Elizabeth Beacon - Captain Langthorne's Proposal

‘Don’t celebrate your escape too soon, my lady. I learnt strategy from a master, and I’m not so patriotic I can’t watch and learn from Boney’s tactics either. A skirmish is never over until the last shot is fired.’

‘Except your foe might refuse battle.’

‘You never ran from a fight in your life, my lady,’ he said softly, and the steady understanding in his eyes made her shiver.

At least she somehow convinced herself it was a shiver, even as she was held by his gaze, warmed by a host of wonderful possibilities even as her sensible self was telling her to break eye contact and shore up her faltering defences immediately. Torn by two contrary urges, she felt the true power of sensual temptation for the first time in her life.

‘On the contrary, I shall retreat to fight another day. It may just be that you haven’t observed the enemy, Sir Adam.’

‘You’re not my enemy, and it’s high time we went—unless you’d like me to compromise you irredeemably, of course?’

Carefully relinquishing the reins to him, with as little contact as possible, she preserved what she hoped was a chillingly dignified silence from then on and tried hard not to admire his easy mastery of the pair. They were highly trained and well mannered, but spirited enough to prove a handful to a less experienced whip. He had good hands as well, she conceded, slanting a look at them—long-fingered and elegant, despite his size and all too evident strength. They would be sure of touch but gentle, she decided, and shivered once more as she guiltily imagined them touching her in the most shockingly intimate fashion. She blushed and turned an apparently intent gaze on the spring barley rushing to fresh green life in a nearby field.

Watching him like some besotted schoolgirl gloating over her hero wouldn’t do at all. She was a widow of four and twenty, not some dazed child, greedy to experience all the forbidden delights the world had to offer.

‘Are you going to enlighten me about your discoveries, Sir Adam?’ she asked, hoping he was too occupied with his pair to notice that betraying flush.

‘Oh, that feminine curiosity you all share—however strikingly you differ in other ways,’ he said, with a secretive smile that probably meant he missed nothing. ‘I found some things I expected and others I certainly did not.’

‘Well, now I know. Pray don’t be more infuriating than you can help, Sir Adam—even if you are a man and therefore can’t avoid it.’

‘Well, that’s put me in my place,’ he lied blithely. ‘But if you must know the vault had been opened lately, as I’m sure you suspected after hearing Wharton’s fanciful tale. The grass around it was torn, as if something heavy was dragged over it. Why anyone should disturb the dead when there must be so many less macabre hiding places in the neighbourhood is currently beyond me, but I did find this,’ he told her, taking the reins in one hand while he dug in his pocket. He handed a small object to her with yet another frisson of shock when their fingers touched.

Serena wondered if he felt it too, but if he did nothing showed on his face as he concentrated on his pair once more and she forced herself to look coolly composed as she examined the object he had passed her. It was a button of distinctive design, still attached to a piece of dark grey cloth. An elusive memory stirred at the back of Serena’s mind, but however hard she tried she couldn’t make it tangible.

‘It looks vaguely familiar,’ she finally admitted, ‘but anyone we know could have lost it in the village churchyard.’

‘It has been torn off in some sort of accident—or an argument, perhaps. No man would have a button wrenched off like that and not notice unless he were preoccupied with something very urgent indeed.’

‘Yet until we discover something illegal has taken place we’re as guilty of flying at phantoms as any gothic heroine.’

‘Speak for yourself, my lady. Nobody ever accused me of being a heroine before.’

And nobody ever would, she decided, with considerable exasperation at his wilful misunderstanding. ‘It amazes me that Rachel never pushed you into the lake when you were children, Sir Adam.’

‘Not for want of trying. But, being five years younger than I am, she was always too small to manage it on her own.’

‘What a shame I didn’t know you both better then; somehow we could have soaked you between us.’

‘In your presence I would have been on my best behaviour even in my unregenerate days,’ he said, with such a mix of teasing and admiration that she felt the breath catch in her throat.

‘You regarded me as a scrawny and irritating chit, not worth knowing because I couldn’t play cricket. Believe me, I’m liberally supplied with male cousins who left me in no doubt as to the general inferiority of the female half of the population when they were home for the holidays, so there’s no need to pretend you were any different,’ she managed, coolly enough.

‘Scrubby brats!’ he said, with apparent amusement and far too much understanding of her contrary emotions in that teasing smile. ‘Point them out to me when we’re in town and I’ll dunk them in the Serpentine.’

Serena couldn’t suppress a delighted chuckle over her mental picture of the scapegrace Marquis of Helvelin, immaculate Mr Julius Brafford and the very dashing Lieutenant the Honourable Nicholas Prestbury picking mud and pondweed off their normally resplendent persons. ‘Well, you could try,’ she said with a smile, as she reckoned up the combined strength of her three tall and muscular relatives.

‘You should laugh more often, your ladyship. It makes you young and carefree instead of overburdened and old before your time.’

So he thought she looked haggish, did he? Her smile wiped effectively off her face, Serena frowned, then gazed haughtily at the distant Welsh Hills to prove he meant nothing to her whatsoever.

‘I am a widow,’ she informed him majestically. ‘And I live a very comfortable life, thank you very much.’

‘That you do not,’ he replied, as if he would like to shake her for taking such an optimistic view of her situation. ‘You’re exploited by your mother-in-law, and when not relieving her of her duties or fussing over her you’re at the mercy of a sister-in-law who delights in setting your consequence at nought and her own A1 at Lloyd’s. What I quite fail to fathom in the face of such wilful self-abasement is why on earth you endure it and what Helvelin is about to let you, considering he’s head of your family. If you’re truly content with such a lot you’re far more poor-spirited than I ever thought you.’

‘I’m nothing of the sort,’ she snapped furiously, trying hard not to let him see how that brutal assessment of her character had hurt. ‘And I’ll thank you to leave my cousin out of this and mind your own business.’

‘No. You’re Rachel’s best friend, and it concerns her deeply that you let yourself be trampled on by a family who don’t really appreciate you. Even if you won’t allow me to be concerned on my own account, you can’t forbid me to worry about my sister’s friend.’

His voice was gruff with emotions she dared not examine too closely. Her breathing threatened to stall in the face of any chances she might be about to throw away—the main one being the possibility Adam Langthorne might care about her. That could not, must not be. There was no future in such thoughts on either side. Even if she loved him—and so far she’d managed to avoid that trap—she couldn’t marry him. Come to think about it, she couldn’t consider it especially if she loved him.

‘I suppose I could always join my aunt in Bath for a while,’ she said without enthusiasm.

‘Where you’ll run her household and look after Helvelin’s tribe of sisters instead of being at the beck and call of your family by marriage, I suppose? You have a way of humbling a man with your choices to avoid him that is without parallel, Lady Summerton,’ he replied austerely.