One Final Season (3 page)

This spring, he’d assured himself as he travelled from his very substantial estates in Herefordshire to his impressive house in Grosvenor Square, he’d look about him for a quiet and biddable female to become his viscountess. Marrying the too-clever, tricky and far-from-biddable beauty his heart had once been set on so uselessly would have been a disaster on both sides. He’d told himself blithely that he was grateful to her for saving them both from such a fate and he should thank her on his knees for refusing him again and again.

It had seemed such a sensible plan when he was still at Cravenhill Park, where Miss Alstone had refused an invitation to stay for the summer and get to know him better with a sweet, distracted smile and a brief assurance that they were too young and probably wouldn’t suit anyway.

How would she know? he silently quizzed himself as he struggled with a strong urge to shake the slender, curvaceous, infinitely desirable and utterly contrary female until her perfect white teeth rattled even now, when both of them were three years older and supposedly wiser.

He shifted uncomfortably to avoid making yet closer contact with her and inflaming himself even further and caught surprise in her blue, blue eyes as she turned to look up at him questioningly. Turning the movement into a demand that she spin fluidly past a less sure couple, he fought a whole pack of demons at the feel of her body so close to his, moving so gracefully to the steps of the dance and reminding him, as if he needed reminding, exactly who he held in his arms at last, warm and desirable and all too real.

No, he ordered himself as his body responded instinctively to hers and he fought the magic fiercely, he was done with self-inflicted torture. He’d wrung Kate Alstone from his thoughts and routed her from his heart and never again would he spend restless nights tossing and turning as he was driven distracted by a bitter yearning for her in his bed, at his board and for ever by his side. Knowing, for the simple reason of having tried it in the throes of youthful desperation, that making love with a
demi-mondaine
he’d fooled himself looked just like her would never satisfy his ridiculous fantasies of Kate, warm and shameless in his bed, with every inch of her velvety skin and stubborn will in tune with his desires at last, he utterly refused to become the besotted, driven idiot she’d once made of him ever again.

Once he’d let himself see the gaping chasm between heated dream and chilly reality, he’d contented himself with his estates and the odd trip to Bath to see his elderly aunt, until the blessed day when he had finally got himself under strict enough control to be indifferent to Kate Alstone. By some benign fluke, it was in that elegant and usually middle-aged spa town that he’d met Therese, a lush and lovely widow ten years his senior, who took him to her bed and taught him there were other women in the world besides Kate, however little his heart wanted to admit it at the time. Then, after what he’d thought was a mutually satisfying association, Therese decided to marry again. So she’d wed a man ten years
her
senior after declaring herself quite ineligible as the next Viscountess Shuttleworth when he offered to make her so.

‘You are too young, my love, too idealistic and intense to be happy in such a lukewarm arrangement,’ she’d told him that last time they were together. ‘We have been happy, but it’s time for us to part. I shall wed my colonel and make him an excellent wife, but I’m not the woman you dream of when you cry out her name in your sleep. Either convince that one to marry you, dearest Edmund, or tear her out of your heart before you wed some poor girl who’ll be for ever second-best.’

He’d protested, of course. Assured her that if she married him she and the family they could make together would always come first. But Therese had chided him for offering what he couldn’t deliver and he’d hesitated too long before she gave him a sad smile and left to plan her wedding to her still handsome and rather rich colonel and to settle three counties away, which was probably just as well for all three of them. Therese was a fine woman with a quick wit and a kind heart and she now had a settled life with a man who adored her. Edmund liked and admired her, but he didn’t adore her. Though nor, he told himself sternly, did he adore the redheaded beauty who’d once driven him half-mad with headlong, youthful love and longing for her.

So this year he’d quit Cravenhill for London, determined to find himself a wife who wouldn’t drive him to the brink of insanity every time she smiled at another man. With her he would retire to his acres, where they’d live a life of quiet contentment and usefulness, spiced by an occasional visit to the capital to catch up with old friends. Such a pity that it all sounded so deadly dull just now.

No, it wasn’t dull, it was sensible. He wanted to be at peace in his own skin and he wanted children, not just to inherit his title and lands, but because he’d been a lone, noble and therefore very privileged orphan ever since he learnt to walk. And he wanted sanity and routine and a sense of rightness about his life, not insanity, uncertainty and a mess of passion, frustration and exasperation that Kate Alstone would offer her long-suffering husband, when she finally condescended to admit one to her bed, if not her heart.

