His Impassioned Proposal (The Bridgethorpe Brides) (2 page)

“You’ve ruined everything.” She struggled in his embrace.

“Yes, I know. It’s what I’ve said from the beginning. When I didn’t leave the army as planned, I ruined all of our plans. But how was I to know how events would turn?”

“No, you ruined what should have been the greatest moment in my life. How could you? You’re a drunken beast!” Jane pushed him away and ran out of the library, slamming the door behind her.

Stephen shivered in the sudden cold of the empty room. Drowning in his pain, he had just cast away the last good thing in his life.
 

Jane rushed past the startled footman who tried in vain to vanish behind a large planter as she left the library. Tears blinded her, but she knew the house like her own. With the guests gathered one floor above, she didn’t dare go to Hannah’s room to hide until a maid could be sent to find her parents. Only one room on the ground floor suited her need for privacy.

Lady Bridgethorpe’s small morning room, tucked in a back corner of the large ground floor, was thankfully empty and dark at this hour. Jane sought out the upholstered chair where she often sat and painted with Hannah, dropping into it and tucking her feet up as if she were a small child. There she poured her pain out through her tears, soaking her delicate linen handkerchief.

How many years she’d waited for an offer of marriage she couldn’t say, but it was something she and Hannah had giggled over and dreamed of as soon as they were old enough to accept their lot in life. A young lady of good family learned from an early age how to manage a household of servants, and how important her role was in providing her husband an heir. While her secret dream had been to teach children, that was not the life for a well-dowered young lady with a titled father. Regardless he was a lowly baronet, she was expected to marry and have children.

In her fourteenth year, something had changed in how she looked at her dear friend Stephen. She might have been too young to know such things, but her heart told her Stephen was the man she would marry. So when he’d bought his colors and gone off that year to fight the evils that threatened the British Empire, she continued to learn how to be the best wife possible. Practiced to become Stephen’s wife.

Fresh sobs tore through her and she didn’t realize anyone was in the room until soft footsteps sounded behind her chair.

Lady Hannah Lumley knelt on the floor next to the chair. “A footman said I’d find you here. What has happened, Jane?”

“The
worst
.”

Taking Jane’s hand, Hannah said, “I don’t understand. Please tell me what has you so upset. Did one of the gentlemen make improper advances? I shall send my brothers after him.”

“None of your guests have been untoward. I am merely disappointed in Stephen.”

“Disappointment doesn’t make one cry like you were when I walked in. What can he have done to distress you so?”

Blotting at her eyes with the wet handkerchief, Jane whispered, “He asked me to marry him.”

Hannah gasped. “But that is good news. It’s what we knew he’d do once he returned from the Continent.”

Jane shook her head, her throat tightening with emotion. “Not this way. He is ape-drunk, slurring his words. After professing himself to be a useless, pitiful wreck, after making it perfectly clear he would never marry and burden any woman with his care, he mistook my arguments of his value as a person to mean I was saying I wanted to be his wife.”

“But you do wish to be his wife.”

“I did, I am no longer certain about him. He was so angry, and so drunk. Besides, I deserve to be courted. To be asked properly after he confesses his love for me. Not ‘so you’ll do it then’ after he’s declared himself to be the lowest prospect a woman could consider.” She burst into a fresh bout of tears.

Sitting back on her heels, Hannah was silent for a moment. Then she cleared her throat. “Perhaps we can just pretend this never happened. No one knows of it except the three of us, and Stephen is not likely to tell anyone he proposed.”

“I don’t know that I can put it aside. He was so angry when he thought I pitied him his injuries. He swung at me and I feared he meant to hit me. What if this is who he is? I haven’t spoken to him but twice in the past six years. I’ve been a fool, Hannah, to think he would remain unchanged after all he has seen and experienced. I’ve heard stories of soldiers who mistake their families for the enemy, and kill or harm them.”

Hannah’s quiet voice was edged with cold steel. “Now, you know Stephen would never hurt you.”

