A Scandalous Proposal (24 page)

EPILOGUE

D
ANY
SNUGGLED
AGAINST
Coop as they reclined against a wide tree trunk, the two of them looking out over the stream. Remnants of their meal lay scattered on the blanket, and from time to time he lifted her hand to his mouth, kissing the ring he now saw as the true promise of their shared lives.

“Forgive me yet?” he asked her when she sighed, hopefully in contentment.

“I do. But you could have just told me, couldn't you? I would have understood.”

“I wanted
everyone
to know, to see. Darby most particularly, since he was feeling guilty about having come up with the idea of a sham engagement in the first place. Now there's no question. I love you, Daniella Foster. In fact, I'm fairly dotty about you.”

“But Darby isn't. You did notice that, didn't you? He smiled and kissed my hand, and said all the right things, but he seemed distracted, as if still bothered by something.”

“That's because he is. He took me aside while you and the ladies were talking, and told me about a letter he found waiting for him when he arrived here this morning. It seems our friend has found himself in a bit of a pickle.”

“Don't say pickle. I don't even want to
see
a pickle for another five years. What's wrong?”

“It's a long story, and Darby's to tell, but while we were stuck in a French prison—this was a year before Waterloo—he struck up a friendship with one of the physician captives who helped care for us. The man had a daughter, and when Darby asked how he could repay the man for saving his eye, if not his sight, his answer was that, if anything happened to him, Darby would take charge of that daughter.”

“And Darby said yes? And the man died? But—but that was years ago. You already said that.”

“No, the physician didn't die. He was wounded attempting to steal food from the French soldiers guarding us, but he didn't die. Then. Apparently he now has, and the daughter is keeping Darby to his word. In fact, according to the letter he showed me, she'll be arriving here at the cottage within a few days.”

Dany pushed herself up to a sitting position, to look toward the others, sitting a good distance away from them. They were all laughing and talking and thoroughly enjoying themselves. But Darby was once more standing alone, his hands shoved into his pockets, a look on his face that didn't bode well for anyone who might decide to approach him.

“What is he going to do? I can't imagine him with a ward, let alone a female ward.”

“I don't know. I do know he's asked his friends to help him, which of course we will. So, if you don't mind, before traveling to see your parents and ask for your hand yet again, do you mind staying in town a little longer?”

How old is this child? Is she still in leading strings? Is she ready for a come-out? How many hoops will Darby have to jump through before he's shed of her?

“Oh, no. Goodness, no,” Dany said, settling against Coop once more. “I don't mind. I don't mind at all...”

* * * * *

How to Woo a Spinster

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

L
ADY
E
MMALINE
D
AUGHTRY
sat in the gardens of Ashurst Hall on one of the first bright days of spring, completely and entirely alone.

It was her twenty-eighth birthday.

On her lap was the letter that had arrived in the morning post from her nieces, Lydia and Nicole. In order to keep to one sheet, thus saving on the postage, Lydia had written her rather formal, excruciatingly correct wishes in her finest copperplate. Nicole, being Nicole, had scribbled her good wishes upside down between Lydia's lines, her usual exuberance evident in both her atrocious spelling and her latest affectation of marking all her
i
's with small hearts.

The twins were back with their mother, the thrice-widowed Helen Daughtry, at their small estate of Willowbrook, as Helen was once again between husbands and had remembered that she had daughters to fuss over in her own fashion.

That would change in a few weeks, when Helen went tripping off to London for the Season, and Lydia and Nicole were once again shuttled back to Ashurst Hall “to bear their dearest spinster aunt their Comfort and Presence, as you must be So Devastatingly Lonely isolated in the back of beyond.” Or so Helen's last letter, all but pinned to the twins' luggage, had stated so cruelly. But all under the guise of being caring and compassionate.

Lady Emmaline knew her late brother's widow could be a kind person, in her own way. She simply wasn't a kind person frequently.

In that way, Helen had fit very well with the Daughtry family, who seemed to belong to another age, the more rough and tumble—and most definitely profane—age of two decades past. Marital fidelity was a joke to them, kindness considered a weakness and selfishness a near art form. Or else today's Society had simply learned to hide their failings and vices better...

Her morals had, however, been the only way her sister-in-law resembled the Daughtrys. Helen always said she'd married the wrong brother when she'd wed the second son, but even that marriage had been quite above her social station. Yet, ever resourceful, she'd made do with a husband who had tired of her within a few months, and built her own life, her own circle of London friends.

When Emmaline's brother Geoffrey had died, Helen had tricked herself out in crushingly expensive widow's weeds, impatiently waited out a full month of mourning and then deposited her son, Rafael, and the twins on the doorstep of Ashurst Hall and returned to London and those friends. Over the years, the children had spent more time at Ashurst Hall than on their own estate, until Rafe had left to serve with Wellington.

