Grey turned to Serena with a question. “Shall we mention anything to Bridget?”
“Oh no.”
“But don’t you think she’ll be mad when she finds out that we’ve meddled in her production?”
Serena grinned. “Oh yes.”
“Ah, that is not a bad thing. You want to make her mad.”
“Sisters,” Serena explained. “Also it’s the least she deserves for casting me as the Lonely Spinster.”
The play
Fortunately, the dowager duchess was well enough to dress and leave her chambers for the final evening of the house party. She was granted a prime seat in the front row.
When Serena and Grey took the stage, dressed as a Lonely Spinster and Lord Pirate Captain, they delivered a performance that brought Bridget’s absurd play to life, for now there was an undercurrent of romantic tension surging beneath all those silly lines. There was palpable passion when she swooned into his arms. Sparks flew between them as they bantered their dialogue, each line more ridiculous than the last.
Serena had also, to her great embarrassment, practiced swooning. But only in the privacy of her bedchamber, of course. She did, after all, have a reputation for perfection to maintain.
Finally, they entered the third act, when their storyline was drawing to a close.
“I shall now vanquish your lovesick swan, who has managed to pursue you all the way from Shropshire to the great English coast where my pirate ship awaits!”
Grey dramatically unsheathed his sword.
There were gasps in the audience.
“Quack, my love! Quack, my love!”
Gosling, being perfect, managed to play the role of Lovesick Swan with humor and grace, neither making a laughingstock of himself or the character.
“No! Do not hurt him!” Serena cried. “I spy another swan with whom he might fall in love when the memory of me fades from his swan brain.”
Indeed, another swan made her way upon the stage. She shook her tail feathers in an effort to catch Gosling’s attention. She succeeded.
“Quack, my love!”
And with that, Serena’s Lovesick Swan was lovesick for her no more.
“Whatever my lady wishes,” Grey said, pulling Serena into a dramatic embrace. “And now, let us sail off into the sunset, on our way to happily ever after!”
The audience erupted in applause, led by Bridget and Sophronia, who were under the impression, along with the audience, that the play had concluded. After all, this is where the script stopped.
“But wait!” Serena cried out. “It is most improper for a lonely spinster such as myself to be alone with a gentleman, especially in the close and confining quarters of a pirate ship. I daresay pirate ships are not adequately stocked with chaperones.”
A murmur rippled through the audience.
“What is this?” Bridget was heard to ask loudly. Sophronia shushed her.
“What is this talk of a lonely spinster?” Grey boomed. “I think you mean a lovely spinster.”
“I swoon!”
And she did. Serena swooned elegantly into Grey’s awaiting arms. He caught her effortlessly. Not only did he hold her for one, two, three, four seconds longer than necessary, he also pressed a kiss upon her lips.
“But you shall be a spinster no more. Marry me, Serena. Make me the happiest man in the world.”
“Oh yes, my Lord Pirate Captain, yes!”
“As I am a captain I could marry us at sea. But as we are not at sea, we require a vicar.”
“Did someone say a vicar?”
It was none other than Bertram, the local vicar.
The audience erupted in gasps and a smattering of applause as it dawned on them what they were witnessing. A wedding. A Christmas wedding.
“Look! It’s a vicar and he just happens to be holding a special license!” Grey declared. In truth, Frye had just happened to call in a favor with the archbishop so that Grey and Serena could wed. It was the least he could do.
“It is as if this union were meant to be,” Serena said. “As if it were blessed.”
The couple ducked their heads for another kiss, but were thwarted before their lips could touch.
“Ahem,” the vicar coughed. “Might I remind you that you are yet unwed.”
“Let us remedy that. For I should like to take my bride to bed!”
Grey grinned wolfishly. Serena blushed demurely.
And with that, the bride and groom were wed.
It was, to say the least, not the wedding Serena had ever dreamt of or expected, but in its own way it was perfect. It was, so far, the third most interesting thing that had ever happened to her.
And that was only the beginning.
About Maya
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About Maya
Maya Rodale began reading romance novels in college at her mother’s insistence. She is now the bestselling and award winning author of numerous smart and sassy romance novels. A champion of the genre and its readers, she is also the author of the non-fiction book Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation Of Romance Novels, Explained and has written for The Huffington Post, NPR, Bustle.com and more. Maya lives in New York City with her darling dog and a rogue of her own. Visit her online at www.mayarodale.com or follow her on twitter: @MayaRodale.
Other Books by Maya Rodale
Keeping Up With the Cavendishes
Lady Bridget’s Diary
Chasing Lady Amelia
Lady Claire Is All That
It’s Hard Out Here For A Duke
Bad Boys & Wallflowers
The Wicked Wallflower
The Bad Bad Boy Billionaire’s Wicked Arrangement
Wallflower Gone Wild
The Bad Bad Boy Billionaire’s Girl Gone Wild
What a Wallflower Wants
The Bad Boy Billionaire: What a Girl Wants
The Writing Girls
A Groom of One’s Own
A Tale of Two Lovers
The Tattooed Duke
Seducing Mr. Knightly
Three Schemes and a Scandal
Snowy Night with a Duke
The last time Lady Charlotte Ascot bumped into the Duke of Frye, she climbed a tree to avoid him. Sometimes it's simply easier to run away than to face her feelings for him—overwhelmingly passionate feelings that no modest lady should have! Now, on her way to Kingstag Castle to celebrate the holidays with friends, Charlotte is trapped by a snowstorm at a tiny country inn with the duke of her steamiest dreams.
