The Bride Chase

Chapter 1

One

Philippa Morgan clasped her fingers around the train ticket in her hand and glanced up at the clock suspended high among the wrought-iron beams of Victoria Station.

Her train would depart within the hour, and she could only pray that no one would discover her absence until she’d boarded the train and was well on her way to Brighton.

The entire plan to flee London had been hastily concocted, which wasn’t her usual way.

When she decided on a course of action, she tended to ponder long and hard.

Perhaps it was something she’d learned from her mother, whom she’d watched organize the layout of her family’s garden and create beautiful pieces of embroidery that she’d designed herself.

Philippa quite liked the idea that she’d inherited her mother’s pensive nature.

But, of course, sitting here, trying to get away from the city before she could be dragged back to Mayfair, wasn’t the only moment of impulse in Philippa’s life. There’d been others. Well, one glaring other, but she tried not to think about that night. She tried not to think about him.

The mad plan she’d hatched in the last couple of days had nothing to do with her foolish infatuation with a certain nobleman who viewed her as nothing more than a lovestruck debutante.

Whatever Atlas Ballentine, Viscount Stonefield, thought of her now, she no longer cared.

She was well rid of him and his deep voice, sea-blue eyes, gold-blond hair, and lips that fitted against hers as if they’d been molded for no other purpose.

Today, she could only concern herself with her own survival.

Marriage to the man her brother Douglas had chosen for her would be a kind of death—of her spirit, her hopes, her belief that she’d one day marry for love.

What surprised her most was how biddable she’d been when Douglas first told her of his negotiations with Mortimer Whitmore, Earl of Kelmscott.

She had expressed dismay, of course, and made every reasonable plea she could muster, but ultimately she’d slipped out of Douglas’s study, gone up to her room, and stared at the fire in her bedroom fireplace until the coals turned to embers.

It had been two months since The Night in the Ballentines’ garden, but her mind insisted on recalling every moment of the encounter that had ripped her heart to pieces.

So when her brother told her of a dreadful match to a distasteful nobleman many decades her senior, her silly, lovestruck brain still insisted on fixating on Atlas Ballentine.

The next day, she’d tried again to plead with her brother.

Kelmscott was thirty-eight years older than her twenty years, they’d only met twice, and she hadn’t enjoyed either of those brief conversations during the previous Season.

But her brother was stubborn and craven, and most of all, eager to refill their family’s depleted coffers.

And Kelmscott was apparently so eager for a youthful bride that he didn’t mind her lackluster dowry and was offering a “bride gift” of his own.

Essentially, her brother had sold her to an aging aristocrat who wished to use her as a brood mare to get the heir his previous wives had failed to produce.

Still, rather than fight the whole diabolical scheme as she would have if she hadn’t been so consumed with Stonefield’s rejection, she’d mindlessly allowed herself to go through the motions of preparing for the inevitable event.

But something like her old spirit had finally reared its head again two days ago.

Buttoned into a sumptuous gown of ivory beaded silk, she’d felt the snugness of the perfect tailoring, felt her chest trying to expand against the tight cinch of her corset, and the wrongness of her brother’s plan had struck her with full force.

The air had whooshed out of her the way it had when she’d been tossed from a pony at ten and landed on the grassy field behind her family’s country house.

Her best friend, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Ellsworth, had accompanied her to the modiste’s for the final fitting of her wedding gown, and she’d seemed to notice the moment when the horror of her circumstances had struck Philippa like a bolt from the heavens.

Her eyes had widened, and as soon as Philippa got herself out of the wedding gown, they’d rushed to Clairmont’s Tea Shop and made a plan for Philippa’s escape.

Lizzie’s former governess had moved to Brighton years ago and now ran a boarding house for young ladies.

That’s where Philippa planned to stay until she decided whether she must go on to France or attempt to make a life for herself in Brighton.

She would come of age in a year, and then Douglas could not decide her future in such a high-handed manner.

Then she could return to London. But then again, maybe she’d find that she liked the new life she made for herself and never return, except to visit her younger sisters.

