Page 2 of Much Ado About Hating You (Second Chance Season #2)

One

N o man with an ounce of self-esteem would be caught dead hiding behind a bush. Richard Clark was a man. No doubt about that. But he must have surrendered every bit of self-worth, because he’d been crouching so long behind the shrubbery he couldn’t feel his feet. His ankles were buzzing. And his knees screamed curses that would surely follow him into the afterlife.

All because of a woman. Two women, really, but one in hellish particular.

The least offensive of the two, Miss Selena Bell, blushed prettily by the peonies, talking to Richard’s sister-in-law, the bride-to-be in a fortnight, Mrs. Evelina Denby. And in Richard’s experience, where Miss Bell was, her cousin, the most offensive woman he’d ever met, would surely follow. Like flies to a pile of dung. Inevitable.

He had to escape. How close was the next bush? Why had his brother put the box hedges so far away from one another? Wait… Richard had done that. Following a fashionable trend in landscape gardening. Damn trends to hell. Much better to make landscape decisions and gardening choices based on covert escape routes.That other box hedge must be two fathoms away. At least. He tried to stretch out his arms on either side to measure, but his elbow met the bush, which stabbed him, sending him toppling to the side.

“Bloody—” he hissed, righting himself.

If he darted, even while crouching, someone was bound to see him. And if that someone was Miss Bell’s cousin, well he wasn’t sure what he would do. Something drastic, no doubt. No options other than the drastic remained when facing a she-devil.

What he needed was a shield.

“John!” He screamed so loudly the name scratched his throat.

All the sounds from across the lawn—the chatting and laughing and whispering—stopped. Bound to happen when a man screamed another man’s name.

But the footsteps—foot stomps, more like—started the sound back up again, slamming toward Richard like an out-of-control stagecoach.

Excellent. John was on his way.

“What are you doing?” his half brother hissed as gleaming hessians appeared in Richard’s truncated field of vision. Richard craned his head back to see John grin at the party guests and raise a hand. “All’s well. Merely an injured cat.”

“Quick thinking, brother.”

“Stand up, man. What are you doing down there?”

“Hiding. I’d think that was obvious. Also obvious—I cannot stand up or risk giving my position away, thus defeating the very point of hiding in the first place. I thought you said the Bells weren’t coming.”

John’s scowl lifted. He looked damn near delighted. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

“You dirty liar.”

“If I had told you Samuel Bell’s daughter and niece would be attending my wedding, you would have run off to London or Bath or the Continent.” He smoothed his jacket. “And I need my brother this weekend.”

“You do not. You do not need me at all. You wish to torment me.” At least Richard was currently tormenting John in a roundabout way. Everyone at the party would think it odd he was talking to an injured cat.

“That’s not true. Now will you stand up? People think I’ve gone mad talking to a bush. Or the dying cat behind it.”

Damn. He’d caught on. John always caught on.

Richard shot up to his full height a few inches above his similarly tall brother and hooked their arms together. “Run.” He took off for the other bush, placing John between himself and the crowd. “And shield me, you scoundrel.”

John chuckled but obliged. “Me? A scoundrel? You know better.”

“And you know better than to put me and Beatrice Bell in the same room together.”

Beatrice . The sharp-tongued plague to all mankind.

“Miss Bell is a delightful young lady.”

“ Miss Bell still?” Richard slowed for a moment, thoughtful. Surely she would have married by now. “Delightful old lady, more like. And hardly delightful. I know her, you forget.”

“Oh, I do not forget. The last time the two of you shared conversation, you nearly destroyed the world. Global chaos.”

“Not true.” They paused behind the second hedge. Where to next? Ah, the gazebo next to the lake offered an excellent partially obscured respite before he jumped into the lake and swam to freedom. He set them in that direction. “We would only have destroyed one another, not the world. It was merely chaos on a very small personal level.”

Technically, the last time they’d talked, there’d not been much talking… but John didn’t know about that and never would.

“Still too much chaos for my liking,” John said. “And there’s to be no destruction at all during my wedding.”

“Then you should not have invited Miss Beatrice Bell. No. You should have eloped.”

“And miss the opportunity to show the entire world that Evelina has agreed to be my wife after all this time? I think not. Everyone must share in my joy for at least a fortnight. Besides, Evelina is old friends with the Misses Bell. All of us were at one point. Or have you forgotten those wild, foolhardy days? You and me and Daniel, Evelina, Edmund and Martin, and the Bells, all dragged to Mother’s yearly house party and bored out of our minds. Oh, the mischief we managed.”

“Perhaps it’s best the old group fell apart,” Richard grumbled.

“I suppose there were several reasons for its dissolution.”

Foremost among them being that Richard’s other half brother, Daniel, was a complete, irredeemable scoundrel who’d been exiled from England. Another reason being that their friend Edmund had wooed and married Evelina before John, who’d always loved her, could take action to woo her for himself. And lastly, Richard and Beatrice Bell had fallen out of friendship with one another in a rather spectacular way.

“Frankly,” Richard said, stepping up into the gazebo, “I’m surprised she came. She… did come, didn’t she?” After all, he’d only seen the cousin.

