Kate clapped her hand over her mouth, but she couldn’t stifle her giggle. Bridgerton offered her a small, secret smile over Penelope’s head, and in that moment Kate had the oddest feeling that she understood this man completely.
But even stranger—suddenly she wasn’t so certain that he was the soulless, reprehensible rake she’d taken such comfort in believing him.
“Did you see that?”
Kate, who, along with the rest of the assembled company, had been staring openmouthed as Bridgerton led Penelope from the room, his head bent to hers as if she were the most fascinating woman ever to walk the earth, turned to see Edwina standing next to her.
“I saw the whole thing,” Kate said in a dazed voice. “I heard the whole thing.”
“What happened?”
“He was…he was…” Kate stumbled over her words, unsure of how to describe what exactly he’d done. And then she said something she’d never thought possible: “He was a hero.”
Chapter 12
A man with charm is an entertaining thing, and a man with looks is, of course, a sight to behold, but a man with honor—ah, he is the one, dear reader, to which the young ladies should flock.
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 2 MAY 1814
Later that night, after supper was done and the men went off to drink their port before rejoining the ladies with superior expressions on their faces, as if they had just talked about something weightier than which horse was likely to win the Royal Ascot; after the assembled company had played a sometime tedious and sometime hilarious round of charades; after Lady Bridgerton had cleared her throat and discreetly suggested that it might be time to turn in; after the ladies had taken their candles and headed off to bed; after the gentlemen had presumably followed…
Kate couldn’t sleep.
Clearly, it was to be one of those stare-at-the-cracks-in the-ceiling sort of nights. Except that there were no cracks in the ceiling at Aubrey Hall. And the moon wasn’t even out, so there wasn’t any light filtering through the curtains, which meant that even if there were cracks, she wouldn’t be able to see them, and…
Kate groaned as she pushed back her covers and rose to her feet. One of these days she was going to have to learn how to force her brain to stop racing in eight different directions at once. She’d already lain in bed for nearly an hour, staring up into the dark, inky night, shutting her eyes every now and then and trying to will herself to sleep.
It wasn’t working.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the expression on Penelope Featherington’s face when the viscount had swooped in to her rescue. Her own expression, Kate was sure, must have been somewhat similar—a bit stunned, a little delighted, and a lot as if she were about to melt onto the floor at that very minute.
Bridgerton had been that magnificent.
Kate had spent the entire day either watching or interacting with the Bridgertons. And one thing had become clear: Everything that had been said about Anthony and his devotion to his family—it was all true.
And while she wasn’t quite ready to relinquish her opinion that he was a rake and a rogue, she was starting to realize that he might be all that and something else as well.
Something good.
Something that, if she were trying to be utterly objective about the matter, which she admitted was difficult to do, really ought not disqualify him as a potential husband for Edwina.
Oh, why why why did he have to go and be nice? Why couldn’t he have just stayed the suave but shallow libertine it had been so easy to believe him? Now he was something else altogether, someone she feared she might actually come to care for.
Kate felt her face flush, even in the dark. She had to stop thinking about Anthony Bridgerton. At this rate she wasn’t going to get any sleep for a week.
Maybe if she had something to read. She’d seen a rather large and extensive library earlier that evening; surely the Bridgertons had some tome in there that would be guaranteed to put her to sleep.
She pulled on her robe and tiptoed to the door, careful not to wake Edwina. Not that that would have been an easy task. Edwina had always slept like the dead. According to Mary, she’d even slept through the night as a baby—from the very first day of her birth.
Kate slid her feet into a pair of slippers, then moved quietly into the hall, careful to look this way and that before shutting the door behind her. This was her first country house visit, but she’d heard a thing or two about these sorts of gatherings, and the last thing she wanted to do was run into someone on his way to a bedroom not his own.
If someone was carrying on with someone not his spouse, Kate decided, she didn’t want to know about it.
A single lantern lit the hall, giving the dark air a dim, flickering glow. Kate had grabbed a candle on her way out, so she walked over and flipped the lid of the lantern to light her wick. Once the flame was steady, she started toward the stairs, making sure to pause at every corner and check carefully for passersby.
