Miss Dashing, page 28
Hecate heard that for the vow it was and answered him with a kiss. Phillip was apparently in no mood to hurry, drat him. Hecate was in no mood to dawdle, and a delicious contest ensued.
She remained in possession of her wits long enough to give him the words in addition to the kisses and caresses. “You will always have me too, Phillip. Always, and you will have me right now as well, if you’d please be about it.”
And nobody could be about it as Phillip could when he was determined on his objective. Hecate tried counting stars to distract her from the pleasure. She tried listening to the distant refrains of the good-night waltz drifting over the woods and fields.
She gave up, and gave in, and gave and gave and gave, until Phillip had sent her twice ’round the bend. When he would have withdrawn, she stopped him.
“Stay with me, Phillip, please. This time, stay with me.”
He levered up on his arms. “Are you proposing to me, Miss Brompton?”
She tried to think. Didn’t get very far. “We do this properly. I’m asking for permission to court you.”
“Ah.” Phillip seemed to be having trouble getting thoughts and words in harness together too. “Is a special license proper?”
“Very. Set you back five pounds, though.”
“No matter. My beloved is a financial genius, and besides, that’s the best use of five pounds I ever heard of. Kiss me.”
The courtship commenced to the wild satisfaction of both parties, who were frequently wildly satisfied, even after the service at St. Nebo’s in Crosspatch Corners, Berkshire, and the wedding breakfast at the Crosspatch Arms.
A dear friend of the family, one Edward Ross, late of Bristol, stood up for the groom, as did Lord and Lady Tavistock. The whole village stood up for the bride, and that, according to Lord Phillip’s faultless sense of proper etiquette, was exactly how it should always be.
To My Dear Readers
I had such fun with this story. Phillip is my favorite kind of hero—quiet, sweet, and shrewd—and Hecate is my favorite kind of heroine—also quiet, sweet, and shrewd. They were made for each other, and yet, getting them together took some doing. Why is that always the case?
Our next Mischief in Mayfair title is, of course, Gavin DeWitt’s story with the lovely Mrs. Roberts. What is going on with those two? I’ve included an excerpt from their story—Miss Dramatic—below. The retail release for this title will be Nov. 28, while the web store version will come out on or around Nov. 14 (with print probably close to the Nov. 14 date). Ordering links here.
I’ve also launched a new historical mystery series. A Gentleman Fallen on Hard Times is the first tale to feature Lord Julian Caldicott, social pariah, former soldier, and sleuth at large despite his inclination to stay home with all the blinds drawn and read racy poetry. Excerpt below. Books two and three, A Gentleman of Dubious Reputation, and A Gentleman in Challenging Circumstances, will follow later this year.
And finally, I’m releasing a little Christmas story—Worth More Than Rubies—which was part of a library/web store limited release last year in a duet titled Yuletide Gems. The duet has been retired, and the story—at 40k+ words, I hesitate to call it a novella—will be available in the webstore by late September and from the retail sites in early November. Excerpt below.
If you’d like to stay up to date on all my illustrious doin’s, I put out a newsletter about once a month. I will never sell or swap your email addy, and unsubscribing is easy. Following me on Bookbub will keep you apprised of new releases and pre-orders, and my Deals page is where I post all the discounts, early releases, and freebies. I also blog most Sundays, and my blog commenters are my first choice for ARC give aways.
Phew! I hope you are having as much fun reading these stories as I have writing them! Happy reading!
Grace Burrowes
Read on for an excerpt from Miss Dramatic, Mischief in Mayfair, Book Nine
Miss Dramatic—Excerpt
“Are you two out of your happily married minds?” Gavin DeWitt did not shout, nor did he pitch the nearest porcelain shepherdess to the hearthstones or lapse into profanity. The acting profession taught a man to control himself before all audiences, as did life in Crosspatch Corners. “The only curse worse than a house party is a hen party, and you propose to gather up every clucking biddy ever to roost at a Mayfair ridotto.”
“Remind me again,” Lord Phillip Vincent drawled. “What exactly is a ridotto?”