But Frye has a secret of his own, and Christmas is the ideal time to finally tell the woman he's always wanted the whole unvarnished truth. Better yet, he'll show her…
Chapter One
Three days before Christmas, 1816.
The Fiddler’s Roost Inn.
Somewhere off the main road, near Dorchester.
When the Mail Coach from London skidded into the yard to disgorge its frozen contents before the tiny inn, its team was lathered and the poor souls atop laden with snow. Yet not all passengers immediately disembarked. Two lingered within.
During the slog through the thickening snow, as the other passengers had grown increasingly alarmed by the icy road, these two young men had alternately snored, yawned, and traded an engraved flask between them. By their fine coats, shiny boots, and thorough disregard for proper public coach decorum, it was clear to everybody that they were town rowdies.
Why they had stooped to travel on the coach, one passenger guessed: the sprigs of high society must be pockets-to-let and fleeing costly London for the less costly delights of Christmas in the countryside. The other passengers simply wished all of high society to
the devil, and especially this unimpressive example and his obviously French friend.
But when the last of the respectable passengers had climbed down from the coach, the change that came over the two young sots was extraordinary. Slumped shoulders squared, slack jaws grew taut, and eyes that had been hazy with drink gleamed with sharp determination.
“Right, then,” the Englishman said in a baritone of such smooth, confident resonance that the Prince Regent had given its owner a fond nickname: Church Bell.
“As planned,” his companion replied, his voice inflected by the cadence of speech of his native island. For he was not, after all, French, rather Haitian. “Then we part ways, my friend, you to return to—”
“No.”
“Mon ami.” The Haitian leaned back against the worn squabs, folding arms thick with muscle. “You cannot—”
“No,” the Englishman said calmly, his breath frosting in the chilly air. “That is over and done with. The best thing I can do now is to leave her be.”
“Scoundrel.”
“Undoubtedly,” the Englishman concurred.
The Haitian’s scowl looked more like a half-grin. The two had known each other since age ten and were like brothers.
“Now, to our present concern.” The Englishman extended his right hand and the Haitian grasped it hard, sinews and bones meeting exactly as they had for fifteen years, since their school days, every time they embarked upon another such mission. In those days, their missions had been minor: return the Headmaster’s stolen wig without detection, hide spiders in the Head Boy’s bed linens, and the like.
Now they did missions on behalf of the crown, and they were deadly serious.
“Solve the mystery,” the Englishman said, the words a sacred ritual.
“Fight the battle.” The Haitian’s eyes glimmered with pleasure.
The Englishman cocked a grin. “Save the girl.”
Then they were opening the door and—shoulders slumping and strides intentionally unsteady—they tromped through the snow toward the inn that glowed with warm welcome.
Chapter Two
An hour later.
The Fiddler’s Roost Inn: the taproom and yard.
Sometimes it was not in a lady’s best interests to follow any dictates but those of her own heart. Because Lady Charlotte Ascot, daughter of the Earl of Ware, had discovered this at a young age—eight, to be precise, during a footrace against boys with considerably longer legs than she—when faced with a challenge to her courage at the age of twenty-one, she did not hesitate to set out from London alone for Kingstag Castle, where all of her friends were gathering for a holiday party.
For in fact the gathering was not really a holiday party. It was an emergency. Charlotte’s dear friend Lady Serena Cavendish had recently been jilted by her longtime betrothed, the Duke of Frye, mere months from the wedding. It had shocked the ton. According to a letter from Serena’s sister Alexandra, it had sent Serena into a spiral of distress.
Serena needed all of her dear friends around her now, and Charlotte was one of them. It mattered nothing that Charlotte had only just returned from a two-and-a-half-year trip abroad; friendships cemented in childhood and matured in young womanhood could never be undone, even across an ocean. Also, Charlotte and the Cavendish sisters had written letters to each other constantly since she had left England.
None of those letters had ever hinted that the wedding of Serena and the Duke of Frye had been in jeopardy. Betrothed to Serena since childhood, the duke had always been gorgeously attentive to Serena, everything that a lifelong fiancé should be. Despite the fact that he was the only person in the world whom Charlotte had literally climbed a tree to avoid, she had always particularly admired that about him.
The jilting was as much of a surprise to her as to anybody.
So when the invitation to Kingstag arrived in London, Charlotte did not wait before instructing her family’s coachman Fields to ready the team for travel or her maid to pack her clothes. That was how Charlotte found herself running through a curtain of snow from the carriage and into a little roadside inn in the midst of a blizzard.