“I want to believe that, but my mind is awhirl with so many thoughts. Foremost is the fear I have wasted two Seasons in London keeping my heart safe for Stephen.”

“Never say it. You truly no longer wish to marry him?”

A knock at the door interrupted them. David stuck his head inside. “Might I come in?”

“Of course,” both girls answered, and Jane dabbed again at her tears.

He went straight to the mantle and lit a candle. “There we are. Why do you girls sit in the dark?”

“I never noticed it,” said Hannah. “I was concerned for Jane.”

“Yes, well, one of the footmen pulled me from the card table and said I must attend you. What’s it to be? Pistols at dawn? A cut direct at Almack’s next spring? Who has committed the offense?”

Jane looked at Hannah, pleading for her not to speak.

“Jane?” David’s voice lost its humor. He stepped closer, studying her face. “This is serious. I supposed some young buck had slighted one of you by refusing to stand up with you for a country dance. Tell me what has happened. Jane, you know your secrets are safe with me.”

Yes, she knew. David, his older brother Knightwick, Hannah and she were like brothers and sisters. But would he side with his cousin Stephen over her? She supposed she must find out one way or another. “You must swear never to speak of this to anyone. I would die if anyone outside our families found out.”

Drawing in a deep breath, and keeping her eyes on the handkerchief she wrought in her hands, she confessed. “Stephen has been alone in your father’s library this evening, as might be expected. He has overindulged, shall we say, in your father’s liquor.”

“The man has had more to bear in the past few months than many of us could handle. I can’t say I blame him for getting bosky.”

“That’s not all,” Hannah warned.

“He offered for my hand.” Jane lifted her gaze to his to see if he understood just how painful the event had been.

David wiped his palm down his face. “I am sorry, dear Jane, I know how young ladies dream of that romantic occasion. And I know he’ll be sorry for it, too. But there’s nothing to be done tonight. Would you like me to find your parents so you may return home now?”

“Please.”

That was what she needed. To escape Stephen and this nightmare of a proposal. She could cry herself to sleep in her own bed and hopefully wake up to discover it had all been a dream.

Chapter Two

The
bang
of a slamming door stirred Stephen from the depths of darkness in which he slept. His head spun and pounded. His stomach roiled. He pulled a pillow over his head and held his breath in hopes of it all passing before he tossed up his accounts.

The pillow lifted and slapped down again on his face. His cousin Knightwick, Viscount Knightwick’s voice shattered the quiet. “Get up.”

Knightwick ripped back the curtains and Stephen was assaulted by the brightness. “Good God, are you trying to kill me with sunlight?”

“Don’t tempt me.” Knightwick was obviously in a foul mood this morning.

Stephen covered his eyes with his bent arm. “To what do I owe the displeasure of your wrath?”

“You don’t even remember?” Knightwick slapped the pillow over Stephen’s head again. “Why am I not surprised?”

At the moment, Stephen remembered very little of anything. The constant ringing in his left ear kept the memory of all his injuries fresh at hand, and the comfort of the bed he lay on spoke so plainly of Bridgethorpe, so he recalled arriving the day before.

Slowly, the prior day played out in his mind. The joy on his aunt’s face at the sight of him, which quickly turned to tears before she excused herself. Bridgethorpe, looking pale and shaken, had taken Stephen into the library and offered him a drink, then broke the unimaginable news.

“There was a fire at Larkspur Cottage yesterday. Your parents…I’m so sorry, Stephen. We couldn’t reach you on the road to tell you.”

Stephen stared at his uncle in disbelief as the news sank in. “Both are gone?”

Bridgethorpe nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

The rest of the day blurred. His cousins rallied around him, welcoming him and commiserating. The manor was filled with guests attending a hunting party for the week. Stephen had done his best to avoid them.

But he remembered nothing which would bring his eldest cousin storming into his bedchamber at whatever ungodly hour it was presently. “I’ve only just arrived. What can I have done?”