Easy enough to weigh his hopeless passion for Kate against that yet-to-be-born tribe of children and the faceless, sweet and loving Lady Shuttleworth, who would give them to him and love every single one as much as she adored him, and be quite certain he was cured. Now none of it was quite so clear-cut and he felt thoroughly out of sorts and nearly as deeply exasperated with Kate as he was with himself.

Curse the contrary female for looking at him tonight as if she liked the man he’d become far more than the foolish boy he’d once been. Trust her to reawaken the slumberous, wanton siren he’d once made of her in his obsessed, Kate-tortured dreams and remind him how lifeless his sweet wife sounded by the side of the rich and passionate promise Kate could offer a potential husband. If, of course, the lucky devil succeeded in awakening the sensuality she managed to hide so well from herself. For he doubted she had any idea with what heady promise her delightfully curved lips and very pleasing form tantalised an idiot like him.

‘She—is—not—what—she—seems,’ he intoned under his breath, enduring the feel of her delightfully formed body brushing his tension-tightened muscles as he shifted her for the final turn and prayed for a rapid end to this torture.
She is everything she seems and more
, the faint waft of her rose-perfumed skin in his oversensitive nostrils taunted him back, the soft shift of woman-warmed silk tantalising his guiding fingers even through his supple evening gloves, as if every sense he had was uniquely attuned just to her. But she’s not for you; she’s not part of your domestic idyll. She doesn’t
want
to love you, the argument began again in his head and he was relieved when the music finally wound down and he could let his hand drop with what might seem unflattering haste to someone who couldn’t read his mind.

Three years on he was more mature, cynical and tried and tested by life than he had once been, but she was three years lovelier, three years away from the eighteen-year-old débutante she’d been then. Then she’d been a girl close to being unformed compared with the gorgeous creature she was now, all rich curves and slender, elegant limbs that carried the usual Alstone height with a panache all her own. He forced himself to remember she was also haughty and cold as he finally made himself step away from the unattainable siren she really was.

What she really was just now, he observed rather ruefully, was an offended goddess who considered herself slighted by some mere mortal who’d dared turn his back on her extraordinary beauty. He caught the hint of suppressed fury in her indigo gaze, the tightening of her lush lips into a line and then a brief pout that warned him his danger wasn’t over, as if he didn’t already know it from his dratted body’s reaction to her proximity. He so desperately wanted to kiss those rosy, lushly discontented lips of hers that he had to clear away an imaginary frog from his throat to manufacture an excuse not to offer her his crooked elbow for a precious moment of respite from her touch.

It was either that or stalk off and abandon her to the giggles of the avidly watching gossips and seek less incendiary company. Even to avenge himself for all those broken nights and wasted days, he couldn’t do it to her. She still had no idea what she did to a man, he decided. High time she wed some unfortunate idiot, who could then spend his time rescuing her from her own folly and leave Edmund to find his sweet, nebulous viscountess and an easier life. The sooner the better, he assured himself and finally decided he was cool enough to offer Miss Alstone that arm and escort her into the supper room after all.

What a fool he’d been to be so full of misplaced confidence she meant nothing to him any more that he’d written his initials on the supper dance to prove he was cured. Evidently something about her called to him on a deeper level than he’d realised, but there was still time left this Season to effect a complete cure. Legions of débutantes would soon arrive and might even be lovely and amenable enough to put Kate Alstone out of his head entirely. He frowned as an inner voice informed him that rumours of such a fabulous paragon would have reached him by now, if such a creature existed outside the covers of a highly coloured novel.

Such an impossibly ideal girl would cause riots if she so much as set foot in the capital, but instinct informed him lugubriously that he’d still prefer the woman at his side to such an exquisite creature. No, he told himself doggedly, he’d choose his kind, pleasingly pretty and so far purely mythical wife, and just managed not to pull his arm away before Kate could settle her hand gingerly into the crook of his elbow, as if he might bite her if she didn’t keep a strict eye on him.

