The Courtship Caper (Scandalous Miss Brightwells 6)

“But now he’s forgiven her.” Sebastian squeezed her hands again, an edge of desperation in his voice as he went on, “Please, Venetia, it’s true that I have no excuses for my behavior with Mrs Compton other than that she invited me to her evening party, whereupon I discovered I was the only guest.” He swallowed. “Do you want me to go on.”

“No, Sebastian!” Venetia shook her head. “It’s…painful.”

“And painful for me, too,” he murmured. I just thought you would want you to hear it from me. But, my darling, I'd searched for you until I believed you were gone forever. Dorothea had been with child for the previous nine months before her death. She left me with a beautiful son and an ache for what she might have yet enjoyed in her life. But she did not feel for me as...as you did. She did not care for the marriage bed. She was fond of me, but she never loved me.” He slipped his fingers beneath her cap and raked his fingers through her hair, as he added, “Knowing how you'd loved me, Venetia, and how glorious it was between us as a result, I tried to find it with Dorothea—and failed. But now I've found you again. Please, I beg you, if you won't say you'll marry me, then please say you'll let me try and win back your heart. Let me at least try and make you feel about me the way you once did?"

Venetia tried to keep him in focus.

After all these years of longing and loss and disappointment, their reunion seemed…

Too wonderful to be true.

His confession hadn’t sounded nearly as terrible as she’d thought it would. So he really had looked for her. Hope made her feel lighter than air.

Could she really believe that she’d finally found her happy ever after so easily?

Sebastian seemed as sincere and as ardent as he had ever been. He’d explained the anomalies of his past. And he’d asked her to marry him.

She allowed herself to smile.

And to believe they had a future.

Chapter 5

Sebastian watched Venetia return to her mistress with a sense of disquiet. He did not feel as confident as he’d expected he would after their arranged exchange, but he was determined he was fully capable of sweeping away any vestige of her reluctance.

He was well aware of Venetia’s determined nature. That had become clear when she’d been a child whom Sebastian had dismissed as wilful and overly confident. He’d been an adolescent at the time, with no reason to think more about Venetia than that the daughter of his father’s bailiff was wondrously clever at wrapping her father—and Sebastian’s—around her little finger the way they indulged her whims. He’d decried it as a nonsensical notion when Sebastian’s father had agreed, extraordinarily, that Venetia could be educated—in a rudimentary manner, of course—with his sister Libby.

With a dismissive shrug of his shoulders at the time, Sebastian had said he supposed it was a kindness to let the girl learn to sew a sampler, play the pianoforte, and do a little drawing and arithmetic if it would equip her with the skills to earn her way in the world as a governess.

How much thought did thirteen-year-old boys expend on such matters, anyway?

When Sebastian returned from the Grand Tour and encountered Miss Venetia Stone—now a young woman—after an absence of four years, his feelings were very different.

As were his father’s. Venetia, at eight, had been a little doll to indulge as much—or more—than he’d indulged his more stolid, less pretty daughter, Libby.

At eighteen, the penniless daughter of his bailiff, who’d now caught the eye of his son, had become a threat.

For, in Sebastian’s opinion, not all the Grecian beauties and Spanish dancers could compare with the allure that Miss Venetia presented him in just her little fingertip.

It was no different, now.

He gazed at the rippling waters of the lake that had been still just a moment before. How easily the calm was disturbed by the merest breeze he thought as he reflected on his own life. His own feelings.

He’d been as good a husband as could be hoped for. He’d offered Dorothea everything she had wanted: his fidelity, security, and, in the early days, his company when she seemed to desire it.

But she had not loved him.

Nor had he loved her, though for the years they’d rubbed along together, it had been tolerable. He’d thrown himself into different pursuits, and he’d had unfettered access to her bed, for she’d desired a son as much as he—and his father—had. She just hadn’t enjoyed the means required to produce one.

Venetia, by contrast, had had his heart: utterly and completely. And when Dorothea’s death had freed him, he’d realized more than ever how much he valued that: the true love of a woman who wanted nothing more of him than his affection and fidelity.

“Mr Wells?”

He spun around, twigs crackling as his boots dug into the soft soil.

“Miss Reeves.”

She took a step forward, wrapping her shawl more closely around her shoulders. The weather had become colder as the day had progressed, and she was underdressed. She shivered noticeably and smiled, and Sebastian felt a twinge of dismay. Glancing in Venetia’s direction, he was glad to see her now wheeling her elderly charge away from them. If he had to convince her that she was the only woman for him, he didn’t want an eye-fluttering debutante suggesting otherwise.