But she’d known they’d just been pretending. Even as she’d given herself to him, she’d told herself that she could be content with that, and nothing more.
“Will you take me home now? Please.”
“If that’s what you want,” he said. “But first...”
Taking her hands in his, he dropped to one knee in the grass.
“Miss Daniella Foster,” he said in a clear, carrying voice easily heard by all. “Although I have proven myself unworthy in so many ways, my deep love and affection for you will not allow me to sink into despair without first asking you if you will consider sharing the rest of our lives together. Dany, dearest, dearest Dany, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
“You...” She looked at everyone watching them, Minerva softly weeping into a handkerchief, Clarice all but dancing as she hung on to her Rigby, everyone watching, waiting. “Them...? You all...you planned this? Do you know how you frightened me? All because you wanted to be honorable? All because you wanted me to know that the sham betrothal is gone and now we’re starting from— Oh, Coop, I do love you. Yes, yes.” She turned to their audience. “Yes! I said yes!”
DANY SNUGGLED AGAINST Coop as they reclined against a wide tree trunk, the two of them looking out over the stream. Remnants of their meal lay scattered on the blanket, and from time to time he lifted her hand to his mouth, kissing the ring he now saw as the true promise of their shared lives.
“Forgive me yet?” he asked her when she sighed, hopefully in contentment.
“I do. But you could have just told me, couldn’t you? I would have understood.”
“I wanted everyone to know, to see. Darby most particularly, since he was feeling guilty about having come up with the idea of a sham engagement in the first place. Now there’s no question. I love you, Daniella Foster. In fact, I’m fairly dotty about you.”
“But Darby isn’t. You did notice that, didn’t you? He smiled and kissed my hand, and said all the right things, but he seemed distracted, as if still bothered by something.”
“That’s because he is. He took me aside while you and the ladies were talking, and told me about a letter he found waiting for him when he arrived here this morning. It seems our friend has found himself in a bit of a pickle.”
“Don’t say pickle. I don’t even want to see a pickle for another five years. What’s wrong?”
“It’s a long story, and Darby’s to tell, but while we were stuck in a French prison—this was a year before Waterloo—he struck up a friendship with one of the physician captives who helped care for us. The man had a daughter, and when Darby asked how he could repay the man for saving his eye, if not his sight, his answer was that, if anything happened to him, Darby would take charge of that daughter.”
“And Darby said yes? And the man died? But—but that was years ago. You already said that.”
“No, the physician didn’t die. He was wounded attempting to steal food from the French soldiers guarding us, but he didn’t die. Then. Apparently he now has, and the daughter is keeping Darby to his word. In fact, according to the letter he showed me, she’ll be arriving here at the cottage within a few days.”
Dany pushed herself up to a sitting position, to look toward the others, sitting a good distance away from them. They were all laughing and talking and thoroughly enjoying themselves. But Darby was once more standing alone, his hands shoved into his pockets, a look on his face that didn’t bode well for anyone who might decide to approach him.
“What is he going to do? I can’t imagine him with a ward, let alone a female ward.”
“I don’t know. I do know he’s asked his friends to help him, which of course we will. So, if you don’t mind, before traveling to see your parents and ask for your hand yet again, do you mind staying in town a little longer?”
How old is this child? Is she still in leading strings? Is she ready for a come-out? How many hoops will Darby have to jump through before he’s shed of her?
“Oh, no. Goodness, no,” Dany said, settling against Coop once more. “I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all...”
* * * * *
Kasey Michaels
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.
When Emmaline’s brother Geoffrey had died, Helen had tricked herself out in crushingly expensive widow’s weeds, impatiently waited out a full month of mourning and then deposited her son, Rafael, and the twins on the doorstep of Ashurst Hall and returned to London and those friends. Over the years, the children had spent more time at Ashurst Hall than on their own estate, until Rafe had left to serve with Wellington.
Emmaline had been as thrilled by these additions to the family as her only surviving brother had been appalled—which may have been one of the reasons Emmaline had been so delighted. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any love lost between Charlton and herself.
Charlton and Geoffrey were so very much older than Emmaline, and males to her female, so it was not surprising that the three had never been especially close. And Emmaline could have