Suddenly Edmund’s sense of the ridiculous reawakened and he made up his mind to distract himself with the heady task of confusing the lovely Miss Alstone, whilst searching for his true quarry. It would do the redhaired witch good, he assured the doubter within. He wouldn’t be cruel, heaven forbid, but someone should make her realise she existed in the same world as the rest of faulty humanity, not on a higher plane where everything was ordered to her convenience.

Chapter Three

‘H
ow is everyone at Wychwood, Miss Alstone?’ he asked in a tone even he knew was insufferably indifferent to her answer, although he liked the Earl of Carnwood and his spectacularly lovely wife. Now he came to think of it, if Miss Kate Alstone resembled her fiery sister as strongly in character as she did in outward beauty, he couldn’t walk away from her to wed a less unique woman. Thank you for not being made in your elder sister’s extraordinary image, he silently praised the beauty at his side, but even he wasn’t yet a bitter enough man to say it out loud.

‘All very well,’ she replied stiffly, as if she could read his thoughts, and he made himself look into her intriguing indigo eyes to make sure he was mistaken.

No, he informed himself sternly, he refused to cave at the hint of wistfulness in her gaze, the faint droop of discontent and perhaps a hint of longing in the curve of her rosy-lipped mouth. It was an illusion, he reminded himself. She might look as if she longed for a tithe of her sister’s passionate and mutually loving marriage for herself, but she didn’t have the least intention of following Miranda Alstone’s stormy path through life. After enduring her chilly lack of attention for a whole Season, he’d concluded Kate had no heart to lose. Trust her to decide to feel piqued that she’d finally lost his adoration tonight, just when he was starting his hunt for a very different female.

‘My sister is expecting to present Lord Carnwood with another pledge of her affection very shortly,’ she added to her terse assessment, again with that hint of wistful longing in her voice he wished she’d learn to conceal a little better.

To anyone else he supposed it might seem a tone of rueful irony, a discreet nod towards the fact that her sister and brother-in-law were deeply in love and therefore made insufferable company for a rational human being. Too many months spent learning her moods and interests from avid observation, he thought crossly. What an irony if she so longed to carry brats of her own that she was prepared to take him as her husband after all, just when he’d realised he couldn’t tolerate such a marriage to a wife he’d once longed to adore until his dying day. Compassion threatened as he wondered why she thought it safe to love her children and not her husband, who could be her equal and her passion. No, Carnwood and his countess were unique and he was done with dreams; Kate was not the wife for him.

‘Ah, well,’ he replied carelessly, ‘your brother-in-law is sadly in need of an heir.’

‘Kit will feel the need for whomever my sister presents him with, my lord. Not even the most cynical and uncaring spectator could deny that.’

Now he’d really offended her, just as he’d intended to. What a shame, then, that the fleeting vulnerability of hurt he glimpsed in her eyes, the not-quite-hidden wince as he pretended indifference to two people he liked and envied, pained him as well. Better this way, he reminded himself and smiled encouragingly at a certain Miss Transome he’d been introduced to earlier and her hovering swain. With any luck, they would join them at supper and break up any suggestion of a tête-à-tête between himself and the beauty at his side before too many people recalled that he’d once been mad, deluded and desperate for her.

‘La, my dear Miss Alstone,’ Miss Transome spouted so fulsomely so that Edmund almost regretted encouraging her, even to save himself an intimate supper with a woman he couldn’t have and didn’t want. ‘How finely you two do dance together. It quite put us off our own feeble attempts, did it not, Mr Cromer?’

‘Yes, quite,’ poor Cromer replied as if his throat was parched after all the monosyllabic replies he’d made this evening to his voluble companion. ‘Get supper for the ladies, eh, Shuttleworth?’ he managed in a magnificent feat of oratory.

‘Quite,’ he replied, apeing his old school friend’s sparse conversational style and they resorted to the groaning supper table to procure enough refreshments to silence even Miss Transome for a few idyllic moments.

Edmund decided both he and his taciturn friend had been rash to attend a party so obviously organised for the benefit of single ladies who’d survived too many Seasons unwed, before fresh débutantes arrived to outdo and outflank them. It was perhaps the last chance for such ladies to catch the eye of a potential husband before open season was declared on them. One glance at their hostess for the evening and her superannuated eldest daughter should have any sane bachelor saying a hasty farewell and dashing off to his club in order to survive and fight another day. He, of course, had a reason to attend any party where he might meet his elusive future viscountess, but what on earth had led Cromer to risk it?

