The Risqué Resolution (8 page)

CHAPTER
ONE

Thirty
Years Later

Marseilles,
France

The funeral was short and bittersweet.

Standing over the freshly dug grave of
the woman he had called his wife for
twenty seven
years, Reginald disguised his quiet grieving behind a mask of stoicism. The
stiff autumn air pulled at his cloak, sweeping it off his shoulders. Beneath
the swath of black fabric he stood tall, a formidable man even at the
progressed age of fifty and two.

His hair was more gray than brown now
and wrinkles creased his face, but time had treated him fairly and aged him
well, rather like a fine wine that grew more potent as the years passed it by.

Murmuring a quiet prayer, Reginald
knelt to lay a single white rose on the overturned earth and with one final,
lingering glance bowed his head and walked away from Theresa’s final resting
sight. She was beside her parents now, which he knew she would have vastly
preferred to being brought back to England and buried at Ashburn, an estate she
had never cared for nor frequented more than a handful of times.

Their lives had been in France, much to
his mother’s everlasting dismay. It was where they built a home. Where Theresa
bore him three daughters.
Where one of them died before her
fifth birthday.
Where they learned to live, and even occasionally laugh,
together. Their union was never intended to be a love match, but there had always
been affection and respect both given and received.

If they found physical comforts beyond
the marriage bed neither complained and in the later years of their marriage
when they lived separate lives, both of them were content in the knowledge they
had always been kind to one another. 

Leaving the small,
well
tended
graveyard behind Reginald followed a narrow footpath to the
bluffs that ran along the edge of the property. It was a cold, blustery day and
the salt air stung his eyes, summoning tears he wiped briskly away.

Soon it would be winter. Theresa’s
beloved gardens would go dormant and the cold would gnaw mercilessly at his
aching bones. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Reginald wondered when the
bloody hell he’d grown so old.

This winter would be his
fifty second
. It was a lifetime for some.
A
fleeting second for others.
Where had the time gone? To a wife he cared
for but did not love. To children he loved but did not know.

With Theresa dead and buried, there was
nothing left for him here. His two daughters had moved on years before, drawn
back to England to begin and raise families of their own. He missed them, but
as he stood on the edge of the cliff and stared down at the waves crashing
violently in a spray of raging white surf against the rocks below, Reginald did
not think of his daughters or his grandchildren or even his deceased wife. He
thought, as he always had, as he always did, of Abby.

And he yearned.

Abigail had only one thing on her mind.

Crumpets.

Bustling through her small, tidy townhouse
– the passage of the time may have given her more gray hairs than she
would have liked, but it had done nothing to dull her energy – she zipped
through the parlor, whisked through the foyer, and came up short in the
kitchen, an expression of horror slowly dawning on her face as she took in the
porcelain plate sitting empty on the table.

“The crumpets. What happened to the
crumpets?”

“I ate them all.” Stepping out from
behind
an  open
cupboard balancing a stack of
white serving plates trimmed with delicate pink roses, Lady Dianna
Foxcroft
– Abigail’s beloved niece and apparent
devourer of sweet – smiled innocently at her aunt.

A remarkably pretty young woman with
short blond curls, a heart shaped face boasting two matching dimples, and
cornflower blue eyes, Dianna lived on the other side of the park with her
parents but frequented Abigail’s townhouse more than she did her own. The two
shared a close bond, one that had been forged during Dianna’s childhood when
her parents dedicated more time to their various social causes than they did to
their only child.    

Since her best friend Miss Charlotte
Vanderley
–
Graystone
now,
following her impromptu and rather scandalous wedding to Gavin
Graystone
, a handsome entrepreneur – had retired
prematurely to the country, Dianna had been calling upon her aunt more often
than usual. Normally Abigail would have welcomed the extra attention, but not
at the expense of her beloved crumpets. 

“Did you truly eat them all?” she said,
aghast at the very idea.

Dianna giggled. “No, Aunt Abigail, I
did not eat them all. Calm yourself,” she said with a disapproving cluck of her
tongue. “You know too much excitement is not good for your digestion. I put
them by the window to cool. They will be ready to eat in a moment or so.”

“Brat,” Abigail said with great
affection. “I thought I raised you better than to play practical jokes on poor
old women.”

Dianna set the serving plates down on
the table and pulled out two chairs, one for Abigail and one for herself,
before she went to the window to fetch the plate of crumpets. She set them down
in the middle of the table before sinking gracefully into her seat with only a
slight flutter of blue muslin. “First of all, you are not old. Second of all,
you are the one who used to
encourage
my
pranks! Do you remember when you coaxed me into putting a frog in Mother’s
drawer of unmentionables?”

Abigail sniffed even as she hid a smile
behind her hand. Dianna may have inherited her poise and ladylike grace from
her mother, but her mischievous nature came purely from her aunt. “I am quite
certain I have no idea what you are speaking of,” she said.

Unfazed by Abigail’s prim denial,
Dianna continued, “She was cross with me for weeks. Not to mention when we put
some of Father’s scotch in the lemonade at the picnic—”

“Eat your crumpet dear, it is getting
cold.”

They ate in companionable silence, and
when the plate was empty and the dishes wiped clean retired to the parlor for a
spot of tea. Dianna sat in front of the pianoforte and began to play a soft,
lilting tune that brought to mind flowers in the springtime and rolling fields
covered in sparkling dew.

