Oh God, he thought, you sound as if you’re making a speech in the House of Lords! For God’s sake, Edmund, there’s a beautiful young woman looking up at you, waiting for you to propose to her – try to sound like a man and not a stuffed shirt!
He cleared his throat.
‘What I mean to say,’ he continued, ‘is that in the time that we’ve spent getting to know each other, I’ve come to appreciate you more than I can say. You are a truly lovely, sweet girl who would adorn any position into which she was placed—’
Position! Why on earth do I keep saying that?
But mercifully, as he seemed to be irredeemably tangled up in unnecessarily pompous verbiage, understanding was dawning on Brianna Jade’s face.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘I get it now.’ She shook back her cascades of hair. ‘Take your time,’ she added reassuringly. ‘It’s not like we’re in any rush. And I want this to be special.’
This helped considerably. I really am hugely lucky, Edmund thought. When Lady Margaret McArdle told me about the most beautiful American heiress London had seen for donkey’s years, what were the odds that she’d also turn out to have a lovely temperament and a sensible head on her shoulders?
‘Brianna Jade,’ he found himself saying very simply, ‘I honestly don’t even feel I deserve to ask you to marry me. And I want very much for us to be able to be honest with each other, which is why I’m not going to tell you that I’m madly in love with you, and I certainly don’t expect you to tell me the same – not right now, anyway. We’re both aware that in some aspects this is an arrangement. I’m very happy about it, and I do hope you are too.’
It was formal, he knew, and it was not the romantic declaration that a young twenty-four-year-old woman might want to hear. But it was the truth, and he had resolved beforehand that she – and he – deserved nothing less. It was common knowledge in his circle that Prince Oliver, heir to the throne, had proposed to Lady Belinda Lindsey-Crofter under entirely false pretences, basically tricking a young woman who was genuinely in love with him into thinking that her sentiments were fully returned, that it was a love match; when the truth had eventually dawned on Belinda, she was trapped, not only married but pregnant with the heir to the throne. The general view among the upper classes was that Oliver had behaved very badly by deceiving her. After all, many aristocratic young women would have been more than happy with the bargain he had to offer, a complaisant husband and a royal crown awaiting them.
But that was not how Edmund intended to treat Brianna Jade. No deception, no trickery. They were both going into this with their eyes open.
Hers were indeed wide as he gazed down at her, but not with surprise or indignation. She was listening intently to every word he said, hands clasped in front of her, lips slightly parted to show her extraordinarily perfect American teeth, a string of pearls behind her velvety pink lips.
‘I honestly think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,’ Edmund said. ‘But you’re also very quick, and curious, and spirited, and funny, and I truly enjoy spending time with you. Goodness knows if you feel the same about me—’ he grinned self-deprecatingly – ‘I know I can’t possibly be the most handsome man you’ve ever met! But I do have all this to offer you.’
He gestured around him, encompassing not just the gazebo and the illegally looted Greek statuary but the entire sweep of Stanclere Hall.
‘You would make a wonderful mistress of the Hall,’ he said. ‘And of course, a wonderful Countess of Respers. But you’ve got to decide if this really is what you want.’
Her smooth tanned forehead crinkled into the faintest of lines as she looked up at him: clearly, she was baffled by this suggestion. Of course I want it! her expression said. I’m standing here waiting for you to propose, aren’t I?
‘I know this is what the Fra— your mother wants for you,’ he clarified. ‘But I do think it’s crucial that you’re free to make your own decision. Your mother can be very – um, err . . . your mother has a wonderfully vibrant and decisive personality, and of course she only wants the best for you—’
Brianna Jade wasn’t frowning any more; in fact her lips had parted further into a lovely smile, her teeth flashing in a ray of late afternoon sun.
‘You can call Mom bossy if you want,’ she said cheerfully. ‘She is! But she loves me way too much to push me into something that would make me unhappy.’
