Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] (2 page)

There, my own daughters failed me miserably. Morag and Finella, I spent money on you so that you could marry higher but you weren’t up to snuff. You expected the world to be handed it to you. If any female
of this family wants another farthing of my money she’d best set herself to earn it.

Therefore, I declare that the entirety of my fortune be kept back from my useless daughters and be held in trust for the granddaughter or great-granddaughter who weds a duke of England or weds a man who then becomes a duke through inheritance, at which time the trust will be released to her and only her.

If she has any sisters or female cousins who fail, they may each have a lifetime income of fifteen pounds a year. If she has any brothers or male cousins, though the family does tend to run to daughters, more’s the pity, they will receive five pounds apiece, for that’s all I had in my pocket when I came to London. Any Scotsman worth his haggis can turn five pounds into five hundred in a few years’ time.

A set amount will be given each girl as she makes her debut in Society, for gowns and whatnot.

Should three generations of Pickering girls fail, I wash me hands of the lot of you. The entire fifteen thousand pounds will go to pay the fines and hardships of those who defy the excise man to export that fine Scots whisky which has been my only solace in this family of dolts. If your poor sainted mother could only see you now.

Signed,

Sir Hamish Pickering

Witnesses,

B. R. Stickley, A. M. Wolfe

Solicitors’ firm of Stickley & Wolfe

NEARLY TWENTY YEARS
passed before three young ladies, chaperoned by Deirdre’s stepmother, took up residence in London for their debut season.

At first, it seemed that pretty, openhearted Phoebe would be the one to land an almost-duke. When she ran away with his rakish half-brother instead, beautiful, willful Deirdre snatched him up, wedding him within weeks.

Deirdre may have loved her new husband desperately, but he wasn’t nearly so pleased with her. Luckily, when she refused to mother his wildly out-of-control child, Meggie, sparks flew—and grew to white-hot flames.

With Deirdre’s handsome lord about to inherit the title of Duke of Brookmoor, everyone assumed it was only a matter of time until Deirdre was handed an enormous amount of money she didn’t especially need.

Sophie, tall, plain and socially awkward, had never nurtured any hope of winning the inheritance herself. After all, scholarly, reserved Sophie had never even met a duke!

England, 1815

If someone had told Sophie Blake one year ago that tonight she would find herself sprawled on the rug before the fire with one of the handsomest, most desirable men in London, she would have laughed outright in disbelief.

Yet here she was, stretching lazily in the warmth, gazing fondly at Lord Graham Cavendish, tall of form and dashing of countenance, as he stroked long capable fingers over her bare, sensitive palm—

“Ouch!” Sophie snatched her hand back.

“Got it!” Graham held his pinched fingers up high in triumph. Then he brought his hand down close to his face and peered at his quarry with his striking green eyes. “Blue glass? How in the world did you manage to get a sliver of blue glass in your hand?”

For Sophie, the question wasn’t so much how it happened as why she didn’t glow like a stained glass window after twenty-seven years of shattering delicate valuables with her clumsiness. She simply shrugged innocently at Graham. “Haven’t the foggiest. But thank you. That has bothered me greatly.”

He bowed his head facetiously. “All in a day’s good works.” Then he moved away from the fire, where he had towed her to get the benefit of better light.

They were in the front parlor of a rented house on Primrose Street, near the fashionable district of Mayfair but not quite in it. Sophie had no choice in the house, but she would have liked it well enough had her chaperone, Lady Tessa, not been in residence.

Not that the snide and insulting Tessa spent much time properly chaperoning Sophie—thank Heaven!—for she became easily bored and turned to her lovers for attention for weeks at a time.

Tessa believed that Sophie had come to London to find a husband—more precisely, to compete with her prettier cousins for the few unwed dukes in Society and win the Pickering fortune—so it might have a subtle form of strategy to abandon Sophie to a solitary life without benefit of a chaperone to accompany her to the many events and balls she had every right to attend.

What Tessa didn’t know—nor did anyone else—was that Sophie had never intended to make a play for the fortune, nor even, in truth, to look for a man to make her own. This opportunity to escape the drudgery of her life in Acton had been seized and perpetrated almost before Sophie herself had been aware of what she was doing.

When the letter from Tessa had arrived, announcing the plan to take all three cousins to London to try their hand at winning the Pickering pounds, Sophie had packed within the hour and left within the day—without a word to anyone.

Here in London without permission or purpose, free for the first time in her life to please herself and not merely be the unappreciated handmaiden of a fretful and demanding woman who held her in no particular regard, Sophie told no one her true mission.

Sophie wanted to have fun. Unsurprisingly, Sophie’s fun was not everyone’s cup of tea, but she relished being free at last to pursue her own interests and her own pleasures—to read for hours, uninterrupted! Heaven!—and to speak to new and interesting people.

To be truthful, she wasn’t very accomplished at that yet, but she had every intention of improving, someday, when there was nothing breakable in sight—and to see something of the world before she must return to a life of dreary servitude. Tessa’s petty vengeance suited Sophie perfectly well.

When Sophie’s cousins, Phoebe and Deirdre, had yet been unmarried, the three of them had spent many enjoyable hours avoiding Tessa’s poisonous company, but now with her cousins away from London with their new husbands, Sophie had no one.

Except Graham.

Of course, Graham had his own house in London, or at least, his father, the Duke of Edencourt, did. It was surely much larger and grander than this simple house. Yet Graham avoided his home as much as possible. The stories Graham told of his three elder brothers made Sophie much happier about her own lack of siblings.

And the time that Graham spent with her made her much happier about her chosen solitude. He never
made her feel odd about her extreme height—for his own quite surpassed hers—nor did he twit her about her lack of fashion or her penchant for scholarly pursuits. At least, he did so only in a fond and lazy way that made her feel as though he actually approved.