A few minutes later she found herself in the library. It wasn’t large by ton standards, but the walls were covered floor to ceiling with bookcases. Kate pushed the door until it was almost closed—if someone was up and about, she didn’t want to alert them to her presence by letting the door click shut—and made her way to the nearest bookcase, peering at the titles.
“Hmmm,” she murmured to herself, pulling out a book and looking at the front cover, “botany.” She did love gardening, but somehow a textbook on the subject didn’t sound terribly exciting. Should she seek out a novel, which would capture her imagination, or should she go for a dry text, which would be more likely to put her to sleep?
Kate replaced the book and moved over to the next bookcase, setting her candle down on a nearby table. It appeared to be the philosophy section. “Definitely not,” she muttered, sliding her candle along the table as she moved one bookcase to the right. Botany might put her to sleep, but philosophy was likely to leave her in a stupor for days.
She moved the candle a bit to the right, leaning forward to peer at the next set of books, when a bright and completely unexpected flash of lightning lit up the room.
A short, staccato scream burst forth from her lungs, and she jumped backward, bumping her behind against the table. Not now, she silently pleaded, not here.
But as her mind formed the word, “here,” the entire room exploded with a dull boom of thunder.
And then it was dark again, leaving Kate shaking, her fingers gripping the table so hard that her joints locked. She hated this. Oh, how she hated this. She hated the noise and the streaks of light, and the crackling tension in the air, but most of all she hated what it made her feel.
So terrified that eventually she couldn’t feel anything at all.
It had been this way all her life, or at least as long as she could remember. When she’d been small, her father or Mary had comforted her whenever it had stormed. Kate had many memories of one of them sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her hand and whispering soothing words as thunder and lightning crashed around her. But as she grew older, she managed to convince people that she was over her affliction. Oh, everyone knew that she still hated storms. But she’d managed to keep the extent of her terror to herself.
It seemed the worst sort of weakness—one with no apparent cause, and unfortunately, one with no clear cure.
She didn’t hear any rain against the windows; maybe the storm wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it had started far away and was moving even farther. Maybe it was—
Another flash illuminated the room, squeezing out a second scream from Kate’s lungs. And this time the thunder had arrived even closer to the lightning, indicating that the storm was pulling closer.
Kate felt herself sink to the floor.
It was too loud. Too loud, and too bright, and too—
BOOM!
Kate huddled under the table, her legs folded up, her arms about her knees, waiting in
terror for the next round.
And then the rain began.
It was a bit past midnight, and all the guests (who were keeping somewhat to country hours) had gone to bed, but Anthony was still in his study, tapping his fingers against the edge of his desk in time with the rain beating against his window. Every now and then a bolt of lightning lit up the room in a flash of brilliance, and each clap of thunder was so loud and unexpected, he jumped in his chair.
God, he loved thunderstorms.
Hard to tell why. Maybe it was just the proof of nature’s power over man. Maybe it was the sheer energy of the light and sound that pounded around him. Whatever the case, it made him feel alive.
He hadn’t been particularly tired when his mother had suggested they all turn in, and so it had seemed silly not to use these few moments of solitude to go over the Aubrey Hall books his steward had left out for him. The Lord knew his mother would have his every minute crammed with activities involving eligible young women on the morrow.
But after an hour or so of painstaking checking, the dry tip of a quill tapping against each number in the ledger as he added and subtracted, multiplied and occasionally divided, his eyelids began to droop.
It had been a long day, he allowed, closing the ledger but leaving a piece of paper sticking out to mark his place. He’d spent much of the morning visiting tenants and inspecting buildings. One family needed a door repaired. Another was having trouble harvesting their crops and paying their rent, due to the father’s broken leg. Anthony had heard and settled disputes, admired new babies, and even helped to fix a leaky roof. It was all part of being a landowner, and he enjoyed it, but it was tiring.
The Pall Mall game had been an enjoyable interlude, but once back at the house, he’d been thrust into the role of host for his mother’s party. Which had been almost as exhausting as the tenant visits. Eloise was barely seventeen and clearly had needed someone to watch over her, that bitchy Cowper girl had been tormenting poor Penelope Featherington, and someone had had to do something about that, and…