Julia London 4 Book Bundle (7 page)

Impossible, but the man moved as close as he could without crawling into her gown with her. “But he has not, has he?” Before she could answer, he smiled that devastating smile of his again and promptly made her
mute. “As I told your father, we are not the first brothers to have settled on the same woman. No matter what you may decide, Benedict and I will sort it out. The choice is yours, Lilliana. A life of luxury as a countess—or, if you prefer, the familiar comfort of Kealing Park, near your family and your home.”

Why did it suddenly sound like a choice between heaven and hell? Lilliana had accepted what she thought was an inevitable match with Benedict, but she had not thought it so terribly ordinary until this very moment. She abruptly turned away and collided with the pianoforte she had forgotten was behind her. A candlestick toppled over onto the wood flooring. “Please forgive me, but I can’t think! This is all so very fantastic! No! So insane! Oh, Lord, it’s insane all right, so sudden, so unexpected—”

“Lilliana,” he murmured, his voice falling over her like a silken drape. “It is sudden because I am quite eager in my desire.” In his
what
? She could not help herself; she glanced suspiciously at him from the corner of her eye. He leaned forward, his lips almost brushing her cheek. “
Quite
eager,” he said softly, and his warm breath fanned her skin. “Please forgive me for having startled you, but try to understand. You know it is a good match, and I give you my word I shall make you happy.”

He leaned closer, and through no will of her own Lilliana turned slightly toward him. His lips brushed hers, singeing her. She did not move, stood as rigid as a statue, her gaze riveted on his cheek. Slowly he lowered his head again, teasing her lips with the whisper of his before carefully shaping her mouth to fit his.

Liquid fire spread rapidly, heating every inch of her body, then suddenly swelled to a full-blown panic. She had never been kissed before, not like this, not so sweetly and tenderly and
earnestly
that she turned molten. It was a strange, enticing sensation—she felt almost weightless, quivering when his hand ran a fiery path down her arm.

And then he suddenly lifted his head. Lilliana grabbed the edge of the pianoforte, her eyes locked on his lips. Those lips had touched hers. Adrian Spence had
kissed
her! It was unimaginable, incredible—“It is unfathomable, my lord!” she suddenly blurted out. “Please, I must … I need to think!”

“Of course,” he murmured soothingly. “May I call again tomorrow? Perhaps that will give you time to digest my offer and we might discuss it further.”

She rather doubted she would be able to digest a single thing for the rest of the day, but she nodded dumbly. The charming smile he flashed her was full of white teeth as he lifted her hand to his lips. When he turned her hand over and kissed the soft inside of her wrist, another startling spark ignited deep inside her and sent a chain of tingles up her spine. “I will make you a good husband, Lilliana,” he murmured, and a suggestive grin curled his lips. “In every conceivable way.”

A deep heat instantly flooded her cheeks; he chuckled and dropped her hand, then turned and strode to the door, where he paused to glance over his shoulder. “Until tomorrow?”

“I, ah, I … tomorrow,” she stammered. And then he was gone, leaving her to absorb the most incredible, most unbelievable thing that had ever happened in all her twenty-two years. Lilliana closed her eyes. It was absurd; the whole thing was patently absurd.

Almost as absurd as her giddy feeling of
complete
elation.

She suddenly pushed away from the pianoforte and rushed to an oval mirror to peer at her reflection. Nothing had changed—it was
her
looking back, the same, simple Lilliana Dashell. Slowly she brought her hands to her cheeks as she stared at her wide-eyed reflection. Heaven help her, but if she could have knocked on the pearly gates and asked God for just one favor, it would have been Adrian Spence. If she were married to a man like him, she might soar where others feared to, far away from Blackfield Grange and her mother’s rigid rules and
the expectations of a gently reared miss! Mother of God, she might actually
experience
life! She could travel to the ends of the earth, see things that most people could not even imagine, and best of all, she could gaze at his handsome face every day! It was more than she had ever dared to dream, but here it was, presented to her on a silver platter.

