A Summer to Remember (10 page)

She gazed up at him. Without honor? Merely because he had pretended a love he did not feel? And why did that fact make her feel so very bleak? She had never believed him.

“I believe you owe me an explanation first,” she said though she was not sure she wanted to know.

For a long time it seemed to her that he would not answer. Footsteps approached along the path, accompanied by soft whispers and laughter. But whoever it was must have spotted them from a distance and turned to go back. The music of another waltz intruded from what seemed to be a long distance away.

“Suffice it to say,” Lord Ravensberg said at last after inhaling audibly, “that I have wagered against three other men that I will have wooed you and wed you by the end of this month.”

Lauren imposed control over herself by trying—and failing—to describe her feelings to herself with one word. Shock? Anger? Bewilderment? Hurt? Humiliation?

“A wager?” She was whispering.

“You were chosen,” he said, “because you have a reputation for unshakable dignity and gentility and respectability. For being the perfect lady, in fact. My . . . friends considered you to be the lady least likely to accept my proposal.”

“Because you are a rake? This was all a game, then?” Her tone, she realized, matched his own in flatness. “But a remarkably foolish one. What if you had won? You would have been stuck for life with a prim, respectable wife. A perfect lady. A perfectly
dull
lady. That is what I am, Lord Ravensberg.”

The sharpness of her pain was ridiculous. She had never respected this man or believed his preposterous flatteries. She respected him even less now. What did it matter that he had made a wager concerning her only because she was dull, dull, dull? For that was what dignity, gentility, and respectability added up to for him. And he was quite right. She was exactly what he thought her to be. She had always been proud of being a lady. She was
still
proud. So the pain was not valid. She was not really feeling it. Only anger—against herself more than against him. She had known from the start who and what he was. She had deliberately chosen not to listen to her family. She had wanted to assert her independence. And all the time she had been persuading herself that she was immune to his charm.

“No,” he said. “You do yourself an injustice. And it was not just a game. I really did—
do
—need a bride. Someone like you. But I should not have courted you with such . . . insensitivity. With such careless disregard for you as a person. I should not have allowed you, or any other lady, to become the object of a wager. You may be the perfect wife for me, but I would be just the worst possible husband for you.”

She should have risen to her feet then, the explanation given, and made her way back to the main path and the box where Mr. and Mrs. Merklinger waited. For very pride’s sake she should have left—and refused his escort. But she did not move.

“Why do you need a bride by the end of June?” she asked him. “That is less than two weeks away. And why a—a perfect lady?” She could not quite keep the bitterness from her voice.

“I had better tell you everything.” He sighed and took a step closer. But he did not sit down beside her. He set one foot on the wooden seat instead and draped an arm over his raised leg. His face, only inches from her own now, was as serious as she had ever seen it.

“I have been summoned to Alvesley for the summer,” he said. “My father’s principal seat, that is. My brother’s death almost two years ago made me his heir and forced me to sell my commission since he pointed out to me that I was no longer free to put my life at risk every day. My life was suddenly valuable to him, you see, even though he banished me forever the last time I saw him.”

“You did not wish to sell out?” she asked, noting the unusually bitter tone of his voice.

“As a younger son, I was brought up for a military career,” he said. “It was what I wanted anyway. And I enjoyed it, all things considered. It was something I did well.”

She waited.

“There is to be a house party in celebration of my grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday this summer,” he told her. “My banishment has been revoked. The prodigal is to be allowed home after all. He is to learn his duties as the future earl, you see. And one of those duties is to take a bride and set up his nursery. It is my father’s intention, in fact, to make my betrothal the central event of a summer of festivities. It is to be a birthday gift to my grandmother.”

All was beginning to make sense. Her respectability, her reputation as a perfect lady, made her a good candidate. She had been chosen with cold calculation. As most brides of her class were, of course. Had he been open about his intentions from the start she would not have been offended. There was nothing intrinsically offensive about them.

