First Season / Bride to Be

by Jane Ashford

  Susan giggled. “Daisy likes you too,” she answered.

  “Does he? I am deeply honored.”

  “This is wonderful,” put in William. “Everything is coming out splendidly just after it seemed that nothing was right.”

  Anabel sat back, listening to the happy chatter and watching Christopher talk with the children. William was right. She had never felt happier in her life.

  When dinner was over and the children had been taken upstairs to bed, Lady Goring and Georgina left the engaged couple alone in the drawing room. They settled on the sofa and let out identical sighs of contentment.

  “I’m glad that is over,” she said.

  “Did you really doubt their approval?”

  “No, I suppose not. But…”

  “But you weren’t certain they had ever considered me in that light,” he finished teasingly.

  “Christopher! How can you remind me of my idiocy? I was stupidly blind for so long. It makes me blush with shame.”

  “Ah, but I mean to extract full payment.”

  She smiled. “What sort of payment?”

  Instead of answering, he bent and kissed her, slowly and gently at first, then more passionately. Anabel felt again that thrill of response through her whole body. She put her arms around his neck and gave herself totally to the embrace.

  It was some time before she could speak again, and when she did, she was breathless. “That is the sort of debt I shall never wish to pay off,” she murmured.

  Christopher’s blue eyes shone as he gave the only conceivable answer to this, pulling her close once again.

  Bride to Be

  One

  Emily Crane walked briskly along the path that rambled through the property behind her house. On either side, meadow grass bent under shimmers of morning dew. The line of ancient willows that marked the course of the brook rustled against a crystalline blue sky. The sound of water bubbling over rocks came to her ears. It was an idyllic early spring scene; and she savored it, and her solitude, to the full. Her companions had gone on ahead. She could enjoy a brief respite from the continual upheavals of her home.

  This morning, she had finally realized that her parents enjoyed chaos. Indeed, they seemed to thrive on it. When bailiffs pounded on the door, or another landlord threw them out, or the sight of a half-clothed model in the studio caused the cook and maidservant to give notice, they ranted and railed and bemoaned their fate. But they did it with such gusto, Emily thought. Why had she never noticed that before?

  Once, when she was fifteen, she had asked her mother how she could bear the endless alarms and disruptions. Her mother had considered the question with bright interest and then decided that it must be a reaction to her upbringing. Emily’s parents had been born into noble families—“the stifling atmosphere of upper-class convention,” as her mother put it. Emily wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by a large family, never to wonder where one would be living this time next year, or whether the boiler might explode, or whether some disreputable friend of her father’s would be hauled off to jail in the middle of dinner.

  She loved her parents dearly, but she didn’t share their artistic temperament. Paints and canvas didn’t console her for every setback. And the itinerant life was beginning to wear on her. She was almost twenty years old; where would she be when she was twenty-five, or thirty? Still helping her family cope with daily disasters? Lately, she had been dreaming of a more settled existence—of tranquility and even, perhaps, a touch of the conventional.

  How outraged her father would be by such thoughts! Smiling, Emily parted the curtain of trailing willow branches and stepped through. Wouldn’t it be pleasant if she had played in this spot as a child? If she had scores of happy memories of this secret hideaway? In fact, she had forgotten most of the places she had lived as a child. There had been so many.

  A movement on the other side of the stream caught her eye. Two rough-looking men were dragging a third along the ground, tugging him toward the spot where the brook widened into a small pond. When one of the men stepped aside for a moment, she saw that the victim’s hands were tied.

  Emily grimaced. She had wanted only a quiet walk. In a life full of the unusual and unexpected, she had asked for just a few minutes’ peace. Was it so much? Evidently it was, replied a dry mental voice. And was she going to allow a helpless man to be drowned? For that was clearly what the two attackers intended.

  She sighed. It must be her fate to resolve other people’s difficulties. She had been doing it for her parents for so long that she had begun to attract other victims of circumstance. It was a lowering reflection.

  Emerging from the willow branches, Emily started across the stream on a line of stepping-stones. “David! Jonathan!” she called.

  Her escorts came running.

  “What are you doing there?” she cried to the men. She didn’t feel a trace of fear. She had been confronting various adversaries since she was thirteen. Indeed, the mob in Essex who had wanted to tar and feather her father had been much fiercer looking than these two disheveled individuals.

  Startled, the two men let go of their burden and straightened. Then, seeing David and Jonathan racing toward them, they took to their heels.

  They were heading for the road that ran along the back of the property, she saw. Confident that they wouldn’t be back, she went to examine the man lying on the bank of the pond. His ankles were tied as well as his wrists, and he had been knocked on the head. A bruise was swelling at his temple. Emily sighed again. Did other young ladies, out for a soothing stroll, encounter such difficulties? She didn’t think so. Perhaps her parents somehow attracted trouble.

  She looked down at the bound man. He had an impressive physique. It was no wonder it had taken two ruffians to subdue him. His skin was bronzed, and his brown hair streaked gold by the sun. His hands were callused, but he didn’t wear the clothes or quite have the look of a laborer. Even unconscious, his straight brows and chiseled features held a proud fierceness. Her father would paint him as a Roman legionary, Emily thought. Or, no, a gladiator. It was oddly easy to imagine this man in a brief tunic, his arms and legs gleaming with oil, his… Emily shook her head, startled at the immediacy of the picture and her uncharacteristic flight of imagination.

