by Julia Quinn
They’d conquer this together.
“Do you think you can convince your aunts that you are madly in love with me?” Kipp asked as they paused before the grand steps.
Cordelia nodded before she glanced up and into his eyes. “Yes, Kipp, I do.”
Chapter 8
And after that confidence—or rather, confession—Cordelia found herself whisked away from her rear guard.
Not that any of them had much of a choice. Kipp and Drew were commandeered by the duke for a bit of “fortification.” And when Drew mentioned something about seeing the duke’s renowned stables, an immediate tour was organized.
Minus the ladies.
Nor was Kate any help. Seeing that the opposition had far superior numbers, she immediately fled the field with some feeble excuse about “supervising the luggage.”
Leaving Cordelia to fend for herself in an intimate little salon surrounded by her dearest friends.
Yes, it was ever so wonderful to see them all—Anne, Ellie, Bea—her beloved school chums.
But that was only magnified by the addition of her father’s indomitable aunts, Aldora, Bunty, and Landon. If that wasn’t enough of a force to be reckoned with, they’d also brought reinforcements, a bevy of companions and other guests whom Cordelia had never met but were now seated all around the edges of the room.
Their excited chatter swirled in a cacophony of questions, and Cordelia grew dizzy trying to keep up.
“This is what comes of not having proper guidance.”
“Yes, indeed. The Earl of Thornton? How is this?”
Aunt Bunty rushed in. “I vow, niece, you wrote it was Mr. Thornton, rather Captain Thornton . . .”
Aunt Landon sniffed and slanted a withering glance at her younger sister. “You must have mistaken the matter. Yet again.”
Aunt Bunty bristled. “Hardly. I read the lines twice and you were present.”
Anne, always the diplomat, smiled politely over the sisters’ bickering and added firmly and politely, “It is absolutely perfect that you are here, Cordelia.”
She smiled in return, grasping Anne’s dear words like a lifeline. “I couldn’t miss your wedding.”
“And we will very soon see you married as well,” Bea added. And as persistent as ever, she continued on, “How did you accomplish such a feat? The Earl of Thornton, of all people.” She pursed her lips together—an unmistakable indication that she was gathering the facts around her.
And that wasn’t a good sign, for if anyone was perceptive enough to see through her deception, she’d wager the sixpence in her pocket that Miss Beatrice Heywood would be the first.
And evidently she had. “I had heard that the earl was spending an inordinate amount of time at Russell Square in Miss Holt’s company.”
At the mention of the heiress’s name there was a sudden silence about the room.
Apparently Miss Holt was quite well-known.
But that hardly lasted long, as several of the older ladies sniffed with disapproval.
“Vulgar creature.”
“Thinks herself quite above the salt,” one of the companions commented.
“My heavens, it seems every upstart family in England has a beauty of a daughter these days. Why ever can’t these people have plain gels as befitting their station?” Aunt Aldora asked in all earnest.
Aunt Bunty nodded in agreement. “’Tis a decided disadvantage when a young lady is richer than all of us put together.”
“Yes, Miss Holt has a bounty that gives her a decided advantage, but you have nothing to fear, Cordelia,” Bea was saying.
Cordelia shifted slightly and glanced over at her friend. “I don’t?”
“Of course not. The way Lord Thornton looks at you is proof enough.”
“Proof?”
“That he loves you, you silly goose,” Anne added.
“Yes, indeed,” Ellie agreed.
“Quite worships you,” Bea informed her.
“Surprised he hasn’t had the banns read already,” Aunt Landon added to no one in particular.
Cordelia forced a smile onto her lips. Clearly, step one of her plan had been managed—convincing one and all that her betrothal was no fiction.
Now all she had to do was survive the next few days of being madly in love with Kipp.
And then let him break her heart.
Yet Cordelia’s resolve to carry on with her deception served only to leave her a frayed mess of nerves.
And for someone who had sailed around the Horn—twice—that was saying something.
The duke’s industrious mother—despite being laid up with a twisted ankle—and His Grace’s six sisters had every minute of the house party planned out right up until the wedding, so Cordelia found herself constantly surrounded by curious well-wishers, as well as her family and dear friends.
Aunt Aldora was the worst. She’d lost her betrothed a week before they’d planned to be wed, some fifty years earlier. Her beloved Wigstam had departed this world via, as Aunt Bunty called it in a loud aside, “naught more than a trifling cold.”
Nor was Aunt Aldora about to see the same fate befall her dearest great-niece, so she fussed over Kipp like he was a newborn lamb—had he had enough beef for supper and not too much of the fish? Did he know the bones could cause desperate problems in his bowels?
All the while, there was Kipp, smiling at her. Doing his utmost to appear the doting betrothed.
Why he didn’t saddle his horse and flee for London, she didn’t know.
Worse, every time he came near her, every time he spoke to her, she was carried back to that morning, when he’d knelt before her in the library and been about to tell her something . . . do something.
Oh, if only Kate hadn’t chosen that exact instant to suddenly decide to actually be a chaperone.
