Free Elisabeth Fairchild by Valentine's Change of Heart

her way--the cat in the corner. Might she go with us to Wales after all? This shy, watchful creature who captures my daughter’s heart far better than I? Dear Miss Deering? An inconvenience if she did not. He would have to chase down a governess in Manchester, on the morrow, or in Chester if he could convince her to stay an extra day or two. He had little hope of finding anyone who would qualify for the post in St. David, or anywhere else along the way for that matter.
    She wore a look in her eyes this evening, my dear Deering. Tucked in the windowseat, trying not to laugh. A look to give me hope.
    If she was set on leaving, he had best prepare an advertisement for the paper in Chester. He sat at his portable secretary to jot something down before he snuffed the candle, before he removed his shirt and breeches, and wasted half the night dreaming of wine or a woman.
    He thought of Palmer. The rogue.
    I was once a drunken rogue. A dragon to be feared. Lord Widnot.
    He wondered, as he undressed, if Penny could ever forgive him completely. He could not help but think of her at this hour of the night, of the dream he had so long held of her love. Her lovemaking.
    He laughed, the sound bitter. A false dream. She never made love to me. I was too drunk to know it was Eve.
    Ironic, really, this fixation with his touch-me-not. Doubly ironic that he should attempt to employ another touch-me-not--Miss Deering--who wanted no more to do with him than Penny had in the end.
    Women liked him, generally speaking. A certain stamp of woman. Camp followers, whores, lightskirts. Like Felicity’s mother, Eve. She had relished his sarcastic wit, his irreverent, neck-or-nothing style. He had won his share of tender moments, heated kisses, passionate declarations, temporary unions, fevered, futureless coupling.
    He had no idea how to go about it, really, the business of wooing a decent woman, of committing himself to a lasting love, marriage. His parents had a lasting marriage, and yet they appeared to him to be mild-mannered examples of tepid companionability. He could not imagine them fervid in their affections, fevered in their lovemaking.
    I am nothing like them. Too little passion, and I have too much of it.
    He snuffed the light, crawled between cold bed sheets and stared into the sudden unfamiliar blackness of the room’s corners, seeing a flash of faces, the lasses he had bedded. He could hear their whisperings--professions of ardor, of love. His not among them. He had wooed them, but never claimed to love them.
    The loneliest time of day, bedtime. Always had been. Will it always be so? Surely not, if he took a wife. A tricky business, to find a suitable wife. His father had wagged a finger. His mother had shaken her head, hands up, as if in defeat. “Decent women have been warned against you, my son, against your wild ways.”
    He had shrugged, said something flip and caustic, not knowing how to ask his parent’s help. How to tell them he felt the bumbling fool amongst decent women, destined to say and do the wrong thing. Decent women were reduced to babbling idiots by his sharp-tongued attempts at conversation, others simply avoided him. Those who did not, braved an introduction in hopes of future acquisitions. They did not interest him, none had interested him but Penny, so kind to Felicity, so good with animals. She had seemed to him to embody all that he was not--Lord Widnot--a man of scaly reputation. Even when he had been convinced Felicity was hers, when he was certain he had fathered her, Penny had been to him inviolate, innocence unclaimed, the heroine out of a fairy tale.
    Fool! What a fool I have been. Will there ever come a day, a woman I can respect who will find enough to respect in me? To love me? To wed a wastrel, a scoundrel, a drunken fool?
    He closed eyes and mind to the voices from his past that too harshly reminded him of his own failings. Still wondering, he fell asleep to dream of Miss Deering, the doe-eyed Deering