The Spinster's Guide to Scandalous Behavior

by Jennifer McQuiston

  A wife belongs to her husband.

  But a woman alone belongs to herself.

  Lucy had always imagined her life would be spent focusing on grand causes, changing the world one unjust practice at a time. But a body couldn’t do that if they were bound in marriage to another. She placed her hands against his chest, pushing him back an inch, seeking space to breathe and think.

  His jaw hardened. “Is this to be another set of negotiations, then?”

  She shook her head. She felt confused, and the temptation of his arm around her middle wasn’t helping unmuddle matters in the slightest. “I . . . I just need to think on it.”

  And she couldn’t do that when she was sighing contentedly in his arms.

  She took another step away, and then another. Why did it feel as though she were going in the entirely wrong direction?

  “Lucy, be careful,” he warned.

  Suddenly, she was wobbling. She cried out in fear.

  But he was there beside her, his hand closing over her arm. He hauled her back against his chest, his arms closing tight. She pressed her face against his shirt, smelling cloves and tobacco, feeling the solid thump of heart and muscle and promise beneath her cheek.

  “Can’t you see?” he growled in her ear. “It is going to be the death of me if I can’t be the one to keep you out of trouble.”

  She closed her eyes, savoring the feel of him, even as his words kindled a deeper uncertainty. Damn it, now he’d saved her life twice.

  How could she be thinking to repay that debt with disappointment?

  “Lucy!”

  The voice pushed down at them from twenty feet above. Her eyes snapped open to see her father’s face, peering over the edge.

  She’d been expecting him to come, of course. The fear that her father would show up was part of what had pushed her these past few days to reach Heathmore as soon as possible. But there was an unanswered question hanging in the balance.

  And she couldn’t help but wish she had a few more minutes to think.

  “Are you hurt?” Her father’s voice had shifted. Anger churned beneath his curt tone. He looked like hell, his hat askew, dark smudges of exhaustion below his eyes. She was used to seeing her father mad, having caused such reactions frequently enough over the years.

  But she’d never seen him look quite this angry.

  “I am fine, Father,” she called up, trying to extricate herself from Thomas’s tight grip. But as she braced herself for the expected tirade and lecture, Lucy realized something odd. Her father wasn’t glowering at her, though she inarguably deserved it.

  He was glowering at the man standing beside her.

  The man who was all that stood between her and the bottom of the cliff.

  “I’ll thank you to take your hands off my daughter, Lord Branston,” he snarled.

  Lucy could feel Thomas’s fingers tighten over her arm. “With all due respect, Lord Cardwell, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

  The distinctive sound of a hammer cocking cut through the air. Lucy caught the gleam of metal in her father’s hand, the barrel of a revolver pointing straight at Thomas’s chest.

  “No!” she screamed, suddenly realizing just what sort of picture this little scene painted.

  She was wearing her chemise.

  Her dress was bunched on the ground.

  And she was tied up with a rope and plastered against his chest.

  Oh, God.

  “Lucy,” her father said, his voice hoarse. The barrel lowered, aimed somewhere now in the vicinity of Thomas’s upper trouser area. “Has the bastard touched you?”

  She hesitated, shocked at her father’s ferocious display of protectiveness. And unfortunately, the answer to that question wasn’t exactly a resounding no. But the explanation was going to take more than a few mumbled seconds, and she wasn’t sure her tongue was working properly at the moment, tied up as it was in fear and surprise.

  “Then I hope you’ve a second in this town who will stand up with you, Lord Branston,” her father snarled, raising the barrel again, this time to point toward Thomas’s head. “Because you’re going to need one.”

  From the Diary of Edith Lucille Westmore

  November 14, 1830

  Is there anything lonelier than a life built entirely of secrets?

  No one here knows me, not really. Oh, they know who I have become, but not who I was once. Even my name is a secret, one I have zealously guarded from the day I arrived in Lizard Bay. Through the years, I have taken such care that no one in town suspects my connections in London. If they knew I was Lord Cardwell’s daughter, who knew what might happen?