Emmaline had been as thrilled by these additions to the family as her only surviving brother had been appalled—which may have been one of the reasons Emmaline had been so delighted. After all, it wasn't as if there was any love lost between Charlton and herself.

Charlton and Geoffrey were so very much older than Emmaline, and males to her female, so it was not surprising that the three had never been especially close. And Emmaline could have accepted that. But Emmaline's mother had departed this earth the same day her only daughter was born, and for that, Charlton and Geoffrey would never forgive her. Even their father, the Duke of Ashurst, had been no more than occasionally aware of his daughter's existence. Not that he'd much cared for his sons, either. Emmaline always thought his children would have garnered more affection from their sire if they could run on four legs, go up on point when they spotted the fox and then lay at his feet at the banquet whilst he celebrated his latest glorious kill.

And then Geoffrey had died, and their father had looked around and noticed that, by Jupiter, he was in danger of being outnumbered by petticoats. Charlton's wife was enough to have twittering about Ashurst Hall, complaining that he came to dinner in his hunting clothes, or tossing fierce looks at him when he belched or scratched satisfyingly whenever the spirit moved him. It was time to marry off the one he could get rid of, by Jupiter!

So Emmaline had been hauled off to London upon the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, where she was put under the supposedly watchful eye of Helen Daughtry. Which was the same as to say Emmaline was left to her own devices while Helen flirted outrageously with any man who happened to look at Emmaline in a matrimonial way.

Not that Emmaline hadn't had her chances during the Seasons she'd suffered through under Helen's haphazard chaperonage. There had been at least a few gentlemen who hadn't taken one look at Helen's décolletage and deserted Emmaline as if she'd just told them she had contracted the plague. There had been Sir William Masterson, a widower with six children under the age of ten. He'd made no bones that he was looking for a woman to ride herd on his...well, on his herd. Lord Phillipson had loved her.

Emmaline had been very aware of that fact from the way he had all but drooled on her shoe tops, but as his breath would fell an ox at ten paces, she'd felt she had to decline his proposal.

There had been no third Season, as her father had died, and Emmaline had insisted on a full year of mourning (Helen had actually laughed when she'd heard that, which was, in fact, as she headed out the door on her way to London less than two hours after the duke had been put to bed for his eternal rest in the family mausoleum).

Charlton, now the thirteenth duke, had given Emmaline one more chance the following Season, sending her off with a warning that an only passably pretty woman of three and twenty shouldn't be so damned choosy and she'd better find some fool who'd come up to scratch because he was done paying through the nose for gowns and gloves and other fripperies.

The Season hadn't gone well. Emmaline sometimes wondered if she had deliberately sabotaged herself and her matrimonial hopes simply to spite the new duke.

On the event of her twenty-fourth birthday, Charlton's gift to her had been a half dozen white, embroidered spinster caps and the information that, while he and his sons George and Harold (their mama having succumbed to a putrid cold three years previously) would be going to London for the Season, she was to remain at home.

Emmaline hadn't protested. Indeed, at the time, she had been rather relieved. After all, in her many Seasons in London she had met, danced and spoken with nearly every eligible bachelor not risking his life on the Peninsula, and none of them had excited her in the least. She could find little attraction in men who cared more for the cut of their evening jacket than they did the notion that Bonaparte might somehow best Wellington and they'd all be speaking French. How on earth was she supposed to take any of these men seriously when none of them had been any better than her brother and nephews, some of them actually worse?

But now the war was at last over and Bonaparte was on his way to a deserved exile, and the world could welcome home all its fine, brave soldiers...who to a man would surely be on the lookout for ladies much younger than Lady Emmaline.

No, she was destined to remain forever on this estate, sitting in this same garden, season after season, year after year, birthday after birthday, waiting for her perfect lover who would never arrive. How she had tired of watching Charlton eat with his fingers at the dinner table, hearing George and Harold brag about their latest bouts of drinking and gambling, wretches that they were, not to mention listening in some fear to her brother threaten to send her off to their great-aunt in Scotland because he was weary of looking at her.

Yes, having Rafael and Lydia and Nicole so often in residence these past years had been Emmaline's main comfort, and she missed them sorely.

She did not miss Charlton or his sons, who had left her alone without a kind word about her birthday, most probably because they'd forgotten the date. No, they'd gone off five days ago to play with George's newest toy, a yacht he had won at the gaming tables. As if any of them knew the first thing about steering a boat, or whatever it was one did with a boat.

Would it be terrible of her to hope that all three of them spent most of their voyage hanging over the side, sick as dogs and casting up their suppers into the Channel?

Emmaline sighed, folding up the letter from her nieces as she tried to shake off her depressing thoughts. She wished her good friend Charlotte Seavers, who lived in Rose Cottage with her parents, right next door to Ashurst Hall, could share her birthday with her, but her mother was still not quite well. But, no, Emmaline wouldn't think about that particular sadness tonight, either.

