The Wicked Wallflower (2 page)

“I suffer from it even thinking about him,” Olivia said. “My heart is fluttering and my skin feels hot. I must be blushing all over.”

“That's probably all the sherry you've been drinking,” Emma remarked.

“My knees are weak,” Olivia sighed, with a dreamy look in her eyes.

“You're sitting,” Prudence pointed out.

“It's an imaginary condition and I am immune,” Emma said confidently. “If I ever meet him, I'll prove it to you.”

“Do you smell smoke? Or is that my imagination?” Prudence asked.

“Can you just imagine if you were engaged to Ashbrooke?” Olivia said, with far too much excitement for Emma's comfort.

“I cannot. No one would believe it, even were it true. No, I wish to marry Benedict and we shall have a neat little townhouse with a library and we shall devote ourselves to his scholarly pursuits.”

“Pfft,” Prudence puffed dismissively. “Olivia, if you please, I shall dictate.”

“What? No!” Emma lunged for the paper, but Olivia—­even drunken Olivia—­was too quick for her. “Oh bother it. No one will believe it anyway.”

Prudence began her dictation. “ ‘To the surprise of everyone, the Duke of Ashbrooke announces his betrothal to Lady Emma Avery.' ”

“Oh, please,” Emma scoffed as Olivia wrote slowly. Hopefully her penmanship was rendered illegible due to the sherry.

“Where do you keep the sealing wax?” Prudence asked.

“I shan't tell you that. Both of those missives ought to go in the fire immediately,” Emma said.

“Are you sure?” Olivia asked, the dangerous sheet of paper in her hand.

“Of course I am sure! I shall speak to Benedict,” Emma said. “Perhaps I can talk him into eloping.”

“That would be romantic,” Olivia said encouragingly.

“But Ashbrooke—­” Prudence started, before Emma interrupted.

“Wouldn't marry me even if that announcement did appear in the newspaper. Which it will not. Because we will burn it immediately.” Emma held out her hand, expecting the letter.

“Speaking of fire, do you smell smoke?” Prudence asked. “I thought I did before, but I really do now.”

Olivia even coughed.

Emma's bedroom door burst open, slamming into the wall. Her mother appeared, gasping for breath and clutching her chest.

“Girls! Come quickly! There is a fire in the kitchens!” she cried.

Three girls jumped up in a hurry, knocking over their glasses, bottles of black ink, spilling half the sherry bottle, and abandoning everything—­including That Letter—­in their haste to reach for shawls and escape the house.

 

Chapter 2

“Noooo!”

—
­
M
ANY MARRIAGE-­MIND
ED MAMAS WAILING DRA
MATICALLY UPON READI
NG THE LATEST ISSUE
OF
T
HE
L
ONDON
W
EEKLY

The Drawing Room, Avery House

N
O ONE EVER
paid much attention to Emma Avery. She did not have breathtaking beauty, sparkling charm, sharp wit, or fortune to recommend her above all the other beautiful, charming, witty, wealthy girls of the haute ton. She was fine.
Fine.

But
fine
didn't quite cut it on the marriage mart. Thus, calling hours were whiled away in an empty drawing room, with the good company of the latest novel from the circulating library. It was not altogether an unpleasant way to spend the afternoon, though Emma could have done without the quiet sense of desperation.

And so on Saturday afternoon Emma sat down with volume one of
The Mad Baron,
which would hopefully provide a distraction from the empty drawing room and her looming, impoverished spinsterhood in Lincolnshire. Her mother read the newest edition of
The London Weekly,
beginning with the front page and proceeding to read each and every page.

The grandfather clock in the hall ticked loudly, marking the passing seconds and hours, reminding Emma that Judgment Day, otherwise known as Lady Penelope's Anniversary Ball, was fast approaching.

Already a week had passed uneventfully (and unromantically) since the night of Lady Wrotham's ball. Had it truly been seven days already?

Her brain must
still
be foggy from all that sherry she, Olivia, and Prudence drank that night. The kitchen fire had saved them from complete and utter drunkenness. Fortunately, it had been contained, but to be safe, the girls spent the night at Olivia's house. When Emma returned the next afternoon, her bedroom had been tidied completely and—­

She gasped and slammed her book shut.

“What is it, darling?” her mother asked. She peered up from behind the newspaper.

“Nothing,” Emma said. But her heart was pounding. Could her mother hear it from across the room? No, definitely not. But lud, her heart beat so hard she could feel it sticking in her throat.

