Free One Final Season by Elizabeth Beacon Page A

to the elegant offices they now kept in the City for a résumé of the firm’s finances and projections for future profit, Edmund could only agree with him.
    ‘Even I can see that for myself, thank you,’ he told his formidable friend and business associate and wondered why Ben Shaw thought he needed reassurance that, while he was at the helm, Stone & Shaw would turn a fine profit for any investors lucky enough to be admitted into the select ranks of their stockholders.
    ‘If you didn’t come and see it all for yourself every now and again, I wouldn’t have much respect for you as a man or an investor, and I dare say we’d never have done business together in the first place,’ Ben told him.
    ‘So long as I don’t try to interfere in the way you run the enterprise from day to day, I presume?’
    ‘Aye,’ Ben admitted wryly, ‘you’ve the measure of me on that front, my fine young lord, and that’s plain to see.’
    ‘Not as young as I was,’ Edmund defended himself automatically, although such teasing bothered him much less than it had when he was first admitted into the august boardroom of Stone & Shaw, probably because he had been thought likely to become part of the family Ben Shaw protected and loved as fiercely as if they truly shared ties of blood, by marrying Kate Alstone.
    Would his refusal to become part of that family, now he’d finally returned to the ton with the aim of taking a suitable wife who wasn’t Miss Alstone, mean an end to such an unexpectedly comfortable and profitable friendship? If so, he’d regret it deeply, Edmund decided, and settled down for an excellent glass of burgundy and a companionable cigarillo, determined to enjoy them and this unlikely friend while he still had the chance.
    ‘Speaking of your relative youth, or lack of it, when are you going to get down to the business of finally wedding and bedding that stubborn girl of ours?’ Ben came straight out and asked the question Edmund had been dreading all morning.
    ‘I’m not,’ he admitted bravely, considering Ben was the largest and most formidably tough man Edmund had ever encountered and could probably mill him down without even having to break his stride.
    Coming under the steady examination of a pair of grey eyes that suddenly looked as if they were determined to see into the very depths of a man’s soul wasn’t the most comfortable experience of Edmund’s life, but he held his ground and managed not to sigh with relief when Ben sat back in his chair and watched him blandly instead of reaching for his neckcloth and attempting to strangle him with it. ‘Because?’ was all Ben said while considering this new state of affairs.
    ‘I can’t imagine a worse fate than being in love with a woman who merely tolerates me, especially if we were to be bound inextricably together for life, can you?’ Edmund replied, thinking of the Tedintons and barely managing to hide a shudder at the idea of being trapped inside a marriage like that one.
    ‘No,’ Ben admitted, ‘but it beats me why you’ve now decided she won’t do when last time you were in town you were so madly in love with her you couldn’t even consider wedding anyone else.’
    ‘Beats me as well, but maybe I finally saw the truth of the matter, before she got so bored with turning me down that she decided to accept me just for a change of scenery.’
    ‘I think you would have discovered you had underestimated her if she did so,’ Ben said sagely and Edmund wondered if the unconventional giant did indeed know Kate Alstone far better than he did. He’d once lavished such minute attention on her every mood and gesture that it seemed a sad reflection on Edmund’s judgement and so-called powers of observation if he’d failed to understand her after all that effort.
    ‘No, for I won’t ask her again, so the situation will not arise,’ he insisted, denying himself the luxury to hope that he was wrong about her after all. ‘I lost my taste for being a