The door crashed open again, rebounding off the small table beside it. The noise jarred Stephen’s nerves as he tried to focus his good eye in the general area of the door. “Ah, David. How nice of you to join us.”

David Lumley, the second of the eight children born to the earl and his wife, ignored him and spoke to his brother. “Has he explained himself?”

Knightwick shook his head. “He was apparently too drunk to know what he did last night.”

With both hands making a poor attempt at holding his head still, since the room refused to quit spinning, Stephen begged, “If you must continue to yell in my bedchamber, perhaps you could advise me what crime I am guilty of?”

 
David kicked the nearest bedpost, jarring the frame and sending Stephen’s stomach whirling. David yelled out, “I never would believe it of you. Proposing when you are too drunk to even remember doing so. There’s no excuse.”

Oh, Lord. That answered part of Stephen’s question. He asked the new one now bothering him. “To whom did I propose?”

The brothers shouted in unison. “Miss Marwick!”

Stephen sat up too quickly, then hung over the side of the bed and reached for the chamber pot. Unable to find the pot before the retching began, he was relieved that nothing remained in his stomach to toss up. When the spasms stopped, he rolled onto his back, pulling the sheet over the scars on his side.

“You have nothing to say for yourself?” Knightwick asked.

“What can I say?” Running the fingers of both hands through his hair, he sat up again and searched for his eye patch on the bedside table. Only when it was in place did he rise and face his cousins, looking around for something to wear over his small clothes. “Before you both beat me to a bloody pulp…there are words to be said, apologies to be made, but not to either of you. I must speak to Jane.”

“
Miss Marwick
has returned home.”

Stephen didn’t miss the inflection in David’s words. At not quite twenty-five, Stephen was too old to use the familiar name of his childhood friend. But for the six years he’d been away with his regiment, Stephen had thought of her as Jane.
My Jane
. If what his cousins said was so, if he truly had asked her to marry him while in his cups—hell, he’d been far beyond his cups, swimming in the dregs of the barrel—she might never be his. “I shall ride to Darley Hall at once and speak to her.”

As Stephen searched through the clothing he’d brought with him, which was now neatly cleaned and pressed, his cousins sat on the edge of the bed. Knightwick spoke first. “But how will you explain yourself?” The anger had faded from his voice and he sounded like the concerned older brother he’d always been.

David also had calmed. “Yes, how will you dig your way out of this one?”

Shrugging on his shirt, Stephen said, “I haven’t the slightest inkling. Stating I’m an arse is a bit too obvious.”

David sniggered. “Quite so.”

“There must be something to be done. Some penance I can pay.”

“She waited for you, you know.” Knightwick’s words were gentle, not the berating Stephen deserved.

“I didn’t know. Well, Hannah hinted in her letters that Jane—
Miss Marwick
—had little interest in the suitors she’d met in London.” Dear Hannah had been his only source of communication with Miss Marwick while Stephen had been away. He couldn’t write to her directly, as they weren’t betrothed. She was only fourteen when he enlisted, so he hadn’t even suggested at a future together. Even once she was of an age to marry, he’d put off speaking to her father. He thought it most cruel when soldiers left their wives and children behind to worry about them, although he realized many men and women felt differently.

And there was no way he’d have her follow him from camp to camp. That was no life for the daughter of a baronet. Looking back, he realized that at eighteen he’d had no real understanding of what life in the cavalry was about. Nor what it did to the loved ones left behind.

He only knew it was what he’d been called to do.

Stephen wrestled with his cravat, trying hard not to look at his face in the mirror. The wine-colored scars on his left cheek stood out harshly against the paleness of his skin and the black eye patch. He desperately needed to shave the shadow of whiskers on his jaw. His fingers faltered once again and he gave up on the cravat in frustration. He let the long, white scarf dangle down the front of his plain ecru waistcoat. “Perhaps this is for the best. She can now forget me and consider one of the many offers I’m certain she has received. Or she can return to London next Season with open eyes.”