His brother, Trevor, Marquess of Tavistock, lounged with an elbow on the library mantel. “The usual dancing and flirtation. Better food at a ball, better gaming at a ridotto.”
“Ah.” Phillip had taken to studying the niceties of polite society as Gavin might have applied himself to a Shakespeare soliloquy. “Interesting.”
Gavin considered pitching the shepherdess at the marquess, his brother-by-marriage. “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool. If you know polite society so well, Tavistock, then you know this gathering will only end in disaster.”
Tavistock merely smiled in that urbane, self-possessed way of his. “In finding you a wife, you mean?”
Lord Phillip rose from the desk. “Stow it, Tavistock. Gloating is bad form even here in the shires. Just because you and I are the happiest of men, delighting in the affections of our darling wives, doesn’t mean you should tease DeWitt about his lamentable bachelorhood.”
Neither Moliere nor the Bard offered a riposte worthy of that bit of inanity. “I like my bachelorhood very well, thank you, and intend to enjoy it for some time.”
Tavistock and Lord Phillip exchanged a look possible only between men who were both in the early throes of wedded bliss. Tavistock was fair, Lord Phillip dark-haired, but the pair of them were tall and rangy, and they shared a certain resemblance in their features.
And in their patient pitying of Gavin’s bachelor state.
“I was like you once,” Tavistock said, as if once had been ages and ages ago, not a mere handful of weeks. “Determined to avoid parson’s mousetrap, but I had a reason: My father’s example would have put any man off marriage. Phillip was concerned about his past overshadowing his future, which we can also lay at our late father’s feet. What’s your excuse?”
“Why do I need an excuse to enjoy my freedom? Phillip, you professed the self-same contentment until very recently.”
Phillip’s smile was sweet, and that hurt worse than Tavistock’s smug condescension. “Then I met my Hecate, and mere contentment would no longer do, though I understand your hesitation. Women like Hecate and Amaryllis are rare.”
Phillip had been raised right here in Crosspatch Corners, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife—and its licentiousness. He was in some regards the most innocent of men, though in his understated, soft-spoken way, also quite shrewd.
“You could not possibly understand why the prospect of a lot of spinsters and meddlers congregating beneath my very nose gives me the collywobbles.” Opening night on Drury Lane wouldn’t have been half so intimidating. “These are the ladies who make up numbers, who pop up on short notice when more fashionable guests decline an invitation at the last minute. They aren’t half so harmless as you might think. You have no idea…”
Phillip and Tavistock were looking at him as if he’d lapsed into Old English.
“You’ve been off racketing about the shires for two years,” Tavistock said. “Doing your Shakespeare impersonation. How could you predict the sort of women Hecate and Amaryllis will favor with an invitation?”
The former Miss Hecate Brompton was not well known to Gavin, but he was better acquainted with his sister Amaryllis than with any other person living up on the earth. He could predict exactly what sort of ladies she’d invite to Berkshire for a few weeks of summer socializing.
Dragons in disguise, basilisks in bonnets, wyverns in white gloves.
“While I was on the stage,” Gavin said, “my troupe was occasionally called up on to grace social gatherings.”
Phillip squinted at him. “You were hired to entertain in private homes. Juggle for your supper?”
If only the expected entertainments had been limited to juggling. “We enacted selected scenes, delivered famous speeches, and assisted with the amateur theatricals. We were also expected to serve as supporting cast.”
“Flirt with the dowagers?” Tavistock pushed away from the mantel. “So you rounded out the dance sets when you weren’t mooning about the court of Denmark or preparing to storm Agincourt. What of it?”
Both men regarded Gavin with genuine puzzlement. If he told them the rest of it, that puzzlement might well turn to disgust or amusement. The situation wanted some thought, some rehearsal. He’d find a way to explain, a way to say what needed to be said without making himself look like the ignorant Yahoo he’d been.
“For the good of all concerned,” he said, “the only role I will be playing for next few years is the country squire conscientiously minding his acres right here in Crosspatch Corners. Perhaps after Caroline and Diana are launched, I will see fit to add a wife to the cast at Twidboro Hall.”