And it was how, shortly afterward, she was sipping hot tea in the taproom—for the inn was so small there were no private parlors—and becoming acquainted with a pair of modest gentlewomen who had arrived on the Mail Coach.
“How do you come to be traveling alone, my lady?” Miss Mapplethorpe inquired. At least sixty, with pale eyes and an air of fragility, she smiled gently. Maiden aunt to the orphaned Miss Calliope Jameson, she was accompanying her niece to a distant relative’s home for the holidays.
“Lady Charlotte is not precisely alone, Aunt.” A shy, sweet girl of seventeen, Calliope Jameson shared the same pale eyes and slender frame as her aunt, but to great advantage. She was a beauty. “For she has come with her maid.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” her aunt said. “Dear Niece, you are so much cleverer than I.”
“Most of my family are still at my family’s home in Devon,” Charlotte explained, letting the heat of her teacup burrow into her palms. “They planned to join me in London for Christmas, but I suspect they have been delayed from that anyway.” And a good thing that was. While she missed them dreadfully, her father’s last letter to her in Philadelphia had made clear his intentions: she must return to England and marry. Since she had taken up her aunt’s invitation and fled to America two and a half years ago to avoid marrying, she was hardly eager to see her father anyway.
“My younger brother, Henry, is staying at a house quite nearby,” she added. “Although I don’t suppose the snow will allow me to see him this holiday either.”
“Oh dear, my lady,” Miss Mapplethorpe said with a shake of her head. “How dreadful to be far from family at Christmastime.”
“Perhaps not so dreadful,” Charlotte replied with a smile at both of them. “I shall have you two as company, after all.”
It was at that moment that they were roused from their cozy tea by a ruckus just outside. Miss Mapplethorpe went to the window to investigate.
“Good heavens,” she said. “I believe there is a brawl taking place in the yard.”
Calliope leaped up and went to her side. “It is those young men from the coach!”
The other guests were streaming out into the snow.
“Who can resist a brawl between two toffs?” one of them said excitedly.
Miss Mapplethorpe and Calliope hurried in that direction. Possessed of a natural curiosity, Charlotte followed.
And so it was that in the snow that still fell in thick curtains, Charlotte discovered the jilting Duke of Frye engaged in a flagrant bout of fisticuffs only moments before his opponent got the best of him.
Horace Chesterfield Breckinridge Church, the eleventh Duke of Frye, was not a Gargantua. He never had trouble finding boots that fit, and neither his tailor nor his valet ever bemoaned the width of his shoulders or thickness of his thighs. Rather, those inestimable persons praised said shoulders for the muscle that made buckram padding unnecessary, not to mention his flat, narrow waist. And they often exclaimed in glee over his marvelously well-toned legs, which made their labors so satisfying.
But Frye was not a particularly small man, either. He was, in fact, of average-to-tall height and average-to-wide shoulder breadth, and under normal circumstances he had no difficulty matching punches with Freddie, who was his same size (in truth an inch taller, but Frye never admitted it, at least not aloud).
Under normal circumstances was when Frye was not throwing a fight.
Barreling toward him at perfectly timed speed, Freddie’s fist made an arc meant to appear haphazard to the crowd that was streaming into the inn’s rear yard to watch, despite the snow.
As planned.
The speed of Freddie’s punch allowed Frye precisely the seconds he required to dodge to the side. The knuckles only grazed his jaw before he pitched onto his elbow in the snow.
“Cur!” He allowed the epithet to roll over his loose to
ngue in a tone suitably garbled to sound drunken. “I’ll ge’sshu now!”
“Cochon,” Freddie replied soberly. Freddie was, after all, the hero in this make-believe scenario. “A gentleman never allows an insult to a lady to pass unpunished,” he said in English better than the King’s. Lord Frédéric Alexandre Fortier had, after all, received higher marks than Frye in the study of Rhetoric and both English and French Literature—although only a bit higher, Frye occasionally reminded his old friend.
“Was only flirting,” Frye slurred, swinging a loose left at Freddie’s shoulder, which his friend nimbly sidestepped. “She didn’t mind.”
“The next time, chien,” Freddie said, his eyes narrowing with stalwart menace—for Freddie always played stalwart menace particularly well—“flirt with your words, not your hands.” Boots braced in a foot of snow, which their pugilistic theatricals were swiftly packing into ice, Freddie jabbed at him again.
Tilting madly, arms windmilling, Frye hurled himself to the ground.
It was shameful.
But they had played this scene to excellent effect many times before: Freddie accused a drunken Frye of insulting a lady, they fought, Frye got banished belowstairs or to a stable, and was then able to ask manservants or coachmen all sorts of questions they would never answer to a duke or to even a proper mister. Meanwhile, the dashingly heroic and intriguingly foreign Freddie would be inside encouraging polite company to raise toasts to honor integrity and good manners. Lots of toasts.
Violence and spirits both tended to loosen men’s tongues.
Now the group of coach passengers and others huddled in the inn’s doorway were casting Freddie looks of guarded admiration. He was obviously defending a woman’s virtue from his drunken friend.
At the Christmas Wedding Page 18