“You have been practicing,” Abigail
observed with no small amount of pride.  Crossing her legs at the ankle,
she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes with a little sigh, letting
the music wash over her in a tinkling wave of notes. This was what she had
always wanted and never let herself dream: a house filled with music and
children and light and laughter. She could have had all of that, she supposed.
But without Reginald beside her it would not have been true, and having
something be only half of what you wished it was far worse than not having it
at all.

“Aunt Abigail, I have been thinking
about what you said all those weeks ago in the carriage,” Dianna said suddenly.
 

Abigail opened her eyes to find Dianna
had stopped playing and was watching her, a troubled expression marring her
fair countenance.

“Oh?” she said, her brow creasing in
thought as she struggled to recall what conversation would give her niece
reason to remember it after so much time had passed. As Dianna’s chaperone she
accompanied the younger woman on nearly every outing and they often discussed a
myriad of topics ranging from the weather to Dianna’s tenuous relationship with
her parents. Nothing out of the ordinary immediately came to mind, forcing her
to ask,
“
What did I say?”

“Charlotte was with us,” Dianna began,
referring once again to her dearest friend, “and we were on our way to
Twinings
Tea Shop.”

That hardly helped to narrow it down.
“I am afraid you will have to be more specific.”

“Your engagement to the Duke of
Ashburn.”

Reginald
.

Abigail’s breath escaped in a little
hiss
of dismay. She had never meant to
tell Dianna and Charlotte of her one time fiancée, but given Charlotte’s
predicament at the time it seemed a rather fitting story to share.

They had been on their way to
Twinings
, just as Dianna said. Charlotte was meeting with
her maid to learn more information about the heinous man she was engaged to
against her will, and Abigail was attending as their chaperone.

Now that she had a reference as to what
conversation Dianna was referring to, it played back through her mind as though
it had happened yesterday instead of weeks ago.

“I was engaged to a duke once, you know,” she had said,
setting aside the book she had been reading on the carriage seat beside her.

“A duke, Aunt Abigail?” Dianna had repeated dubiously. “Are
you certain?”

“Am I certain who I was once engaged to?” She smiled, amused
by her niece’s incredulous expression. “Yes, I do believe I am. I may now spend
my days with my nose buried in a book, but it wasn’t always so, my dears. I
once led quite the exciting life.”

“What was his name?” Charlotte asked.

“And what happened?” Dianna piped in.

Taking a moment, she smoothed her skirt into place before
resting her hands across her lap. She gazed out the window, her countenance
softening as she remembered a time long since past. “His name was Reginald
Browning the Third, Duke of Ashburn.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she
smiled. “I called him Rocky. We grew up next to each other and as a result
became fast childhood friends, even though he was destined to inherit a dukedom
and I was the third daughter of a Baron. He asked me to marry him on my
seventeenth birthday. He was the impulsive sort. We both were.”

“Oh, how romantic,” Dianna sighed.

“Romantic, yes.
Practical, no.
Rocky’s
mother was furious with him, and with me. She
demanded he break the engagement. By then it had gone public, of course.”

“Oh dear,” Dianna murmured. 

“Yes,” Abigail agreed, “‘oh dear’ sums it up quite nicely.
Rocky said he loved me, and I believed him. But we both knew the engagement
could not continue, and he ended it a week later. We fell out of touch after
that. I saw him occasionally in London, but after his father died and he became
a duke he ran with a more exclusive set than I did. He ended up married to the
daughter of a
marquess
, I believe, and moved to
France to be near her family. I have not seen him since.”

“Were you heartbroken when it
happened?”

Dianna’s question, bluntly spoken, drew
Abigail out of the past and into the present. Had anyone else asked her about
Reginald she would have changed the subject, but if Dianna wanted the truth,
then she would
receive.

“I was,” she confessed. Her hands
twisted in her lap and for a moment she stared at her left ring finger where
the Ashburn crest had once rested. She wondered now, as she had wondered then,
how different her life would have been if the ring remained there still. But
she banished the wayward thought with an inward shake of her head, chasing away
all of the “would haves” and the “could haves”.

Dianna bit her lip. “I do not mean to
pry, but I have been giving my own engagement considerable thought lately. I
never loved Miles as you loved your Rocky, but it still hurts.”

The Mannish women, Abigail reflected
dryly, were quite unlucky in terms of love. Of her three sisters only Martha
had ever married, and it was not precisely what one
would call a happy union.

Rodger
Foxcroft
,
a baron of some wealth and property, had swept Martha off her feet in a matter
of weeks and she was married before the season’s end. Unfortunately, by the
time Dianna was born the passion between Rodger and Martha had cooled
considerably and they lived completely separate lives
;
a sad, albeit not uncommon, occurrence within the
ton
.

That did not stop them from forcing the
same fate upon their daughter, however, and Abigail’s mouth twisted in anger as
she thought of the ridiculously outdated betrothal contract her sister and
brother-in-law had made Dianna enter at the young, impressionable age of nine.

To her surprise and relief, however, it
seemed for a time as though all would be well. Dianna and her future husband
– a charismatic lad who would one day inherit the Earldom of Winfield
– got along splendidly as children and continued their friendship into
young adulthood. But the day before Dianna’s sixteenth birthday Miles left to
travel the continent.

That was four years ago, and no one had
heard a word from him since.

“It must be positively dreadful for
you,” Abigail said sympathetically. “I cannot imagine.” To lose Reginald was
bad enough, but at least she knew what had
happened
to him. To go through her life never knowing… It was unbearable to think
about. “I do not mean to upset you, dear, but do you know how much time must
pass for one to be declared legally deceased? If that were to happen then you
would be free from the contract.”