“And thus too young to be off on her own, I imagine.”
Implying that she was too young as well. Her eyes narrowed at the vague sarcasm in his voice. “Are you scolding me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Because I’m not fifteen,” she said pertly, “and I go for walks by myself all the time.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Well, not walks very often,” she admitted, somewhat mollified by his bland expression, “but I do ride.”
“Why aren’t you riding, then?” he asked, kneeling down beside her.
She could feel her lips twist into an extremely unpleasant expression. “Someone took my mare.”
His brows rose. “Someone?”
“A guest,” she ground out.
“Ah,” he said sympathetically. “There seem to be quite a lot of those milling about.”
“Like a plague of locusts,” she muttered, before realizing that she had just been unforgivably rude to a man who thus far was not proving to be the unpleasant boor her sister had painted him to be. One man’s locusts were another man’s wedding guests, after all. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, glancing up at him with hesitant eyes.
“Don’t be,” he replied. “Why do you suppose I’m out for a ride?”
She blinked. “But it’s your wedding.”
“Yes,” he said wryly, “it is, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” she replied, taking his query literally, even though she knew he hadn’t intended it thus, “it is.”
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he said, lightly touching his hands to her boot. “May I?”
She nodded, then tried not to whimper as he tugged the boot off her foot.
“Weddings,” he announced, “are for women.”
“One would think they require at least one man,” she returned.
“True,” he acceded, at last easing the boot all the way off. “But truly, does the groom have much to do besides stand there and say, ‘I will’?”
“He has to propose.”
“Pfft.” He gave a dismissive snort. “That takes but a moment and besides, it’s done months in advance. By the time one gets around to the actual wedding, one can hardly remember it.”
Charlotte knew his words to be true. Not that anyone had ever bothered to propose to her, but when she’d asked Lydia what the viscount had said when he’d asked her to marry him, Lydia had just sighed and said, “I don’t recall. Something terribly ordinary, I’m sure.”
Charlotte offered a commiserating smile to her future brother-in-law. Lydia had never spoken highly of him, but he really didn’t seem like a bad sort at all. In fact, she rather felt a kinship with him in that they’d both fled Thornton Hall looking for peace and quiet.
“I don’t think you’ve broken it,” he said, lightly pressing his fingers to her ankle.
“No, I’m quite sure I haven’t. It’ll be better by tomorrow, I’m certain.”
“Are you?” Ned asked, quirking one corner of his mouth into a dubious expression. “I’m certain it won’t. It’ll be at least a week before you’re able to walk without discomfort.”
“Not a week!”
“Well, perhaps not. I’m certainly no surgeon. But you’ll be limping for a while yet.”
She sighed, a long-suffering sort of sound. “I shall look splendid as Lydia’s maid of honor, don’t you think?”
Ned hadn’t realized that she’d been offered the position; in truth, he’d paid only scant attention to the wedding details. But he was rather good at feigning interest, so he nodded politely and murmured something that wasn’t meant to make much sense, then tried not to look quite so surprised when she exclaimed, “Maybe I won’t have to do it now!” She looked at him with palpable excitement, her wide, gray eyes gleaming. “I can pass it off to Caroline and hide in the back.”
“In the back?”
“Of the church,” she explained. “Or the front. I don’t care where. But maybe now I won’t have to take part in this wretched ceremony. I—oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth as her cheeks turned instantly red. “I’m sorry. It’s your wretched ceremony, isn’t it?”
“As wretched as it is to admit it,” he said, unable to keep a sparkle of amusement from his face, “yes.”
“It’s a yellow dress,” she grumbled, as if that would explain everything.
He glanced down at her green riding habit, quite certain that he would never understand the workings of the female brain. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m supposed to wear a yellow dress,” she told him. “As if having to sit through the ceremony isn’t bad enough, Lydia picked out a yellow dress for me.”
“Er, why will the ceremony be so dreadful?” Ned asked, suddenly feeling rather afraid.
“Lydia ought to know I look wretched in yellow,” Charlotte said, completely ignoring his query. “Like a plague victim. The congregation is likely to run screaming from the church.”
Ned should have felt alarmed by the thought of his wedding erupting into mass hysteria; instead, he was alarmed by the fact that he found the image rather comforting. “What’s wrong with the ceremony?” he asked again, giving his head a little shake as he reminded himself that she hadn’t answered his previous question.
She pursed her lips as she poked her fingers against her ankle, paying him little mind. “Have you seen the program?”
“Er, no.” Which he was beginning to think might have been a mistake.
She looked up, her large, gray eyes clearly pitying him. “You should have done,” was all she said.
“Miss Thornton,” he said, using his sternest voice.
“It’s very long,” she said. “And there will be birds.”
“Birds?” he echoed, choking on the word until his entire body collapsed into a spasm of coughing.
Charlotte waited for his fit to subside before her face assumed a suspiciously innocent expression, and she asked, “You didn’t know?”
He found himself unable to do anything but scowl.
She laughed, a decidedly mellow and musical sound, then blurted out, “You’re not at all how Lydia described you.”
