Chapter Ten
“My goodness,” groaned Reginald, placing his hands on his stomach theatrically. “I do believe I shall have to send a note to your cook, Your Graces, and request that they cease their impressive concoctions immediately. My poor valet will have to adjust all my waistcoats!”
There was good-natured laughter around the large dining table as all the plethora of Chances chuckled at his pronouncement.
“Nonsense, you need feeding up,” said the Dowager Duchess of Cothrom gracefully. “I always say—”
“Mama,” interrupted her eldest son with more than a little of an eye roll. “You do not need to worry about feeding up men marrying into the family! You have a grandson now. You can worry about feeding him.”
“Oh, I think it quite important that I feed up everyone who comes into this family—after all, am I not still, in a sense, the matriarch, even if I’ve stepped aside for my dear daughter-in-law?
” His mother grinned. “Besides, I will happily accept any compliment that comes my way, even if it is technically for our cook. Lord Llyne, another ice?”
“Your Grace, I am utterly undone, as are my waistcoat buttons,” said Reginald with a grin as a few of the younger Chances snorted. “I am considering skipping the port and cigars and having a footman roll me up to my bed forthwith.”
More laughter, though there was none emanating from the beautiful woman seated to his left.
Against his better judgment, Reginald glanced at Miss Jessica Chance. She was smiling. She was also flushing.
“Absolute nonsense,” she murmured under the raucous chatter that had erupted down one end of the table—a debate about the cheese course, it appeared. “You have never looked so…so trim.”
The flush of pink on her cheeks told Reginald that it had taken Jessica a great deal to compliment him in that way, and he rather enjoyed it.
He rather enjoyed her. Dear God, but he had not expected this.
Go to the Chance family manor, easy, select his bride, fine.
But actually start to…to care for her? To admire her, to see her wit and respect it, to see her loneliness and wish to change it?
To see her beauty, to see it unfurl before him and then taste those lips and know that no cuisine, not even from the Stanphrey Lacey Cook, would ever compare?
Reginald swallowed and shifted in his seat. “I thank you.”
Jessica inclined her head and yet said nothing. Her hand slipped to her side and almost without thinking, he mirrored her and took her hand, squeezing it.
Squeezing it as she had done in the portrait gallery before they had…
Well. It had been fortunate, indeed—or unfortunate, a matter of opinion—that they had been interrupted by a well-meaning footman, investigating the source of the clatter, before he had managed to get his hand up Jessica’s skirts.
So close. His whole body had throbbed with unrequited need the rest of the day.
And now here he was, seated beside her at dinner, remembering that moment, how his body had thrummed, how his manhood had twitched, how her breasts had felt under his eager palm—
“You look a tad warm, Lord Llyne,” said Jessica’s brother from the other side of the table. There was a mischievous twinkle to his eye. “Something heating you up?”
Jessica immediately dropped Reginald’s hand as he said, “In fact there is, Mr. Chance. Guilt.”
“‘Guilt’?” Chance spoke so loudly that the rest of the table—and there was a great deal of them—quietened to hear them. “Goodness, you astonish me. What, precisely, are you guilty of?”
Reginald was very careful not to even glance at the beautiful woman beside him, but even in his peripheral vision, he could see that she was flushing most deeply.
Did she believe that he was about to announce to her entire family, at dinner, precisely what they had been getting up to in the portrait gallery?
Never fear…
“I am guilty of overstaying my welcome, I regret to say,” Reginald said quietly, hating that he had to say it, but knowing that the feeling had been overcoming him for some time.
“I have imposed. I arrived here with no invitation, merely the hope of gaining the hand of your fairest flower, and now I have done that, I suppose, even though the reading of the banns have only just begun, I should be returning to—”
He was not permitted to finish his sentence.
“Absolutely not,” said the dowager duchess firmly.
“Not an imposition at all—tell him, Frederick,” said Jessica’s mother just as firmly.
“If anything, we’re the imposition, making you part of our entertainment!” That was Jessica’s brother, and he looked genuinely aggrieved at the idea that Reginald might depart.
“We still haven’t gotten to know you—those Pernrith Chances have kept you all to themselves,” protested a cousin whose name Reginald could not quite recall in this moment. “I mean, fair’s fair.”