The Letter.
What had happened to the letter?

Her room had been cleaned within an inch of its life. The carpet had even been removed because of the ink stain—­and presumably the stink of sherry. The glasses had been whisked away, the bottle, too. But The Letter . . .

What the devil happened to that cursed letter?

Emma closed her book. Her palms were damp. Her heart was still thudding like a drum in her chest. She should go search for it right now and burn it immediately.

“Mother, if you'll excuse me, there is something I must tend to—­”

Emma quickly crossed the room before her mother could protest, but she didn't make it past the double doors to the foyer before Jenkins, the butler, stepped into her path.

“Lady Emma, you have a caller,” he intoned.

“Is that so?” her mother asked curiously, looking up from the newspaper.

Emma closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. It was one thing to know one was “not quite.” It was another thing entirely if your own mother thought so.

And it was another matter entirely when the most incriminating and humiliating letter ever composed was lurking somewhere and she had to find it immediately, and
now
she had a caller?

“Who is calling, Jenkins?” she asked in a small voice, while silently praying,
Please don't say the Duke of Ashbrooke.

Ashbrooke House, London

The Duke's Library

Blake William Peregrine Auden, the ninth Duke of Ashbrooke, shrugged out of his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing the taut muscles of his forearms as he set to work on the confounding problem that had been occupying his attentions for days.

Portraits of disapproving ancestors looked down upon him. Understandable, given his usual activities.

Blake focused on the drawings and calculations on the pages spread out on a table before him. After entering the room, his idiot friend Lord Salem had given one look and declared it “incomprehensible rubbish” before availing himself of the brandy. What the fool didn't see were calculations for a machine that could revolutionize everything.

A second visitor, his cousin, heir, and good friend, George Parker-­Jones, sat before the fire, newspaper in hand.

“First the Tarleton twins and now this,” George lamented, shaking a copy of
The London Weekly
above his head.

It was not the problem that absorbed the duke.

“Are we still talking about the twins?” Ashbrooke asked, bored. “For the thousandth time, to be caught with one girl is to compromise her. But two chaperone each other.”

It was only logical. The ton did not see logic.

“By all accounts they did not appear to have
properly
chaperoned each other, given the state of their hair, attire, and virtue when discovered with you,” George said, grinning.

“I don't know if I should be flattered or insulted that the ton thinks me capable of ruining two young, twin sisters in just a quarter of an hour,” Ashbrooke said. Then, with a grin, he added, “Hell, I'm just getting started after a quarter of an hour.”

“This may be a shock to you, but I am not interested in the details of your lovemaking,” George declared. “Unlike the rest of the ton.”

“Please spare us,” Salem said. “I beg of you.”

“I should publish my memoirs,” Ashbrooke said. “I'd make a fortune.”

“There's the funds for your Difference Engine,” George pointed out, referring to Ashbrooke's latest, frustratingly slow project.

The Difference Engine was a machine that performed mathematical calculations perfectly every time, no matter how complex or difficult. The results would be free of human error.

Or rather, the Difference Engine would do that once he completed his calculations and designs and then secured the funds to build it. He estimated it would require fifty thousand pounds—an enormous sum that he wasn't about to bankrupt his estate for. Yet.

Then architects, ship captains, bankers, investors, inventors, and tradesmen could conduct their business based upon accurate calculations rather than the grossly infallible “ready reckoners” everyone currently relied on. Those huge books full of multiplication tables, fractions, and other mathematical calculations were riddled with human errors.

In his darker moments, Blake believed lives—­such as those of his parents—­were lost because of this. Ships gone astray. Buildings collapsing. Dangerous machines. Fortunes lost.

In his waking moments—­when he wasn't seducing women or living the high life of a duke in London—­Blake worked on plans for the machine.

His efforts at soliciting the support of his friends in the government and of his peers had met with great success—­and disastrous failure.

During a wild bachelors' only excursion at Lord Norton's country seat, Blake had busted into his lordship's priceless collection of rare vintages and imported brandies, much to the drunken delight of all the guests and much to the unbridled fury of Lord Norton.

The shipping magnate, Archibald McCracken, was irreparably offended when Blake was an hour late to their interview. Matters were only made worse by Blake's attire, which consisted of his wrinkled, smoke-­stinking evening clothes and a limp cravat that had obviously spent the better portion of the previous night on a bedroom floor.

