He was the most irritating, provoking, overbearing man she had ever known. She deliberately set her mind to thinking of all she most disliked about him. She tried to visualize him as he had been on the road that first day when she had bristled with hostility toward him—and he had returned the compliment.
But instead she saw him turning suddenly to hurl a snowball at her and then engaging in a high-spirited, laughter-filled fight before bearing her backward into the snow, his hands on her wrists . . .
Frances sighed deeply and despite herself drifted off to sleep.
Lord Balderston had borne his lady and daughter off to the country for a few days to help celebrate the birthday of some distant relative. It was with some sense of temporary reprieve, then, that Lucius went riding in the park early one morning in the thoroughly congenial company of three male friends. The fact that a fine rain was drizzling down from a gray sky did not in any way dampen his spirits. Indeed, it added the advantage of an almost deserted Rotten Row so that they could gallop their horses along it without endangering other, more sober-minded riders. As he returned home to change for breakfast, he did not even have to hold the usual inner debate with himself about what he ought to do after he had eaten. He could not go to the house on
even if he wished to do so.
Only his grandfather and Amy were up, the others being still in bed after a late night at some ball he had not even felt constrained to attend. He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction and viewed the array of hot foods set out on the sideboard. He was ravenous.
But Amy was clearly bursting to tell him something and could not wait until he had made his selection and taken his place at the table.
“Luce,” she said, “guess what?”
“Give me a clue,” he said. “No, let me guess. You have had ten hours of sleep and are now overflowing with energy and ideas on how to use it—with me as your slave.”
“No, silly!” she said. “Grandpapa has just had an invitation to dine at Mrs. Melford’s tomorrow evening, and I am invited too. Mama will not say no, will she? You simply must speak up for me—you and Grandpapa both.”
“I don’t suppose she will,” he said guardedly, “provided it is a private dinner.”
“Oh, and you are invited too,” she said.
That was what he had been afraid of. One visit had been amusing, but . . .
“Miss Allard has come up from Bath,” she said.
Well!
“She has, has she?” he asked briskly. “And I am expected to give up an evening to dine with Mrs. Melford and her sister merely because Miss Allard is there too?”
“It would be the courteous thing to do, Lucius,” his grandfather said, “since you are the one who suggested she be summoned.”
“And so I did,” Lucius admitted. “I hope her arrival has had the desired effect.”
“Mrs. Melford declares that Miss Driscoll made something of a miraculous recovery within an hour of the arrival of their great-niece,” his grandfather told him. “It was an inspired suggestion of yours, Lucius. May I send back an acceptance for you as well as for Amy and myself?”
Lucius stood with a still-empty plate in his hand and an appetite that seemed somehow to have fled. When he had watched Frances run away from the pavilion in Sydney Gardens after refusing to marry him or give him a thoroughly satisfying reason for doing so, he had thought that if he never saw her again it would be rather too soon.
Yet he had undeniably maneuvered matters so that she would come to London to see her great-aunts.
And was he now going to stay away from her?
“Yes, please do, sir,” he said with as much carelessness as he could summon.
“I shall look forward to it of all things,” Amy said, turning her attention back to her own breakfast. “Will not you, Luce?”
“Of all things,” he said dryly as he scooped fried potatoes onto his plate and moved on to the sausages.
He would probably do something asinine like count down the hours until he would see her again. Like a love- struck mooncalf.
But would Frances? Look forward to it of all things, that was?
Frances was beginning to think—and hope—that her great-aunts had forgotten about their plan to invite the Earl of Edgecombe to come to dinner with Viscount Sinclair and Amy Marshall. Two days passed and nothing more was said about it.
She enjoyed those days. Her aunts—not only Great-Aunt Gertrude, but Great-Aunt Martha too—visibly improved in both health and spirits during that time. And so did she, she felt. It was good to be with them again, to be fussed over, to be the apple of their eye, to have the feeling of being part of a family. She really had been very depressed during the last month, and indeed she had not been in the best of spirits since Christmas.
She would stay for a week, she had decided. And she would not worry about being back in London. She was not planning to go out anywhere, after all, and the world was unlikely to come calling.
She was mistaken about the plan for dinner, though, as she discovered late in the afternoon of that second day,