The bothersome image of Benedict appeared in her mind’s eye, and she felt no small amount of guilt for what she was thinking. Yet she knew as she turned and blindly made her way to the door that she would accept Lord Albright’s offer. As patently ridiculous as it was, she knew that as well as she knew the sun would come up in the morning.

Adrian accepted the reins from a groom who glared at him as if he had stolen the crown jewels, and sent Thunder trotting toward Newhall, the little village just five miles east of Kealing and the closest accommodations to Blackfield Grange. At least, he thought as he glanced at the fields around him, she seemed to take it well. He had expected some indignation, but Lilliana Dashell had taken his unorthodox offer rather well once she was capable of speaking instead of staring at him as if he were some sort of apparition.

He was not displeased with his progress.

And he was not entirely displeased with her. For all of Pearle’s praise of the younger sister, he had feared she would be homely. She was not homely, but neither was she pretty. Just … average. Average height and build, average looks—exactly what one might expect in a parish princess. Her blond hair was pretty, he thought idly, or rather,
could
be pretty—it looked a bit like a bird’s nest today. And the mud on her gown might be cause for wonder, but he shrugged to himself, unaffected by it. She was, in a word, unremarkable, and he couldn’t help wondering briefly what Benedict saw in her. He didn’t
really care—he only cared that her father seemed to be a wise man.

Not that Dashell wasn’t astounded, and that son of his rather indignant But the baron had quickly understood the enormity of his offer, and had quickly agreed that while it was Lilliana’s decision, he would not be disinclined to a match. What else could the man say? He was offering Dashell a solution to his many problems, and giving his daughter a match far above what she could hope for otherwise. Adrian had no doubt his offer would be accepted.

Lilliana descended the stairs very slowly, careful to step in such a way that the wood did not creak. If there was one thing that infuriated her mother even more than her racing, it was her habit of taking moonlit walks.

Yes, well, she was a bit restless, thank you, and her mother would just have to bear it.

How could she blame her? There was too much to think about! With a bewildered shake of her head, Lilliana paused in the corridor to fetch a heavy cloak. The sound of raised voices coming from the drawing room startled her, and she froze, straining to hear. It was quite extraordinary, really, as she could not recall ever having heard her parents argue. No one had to tell her that they argued about Lord Albright’s offer. She quietly moved closer, listening carefully to the muffled voices, then catching her breath when she overheard her mother demand that the earl’s offer be denied. “Oh, Walter, the entire parish will think Lilliana has jilted Lord Benedict! Everyone knows he intends to offer for her—can you not see how it will look when she marries his
brother
? Not to mention that there will be talk of
why
, exactly, they were married in such a rush!”

“My dear,” her father answered patiently, “if she accepts the earl, they will be gone from the parish in a fortnight. What little talk there is will soon vanish, and
we can ill afford to let a little scandal cloud our judgment.”

That remark astounded Lilliana, seeing as how her mother lived in
constant
fear of scandal, and very deliberately, she crept to the door. The scrape of a chair on the wood floor was followed by the sound of her father’s footfall. “Don’t look so ill, love. He offers us a freedom I could never give you, you know that. Fifty thousand pounds, Alice! Kealing offers us little more than servitude—he may pay our debts, but he takes the Grange in return. Think of our Tom! Think of what he will inherit if we are forced to accept Kealing’s offer—a mere forty percent!”

“I
do
think of Tom, but I also think of Lilliana!” her mother moaned. “She does not know this man! He has a horrid reputation—”

“Granted, he is known as a rogue, but he also has a very fine reputation of being fair and reputable in his business dealings. And you can hardly ignore the fact that he can give her a rich life. We could never hope for a better offer, my love.”

“He can give her a rich life, but he can also break her heart. I’m sorry, Walter, but it is all very suspect that he should come now. He does not know her, and—”

“He does not need to know her, Alice. He needs the requisite connections and good breeding stock, nothing more,” her father said flatly.

A curious silence had followed that remark, and then her mother sighed sadly. “Oh Lord, the rift this is bound to cause in that family is not to be borne! We should refuse
both
sons and take our chances!”

