Free An Improper Proposal by Patricia Cabot

the exact date it had occurred, but it was as clear as the bubbles in the champagne that was continuously poured into her glass:
    She was in love with this man. And he was marrying someone else.
    Not only marrying someone else, but marrying someone else without ever once having cast her, the Honorable Miss Payton Dixon, a second glance!
    Oh, he’d shown her a gentlemanly civility once or twice: that summer night she’d been stretched out on the deck of the
Virago
, watching a spectacular display of falling stars. No sooner had she spied one flashing white streak in the sky than there’d been another. When everyone else, their necks stiff, had declared their intention of retiring, Payton alone had remained on deck, insisting on watching the dazzling light show until it—ended, or the sun rose, whichever came first. And Drake, who’d gone into the foc’sle with the others, had suddenly reappeared, a blanket and a pillow in either hand.
    Payton had thought, for one dizzying, glorious moment, that he intended to join her on deck. But he soon dashed those hopes, and awakened a different kind, when he’d fussed over her, insisting she keep warm, and use the pillow as a cushion for her head against the hard wood of the quarterdeck.
    And Payton had been as touched as if he really had joined her, for it was his blanket he’d brought her, and his pillow. They smelled of him, that odor that was peculiarly Drake’s, of salt air and fresh laundry and clean man, an odor she’d gotten used to in the years they’d traveled together in what was, at times, very close quarters, indeed. She had lain on the deck, wrapped in his blanket, her head on his pillow, and marveled at his sacrifice, since it meant he was sleeping on his hard pallet in the forecastle with no such comforts.
    Of course, her brothers pointed out the following day that he’d been far too drunk to miss them. They’d all been imbibing heavily that night, Drake heaviest of all, and if, in a moment of morbid sentimentality, he’d loaned Payton his blanket and pillow,  it was only because he’d been too intoxicated to know what he was doing. Drake had very nobly denied the veracity of this, but to Payton, it hadn’t mattered: even if he’d been drunk, he’d still thought of her. Drunk or sober, to be thought of by Connor Drake at all was no very small thing.
    There’d been other examples of Drake’s superiority to all the men of Payton’s acquaintance, of course. That time they’d been involved in that brawl in Havana, and a pirate had seized Payton about the waist and tried to toss her into the bay: Drake had shot him through the eyes with what Payton liked to think was almost lover like savagery. And, more intimately, an evening when Drake had been recuperating from a disastrous love affair with a native girl—she’d turned out to be married; granted her husband had several other wives in addition to her, but their union was still legal—and had been drunkenly bemoaning the fact that he was never going to find a wife, and Payton had volunteered her services, if by the time she was of marriageable age, he still hadn’t found anyone. Despite her brothers’ guffaws at the idea of Payton marrying anyone—and their speculations as to Payton’s abilities as wife and mother—Drake had quite gallantly kissed her hand, and told her he had every intention of taking her up on her offer.
    That had been, by Payton’s reckoning, only four years ago. But here she was, of eminently marriageable age, and no proposal was forthcoming.
    Because, of course, he’d found a bride so much more appealing.
    Looking across the table at Miss Whitby, Payton had no choice but to admit it to herself: penniless or not, Becky Whitby would make any man an enviable wife. She was everything a woman ought to be: soft, feminine, sweet, gentle. Miss Whitby never cursed, or found lice in her hair, or freckled. Miss Whitby never roughhoused, or stabbed waiters with chopsticks, or declared