  Worse, Heathmore hides secrets of its own. I must confess, as my money wears thin I wonder if I might need to consider a more mercenary approach to the property. I cannot live on good intentions and fresh air, and I’ve no more jewels to sell. Yet such a choice would destroy the very life I have built. Worse, I’d have to sign my true name on a contract, and solicitors would be involved. There would be no hiding my connections then.

  And then, of course, there is the biggest secret of all, the one that carries me down to town so often, particularly on Fridays and Sundays. The one I refuse to confess, even in my diary. Because putting words down on paper would be admitting I have been wrong, all these years. And a lady never admits she is wrong.

  Chapter 21

  Thomas raised his hands, though he was loath to let Lucy go.

  It didn’t make him happy to relinquish his hold. After all, there were two dangers they were facing. One was obvious, aiming down at them above the cliff. The other was waiting below, the sharp rocks eager to claim their first victim.

  “Father, give me a chance to explain,” Lucy twitched beside him, her agitation palpable. “There is to be no duel. I absolutely forbid it. And put the damn gun away. You know you can’t shoot the side of a building in broad daylight.”

  The barrel slowly lowered. The sound of the hammer uncocking had Thomas breathing a sigh of relief. It seemed the girl even cursed around her father, a fact that ought to make him smile. But this was not the time to give into such an impulse. In terms of explanations, he was curious what Lucy had in mind, because the truth was rather likely to send that barrel pointing again at his head

  “We need to get her to safety,” he called up to Lord Cardwell. “Can you haul the rope up while I push her up from beneath?”

  Lucy turned to him, shaking her head. “I want you to go up first. I’m safe enough with the rope tied about my waist.”

  “No!” Thomas growled. In that moment, he heard, as well, Cardwell’s nearly simultaneous echo. Thomas looked up at her father, his irritation with the man easing somewhat. It was hard to be annoyed with Lord Cardwell when it was clear he loved his daughter and was concerned with her safety.

  “Lucy, you must come first.” Cardwell’s voice was hoarse with worry. “I insist upon it.”

  Lucy put her hands on her hips. “Do you promise you won’t shoot him once I am up?”

  Cardwell’s mouth turned down in a frown. “I . . . er . . .”

  A snarl of irritation escaped those lovely lips. “Throw the revolver over the edge.”

  Cardwell’s face reddened. “Now Lucy, be reasonable . . .”

  Thomas winced. If he learned one thing in the week since he’d met her, it was that telling this woman to be reasonable was an entirely stupid thing to do.

  “No, you are the one who needs to be reasonable.” She took a step toward the edge and pointed to the empty space beyond. “I mean it, Father. I am not playacting here. This isn’t one of Geoffrey’s pranks. And the longer you wait, the longer it will take to hear my explanation.”

  There was a muttered oath, and then the revolver came sailing down. The sound of metal on stone clattered up from below.

  “I knew that would work,” she whispered, offering Thomas a cheeky smile. She squared her shoulders and nodded. “Right, then. Up I go.”

  This time her progress w
as solid. With Thomas working from below, boosting her bum against his shoulder, and her father hauling the rope from the top, she half climbed, half hung, until she was being pulled over the edge and her face was peering down at him beside her father’s.

  Thomas smiled up, relieved to see her safe. And then it was his turn, his progress sure and swift as he went up the rope, hand over hand, welcoming the burn of the rope fibers against his sweating palms. It was only after he reached the top that he realized the obvious.

  Damn it all, but Lucy’s skirts and corset were still on the ledge below.

  “Well?” Cardwell crossed his arms, his frown deepening as his gaze shifted between them. “I think I have been more than patient.” His gaze hardened on Thomas. “And I would have you know that my gun may be gone, but I still have a knife in my possession.”

  Lucy waved a hand in the air. “There is no need to resort to threats. It is really quite innocent.”

  Her father’s eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t look innocent.”

  She gestured toward the cottage. “Well, it all started with the rats.”