So as a new day dawned, Cordelia had high hopes the next twenty-four hours would be easier, that is, until she came to a stop in the doorway of the dining room just as Aunt Aldora inquired—most indelicately and in painful detail—as to the state of Kipp’s digestion.
Listening to him falter for a polite reply, something inside Cordelia snapped and she discovered she was hardly the intrepid explorer she thought herself to be—for suddenly she was beating a hasty retreat, racing up to her room, catching up her sketch box, and fleeing the grand house as if the devil himself was chasing her.
And so it seemed he was.
“Where do you think you are going?”
The question stopped her in mid-flight. She’d nearly cleared the corner of the maze and had hoped to get to the distant hill before anyone noticed.
Yet someone had.
The last person she wanted to see. The only person she wanted to see.
“And without your breakfast,” Kipp added, holding up a large bundle in a napkin. “I wouldn’t want your digestion to become disquieted.” This was added with the high-pitched notes of Aunt Aldora’s constant fret and a waggle of his brows.
For good measure.
Cordelia hitched up her skirt and hurried over to where he stood, catching him by the arm and pulling him around the corner of the hedge and then not stopping until she’d dragged him behind a nearby oak.
Well out of sight.
“You’re a dreadful tease,” she told him even as he handed over his bounty in exchange for her sketch box. She glanced inside the napkin and sighed. “But you are also a dear.”
“And where exactly did you think you were going?” he asked as he bemusedly watched her eat.
“I think that would be obvious by now,” Cordelia told him between bites. She’d barely managed to eat a morsel during dinner, and she’d be the first to admit, she did love a good breakfast. And this roll was heavenly. “I am going sketching.”
“By yourself?” He shook his head. “I thought we already settled that issue back at the inn.”
“You settled it,” she told him, finishing up the roll and taking a bite from the slice of bacon he’d purloined. Who knew he c
ould be such a talented and discerning breakfast thief?
“And I will settle it now: Either you let me come along or I go in and inform the duchess and your aunts that you’ve wandered off. Alone.”
That tore her gaze away from her breakfast. “You wouldn’t dare!” Then after a few moments of poignant silence, she realized he would. “Oh bother. Come along if you must.”
“I thought you would never ask,” he said, taking a surveying glance at the landscape around them. “Which way?”
“As far from the house as we can manage.” Cordelia nodded toward a small rise in the distance.
And so they set out. Somewhere along the way, Kipp took her hand in his and she didn’t protest, for the heat of his bare fingers twining with hers was enough to send shivers of delight through her.
This is only for a few days, she reminded herself. Whatever harm can come of it?
Plenty, she soon realized as they walked and talked about everything—or so it felt like. It was the same companionable familiarity that had made them fast friends as children.
She regaled him with stories of India and he listened with a faraway light to his eyes, as if he were walking with her there. Smelling the sandalwood, the hot sun on his back, the clatter of a dozen languages alive around them, instead of the familiar tweets and twitters of robins and larks.
As they reached the top of the rise, a bucolic scene unfolded before them—a long green valley marked by the smudges of smoke rising from low-slung cottages nestled alongside the well-ordered fields. In the distance, an old steeple jutted up toward the sky.
“How perfect,” Cordelia said, feeling that familiar desire to put her pencil to paper, and without a thought settled down atop the grass. Kipp joined her, proving his skills in larceny once again as he purloined a bit of paper and a nub of a pencil, the cartographer in him taking over as he began outlining the landscape.
“Don’t forget, close your eyes first,” she told him, settling in and letting the landscape surround her.
Kipp laughed and then did as she bid, but she suspected he was only doing it to humor her. “Yes, yes, I’m quite part of the land now.”
She sniffed, but suspected one day he’d come to realize she had the right of it.
They drew in happy silence, only pausing to make note of the other’s progress. Yet as the sun climbed toward midday, Cordelia knew the longer they were gone, the greater the reckoning. Silently, she packed up her belongings, Kipp returning the bits of pencil and charcoal he’d borrowed.
As she stood, he glanced down at her feet. “You’ve dropped something.” Retrieving it for her, he started to hand it over, but then stopped and turned the bit of silver over in his hand. “This is old.”
“My sixpence!” Cordelia swept it out of his grasp, even as a hot blush rose on her cheeks. “Oh dear, I’d be in a barrel of trouble if I lost that. Ellie would have me drawn and quartered.”
“It’s just an old coin,” he remarked as he picked up her sketching case.
“Oh, hardly that,” Cordelia said without thinking as she tucked the bit of silver back into her pocket. She’d taken to carrying it about like a talisman, but now regretted her foolishness, for here was Kipp looking for an explanation to her careless words. “It is just that we found it so long ago—Bea and Anne and Ellie and I. In a mattress. At Madame Rochambeaux’s. That was where we met. And we thought, that is at the time, we decided the sixpence was”—oh dear heavens, she had to stop rambling along—“that it might be good luck. Anne has had it ever since, then recently she sent it to me.”
“She did? Did her good luck have anything to do with Dorset?”
Cordelia flinched. “However did you know?”
“You forget, I just spent the last season surrounded by girls fresh out of their ‘Bath schools.’ By the way, whatever do they teach in those places?” The way he said it sounded like the ladies had spent their formative years learning an array of chicanery and fraud.
