Мэри Бэлоу - Someone to Romance

Except that she was not just Lady Jessica Archer. She was . . . She was her . She was the being that was inside her and far more meaningful to her than any of the outer trappings of birth and rank.

It was a strange time to be having all these thoughts, which she could not recall ever having before. Not consciously or coherently, anyway.

He turned to stroll onward, and she walked beside him, leaving two feet of space between them. She could see the curricle in the distance. Thank heaven. Though the ride home was going to seem endless.

But she was not sorry, she thought, lifting her chin. She was not . How dared he, or any man, decide that he was going to marry her ?

“Very well, Lady Jessica,” he said as they drew closer to the curricle. “I will romance you. Not with a view to matrimony, but as an end in itself, to see where it leads.”

Jessica licked her lips. Oh goodness, what had she started now? “Thank you,” she said, her words cold and clipped.

“But I do hope,” he said as he offered his hand to help her up to her seat, “that you will not expect a bouquet quite as large as the one that was in your brother’s drawing room yesterday.”

He spoke the words in all seriousness. But . . . A joke from Mr. Thorne? Really?

She settled her skirts about her as he climbed to his place and took the ribbons from his young groom.

“Oh, I will not,” she assured him, raising her parasol and twirling it behind her head. “I shall expect a far larger one.”

He did not laugh. But when she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, she could see that he was actually and definitely smiling.

He looked different when he smiled. He looked handsome. Not almost handsome, but the real thing.

Not that looks mattered. At all.

Eight

Gabriel sent Lady Jessica Archer a single long-stemmed pink rose the following morning.

He ought to have turned his eyes and his mind elsewhere, of course, as soon as it became obvious she was going to make him work to win her, with no guarantee that the prize would be his at the end of it all. He needed a wife soon. And there was no reason to believe he would have any great difficulty finding one even if the ton knew no more about him than it already did. For some reason he had captured the public’s imagination. Yet he had set his sights upon the very lady whose imagination had not been captured.

He had no time to romance Lady Jessica just because she had taken offense at his saying he intended to marry her. What the devil did it mean, anyway, to romance a woman? He was still not convinced there was any such verb. Though her meaning would stand even if the word did not. She wished to be flattered, to be fawned over, to be sighed over with open adoration, to be sent flowers, and generally to be treated like a goddess.

Gabriel was gazing out of his sitting room window upon rain—the drizzling sort that only England seemed able to produce in such depressingly copious quantities. He had intended to call at Archer House this afternoon to invite her to drive in the park with him later. It was what the ton did in large numbers, apparently, in the late afternoon. It was where they went to see and be seen, to pick up the latest gossip and to spread it, to ogle the opposite sex and to flirt.

It was not going to happen today, however. Even if the rain let up right at this moment it would be damp and miserable out there. Chilly too, or at least it had been chilly when he went to White’s Club this morning with Bertie Vickers.

No. He was being unfair—perhaps because he was feeling frustrated and therefore irritable.

Everything he had just thought was almost certainly not what Lady Jessica had meant by the term romancing . It was unfair to think she was so shallow. Indeed, he knew she was not. He just could not imagine her being susceptible to any sort of flattery. She would stare right through him, her chin and her nose in the air, as though she could see the hairs on the back of his head. No. What had offended her was her assumption that he saw her as a commodity rather than as a person. Did he? He very much feared she might have a point. She wanted him to see her for what she really was—or perhaps that should be who she really was, quite independent of all the attributes that made her one of the most eligible ladies in England.

He had been taken aback by her outburst. She had been seriously upset with him. Not so much with his presumption in informing her that he intended to marry her as with the fact that it was not she he wished to marry, but rather the titled, wealthy Lady Jessica Archer, sister of the Duke of Netherby. Just as though they were two quite separate entities.

Were they?

Strangely, stupidly, the possible truth of that had not struck him until she said it. He had assumed that the Lady Jessica he saw was the whole person, that there was no more to her than the appearance she presented to the world, of beauty, elegance, poise, arrogance, and entitlement. She would perfectly suit his purpose, he had decided almost the first moment he saw her. Even her beauty would suit him. One of his first duties as Earl of Lyndale, after all, would be to produce sons. She would be an attractive bedfellow, he had thought, if perhaps a trifle cold.

Which of them, then, had been the arrogant one?

He had been taught by Cyrus and his own instincts to identify what he wanted and to go after it. He had been taught to expect success so that he could the more easily achieve it. What if those admirable traits in a businessman did not apply to a lover?

They almost certainly did not.

Gabriel drummed his fingers on the windowsill and called himself all sorts of an idiot.

Her outburst had dispelled any notion he had had that she was cold to the core. And it had done strange things to his resolve. It had not lessened it as it ought to. He had found himself wanting to waste time and energy romancing her, with no assurance of success. His fingers stopped drumming as he frowned in thought. I am not at all certain I want to marry you. Indeed, I am almost certain I do not. Those, he believed, had been her exact words. Would his time and effort be all for nothing, then? Was he willing to pin all his hopes upon that one little word— almost ? She was almost certain. And what the devil did romancing a woman entail?

It is about the possibility of love, she had said when he had pressed her on the point. The possibility of friendship and laughter and . . . oh, and something more. Something bright and beautiful. Something that will transform life and fill it with color and . . .

She had been talking about love. Romantic love, though she would not admit it.

The Lady Jessica Archer he had thought he knew, because really there was not a great deal to know, had been transformed before his eyes into someone of mysterious depths. And he had promised that he would indeed consider the possibility she had spoken of. Very well, Lady Jessica. I will romance you. Not with a view to matrimony, but as an end in itself, to see where it leads.

Was he mad?

Would he keep that promise? Madness was something he did not indulge in. Madness cost time. And efficiency. And money. Time, in particular, was not something he could afford to waste in this instance. He needed a bride so that he could move on to the next stage of his homecoming.

Nevertheless he had sent her a rose this morning, wondering as he did so what she would make of it. Did she receive many gifts of a single rose? Would she be offended at the paltriness of it? Or would she be amused, as he hoped she would be, at the contrast with that ostentatious bouquet that she had seemed to find a bit objectionable? Would she make the connection?