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He left without another word, and as Marina watched him go, she gripped the pillar beside her, suddenly feeling very unsteady on her feet.

I could have been a duchess. Me. The Duchess of Knotgill.

Drawing in a shaky breath, she knew without doubt that she had just rejected her best prospect. Perhaps her only prospect, for who else would have her?

“She rejected me. She did not even blink,” Anthony groused, unable to believe the gall of the woman. “At first I thought I had misunderstood her, but there was no misunderstanding. Well, I shall not be repeating the proposal; I can tell you that with all certainty.”

He had never been so insulted in all his thirty-two years. She had not even had the decency to reject him courteously. Instead, she had dared to accuse him of being insincere.

Malcolm, who had just heard the whole tale, gave a gruff chuckle. “And yer pride is wounded?”

“This has nothing to do with pride. It is to do with manners,” Anthony retorted.

He would never admit to his friend that Marina had gotten to him, her blue eyes not mocking this time, but wary.

“Had I asked any other woman at this party to marry me, they would either have leaped at the chance, or they would have at least made an excuse or a polite rejection. She just said no.” He shook his head, his body too tense, too uncomfortable, as if he had ants in his veins.

Malcolm smiled. “Ye could always try courting the lass first. Then, next time ye ask her, it might nae come out of nowhere and startle her into rebuffing ye.”

“I told you, there will be no second attempt at this proposal,” Anthony replied, his jaw clenched. “I accept her rejection, however uncouth. No… there is no use in trying harder for a lost cause.”

Even the intensity of those beautiful, striking blue eyes would not be enough to rouse his curiosity a second time. Indeed, he would not be considering this marriage rigmarole again.

My grandmother and my son will just have to live with that.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Ithink it needs to be thicker,” Marina said with a frown, as she stirred the greenish paste.

She had been working on a salve for burns for months now, using every book of herbs and remedies and modern research that she had been able to get her hands on. Of course, she knew that her own scars could never be healed, but she hoped to one day create something that might help others who ended up in her situation.

The trouble was, the most successful remedies for burns that she had read about all required ingredients that were hard to find in England, and just as difficult to import. Plants from the Far East and Africa. Plants that, try as she might, she could not get to grow here.

“You could try a neutral powder,” her uncle, Bernard Longman, the Viscount Stadley, suggested.

Marina chewed her lip in thought. “But that might lessen its potency.”

“Honey? Honey has excellent properties.”

Marina nodded. “I thought about that, but it might make the salve crystallize if I add too much.” She groaned and pressed her brow into her palm, her eyes closing. “I do not have enough ingredients to be making such mistakes.”

“We have another shipment arriving at the end of the month,” Bernard reminded her with a smile in his voice. “There is no need to rush, dear girl. Miracles take time.”

She cracked open one eye, giving him a questioning look.

They had not yet spoken about the garden party yesterday, nor the fact that Marina had returned from it rather early, and had retired to bed in silence, forgoing their evening ritual of chamomile tea and reading a chapter of a book aloud in the drawing room.

And some miracles, like me getting married, never happen, she wanted to tell him, but she did not want to be the first to broach the subject.

“How are you faring with your work?” she asked instead.

Her uncle shook his head, perplexed. “I grow ever more convinced that disease travels by many means… and I cannot prove a single one of them. How can influenza that begins in Bath end up in London a week later? Why is it winter when such ailments are at their most potent? Does disease come by rain? Is the sun, perhaps, a natural remedy, and that is what protects us in the summer? Endless questions, very few answers.”

“You are not convinced of the germ theory?” She smiled, already knowing his answer.

He scoffed. “It is nonsense. Minute creatures that cannot be seen with the eye, crawling all over everyone? No, I certainly am not.”

The theory was mocked far and wide among the scholars of Europe, discredited and generally condemned, though Marina secretly had a less judgmental opinion of the theory. There were so many things that scientists did not know of the world; why not tiny entities that the human eye could not see?