  David and Jonathan came running back. “Have you chased them off?” asked Emily. “Good.”

  After giving the matter careful consideration, Emily untied the ropes that bound the man. She went to soak her handkerchief in the pond and then applied it to his bruised temple. The chilled cloth elicited a groan, and she moved back out of reach as the man drew in a deeper breath.

  He opened his eyes, and blinked at the formidable pair of fangs poised inches from his face. With a speed that was truly startling, he jerked away and reached for Jonathan’s throat in one fluid movement.

  “Jonathan!” cried Emily.

  The dog hadn’t needed the admonition. He had already retreated from the look in the man’s eyes. “Sit,” said Emily.

  The man stared at her blankly. Slowly, he sat up, biting back a groan. He put his hands to his head. When they encountered her embroidered linen handkerchief, he removed it and stared as if he’d never seen such a thing before in his life. Then he looked around at the pond, meadows, willow trees as if they too were strange and disorientating.

  Had the attack addled his wits? Emily remembered the time her father had brained the local squire with a vase he had been using in a still life. That poor man had been incoherent for quite half an hour. Of course, with the squire it was mostly fury. And then they had had to move again and…

  The man turned his head and then swayed dizzily. He squinted up into the sunlight and, looking at her, blinked.

  “Are you all right?” Emily said. “You’ve had a knock on the head.”

  He put a hand to his temple, and winced.

  “I b
elieve you were attacked on the road,” she added helpfully. “But we scared them off.”

  Sinking back, the man blinked again as if to clear blurred vision. He surveyed her more closely. “You?”

  Emily snapped her fingers. Immediately, she was flanked by two gigantic Irish wolfhounds, nearly three feet at the shoulder and fiercely alert. Her father didn’t let her go walking without them. She watched with some amusement as they regarded the man and each gave a soft growl. “David,” she said, gesturing left, then right. “And Jonathan.”

  “I see.” He looked well aware that those jaws would shatter bone.

  “Why were those men trying to throw you in the pond?”

  He looked at the water behind him. “What?”

  “They had tied you up.” She indicated the ropes lying in a tangle beside him. “And they were dragging you to the pond. They meant to drown you, I think.”

  He cradled his head as if it ached. “They must have been footpads. I was riding toward London when they…” He frowned. “One of them jumped from the hedge and started to pull me from my horse. I was fighting him off when the other came out of nowhere and hit me.” He fingered the bruise on his head. “He must have had a cudgel.”

  “Common thieves wouldn’t tie you and drag you across a field,” she pointed out.

  The man shrugged. “Perhaps they were angry that I had nothing to steal.” He frowned again. “Except my horse. It’s gone, I suppose.” He looked around as if the animal might magically appear.

  “They might have kicked you for that, or taken your clothes, but they wouldn’t have bothered with more.”

  “You are an expert on footpads?” With an obvious effort, the man made it to his feet.

  The top of her head barely reached his shoulder, Emily noticed. He really was quite large. And impressive, somehow, despite his condition.

  “I appear to owe you a debt,” he added. “You have my thanks. I won’t trouble you further.” He turned away and then stopped, swaying and putting out a hand to catch his balance as he staggered.

  Emily slipped under his arm and steadied him. “You probably shouldn’t move.”

  “I am not going to lie here in the grass. I must find my horse.”

  “You can’t even walk.”

  “Of course I can.” But when he tried to push her away, he almost tumbled to the ground again.

  Emily looked up at him, the latest in a seemingly endless line of dilemmas that she had had to solve. “You had better come to the house. We’ll send for the doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  The man managed with some difficulty to gaze down at her, tucked under his arm. “You are a very odd young woman.”

  It always came to that, Emily thought wistfully. Everyone she met—particularly every young man she met—found her dauntingly eccentric. It was her parents’ fault, with the life they had given her.

  “You seem to take highway robbery quite in your stride,” he added.

  And so would he, if he had spent just about all his life moving from one emergency to another. Her father had a weakness for rogues. Over the years, he had befriended a variety of beguiling confidence men, at least one of whom made his living by highway robbery.

  “Yet you have the face of a Botticelli angel,” he said.

  Emily looked up at him, meeting his intelligent hazel eyes from a distance shorter than she had ever experienced before—a rather unsettling distance, if the truth be told. Her eventful life had not included many compliments or the attentions of attractive young men. Her father’s freewheeling ways most emphatically did not extend to his only daughter. He never allowed her to be alone with a man, let alone plastered against one’s side holding him upright. Papa was going to be apoplectic if he found out. She needed to get her charge home and safely out of her arms. “Come along,” she said, giving him a slight push.

  He took a step, and stumbled. She wrapped her arm around his ribs to give him more support. With a naturalness that surprised her, his arm draped itself over her shoulders. The warmth of his body against her side was disturbing. “Move,” she said, pushing him slightly again.