‘She’s m’aunt,’ Cromer explained obscurely and Edmund must have looked almost as puzzled as he felt, because his friend added a brief explanation. ‘Lady Finchley, she’s m’aunt.’

‘That accounts for it then,’ he conceded.

‘Your excuse?’ Cromer asked morosely.

‘Idiocy,’ Edmund replied, borrowing some of his friend’s abruptness.

‘Must be,’ Cromer commiserated as they turned back with their booty. ‘Though the Alstone icicle’s a beauty,’ he conceded generously.

‘Aye, but is she worth enduring the frostbite for, I wonder?’ Edmund asked in a thoughtful undertone as he watched her nod regally to an acquaintance.

‘M’father wants me to wed. Always liked Amelia Transome, but the thing is that she
will
talk. Much better tempered than my cousin Finchley, though,’ Cromer risked waxing lyrical.

Scanning the room and finally spotting Miss Finchley seated at a flimsy table with a widower of at least five and forty, who still looked hunted and not very willing, Edmund sympathised. Miss Transome was open and amiable, but the thought of being fluttered at over the breakfast table for the rest of his life must make the strongest man hesitate. Neither female bore the slightest resemblance to his dream wife, so he turned his attention back to Kate Alstone with a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t stand in Cromer’s shoes and could at least please himself whom he brought to supper, so long as she wasn’t the woman who pleased him all the way to the altar.

‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ Miss Transome gushed at the loaded plates.

‘Quite,’ Kate said with much less enthusiasm, and Edmund wondered if she’d been talked into a headache by Miss Transome’s busy tongue and dreaded carrying the burden of conversation with her on his own.

Kate nibbled unenthusiastically at her supper, despite poor Lady Finchley having pushed out every boat she could launch in the hope of netting her daughter a husband at long last by hiring an excellent chef. To be fair, the headache she felt tightening her hairpins and nagging at her temples had nothing to do with Miss Transome’s prattle, so the blame for that must lie at Lord Shuttleworth’s door. Wretched man, she decided, as she surreptitiously surveyed him with a disillusioned gaze. Once upon a time he would have fallen at her daintily shod feet given the slightest hint of encouragement, but now that she’d finally steeled herself to accept a husband, he certainly wouldn’t be one of her suitors.

She hoped she was too proud to wilfully mistake his indifference to her tonight for a fleeting headache or a black mood on
his
part. There was too much distance about him to lay his behaviour at such a random and socially convenient cause and gaily expect tomorrow to bring amendment. He no longer desired her, now she finally wanted to become a wife and mother, and it was the frustration of it all that had caused her headache. It wasn’t as if she cared for him, other than as she might for any man she’d once known and come to value for his integrity and the dry sense of humour that had once lurked under his youthful enthusiasm.

Now it was gone, she decided guiltily that she’d always secretly revelled in Edmund’s apparent obsession with her and the certainty that he’d always long for her, even if he couldn’t have her. Had it been a guilty pleasure she knew she ought not to feel to know one person on this earth probably still thought of her as uniquely desirable? She really hoped not, since that would make her a tease or a shrew, then and now. And he certainly didn’t want her now, so why did it feel as if someone had taken away the most promising treat she’d ever pretended she didn’t really want in the first place?

So all in all it was little wonder that she was nursing the beginnings of a fine headache and an inexcusable grievance against Edmund Worth, just because he no longer felt inclined to make a fool of himself over the Honourable Katherine Alstone. Now that there was no chance of him offering for her ever again, she supposed she could acknowledge in her own head that it would have been wrong to accept him anyway, when he so obviously wanted to love his wife and she certainly didn’t want to love her husband. However, she wondered uneasily if she would have found it so wrong to accept him on such terms if he hadn’t made it so very clear they were no longer on offer.

Kate surreptitiously scanned the room under cover of Miss Transome’s interminable prattle for any likely bachelors, now the most promising one of all was struck off her list. Not one of those present made the idea of sharing the intimacy required to bring her children into the world seem anything other than a nightmare. There would be other balls and routs, of course; ones where the gentlemen were both more plentiful and a little more willing to be charmed, although the other ladies would also be both more sparkling and more innocent, if also more tongue-tied.