He was very intelligent himself, though he rarely exerted himself to show it, and his breezy insouciance was a welcome antidote to her own more thoughtful bent.

He was also extremely enjoyable to look at. He was tall and lean, but solid with muscle and more than enough shoulder to fill out his dandy’s coat most appealingly. His fair hair curled back from a high brow, and sea green eyes gleamed over sculpted cheekbones and jaw. Most decorative indeed.

Sophie only wished she could return the favor. She was too aware of her not-quite-blond ginger hair and her spectacles and the nose that Tessa had pronounced “the Pickering Curse,” with a decided bump where no bump should be.

She watched Graham as he stood brushing industriously at his trouser knees. As well he should, for Lady Tessa was not inclined to treat her servants well, either in manner or in pay, and therefore was picked up after accordingly. Sophie had given up on trying to keep tidy any but her own chamber and this parlor—where she spent these precious rare hours with Graham.

In any case, those he could spare from his busy calendar of gaming, carousing, wenching and generally living up to his reputation as the layabout youngest son of the Duke of Edencourt. As Graham himself said, with three elder brothers to stand between him and the
title, such activities were practically his required duty to perform!

“After all, someone has to wear the wool of the black sheep.” He’d sighed melodramatically, then grinned. “And I look very fine in black.”

Now Sophie, still seated on the carpet with her outrageously and unfairly long legs tucked beneath her, rubbed absently at the sore spot on her palm and gazed up at the most intelligent, difficult, contradictory man she had ever had the pleasure to know.

Not that she’d known many men at all. Until she’d come to London, she’d managed to go years without speaking to anyone but the mistress and all-female servants at Acton Manor.

She’d come to be fairly comfortable with the two men the other cousins had married. At least she didn’t break things when they were in the room. Yet it wasn’t until she’d met Graham that she’d ever really come to know a man at all.

It was Graham himself who’d set her at ease. “I am not in the market for a wife—ever!” he’d told her. “Furthermore, I, handsome bloke that I am, am entirely out of your reach. So you see, we might as well be friends, for there isn’t a chance in hell that we will ever be anything else.”

Comforted by that, and won over by a mind that finally equaled her own, Sophie was quite satisfied with the friendship.

Mostly.

Graham was great company—when he remembered to call at all. He was too handsome for his own good
with that chiseled jaw and, most detrimental to his character, a rakish smile that made any woman he met forgive him for everything. In advance.

It seemed she was no different. At the moment, he’d not made a move to return to his previous seat on the sofa. Sophie knew the signs.

He was becoming restless. It was always so. He’d tire of the games and petty machinations of Society and he’d seek her out. She’d watch the tension ease from his shoulders and his smile go from smooth to sincere.

Then would follow golden glowing evenings of conversation and cards—he cheated, but then, so did she, only better—and scandalous gossip—his, not hers, for she didn’t know any, except about Lady Tessa, who was Graham’s cousin so it wouldn’t do to repeat it.

Then, usually just when she’d begun to hope it wouldn’t happen again, he’d become twitchy with the need for action and diversion. Of course, she made no sign that she was sorry to see him go. The slightest hint that she was becoming too attached would send him fleeing, possibly forever.

And she wasn’t attached. Not seriously, anyway. How could she be, when he was so very far out of her reach? Who was she but a woman here on false pretenses? When she’d left Acton in the middle of the night, without a word, taking the money Lady Tessa had sent according to the Pickering will, the only thing she was sure of was that she would die if she stayed any longer.

She was no one, a woman too unattractive to marry,
too unskilled to work. Only an idiot would allow herself to become too fond of a man she could never have.

Sophie was no idiot. Plain, poor “Sophie the Stick” knew that this time in London was stolen magic, that dreams ended on waking and that some girls had better learn never to dream at all.

So she sent Graham a glare of friendly contempt. “You’re off to that slavering mistress of yours again, aren’t you?”
Very good. It sounded as if you couldn’t care less
.

He slanted her a reproving look as he tugged his weskit smooth. “You ought not to speak of such things. Furthermore, Lady Lilah Christie hardly drools at all—and then only in private.”

Sophie narrowed her eyes. Lady Lilah Christie, social she-wolf, reportedly avid student of all things erotic and sensual, stunning beauty and recent widow, had been married to the only man in London rich enough to support her and enslaved enough to turn a blind eye to her extramarital adventures.

He could not have been actually ignorant of them, for Lilah’s every move—and now Graham’s as well, as her current paramour—was observed and ruthlessly masticated in print by the daily scribblings of that omnipresent tale-bearer, the Voice of Society.

Every night Sophie swore to herself that she would ignore the gossip sheet and every day she rushed to get her hands on it before it disappeared on Tessa’s afternoon breakfast tray.

It was tawdry and inconsequential and beneath
her . . . but it was the only way for her to take part in the life Graham led outside the walls of this house.

Oh, she could attend all the same balls and events herself—for as the cousin of the new Marchioness of Brookhaven she would certainly be tolerated—and she sometimes did when forced to by Tessa’s belated and half-hearted sense of duty to her charge.

Yet as the properly virginal lady appearing in her first (and last! God, how was she to ever go back to Acton now?) Season in London Society, Sophie was not privy to the other side of city life. It seemed there was another world, the world of gaming hells and sultry mistresses and whatever else it was that Graham did all the hours he was not with her.

So she waited for him to tire of the fast-paced underbelly and kept the parlor as inviting as possible. When allowed, she treasured these evenings when Graham would sprawl in the chair before the fire and tease her and make her laugh with outrageous stories of his hairy-chested brothers and their obsession with hunting, or play the pianoforte with absent-minded skill, ignorant of the way her heart soared on the music.