Now that was interesting. “Am I not?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully mild.
She swallowed, and he could tell that she regretted her loose tongue. Still, she had to say something, so he waited patiently until she tried to cover for herself with, “Well, in truth, she hasn’t said much of anything. Which I suppose led me to believe you were a bit aloof.”
He sat down on the grass beside her. It was rather comfortable to be in her presence after having to be at constant attention among all the crowds back at Thornton Hall. “And why would you reach that conclusion?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I suppose I just imagined that if you weren’t aloof, your conversations with her would have been a bit more…” She frowned. “How do I say it?”
“Conversational?”
“Exactly!” She turned to him with an exceptionally sunny smile, and Ned found himself sucking in his breath. Lydia had never smiled at him like that.
Worse, he’d never wanted her to.
But Charlotte Thornton…now there was a woman who knew how to smile. It was on her lips, in her eyes, radiating from her very skin.
Hell, by now that smile was traveling down his midsection to areas that should never be touched by one’s sister-in-law.
He should have stood immediately, should have made up some sort of excuse about getting her back home—anything to end their little interview, because there was nothing more unacceptable than desiring one’s sister-in-law, which was exactly what she would be in three days’ time.
But his excuses would have made rather transparent falsehoods, as he’d just told her that he wanted nothing more than to escape the pre-wedding festivities.
Not to mention the fact that those unmentionable areas of his anatomy were behaving in a manner that might be termed a bit too obvious when one was in a standing p
osition.
And so he decided simply to enjoy her company, since he hadn’t enjoyed anyone’s company since he’d arrived two days earlier. Hell, she was the first person he’d come across who wasn’t trying to congratulate him or, in the case of his sister and cousin, attempting to tell him how to conduct his life.
The truth was, he found Charlotte Thornton rather charming, and since he was quite certain his reaction to her smile was a freakish, one-time sort of occurrence—not to mention that it wasn’t terribly urgent, just potentially embarrassing—well, there was really no harm in prolonging their encounter.
“Right,” she was saying, clearly oblivious to his physical distress. “And if your conversations with her had been more conversational, I imagine she’d have had more about which to tell me.”
Ned rather thought it was a good thing that his future wife wasn’t one for indiscreet talk. Score one for Lydia. “Perhaps,” he said, a little more sharply than he ought, “she doesn’t tell tales.”
“Lydia?” Charlotte said with a snort. “Hardly. She always tells me everything about—”
“About what?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
Ned knew better than to push. Whatever it was that she’d been about to say, it wasn’t complimentary toward Lydia, and if there was one thing he could already tell about Charlotte Thornton, it was that she was loyal when it counted. And she wasn’t going to reveal any of her sister’s secrets.
Funny. It hadn’t even occurred to him that a woman like Lydia might have secrets. She’d always seemed so…bland. In fact, it had been that blandness that had convinced him their marriage was not an ill-advised endeavor. If one wasn’t going to love one’s wife, one might as well not be bothered by her.
“Do you suppose it’s safe to return?” Ned queried, motioning with his head in the direction of Thornton Hall. He’d much rather stay here with Charlotte, but he supposed it would be rather unseemly to remain alone in her company for very much longer. Besides, he was feeling a bit more…settled now, and he thought he ought to be able to stand up without embarrassing himself.
Not that an innocent like Charlotte Thornton would probably even know what it meant for a man to have a bulge in his breeches.
“Safe?” she echoed.
He smiled. “From the plague of locusts.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “I doubt it. I think Mother has arranged for some sort of ladies’ luncheon.”
He smiled broadly. “Excellent.”
“For you, perhaps,” she retorted. “I’m probably expected.”
“The maid of honor?” he asked with a wicked smile. “For certain you’re expected. In fact, they probably can’t begin without you.”
“Bite your tongue. If they get hungry enough, they won’t even notice I’m gone.”
“Hungry, eh? And here I thought women ate like birds.”
“That’s only for the benefit of men. When you’re gone, we go mad for ham and chocolate.”
“Together?”
She laughed, a rich, musical sound. “You’re quite funny,” she said with a smile.
He leaned forward with his most dangerous expression. “Don’t you know you’re never supposed to tell a rake that he’s funny?”
“Oh, you can’t possibly be a rake,” she said dismissively.
“And why is that?”
“You’re marrying my sister.”
He shrugged. “Rakes have to get married eventually.”
“Not to Lydia,” she said with a snort. “She’d be the worst sort of wife for a rake.” She looked up at him with another one of those wide, sunny smiles. “But you have nothing about which to worry, because you are obviously a very sensible man.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been called sensible by a woman,” he mused.
“I can assure you I mean it as the highest of compliments.”
“I can see that you do,” he murmured.
“Common sense seems like such an easy thing,” she said, punctuating her words with a wave of her hand. “I can’t understand why more people don’t possess it.”
Ned chuckled despite himself. It was a sentiment he shared, although he had never thought to phrase it in quite those terms.
