Lord Dashwood Missed Out(2)
He’d accepted a place with a cartography expedition and left England with scarcely a word of farewell. Nora had felt rejected, worthless.
And—as the months went by—she grew angry. With Dash, with the world, with herself.
One lonely evening, after drinking a touch too much sherry, she sharpened a quill and attempted to purge her feelings on paper. By first light she’d put the finishing flourish on an essay. A literary vindication for every young woman who’d pinned her hopes to a man and then watched both man and hopes walk away.
She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed anew.
Oh, Lord. If you can grant me one plea, let it be this one: Please, please, please. Don’t let him have read that pamphlet.
“Your pamphlet made for quite interesting reading.” His voice had a frosty edge.
Nora slid her eyes heavenward. Really. Do you ever answer these things?
“What was it called?” he mused, tapping his finger on the seat rail. “Oh, yes. Lord Dashwood Missed Out.”
“Actually, the title is Lord Ashwood Missed Out.”
“Yes, of course.” He fixed her with a stern glare.
She tried to escape it by turning to look out the window, but the small pane was too foggy. She huffed a breath and rubbed the glass with a corner of her sleeve.
All the while, she could sense him staring at her.
“Are you ill, Miss Browning? You’ve turned quite pale.”
“Coach travel rarely agrees with me.”
“Pity. Is there something I might offer to increase your comfort?”
“Thank you. I find that silence is the best medicine.”
He made an amused noise. “Then I shall let you have your silence. That is, just as soon as you’ve answered one question to my satisfaction.”
The back of her neck tingled.
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, confronting her. Caging her. Forbidding her to escape.
And now the tingling made its way down her spine, bringing her every nerve to awareness.
“What, precisely, did I miss out on?”
CHAPTER TWO
“Bollocks.”
With a baleful look at the gray clouds overhead, Pauline gathered her cloak about her shoulders and hurried across the village green, dodging raindrops as she went.
When she clattered through the door of Brights’ All Things shop, she was glad to see a familiar face—and a flash of sunny hair—behind the counter.
Sally Bright looked up from her work, glimpsed Pauline, and then dipped in an exaggerated curtsy. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
“You know how I hate it when you call me that.”
“Of course.” Sally gave her a cheeky look. “That’s why I do it.”
Yes, Pauline understood that. And she couldn’t help but smile in response as she unknotted the drawstring of her cloak. She and Sally were the oldest of friends, and old friends teased one another—even when one of them kept a dry goods shop and the other had become a duchess.
“Has the mail coach come through?”
“Not yet.” Sally returned to her work, arranging a row of Christmas ribbons on a prominent shelf. “No doubt it’s delayed by the weather.”
“That’s what I feared.”
“Why, were you waiting on something in the post?”
“Not a letter. But I’m worried about the roads. Miss Browning is supposed to arrive today. You know, the visiting authoress?”
“Certainly I know her. I like her. She sells. I ordered in a dozen extra copies of her pamphlet. Sold every last one, and I’ve just received a dozen more.”
Without turning, Sally tipped her head toward a stack of slender pamphlets encased in plain brown board.
Pauline walked to the display and picked up the topmost folder. She opened it to see the defiant title: Lord Ashwood Missed Out: A Gentleman’s Rejection, Rejected by Miss Elinora Browning.
“No surprise that one’s popular with the Spindle Cove set,” Sally said.
“Indeed.”
Spindle Cove had long been a refuge for “unconventional” young women—the bookish, the awkward, the heartsick, the painfully shy. In short, any well-bred young lady who didn’t quite fit in with London society.
As a serving girl who’d somehow married a scandalous duke, Pauline counted herself foremost among the odd ducks. From time to time, Griff needed to spend a few weeks in London, but she certainly didn’t fit in there. She would far rather be here in Spindle Cove, surrounded by her friends and children—and close to her sister Daniela, with whom she managed the Two Sisters subscription library.
Miss Browning’s visit was the first in what Pauline hoped would be a series of literary salons. An attraction during the seaside village’s low season. However, if their first authoress failed to appear, the series would not be off to an auspicious start.
