by Julia Quinn
“Oh, Sophie,” he groaned, her name the only word he could manage to say. “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.”
She smiled up at him, and he was struck by the most remarkable desire to laugh. He was happy, he realized. So damned happy.
And it felt good.
He positioned himself over her, ready to enter her, ready to make her his. This was different from the last time, when they’d both been swept away by emotion. This time they had been deliberate. They had chosen more than passion; they had chosen each other.
“You’re mine,” he said, his eyes never leaving hers as he slid inside. “You’re mine.”
And much later, when they were exhausted and spent, lying in each other’s arms, he brought his lips to her ear and whispered, “And I’m yours.”
Several hours later, Sophie yawned and blinked herself awake, wondering why she felt so lovely and warm, and—
“Benedict!” she gasped. “What time is it?”
He didn’t respond, so she clutched at his shoulder and shook hard. “Benedict! Benedict!”
He grunted as he rolled over. “I’m sleeping.”
“What time is it?”
He buried his face in the pillow. “Haven’t the foggiest.”
“I’m supposed to be at your mother’s by seven.”
“Eleven,” he mumbled.
“Seven!”
He opened one eye. It looked like it took a great deal of effort. “You knew you weren’t going to make it back by seven when you decided to take a bath.”
“I know, but I didn’t think I’d be much past nine.”
Benedict blinked a few times as he looked around the room. “I don’t think you’re going to make it—”
But she’d already caught sight of the mantel clock and was presently choking frantically.
“Are you all right?” he inquired.
“It’s three in the morning!”
He smiled. “You might as well spend the night, then.”
“Benedict!”
“You wouldn’t want to put out any of the servants, would you? They’re all quite asleep, I’m sure.”
“But I—”
“Have mercy, woman,” he finally declared. “I’m marrying you next week.”
That got her attention. “Next week?” she squeaked.
He tried to assume a serious mien. “It’s best to take care of these things quickly.”
“Why?”
“Why?” he echoed.
“Yes, why?”
“Er, ah, stemming gossip and all that.”
Her lips parted and her eyes grew round. “Do you think Lady Whistledown will write about me?”
“God, I hope not,” he muttered.
Her face fell.
“Well, I suppose she might. Why on earth would you want her to?”
“I’ve been reading her column for years. I always dreamed of seeing my name there.”
He shook his head. “You have very strange dreams.”
“Benedict!”
“Very well, yes, I imagine Lady Whistledown will report our marriage, if not before the ceremony, then certainly very quickly after the fact. She’s diabolical that way.”
“I wish I knew who she was.”
“You and half of London.”
“Me and all of London, I should think.” She sighed, then said, not very convincingly, “I really should go. Your mother is surely worried about me.”
He shrugged. “She knows where you are.”
“But she’ll think less of me.”
“I doubt it. She’ll give you a bit of latitude, I’m sure, considering we’re to be married in three days.”
“Three days?” she yelped. “I thought you said next week.”
“Three days is next week.”
Sophie frowned. “Oh. You’re right. Monday, then?”
He nodded, looking very satisfied.
“Imagine that,” she said. “I’ll be in Whistledown.”
He propped himself up on one elbow, eyeing her suspiciously. “Are you looking forward to marrying me,” he asked in an amused voice, “or is it merely the Whistledown mention that has you so excited?”
She gave him a playful swat on the shoulder.
“Actually,” he said thoughtfully, “you’ve already been in Whistledown.”
“I have? When?”
“After the masquerade. Lady Whistledown remarked that I’d been rather taken with a mystery woman in silver. Try as she might, she couldn’t deduce your identity.” He grinned. “It very well may be the only secret in London she hasn’t uncovered.”
Sophie’s face went instantly serious and she scooted a foot or so away from him on the bed. “Oh, Benedict. I have to . . . I want to . . . That is to say . . .” She stopped, looking away for a few seconds before turning back. “I’m sorry.”
He considered yanking her back into his arms, but she looked so damned earnest he had no choice but to take her seriously. “What for?”
“For not telling you who I was. It was wrong of me.” She bit her lip. “Well, not wrong precisely.”
He drew back slightly. “If it wasn’t wrong, then what was it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain exactly why I did what I did, but it just . . .” She chewed on her lips some more. He started to think that she might do herself permanent harm.
She sighed. “I didn’t tell you right away because it didn’t seem to make any sense to do so. I was so sure we’d part ways just as soon as we left the Cavenders. But then you grew ill, and I had to care for you, and you didn’t recognize me, and . . .”
He lifted a finger to her lips. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her brows rose. “It seemed to matter a great deal the other night.”
He didn’t know why, but he just didn’t want to get into a serious discussion at that moment. “A lot has changed since then.”
“Don’t you want to know why I didn’t tell you who I was?”
He touched her cheeks. “I know who you are.”
She chewed on her lip.
“And do you want to hear the funniest part?” he continued. “Do you know one of the reasons I was so hesitant to give my heart completely to you? I’d been saving a piece of it for the lady from the masquerade, always hoping that one day I’d find her.”
