Page 5 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

Chapter Four

My presumptuous Captain,

I agree to your request. Before your next deployment, you may find me at the Kingsley archery range near Bond Street of any Wednesday afternoon.

However, I have only this to request in return: please don’t go and fall in love with me.

It would be terribly ungentlemanly of you and very inconvenient for me.

I also have impeccable aim, so I hope you come prepared.

Lady Margaret

* * *

My devious Lady,

I never professed to be a gentleman and I would love nothing more than to be extremely inconvenient for you; nevertheless, consider your challenge accepted. Just don’t go and be entirely too loveable. This challenge sounds even more improbable by the moment and I fear I’ve already lost.

Yours,

D

* * *

“You can’t send flowers or call on a lady you haven’t been publicly introduced to, you dolt. Have you remembered nothing from the etiquette lessons we were drilled on as children or has all of it been replaced by battle briefs?”

Peregrine Winter had at least waited until his younger brother Devyn returned from active duty to call him out.

Devyn gave a low chuckle, scrubbing his freshly shaved jaw with an inked hand.

“Looking back, I should have known that I was walking into a waiting ambush. That’s on me for not coming here better prepared. ”

Devyn took an empty seat across from Perry, where the two sat in (mostly) companionable silence in one of the solariums at the family house in Mayfair.

Peregrine had been the only one who had listened during the aforementioned etiquette lessons he and Devyn had been on the receiving end of.

In fact, Perry would have been the perfect match for a woman like Lady Moria, having the right training and smooth manners- as well as the earldom he’d inherited from their uncle.

Devyn had been back in London for only five days.

Four of them had been spent on drills with his company, and he’d spent an entire day debating about how he’d call on the woman he’d seen every time he closed his eyes.

Right there behind his eyelids like a ballerina in a music box, except far less innocent with that wicked mouth of hers and the teasing in her eyes, the curves of her body that could lead him to ruin.

He’d written to tell her that he had returned from Belgium, the same day he’d bought a scandal sheet just to see if her name was inside.

It had been over twelve months since he met Lady Moria Pembrooke underneath a willow tree at a coaching inn.

She’d replied to his letters; she’d returned his gifts via her ladies’ maid.

He’d called upon her family residence, but the butler had said she wasn’t at home.

He’d been, as promised, bested by her on an archery pitch.

He’d met with her in person twice since their meeting before he’d been sent to Belgium for eight months.

The solarium around him fell away as Devyn remembered one such outing: a boat ride on the River Cherwell in Oxford, one of the days he’d turned over and over in his memory while he’d been playing the part of warrior.

That day, she was all golden haired and gold-and-pink cheeked in a heart-stopping dress the color of a perfect British summer sky while he’d rowed them down the river.

His focus had been torn between the steady movement of the oars, and the view his perch offered of the glorious tops of her breasts fighting against the tyranny of the neckline of her dress.

She was perched on the opposite end of the boat, holding an obnoxious little matching parasol just above her head like she hadn’t a care in the world that he could tip their boat over in only a few movements.

“You don’t seem like the type of lass who’d agree to step foot in a water vessel with a gentleman of this size.”

“Are we talking of the size of the boat…or the size of you?”

Devyn hated to admit the way his skin had burned beneath her appreciative gaze as her eyes traveled the bulk of his form. “And…do I not? I like to think I seem rather…intrepid.”

She’d been leaning back on her forearms letting the sun dance over her stupidly perfect face with her eyes closed and her little straw and beribboned bonnet dangling between her pointed shoulder blades.

The laugh floating out of him was natural and light in an unconscious way he wasn’t sure a woman had ever made him laugh.

In the bleakest winter in his memory, the image of the sun kissing her like he wanted to, the feeling of the laugh she brought out of him reverberating in his chest came to his mind unbidden.

Not only unbidden; bloody unwelcome, but persistent.

“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose, both? Either? And for a woman who is remarkably fit,” he looked down her body, and she must have felt his eyes scorch her as much as the July sun as she’d turned to look at him with a knowing smirk.

