family who hadn’t found him wanting. ‘I haven’t been back there for years.’ Not since his mother had passed, in fact, and had left him feeling like a cuckoo in a nest with only his overbearing father and equally staid and pompous elder brother for company, regularly disappointing the both of them simply by breathing.
That was when everything in his life had started going downhill—but at least he’d still had Cecily. Still clung to her and all they would have one day, biting his tongue and trying to please his father. An endeavour which had been ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things, when Gray had never wanted to join the army or the church as good second sons were supposed to do. From his earliest memories, all he had ever wanted to do was raise horses. As a child he had lived in the stables. He’d loved animals. Had a way with them.
He found himself frowning at the buried memory, wondering why it had chosen today of all days to pop into his mind. Routinely, he avoided the past as a point of principle. It couldn’t be changed, so why ponder it? Especially when the moment always held more promise. Or disaster. That wish for a farm filled with the finest horses he could breed was nothing more than all those carefully laid plans had been. A disappointing mirage of a future fate had never intended for him. One he would have loved if things had been different and a fine example of why he preferred now never to look too far ahead or too far behind. He had mourned the loss of that dream almost as much as he had Cecily.
Yet there was something about Suffolk which reminded him of home. Ridiculous, really, when home was more than two hundred miles away and nothing in the universe could ever tempt him to return there. He ruthlessly pushed the memories away, knowing the unwelcome spectre of his past would not help salvage this mission. ‘Please allow me to compensate you for the dress. It is the very least I can do.’
‘It’s only a bit of mud. Nothing that won’t come out in the wash. I have plenty of other dresses to wear this afternoon.’
‘For Mr Hargreaves?’ A faceless man Gray suddenly, and irrationally, disliked.
She smiled and his breath caught. She was pretty beforehand, in a classic English rose sort of way, but that smile did something miraculous to her features. It turned pretty into beautiful. Achingly, uniquely beautiful. ‘For my aunt’s tea party this afternoon.’
‘She has invited half the county,’ said Lady Crudgington with mock solemnity, ‘which in Thea’s world means less than twenty. Aside from being staid, the local society is also distressingly small. The tea will be nought but a hot, claustrophobic room full of dullards. Unbelievably tiresome.’ Lady Crudgington wound her arm through his, her eyes twinkling with mischief. ‘You should come, too, young man. Introduce yourself. Meet your other neighbours and see first-hand how dire they all are, while keeping me entertained with your scandalous maritime stories. Shouldn’t he, Thea? I shall happily vouch for his credentials.’
* * *
Her hair was an unmitigated disaster. So horrendous it had made its way on to her unwritten list of her Worst Hairstyles of All Time. Not quite as bad as the epically awful Fuzzy Chignon of Eighteen Nineteen, when the combination of cold winter rain and Colonel Purbeck’s stuffy drawing room had created a gargantuan tangle of fleece-like spirals that had soared towards the ceiling—but dangerously close. Thea had caught Mr Hargreaves staring, perplexed, at the top of her head three times in quick succession as he sipped his tea, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing either. Hair shouldn’t be vertical. Especially when it had enough pins in it to secure an elephant to the ground.
She resisted the urge to excuse herself to circulate among the other guests, knowing at best it was a flimsy excuse to wander past the mantel mirror and witness the mounting disaster for herself, as she had several times already. With every passing minute her wayward hair became even more wayward and the sight of it would only depress her. If she couldn’t fully tame her hair, how was she ever going to tame the streak of wayward selfishness that ran straight through her? The older she got, the harder it was becoming to behave when the urge hit and Impetuous Thea bubbled back to the surface.
She glanced at the door for the umpteenth time instead and tried to tell herself she was relieved that their new neighbour was not going to make an appearance. Another flimsy lie when she had spent most of the morning, all of luncheon and the entirety of Mr Hargreaves’ conversation thus far thinking about the way Lord Gray’s bronzed skin and intriguing muscles had looked, slicked with water.
Thea had never seen anything quite like it. Even as he had insisted on accompanying them to the boundary of the garden, the thin, wet shirt had been practically and gloriously translucent as he had chatted amiably about his dog and the navy and his utter wretchedness at what he had inadvertently done. When her eyes had begun guiltily wandering to his chest again, she had hung back to play with Trefor and been subjected to the equally enthralling sight of the damp linen clinging to his broad shoulders and back. Like her wayward hair, the wayward part of her character then refused to catch up, so it could feast on the sight for the rest of the way home—and feast it had. Thea was heartily ashamed of herself. Proper young ladies shouldn’t be ogling disgraceful scoundrels. Or worrying about the state of their hair for them either.
It would almost be a relief to see the man fully clothed. But then again, another part of her—the prim, proper, sensible part—never wanted to see him again, in the hope the memory of his body would quickly fade and her silly, flustered pulse would beat again at normal speed. Merely thinking about it all made her cheeks hot.
‘Can I fetch you some more tea, Mr Hargreaves?’ Which she would collect by way of the retiring room and dab mercilessly at those same cheeks with a cold flannel until they became decent.
‘You are most kind, Miss Cranford.’
As she took the saucer from him, she felt his fingers purposely brush against the back of her hand in an obviously flirtatious manner and immediately gritted her teeth. There was something about Mr Hargreaves and his blatant, ardent pursuit of her when her aunt wasn’t looking that raised her hackles, but ingrained politeness made it difficult to call him out on it in a room full of guests. Instead, Impetuous Thea broke free for a moment and she pretended to catch her slipper on her skirt. With more force than was necessary, she sent the cup flying, spilling the last dregs of the tea deliberately in his lap. ‘Oh, I am so sorry!’ She grabbed his napkin and passed it to him, enjoying the way the lukewarm stain quickly seeped into the pale kerseymere fabric. ‘Will you have to go home to change?’ She certainly hoped so.
‘Not at all, Miss Cranford. It is just a drip.’
As was he.
No matter how many times he pressed the match, Thea could not imagine an eternity shackled to him. A lifetime of spinsterhood would be more appealing—not that she was resigned to the shelf just yet. At three and twenty, she wouldn’t make a fresh-faced bride, but neither would she be a matron. As Aunt Caro frequently reassured her, there was still plenty of time to find the right sort of husband. Preferably one who regarded her with a heated look in his eyes, rather than her aunt, and wasn’t solely after her money.
He would be respectable and trustworthy, not a scoundrel. Noble in both thought and deed, and—and this part was not negotiable—in possession of enough of his own fortune that hers merely complemented it rather than supplemented it entirely. He didn’t need to be handsome and wear his breeches well. Both would be nice, of course, but they were in no way essential. Thea wasn’t Harriet, after all. No indeed. She enjoyed stability and discipline nowadays far more than the pleasing aesthetics of a broad pair of shoulders. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that. Since the soldier, she had vowed to be sensible and suppress the impetuous, wayward part of her nature that acted on impulse and got her into trouble. Because that same day, while being taken for a fool, she had also learned the hardest of lessons. Her selfish pursuit of forbidden fruit had consequences.
Dire ones.
After she had self-righteously stomped out of the house to dally with that soldier, the worst had happened and her poor uncle had paid the price. Just as her father had all those years previously when he had slammed out of the house, justifiably at his wits’ end with his precocious daughter, and had failed to come home