“The Earl of Redfield has instructed you to choose a respectable bride?” she asked. “Was it he who suggested my name?”

“No.” He tapped his free hand against the leg on which he stood. “Actually he has another prospect in mind.”

“Oh?”

“My dead brother’s betrothed.”

“Oh.” Lauren clasped her hands tightly in her lap. How very distasteful for both Lord Ravensberg and the poor lady, who was being handed from one brother to the next like a worn inheritance.

“And my own before him,” he said after a slight pause. “But when given the choice three years ago, she chose the heir rather than the second son, the mere cavalry major. Ironic, is it not? She might have had both me and the title. But I no longer wish to marry her. And so I decided to choose my own bride and take her with me when I go as a fait accompli. I wanted a bride to whom my father could not possibly object. Your name was suggested to me—not as someone who would surely accept, but as a lady of perfect gentility who probably would not. Hence the wager.”

Lauren looked at her hands in her lap. She was not sure he spoke the strict truth. She thought it more likely that she had been named as someone who would almost certainly accept his proposal with alacrity. Was she not a jilted, abandoned bride, after all? A woman past the first blush of youth who would surely grab with desperate gratitude the first man who asked? But if that were so, why would three gentlemen have wagered against his success?

But did it matter?

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “You have been the victim of my unpardonable lapse of honor. I owed you honesty from the start. I should have approached the Duke of Portfrey with my offer and been content with whatever he might have said. But it is too late now to court you the right way. You have done nothing to deserve such shabby treatment. Please believe me to be truly contrite and most humbly your servant. May I escort you back to the box?” He returned his foot to the ground and offered his arm.

She continued staring at her hands while he waited. Another crossroads. Yet there was nothing further to decide, nothing more to say.

Because you are a woman—a beautiful woman—and I am a red-blooded male. Because I desire you.

All a lie. And she was undeniably hurt by it. It had all been a ruse to lure her into accepting him and winning his wager for him.

But still . . . a crossroads.

“No, wait,” she said softly, even though he was already doing that—waiting to escort her out of his life. “Wait a moment.”

Kit watched her spread her fingers in her lap. She did not speak again for a long while. He felt damnably wretched. All he wanted to do, if the truth were known, was take her back to Mrs. Merklinger’s side and wait out the evening with all the patience he could muster. And to seek out his three friends in the morning to pay his debts before taking himself off to Alvesley.

He was deeply mortified to realize that in consenting to make a lady—a perfectly innocent lady—the subject of a sordid wager he really had tainted the honor he held so dear. It had seemed faintly amusing at the time, before she had become a person to him.

Another group was approaching along the narrow path, this one more boisterous than the couple before them. And they came right along even when they saw that they were interrupting a tête-à-tête. Kit sat down beside Lauren, and the four revelers walked past in loud silence, their eyes carefully averted, and then laughed and snickered before they were quite out of earshot. Kit stayed where he was.

“Will you go to Alvesley, then,” Lauren Edgeworth asked, “and betroth yourself to your former fiancée after all?”

“I hope I may avoid that fate,” he said.

“Does
she
wish to marry
you
?” she asked.

“I very much doubt it,” he said. “She preferred Jerome to me three years ago.” Though one never quite knew with Freyja.

“I will make a bargain with you, Lord Ravensberg,” Lauren Edgeworth said, her voice quite steady and calm, “if you will agree to it.”

He turned his head to look at her, but her eyes were still directed downward at her spread fingers.

“I will go to Alvesley with you,” she said very deliberately, “as your betrothed.”

He sat very still.

“As your
temporary
betrothed,” she explained. “I will go with you and be presented to your family and be everything you hoped I would be. I will be there while you establish yourself again as your father’s son and while you take your rightful place in his home as his heir. I will be there so that a distasteful engagement will not be pressed upon either you or the lady who once chose your brother rather than you. I will give you some breathing room, so to speak, during the house party and the birthday celebrations. But I will not marry you. At the end of the summer I will leave Alvesley and break the engagement. I will do it in such a way that no censure will fall upon you. By that time it is to be hoped that your family will have accepted your right to choose your own bride in your own time.”

