An Improper Proposal (7 page)

But then he’d seen for himself that it wasn’t a child at all his friends had been discussing: oh, her brothers might treat her like one, but someone in the family—Georgiana, no doubt—had realized she no longer was one, and had decided to start forcing her to dress accordingly. And the truth was, Payton Dixon in a corset was a far different girl from the Payton Dixon Drake was used to, the one in vest and trousers. Payton Dixon in a corset was very definitely not a child. He’d seen the proof himself when he’d come to her rescue after the wrestling match she and her brothers had engaged in earlier that day. What had come dislodged during that battle were most definitely the breasts of a woman—a young woman, maybe, but definitely, most definitely, a woman.

When, he wondered again, as he’d wondered back then, had Payton Dixon gone and grown breasts?

“Things weren’t so very different then.” His grandmother’s creaky voice broke in on his ruminations on Payton Dixon’s chest. “Nineteen is a perfectly reasonable age at which to marry. I fail to see why you consider it—or her—too young.”

Drake shook his head, trying to clear it. It wasn’t right to think of Payton that way. She was, after all, the little sister of his best friends, and a guest in his house. He would protect her from any and all advances, even if it meant he had to ask Raybourne and Gainsforth to sleep in the dairy.

“This discussion is pointless,” Drake declared, a little more churlishly than he meant to. “I’m marrying Becky Whitby tomorrow morning, and if you’ll forgive me, Grandmother, I don’t much care what you think about it … or her, for that matter. After tomorrow, I can assure you, you’ll never see either of us again.”

Lady Bisson lowered the lorgnette. “I see,” she said, in tones of extreme mortification. “That’s the way it is, then?”

Drake looked away. The sun was sinking rapidly in the west. Soon it would be time to gather his guests for dinner. “That’s the way it is,” he said firmly.

But his grandmother’s voice was equally firm. “We shall see about that,” she said, and with a haughty toss of her head, she turned, and left the room.

Drake watched her go, the long purple train of her gown trailing behind her with a gentle swishing sound. He couldn’t say he loved his grandmother, but he respected her. She was, in many ways, as stubborn as he was.

But she didn’t have any idea what she was up against. No idea at all.

And Drake, who had a very good idea, knew fighting it was futile. He gave the fish pond one final glance—the swans had disappeared; hopefully, they’d choked to death on his cigar,  the pair of them—then shrugged his shoulders. It was time to get back to his guests.

And his fiancée.

“Oh, no,” said the man at Payton’s right upon discovering that his seat was beside hers.

“Not you,” said the man at her left. Payton hissed, “I won’t. I won’t sit between you. It’s not fair!”

“You think it’s unfair?” Hudson looked around the dining room furiously. “There’s scads of attractive, eligible ladies at this function, and we have to sit by our little sister? How do you think we feel?”

“I don’t know what Drake could have been thinking.” Raleigh glared daggers at his host. “There must be some kind of mistake. Quick, let’s see if we can trade—”

But chairs were already being pulled out all around them. It was too late to trade places. Besides, Lady Bisson, Drake’s grandmother, seated on Hudson’s right, had already given them a strange look as her grandson had helped her into her chair. While the look might have been directed solely at Payton, who had already thoroughly embarrassed herself by admitting—albeit unknowingly—to the groom’s family that she didn’t care for his bride, the two brothers thought it was meant for them, and they quickly took their seats.

The Dixons—at least the younger ones—were,  it appeared, stuck with each other.

“Well,” Hudson muttered, unfolding his napkin. ‘This is a fine how-d’you-do.”

“Really,” Raleigh agreed. “Try not to embarrass us this time, Pay.”

“Me?” Payton scowled at them. “What did I ever do?”

“Oh, let me see,” Hudson said, feigning thoughtful contemplation. “There was the time you drove the fork into the waiter’s hand in Canton.”

“He deserved it,” Payton asserted. “I saw him try to lift Drake’s wallet. Besides,  it wasn’t a fork,  it was a chopstick.”

“What about that year you refused to eat anything yellow?”

“Need I remind you that I was eight years old at the time?”

“We were in the West Indies, for pity’s sake. All the food there was yellow.”

“Well, you needn’t worry. I shan’t embarrass you tonight. I’m sure that’s why Drake seated me between you.” She couldn’t help leveling a bitter glare at their host, who was chatting amiably with his grandmother. “He doesn’t trust me not to stab his footmen with my fish fork.”