“What Frank is trying to say,” said Lady Liliana with a wry smile, “is that you are very welcome to stay and you must not dream of leaving merely due to propriety.”
“Yes,” said Frank, yes, that was her name, with a snort. “Most of us don’t follow propriety any—Sammy, that hurt!”
“And what my nieces are attempting to say,” said a genteel woman whom Reginald knew was Aunt Dodo, “is that you are no imposition, and you are very welcome to stay for the rest of our time here. Is that not right, Cothrom?”
All eyes turned to the patriarch of the family. Or he would rightfully have been, if he had not prematurely passed his title on to his son. The family still seemed to think of him in that way, though, a mark of respect for a man so long the head of such a brood.
His temples were gray and his eyes were sharp, and Reginald swallowed to see himself inspected so closely by a man who demanded and received such respect.
Uncle William—or the Dowager Duke of Cothrom, as Reginald rather thought he should consider him—inclined his head. “You do us great honor by your presence, Lord Llyne. Do not deprive us of it now.”
There was applause, and cheers, and laughter, but none of it mattered nearly so much as the hand on his knee.
On his knee?
When Reginald turned to Jessica, she was flushing, but she was also smiling.
“Stay,” she said softly.
His pulse skipped a beat.
And that was the trouble, wasn’t it? If this was still all a marriage of convenience, a plot, a clever plan to secure and guarantee his family’s place in Society, then perhaps he could stay.
If it was all merely a laugh, a charade, then Reginald could stay at Stanphrey Lacey for weeks on end, awaiting the three Sundays for the banns to be read, entertaining himself, and ensuring that he convinced Miss Jessica Chance that he cared for her and would marry her.
That had been the plan.
The plan had been upended. As Reginald stared into Jessica’s brilliant eyes, his gaze darting to her luscious mouth, he knew that this had ceased to be a marriage of convenience. When that had occurred, he did not know.
He did know that he cared for this woman. That the plan had been to use her, and now he wanted her for herself.
Love…that was perhaps too strong a word. Certainly desire, certainly admiration. A need to be with her, a strange urge to protect her, to try to convince Jessica that she was worthy of his desire and admiration.
“Stay,” Jessica repeated under the noise of her family. “I… I would like you to stay.”
And that was when Reginald knew that he would. How could he say no to her? How could he leave this woman who was starting to mean more and more to him?
Besides, it all worked, didn’t it? He needed her; his family needed her.
His brother’s disgrace would soon be out into the world, and if his sister were ever to hold her head up high as she stepped into Almack’s, she needed a sister-in-law who could present her.
Who would always be accepted by Society. A Chance.
Surely, he could not be guilty of using Jessica, of needing her for his plan, if he was starting to care?
“Besides, we need you,” came a voice that cut across his thoughts.
Reginald’s head jerked round. “I beg your pardon?”
“We’re going to skip port and cigars,” said Michael Chance cheerfully, pushing back his chair, “and go straight to the dancing. Jessica, you’ll lead us out, won’t you?”
“L-Lead you all out?”
Reginald did not need to look around to see the fear in his betrothed’s eyes; he could hear it in her voice, sense it in the shifting air. He knew her all too well.
Her hand had gone from his knee now, more’s the pity, and she was holding her hands together before her as though they could shield her from an incoming storm.
His eyes raked over her face. Jessica was nervous, uncertain—she had clearly never been asked to lead a dancing set in her family before.
And that fact alone was enough to make him do what he did.
How was it possible, after years and years, that his Jessica—that Jessica Chance, eldest daughter, had never led a set at a family dance?
Surely, they had danced together countless times, but in all those dances she had never been asked to lead?
It was ridiculous. It was almost insulting. And it was what propelled him to rise from his chair, hold out his hand, and say, “Will you give me the honor, Miss Chance?”
Perhaps it was a mite formal. There was a titter from someone at the other end of the table, then an “Ouch!” when the Chance in question was presumably elbowed by a neighbor.
Reginald did not look away from Jessica, his hand outstretched. She was staring at it, as though the rest of the table did not exist.
For a heart-stopping moment, he thought she was going to refuse him.
And then she rose, skirts sweeping and lips breaking out into a shy smile as she said, “Y-Yes.”