Her smile dissolved and she made a little gasp.
Yes,he thought.Gasp.That reaction seemed exactly, perfectly right.Whatever you do, please do not go.
He said, “My partner, the Earl of Cassin, has already spoken to your friend, I believe. Likewise, I could not resist seeking you out. Forgive me. There was meant to be a formal introduction, but...”
Slowly, her smile changed. She looked... delighted. His name was familiar to her. She knew why he’d come. Andher reaction was delight.His heart surged.
She said, “Mr. Joseph Chance. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. But are you...?” She let the sentence trail off.
The next words were out of his mouth before he’d fully thought. “Your future husband,” he said.
“Are you, indeed?” she laughed. Her voice was a frothy combination of a gasp and smile and something else.
Falling back on years of practiced charm and manners, Joseph winked. He smiled down at her with what he knew to be a very popular smile. “Shall we discuss the advertisement while I help you locate these brothers?”
Chapter Two
The potential of Joseph Chance-Future Husband hinged on whether he would call to Berymede the next day. If he called, Tessa would allow herself to hope. If he did not, the momentum would be lost, the attraction they felt in Pixham would dissolve, and Tessa would...
Well, Tessa was not sure what she would do. The worst thing about Tessa St. Croix’s condition was the persistent, terrifying question,What am I to do?
She lay awake at night, heart pounding, and tried to predict what would happen if she did nothing at all, if the pregnancy became obvious and her family discovered what she had done.
Banishment immediately. Disinherited completely. Turned out with no way to provide for her baby or herself.
Such specific threats had never been made—who could have ever guessed she’d find herself in this situation—but Tessaknew. She knew in the same way she knew she would not survive a fall from a high cliff. She’d had a girlhood of stumbles to prove her mortality.
Only a harlot would find herself in this situation.
We would never recover from the shame.
A condition worse than death.
Not in this family.
She’d heard years of comments about village girls, cautionary tales of distant shamed cousins, reactions to certain young women brought around by her brothers. No one had to say the words; Tessa was well aware.
Purity had always been her parents’ highest goal for their only daughter, followed closely (and ironically) by allure. Tessa was meant to be a paragon of chastityandbeauty, with no partial credit for beauty alone. What was beauty if she could not hold at bay the men she attracted? Beauty used in service to baser instincts was not beauty, it was craven. It was ruined.
Considering this, perhaps Tessa was more desperate than confident that Joseph Chance would call the morning after they met. Perhaps she willed it to happen. Really, she had few other choices.
And anyway, he’d said he would. Calling had beenhisidea. Even so, they had only spoken for twenty breathless moments as they walked the high street of Pixham, looking for her brothers.
Although twenty minutes had been long enough.
On the walk from Gibson’s store to Alabaster’s Tea Emporium and back, they had established two very promising things: a mutual interest and a loose plan.
The plan was for Joseph to call on her and seek permission from her father for a courtship. Tessa had objected at first, insisting that she be the one to smooth the way with her parents, to make the introductions, to do the talking, but he refused. He would not be managed. He would approach her father formally and ask permission properly.
As to mutual interest, Tessa was so far and away more interested than ever she planned to be. Joseph Chance was a stranger who answered her friend’s advertisement, and she had long since reconciled herself to the certainty that any stranger elicited by the advert would be terrible. Old, tedious, and petty were three of the better assumptions held for any man solicited by the advertisement.
Instead, Joseph was clever but not silly, masculine but not arrogant, attentive but not oppressive or clingy. And he was so very handsome. The opposite of old and tedious. Young, golden, tall, with broad shoulders and long legs. He smiled and his eyes wrinkled at the edges. His hand swallowed hers, but not aggressively, not clinging. Gently, carefully. From a crowd of fifty men, even a hundred, she would have chosen him every time.
Joseph Chance was so superlative, she struggled to trust her good fortune. The advert needed only elicit a man desperate enough to marry her and then detached enough to sail away from her.
And yet this was the man who came to call? A strong, gentle Adonis who was not intimidated by her vibrant personality and whom she did not want to go?
As forhisattraction toher, Joseph Chance stared at her like she was a pin on the globe, like the world spun around her.