It wasn’t exactly a passionate declaration of love, but neither was his, and it certainly told Edmund that Thunderbirds were Go. He sank to one knee, simultaneously bringing his right arm round in front of him, so that it ended up just above his eye level. Should he have opened the box first? Probably, but then the ring might have fallen out. He really should have rehearsed this; but then, he’d wanted to be authentic, honest, not over-polished. Luckily, regular winter skiing meant that he had decent enough balance to stay on one knee without wobbling while he held up the box with his right hand and opened it with his left.
‘Wow,’ Brianna Jade breathed out on seeing the ring, a long, slow exhalation of sheer delight.
‘Brianna Jade,’ Edmund said, ‘will you do me the very great honour of becoming my wife?’
‘I will!’ she said, her eyes sparkling now as brightly as the enormous pink diamond. ‘I definitely will!’
Should he stand up first? No, she was already holding out her left hand, each finger tipped with pale pink nails whose own tips each had a white crescent painted onto them, so perfectly executed that they were like miniature works of art. She had slightly separated the third finger from the others to make it easy for him; in a moment, he had detached the ring from its velvet slot and slid it onto its allotted place. He came to his feet as she turned her hand from side to side in the approved brand-new-fiancée fashion, marvelling at its lavishness.
‘You carry that off wonderfully,’ he said with complete sincerity. ‘It looks superb on you.’
She beamed up at him and raised her arms to wrap around his neck, the ring flashing streaks of colour across the stone pillar next to them; he encircled her waist and bent to kiss her for the first time. His cock stiffened almost immediately. She felt delicious in his arms, her body taut and toned from the runs she took every morning, but her breasts were soft against him, pressing seductively against his chest, her lips equally soft and pillowy beneath his, parting to let his tongue slip in, kissing him back with not a shred of false modesty. His hands tightened around her slim waist, pulling her closer, and she tilted her head up more and slid her hands down his back.
Her breath was fresh and pepperminty; she must have not only brushed her teeth before this crucial encounter, as he had done, but surreptitiously sucked on some sort of mint as well. Neither she nor her mother did anything as vulgar as chew gum, thank goodness. His cock was fully hard now, pressing against her lower body, and he was both mortified – they had barely got engaged and here he was, acting like a rampant bull! – and relieved that the attraction was fully there, that he had committed himself to a woman to whom it would be a positive pleasure to remain faithful. He shifted back fractionally, but she followed him with a lean of her body so his cock was still sandwiched between them, showing him that she, too, was relishing the proof of his instant reaction to her. When he eventually raised his head, they were both breathing fast, pink-cheeked, and smiling rather goofily at each other. Edmund dropped a kiss on her forehead and took a step back, clearing his throat.
‘Well,’ he said idiotically, ‘um, that was very nice indeed.’
Brianna Jade burst out laughing.
‘You’re not kidding!’ she said. ‘Wow, what a relief! I mean, I think you’re really cute. Mom promised me she’d googled you and you were a hottie before she set us up to meet – but you know, you don’t know until you know, if you see what I mean.’
‘I do see what you mean,’ Edmund said, grinning and telling his erection firmly to go down. ‘Firmly’ perhaps wasn’t the right way for him to think of that, dammit . . .
‘She loves you very much,’ Edmund observed.
‘Yeah, but don’t worry. She’s going to be fine letting me go,’ his fiancée said with that quick perceptiveness of hers, combined with her American frankness: he was deeply grateful for both qualities. ‘Mom’s had to look after me since she was just a kid herself, you know? She’s due a whole lot of “me” time, and now she’s gonna take it. She won’t be hovering around here, checking that you’re treating me okay, or any shit like that.’
‘Don’t mince your words on my account,’ Edmund said, laughing. ‘Do feel free to express yourself.’
‘Oh yeah, British humour, I get it,’ Brianna Jade beamed. ‘You say the opposite of what you mean. Anyway, Mom isn’t going to be a hover mother. She said last night she’d been running my life for way too long and she just wants to see me happy and settled. And she wouldn’t want to move in here or anything. Mom loves London. She wants to buy the house we’re renting there.’
