The Lady Most Willing

Old plays, poetry . . . and Persuasion: a Novel by the Author of Sense & Sensibility! How in the world did such a novel end up in the laird’s library? It could not have been published more than a few months ago.

She read the first couple of pages and instantly began smiling. Sir Walter Elliot—he who read no book for amusement but the Baronetage—was surely a parallel to Lord Oakley. Sir Walter viewed those below his estimation with pity and contempt, which was a fair summary of the way that the earl looked at lesser beings such as she.

She threw herself happily onto the sofa before the fire. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable piece of furniture—more lumpy than soft—but the inimitable Sir Walter promised to make her forget any discomfort.

It was a good forty minutes before Mrs. McVittie appeared with a pot of tea, but Fiona was so engrossed in the novel that she scarcely noticed.

By then she had wriggled into a more comfortable position: head propped on one arm of the sofa, feet crossed on the other arm. Marilla would squeal like a stuck pig if she walked in and saw Fiona’s ankles, clad in pale pink silk, but Marilla was in the drawing room, presumably chasing a blindfolded peer around the furniture, if they had moved on from cards.

“This is heaven,” she said to Mrs. McVittie, swinging her feet to the floor and smiling at her. “Thank you so much.”

“Mr. Garvie’s taken a shine to you,” Mrs. McVittie confided, bending over to put another log on the fire. “He reckons that you’re not the sort to marry, so you might as well be comfortable. The rest of them are all in the drawing room playing at Pope Joan and the like.”

“He’s right,” Fiona said. “I am not the type of woman who marries.” She felt only a tiny pang at that idea, which was quite a triumph.

In no time, she had sunk deeply back into the book and had realized that the prescient Miss Austen had, in addition to creating Sir Walter—who bore such a similarity to the Earl of Oakley—created in Elizabeth Elliot a perfect portrait of her own sister, Marilla, who like Elizabeth was indeed “fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome as ever,” but “felt her approach to the years of danger.” Granted, Marilla was only twenty-one, but even she had begun to notice the reluctance of English gentlemen to offer for her hand during her three seasons in London.

Englishmen seemed to be remarkably canny. They buzzed about Marilla like flies in honey, but they didn’t come up to scratch.

It was much more satisfactory to read about Sir Walter and his daughter than to be trapped in a cold castle with two versions of the same. While the aggravations and extravagances of polite society were funny on the page, they were deeply irritating in real life.

Chapter 11

After luncheon Byron couldn’t stop thinking about the way Catriona Burns looked up at Bret, eyes shining, her love obvious. His own expectation of marriage did not include feelings of that nature. His father had taught him well: one’s wife should be a chaste woman of good breeding. Passion between a husband and wife was out of the question.

The new Countess of Oakley, as his father had instructed him time out of mind, should be virtuous, well mannered, and above all, show respect if not fawning submission to her husband.

Respect and submission wasn’t what Catriona felt for Bret.

Envy was an uncomfortable emotion. It felt like a dark, raging burn in his veins.

Before he chose Opal to wed, he had danced with every maiden on the marriage market who fell into his purview—which left Scottish girls such as Marilla and Fiona to the side—and then he had made what he thought was a reasoned, intelligent decision.

His thought process had been a bit embarrassing, in retrospect. He had decided that Opal would make a good mother. He hadn’t known his own mother well, since she had run away with his uncle—his father’s younger brother—when he was just a child. They had gone to the Americas, and for all he knew, they were there still.

Still, it didn’t help to know that he had a reason to feel unsure of himself around women. His father’s freezing tirades, which invariably emphasized female lust, had clearly affected him.

He would have sworn that Opal was chaste; among other signs, he had never detected the faintest shadow of desire when she looked at him. Now he thought back to the docility with which she accepted his compliments, her downturned eyes, and the way she turned her head to the side . . . He had been a fool.

It wasn’t that he wanted to make a fast woman his countess. An unblemished reputation was of supreme importance. But . . . he would like to have his wife love him. Enough so that she wouldn’t leap to another man’s bed.

What’s more, if Bret could make a woman love him, Byron damn well could as well. His competitive edge rose to the surface. He could make a woman look at him with wild delight. He could bind her to him so persuasively that she would never look at another.

Marilla Chisholm was an obvious candidate. She was pretty, devastatingly so. Her curls were soft as butter, and her eyes a delightful blue.

And the fact that her youthful spirits led her to behavior that would be classified as outrageous by the strict matrons who ruled the ton . . . well, that was all to the better. After all, she was trying to kiss him, rather than a dancing master. She was