An Improper Proposal (17 page)

Did God approve of sarcasm? Payton didn’t know. But it was all He was going to get out of her, for the time being.

It wasn’t until the church organ suddenly wheezed that she looked away from the ceiling, startled by the noise, and in advertently met Drake’s gaze.

Then froze, looked into that hypnotic stare. His eyes—the color, she’d often thought, of ice—seemed to bore into hers. It was unnerving, having those eyes, so unnaturally bright in that dark face, on her. What, she wondered sluggishly, in the part of her brain that hadn’t automatically shut down the minute that gaze looked on hers, does he want? Why is he staring at me like that? Did he get my note? Is that it? But if he got it, why is he still going through with the wedding?

She scanned his face, but could find no hint as to the reason behind that enigmatic stare. Maybe, she thought grimly, this is his way of saying good-bye. Good-bye forever.

Then, all around her, people in the pews began to stand. For the only time in her life, Payton broke eye contact with Connor Drake first, and swiveled her head to look past the bunch of rose blossoms tied to the end of her pew. Between the time she’d slipped into her seat and now, looking back down the aisle, someone had laid down a carpet of white crepe for the bride to walk along during her approach to the pulpit. At the end of that long carpet stood Payton’s father, beaming proudly, blissfully ignorant of the secret pain his daughter was going through, with Miss Whitby, resplendent in ivory lace, a long veil lowered over her face, on his arm.

Beside Payton, Georgiana tugged on her sleeve. “Stand up,” she leaned down to hiss.

Obediently, Payton climbed to her feet.

Georgiana studied her young sister-in-law’s profile carefully. She was really very worried about Payton. It was clear the girl fancied herself in love with Captain Drake—or Sir Connor, as they were to call him now. It mustn’t be at all pleasant, Georgian a supposed, watching the man you love marry someone else. Georgiana wouldn’t have stood for it, herself. Why, if Ross had taken it into his head to marry someone other than her, she would have lain down in the middle of the church, kicking and screaming, if that’s what it would have taken to stop the ceremony. That Payton was restraining herself from doing so struck Georgiana as admirable in the extreme.

The organist launched into a wedding march. Slowly, Sir Henry Dixon and Miss Whitby began to make their way down the aisle.

Georgiana glanced at Captain Drake, to see how he was bearing up. Really, for a groom about to marry such a lovely young lady, he did not look at all well. Georgiana, of course, hadn’t missed the way he’d stared at Payton, for most of the time she’d been seated there in front of him. Georgiana fancied herself the most practical of women, without much imagination, but she’d caught herself feeling quite certain that there’d been something in Captain Drake’s face, as he’d looked down at her little sister-in-law. Something not unlike … well, longing.

Oh, it was silly, she knew. After all, Captain Drake—oh, bother. Sir Connor—was more than a decade older, and a hundred times more sophisticated than Payton. It was hardly likely that a man like him would fall in love with a girl who, up until a few weeks ago, he’d probably never actually seen in a dress.

Still, there’d been something in his face. It had disappeared the moment Payton looked up. Like a gate crashing down over an entrance, Captain Drake had schooled his features back into stony impassability. But not before Georgiana had seen … and for the first time, she began to suspect that perhaps … just perhaps … some of her sister-in-law’s feelings might be returned.

But it was too late now. Because here came the bride.

And she was lovely, Miss Whitby was, in the gown Georgiana had chosen for her. It was scandalously low-cut in the front for a bridal gown, and Georgiana saw with disapproval that Miss Whitby had not, as Georgiana had suggested, inserted a piece of lace over the place where her décolletage dipped lowest.

Common, Georgiana thought. That’s what Becky Whitby was. Quite common. How she’d ever lured a man like Captain Drake into her bed, Georgiana couldn’t imagine. She supposed she had only herself to blame for that. She should never have allowed the creature into the house. Payton was forever collecting injured animals and birds and nursing them back to health again. Miss Whitby had, at first, seemed like one of those birds, a dove with a broken wing, or some such. Georgiana hadn’t noticed how common she was until it had been too late, and Captain Drake had already announced his plans to marry her.

Poor Payton. She’d never really stood a chance, with a woman like that in the house. Well, it would be a good lesson for her: there were sirens everywhere, not just perched on rocks at sea.