Cook had promised her a special treat for supper, and she really should go change out of her simple sprigged muslin gown and into something more festive. She didn't wish to disappoint the servants, who she knew had been busily polishing silver especially for what would be a solitary meal in the cavernous dining room, followed by a quiet evening of reading and an early bedtime.

Perhaps she should reconsider those caps Charlton had given her along with the warning that she was only living under his roof because of his kind and generous nature. She considered this idea for a full three seconds before declaring to the flowers and the trees: “The devil I will. With or without my family, I'm going to celebrate my birthday. By Jupiter.”

And then, after surprising herself with her outburst, Emmaline quickly bit her lips between her teeth as she heard the sound of firm, purposeful footsteps approaching along the brick path. How wonderful. Now she was talking to herself, a very spinster-like thing to do, and someone may have heard her.

She turned her head at the sound of her name. “Yes. Here I am,” she said, knowing she did not recognize the male voice that had called to her.

The gentleman who appeared momentarily was a complete stranger to her, for she surely would have remembered such a tall, darkly handsome man as this if she had ever seen him.

“Lady Emmaline?”

“Yes...um, yes, I am she,” Emmaline said, feeling rather shaken by the sight of the man's coal-black hair and blazingly blue eyes. As her own eyes were a very ordinary brown and her hair so typically English blond, she had always had an attraction to dark hair and blue eyes. Indeed, she had secretly envied young Nicole her ebony curls and nearly violet eyes, knowing that when she and the differently beautiful Lydia came of age and headed to Mayfair, their suitors would probably have to be beaten away with stout sticks.

“Please pardon the intrusion, ma'am. Your butler told me I would find you here.”

Belatedly, Emmaline held out her hand to the man, her hopefully subtle inspection unnoticed by him. She recognized his uniform as belonging to the Royal Navy.
And on my birthday, too—what a lovely present.

She mentally slapped herself for her frivolous thoughts, probably old-maid thoughts, or those more often entertained by someone like Helen. Then again, Emmaline reminded herself, she was not exactly a debutante, was she? “Captain?”

“Alastair. Captain John Alastair, ma'am,” he said after only a slight hesitation, taking her hand in his and bowing over it before releasing her and rising to his full height once more. “I've brought news. If we might step inside, ma'am? And do you have other family in residence at the moment?”

Goodness, what a glorious uniform, right down to the bicorne hat he had tucked up under his arm. Now this was a man worth meeting.
Stop that!
she warned her inner self, who was certainly not behaving as a spinster should. But, my, he was so handsome...

“No, I'm quite alone,” Emmaline answered after a moment, feeling slightly dazed. When he'd taken her hand she'd felt a tingle of awareness skip up her arm, and knew she was disappointed that he had not kissed her hand. Which was ridiculous. It wasn't as if someone had sent her the man as a birthday present, for goodness' sake. Still, the image of him being presented to her, all tied up with a lovely satin bow, persisted in her traitorous brain. If this was what reaching the lofty age of eight and twenty got her, what would she be doing at thirty? Chasing men down the streets of the village? Shame on her!

His frown told her she had given him an answer he could not like. “Then perhaps your maid? A companion?”

Reluctantly, Emmaline brought her mind back to attention. “Captain Alastair, I don't understand. I'm certainly past the age of needing a chaperone. Or have you come to the front door of Ashurst Hall and introduced yourself to my brother's butler all with the intention of either robbing us or killing us, or both? If so, you may want to reconsider housebreaking as a way to make your way in the world now that the hostilities are a thing of the past.”

Had she really said all of that? Why, she was babbling, that's what she was doing. But he looked so serious. So handsome and so serious. It seemed necessary to keep speaking, even babbling, so that he didn't say what he had obviously come here to say. Something he would say that, it would seem, required that she have some other female conveniently on hand for the moment when she would either erupt in hysterics or faint dead away.

A sudden fear invaded her. “Has this to do with Rafe? My nephew, Captain Rafael Daughtry? He is with Wellington. But no, that can't be it. For one, the hostilities are over. And you are a navy captain, and Rafe is with the—I'm sorry. I should stop asking questions and ask you to accompany me inside, shouldn't I, as that is what it would seem you wish me to do?”

“That was another question,” Captain Alastair pointed out, not unkindly. “If I may?” He held out his arm to her, and she took it, suddenly believing she might need some sort of support.

Neither spoke as they made their way along the brick path to one of the many sets of French doors leading into the large formal saloon. The captain held open the door for her, and Emmaline stepped inside to see that not only was the silver tea service already set up on the table between the two couches near the center of the room, but that both Grayson and the housekeeper, Mrs. Piggle, were standing just outside the room, pretending not to be watching for her.