“It
can
be borne if it means keeping us from debtor’s prison and giving Tom his due. Alice, you know that we must accept one of the offers, or we are ruined. You
must
think of Tom! And I daresay, Lilliana’s chances for a good match grow smaller with each passing day!”

Lilliana stood perfectly still, her head swimming with confusion. Debtor’s prison? She knew that they had experienced what her mother called a rough patch … 
but debtor’s prison? A band of fear tightened around her chest as she imagined the authorities dragging her father away. And exactly when had Lord Kealing made an offer? Her father had told her only that the marquis had mentioned his son’s interest in her!

She heard the scrape of the chair again. “Ah, Alice. It is Lilliana’s decision, not ours. If she chooses the earl, well then, I am quite confident she will bear it well. She is a spirited girl.”

Her mother snorted her opinion of that, and Lilliana could not bear to hear more. She didn’t
need
to hear more—everything was suddenly very clear now, and she turned and walked quietly away.

Outside, she ran to the edge of bowling lawn, her breath frosting in the night air. The icy cold felt good in her lungs and cleared her mind. In truths the conversation she had overheard had shaken her badly, but not for the obvious reasons. Oh, she thought Lord Kealing’s terms were as odious as Lord Albright’s were suspect. But instead of being shocked and outraged, she felt an enormous sense of relief. Her parents did not think her particularly marriageable. That was not new—although they had never said it to her, it was something she just knew. It logically followed, then, that they did not believe a man like Lord Albright could want her. Well, she could not believe it either. But all that aside, if what they said was true, then Lord Albright had given her the reason to do what she knew she would do this very afternoon, what she
longed
to do. He had given her a sane reason to accept his offer—to save her family’s home.

She paused at the edge of the lawn and looked up at the crystal night and stars twinkling like so many gems above her. A distant memory came to her, when she had been a small child, looking out the window of the drawing room at a night sky just like this one.
I want to be a star when I grow up, Mama
, she had said.
Don’t be ridiculous, Lilliana! Now look at what you’ve done! You’ve missed another stitch!
But Lilliana had not cared about stitches; she had wanted to be up there, flying high
above the earth seeing what God saw. She still did. But at Blackfield Grange she was earthbound, stifled by boredom and a desire to know more. There was nothing in this parish to hold her except the overbearing sense of duty and propriety that had been drilled into her from the crib.

She could not let this one chance at heaven slip by. If she did, she would die, extinguished by a life so mundane as to stifle the breath from her. It didn’t matter what others said of Lord Albright—he was the man of her dreams, had always been, and she was not going to let him slip through her fingers because of some outdated fear of scandal. And her father was right—if she did not accept one of the two offers, Lord only knew what would become of her. She was two and twenty and lived in the middle of nowhere where less than a handful of eligible men knew of her existence. And without a suitable dowry her choices were extremely limited. So were Caroline’s, and she was blocking her sister’s chance at happiness with that ridiculously foppish Horace Feather—assuming, of course, her father ever agreed to accept “Mr. Featherbrain.”

Nonetheless, she felt terribly guilty and foolish and appalled by her reckless determination. But heaven help her, all she could think of was how perfect her life would be married to the most exciting man in all of Great Britain. God was smiling on her for once, offering her the one person who could make her truly happy—Adrian Spence.

At long last, she might soar.

     
A
SMILING LORD DASHELL
greeted Adrian the next day when a footman showed him to the solarium, and Adrian took that to be a good sign.

Crossing the threshold of the brightly lit room, he noticed the sister before anything else. He bowed over her hand as Dashell introduced her, taking in the heavily lashed green eyes and hair the rich color of honey. In spite of Miss Caroline Dashell’s uncontrollable giggling, Adrian could see why Pearle had described her as the family beauty.

Dashell pointed him toward his other daughter. Lilliana was seated at an easel, but she came quickly to her feet as he crossed the room to greet her. “Lilliana,” he murmured, and bowed over her hand, allowing his lips to linger a moment longer than etiquette allowed. The rustic parish princess flushed furiously. “You look lovely,” he said, and her flush turned to a delightful smile, ending in a lone dimple in one cheek.