“Wife is not a part to be acted,” Phillip said, “any more than husband is a role to be put on and taken off. One fears for your understanding, DeWitt.”
Better that than fearing for a man’s good name.
“You won’t run off?” Tavistock said. “Hecate and Amaryllis have quite warmed to the idea of a mostly-ladies gathering, and if you were to absent yourself, they would be puzzled.”
Amaryllis would be hurt, possibly furious. “I won’t run off.” Appending the word again was unnecessary. For the two years Gavin been racketing about the provincial stages, his family hadn’t known where to find him, through no direct fault of his.
The indirect fault had been and remained entirely his.
“Splendid.” Phillip came around the desk and clapped him on the back. “You will enjoy yourself, and we might even let you do some of that to-be-or-not-to-be business. The guests we’re expecting are a bookish lot, and they will doubtless appreciate some rousing speeches from a tall, dark, and handsome Hamlet.”
“Not Hamlet,” Gavin said, and handsome was doing it a bit brown. “The poor fellow went mad, committed suicide by duel, and left his kingdom ripe for plucking by a foreign invader. I don’t suppose you have a copy of the guest list?”
Another shared glance that spoke volumes. “Got him!” from Tavistock, and “I told you he’d come around,” from Phillip.
Tavistock opened the desk’s middle drawer and brandished a piece of foolscap. “Might not be complete, but these are the ladies who have accepted.”
Gavin read down the list, recognizing a few names, and allowing himself a gathering sense of relief. Formidable women, but none with a reason to wish him ill. No drunkards or hopeless gamblers, no prattling…
Oh, spite. Oh, hell. His dearest memory, his deepest regret lurked near the bottom of list, gracing the space between Lady Iris Wolverhampton and Miss Zinnia Peasegood.
“You see some familiar names, I trust?” Lord Phillip sounded pleased with himself. “I know you and Mrs. Roberts are cordially acquainted.”
“She was at the Nunnsuch house party, wasn’t she?” Tavistock asked, overdoing the casual tone by half. “A widow, as I recollect.”
“Mrs. Roberts was at Nunnsuch,” Gavin replied, passing back the list. “An agreeable, sensible lady.”
“And easy on the eyes,” Phillip added. “Surely you noticed that part?”
How could Gavin have failed to notice that a woman who’d been luminous eighteen months ago despite her grief had bloomed in the wake of mourning? Hair between auburn and Titian that loved both sunlight and candlelight, a smile to intrigue even a saint—Gavin was not a saint—and silences that could bless or condemn. Then there were her hands, her eyes, the way she caressed the rim of her wine glass when her thoughts wandered…
“Quite pretty,” Gavin said. “Also well read, and much enamored of her late spouse, if I’m to believe the Earl of Nunn. I can see why Amaryllis would enjoy her company. Unless you two have any more ambushes to spring upon me, I’m off to see Old Man Deever about a new pair of riding boots.”
The bedrock of any successful role was in the details. Which hat would a rake wear to see his mistress? Which would he wear to take supper at his sister’s house? The audience noticed those details, even if they didn’t realize they noticed.
The mention of riding boots was a such a detail—Gavin was notably fond of his colt, Roland—and apparently convincing.
“My regards to the Deevers,” Tavistock said. “Amaryllis and I will expect you and the rest of the family for supper tomorrow evening.”
Gavin assayed his best, harmless smile. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
He knew not to rush his exit and denied himself a moment to tarry in the wings. He cared not one fresh horse dropping how they Phillip and Tavistock parsed the conversation.
He knew only that this hen party could foretell his doom, but that he’d risk even his good name if he could once again escort Mrs. Rose Roberts in to dinner.
* * *
Order your copy of Miss Dramatic, and read on for an excerpt from A Gentleman Fallen on Hard Times, The Lord Julian Mysteries, Book One!
