In any event, this outstanding tactical maneuver on Gideon’s part prompted Max to say in some awe as he stood at the window and watched the earl ride off, “That’s why it’s so convenient that he’s the earl. He thinks of things. All I could think was how I’d have been stuck inside the coach with those two all the way back to Mayfair, and how I was going to make Valentine pay for that indignity the moment his leg was mended. Still, we should have thought of something like that.”
“We shouldn’t have had to,” Kate responded, at which point she and Max and Bailey turned to stare at Valentine, who was pretending a great interest in the bit of orange marmalade slowly sliding off his piece of toast and heading for his nightshirt.
In any case, Sylvia Wise was halfway to the city by now, and while Bailey wasn’t breathing all that easily, he at least no longer felt as if a noose was slowly tightening around his neck.
And in just a few days’ time, he and Alana
would be wed, and the unfortunate interlude with Sylvia Wise would be a thing of the past.
Unless Kate was wrong, and Alana was about to ask him to release her from their engagement.
Unless Kate was wrong, and Alana was in no mood to be spoken to, let alone…seduced.
And how in bloody blazes did a person go about seducing someone in the first place?
Bailey was young, only four and twenty, but he wasn’t some wet-behind-the-ears looby. He’d bedded his share of women. Granted, the evenings all ended with coins leaving his pocket to reside in the woman’s purse, but still—he wasn’t inexperienced.
It was just that Alana was…different. She was young, only just nineteen, and innocent. He’d written her poems. He’d brought her flowers. He’d kissed her fingertips. They’d shared only one brief, chaste betrothal kiss. He…he cherished her. Yes, that was the word: cherish. She was a lady. Innocent. Virginal.
In point of fact, he’d been more than a little concerned that their wedding night might prove something of a shock to her.
Her mother had died just as Alana had left the schoolroom; she was scarcely a woman of the world. The only female influence she’d encountered before entering her first Season had come from the Dowager Countess and Kate. Bailey felt certain Kate wouldn’t have educated Alana in the way of wives, and he could only pray the dowager hadn’t.
He, her husband, would be cast in that role. Teacher. He’d planned to be gentle. Seduction wasn’t a word that went well with gentle. One didn’t have a gentle seduction. Seduction was wild, impetuous, fraught with impatience and heavy breathing…and often indulged in sans bed.
While the notion appealed to him very much—he had to be honest with himself and admit that—Alana had never experienced real, womanly desire, he was certain, and his prenuptial ardor might frighten her.
“It’s the only way,” Kate had told him again just that morning. “Saying you love her is one thing. But those are just words. Anyone can say the words. Saying you would have tossed away her fortune is nothing but mouthing words that even I find hard to believe, considering your circumstances. It doesn’t matter how you found each other, things like fortune don’t matter when there’s real love—I do truly believe that. What matters is that you did find each other.”
“I know, I understand,” Bailey had told her, hoping she’d stop talking, as they were in the hallway outside the breakfast room when she caught up to him, and someone could come along and overhear them.
“Now you have to show her you can’t exist without her, that she is the sun and the moon and the stars and all of that nonsense to you. That’s probably been the problem all along, you know, Bailey. You’ve been treating Alana as if she’s made of crystal. She would never have questioned your love for her if you’d—well, you know what I mean. At least I dearly hope so, or we’re all lost.”
He’d been lectured by a woman, a young, unmarried woman at that, nearly five years his junior. And the bleeding pity of it had been that she was right.
How many nights had he left Alana at the Redgrave mansion and then walked the streets of Mayfair, unable to sleep for wanting her? How many times had he longed to pull her into his arms, kiss her the way a man kisses the woman he loves. Touch her. Teach her. Take her.
Now he wasn’t simply being encouraged to do all of those things—he’d been ordered to.
“And yet you’ve been sitting here running your mind in circles, instead of hunting up Alana,” he told himself as he left the others and went off in search of his betrothed. “Maybe you are a looby.”
* * *
ALANA HAD BEEN WALKING the lower gardens for what seemed like hours, pretending an interest in the flowers and topiaries that was shallow at best, wondering how long it would take for Bailey to find her. Kate had promised to position herself in the drawing room and then steer him in the correct direction if he should ask where she was. But perhaps he hadn’t asked.
She wouldn’t blame him. She’d conducted herself abominably and then avoided him whenever possible. She’d known then that she’d behaved badly, but it had taken Kate to truly open her eyes to what she had done.
Of course Bailey hadn’t wanted to answer her. How could he have tossed his family aside—three dowries to be found, not to mention fixing the leaking roofs on the estate, paying off all his father’s duns and other creditors—all for love? That would have been selfish of him in the extreme.
Worse, or so Kate had explained the thing, he would at the same time be asking the woman he loved to share his penury, and that he would never do. He was a man, and therefore too proud to ask such a sacrifice of her. Men could be so unreasonably starchy and honorable that way. Kate had told her.
She never should have asked the question. She never should have thought it. The question had been romantic and silly and unworthy of a person who longed to call herself woman, wife.
And she’d thought of one thing more, the question Bailey had not asked of her and most certainly would have been justified in putting to her: If I were not heir to an earldom, but only a poor man with no prospects, would you have married me?
In her mind, she’d said vehemently, Of course I would have! But then she’d thought about Gideon’s sure protests to such a union, and what her mother’s reaction would have been were she still alive, as Bailey’s mother was. Yes, she would still have said that she would marry him. But it would not have been easy, and she would have hesitated before answering, just as Bailey had done.
She may even have protested that there was no reason to answer, because that was not the case for them.