And Daniela would take the disappointment to heart.
In a village of unique young women, Pauline’s sister was perhaps the most different of all. Despite being a grown woman, Daniela had the understanding of a child. She struggled with speaking and complicated sums, and she was deeply wounded when long-awaited pleasures didn’t go as planned.
Pauline let the pamphlet fall closed. “Well, I can’t just stand about fretting. Too much to be done. Daniela is still readying the shop. The children are at home with their grandmother. I must go over to the Bull and Blossom to see how the biscuits and cakes are getting on. Griff is due back from Town. He’s bringing the sherry.”
“Sherry? If you’re serving spirits, even I might attend.”
“It’s Miss Browning’s favorite. Supposedly too much sherry one evening is what gave her the courage to write this.” She tapped the pamphlet on the counter.
Sally took the pamphlet from Pauline’s grasp and leafed through it. “This was more than sherry. Something tells me the woman brash enough to give a wealthy lord a published rebuke isn’t about to be cowed by a bit of typical English weather. It’s not even three in the afternoon. She’ll make it through. It’s only a touch of rain.”
Pauline peered out the window, wishing she shared her friend’s certainty. “It looks as though it’s turning to snow.”
“Well?” Dash prompted. “I’m waiting.”
Keeping his arms braced on his knees, he interlaced his fingers in the center and drummed his thumbs with impatience.
I have you now, Nora. You won’t escape.
“I’m sorry, what was the question?”
“You published a pamphlet alleging that I missed out. What, precisely, did I miss out on?”
She didn’t answer, which irritated him.
More irritating by far, however, was the way his mind starting filling in answers of its own.
Those lively eyes. That fiery hair. That damnably tempting body.
He recalled her being powerfully tempting, of course, but he’d taken to attributing those memories to his own youthful randiness. To an adolescent boy, even a shapely table leg looked arousing.
And surely she would have aged and changed. He’d aged and changed. The tropical climate and sea crossings had weathered him.
But Nora wasn’t weathered. She was as pale and rosy and deliciously curvy as all of his memories—only more so. The only noticeable difference he could find was the scarcity of freckles on her cheeks and neck. Had they faded, he wondered? Or had they merely migrated south like a flock of sparrows, seeking warmer climes beneath the tropic of her neckline?
His gaze wandered downward. Perhaps if he were to grasp the tight-fitting cobalt velvet of her traveling frock and rip it seam from seam—laying her bare—he would discover them.
He shook himself. Erotic fantasies were all well and good, but not when they involved Nora Browning.
He didn’t want to want her. Not after what she’d done.
Not after what she’d written.
“The pamphlet?” Her lush, pink mouth broke into a nervous smile. “I hope you can understand, Dash. That wasn’t about you.”
He stared at her with incredulity.
The nerve of her denial. The unmitigated cheek. He was almost impressed by it.
“Not at all,” he said, playing along. “I understand completely.”
“Oh.” She exhaled. “I’m so glad.”
“Obviously Dashwood and Ashwood are entirely different names.”
“Well, I meant to say—”
“Just because you penned a petty, vindictive screed about a handsome young lord of your acquaintance . . . a lord whose title happens to be a mere consonant different from my own . . . it would be absurd of me to suppose I was the inspiration.”
The rain pelting the carriage picked up strength, growing from a mere patter to a proper din. A gust of frigid wind swayed the coach on its springs.
She squared her shoulders and looked at his knee where it pressed against hers.
Was he intimidating her?
Good.
“Lord Dashwood, there’s no need to be angry.”
He leaned back, stretching his arm along the back of the seat. “Why would I be angry? Just because the name Dashwood—beg pardon, the name Ashwood—is now synonymous throughout England with ‘vain, self-important jackass who can’t observe what’s beneath his own nose.’ I can’t imagine why that would inconvenience me. I mean, it’s not as though that reputation might damage my standing in my chosen profession of cartography, in which a man’s success rather stands or falls on his powers of observation.”