“That’s true. I have.” Eve looked around at the shabby shop and felt a rush of affection for it.
“You once said that you preferred being a pawnbroker to being a duchess.”
“Perhaps I shall have to reconsider.”
“I thought,” Rowarth said, “that you might wish to keep the shop anyway. Perhaps Joan could run it for you?”
“I think that she would like that very much.” Eve pressed her fingers to his lips. “How generous you are to risk offering me a means of escape should I find I really do prefer being a pawnbroker to being a duchess.”
“You will not want to escape.” His arms about her told her that he would never let her go now he had found her again. The happiness swelled within Eve and this time she dared to trust it. “You are arrogant,” she whispered.
He laughed. “So you keep telling me.” His voice changed. “Accept me, Eve. Come away with me.”
Her heart was so light and full of joy she thought she might burst. “I thought that you had a job to do,” she teased. “You have not yet caught Warren Sampson.”
“The other Guardians can do that,” Rowarth said. “Hawkesbury will not rest until he has Sampson behind bars.”
“And what will you be doing meanwhile?” Eve asked, standing on tiptoe to kiss him.
“I shall be on my wedding trip with you,” Rowarth said. He bent his head and his lips met hers. “We can go wherever you wish, my love. Wherever you are is my heart’s home and it always will be.”
* * * * *
How to Woo a Spinster
Kasey Michaels
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
CHAPTER ONE
LADY EMMALINE DAUGHTRY sat in the gardens of Ashurst Hall on one of the first bright days of spring, completely and entirely alone.
It was her twenty-eighth birthday.
On her lap was the letter that had arrived in the morning post from her nieces, Lydia and Nicole. In order to keep to one sheet, thus saving on the postage, Lydia had written her rather formal, excruciatingly correct wishes in her finest copperplate. Nicole, being Nicole, had scribbled her good wishes upside-down between Lydia’s lines, her usual exuberance evident in both her atrocious spelling and her latest affectation of marking all her i’s with small hearts.
The twins were back with their mother, the thrice-widowed Helen Daughtry, at their small estate of Willowbrook, as Helen was once again between husbands and had remembered that she had daughters to fuss over in her own fashion.
That would change in a few weeks, when Helen went tripping off to London for the Season, and Lydia and Nicole were once again shuttled back to Ashurst Hall “to bear their dearest spinster aunt their Comfort and Presence, as you must be So Devastatingly Lonely isolated in the back of beyond.” Or so Helen’s last letter, all but pinned to the twins’ luggage, had stated so cruelly. But all under the guise of being caring and compassionate.
Lady Emmaline knew her late brother’s widow could be a kind person, in her own way. She simply wasn’t a kind person frequently.
In that way, Helen had fit very well with the Daughtry family, who seemed to belong to another age, the more rough and tumble—and most definitely profane—age of two decades past. Marital fidelity was a joke to them, kindness considered a weakness and selfishness a near art form. Or else today’s Society had simply learned to hide their failings and vices better…
Her morals had, however, been the only way her sister-in-law resembled the Daughtrys. Helen always said she’d married the wrong brother when she’d wed the second son, but even that marriage had been quite above her social station. Yet, ever resourceful, she’d made do with a husband who had tired of her within a few months, and built her own life, her own circle of London friends.