Most eligible gentlemen had spurned Lady Finchley’s rout for their clubs, which severely limited her choices. Sensible gentlemen, she decided, as she noted her fellow quizzes dotted about the supper room, trying their best to be all the things their desperate mamas bade them be. Miss Transome was projecting vivacity with such determination Kate wondered if she might sprout wings and fly up to the ceiling and circle about them all, still twittering frantically as she did so. Nearby, Miss Wetherby had cornered the market in pale and interesting and was reclining gracefully on a fragile chair that looked to be her only support in a failing world. And just what was Miss Alstone doing? Wilting too, Kate decided crossly; she was drooping like a wallflower and refusing to even try to be civil to those about her, just because she’d been disappointed in hope, if not in love.

‘Do you attend Mrs Flamington’s ridotto, sir?’ Miss Transome asked Mr Cromer with apparently artless curiosity, and Kate could have told her just from reading Mr Cromer’s hunted expression that it was unlikely.

‘No,’ he managed reluctantly, before courting even more silence by popping a bite of lobster patty into his mouth and consuming it very slowly as if to stop his reckless tongue committing him to something the rest of him didn’t agree with. ‘Are
you
planning to be there, Lord Shuttleworth?’ the lady asked earnestly.

Yes, how about you? Kate asked him with silent malice as she watched him swallow his chicken puff with gallant determination and even manage not to cough while he did so. Seeming to read her very thoughts, he cast her a repressive look and Miss Transome a warm smile that probably gave her far more encouragement than he ever dreamt it would, if the flush of sudden colour in her cheeks and the pleased sparkle in her eyes was anything to go by.

Kate sympathised with the foolishly romantic nature concealed under all the fluff and froth, even as she had to fight a primitive urge to ruthlessly crush any hopes of capturing Shuttleworth’s interest that might be stirring in Miss Transome’s receptive breast. He wasn’t hers to be possessive about, and had made that abundantly clear tonight. If he wanted to land himself with a wife who’d foolishly long for his love and affection for the rest of their days together, then that was his problem. Except that some annoying part of her argued it was hers as well, however hard Kate tried to ignore it.

‘I fear I’m otherwise engaged that day,’ he said with apparent regret.

‘Yes,’ Kate said with a hint of malice, ‘Lady Tedinton has a waltzing party, has she not?’

When she’d heard rumours that a lady with a Frenchified name, who might or might not be Selene, Lady Tedinton, had shared a lot more than a mere friendship with young Lord Shuttleworth while they were both in Bath one spring, Kate had dismissed them as mere gossip, even if the thought of him sharing that exotically beautiful lady’s bed had pained her with surprising sharpness while she did so. An honourable young gentleman like Shuttleworth wouldn’t cuckold a man of Tedinton’s venerable years and genial temper, she’d assured herself, even if her ladyship was twenty or thirty years younger than her lord and reported to hold to a conveniently elastic interpretation of her marriage vows. Since neither had confirmed or denied the rumour, it had flourished on and off and Lady Tedinton was even said to preen to her friends for having fascinated such a potent young lord.

Now Kate was nowhere near so certain Edmund would refuse the invitation in the lovely Lady Tedinton’s somnolently knowing sloe eyes and could see how his leanly handsome face and fine form would appeal to a jaded wife of her ladyship’s sybaritic nature. In that lady’s position, with a much older husband preoccupied with affairs of state and his estates, as well as his children from his first marriage, would she be tempted to dally with a vigorous young gentleman who’d be sure to make her a passionate and considerate lover? She hoped not, but eyeing Viscount Shuttleworth surreptitiously now, Kate knew she’d find him nigh irresistible if she stood in Lady Tedinton’s expensive Parisian shoes, even if she wouldn’t much like the fit of them.

Anyway, it certainly wasn’t jealousy that pricked at her as Edmund explained himself to Miss Transome far more warmly than he’d spoken to her all evening. It was merely pique that one who had once seemed to adore her had returned to town looking as if he couldn’t imagine what madness had come over him to have ever thought her the centre of his universe.

‘I am engaged on business that day, Miss Transome, but most of my acquaintance seem set on going to the ridotto, so you certainly won’t lack for companionship if you intend to go yourself.’