And then she sighed, a soft, weary sound that went straight to his heart. “I’d best be getting back,” she said, not sounding at all excited by the prospect.
“You haven’t been gone long,” he pointed out, absurdly eager to prolong their conversation.
“You haven’t been gone long,” she corrected. “I left an hour ago. And you’re right. I can’t avoid the luncheon. Mother will be terribly cross, which I suppose I could bear, since Mother is often terribly cross, but it wouldn’t be fair to Lydia. I am her maid of honor, after all.”
He rose to his feet and held out his hand. “You’re a very good sister, aren’t you?”
She looked at him intently as she placed her fingers against his palm. Almost as if she were trying to gauge his very soul. “I try to be,” she said quietly.
Ned winced as he thought of his sister, yelling up at him as she sat in the dust. He probably ought to go and apologize. She was his only sibling, after all.
But as he rode back to Thornton Hall, Charlotte Thornton tucked neatly behind him in the saddle, her arms around his waist, he didn’t think of Belle at all.
Or Lydia.
Chapter 2
The luncheon was just as Charlotte had imagined it would be.
Dull.
Not quite unbearable. The food was rather good, after all. But definitely dull.
She filled her plate with ham and chocolate (she could hardly believe her mother had served both at the same time, and she simply had to take servings of each in the viscount’s honor) and found a chair in the corner, where she hoped no one would bother her.
And no one did, at least not until the very end, when Lydia slid into the seat next to her.
“I need to speak with you,” Lydia said in a harsh whisper.
Charlotte looked to the right, then to the left, trying to discern why Lydia felt the need to announce it. “Then speak,” she said.
“Not here. Privately.”
Charlotte chewed her last bite of chocolate cake and swallowed. “You’d be hard-pressed to find any place less private,” she commented.
Lydia shot her an extremely annoyed look. “Meet me in your bedchamber in five minutes?”
Charlotte glanced toward the festivities with a doubtful expression. “Do you really think you’re going to be able to escape in five minutes? Mother looks as if she’s enjoying herself exceedingly well, and I doubt she’ll want—”
“I’ll be there,” Lydia assured her. “Trust me. You go now, so no one sees us leave together.”
That was more than Charlotte could let pass without comment. “Really, Lydia,” she said, “we’re sisters. I hardly think anyone will take notice if we leave a room together.”
“All the same,” Lydia said.
Charlotte decided not to ask what, precisely, was all the same. Lydia tended to assume the air of a Drury Lane actress when she had it in her head that she was talking about something important, and Charlotte had long since realized that it was often best not to inquire about her convoluted thoughts. “Very well,” she said, setting her plate down on the empty chair beside her. “I’ll be there.”
“Good,” Lydia said, looking furtively around her. “And not a word to anyone.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Charlotte said, even though Lydia had already walked away. “Who would I tell?”
“Oh, my lord!” Charlotte did not so much say as chirp. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Ned glanced slowly around the hall. Hadn’t he just dropped her off right here, barely an hour ago? “It’s not so very strange a coincidence,” he felt compelled to point out.
“Er, yes,” she said, “but seeing as how our paths have never crossed before, twice in one day seems quite remarkable.??
?
“Indeed,” he said, although he didn’t think it remarkable at all. Then he motioned to the woman at his side. “May I introduce you to my sister? Miss Thornton, my sister, Lady Blackwood. Belle, Miss Charlotte Thornton. She is Lydia’s younger sister,” he explained to Belle.
“We have been introduced,” Belle said with a gentle smile, “although we have never been given the opportunity to exchange anything other than the most basic of pleasantries.”
“I’m pleased to further our acquaintance, Lady Blackwood,” Charlotte said.
“Please, do call me Belle. We will be sisters of a sort in just a few days’ time.”
She nodded. “And I am Charlotte.”
“I met Charlotte earlier this morning,” Ned said, not at all certain why he was offering that information.
“You had never met Lydia’s sister?” Belle asked, surprised.
“No, of course I had,” he said. “I just meant that I stumbled across her outside.”
“I turned my ankle,” Charlotte said. “He was prodigiously helpful.”
“How is your ankle?” Ned asked. “You really shouldn’t be walking on it.”
“I’m not. I’m—”
“Limping?”
She gave him a guilty smile. “Yes.”
“I saw her out on the fields,” Ned said, directing his explanation to his sister, but not really looking at her. “I’d gone to escape the crowds.”
“As had I,” Charlotte put in. “But I had to walk.”
“One of the grooms gave her horse to a guest,” Ned said. “Can you believe it?”
“My mother did give him permission to do so,” Charlotte said with a roll of her eyes.
“Still.”
She nodded her agreement. “Still.”
Belle gaped at the two of them. “Do you realize you’re finishing each other’s sentences?”
“No, we weren’t,” Charlotte said, just as Ned offered a considerably more disdainful, “Don’t be absurd.”
“We were talking rather quickly,” Charlotte said.
“And ignoring you,” Ned put in.
“But we weren’t finishing each other’s sentences,” Charlotte added.