Edmund briefly tried to compute what Tamra’s Chelsea mansion might cost on the open market. It came complete with a ballroom whose floor slid back to reveal a swimming pool, a climate-controlled wine cellar, billiard room, climate-controlled cigar storage room, cinema, a fully equipped gym and four underground parking spaces accessed through a private tunnel . . . He shook his head in disbelief at how much money there obviously was in fracking. It certainly made spending forty thousand pounds on Brianna Jade’s ring look like a mere bagatelle. Tamra had wanted to spend six figures, but Edmund had told her that countesses did not wear engagement rings that looked as if they belonged to pop stars, and she had reluctantly yielded.
He was looking at the ring as they strolled arm in arm out of the gazebo, and his fiancée followed suit.
‘I didn’t—’ he started, wanting to be honest about everything, but again, she knew what he was thinking.
‘I know Mom picked it out and bought it,’ she said simply. ‘That’s totally cool. Men aren’t as good at this kind of thing, and Mom knows just what I like.’
‘I wanted you to have an heirloom,’ he said. ‘We do have some fairly decent family jewels. I was thinking about getting my mother’s engagement ring reset.’
‘Aww, that would have been lovely!’ Brianna Jade said sympathetically. ‘Let me guess – Mom nixed that idea?’
Edmund nodded, amused.
‘Hah! I know – it wasn’t big enough for her, I bet,’ Brianna Jade said, grinning. ‘Look, I get how things work here. People don’t buy stuff, ’cause their families have loads of antiques and they pass them on. But there’s no way Mom could give up the idea of me having a big shiny ring.’
She squeezed his arm empathetically.
‘I’m sorry. I hope you’re not offended. I’d love to wear your mom’s ring, if you’d like. Would that be okay? It would mean a lot to me. And I’m sorry you’re an orphan, too. I can’t imagine what I’d do without Mom in my life. I know you don’t like to talk about it much – the whole British stiff upper lip thing – but I’m here if you ever want to.’
Her sincerity was so evident that Edmund, very touched, stopped for a moment, reached for her other hand and pressed a kiss onto it.
‘I truly am so lucky to have met you,’ he said with equal sincerity. ‘And I would be honoured for you to wear my mother’s ring. I’ll make sure to pull it out of the safe as soon as we get back to the Hall, and if it needs resizing we can easily organize that.’
‘That’s lovely,’ Brianna Jade said happily. ‘I’d really like that. Thank you.’
They fell into an easy, companionable silence as they rounded the overgrown shrubbery and started up the path that led back to Stanclere Hall. Edmund, who had been mulling something over, decided that he and Brianna Jade seemed able to talk about things so comfortably that he should raise a nagging concern he had about how their marriage would work.
‘I’m wondering though – you must have thought this through already, but you know that I’m basically a farmer, don’t you?’ he started. ‘I spend most of the year here, at the Hall. Not, you know, jetting off to Venice for the weekend or anything like that. I’m very fond of London, and I go to the races, of course, but really, my place is here. And we’re in Rutland, not Sussex – you can’t just pop up to London for a day.’
‘Well, you can if you hire a helicopter,’ his fiancée suggested.
‘Yes! Yes, I suppose so.’ It was an entirely new concept for Edmund. ‘Frankly, I’m surprised the Fr— your mother hasn’t done that already, instead of driving from London.’
‘She loves the countryside here,’ her daughter explained. ‘She’s really into looking at it. We get the chauffeur to take the back roads to see little villages and stuff like that.’
‘I had no idea . . .’
‘But Edmund—’ It was the first time that Brianna Jade had said his name as his fiancée, and it made her feel happily cosy and intimate. ‘You don’t need to worry about me being bored here. I love the countryside even more than Mom does. I like London, but I’m not a city girl. Cities are crowded and dirty, and after a few days’ shopping I want to get out and breathe some fresh air. Remember, I grew up in pig and corn country. I’d’ve been a farmer’s wife back home, probably.’ She sighed in nostalgia.
‘Do you miss Illinois?’ Edmund asked understandingly. ‘I’d miss Rutland more than I can say if I had to leave.’