“No, you do not seem intrepid at all to the untrained observer.”

“And are you… an untrained observer?” She was sitting toe-to-toe with him in a small wooden boat, looking away and trying to hide that she was watching the tight repetitive movements of his shoulders and arms as he’d rowed them downriver.

“A man doesn’t rise to an officer in Her Majesty’s Army without being disciplined and detail oriented, my lady. But of you?” He shook his head like he was being silly, but knew what was on his mind was what she wanted from him.

“I notice everything. You fancy yourself well-versed in subtlety and hiding your true emotions and intentions, but I study it all. The pinch between your brows and the rigid way you hold your shoulders…the way your eyelashes flutter or when you're holding your hands in your lap just a little too tightly. I hear you, even when you’re saying nothing at all. I do that too… learned to hide my thoughts so the men I lead don’t hear them. We aren’t that unalike you and I.”

She looked at him, at his lips more specifically, another one of her subtle tells.

She cleared her throat and looked down at her hands, which were tightly and primly folded in her lap, and then back at him.

They barely made it out of sight of her red-haired chaperone before she’d tossed back her bonnet and taken his face in both of her small hands and he’d let her.

He’d held her lithe, tight body in his grateful hands.

He’d fantasized about kissing her lips, taking the stunning bow of them with his own and drinking in every sound she made like they were the water sustaining him.

But if he did, he’d be just like the scores that wanted to claim her, to have her, but that wasn’t what this was.

There couldn’t be a woman this artfully crafted by God in Christendom, and she was there, with him, on a rowboat on a summer day, delicately closing her eyes at the feel of his hands pulling her to lean against his chest, legs tangling with his.

When he closed his eyes at night, he saw her looking back at him when she stepped back onto the shore, admiration in her perfect eyes and one side of her sinful mouth curving into a smile.

He’d have given up his army commission simply to kiss her, but he was afraid to let her know it.

There was talk that she’d been courted by a Duke, and then there had been her sister’s wedding and her returning to the country at the end of the season, and his being shipped off with his company to Belgium for nearly eight long months.

And so, when the biting winds of winter came, he had sustained himself on the bonfire of a woman tucked away in his consciousness and yes, a woman or two who didn’t look a thing like her just to prove to himself that she didn’t mean anything and didn’t have her tentacles and hooks sunk into and through him, but of course she did.

He was lying to himself and a fool to boot.

He’d given way more of the corners of his heart (fine, more than the corners, it was the prime real estate too) to a woman who seemed to not know what in hell she wanted or did indeed know and didn’t want the inconvenience of wanting it.

“I see you haven’t given up this…attraction…

to Lady Macbeth,” Peregrine observed, taking the scandal sheet from Devyn’s hands and looking it over.

“I’ll say this for the girl, she always looks fierce, and she always wins; but she hasn’t been easy to woo.

In your absence, the Earl of Essex allegedly proposed to her five times and each proposal was increasingly more elaborate.

She reportedly told the poor sod that she was “undeserving” of his attention and suggested he find someone more “worthy.” A hallmark maneuver of a true diplomat to be sure, or a duchess. ”

“The Duke of Andover’s still courting her then?

” Devyn said, casually draping an arm over the boot kicked up atop his knee as if all his hopes weren’t riding on the answer.

He felt there was some great tragedy, something in her past that drove her to occupy thoughts of a Duke, of an illustrious title, while still writing to Devyn, a mere soldier.

Peregrine took his time answering, seemingly only to torment him. “Well, you missed all the most interesting bits of that whole drama,” Devyn raised a brow for his brother to continue. “His Grace announced in Parliament that he’d overthrow the opposition’s bill before taking a wife.”

Devyn popped a grape in his mouth. “Level-headed, I see. Not theatrical at all.”

“The papers loved that one. ‘She’s either saving herself for a Prince, or-”

“A man who knows the way to win her isn’t through self-interested gestures only for show?” Devyn ventured, his brows kissing in the middle.

“And pray tell what ‘gestures’ have you gone to the effort to do for her?”