Cordelia tucked up her nose. “How would I know? Madame Rochambeaux’s was not in Bath.”
“Obviously.” He had shifted the case in his hand and set off toward the path.
She hurried after him. “What does that mean?”
Kipp glanced over his shoulder. “That you—and your friends—are rather unique.”
Coming to a blinding halt, her hands fisted to her hips. “And what does that mean?”
Turning slowly, he grinned and then stalked back to where she stood, until he was towering over her, and now she was shivering with something quite different than indignation.
Slowly, he leaned down, his breath warm against the curve of her ear. “My dearest Commander Whey-Face, how could I not find you different?”
Unable to stop herself, she reached out and laid her hand on his forearm, if only to give herself something solid to hold on to as her entire world began to waver beneath her.
“And that is a good thing?” she managed to ask, daring herself to look up at him. Into those clear blue eyes of his. The ones that made her think of the warm waters off Madagascar.
“The very best,” he told her, and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Again.
And how she wanted him to. Longed to feel his arms around her, his lips crashing down on hers.
Wanted to believe that such a kiss could last a lifetime.
But in that instant, images of Mallow Hills flashed through her thoughts. Of all the money needed to save his home.
Money he didn’t have, and she certainly didn’t.
She stumbled back, out of reach, looking anywhere but at him. “Yes, well, we should be getting back. We wouldn’t want to be late to the duchess’s luncheon.”
“Yes, if you insist,” he agreed. “Your Aunt Aldora will want a full accounting of our morning.”
Cordelia giggled. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
“I might. I know I’m terrified. Then again, does it help that there will be cakes with the luncheon? The iced ones you always liked when we were young.”
“A little,” she replied.
They both laughed, and once again, Cordelia found herself saying exactly what was in her heart. “I wish this never had to end.”
“Indeed,” Kipp agreed, with a long sigh. “But we have until Sunday. Let’s make the most of it until then.”
She wished she could be so carefree. “I can’t help worrying that someone will discover the truth.”
Kipp shrugged. “I can’t think of what else we might do to prove our betrothal is anything other than legitimate, save—”
Right then they turned a corner in the path and there, just down the way, near the next bend, stood Anne and Dorset.
Not so much standing as entwined.
A sight that rather encapsulated Kipp’s line of thought. For what else could they do to make their betrothal appear to be a love match . . .
Save get caught in a compromising position . . .
“Not this way,” he told her, steering Cordelia in another direction.
“Yes, I suppose not,” she agreed. Still, she couldn’t help but take a glance back at the pair—Anne pinned against the wide trunk of the tree by the duke, who was doing a very thorough job of kissing his bride-to-be, so lost in their embrace, they hadn’t heard Cordelia and Kipp’s approach.
There was something so intimate, so passionate about the moment, Cordelia’s fingers slipped into her pocket and wound around the sixpence there.
Had this bit of silver truly helped Anne? It was rather hard to believe.
And yet, there it was. The most unlikely of matches.
She followed Kipp away from the couple and had to wonder if all betrothed couples behaved so. And then she couldn’t help herself—she had to know. “Is that how it is with you and Miss Holt?”
Is that how it is with you and Miss Holt?
Kipp stumbled a bit and then whirled around. “Good God! Certainly not!”
Cordelia’s expression widened, for obviously she hadn’
t expected such a vehement response.
Then again, he hadn’t realized his own horror until the words came erupting out of him.
“Truly? I would think—” she began, glancing back. “It is just that if you are about to be—”
“No!” Now he wasn’t sure what he meant. But he was quite certain of one thing. “That is, we’ve never . . . that is, Miss Holt and I haven’t—”
“Never?” She sounded entirely too pleased with his revelation.
That he’d never kissed Miss Holt.
And in a sense, it was a revelation to him. For come to think of it, he’d never really wanted to—certainly not with the same fervor that seemed to have overtaken Dorset and his intended, the pair thoroughly lost in their mutual passion.
“I don’t think Miss Holt would approve—” he rushed to explain, as if that made it all more palatable.
“Of a kiss? From you?” Cordelia shook her head. “She sounds perfectly foolish.”
“She’s hardly all that,” he said, rising to the heiress’s defense, though not as passionately as one might think a nearly betrothed ought. “It’s just that she isn’t . . . well, I think she’d find that . . . not to her liking. And I certainly wouldn’t want to impose myself upon her.”
Cordelia hardly looked appeased. “If this lady is the one you want to marry with all your heart, and she you, kissing you . . . well, that should be her every waking thought. Her every desire.”
And there it was.
For they both knew that Cordelia wasn’t talking about Miss Holt.
Seeing Dorset and Miss Brabourne tangled together in such a way . . . He had to imagine Pamela would have had vapors over such an unseemly display.
Nor would Pamela ever allow such liberties. Not before she was married. And even then, he suspected it wouldn’t be welcomed all that much after the parson had given his blessing.
Oh, she’d do her duty to produce the requisite heir and spare, but after that?
Hardly.
Then he looked at Cordelia. She would never settle for such a loveless, passionless match.