‘I do,’ she said frankly. ‘Feeding the pigs and chickens, running round finding where they’d laid their eggs . . . I really loved it. But it’s way prettier in England! Where I come from, it’s wide-open country, but here all the little fields are so green, with the hedges and the trees . . . I’m going to love seeing the seasons change, I know.’
‘And we have pigs and chickens here too,’ Edmund teased her. ‘Plenty of both. You’re welcome to help with either any time you like.’
‘I might just do that,’ she said. ‘Seriously, no kidding. I’d really like it. That would make me feel more at home than almost anything.’
‘Well!’ He grinned. ‘I see I didn’t have to worry about you minding the prospect of being a farmer’s wife. We should probably have talked about all this before – actually, we should definitely have talked about this before. I suppose I took a lot for granted. But things were moving so fast . . .’
‘That’s Mom,’ his fiancée said reassuringly. ‘It’s not your fault. She kind of only has one setting, and it’s hyperspeed.’
She squeezed his arm again. ‘Don’t worry – I haven’t inherited that from her. I’m much more laid-back. I’m not going to shoot round Stanclere Hall on hyperspeed, driving everyone crazy.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t drive everyone crazy,’ Edmund demurred politely, but he couldn’t help but be grateful for Brianna Jade’s promise that his married life would be what she called ‘laid- back’ and he would describe as restful.
They had fallen into a pleasantly even pace, their steps nicely synchronized, as they crested a rise in the gravel path and Stanclere Hall appeared before them. The view of the house was partly obscured by overgrowth and trees that needed pollarding, another of Capability Brown’s vistas which required regular maintenance for full, stunning effect. Still, the Hall, its soft golden stone glowing at sunset, its two wings stretching out nobly from the central edifice with its double flight of steps leading up to the massive front door, was still a sight so beautiful that, despite its familiarity, Edmund caught his breath.
‘You really love it,’ Brianna Jade said, a comment, not a question. The breeze caught the pleated skirt of her dress, lifting the chiffon slightly; she lowered one hand to hold the folds down, her other still linked through Edmund’s as they strolled down the path to the Hall, lush green swards spreading out on either side. Like the rest of the gardens, the grass needed
urgent attention; the croquet lawn was pocked with mole holes and had gone to seed years ago. But from a distance it was serene, verdant, the perfect setting for a perfect English stately home.
‘I do,’ Edmund said, his voice quiet as he let his breath out. ‘But I’m not a monomaniac.’
‘Uh—’
‘I’m not someone who’s mad about only one thing,’ he elaborated quickly for her benefit. ‘I really do hope that you and I will come to love each other too, Brianna Jade.’
‘Oh, go ahead and drop the Jade!’ she said easily. ‘It’s way too long for everyday use. Brianna or Bri is just fine.’
‘Phew,’ he said, grinning at her. ‘It is a bit of a mouthful.’
‘Edmund—’ She felt the same frisson using his name as before, which was really nice – ‘talking about names, now that we’re engaged, do I get a title? I was wondering. Do I get to be a Lady? Or an Honourable, like Minty?’
This is why it’s such a good thing that we were honest and direct with each other, Edmund told himself. We haven’t pretended that part of her appeal for me isn’t her money, nor that mine for her isn’t my title. So no one needs to be embarrassed by this at all. Not in the least.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said with regret. ‘You have to be born into the peerage to have a title like that. On our marriage, you become the Countess of Respers, and people will call you Lady Respers. Except, I think, on legal documents, where you’re the Right Honourable Brianna Jade, Countess of Respers. But the lawyers deal with all that sort of thing, so you don’t need to worry about it.’
‘Oh! I don’t get to be Lady Brianna Jade?’ she asked naïvely. ‘I was sort of hoping I would.’
‘Sorry,’ Edmund said, charmed despite himself at her lack of pretence. ‘It isn’t in my power to give you that. Not even King Stephen could. You have to be born into the peerage, you see.’
‘Ooh! So our kids—’
‘If we have a son, he’ll be Lord and then his name,’ Edmund informed her. ‘Younger son’s are Honourables. And daughters are Lady, and then their name.’
Bad Brides Page 3