“Wise? I don’t recall saying that,” he said facetiously. “I’d say you’re much more of a trial than I’d expected from a debutante.”
“Oh? And what attributes do you believe commendable in a debutante?”
“The usual, I’d imagine. Sweet. And biddable. Shy, not at all forward.”
“Simpering? With a tendency to giggle? Smelling of nothing more than bread and butter, as Byron wrote? Proficient in discussing the state of the weather, as in it is fair, or coming on to rain, or beastly hot? No, not beastly. Horridly hot.”
Even with the fraying cord holding a figurative sword of Damocles dangling over his head, Coop realized he could speak nonsense with Daniella Foster for hours, heartily enjoying himself. “Warm. Ladies of quality don’t know the meaning of hot.”
“Yes, I remember now. And moist. Ladies, even if lost in a desert, would get no more than moist. However, under the circumstances, I think you’re much better off with me.”
“Yes, in the end, that was the deciding factor,” Coop murmured just as the heavy chapel door swung open, followed closely (too closely, really) by a woman’s voice. “Aha! Basil, get yourself in here! Look what I’ve found. Oh, the shame, the shame.”
Dany whirled about to see the intruder, or she would have if Cooper hadn’t grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her against him for a kiss. The kiss he was to have stolen just as the timepiece in his pocket chimed out the hour, which it had not yet done.
A kiss, he would later tell Darby when he recounted the scene, as being as inspiring as pressing one’s lips against a block of wood.
“Basil, do you see them? Minerva’s Cooper and some hapless gel, as I live and breathe. The hero of Quatre Bras—I recognized him immediately from the chapbook. Locked in a clandestine embrace.”
“Yes, dear, I see them,” the Duke of Cranbrook said, puffing only a little from his small climb up the stairs, as neither duke nor duchess would see sixty again. “Nothing we haven’t done a time or three, eh, Viv?”
“Not now, Basil, not when we’re being decorous,” the duchess scolded, abandoning her husband to all but float across the stone floor in a compilation of skirts and scarves that, were it any darker in the chapel, would have put most in the mind of a ghost. If ghosts wore ruffled, tule-wrapped bonnets.
By now Dany was standing stock-still, her eyes all but popping out of her head, and Cooper had dropped to one knee, her hands held tightly in his.
So she couldn’t run away. Or pummel him heavily about the head and shoulders, which he wouldn’t dismiss as impossible. Not from the look on her face.
“Miss Foster,” he said hurriedly, squeezing her fingers to get her attention. “Under the circumstances, it would indeed be my honor and privilege to ask for your hand in marriage, in front of these witnesses.”
“You hear that, Viv? We’re witnesses,” the duke said, catching up to his wife and slipping his arm about her waist. “I’ve always wanted to be a witness.”
“Basil, hush. Pretty little thing, isn’t she? Minerva was worried about that. Oh, dear, she hasn’t answered yet. Go on, dearie, it’s your turn now. Say yes,” the duchess prodded, leaning in as if to not miss a word.
Cooper watched Dany as she looked to the pair of seeming cherubs beaming at them, actually dropping into a brief curtsy before redirecting her attention, and indigo eyes gone close to black, to him.
Suddenly, he felt himself transported to Bond Street.
Those eyes, like a mirror into her soul, told him her every thought, each rapidly transitioning emotion. Wide-eyed shock. Embarrassed innocence. Questioning. Recognition. Amusement, almost as if she was laughing at their situation, perhaps even at him.
“Just say yes, all right?” he whispered. “I’ll explain later.”
“Oh, my, yes, you will be doing that, won’t you?” she answered just as quietly.
“Viv, I can hear them talking, but I can’t quite make out what they’re saying,” the Duke of Cranbrook complained.
“She said yes, Your Grace,” Coop told him, rising to his feet before raising Dany’s hands for what he hoped resembled chastely devout kisses.
“Well, good, then,” the duke chirped. “Good on you, young lady, and good on my nephew’s chum. Oh, and good on me, because now I won’t be late to dinner.” He tucked his wife’s arm within his. “Come on, sweetums, let’s leave these two lovebirds alone, to continue their billing and cooing—and whatever else they might put their minds to, eh?”
The duchess tapped on her husband’s arm. “You’re so bad. Come along now.”
As they turned to make their exit, the duke leaned down and whispered something in his wife’s ear that had her giggling like the worst of debutantes all the way to the door. “Oh, Basil, of course there will be time before dinner, you randy old goat.”
“The Duke and Duchess of Cranbrook, aunt and uncle to their heir and my good friend Gabriel Sinclair,” Coop said once the door was closed behind the pair. “Under the circumstances, I thought I’d leave introductions to some other time.”
He let go of her hands.
“Miss Foster? You’re not saying anything.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she told him, and left him where he stood, returning to the bench to retrieve her gloves as he followed her. “Oh, wait, I suppose I do.”
And with that, she went up on her tippy-toes and employed those gloves to slap his face.
“That’s for bringing me here under false pretenses.”
Coop kept his hands at his sides, fairly certain she was only getting started.
He was right.
Slap.
“That’s for being so harebrained that you’d let the viscount talk you into this.”
“In all fairness to Darby, my mother was in on it, as well. I was outnumbered at least ten to one.”
“You said the viscount and your mother.”
Slap.
“You’re right. Make that outnumbered twenty to one. You’ll understand when you meet Min—my mother. I had no plan—she and Darby did. We were running out of time, and it was and is plain as day that you’d involve yourself, anyway, and that was the end of that.”
“We are leagues from the end of that, Cooper Townsend.”
Slap.
“Ow. There are buttons on those gloves, you know.”
“I don’t care. I was to obey you. You were in charge. ‘How old are you, Miss Foster?’ Old enough to be compromised, or must I find another way? You couldn’t simply ask? Does it feel more comforting to you to have been forced into marriage with me? I couldn’t be trusted to have a brain in my own head?”
Slap.
It wasn’t the force of the slaps, but the buttons, and the repetition, that were beginning to grate on Coop’s nerves. That and the fact that she was right, all the way down the line. “We need to be able to be in each other’s company at all times, and there’s no time to devote to putting on a show of courting you, not while the blackmailer could be closing in on us, and probably many more like us. There are surveillance limitations to my current residence at the Pulteney. I need access to Portman Square. I need to be left alone by ambitious mamas and silly young ladies throwing themselves in my path, getting in my way. And once more, because it’s important, you’d be in the way no matter what, so at least this way I could have some small chance