“Oh, Benedict,” she sighed, thrilled by his words, and at the same time miserable that she had hurt him so.
“Deciding to marry you meant I had to abandon my dream of marrying her,” he said quietly. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry I hurt you by not revealing my identity,” she said, not quite looking at his face, “but I’m not sure that I’m sorry I did it. Does that make any sense?”
He didn’t say anything.
“I think I would do the same thing again.”
He still didn’t say anything. Sophie started to feel very uneasy inside.
“It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” she persisted. “Telling you that I’d been at the masquerade would have served no purpose.”
“I would have known the truth,” he said softly.
“Yes, and what would you have done with that truth?” She sat up, pulling the covers until they were tucked under her arms. “You would have wanted your mystery woman to be your mistress, just as you wanted the housemaid to be your mistress.”
He said nothing, just stared at her face.
“I guess what I’m saying,” Sophie said quickly, “is that if I’d known at the beginning what I know now, I would have said something. But I didn’t know, and I thought I’d just be positioning myself for heartbreak, and—” She choked on her final words, frantically searching his face for some kind of clue to his feelings. “Please say something.”
“I love you,” he said.
It was all she needed.
Epilogue
Sunday’s bash at Bridgerton House is sure to be the event of the season. The entire family will gather, along with a hundred or so of their clo
sest friends, to celebrate the dowager vis countess’s birthday.
It is considered crass to mention a lady’s age, and so This Author will not reveal which birthday Lady Bridgerton is celebrating.
But have no fear . . . This Author knows!
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 9 APRIL 1824
“Stop! Stop!”
Sophie shrieked with laughter as she ran down the stone steps that led to the garden behind Bridgerton House. After three children and seven years of marriage, Benedict could still make her smile, still make her laugh . . . and he still chased her around the house any chance he could get.
“Where are the children?” she gasped, once he’d caught her at the base of the steps.
“Francesca is watching them.”
“And your mother?”
He grinned. “I daresay Francesca is watching her, too.”
“Anyone could stumble upon us out here,” she said, looking this way and that.
His smile turned wicked. “Maybe,” he said, catching hold of her green-velvet skirt and reeling her in, “we should adjourn to the private terrace.”
The words were oh-so-familiar, and it was only a second before she was transported back nine years to the masquerade ball. “The private terrace, you say?” she asked, amusement dancing in her eyes. “And how, pray tell, would you know of a private terrace?”
His lips brushed against hers. “I have my ways,” he murmured.
“And I,” she returned, smiling slyly, “have my secrets.”
He drew back. “Oh? And will you share?”
“We five,” she said with a nod, “are about to be six.”
He looked at her face, then looked at her belly. “Are you sure?”
“As sure as I was last time.”
He took her hand and raised it to lips. “This one will be a girl.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“I know, but—”
“And the time before.”
“All the more reason for the odds to favor me this time.”
She shook her head. “I’m glad you’re not a gambler.”
He smiled at that. “Let’s not tell anyone yet.”
“I think a few people already suspect,” Sophie admitted.
“I want to see how long it takes that Whistledown woman to figure it out,” Benedict said.
“Are you serious?”
“The blasted woman knew about Charles, and she knew about Alexander, and she knew about William.”
Sophie smiled as she let him pull her into the shadows. “Do you realize that I have been mentioned in Whistledown two hundred and thirty-two times?”
That stopped him cold. “You’ve been counting?”
“Two hundred and thirty-three if you include the time after the masquerade.”
“I can’t believe you’ve been counting.”
She gave him a nonchalant shrug. “It’s exciting to be mentioned.”
Benedict thought it was a bloody nuisance to be mentioned, but he wasn’t about to spoil her delight, so instead he just said, “At least she always writes nice things about you. If she didn’t, I might have to hunt her down and run her out of the country.”
Sophie couldn’t help but smile. “Oh, please. I hardly think you could discover her identity when no one else in the ton has managed it.”
He raised one arrogant brow. “That doesn’t sound like wifely devotion and confidence to me.”
She pretended to examine her glove. “You needn’t expend the energy. She’s obviously very good at what she does.”
“Well, she won’t know about Violet,” Benedict vowed. “At least not until it’s obvious to the world.”
“Violet?” Sophie asked softly.
“It’s time my mother had a grandchild named after her, don’t you think?”
Sophie leaned against him, letting her cheek rest against the crisp linen of his shirt. “I think Violet is a lovely name,” she murmured, nestling deeper into the shelter of his arms. “I just hope it’s a girl. Because if it’s a boy, he’s never going to forgive us . . .”
Later that night, in a town house in the very best part of London, a woman picked up her quill and wrote:
Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers
12 April 1824
Ah, Gentle Reader, This Author has learned that the Bridgerton grandchildren will soon number eleven . . .
But when she tried to write more, all she could do was close her eyes and sigh. She’d been doing this for so very long now. Could it have possibly been eleven years already?