A Gentleman Fallen on Hard Times—Excerpt
Society addresses me as Lord Julian Caldicott, though as that aristocratic curiosity, a legitimate bastard, I bear no blood relation to Claudius, the late Duke of Waltham. Toward the end of His Grace’s life, when he and I were both using canes as more than fashionable accessories, we got on tolerably well.
Not so in earlier years, though let it be said both parties as well as my mother had a hand in instigating skirmishes.
I survived those battles and even weathered Waterloo in better shape than many. The worst blows to my body and spirit were dealt long before Wellington’s great victory, when I’d been held as a prisoner of war by the French.
The guns have gone silent, the ghosts have not. The best medicine for me of late is solitude and quiet. I was thus starting my day with an ancient Sumerian text involving agrarian metaphors and procreation when Lady Ophelia Oliphant sailed into my study like a seventy-four gunner bearing down on the French line.
“Julian, do instruct your butler that his harrumphing and stodging are pointless. I call only when you are on the premises, and his posturing will not serve.”
“I am at home because you pounce at an indecently early hour, Godmama. Good morning to you.” I drew a blank page over my translation—Godmama could read upside down and, I am convinced, with her eyes closed—and came around the desk to kiss her ladyship’s proffered cheek. She smelled of bourbon roses and mischief, and in my youth, she’d been one of my favorite people.
Her ladyship had known considerable sorrow, burying two husbands, a son, and a daughter, the latter two in their early childhoods. She banished life’s woes with a determination I envied, except when she aimed her schemes at me. Since I’d returned from the battlefields, she’d left me mostly in peace, though the look in her gimlet blue eyes said my reprieve was at an end.
“How can it be a good morning,” she began, “when you look like a death’s head on a mop stick and your hair needs a trim? Young men today might as well be die-away schoolgirls for all they primp, lisp, and sigh. Back in my day, men could wear the most elegant fashions and still comport themselves like men. You lot, with your scientific pugilism and Hungary water, make me bilious.”
“The only pugilism I engage in of late is verbal, dear lady, and never a drop of Hungary water has touched my manly person. Shall I ring for a tray, or will you swan out the door before my poor, stodging Harris can heed my summons?”
“You wish.” She settled onto the sofa, her presence a contrast to the masculine appointments and closed curtains of my study. Godmama had been a beauty, to hear her tell it, and my mother—who would argue with the Almighty over the ideal order of the Commandments—did not contradict her. The former beauty still indulged in every fashionable whim her heart desired or her modistes suggested.
She donned pale silk when sprigged muslin would have done nicely, and she wore jewels during daylight hours. Her slippers, gloves, and reticules were exquisitely embroidered and usually all of a piece—today’s theme was roses and gold. No grand diva ever assembled her stage appearance as carefully as Godmama put herself together simply to disturb my peace on a Tuesday morning.
My mother muttered about Lady Ophelia’s flamboyant style, but I was nobody to begrudge Godmama her crotchets. One coped with grief as best one could, as I, half of England, and much of the Continent had occasion to know.
“Cease pacing about, dear boy.” Her ladyship patted the place beside her. “I come to you in my hour of need, and you must not disappoint me.”
I settled a good two feet away from her ladyship. I wasn’t keen on anybody making free with my person, and Godmama was extravagantly affectionate. I had a valet. Sterling tended to my clothing, and I tended to… me. I was working up to allowing him to trim my hair, but until that day, an old-fashioned queue served well enough.
Though I have yet to obtain the thirtieth year of my age, my hair is snow white, a gift from my French captors. I owe the French army for my weak eyes, as well. My vision is adequate, but strong sunlight, London’s relentless coal smoke, or simple fatigue can cause my eyes to sting and water. Tinted spectacles help, though they add to the eccentricity of my appearance.
To my dismay, my looks render me far too appealing to frisky dowagers. Lady Ophelia likely finds my situation hilarious.
“I have disappointed you any number of times, my lady. I’m sure you’ll weather another blow if need be, stalwart that you are.”
Before I’d gone for a soldier, she would have countered with a witty retort about her fortitude being the result of the thankless job of godparenting me, but now she frowned, glanced at the clock, and held her silence.
