Page 5 of The Rogue and the Viscountess

“Yes. Thank you,” Prunella echoed, though she didn’t feel grateful at all. She wanted to take Gwen’s little love spoon and hurl it across the room.

So she was still suffering, and would suffer a while more, from the mess that Edwin had left behind. Very well. She would endure weeks in Bath with Lydia. She would endure another Season in London, and the whole time, she would have her eye out for an opportunity of her very own.

Because she, Prunella Price, was not going to vanish into a life of pittances and penury. She was going to do something—she didn’t know what, but something—to achieve the little cottage and the garden and the lovely peaceful village and the circle of friends who were not Edwin’s, not Lydia’s, but her own, all her own.

And she would have a cat to sit on her lap as she visited and gossiped and sewed and ate all the cakes she wished, with no one about to scold her as, for the first time in her life, she did exactly as she pleased.

She would find a way.

Of course, being kidnapped—again—and held hostage by a man you were quite certain meant to kill you had a way of upsetting all the most ambitious or carefully laid of plans.

Chapter Two

Wiltshire, England, September 1799

“Peter Wilkins, straighten your cravat and the buttons on your coat. You are a baronet now and not some slubber de gullion.” Pete’s grandmother advanced across the parlor as if she meant to take him by the throat and fix his neckcloth herself. He had no doubt she’d take the opportunity to strangle him as she did.

Pete stepped back, shielding his neck and widening his eyes at her. “Lady Wilkins. Such language from a baronet’s wife? I’m shocked to the core, I am.”

If he’d learned one thing in the short weeks he’d been the new baronet, Pete had learned not to give Grandmother Barbara an inch of rein over him. She’d clutch the whole harness in her bony hands and drive him into the ground.

If he’d learned another, it was that he was to eradicate all traces of his upbringing. He wasn’t to speak Welsh, act Welsh, or look Welsh, however that was to be contrived. He feared he’d never again hear the Welsh name his mother had given him—Pedr, symbolizing all the rocky beauty and strength of the Welsh countryside he might never again see. He was Peter Wilkins in the eyes of his grandmother and everyone else in the neighborhood.

He’d compromised and allowed his new acquaintances to call him Pete, since they couldn’t speak his Welsh name proper anyway.

Every other part of his old self, he was losing, piece by piece. He had a new wardrobe that made him look laughable, an oaf trying to model a dandy. He was too big to fit into these English coats, not to mention the pantaloons. Pantaloons! The very word was preposterous. He much preferred the rough fustian and wool of the jacket and trousers he’d worn as a working man, such as his work was.

He’d hidden his old clothes, the outfit he’d arrived wearing, in a trunk in his bedchamber. A last vestige of the identity he’d been asked to shed as he became someone else, an English gentleman instead of a Welsh ruffian.

He’d given up enough already. He’d given up everything. And still, his grandmother was not satisfied.

She marked this by a sniff. Barbara’s sniffs could convey an entire register of insults, from gentle disapproval to cool disdain to outright contempt. This sniff communicated, I am trying my best and you refuse to cooperate, you infernal ox of a man.

“I learned that term from your Welsh mother. Slubber de gullion,” she repeated with a sneer.

Pete gritted his teeth. She was calling his mother a slubber de gullion, wasn’t she? Even though Barbara and her equally haughty son were the reason Pete’s father had left Wiltshire and headed west for a chance at work and love with a gentle Welsh maiden. Nia Wilkins, née Pugh, had been a saint in this life and was already in Heaven seated in audience with the Father, giving Him gentle advice about how to go on.

Barbara Wilkins, when the devil came to take her, would be dragged straight into the infernal regions, following her self-indulgent husband, her arrogant son, and the intolerable cur that her other grandson, Barnaby, the 3rd Baronet, had by all accounts been.

They squared off as if in a boxing match, the crotchety old dowager and the still relatively young man who now owned the house and land she had lived on for all her married life. Little wonder she thought of him as the interloper, even if English law saw it differently.

“And I won’t go in and sip tea with that insipid maid in your parlor,” Pete added, because he’d made enough concessions already. Having Barbara play matchmaker, when so much else was upended in his life already, was the outside of enough.

“She’s a Guy,” Barbara said, waving her hand in dismissal. “It’s not like you’ll be able to win one of the Methuen daughters, and certainly not an Awdry.”

“What if I don’t want to win anyone?”

Despite his argumentative tone, Pete followed his grandmother to the drawing room. Anthony Guy owned a nearby estate and, unlike the Methuens, was frequently in residence there. If Pete had a house and lands of his own to oversee, best to have good advice on how to go about the business.

He stopped short when he entered the drawing room, and not only because Barbara had done the room up with pea-green paper and draperies the pink of the salmon he used to catch and eat in South Wales, a color combination that turned Pete’s stomach. The girl waiting for them was clad in a morning gown the blue of the viper’s-bugloss currently blooming in the chalky grasslands behind Rowan Hill. She was also as slender as that plant, though her bosom swelled in a creditable fashion. A round straw hat cupped her head, the brim turned up and lined with blue silk to show her piquant face.

Her rosebud mouth fell into a little O as Pete stopped inside the room. He’d met Anthony Guy and his lady shortly after he arrived, when the neighborhood folk made their courtesy calls to express condolences over the death of the unlamented Barnaby and to take the measure of the new baronet, the other grandson hailed home from Wales and a surprise to everyone as he’d never been talked about.

He was a surprise to the girl in blue, for a certain, and a flash of disappointment chased across her face. Pete could guess why. As Barbara had taken pains to tell him, he was an eligible bachelor, and all the girls of the neighborhood would be lining up to take a crack at him. They’d want a well-knit, handsome, debonair gentleman, and they’d find a weather-beaten, rough-hewn brute.

“Peter, this is Miss Elizabeth Guy, and that is her sister, Jane.” Another, younger girl, clad in virginal white with a cluster of pink roses in her hat, made a quick curtsy, then went back to inspecting the spinet. She was too young to think about suitors, but Miss Elizabeth was exactly the right age.

It was clear from her expression that Peter had already been evaluated and assigned to the not likely to succeed in his suit column.