But the fallout from the Tarleton twins debacle had been enormous. Their enraged father withdrew his support and persuaded his friends to do the same. It seems that stodgy old blokes—­the ones with the money and connections—­did not want to do business with the kind of man who was caught in a compromising position with twin sisters. Duke or not, some things were just beyond the pale.

And that was just last week's scandal.

“If you would have married one of them, you wouldn't be in this situation,” George, not helpfully, pointed out. “You could be building the engine rather than just laboring over the drawings and calculations.”

Ashbrooke sighed and once again tried to explain, logically: “I couldn't marry one twin and ruin the other. Of course I cannot marry
both.
So I shall marry neither.”

“They shan't marry either, it seems,” Salem pointed out.

“I shall never marry at all,” Ashbrooke stated. For the thousandth time.

“That's not what
The London Weekly
says,” George said, with a cryptic smile. He rustled the pages of the newspaper. Even Salem was intrigued.

“Let me see that,” Ashbrooke said, snatching the paper away. He flipped through until—­but of course—­he found his name in the gossip column, “Fashionable Intelligence.”

He held his breath as he read what was very likely more disastrous news.

The Drawing Room, Avery House

Emma held her breath, awaiting what could only be disastrous news.

Jenkins cleared his throat and announced the callers: “Ladies Abernathy, Crawford, Mulberry, Falmouth, and Montague.”

She would have scowled were she not paralyzed by a slow dawning terror. Ashbrooke would have been preferable to that pack of young women. As would a trip to the dentist, an attack by highwaymen, or being kidnapped, ravished, and murdered by a band of bloodthirsty pirates.

“My goodness!” Mother announced. “Show them in and send up tea.”

A sweat now broke out on Emma's brow. She rather felt like she might be sick, right there on Jenkins's silver tray bearing the calling cards of Ladies Abernathy and Crawford, Mulberry, Falmouth, and Montague—­all of whom had delighted in torturing her and her friends at Lady Penelope's Finishing School.

There was no reason for them to be calling on her, unless . . .

The Letter!

Emma had barely taken a seat when the five ladies burst into the drawing room in an explosion of girlish chatter, silk, lace, jewels, bonnets, feigned laughter, and deceptive smiles.

“We saw the news in
The London Weekly
and had to be the first to congratulate you!” Lady Falmouth exclaimed.

Out of the corner of her eye Emma saw her mother frantically flipping through the pages of
The Weekly
to see what they might be referring to. Unlike most mothers of the ton, Emma's actually read the parliamentary reports and did not skip straight to the gossip columns.

She watched her mother's eyes grow large. And then she started coughing. Emma suspected she knew exactly what she had read. She prayed fervently that it was anything else.

“Are you alright, Lady Avery?” Lady Crawford inquired. “The prospect of planning such a grand affair must be so overwhelming.”

“I cannot believe we had to read it in the paper—­when we are your dearest school friends!” Lady Abernathy said sweetly.

“Yes, we were so close,” Emma replied, just as sweetly. “Like England and China.”

Lady Abernathy paused to puzzle over that.

Once, Emma had been selected to give a solo pianoforte performance at the school musical—­a rare achievement. The morning of the show, Lady Katherine Abernathy had deliberately slammed her fingers in the schoolroom door, making it impossible for Emma to play and thus obtaining the solo opportunity herself. That was Lady Katherine Abernathy in a nutshell.

“Indeed,” her mother said, clearing her throat. “It must be such a shock to read such intimate, personal news in the gossip columns. I really couldn't imagine it.”

Ashbrooke House

It was nothing unusual for the duke to read intimate, personal news about himself in the gossip columns. Often it was pure fiction, fantasy, or a complete fabrication for the sole purpose of selling more copies. More often, however, his real life antics provided ample fodder for the gossips.

The week prior to the Tarleton twins debacle, Lord Doyle's mistress had been persuaded to share her favors with Blake, much to the fury of her protector. And the week before that he could scarcely remember, but it was surely something.

Which made what he read in
The London Weekly
all the more intriguing.

Ashbrooke read aloud, perplexed, amused, and annoyed by the words he uttered: “ ‘To the surprise of everyone, the Duke of Ashbrooke announces his betrothal to Lady Emma Avery.' ”

“Who is Lady Emma Avery?” Salem asked, clearly wracking his brain to match a name with a face. His recognition of women usually began and ended with their breasts.

“She is one of London's Least Likely,” George explained, since he kept track of these things.