“Yes, she’s here.” John joined him, and they leaned back against the railing. “I’m sure she is quite over what happened between you. She would not have come if she wasn’t.”

Richard snorted. John hadn’t heard the last thing Beatrice had said to him.

You have no idea how many hearts you break, Mr. Clark .

An eternity would be too soon, according to Beatrice Bell’s timeline.

“You cannot hide for the entire length of the party, Richard.”

“I’m an excellent hider, John.”

“Be a man and face her.”

“I won’t be a man if I face her. She’ll have my balls. Almost did last time.”

“Last time was at Edmund Denby’s funeral. She did nothing but glower at you.”

She’d done a tiny bit more than that. Richard sighed. “I suppose I shall have to swallow my pride and my fears and face the she-devil.”

“She-devil?” John chuckled. “Come, Miss Bell is not that bad. In fact, I thought at one point that you and her…” He grinned, wiggling his eyebrows.

Each rise and fall of those damn dark caterpillars was like a cudgel over Richard’s head. He should have added grave-sized holes to the landscape gardener’s design. Then he could jump straight into one. Although the lake was a nice option. Sink to the very bottom and drown himself.

“Me?” Richard found himself saying. “And Beatrice Bell? Absurd.” She was too good for him. A wealthy merchant’s daughter and a marquess’s bastard? Not exactly a desirable match. Pride was a monster, wasn’t it, tearing at flesh till a man howled. And he’d mauled her. Kissed her, pawed at her like a man possessed. At his friend’s funeral. While his other friend, the lonely widow, grieved graveside. What had Beatrice called him? Que bruto . She’d told him what it meant, too, had wanted him to know. She thought him a brute, a beast. She thought right. And he hated it, every reminder of his deficits boiling his anger higher, spilling over onto the woman who made him want and ache and hate all at the same time. “You cannot make a bride of a demon. The fact that she is a spinster attests to that.”

John’s face went waxen.

Richard was being too harsh, but the words wouldn’t stop, the boiling reached higher temperatures. “I’d rather marry?—”

John’s eyes went large, and he began to shake his head.

“—the cow than marry?—”

“Miss Bell!” John said much too loudly for the small gazebo space. “And Evelina, my dear! So lovely to see you both!”

Miss Bell. Damn. Damn. Damn . But perhaps it was the cousin and not Beatrice.

“Oh,” a woman’s voice said behind him, “you used to call me Beatrice. Let us not be so formal.” That voice—rich and sharp and filled with as much intelligence as humor. She Whom He’d Royally Pissed Off. More than once. The woman who would like to kick him off a cliff. The only woman who boiled his blood. All it took was one memory of her to make his cock twitch.

Beatrice bloody Bell.

His nether regions had long ago decided she was the North Star. They possessed horrid decision-making skills.

John shoved Richard out of the way as he stepped around him. “Yes, well, we were young then. Life was not so formal. But if it pleases you?—”

“It does, I assure you.”

“Then Beatrice it is,” John said. “Richard… will you not turn around and greet our guest?”

No, he’d rather not. But he was trapped. There was always the lake. But wouldn’t Beatrice simply love to see him so shaken he jumped in a lake to escape her?

Not today, Beatrice Bell. She would not win his pride today. He’d already sacrificed enough of it to the bush.

He turned slowly—so, so slowly—attempting to prolong the time between the last moment he’d seen her, lips swollen from his kisses, eyes wide with disbelief, hand swinging through the air to mark his cheek with the sweet violence of her palm, and the inevitable next one, the moment still to come. And to school his features, which felt rather numb and must look somewhere between wildly petrified and terribly indignant. He shifted his mandible side to side to loosen it, and he blinked several times to put his eyes in a more natural width.

But no mere half circle could be delayed as long as he’d like it to be. One more slight turn of his foot, and… there. Done.

And there. Her .

Beatrice Bell, bright-eyed and beautiful. A brazen tilt to her pointy chin, her spine the boldest of straight lines, and her brows thick brown slashes over pale-green eyes. His soul staggered backward, the sight of her a cannonball to the gut. Even now… after all this time… she rearranged his very world. Time had been so kind to her it had mostly stopped. Her chocolate-brown hair was still thick and heavy, without a streak of silver in it. She’d always despised it because it had never quite held a curl. But he’d always…

Push his fingers through it, decimate the pins holding it back, spread it against his bedsheets, wrap it around his fist ? —

It didn’t matter.

The need to touch it again would not beat so persistently through his veins if he’d not already touched it once, if he couldn’t remember the heavy silk of it in his hands as he’d kissed her. But he had. And he could.

That also did not matter. Better forgotten.

He swallowed and shoved the cannonball out of his gut. Rearranged the world to his liking, focused on her eyes. The last time he’d seen her they’d been rich with rage. Now they were flat, as if looking at him inspired not even the most mundane of emotions. He was less than a speck of dirt on her skirts. The speck of dirt would annoy her. He simply was of no consequence. Better that way. He couldn’t abandon his brother for the next fortnight, refused to. But if he were going to survive it, he’d need to nurture the feeling her eyes reflected for him, and he’d need to do his best to spark it in himself.