  “The rats?” her father echoed with disbelief. “Have they chewed off your skirts, then?”

  “Actually, I should probably go further back.” She began to collect the rope, coiling it about her arm and shoulder. She seemed outwardly unruffled, but Thomas had come to know her these past few days. He could tell by the way her teeth were gnawing her lower lip that she was thinking, hard and fast. “Lord Branston escorted me here yesterday to see Heathmore, and I fell off the cliff while . . . er . . . inspecting the property.”

  “That scarcely explains how he came to be down there with you today.” Cardwell’s gaze turned back to him, and Thomas felt the burn of a father’s ire. “Or how your skirts came to be removed.”

  “It is all very simple.” She reached the end of the rope. “My skirts were in the way.”

  “In the way of what?”

  At her father’s enraged growl, she took a step toward the rock where the rope was still tied and began to tug on it. “You know, this is really knotted quite tightly,” she said. “Do we have anything we might cut it off with?”

  With a growl of frustration, her father pulled a wicked-looking blade from his coat pocket and handed it over.

  “Thank you.” She cut the rope free and then promptly sent the knife sailing over the edge of the cliff as well.

  “Lucy!” Her father’s voice was now as hopelessly knotted as the rope had just been.

  Any meekness in her manner vanished along with the knife. “Well, I can’t bloody well think of a proper explanation when you are shouting at me and waving a weapon about!”

  “I wasn’t waving it about!”

  “Well, you were threatening to! And proving quite the idiot about it, too.”

  “Young lady, you will not speak to me that way—”

  “I’m not a young lady! I am twenty-one years old!”

  Thomas stepped between them, raising his hands in a bid for peace. Or quiet. Something beyond shouts and accusations. They both fell abruptly silent.

  “May I have a chance to explain?” he asked tersely. They nodded, their faces matching shades of red. He turned to Cardwell, determined to erase the censure he saw on the man’s face, to make him see his daughter the way he himself did: brave and resilient and unwavering in her desire to set things right. “You should be proud of your daughter, sir.”

  He looked unconvinced. “I should?”

  Thomas nodded. “She has proven herself a shrewd negotiator. She sensed from the start something wasn’t right about my offer for the property.”

  “Not right?” Cardwell echoed, looking more confused than angry now.

  “I tried to convince her to sell me Heathmore for less than it was worth, and she insisted on coming to conduct a proper inspection of the property so she could determine its true value.”

  Cardwell blinked. “She . . . ah . . . she did?”

  “She drives a hard bargain, too. Has me up to one thousand pounds.”

  Cardwell’s eyes bulged in his head. He looked at his daughter, his mouth open in surprise. “She does?”

  But Lucy was glaring at him, no doubt remembering that moment in Salisbury when she’d choked out the outrageous amount. “If you recall,” she said tightly, “I did not agree to the terms of that particular offer.”

  “I would gladly give you my name,” Thomas said bluntly.

  “I don’t want your name. I have a perfectly good name,” came her strangled response. “Why do men always think women want a new name?”

  “Lord Cardwell.” Thomas turned, prepared to ask the man for his daughter’s hand in marriage—a proper proposal, done right. He knew she cared for him. Could feel in his bones the rightness of them together. But Cardwell wasn’t listening. Instead, he was scratching his head, standing by the rock where the rope had just been tied. Thomas saw him run a hand across its white-marbled surface, heard him muttering under his breath.

  “Lord Cardwell?” Thomas called, trying to pull his attention back to the matter at hand.

  But the man was striding away now, shaking his head. He peered over the edge of what remained of the cliff, then turned back around, his face red with anger. “Well done, Lucy.”

  She stared at her father, her mouth open. “I . . . ah . . . thank you?”

  “I didn’t see it at first.” Cardwell pointed a finger at Thomas. “But you did, brilliant girl. He’s tried to swindle us!”

  Thomas felt a knot begin to grow at the pit of his stomach.

  “Don’t you mean he’s tried to swindle me?” Lucy asked archly.