“Right,” Raleigh agreed with a smirk. “Any more than he trusts us around those cousins of his, eh, Hud?”

Hudson chuckled lasciviously, and the two men exchanged leers over the top of Payton’s head.

Payton rolled her eyes. She didn’t blame Drake, she supposed, for forcing her to sit between her brothers, who were such incorrigible bachelors. Especially since so many of his pretty young cousins were in the room. But she wondered if that was really the reason he’d sat her there. More likely, it was because Connor Drake considered her a child, in need of adult supervision, and probably expected her to stand up and throw things during the course of the meal. If there’d been a separate table for his underage guests, Payton had no doubt she’d have found herself seated there.

Well, and why shouldn’t he consider her a child? Every time he saw her she was engaged in some kind of buffoonery, like that wrestling match earlier with her brothers. And now she had that embarrassing gaffe with his grandmother to worry about. How was she to have known that the old lady was related to him? Of course, she ought to have guessed by all the questions—not to mention the old woman’s piercing gaze, an exact replica of Drake’s.

Lord, of course he thought her a child! She was forever acting like one. She twisted disgustedly in her chair. Georgiana could put her in all the corsets she wanted: the truth was, no one would ever consider Payton an adult woman, with an adult woman’s body, and an adult woman’s heart.

Payton slumped defeatedly in her seat
—
or as much as she could slump, with those stays pointing so uncomfortably into her ribs—and turned her attention to the head of the table, where Drake had risen, a glass of champagne in his hand .. She sat only a few place settings away from him, since her brothers, as groomsmen, were part of the bridal parry. She could see that the harsh lines that had been in his face earlier in the evening were still there. In fact, now that the sun had finally set, and the room was lit by candle flame, those lines were thrown into harsher relief than ever. Whatever was eating away at him, it wasn’t getting any better as the evening progressed. Well, it wouldn’t, she supposed. Not until tomorrow. Every man was nervous before his wedding day. She remembered that Ross had retched repeatedly the night before his wedding to Georgiana.

But then again, that might have been a result of all the rum.

“If I could have your attention, please,” Drake said, in his deep voice, the one that reminded Payton of velvet sky on a summer evening—not unlike this one. The fifty or so people seated at the long dining table quieted, and turned in their seats to look expectantly at their host. He managed a smile, though it wasn’t a very convincing one. Payton had seen Drake converse with hostile island natives with more ease.

Well, she supposed, it had to be nerve-wracking: seated on either side of him was his bride-to-be and his grandmother, each woman gazing up at him raptly, Miss Whitby with a tiny smile that, to Payton’s admittedly jealous eye, was triumphant, Lady Bisson with a frown that, as far as Payton could tell, was directed more at the footmen behind her grandson, whom she didn’t seem to feel were pouring the champagne into the guests’ glasses quickly enough.

“I’d like to thank all of you,” Drake went on, “for joining me on this very special occasion. I know that some of you have come a very long way, indeed—”

“Aye,” Payton’s father burst out, unable to contain his good humor. “All the way from London!” He elbowed Georgiana, who had the misfortune to be seated on his right. “All the way from London, right, my dear?”

“Indeed,” Drake said solemnly. “Some of you from as far away as London. And Becky—Miss Whitby, I mean”—the bride blushed prettily at this blunder—”and I would like to thank you heartily for coming, and helping us to celebrate what will, I hope, be a very happy day.”

“Here, here,” Raleigh cried, raising his glass.

“Cheers,” Hudson bellowed.

Everyone raised their glasses and tipped them in the direction of the bride and groom. Even Payton toasted them, and then wondered if she was going to burn in hell for uttering a swift and silent prayer as she did so that Miss Whitby might perish in her sleep. Quickly and painlessly, of course.

Was it really so very wicked of her to wish something like that? Yes, she supposed it was. She offered up another prayer, this one asking the Lord’s forgiveness.

When she set her glass down, she wasn’t the only one who was surprised to see that she’d swallowed the whole of its contents.

“Heave to, Pay,” Raleigh cried. “You’ll be tipsy before the soup comes.”

“She’s not the only one,” Hudson said, poking her rather hard in the ribs. “Look at Drake.”