And her brother, if she ever managed to forgive him.

A train approached the station, rattling down the line as it puffed out thick clouds of smoke.

Her means of escape had arrived. As soon as its passengers disembarked, Philippa stood, collected her embroidered satchel containing all the worldly possessions she’d dared to take with her, and stepped onto the train.

Only once she’d settled in one of the cars did she let out a shaky sigh of relief.

The possibility that her brother would look for her or send one of his retainers to do so was slim.

Douglas had been at a soiree until the wee hours of the morning, and Philippa had sworn her maid to secrecy until well after the time of her departure.

Her plan would work. Only Lizzie knew the details of where she was headed, and she’d never reveal any of it to Douglas. She’d come to loathe Philippa’s brother for attempting to arrange her nuptials against her wishes.

All Philippa needed now was to find the strength in herself to walk away from her family and her home and make a new life for herself. She could do this, she told herself. If she wished to avoid being forced into a miserable marriage, she had no other choice.

Atlas Ballentine, Viscount Stonefield managed to hold back a groan at the off-color joke made by the man sitting across from him in his study.

He didn’t like Sir Roland Caulfield, Viscount Halford, which was a pity because the man was very likely going to be his father-in-law by the end of the month.

Atlas had put off the duty to marry for too long.

He’d allowed himself to become distracted with other matters.

But now, with his twin sisters’ first Season underway, he felt, more than ever, how useful it would be to have a partner to help him, and them, navigate the social whirl of the Season.

Not to mention how thoroughly he did not want to engage in another Season on the marriage mart himself.

Thus, rather than end the meeting as everything in him yearned to, Atlas gave the older man a tight smile.

Halford took it as encouragement and went on listing all the comely attributes of his daughter.

Jane Caulfield was pretty enough and seemed intelligent, based on the handful of times Atlas had spoken to her at various soirees and balls.

Best of all, she didn’t disturb his peace of mind.

She wouldn’t distract him from his duties.

Indeed, she seemed biddable and would no doubt take up the mantle of viscountess with aplomb.

Halford had already reminded him thrice that the family’s name had a long and storied history.

And the not insignificant final consideration was that Halford promised a sizable dowry.

Seeing as he had two households to support—both the Belgravia townhouse where he lived with his younger twin sisters, and a house in Hampstead, where his eldest sister, whose baronet husband had died only two years after they’d married, lived with her child and a mountain of her late husband’s debts—the influx of cash after marrying Miss Caulfield was not a minor consideration.

Atlas believed he could learn to appreciate Miss Caulfield, and he would ensure that the lady wanted for nothing. He told himself the rest would come in time. If nothing else, Miss Caulfield was certainly far more agreeable than her father.

“Jane will come around,” Halford said at the end of a long family history diatribe.

“Come around?”

Halford nodded and smiled. “You know how ladies can be. A case of the jitters that shall soon be overcome.”

Atlas sat up straighter in his chair and squared his gaze on the elderly viscount. “Miss Caulfield is amenable to this arrangement, is she not? I trust she has no misgivings about the match between us.”

He’d thought from the handful of times he’d met her that she would be amenable. She’d smiled at him, and they’d conversed congenially enough.

It was important to him that the lady wasn’t forced.

As a guardian to his sisters, he understood that young women often had little choice in such matters, but he would never wish to marry a lady who felt she’d been compelled against her will to do so.

He understood that there was no love between himself and Miss Caulfield.

Romance was rarely the most important consideration in noble pairings.

In most cases, marriage settlements were negotiated in a study between two men for practical reasons.

To marry for love was impractical.

Unbidden, the thought of another young lady arose in his mind. Just as quickly, he pushed the thought away, as he’d been doing for two months.

He could not think of her. Would not. She was his best friend’s sister, had no dowry to speak of, and her brother had already arranged a marriage for her with a man who…

No. Atlas pushed that thought away too. If he pondered Philippa Morgan’s match with Lord Kelmscott too long, he was liable to tear something to shreds or put his fist through the nearest flat surface.

The idea of Philippa and Kelmscott…