Free An Improper Proposal by Patricia Cabot Page A

to anyone’s grandmother that she hated their grandchild’s intended spouse. Miss Whitby, to Payton’s certain knowledge, did not even know how to load a derringer, let alone fire one.
    Miss Whitby was perfect.
    Which was why Payton took the silk ribbon from her menu and slipped it, still in its bow, over her hand, to wear about her wrist. In this way, she hoped to bear a constant reminder to herself that what she wanted was most definitely out of her reach. Captain Connor Drake had never considered her anything more than the little sister of his three best friends. He had never thought of her as a woman, or even as female. He was marrying Miss Becky Whitby, and that was all there was to it.
    And the sooner she got that through her thick little head, the better.
    The ribbon helped. She looked at it every time one of her brothers rose to make a toast to the happy couple, toasts that became progressively bawdier as the night wore on. She looked at it every time Miss Whitby tittered and hid her face behind her fan. She looked at it every time Drake reached for his glass just as Miss Whitby reached for hers, and their fingers touched, and Drake, looking every hour more like a man approaching his execution than the happiest day of his life, murmured, “I beg your pardon.”
    She looked at it so much, in fact, that finally Hudson noticed, and said, “Gad, Payton, are you so hard up for baubles you’ve got to start wearin’ the party favors?”
    Fortunately, no one heard him. It was a gay and boisterous parry, with everyone talking at once. Payton, from years of long practice, was able to separate Drake’s voice from all the others. He was speaking to his fiancée and grandmother. Payton would have supposed that, since these two ladies who shared such important places in Drake’s life had just met, their conversation would necessarily revolve around getting to know one another: Lady Bisson might perhaps share an embarrassing incident from her grandson’s childhood. Miss Whitby would then relate some equally embarrassing incident from her own. In this way, Payton knew, from having watched her brother around his wife’s family, in-laws got to know one another.
    But that was not the case here at all. Lady Bisson was absolutely silent, opening her mouth only to spoon soup into it now and then. And Miss Whitby was just sitting there, hanging on Drake’s every word.
    And what was Drake, the night before the most important day—or what ought to have been, at least—in his life, discussing? Not his plans for their future. He wasn’t telling his grandmother how they met (he couldn’t know that Payton had, albeit unknowingly, already performed that function). No. He was telling them both about his last voyage to the Sandwich Islands. Payton could hardly believe it. He was going on and on about the island natives, as if they were the most interesting topic in the world, and he was doing it in a strange voice Payton had never heard him use before, a voice completely devoid of whatever it was that made Drake’s voice so distinctive, so that, whenever he was talking, she could easily trace his whereabouts on any ship, no matter what its size.
    Payton knew a thing or two about the natives of the Sandwich Islands, and in her opinion, while they were quite interesting, they did not bear discussing just then, when so many other, more important topics might be explored—like whether or not the groom intended to give up his career upon the sea now that he’d inherited a baronetcy, or just why, precisely, he’d decided to marry this woman he hardly knew anything about, beyond the fact that she had a pretty face and a remarkably bouncy bosom.
    Payton became so incensed as she listened to Drake expound on what he called the charming rituals of the Sandwich Island natives, that she finally interrupted with the tart suggestion that he tell his grandmother all about the charming Sandwich Island ritual of imprisoning any woman suspected of