He could not possibly be misunderstanding her. She spoke very precisely. But what the devil?

“You would
break
the engagement?” he said, frowning. “Do you realize what a scandal that would cause? You would put yourself beyond the social pale.”

“I think not,” she said with a faint smile for her hands. “There would be those who would congratulate me upon having freed myself just in time from marriage to a rakehell. But I care little anyway. I have told you that I am not in search of a husband, that I have no intention of marrying. What I have realized only very recently is that I need to break free of my well-meaning relatives, who treat me as if I were both a green girl and excessively fragile goods. In reality I am a woman who long ago reached her majority, and I have a comfortable independence. I intend to set up my own home, perhaps in Bath. After spending the summer at Alvesley, supposedly as your betrothed, and then breaking the connection, I will find it far easier to do what I ought to have done a year ago. None of my relatives will argue with me. I will be demonstrably unmarriage-able.”

What the devil?
He stared at her profile and realized fully what he should have realized long ago—that he did not know this woman at all. Yet he had been prepared to marry her within the next two weeks.

“Were you deeply attached to Kilbourne, then?” he asked her.

Her head dipped a little lower. Her fingers closed and then spread again.

“I grew up with him at Newbury Abbey,” she said, “from the time I was taken there at the age of three. In some ways he seemed like my brother as much as he was Gwen’s. But I always knew too that we were intended for each other when we grew up. I shaped my life to the expectation that one day I would be his countess. Even when he bought his commission and went away, telling me not to wait for him but to feel free to marry someone else if I wished, I remained loyal. I waited. But while he was gone he married secretly and then watched his wife die in an ambush in Portugal—or so he thought. He came home and would have married me after all. It seemed as if life would proceed in the direction I had always expected it to take. But Lily did not die. She came home to Neville—on my wedding day.”

He was not deceived by the lack of emotion in her voice. This story had been the sensation of last year. But almost all the gossip, he guessed, had focused upon the glorious love story that was Kilbourne and his lady’s. Lauren Edgeworth had been pitied, spoken of, no doubt, in hushed, shocked whispers. How many people, himself included, Kit thought, deeply ashamed, had really considered the pain the woman must have suffered and must still suffer? She had been within a few minutes of fulfilling a lifetime’s dream only to have it shattered most cruelly.

“You loved him?” he asked. Though he was not sure the past tense was strictly appropriate.

“Love,” she said softly. “What is love? The word has so many meanings. Of course I loved him. But not in the way Neville and Lily love each other. Love of that sort is a disordered, undisciplined emotion, best avoided. I would have remained loyal and faithful and . . . Of course I loved him.” She sighed. “I will contemplate no other marriage, Lord Ravensberg.”

He gazed at her, deep pity—and guilt—holding him silent. But she appeared to read his thoughts.

“I am not asking for your pity,” she said. “Please do not offer it or even feel it. I need only to be accorded the privilege that men expect as a natural right—to be allowed to live my life my way without having those who claim to love me forever knowing better than I what it is that will make me happy. I want to be alone and independent. If I ruin my reputation this summer, I will achieve that for which I ought not to have to fight.”

“Good Lord,” he said, running the fingers of one hand through his hair and then leaning forward to rest his forearms across his legs. “How can I agree to this? Having spoken of honor just a few minutes ago, how can I now agree to deceive both my family and yours? And how can I leave all the burden of breaking our betrothal to you? You do understand, do you not, that as a gentleman I could not possibly break it myself?”

“And therein is your answer,” she said. “To you the betrothal would have to be a real one, my lord, would it not? If I were to behave dishonorably, you see, and refuse to break it off even after striking a bargain with you, you would have no choice but to marry me. And so you would be involved in no deception if you were to agree to my suggestion.”