Page 1 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)
S he shouldn’t. She really, really shouldn’t.
Lady Kay Matheson stared at the breakfast plate before her, her hand still holding the silver cover she’d just pulled from the tray, and she felt the paralyzing agony of sudden temptation. And who could blame her?
Before her were all the elements of a traditional English breakfast—eggs, bacon, baked beans, fried potatoes, and mushrooms sautéed in lovely, lovely butter. No fried bread was on the tray, but there was a basket of French croissants, along with a pot of jam. Raspberry jam—her favorite. Naturally.
Kay’s empty stomach rumbled.
This was not, she reminded herself sternly as she set aside the plate cover, her breakfast. She slid her gaze across the table to the other tray, then to the one being carried away by her mother’s maid, Foster.
Either of those, Kay knew, could contain her own breakfast, which consisted of a single piece of melba toast, a few paper-thin shavings of cold ham, and a boiled egg. She opened her mouth to call Foster back, then stopped.
Just one slice of bacon, she thought, as the maid disappeared into Mama’s bedroom.
Unable to resist, she moved to take a piece from the plate in front of her, but then a vision of white satin, lace, and tulle sprang into her mind, and the first notes of Mendelssohn’s wedding march sounded in her imagination.
She snatched her hand back and sat on it, reminding herself of the fabulous wedding gown Lucile was making for her and how it would never look right if it had to be let out at the seams. Desperate to marshal her willpower, she took a deep breath, but she was immediately overwhelmed by the delicious scent of bacon.
Willpower went to the wall, and Kay capitulated, sliding her hand from beneath her hip just as the door of her bedroom opened. Quick as lightning, she snatched the bacon off the plate and shoved it into her mouth, then slammed the plate cover back over her sister’s breakfast.
“I smell breakfast,” Josephine said as she crossed the sitting room to the table where Kay sat.
“Morning,” Kay mumbled rather indistinctly as her sister crossed the sitting room and approached the table.
“Morning,” Josephine responded, sliding into the opposite chair, her hand lifting the cover off the tray in front of her, exposing Kay’s meager bits of food. “What the—”
Josephine paused, looking up, her emerald-green eyes widening a little, her exquisitely shaped lips curving at the corners. “Stealing my breakfast, are you?” she said teasingly.
Kay’s answering glance was apologetic even as she savored the heavenly taste in her mouth. “Only a bit,” she said once she had chewed and swallowed the stolen treat. “Sorry, but I just couldn’t help myself.”
“Perfectly understandable.” Josephine gestured to the full plate in front of her sister. “Have the rest, do.”
Kay sighed. “I can’t. I felt my corset growing tighter with every moment I spent looking at those fried potatoes of yours.”
“You’ve been banting for months. You’ve been so terribly strict with yourself, in fact, I’m surprised you haven’t fainted dead away at some point. It won’t hurt to indulge yourself just this once.”
“Won’t it, though?” Kay gave her sister a rueful glance across the table. “If that dress of mine shows the tiniest bulge, the gossip rags will shred me into spills. And giving them any excuse to employ their poisonous pens is something I will never do again. So…”
She paused, shoving the tray toward her sister before she could change her mind. “Take it,” she urged, making a face. “And give me my bread and water.”
The trays were exchanged, but before either of them could pick up a fork, their mother’s voice entered the conversation.
“It’s a miracle, my darlings!” Magdelene cried, coming toward them in a negligee of pink silk, a newspaper in her hand and a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez perched on the tip of her nose. “An absolute miracle!”
Always flamboyant, Magdelene paused beside Kay’s chair, lifted the paper higher, and began to read. “‘Lady Kay Matheson, as we all know, was one of London’s least impressive debutantes the year she came out—’”
“What are you reading, Mama?” Kay cut in, though given the words her mother had just recited, she feared she already knew.
“ Talk of the Town .”
“Delilah Dawlish’s column?” Her fears confirmed, Kay made a sound of exasperation and disdain. “Awful woman. Why do you read her malicious rubbish? We already know she hates me—”
“Ah, but she doesn’t,” Magdelene said triumphantly, waving the paper in the air. “Not anymore.”
Kay gave a snort of disbelief. “Since when?”
Magdelene merely smiled, held up the paper and continued, “‘Because of her scandalous attempt at elopement fourteen years ago, we thought reckless, foolish Lady Kay was forever doomed to shame, disgrace, and spinsterhood. But—’”
“That’s what you deem a miracle, Mama?”
“ Listen , won’t you?”
