“Then I suppose we needed each other to point ourselves in the right direction,” Tamsin said.
“Indeed, we were each other’s compass. And that means we must be the closest of friends just in case we need direction in the future.” Evangeline squeezed her hands. “I insist on it. As soon as we recover from the celebration, I shall ask you and Simon for supper.”
“We would love to join you.” Tamsin sent a glance across the room and then blushed. “Though right now I must leave you, for I can see my husband sending me a look across the room. If you’ll excuse me…”
Evangeline smiled as she looked in Simon’s direction and saw he was, indeed, focused very intently on Tamsin. She shook her head, for she’d always written Simon off as a bit…silly. Unfocused. But it seemed love had all the power in the world to make people…better.
It certainly had for her.
“Best go to him then,” she said.
The two broke apart and Evangeline continued her way across the room to where her new husband stood by with both their fathers. For the first time ever, the viscount actually looked like he was proud of his son. She pursed her lips. At least she’d given Henry that.
She couldn’t wait to give him more. But first she had to save him.
“Husband,” she said, smiling at the fathers before she winked at her groom. “I would dearly love to dance with you.”
Henry bowed toward her and then tipped his hand to their fathers. “I cannot deny my lady what she desires. Excuse me, gentlemen.”
He took her hand and to the dancefloor they went, falling into the spinning crowd together with a few graceful steps. “Thank you for saving me,” he said with a bright smile.
“I will always save you,” she reassured him as she gripped his hand all the tighter, “and know that you will do the same for me.”
“Aye, I will,” he agreed. “That is part of our future.”
“Part? And what is the rest?” she said, smiling at his teasing.
“Well, every day we’ll come to know each other more,” he said.
“Trust each other more,” she added.
“So you do know the future,” he said. “I do not need to tell you at all.”
“Not true.” She leaned a little closer. “I want to hear my future from your lips every day for the rest of my life. I demand it.”
“If you demand it, I must obey,” he said, his fingers brushing along her hip quite scandalously. “For as you know, I am hopelessly devoted to you.”
And as he spun her around the floor once more, she realized that fact was the only thing she really knew for certain. And it was more than enough.
Author’s Note
The planet Henry is so earnestly seeking in A Lady’s Gift for Seduction is Neptune. There are some who theorize that Galileo first predicted the existence of Neptune in the 17th century. By the regency, astronomy (especially comets, like the one Henry viewed with his beloved mother) was all the rage and amateur astronomers were seeking celestial bodies all over the sky. Telescopes of the time obviously couldn’t find planets so far from our own, so mathematical equations were developed to predict orbits and provide proof of existance. At the time what we know now as Neptune wasn’t known to be a planet or a meteor or some other body, but our Henry is convinced and of course he was right.
* * *
But poor Henry would be skunked by a Frenchman, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier almost thirty years after our story, who proved the existence of the planet mathematically in 1846. I would like to think in our Jess Michaels story world that he used some of Henry’s equations to do so, and that Henry would simply be over the moon pleased with the proof of what he always believed to be true.
* * *
I hope you enjoyed Henry and Evangeline’s love story. Happy reading!
A Lady’s Gift for Scandal
Elizabeth Essex
All thanks for this wonderfully fun project go to
my brilliant co-author and co-conspirator, Jess Michaels.
* * *
Your friendship and encouragement made this project an utter delight!
Chapter 1
London December 1814
Miss Thomasina Lesley was desperately disappointed in London.
Well, not London itself—the city at Christmastide was a delight of bright, festive sights and sounds. But the people in Society, and in this dimly lit room in particular, where a score of supposed gentleman were gathered around a flaming punch bowl, included a great deal too many, “Japes and jackasses, if you ask me.”
“I do not ask you.” From her place beside the holly-bedecked mantelpiece, her mama was quite emphatic. “Smile, for heaven’s sake. You’ll frighten all the gentlemen away with that scowl.”
“Good.” Tamsin was rather emphatic herself. “I shouldn’t like to let such simpletons near me.” Just because she was pretty did not mean she was sweet or unintelligent. Or without expectations.
Tamsin had expected the gentleman of London to be more…
Urbane. Cultured. Sophisticated.
But the snow-cold fact of the matter was that the gentlemen arrayed before her seemed to be nothing but idiots—witness the fact that they were engaged in lighting themselves on fire by attempting to drink from their flaming punch bowl. And laughing like braying jackasses while they did it.
As if it were the greatest joke in the world to set one’s eyebrows on fire.
“The fellow in the green coat is smoldering.” If that wasn’t the very definition of an idiot, Tamsin did not know what was.
Her mother nearly throttled her fan in exasperation. “Had you rather pack your bags back for home,” Mama asked in a furious whisper, “and be married to your cousin Edward, who is the only man in Somerset to overlook your errant tongue and ask for you?”
Heaven forefend. “No.” A duller, more pompous man than her cursed cousin had yet to be born—he was thirty going on sixty, if he was a day. But at least he had never set his own eyebrows on fire. That she knew of—this idiotic game of Snapdragon seemed just the sort of male jollity Cousin Edward would extol as manly.
