And that he was the not-stupid man of her dreams.
“And his hands ...” Arabella was lost, thinking about those hands.
“Have you kissed him, Arabella?” Juliana asked.
Juliana’s question brought Arabella’s mind back to actuality. “I have met him only once, and our meeting was only ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, at most. In June. At St. Paul’s Cathedral. So, no, I have not kissed him.”
She thought of Alasdair’s mouth and the dimples that bookended his smile.But I want to kiss him so badly.
“Does he write to you, Arabella?” Rebecca asked.
“No.”
“Do you write to him?”
“How can I?” Arabella fell backward onto the bed. “It would be so forward. I have to find some other way to meet him again.”
Juliana scoffed and got off the bed. “You have met a man for ten minutes and you think you love him. Andyouwant to advisemeonmyengagement.”
“On your engagement to be engaged,” Rebecca said and fell backward so that she was lying next to Arabella.
Rebecca held Arabella’s hand.
“You will see him again, Arabella, I am sure of it,” she whispered.
Arabella stared up at the canopy of the bed.
She was not so sure.
Every day her memories of what he had looked like, what they had said, how she had felt, waned and became dimmer and dimmer. And he had not pursued her—had not asked her mother if he could write to her, not come to London or Middlewich to pay a call. Surely, if he felt for her what she had felt for him, he would do something. He had the freedom of action that she did not.
Oh, to be a man.
Arabella blinked several times and set her jaw.
No, not to be a man. To have the liberty of a man.
Three
Ayear and some months had passed since their one and only meeting. Since her mother’s remarriage. And a year since her brother Sebastian’s birth.
Alasdair had not come after her. He had not written her. He had not wanted her.
The ten minutes in the bishop’s study in the cathedral were enshrined forever in her memory, but at times, it was as if those minutes had happened to someone else and she had merely read about it.
And then she would see a head of auburn hair on a baby and suffer a wrenching pain deep in her abdomen.
She first saw Giles at the theater. At the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane, to be precise. She was sitting in her stepfather’s box. Historically, the Cavendish family had had quite a good box, but after James Cavendish, the Duke of Middlewich, had married her mother, they had been given an even better box—one right next to the Prince Regent’s. The improvement in the family’s seats was due to the fact that her mother had been a leading actress at this very theater years ago. The management was nothing if not sentimental. One of their own was now a duchess! They would acknowledge and celebrate that with the third-best box in the theater.
Yes, the Prince Regent was no longer the Prince Regent and now was King George IV and sat in the King’s Box. Still, the Middlewich box was excellent. And Arabella loved the theater, especially when the story was one about lovers who were separated and reunited in the last act through some bit of fate or wonderfuldeus ex machina.
She was in the box with four of her step-aunts, all chaperoned by her sister Mary and her husband, David Vaughan, the Viscount Tregaron. Mary was finally pregnant but was not to have her baby until next year and was determined, she told Arabella, “to enjoy the best of London until I become tied to a nursery in Wales.”
Halfway through the first act, Arabella saw a glimmer of reflected light out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head to the left and saw a towering man in a box that faced the stage. He had a spyglass to his eye and the lens at the end was the source of the reflected light that had caught Arabella’s eye. Because the spyglass was not directed toward the stage, but at an angle toward the Duke of Middlewich’s box.
As she gazed at him, he took the spyglass down and inclined his head slightly, acknowledging her. He was a big man. Tall. Broad shoulders. A powerful chest. His hair was dark and wavy and long enough to come down over his cravat. His eyes were dark. His jaw was square.
As he straightened back up from his small bow and gazed at her, she felt a shiver run up and down her spine.