“Must I?”
Magdelene ignored that wistful plea, gave a theatrical little cough, and went on, “‘But things may at last be changing for poor Lady Kay. She was spied Tuesday last in the showroom of Lucile. And what, you ask, was she doing? Selecting bolts of satin. White satin, my dears! Can it be that society’s longest-suffering jilted bride has finally found some much-deserved happiness?’”
“I admit, that’s an agreeable change from her usual dreck,” Kay said, working to keep her voice light. “I wonder how long it will last.”
“Permanently, I hope,” Magdelene replied, tapping the newspaper with one decisive finger. “It’s taken years, but all the other society pages have been slowly coming around, especially once dear Wilson began showing his interest in you.”
To her mother, Kay’s fiancé was always “dear Wilson.” The American millionaire was saving her family from the dismal fate of genteel poverty, after all. Even if he proved to be the greatest villain since Napoleon, Mama would probably still call him a dear.
“Delilah Dawlish was the last one holding out on you,” Magdelene said, as if Kay needed that particular reminder, “but it appears that even she is finally ready to forgive and forget your great mistake.”
Kay’s disastrous attempted elopement with a stone-broke fortune hunter had been a mistake, no doubt, but given the humiliating way she’d been forced to atone for it, she felt her mother’s hopes about Delilah Dawlish were somewhat premature.
Granted, she was finally going to be washed clean by becoming respectably married, but she’d seen her name dragged through the mud of the gutter press too many times in the past to think anything was going to change before she got to the altar.
“You’re so optimistic, Mama,” she said wryly.
“Fourteen years ago, if you recall, I was the plain, freckled, chubby girl no man would ever look twice at. Is it any great surprise that I eloped with a fortune hunter? I thought,” she added before her mother could reply, “after I’d come to my senses, that we’d be able to hush it all up.
But no. Just as I was on the verge of marrying Cousin Giles, the elopement scandal came out, Giles called things off, and I was ruined, shamed, destined—so Talk of the Town and all the other gossip rags reminded everyone daily—for permanent spinsterhood, forever spurned by the bachelors of good society. ”
As she paraphrased bits from the stories that had been written about her over the years, Kay could not quite hide her past pain nor her contempt for both the ravenous journalists and the despicable scoundrel who had given them such rich meat to feed on at her expense. “And we can all thank Devlin Sharpe—”
She stopped, her utterance of his name like a hand around her throat, choking her.
Magdelene sighed, giving her daughter a censorious glance over the rims of her pince-nez. “We do not mention That Horrible Man,” she reminded, giving the devil his due in obvious capital letters. “Not ever.”
“Quite right, Mama,” Kay replied, shoving thoughts of Devlin out of her mind. “But I can’t imagine what on earth has brought about this transformation of me into the—how did the Dawlish woman put it?—the ‘longest-suffering jilted bride’ deserving of happiness.”
“Does it matter? You cannot deny that Mrs. Dawlish speaking in your favor is a splendid turn of events. For both of you,” she added with a glance at her younger daughter.
“Very splendid,” Kay agreed. “Especially with Jo coming out this season. But I’d still dearly love to know what has inspired this change of heart about me.”
“Dear Wilson,” Magdelene murmured with a sigh. “Such a wonderful man. Handsome, successful, and so, so generous.”
It was the final part of that assessment that gave Kay a hint as to what her mother meant. “Are you saying Wilson bribed that sordid scandal sheet to write something nice about me?”
Even as she spoke, Kay knew such an action would not have been out of character for her fiancé. He did tend to think money could solve any problem. That, she supposed, was a luxury of the very rich.
“No, no, darling. That’s not how it came about. Not at all.”
Kay found her mother’s choice of words anything but reassuring. “How then?” she asked, growing uneasy.
Magdelene gave a deprecating shrug. “Wilson and I have been corresponding regularly during his visit home to New York, and in one of my letters, I happened to mention that Sir Adair Sloane owns Talk of the Town . And,” she added, ignoring her eldest daughter’s aggravated sigh, “I explained that it is London’s most influential society paper, that it has been very cruel to you in the past, and that it still seems inclined to harp on some…
ahem… unfounded rumors about your past. Upon his return yesterday from New York, he must have called on Sir Adair and resolved the problem. ”
“Unfounded rumors?” Kay echoed and laughed. “I know we’ve had to deny everything and pretend to society that the elopement never happened, but there is no point in whitewashing things to Wilson. When he proposed to me in January, I told him that the rumors about me were true.”