To Wed a Rake(27)

The stars were far away, small and cold and quite unlike the twinkling bits of gold flake that still danced at the corner of her vision. She tried to imagine using transparent stretches of silk to revolutionize Mr. Tey’s stages, but she dropped the idea without even trying. She didn’t want to paint scenery flats any longer. And it wasn’t only because Grieve’s set had been so much better than hers.

For some reason, it felt as if she’d





taken Gil’s virginity, which was absurd. Absurd. Then why did she feel this dragging sadness?

Clouds kept drifting across the full moon, looking like boats, frigates, and ships making their way over to France, and all those enchanting, irresistible Frenchwomen.

At last she fell asleep, not even realizing that her cheeks were wet.





Chapter Thirteen





The next day Emma went back to St. Albans and waited for Gil to contact her. A day passed. Another day. Bethany sent a scolding letter, and a former school friend wrote, describing Gil’s scandalous behavior at the Cavendish masquerade. By all accounts, he left the ball with a Frenchwoman. Emma smiled to herself. Another day passed.

On the third day, Emma received a letter from her cousin. It seemed that Kerr had danced all night long, the previous night, with the wife of a French envoy, and there was talk of a duel. That letter struck like a blow from the dark.

Suddenly Emma realized that she hadn’t really thought that Gil would be so dazzled by Madame de Custine that he wouldn’t realize who she was, eventually. She hadn’t truly believed that her future husband was the sort of man who slept with a beautiful Frenchwoman and never asked for her forwarding address.

But it seemed that Gil was precisely that sort of man.

As the days passed, the Earl of Kerr was as uncommunicative as he’d been for the previous three years. So finally Emma spoke to her father, who focused on his daughter just long enough to agree that perhaps the betrothal had been a mistake.

Kerr responded by return post to her request that their engagement be terminated. Most likely he had been hoping for just such a letter. After all, the man had devoted himself to outraging his fiancée’s sensibilities. Her mail was flooded with letters describing a flaxen-haired beauty in his carriage at Hyde Park; the color her hair notwithstanding, no one had the slightest hesitation in asserting the woman’s nationality.

As for her, Emma had come to understanding that in winning, one can lose as well. She didn’t want Gil on the terms that he had flung forth as a challenge. What’s more, the whole baby-in-one’s-belly thing must take more than one night, as she’d discovered in the last two weeks. She didn’t want Gil on the terms of marriage that her father had established, either. It had never been about winning, although she hadn’t understood that at first.

Now she had a new plan.

She has going to dissolve their engagement, and then she was going to London, like Queen Titania, and she was going to choose her mate.

And if he was an earl, with the initials GB-G, that would, of course, be serendipity.

< ~&#xpu-inp width="1em">She wrote back and told the earl that she saw absolutely no purpose to their meeting in person. In fact, she was occupied on the day he proposed to visit St. Albans and would rather that the business was taken care of by their respective men of business. To that end, she enclosed the name of her father’s solicitor, Mr. Prindle, with all best wishes & etc.

But he was a stubborn man, this Earl of Kerr. Although he agreed with her that it was best for everyone if their betrothal be dissolved since it was initially set up, he pointed out rather unnecessarily, with the agreement of neither of them, he still felt that duty required that they effect this delicate business in person.

“I shall attend you tomorrow, Tuesday, at four in the afternoon,” he finished.

Emma stared at his handwriting. Her heart panged with love and desire. That was the worst of it: she found herself lying in bed at night, wrung tight as a spring by memories of their evening together. And yet he, by all accounts, had had so many of such nights in his life that he had forgotten the half of them.

She couldn’t seem to forget even the slightest detail, try though she might. She practiced her archery. Her arm brushed her chest as she pulled back the bow, and the pang of lust at the thought of Gil’s mouth went straight down her spine. She took a bath and rubbed rose-scented oil on her legs, and that simple, innocent action, which she had completed every day since her birth, was no longer simple. Nor innocent.

He’d changed her. Yet he hadn’t been changed at all, and the knowledge of it was bitter as ashes in her mouth.

It didn’t change her conviction though.