodded, still waiting to cry. She should be crying, shouldn’t she? Clearly Captain Alastair believed she should be weeping, in need of comfort. She was an unnatural sister, that’s what she was, and an unnatural aunt.

      Because all she could feel, of the little she seemed capable of feeling, was relief…