Georgiana sent an anxious glance in her sister-in-law’s direction when Sir Henry presented Captain Drake with Miss Whitby’s hand, then stepped aside, to take his seat beside Lady Bisson in the pew across the aisle from theirs. But Payton didn’t flinch. She didn’t move so much as a muscle. When Captain Drake and his bride turned to face the vicar, Payton sat down calmly with the rest of the congregation, laying her fingers in her lap, not even curled into fists, as one might have expected, with a girl who was so quick to strike out at things … and people. Georgiana could not even detect a tear on Payton’s smooth, tanned cheeks.

She’s weeping, Georgiana thought, on the inside, and felt such pity for her young sister-in-law that she reached out and took the hand closest to her.

Payton did turn her head then, but only in surprise that her sister-in-law had taken her hand. Why, she wondered, is Georgiana being so nice to me? Not that it mattered. She had known, the minute she’d seen the sunlight streaming in through the round stained-glass window above the vicar’s head, setting Miss Whitby’s red hair, beneath her veil, ablaze, exactly what it was she had to do. After all, how did the saying go?

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

Well, it was morning. But it was Miss Whitby herself who had better take warning.

Payton wasn’t afraid. What did she have to fear? She’d already sat through the worst thing she could ever imagine, watching her own father walk her bitterest enemy down the aisle, to deliver her to the arm of the man she had loved for as long as she could remember. What could possibly be worse than that?

A sort of calm descended over her. She listened to the vicar’s monotone as he explained to the gathered assembly that they’d been asked there in order to witness the union of one
Rebecca
Louise Whitby and Sir Connor Arthur Drake. She almost let out a hysterical bark of laughter upon hearing the Arthur. She’d had no idea Drake’s middle name was Arthur, but she supposed she was no one to talk. Her middle name was Fulton.

Beside Payton, something suddenly clutched at Georgiana’s heart. Seeing her sister-in-law’s expression change so dramatically from tense to calculating, she knew good and well exactly what Payton intended. She clenched the hand she held, driving her nails through the kid leather of Payton’s gloves. But Payton only looked at her and smiled. Smiled, with those hazel eyes of hers so clear and cool, they seemed fathoms and fathoms deep. No, Payton, Georgiana thought frantically. No!

When the vicar finally—after what seemed to Payton like hours—inquired of the assembly at large if there was anyone there who had knowledge of any sort of impediment to the match, let him speak now, or forever hold his peace, Payton felt Georgiana’s hand, still resting over hers, convulse. She clutched Payton’s right hand firmly, and shot her a look that was so very forbidding, had Payton been four years old again, she might have been quite frightened.

But Payton was nearly nineteen. So instead of being cowed, she merely lifted her free hand, and waved it at the vicar.

The vicar, who, expecting no interruption of his service at that point—he had doubtlessly married hundreds of couples, and never had a positive response to that particular question before—had glanced down at his prayer book to see what he ought to say next, when he became aware of a startled ripple through the assemblage, and glanced up …

And saw Payton’s hand very firmly in the air. He also saw that the young lady seated beside her was trying very hard to pull that hand down. Well, he’d noticed the two of them whispering together already. He ought to have known they’d be trouble.

“Um,” he said, in a somewhat distressed tone. “Yes, miss?” Payton was aware that not only Drake and Miss Whitby had turned round to look at her, but all three of her brothers were staring daggers at her, as well, Ross most particularly. She didn’t care. She stood up and said, “I believe there is an impediment, sir.”

The vicar swallowed. It was growing quite warm in the church, what with all the sun spilling in through the stained glass. He wasn’t at all certain he was in any fit state to handle this sort of interruption.

Fortunately, it looked as if he wouldn’t have to. One of the groomsmen, the eldest one, suddenly stepped forward, his expression one of abject embarrassment.

“Never mind,” he said to the vicar, as well as the congregation. “Please go on. She just needs a bit of air.”

To the vicar’s astonishment, the man then wrapped a single arm around the girl’s waist, lifted her feet off the floor, and began to carry her bodily from the church. Before he could say a word about it, however, Lady Bisson, the groom’s formidable grandmother, stood up, her expression dark as a thundercloud. Rapping her cane sharply upon the flagstoned floor, she snapped, “Put that girl down at once!”

Ross stumbled, and very nearly dropped his sister altogether. “W-what?” he stammered.