“Then smile, for heaven’s sake, girl. You’re a diamond of the first water, prettier than any of your sisters,” her mama reminded her. “Pray smile and look like it.”
It was all humbug, this diamond business—Tamsin had never felt more like paste, being given the chance to go to London instead of her older sister, Anne, just because of her looks. She was a counterfeit diamond at best, a determined bluestocking being made to masquerade as a marriageable ninny in search of an equally marriageable ninny of a man. She looked the part, certainly, rigged out like a dressmaker’s doll in the latest styles from the London modistes, but she felt nothing but an absolute imposter.
A frustrated, bored imposter, sore from biting her own tongue.
Exactly how she had felt at home, deep in the Somerset countryside, where nothing exciting or intellectual ever happened. As much as she loved her sisters and their intelligent, well-read company, she longed for a wider acquaintance than their be-nighted neighborhood provided. She yearned for newer ideas. The country was a vast, tedious, snow-covered prison, if you asked her.
But no one asked her.
Especially not Mama. Under her escort, London had become more tedious—the city jackanapes who set their tailcoats on fire excepted, of course—than the country. Here, Tamsin could not even for one minute be herself. Here, she was an ornament to be displayed and disposed of—preferably to a man who was both titled and rich. Anything above a lord, and Mama would be in alt. Anything below, and Tamsin would be accounted a failure.
Frankly, Tamsin preferred to fail on her own, without reference to anyone else—father, mother or future smoldering husband.
Her frustration made her tone far sharper than her mama would like. “I suppose a game of Snapdragon can’t be counted a success until at least one idiot has lost an eyebrow.”
“Sometimes two,” a stunning young woman murmured at her
elbow. Lady Evangeline, eldest daughter of the Duke of Allingham, was a true diamond of the first water—the sort of raven-haired, creamy-skinned English rose Mama was forever extolling as the epitome of beauty. The young woman was like an elegant swan gliding across the gilded surface of Society, regal and serene, as if she didn’t need to paddle madly beneath the water like Tamsin.
“I do beg your pardon.” Tamsin felt she had best apologize, for Lady Evangeline was a noblewoman—a duke’s daughter—and her opinion was listened to. “I fear I should not be so critical of the fun, especially at this time of year.”
“Do not go back now,” Lady Evangeline’s laugh was tempered by a wry smile. “I need an ally. You are utterly correct that they are all idiots. They’re not the sort of fellows one wants for a husband, are they?”
“Heavens, no,” Tamsin was too straightforward not to admit the truth, though she was both surprised and relieved to find anything like an ally in Lady Evangeline.
“Lord, grant me the confidence of a man of supposed education who knows absolutely nothing in truth,” the lady intoned.
“Indeed.” Tamsin was thrilled to find the lady possessed such an arch wit—it gave her permission to add her own rather acerbic thoughts. “If this is what’s on offer, I don’t think I want any sort of a husband at all. It seems a devil’s bargain at best.”
“True,” Lady Evangeline agreed. “But what sort of life can one have without one?”
“An independent life,” Tamsin vowed. The sort of quiet life where she might be left alone to read. And write. And think for herself.
She knew it was impossible—she and her sisters had been told so, over and over until she was blue in the face from hearing it. But somewhere in the last stubborn corner of her character, she had refused to accept it. “I had rather entertain myself, not with silly parties with flaming punch bowls, but with intelligent salons where ideas and ideals might be exchanged. Where books might be discussed or poetry recited.” Where she might get advice and encouragement about the study of Bess of Hardwick that she had undertaken.
“You’re a secret bluestocking.”
“It’s no great secret,” Tamsin admitted. “I would be a true bluestocking if I were allowed, like my aunt Dahlia—she has her own establishment here in London and has the most elegant salons, full of the most interesting people.” But Tamsin was not allowed go to any event that smacked of intellectualism. She had visited her aunt but once, before Mama had decreed such salons—as well as trips to museums or lectures—a waste of their precious time when they might be at balls instead, securing Tamsin’s future. “But the sad truth is that if I don’t marry one of them”—she gestured to the rowdy young men on offer—“I’ll only be married off to my odious cousin who is to be a baronet someday but cares nothing for books or ideas, unless they’re to do with beef cattle or crop rotation.”
“Great God,” her new friend said with feeling. “Might you be able to manage him into thinking better? A good woman can often make a mediocre man into something more.”
“I doubt it.” A more vain, self-convinced man than her cousin Edward, Tamsin had yet to meet. Every sentence out of his mouth began with Actually, Thomasina… He was positively enraging—even Mama said so, and she was normally enthusiastic about anything with a title and a pulse.
How different it would be if clear-sighted people like Lady Evangeline and Tamsin had charge of their lives. “I wish we were truly allowed to choose instead of only being chosen. Don’t you, Lady Evangeline?” she mused. But the lady made no response. “Lady Evangeline?”
“Yes?”
“I was only saying I wish we were truly allowed to choose, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Lesley, I was just woolgathering—thinking of your situation. So you do not wish to marry this dreadful cousin?”
Tamsin could only shake her head.
“What is it you do want, then?”
