Free Woo'd in Haste by Sabrina Darby

jumped up from the particularly long problem of division on which he had been toiling and ran to the window. Perhaps a real tutor would have forced the boy back to his work, but Luc followed him, equally eager to see. After all, Bianca was back.
    Good. He had to tell her. He had put himself in an impossible situation. Made love to her when she likely thought he was the worst sort of bounder, someone who could not possibly offer for her unless he meant to make her elope with him and live in poverty. Would he do that if he truly were the simple man he pretended to be? For love, perhaps. So then he was a bounder regardless. At least he was a bounder who could tell her the truth. Not woo her under false pretenses. Reassure her that he had the means to take care of her. That she didn’t need to worry about the risks of stolen kisses.
    Peter had thought the entire plan ridiculous, and though Luc had had difficulty admitting it in front of the older man, he knew it was. Even Reggie seemed to think Luc should not have kept up the deception so long. But each day it had been harder and harder to reveal himself.
    Then she was gone. Now, once again, he would have a narrow window of opportunity. Before her sister and the guests arrived.
    The carriage pulled up. The footman, Alex, went to open the door. Luc longed to run downstairs and greet her but at this point it would be unseemly. There would be time enough at dinner and after dinner.
    But then he noticed the carriage was slightly different from the one that had departed six days earlier. And the horses were not the Cleveland bays that had departed a week earlier, but instead were hackneys.
    Then the door opened and a bare head of brown curls popped out. Followed a moment later by another head of darker brown hair. Henrietta and Catherine. His time had run out.
    “Mama!” Thomas cried, and then he ran out of the room and Luc was forced to follow him. Through the hall, down the stairs, into the entry hall, where the two ladies were standing amid piles of luggage and a gaggle of servants.
    The woman Luc presumed to be Mrs. Mansfield, though she hardly looked older than Catherine, was talking to the housekeeper when Thomas barreled toward her.
    “Mama!” he cried again. She turned with a beatific smile on her face and opened her arms, bending down slightly to embrace him.
    “Look how big you’ve grown!” Then she looked up at Luc, her smile no less welcoming. “And you must be Mr. Dore. My husband wrote glowingly of you.”
    “Mrs. Mansfield, what a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said.
    “My daughter, Catherine.”
    He turned his full attention to Kate. She looked nothing like what he had expected: evil personified. Instead she was a young woman of an age with him, petite, with dark brown hair and brown eyes, completely the opposite of Bianca’s golden, voluptuous beauty. She’d be forgettable, really, another “pretty enough” girl, if not for a certain intensity about her.
    “Mr. Dore,” she said with a small smile. Then she looked about. “But where are my sister and father?”
    “In Eastbourne, to pick up the new horses,” Thomas interjected.
    “They are due home any day now,” Luc added. His words were rewarded by a flash of disappointment across Kate’s features. “We thought you would be them.”
    “Ah, yes, the horses,” Henrietta said.
    “And Bianca, as well?”
    Luc looked sharply at Kate. Was there jealousy behind those words or merely disappointment that she could not see her sister? He was fascinated by her, by this woman who had up until now simply been the mythical obstacle in the way of his path to love.
    “Yes, Bianca, as well.”
    Kate nodded and then turned away. He watched as she and her brother embraced and then the family disappeared from the hall. He stood for a moment, watching the footmen move trunks and packages here and there before he, too, moved on.
    “S urely you don’t think so, Miss Mansfield!” Arthur Latham exclaimed. He