“You heard me.” Lady Bisson was now shooting her poisoned darts in Ross’s direction. “If the girl says there is an impediment, then I for one want to hear what it is.”

Payton elbowed Ross forcefully in the ribs. “See? Put me down, you bloody sod.”

The vicar noticed that a number of fans that had been produced by ladies hoping to combat the heat began to move quite a bit faster at the words “bloody” and “sod.” He cleared his throat.

“Now, see here, young lady,” he said. “Kindly remember that you are in a house of the Lord.”

Payton, whom Ross had deposited, none too gently, back on her feet, adjusted the bodice of her gown and said, “Oh, I do apologize, Vicar. It’s just that my brothers can be such galley rats sometimes.”

“Er, yes.” The vicar thought fleetingly about the roast his cook had been preparing when he’d left home that morning. He hoped this delay wouldn’t cause it to be overcooked. “Now, what was that impediment of which you spoke?”

“Oh,” the young lady said. She was quite an extraordinary-looking little thing, he saw. Slender as a reed, she was quite tanned, with disgracefully short brown curls sticking out of the sides of her bonnet. Across her nose was a layer of—he was almost certain of it—freckles. And while she wasn’t precisely beautiful—the bride, Miss Whitby, was the only woman in the church who could have been called that
—
she was in no way unattractive. In fact, she was quite arresting, with her large, intelligent eyes, and boyish, husky voice.

“The impediment,” the girl went on, “is only that I believe Miss Whitby to be in secret alliance with Sir Marcus Tyler, Dixon and Sons Shipping’s arch rival. I saw them together this morning, in Captain Drake’s hedge maze.”

There was a collective g a sp from the congregation, although few of them, including the vicar, had the slightest idea why such a thing connoted a n impediment to marriage.

And then Miss Whitby astounded everyone further by dropping her bouquet and sinking, in a dead faint, to the stone floor.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something, miss?” asked the innkeeper’s wife. “A glass of wine, perhaps?”

Payton, sitting in quite an unladylike position with her back against one arm of the leather chair and her legs draped over the other, looked past Mrs. Peabody, at the others gathered in the private sitting room.

Ross was still too angry to sit down. He kept pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. Georgiana had collapsed some time ago upon the settle, and except for having laid a handkerchief across her face, had not stirred once in the past half hour. Hudson and Raleigh had taken up positions on either windowsill, and took turns alternately glaring at Payton and sneaking glances through the mottled glass, hoping for a glimpse of the fetching barmaid they’d spied on their way in.

Only Sir Henry, mulling over his musket-ball collection, seemed oblivious to Payton’s status as a social pariah, and occasionally leaned over from the table at which he sat and asked her if she didn’t think the ball attributed to the nefarious pirate Lucien La Fond didn’t look a good deal similar to the one attributed to Blackbeard. He was worried he might have been cheated, a little.

“Miss?”

Payton smiled queasily at the innkeeper’s wife, and shook her head. She couldn’t imagine eating or drinking much of anything while under the malevolent glares she seemed to be engendering. Anything that touched her lips was bound to taste like sand.

“Very well, then.”

Mrs. Peabody took away the tray of sliced meats and cheeses that had sat untouched on the table since noon. If it struck her at all strange that, out of a family of such hearty-looking eaters, not a single one had sampled her best luncheon platter, she didn’t say anything. She recognized a family in turmoil when she saw one. She rather fancied that the young lady was the root of all the trouble. Young ladies often were. Perhaps, Mrs. Peabody thought, the young lady had been caught whilst trying to run away with her lover. A penniless lover, of whom her obviously well-off family did not approve. A romantic at heart, Mrs. Peabody felt quite bad for the Honorable Miss Dixon, who had so many alarmingly large brothers, and a father who didn’t appear to have the firmest grasp on sanity. She decided that if the young man came in the night, and tried to rescue the young lady from all those brothers, she’d do what she could to help.

Mrs. Peabody, however, like so many people that day, was bound to be disappointed. Because the young man—who was not as young as Mrs. Peabody might have imagined—was not going to come, and he was most certainly not going to try to rescue the young lady. He was by now a good many miles out to sea, and he was in the company of a much prettier young lady who, at the end of their journey, would be his wife in deed, if she was not already so in name.