No one, not in all the days she had been in London, nor in any of the days that had passed before, had ever asked Tamsin what she wanted for her life. Not Mama, nor Papa. And certainly not odious Cousin Edward.
But Tamsin knew her answer. “I’d rather be a spinster, like my aunt Dahlia. My mama does say she ruined herself, coming to London on her own, but she’s left to live in peace with books and cats, and no men. It’s heavenly.” Especially when compared to the smoldering idiots. “That is what I want. But my mama will never approve. I must choose, and by the end of this little Christmas season.”
Tamsin had never felt so helpless, or so angry. Heat scratched her throat. “The very thought of Cousin Edward makes me want to ruin myself like Aunt Dahlia, so he’ll have nothing to do with me.” Cousin Edward would get her father’s small estate regardless, so why should she let him torture her with his odious opinions for the rest of her life?
Lady Evangeline’s eyes lit with mischievous excitement. “Why not do it then?”
“Do what?”
“Ruin yourself.”
The suggestion had Tamsin instinctively shaking her head—it was one thing to give vent to her secret fears and frustrations, but it was another thing entirely to act upon those wishes. Yet everything within her shrank from the suggestion at the same time that she yearned toward it.
Lady Evangeline was all confident decision. “It would have to be light ruination,” she mused, smiling as if she already had a perfect plan percolating behind her equally perfect face. “To maintain your standing on some level. It all has to be done very carefully, in a controlled fashion—a bespoke sort of ruination, if you like.”
Hope—crazy, unrealistic, exhausting, exhilarating hope—slid into Tamsin’s veins like too much French champagne, lifting her up on the possibility. “Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely,” Evangeline said.
Tamsin urged her brilliant new friend away from Mama so there was no possibility she might overhear. “Pray, tell me more.”
Lady Evangeline tossed up a shoulder. “If you truly do not want to fall victim to the machinations of your parents, you must do a little machinating of your own.”
The idea took root in Tamsin’s head and began to grow stronger. “How?” Tamsin could barely hear her own voice over the strident, hopeful beating of her heart.
“We must simply think like the men, mustn’t we, when they want to find a biddable bride.” Evangeline clapped her hands together like a magician conjuring a trick. “And who is a biddable bride, at least in their minds?” She opened her hands wide as if the answer were self-evident. “A wallflower!”
Of course. So simple. So practical. So perfect.
“A wallflower,” Tamsin repeated, trying the idea out for size—tailoring it to suit her needs. “A masculine wallflower.”
“Exactly!” A mischievous smile of angelic radiance and devilish determination gave something more than beauty to her new friend’s already-beautiful face. Lady Evangeline took her arm with purpose. “And I know just where they are.”
Chapter 2
Tamsin cast a wary backward glance at Mama. While she might have secretly thought of rebelling against her mother and her draconian strictures, she had never actually put so much as a toe out of line.
But where had that got her? Watching idiots set their eyebrows on fire.
So despite the fear beating a hectic tattoo on her heart, Tamsin followed in her new friend’s wake like an ugly duckling swimming after a swan. Lady Evangeline led the way to a tall door that stood slightly ajar, spilling warm, mellow light into the darker corridor and threw open the portal to reveal row upon row, and shelf upon shelf of rich, jewel-toned volumes.
“The library.” Of course. Why had she not thought of seeking like-minded intellectuals here, in this temple to learning, instead of wasting her time standing by the side of the dance floor?
Lady Evangeline smiled like a cat in cream. “And just as I promised, here are the wallflowers.”
There they were—two gentleman sitting in perfect peace, readi
ng beside the fire. And not a one of them smoldering.
“Who is that?” Tamsin gestured to a third fellow, a bespectacled gentleman quietly focusing a telescopic glass out the window at the night sky. He looked to be just the sort of kindred spirit who would welcome intellectual discussion. Perhaps she might even become acquainted with him without any sort of ruination required.
“Do you not know Henry Killam?” Lady Evangeline’s tone indicated that everyone did. Everyone but Tamsin.
But she was happy to correct that mistake. “Might he do? He seems quite a bluestocking sort himself.” And she rather liked his sort of gentle handsomeness.
Lady Evangeline took a long time before she answered. “Well…he is a thorough, scientific sort of fellow, who never does anything by halves, so that would be an advantage in your predicament, specifically…” Lady Evangeline trailed off, staring at this Henry for a long moment, as if she could divine his flaws. She shook her head. “Do you know, I don’t think Henry will do at all for your purposes, not at all.”
“No?” Tamsin could not keep the disappointment from her voice.
“No.” Lady Evangeline’s tone firmed. “Because he’s… Because he’s not… Simon!” She headed for the other side of the room to an alcove where a tall fellow Tamsin had not noticed reposed upon an upholstered sofa. “Oh, yes. Simon Cathcart ought to do quite nicely.”
“Really?” This time, Tamsin couldn’t keep her skepticism from her voice. The fellow in question lay full length upon the sofa, with his buff-clad legs crossed comfortably at the ankle. Apparently asleep. In the middle of a ball. “He looks rather too indolent. And too…” The man was so tall, his booted feet stuck well out over the arm of the sofa. “…too everything."
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