Captivating a Lady (The Untamed Hartwells 2)

Chapter 1

An Absence of Opportunity

Lady Eveline Hartwell had settled down. That, at least, was the opinion that circulated among the people who knew her too little to mistake a truce for a conversion.

At Hounslow Park, the country house her brother Oliver, Duke of Statony, owned in Middlesex, near enough to London and its noisiest temptations, the youngest of the Hartwell siblings had gone years without provoking a single scene worth mentioning in whispers.

She had not run off to Vauxhall with an unsuitable gentleman, nor argued aloud with any sharp-tongued lady, nor vanished from a ball long enough to give the dragon mamas an apoplectic fit, for she had had no opportunity whatsoever to commit such atrocities in the country.

To anyone’s eye, that must have looked like progress; and yet it was merely an absence of opportunity.

Eveline, who knew the truth, would have said that virtue proved quite easy when one lived apart from nearly everything that put it to the test. It was not that she liked to cause scandals.

Of course not! It simply happened that scandals pursued her, or presented themselves so temptingly that she was incapable of resisting them.

The Duke of Statony’s country estate did not sit so far from London that Oliver could neglect his duties altogether.

The House of Lords still summoned him whenever some parliamentary measure required his presence, and then he would set off for the city as though he were going to face an administrative plague.

In Eveline’s opinion, her elder brother had changed a great deal, for he had once lived solely to attend to his ducal obligations, but since his marriage to Alice he had cut his stays in town to the bare necessity.

He no longer lingered at his clubs, nor attended interminable dinners or gatherings whose importance, Eveline suspected, he had exaggerated for years in order to keep his distance from a sister he loved but never quite understood.

The present Duchess of Statony, Alice, loved the country with a passion.

She liked managing the estate, dealing with the tenants, and enjoying the sunlit library where she could read without anyone mentioning the latest infamy committed at Almack’s by some newly out young lady.

In short, the duchess adored the freedom the country allowed her.

Oliver could not bear to be parted from his wife, because he loved her madly.

And so, since Alice was so fond of the estate, he had installed the family there, his sister included.

If anyone had told Eveline years ago that her brother would prove capable of feeling so beautiful a sentiment with such intensity, she would have scoffed at the notion on the spot.

Did the quiet, agreeable life suit Statony’s sister?

Yes. Eveline no longer felt alone.

At first, the idea of leaving London had struck her as an unacceptable sentence.

Then she discovered that Hounslow Park held advantages no one had ever explained to her.

She could ride before breakfast, wander the paths beside the lake without some widow with a vocation for spying counting her every step, and walk into Alice’s sitting room to talk with her without requesting an audience in advance or weighing every word for fear of seeming ungrateful, frivolous, or too young to have any judgment.

There was also Henry. Her nephew.

Henry Augustus Hartwell, Marquess of Haverleigh, heir to the dukedom of Statony, future master of too many acres, grand titles, and a fortune that, for the moment, interested him less than gnawing the ribbons of his aunt’s bonnet.

He had not yet turned three, and already he had achieved something Eveline had been attempting for as long as she could remember—namely, getting Oliver to drop to his knees in the middle of a Persian carpet to entertain him.

Eveline adored her nephew with a devotion that had surprised her.

She had seen him and fallen in love at once.

Love at first sight did exist; she had experienced it herself at eighteen, but what she felt when she first beheld Henry…

nothing was comparable to that purity. She liked to watch him sleep with his hands curled into fists, to hear his unintelligible syllables as he tried to say her name, and to see that Alice, so firm about so many things, melted before him just as his formidable father did, and as she did herself.

Henry had turned Oliver into a familiar, approachable man.

Tender, even. No weaker, certainly. No one who had seen the Duke of Statony correct a steward with two and a half questions would have made the mistake of thinking him fainthearted.

Eveline was happy. She delighted in her family completely.

She had spent too many years clamoring for the attention of an extremely severe brother.

