Kieran Kramer: When Harry Met Molly

Harry’s eyes narrowed. “I know all about duty, Father. You won’t let me forget it.”

Molly cringed at his bitter tone.

“You have more to learn,” his father reprimanded him. “It will take you several years. And when you do learn what you must, you may rejoin the family with my blessing. Until then, you are not welcome here.”

“Not even on Christmas?” Harry’s face blanched beneath the blood smeared across his cheeks. He looked first at his father, then his brother.

“I’m afraid so, my son.” His father sighed. “Your presence here tomorrow would simply extend everyone’s misery, would it not?”

Harry picked up a goblet of wine, drained it, and set it down on the head table. “To your happiness,” he said to Roderick and Penelope, neither of whom said a word.

Harry then looked at Molly. “And you, you little nosy-body, may our paths never cross again.”

“They shan’t any time soon,” Lord Sutton said. “The events of today have convinced me that my daughter requires a firmer hand than I can provide her here at home or at Miss Monroe’s Academy in London. She shall be sent away. The day after tomorrow. To Yorkshire.”

Away? Not to London but to…to Yorkshire?

And the day after Christmas?

“No!” Molly cried. “How could you send me to Yorkshire? It’s cold and windy and—”

“It’s for the best.” Lord Sutton’s tone was steely. Several people beside him nodded.

Molly’s eyes spouted tears. “But—but why so soon after Christmas?”

Lord Sutton said nothing, merely drew his brows together.

And then the worst of it dawned on her. “Oh, no,” she said, trembling. “I can’t miss the wedding, Papa. It’s a mere two weeks away, and I’m to stand next to Penelope and hold her flowers.”

She loved Penelope. Yes, Molly did, even though she wanted to marry Roderick, too!

It was all so confusing. At that moment, she loved and hated her family all at once, and she needed someone to hug her and tell her everything would be all right.

Mama, her heart cried. Help me!

But Mama had long since gone to heaven.

Nevertheless, Molly waited. She waited for Mama or the angels or somebody to make things seem less horrible. But Penelope didn’t step in and tell Papa to let her stay. No one did. Not even Roderick—and she’d written the poem for him.

The wretch.

The crowd was silent again. Harry turned to leave, his hand gripping his nose.

“Go,” Lord Sutton told Molly. Then he looked toward Cousin Augusta. “See that she’s taken home immediately and put to bed.”

“Of course,” Cousin Augusta said, and pushed her glasses up her nose. “No presents for you tomorrow, missy. This Christmas incident shall never be forgotten, not as long as I draw breath.”

Cousin Augusta was a mean old bat. And just yesterday, she’d wandered about the house looking for her glasses when they’d been right on her nose!

Molly fell in line with Harry.

“I hate you,” she whispered to him.

“The feeling is mutual,” he said quite cheerily.

And with those parting words, the two young troublemakers walked away from the people they loved best, both of their futures gravely altered by a single act of passion, both of them believing they were alone and destined to be alone—

Forever.

Lord Harry Traemore knew the man next to him in the private room at his club in London—Lord Wray, who’d slithered to the floor and begun snoring—might appear to most passersby to be passive, even sleeping. But Harry and his old schoolmates from Eton, their reasoning skills gently manipulated by rather copious amounts of brandy, realized this prone position of Wray’s was actually his attempt to bravely endure his fate.

After all, Wray was to be married in the morning. And everyone knew his future wife was…

Exactly like his mother .

“I’m sad,” Harry’s friend Charles Thorpe, Viscount Lumley, said, an empty snifter dangling from his hand. “A good friend’s freedom is being taken away.”

Lumley was rich as Croesus, with the most twinkling blue eyes Harry had ever seen and a grin that could light up Vauxhall Gardens at midnight better than any fireworks.

“It’s not right,” said Captain Stephen Arrow. His naval uniform, crisp and distinguished with its gold braid and buttons, offset the casual manner in which he sprawled in his chair. “He put up a good fight, didn’t he?”

Harry sloshed some brandy into his mouth. He couldn’t even taste its flavor anymore. His tongue…it felt numb. And his lips, for that matter. It wasn’t often he drank this much—contrary to the stories told about him, which he did nothing to deny.

But tonight was different. Tonight he felt the brush of the nuptial guillotine close to his own neck. He didn’t want to marry. Not for a long, long time, not until he was truly cornered by familial obligation. And as far as he knew, that would likely never happen.

Harry was simply a spare. Only if his robust older brother Roderick somehow stuck his spoon in the wall before his wife Penelope produced a son—the next heir to the House of Mallan—would Harry’s potential as a bridegroom begin to matter. Penelope had already produced four daughters—his splendid little nieces Helen, Cassandra, Juliet, and Imogen—so it couldn’t be long now before she gifted Roderick with the son the whole family craved, even prayed for.

Because it wouldn’t do, Harry knew from whispers in the servants’ hall and the perpetually disappointed expressions on his parents’ faces, for disgraced Harry—the returning war hero who was not a hero but should have been—to be merely one person away from inheriting the ducal title.

No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Which was why Harry was so averse to marriage in the first place. Why take on yet another person in his life who would only disdain him?

Wray smacked his lips and shifted on the floor.

“At least he’s out of his pain,” said Nicholas Staunton, Lord Maxwell, in that unruffled tone of his. Cool, mysterious, and rather unconventional despite his strong aristocratic lineage, Maxwell, Harry was well aware, was unlikely to voice an observation unless he were truly moved to do so. He raised a quizzing glass and observed Wray further. “I understand he’s had a hell of a year. Dozens of debutantes and their mothers chasing him without cease.”

“Poor sod,” said Harry, looking down at Wray. “He was even thrown into a carriage by two masked thugs and almost forced to elope with the Barnwell girl, but he leaped out on the London Bridge and nearly got run over by a coach-and-four instead.”

A loud popping noise—followed by another pop and a creak—sounded from the logs burning in the fireplace.

The sound even woke Wray. He opened his eyes, gazed at nothing, and said, “No. I won’t eat my porridge. Please don’t make me,” before he went back to his snoring.

“God save his tormented soul,” Arrow entreated with great solemnity.

And then the bookcase opened. The one near the fire.

Yes, opened .

Harry rubbed his eyes.

“What the hell?” said Arrow.

Harry knew, of course, that every great house had a secret door to somewhere, but he’d no idea his own club did.

A buxom female—rather matronly in dress and age, actually—stumbled out from a dark passageway, a spitting candle in her hand. The curls at her temples had gone to gray beneath the half-handkerchief pinned to her hair, and her gown, while a pleasing midnight blue, couldn’t disguise her spreading hips. She placed the candle on the mantel, turned to the men, and curtsied.