  “I can walk,” he declared, stepping away from her. But to his obvious frustration, vertigo returned, and he reeled.

  “Why can’t you be reasonable?”

  “Reasonable? There is nothing reasonable about this situation. Any reasonable young woman would be sunk in a fit of the vapors by this time, wringing her hands and praying for aid.”

  “Would she?” Emily let her hands fall to her sides and frowned. Could this really be how a gently reared girl would behave? “That wouldn’t be particularly helpful,” she had to point out.

  “No,” he agreed, fixing a fascinated gaze upon her. “Who are you?”

  It was a very good question, Emily thought. She often asked it of herself. “My name is Emily Crane.” She waited, and when he said nothing, added, “And yours?”

  “I beg your pardon. I am Richard Sheldon.”

  “Well, Mr. Sheldon, if you really wish me to have a fit of the vapors…”

  “I don’t,” he put in hastily.

  “Good. You will be spared a disappointment.” She approached him once again. “We must go to my house.”

  She put her arm around his waist. His arm settled over her shoulders once again. “Come,” said Emily, pressing closer to urge him forward. Richard stiffened a little and nearly toppled both of them to the ground. “Are you going to faint?”

  “No,” he snapped.

  Pressed together, they made their way slowly across the meadow, the massive dogs gamboling at Emily’s heels like puppies. Fortunately, the stepping-stones in the stream were large and flat, and they got across without mishap. Now and then, Richard would lurch unexpectedly as dizziness caught him. Each time, she supported him, and each time he stifled a curse.

  The journey was beginning to seem endless when he said, “We are going to the house of…?”

  “My parents. We are nearly there.”

  And with any luck, they would evade her father, she thought as she helped their unexpected visitor across the last bit of meadow. The Honorable Alasdair Crane might be outrageous. He might wear Turkish robes and stand before his easel barefoot. He might threaten the local vicar with a cauliflower. He might send his Irish wolfhounds to the post office with a parcel. But his daughter was supposed to be a model of propriety. And this did not include dragging large virile strangers home from country walks.

  Emily stole a look at his face through her lashes. He seemed to radiate heat. Perhaps the blow had given him a fever? But that didn’t explain why fitting her head into the hollow of his shoulder was so disconcertingly pleasant. Nor why she was so intensely conscious of his hand on her arm.

  Although Emily’s experience of humanity was far broader than that of most young ladies, she had never encountered anyone like Richard Sheldon. His voice and bearing had an aristocratic polish, but his clothes and hands were not even those of a gentleman. He had come within an inch of throttling Jonathan, and in that moment he had been—ferocious. Yet he spoke to her with civility.

  Emily shook her head as they stepped up onto the weedy flagstone terrace that ran along the back of their current house. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t figure him out.

  Perhaps it would be easier when she no longer had her arm around him. His proximity was distracting. He was so large, looming over her, and the scent of leather and soap and…man were so heady.

  The French doors that led inside were propped open, which was fortunate because one of them was loose on its hinges and continually threatening to fall. Now if only she could get Mr. Sheldon seated in their shabby drawing room before her father discovered his arrival…

  But here Emily’s luck ran out. Her father appeared in the archway opposite before they ha
d taken two steps into the house.

  “What the devil is this?” he shouted. “Get your hands off my daughter, you blackguard!”

  He surged forward with his hand raised to strike, obviously forgetting that he held a loaded paintbrush. “Father!” Emily cried. “This man was attacked on the road. He’s hurt.”

  Knowing that the words wouldn’t penetrate at once, she pivoted somewhat clumsily and dropped Richard Sheldon into an armchair.

  “Footpads,” she added loudly. “In broad daylight.”

  “Eh?” Her father came to an abrupt stop before them. “What? Footpads?”

  “Yes,” said Emily. “They knocked him on the head and stole his horse. I found him in the meadow, ah, er, crawling toward the house for help.”

  A stifled exclamation escaped Richard, and Emily sent him a silent command to be quiet. Simple explanations worked best with her father.

  “Crawling?” he repeated.

  Emily nodded, gazing innocently up at him.

  The hand holding the paintbrush dropped, leaving a streak of brilliant crimson along his pants leg.

  “I was not—” began Richard.

  “Isn’t it a terrible thing?” put in Emily quickly. “Do you think we should inform the magistrate?”

  “That jumped-up country squire?” exploded her father. “He wouldn’t know a footpad from his own backside. Of all the dim-witted, bad-tempered, rag-mannered blusterers…”

  Satisfied with her diversion, Emily let her father’s ranting run its course. She threw Richard Sheldon a fierce glance, signaling that he should keep quiet.

  “We should send for the doctor,” Emily said when her father at last fell silent. “Mr. Sheldon has suffered a severe blow to the head.”

  Her father stared at their guest suspiciously. His eyes narrowed. His dark brows drew together. “Olivia!” he bellowed.

  Wherever they lived, each of her parents always had a workroom. In this house, they were at opposite ends, which Emily found far more restful than some arrangements she had been forced to endure. But in this case it meant that her father had to shout at the top of his lungs before he gained her mother’s attention.