  Missing her point, Cardwell pointed back to the newly exposed cliff face. “I missed it before, during my first visit. I was too upset over Edith’s death, and I didn’t understand why she would leave Heathmore to you when it seemed all but worthless. But damn it all, there’s tin on this property, isn’t there?” His voice rose in volume and his finger came back to stab the air in Thomas’s direction. “You, sir, have tried to steal my daughter’s inheritance!”

  The knot in his stomach began to tighten. In fact, it began to feel a bit like a noose, particularly when Lucy turned troubled blue eyes in his direction.

  “Lucy, I can explain.”

  “Is this what you meant in your note? What you wanted to show me this morning?” she whispered, her voice anguished. “That there is tin on the property?”

  Thomas hesitated. It would be so easy to lie. To nod and play along.

  But he had given her far too many omissions of the truth already. And so he shook his head. “No. I had planned to show you something else.” Anything, in fact, but this. He gestured to the moors, to the wild barren fields that stretched out above the cottage. “I wanted to show you what lay on the grounds.” At her look of confusion, he stooped down and fumbled in the satchel on the ground, bringing out a fistful of heath—wilted, now, in all the excitement and delay. “I wanted to show you this.”

  There was a strained moment of silence, where only the wind and the ocean held sway as she stared down at his hand. “You wanted to show me grass?” she finally whispered.

  He stifled a growl, frustrated beyond reason at the awkwardness of the conversation, one he had no hope of remedying in the moment. “Not grass. Heath. A flower, actually.”

  “It doesn’t look like a flower.”

  “It flowers later, in summer. The point is, it is indescribably rare.” From the satchel he pulled out the rock he’d dug up this morning, its green and gray dirt-crusted surface hiding its potential beauty a little too well. “There is this, as well.”

  Her lips firmed. “A rock?”

  “Not just a rock. Lizardite.” He gestured toward her neck. “It can be fashioned into serpentine, like the necklace around your neck.”

  Her brow puckered and her fingers drifted toward the pendant.

  “I know it doesn’t look the same,” he said hurriedly. “Not yet. It has to be polished first. But
it is part of the rare geology of this peninsula, found nowhere else in England. And there is more, if you would let me show you.”

  He could tell, by her lengthening frown, that she didn’t understand. Either that or she didn’t care to try. The problem was, you couldn’t tell someone something like this. You needed to show them, needed time to explain how rare and precious and important such things were.

  But time was something she didn’t appear to be willing to give him.

  “You wanted to show me flowers and rocks,” she said flatly. She straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eye, her dirt-smudged face stiff with disappointment. “Well then, that makes me very sorry I pitched my father’s pistol and knife over that cliff, Lord Branston.”

  LUCY’S THOUGHTS TUMBLED ungracefully about in her skull.

  Tin. It would need to be mined. Refined. Presumably, the entire cliff might need to be dug out. Possibly even the entirety of the property. She hadn’t a clue as to its value, but she suspected it was something more significant than one thousand pounds.

  With or without her maidenhead.

  Her father was standing beside her, glaring at Thomas every bit as fiercely as she was. As though he was proud of her. She had little enough experience with the notion, but in the shadow of what appeared to be Thomas’s overwhelming betrayal, she wanted to lean toward that now. It was perhaps the only thing holding her together. One pull and it might all unravel.

  “I would ask you to leave now, Lord Branston,” she choked out, even as she had to school her mouth to skip over his given name. Had she felt humiliated that day at the inn, when she’d first imagined his interest had been feigned to tempt her to sell Heathmore? That experience was a pale cousin of the mortification she felt now.

  “Lucy—” he began.

  “You lied to me,” she ground out. “Lied to the town, too. There is tin here, perhaps enough even to save Lizard Bay from its slow, steady slide toward nothingness.” He’d tried to steal it, and for what? To hide it away, never to be disclosed? Or was he trying to acquire the property so he alone would be poised to benefit, at the expense of everyone else?