Tempting Fate by Kerrigan Byrne (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

“Think nothing of it.” He nudged her affectionally. “Speaking of difficult, you usually bring Mrs. Winterton along to these sorts of outings, do you not?”

Felicity winced in sympathy. “She is suffering the gastric effects of a poorly cooked fish stew.”

His pout was meant to seem affected, but she thought there was some genuine disappointment in the gesture. “Poor thing. I was rather looking forward to her disapproving frown, icy glare, and scorching condemnation.”

At that, Felicity smothered a giggle with her silk glove. “Oh, it’s not so bad as all that. Mrs. Winterton barely approves of me. It’s why she was hired, I think. Father liked nothing so much as a censorious person. And she’s been ever so much kindlier since his passing.”

“Yes, but I’ve often wondered why you keep her? Especially now that you have this strapping barbarian who’s almost half as frightening as she is.” He chuckled at his own joke.

Felicity had to be very careful not to check over her shoulder to ascertain if the strapping barbarian in question had taken offense.

“Mr. Severand is employed for my safety, not my companionship, and Mrs. Winterton reminds me of Mercy, so I can’t help but like her very much. We’re more friends than we are employer and staff.”

“You have to be careful of that,” he cautioned with a wry smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You let someone like that get close, and they’ll take you for everything you have.”

That drew her brows together. Bainbridge had always been a bit caustic, but she’d not known him to be so cynical.

“How many times should I dance at the ball with you?” he asked, levity returning to his manner as if he’d summoned it from thin air.

Felicity chewed on the inside of her lip, wondering if Bainbridge was every bit as wicked as he seemed, or much, much worse. She enjoyed his company always, but questioned if he was like this even when alone.

When no one was there to watch his spectacle.

“You know as well as I that dancing with me more than once would make a statement of intention…”

“And what do you think about that?” he pressed gently.

Her step faltered a bit, and she brushed it off as if checking her shoe for a flaw. “A statement? Are you implying you want to make one? But we’re not… and you’re…”

“Old?” His lips twisted into a rueful sort of smirk.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” she rushed to placate his feelings. “I mean, you are quite twenty years my elder, but I was more thinking about how a connection might come across as a bit… incestuous, you being my cousin and all.”

“Second cousin,” he corrected. “And I know that’s fallen out of fashion these days, but we needn’t even produce an heir if you’re not inclined. I merely thought that since your father’s title and certain lands passed to me upon his death, so, too, might your delightful self. Furthermore, you mentioned in the past, you’d like to find a way to keep the holdings together.”

“I-I did, but…”

“Oh!” Bainbridge lifted a hand and waved enthusiastically at a group of gentlemen. “Pardon me, dear Felicity, I see a scoundrel with whom I must have a word. I’m going to leave you in the hands of this fellow for no longer than it takes for a kettle to whistle.”

He hurried away over the green expanse of lawn, leaving her beneath the shade of a beech tree by a bench made of iron and oak.

Felicity sank onto it, unfocusing her eyes at her twirling her parasol as she fought a rising bout of nerves.

Bainbridge had spoken so blithely about marriage. As if it were a lark. But— God willing— she’d several decades to live her entire life. Deciding what that future would look like— and with whom she would share it— seemed like too monumental and overwhelming a task to leave in her own hands.

What if she made an enormous mistake? This was the sort of contract only broken by death.

Or worse, divorce.

She had no idea about marriage. Most of the books she read ended by the time the vows were spoken. And when asked, her sisters all claimed to have known the men they married were the loves of their lives. Their choices were absolute and their regrets nonexistent.

Whereas she… she’d received twelve proposals by post once she’d entered half mourning. Most of them from men she’d hardly met, and all of them little better than business contracts. Noblemen, politicians, even an impoverished duke, all offered to take over the running of her father’s shipping company.

Indeed, her suitors thought that offering her a generous stipend of her own money was tantamount to courtship.

Bainbridge represented a different course, or so she thought. Someone she knew. Someone she liked.

However, behind his charm lurked something secretive, something that set alarm bells tolling in her head.

Was this fear valid, or something foisted upon her by her already nervous, overwrought disposition?

Blast, but it was bloody awful not to trust oneself.

She felt a presence before she heard the faint rustle in the grass beside the bench. A large body sheltered her from the increasingly chilly breeze as Gareth Severand stood sentinel at her side.

She glanced up at him, so glad to have the help of her spectacles to observe him.

Lord but he was compelling to look at. From every angle, she learned something new. Discovered a scar or mannerism she’d not previously detected. His teeth ground together when he pondered the world, as if chewing on his thoughts to make them more palatable. He’d a vein in his forehead, just beneath his widow’s peak, that would appear when he was tense or irked. His eyes were never still, never fixed; they made ceaseless journeys across his entire vicinity, and she suspected he identified and catalogued any perceived threat, no matter how slight.

From this angle, she could tell he’d nicked himself shaving this morning beneath his jaw.

A vision of the man about his toilette distracted her from