Their host had swallowed everything in his own glass, as well. Smiling—this time more genuinely—he took his seat again with a shrug.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose that means Payton and I will just have to have some more.”

His footmen seemed only too happy to oblige. The champagne flowed very freely, indeed. According to the menu, which Payton found beside her plate, tied up with a piece of pink silk ribbon—a pink silk, she noticed, that matched the color of the rosettes in the bride’s hair—they were to expect a veritable feast, including lobster tails and lamb cutlets, two of her favorite foods, with a different wine or liqueur for each course.

Still, she could not enjoy the talents of Daring Park’s exemplary cook, or share in the high spirits—both literally as well as figuratively—of the rest of the table. She hated herself for this. Why—and when—had she developed this insufferable weakness for Connor Drake? She could not put her finger on the exact date it had occurred, but it was as clear as the bubbles in the champagne that was continuously poured into her glass:

She was in love with this man. And he was marrying someone else.

Not only marrying someone else, but marrying someone else without ever once having cast her, the Honorable Miss Payton Dixon, a second glance!

Oh, he’d shown her a gentlemanly civility once or twice: that summer night she’d been stretched out on the deck of the
Virago
, watching a spectacular display of falling stars. No sooner had she spied one flashing white streak in the sky than there’d been another. When everyone else, their necks stiff, had declared their intention of retiring, Payton alone had remained on deck, insisting on watching the dazzling light show until it—ended, or the sun rose, whichever came first. And Drake, who’d gone into the foc’sle with the others, had suddenly reappeared, a blanket and a pillow in either hand.

Payton had thought, for one dizzying, glorious moment, that he intended to join her on deck. But he soon dashed those hopes, and awakened a different kind, when he’d fussed over her, insisting she keep warm, and use the pillow as a cushion for her head against the hard wood of the quarterdeck.

And Payton had been as touched as if he really had joined her, for it was his blanket he’d brought her, and his pillow. They smelled of him, that odor that was peculiarly Drake’s, of salt air and fresh laundry and clean man, an odor she’d gotten used to in the years they’d traveled together in what was, at times, very close quarters, indeed. She had lain on the deck, wrapped in his blanket, her head on his pillow, and marveled at his sacrifice, since it meant he was sleeping on his hard pallet in the forecastle with no such comforts.

Of course, her brothers pointed out the following day that he’d been far too drunk to miss them. They’d all been imbibing heavily that night, Drake heaviest of all, and if, in a moment of morbid sentimentality, he’d loaned Payton his blanket and pillow,  it was only because he’d been too intoxicated to know what he was doing. Drake had very nobly denied the veracity of this, but to Payton, it hadn’t mattered: even if he’d been drunk, he’d still thought of her. Drunk or sober, to be thought of by Connor Drake at all was no very small thing.

There’d been other examples of Drake’s superiority to all the men of Payton’s acquaintance, of course. That time they’d been involved in that brawl in Havana, and a pirate had seized Payton about the waist and tried to toss her into the bay: Drake had shot him through the eyes with what Payton liked to think was almost lover like savagery. And, more intimately, an evening when Drake had been recuperating from a disastrous love affair with a native girl—she’d turned out to be married; granted her husband had several other wives in addition to her, but their union was still legal—and had been drunkenly bemoaning the fact that he was never going to find a wife, and Payton had volunteered her services, if by the time she was of marriageable age, he still hadn’t found anyone. Despite her brothers’ guffaws at the idea of Payton marrying anyone—and their speculations as to Payton’s abilities as wife and mother—Drake had quite gallantly kissed her hand, and told her he had every intention of taking her up on her offer.

That had been, by Payton’s reckoning, only four years ago. But here she was, of eminently marriageable age, and no proposal was forthcoming.

Because, of course, he’d found a bride so much more appealing.

Looking across the table at Miss Whitby, Payton had no choice but to admit it to herself: penniless or not, Becky Whitby would make any man an enviable wife. She was everything a woman ought to be: soft, feminine, sweet, gentle. Miss Whitby never cursed, or found lice in her hair, or freckled. Miss Whitby never roughhoused, or stabbed waiters with chopsticks, or declared to anyone’s grandmother that she hated their grandchild’s intended spouse. Miss Whitby, to Payton’s certain knowledge, did not even know how to load a derringer, let alone fire one.