Maybe it was time to move on. She was tired of writing about everyone else. It was time to live her own life.
And so Lady Whistledown set down her quill and walked to her window, pushing aside her sage green curtains and looking out into the inky night.
“Time for something new,” she whispered. “Time to finally be me.”
Dear Reader,
Have you ever wondered what happened to your favorite characters after you closed the final page? Wanted just a little bit more of a favorite novel? I have, and if the questions from my readers are any indication, I’m not the only one. So after countless requests from Bridgerton fans, I decided to try something a little different, and I wrote a “2nd Epilogue” for each of the novels. These are the stories that come after the stories.
At first, the Bridgerton 2nd Epilogues were available exclusively online; later they were published (along with a novella about Violet Bridgerton) in a collection called The Bridgertons: Happily Ever After. Now, for the first time, each 2nd Epilogue is being included with the novel it follows. I hope you enjoy Benedict and Sophie as they continue their journey.
Warmly,
Julia Quinn
An Offer From a Gentleman: The 2nd Epilogue
At five and twenty, Miss Posy Reiling was considered nearly a spinster. There were those who might have considered her past the cutoff from young miss to hopeless ape leader; three and twenty was often cited as the unkind chronological border. But Posy was, as Lady Bridgerton (her unofficial guardian) often remarked, a unique case.
In debutante years, Lady Bridgerton insisted, Posy was only twenty, maybe twenty-one.
Eloise Bridgerton, the eldest unmarried daughter of the house, put it a little more bluntly: Posy’s first few years out in society had been worthless and should not be counted against her.
Eloise’s youngest sister, Hyacinth, never one to be verbally outdone, simply stated that Posy’s years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two had been “utter rot.”
It was at this point that Lady Bridgerton had sighed, poured herself a stiff drink, and sunk into a chair. Eloise, whose mouth was as sharp as Hyacinth’s (though thankfully tempered by some discretion), had remarked that they had best get Hyacinth married off quickly or their mother was going to become an alcoholic. Lady Bridgerton had not appreciated the comment, although she privately thought it might be true.
Hyacinth was like that.
But this is a story about Posy. And as Hyacinth has a tendency to take over anything in which she is involved . . . please do forget about her for the remainder of the tale.
The truth was, Posy’s first few years on the Marriage Mart had been utter rot. It was true that she’d made her debut at a proper age of seventeen. And, indeed, she was the stepdaughter of the late Earl of Penwood, who had so prudently made arrangements for her dowry before his untimely death several years prior.
She was perfectly pleasant to look at, if perhaps a little plump, she had all of her teeth, and it had been remarked upon more than once that she had uncommonly kind eyes.
Anyone assessing her on paper would not understand why she’d gone so long without even a single proposal.
But anyone assessing her on paper might not have known about Posy’s mother, Araminta Gunningworth, the dowager Countess of Penwood.
Araminta was splendidly beautiful, even more so than Posy’s elder sister, Rosamund, who had been blessed with
fair hair, a rosebud mouth, and eyes of cerulean blue.
Araminta was ambitious, too, and enormously proud of her ascension from the gentry to the aristocracy. She’d gone from Miss Wincheslea to Mrs. Reiling to Lady Penwood, although to hear her speak of it, her mouth had been dripping silver spoons since the day of her birth.
But Araminta had failed in one regard; she had not been able to provide the earl with an heir. Which meant that despite the Lady before her name, she did not wield a terribly large amount of power. Nor did she have access to the type of fortune she felt was her due.
And so she pinned her hopes on Rosamund. Rosamund, she was sure, would make a splendid match. Rosamund was achingly beautiful. Rosamund could sing and play the pianoforte, and if she wasn’t talented with a needle, then she knew exactly how to poke Posy, who was. And since Posy did not enjoy repeated needle-sized skin punctures, it was Rosamund’s embroidery that always looked exquisite.
Posy’s, on the other hand, generally went unfinished.
And since money was not as plentiful as Araminta would have her peers believe, she lavished what they had on Rosamund’s wardrobe, and Rosamund’s lessons, and Rosamund’s everything.
She wasn’t about to let Posy look embarrassingly shabby, but really, there was no point in spending more than she had to on her. You couldn’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and you certainly couldn’t turn a Posy into a Rosamund.
But.
(And this is a rather large but.)
Things didn’t turn out so well for Araminta. It’s a terribly long story, and one probably deserving of a book of its own, but suffice it to say that Araminta cheated another young girl of her inheritance, one Sophia Beckett, who happened to be the earl’s illegitimate daughter. She would have got away with it completely, because who cares about a bastard, except that Sophie had had the temerity to fall in love with Benedict Bridgerton, second son in the aforementioned (and extremely well-connected) Bridgerton family.
This would not have been enough to seal Araminta’s fate, except that Benedict decided he loved Sophie back. Quite madly. And while he might have overlooked embezzlement, he certainly could not do the same for having Sophie hauled off to jail (on mostly fraudulent charges).