Oliver had confused his obligation to protect her with control, discipline, and authority.

She, for her part, had used rebellion as the only language capable of making her brother turn his head in her direction.

Between them a rather painful habit had formed, something like a fraternal dance in which he commanded, she disobeyed, and the two of them ended up wounded.

Alice had begun to change that, and Henry had finished it.

The Duchess of Statony had entered the Hartwell family with force, making the great duke succumb at once to love.

Alice did not treat Eveline like a wayward creature or a burden inherited along with the marriage.

She listened to her, corrected her when necessary, defended her when it had to be done, and little by little they forged a friendship that looked more like pure sisterhood.

Even so, not even Alice had managed to ease the one headache that remained to Eveline in this phase of rural respectability.

Lord Arden.

Nathaniel Greystoke, sixth Earl of Arden, was Oliver’s closest friend and, by an injustice Eveline considered a very personal affront, he visited Hounslow Park more often than was advisable for her peace of mind.

He always arrived with his impeccable composure, his ash-blond hair and his brown eyes, his manners of a gentleman carved from marble, and that gaze that seemed capable of finding a moral failing even in the way she held a teacup.

Arden hated her, and she loathed him with all her might.

He always had a reproach ready or some disagreeable remark whenever she failed to keep her distance from him.

And the worst of it was not his biting attacks, for Eveline was every bit as strong as Statony and could repel his words with others more cutting, if it came to that.

What galled her was that Lord Arden did not need to speak in order to unsettle her.

It was enough for him to watch her for a few seconds, from across a room or from the edge of the breakfast table, to make her feel that he had already taken down the testimony, questioned the witnesses, passed sentence, and ordered a moral cell prepared to her measure.

Since her début, Eveline had lived convinced that the earl was forever judging her. Not without cause, any reasonable person would have said. And Eveline detested reasonable people when they happened to be right.

The matter of Cedric Lancaster, Viscount Tentwall, still clung to everyone’s memory with the persistence of a poorly washed stain.

She had been young enough to believe a man’s attention was love, and vain enough to think that if a gentleman chose her out of so many girls, he must have seen in her something the others overlooked.

Tentwall was an Adonis; she still sighed when she summoned his memory.

Blond, blue-eyed, athletic of figure, with the soul of a poet and the manners of a rogue.

It had seemed thrilling to Eveline to behave boldly in order to try to dazzle him.

Afterward she understood that falling in love with a scoundrel was the same as looping a rope around one’s own neck.

At Vauxhall, during an evening that ought to have been remembered for the music and the lanterns, Cedric persuaded her to step away from her group for a few minutes.

He spoke to her of feelings, of obstacles, of a future he did not dare announce before everyone.

She had wanted to believe him because she was in love with the perfect man.

That became a scandal involving a scarlet mask, a phaeton race, and the attempt to claim a kiss she did not wish to give.

Many witnesses. From that she had learned several things.

The first was that she must not transgress when everyone was watching her.

The newspapers began to give free rein to the rumors, and the affair called into question even the good judgment of the great Duke of Statony, of whom they claimed he meant to govern the realm while proving unable to manage his unruly sister.

That was what made him decide to marry, all to drown out the rumors about her.

Oliver’s marriage, at least, had turned out well.

The business with Tentwall… that was still a disaster.

When Eveline looked back, she could not recall that Arden had always been so interested in her doings. It was precisely when the scandal occurred that Oliver’s best friend began to play nursemaid to her.

Her brother must have asked him to keep watch over her after that. She was convinced of it. It would not have been enough for Statony to be her jailer; he would have asked Arden to help guard her as well.

And that was horrible.

Ever since, every time Arden appeared, Eveline felt the absurd urge to flee in the opposite direction. It would not have surprised her if one day that wretched earl were to request a formal writ declaring her a witch and recommending she be burned at the stake.

Fortunately, Hounslow Park offered enough corridors, terraces, and excuses to avoid him.

That afternoon, however, evasion proved more complicated.