Page 38 of The Lady Knows Best

Out of habit, Miles chuckled, but he couldn’t laugh off the question quite as easily as he would’ve liked. “Do you know, I think it might be,” he confessed after a moment. “Serious, that is.”

Breath wheezed into and out of Alistair’s lungs, the only sound in the room for a long moment. “I see,” he said finally. “So, you can’t very well refuse Ashborough’s invitation.”

“No, I can’t.”

After a fit of coughing, Alistair made his way to the room’s only chair and sat down. “All right, then. Since I haven’t any dueling pistols, and I haven’t the strength this morning to run you through—merciful though the gesture might be—I suppose we’d better discuss what you’re going to do, or rather, not going to do, to avoid another betrothal dinner fiasco.”

Miles nodded and propped one shoulder against the mantel, settling in for a conversation that promised none of the diversions of Daphne’s impromptu botany lesson.

The realization that he liked her was both unexpected and more than a little unwelcome. Of course, he certainly might do worse than a woman who brought a smile to his lips, who kept him on his toes, who made him want to kiss her until she was too breathless to argue anymore.

But liking her made it deuced uncomfortable to be thinking of, well, blackmailing her. He’d threatened to use his knowledge of her work at the magazine to force her to help him win his wager. It was one of the—no, the most despicable thing he’d ever done, one of the most despicable things he’d ever heard of anyone doing.

If he liked her, he should let her go.

Because he liked her, the solution wasn’t quite so simple.

She’d proposed marriage. She was willing to sacrifice herself rather than lure some other woman into a match with a profligate like him. In a matter of days, she could be his.

But only a fool would imagine he would ever be hers in return.

CHARM is the rake’s principle means of attracting the notice of respectable young ladies. (What methods he may use to attract other sorts of women lies not within this author’s expertise nor the purview of this publication.) A young lady has trained herself to accept the attentions only of those who speak intelligently and behave in a gentlemanly manner. She may therefore imagine it will be an easy matter to guard against a rake’s charms—she will be on the watch for a too-handsome face, dandified dress, and a disagreeable demeanor.

Charm, however, is that which makes foolish nonsense seem like rational speech. The rake may flatter, cajole, tease, and even insult! The young lady, to whom these sorts of words have never been addressed, will naturally intend to make clear that such talk is unwelcome and offensive to her. She will have been taught to turn away from such prattle, or ignore it if it cannot be altogether avoided.

She is in danger of discounting the transformative effect of charm, which has the extraordinary power to make his flattery ^seem welcome and turn sharp words into sweet.

Charm affects not only the ear, but also the eye. A young lady must guard against allowing the rake’s ’s ^despicable visage to take up residence in her thoughts. Otherwise, she may find herself at most inconvenient times in a dreadful disarray of spirits, with racing heart, quickened breath, and

“Daph? You’ll never guess what!” Bell burst into the bedchamber the sisters shared, her cheeks pink and her hair disordered by the speed with which she must have flown up the stairs to deliver her news.

Instinctively, Daphne laid her forearm over her work, smearing the word despicable—her most recent addition to the page. Ordinarily, she wrote a neat hand, with no blots and few cross-outs. But the essay on rakes had bedeviled her. She’d consigned three drafts to the fire already and hadn’t high hopes for the fourth. Every time she dipped her pen, she saw one of two faces: Lady Stalbridge, a slight frown creasing her brow, clearly disappointed by Daphne’s slowness; or Lord Deveraux, smiling in that way of his, the effects of which expression Daphne had unwisely been trying to commit to paper when her sister entered the room.

She ought to have guessed that the movement of her arm would only draw Bell’s notice and pique her curiosity.

“Ohhh.” Bell stretched out the word, craning her neck as she approached the dressing table, atop which rested Daphne’s writing desk.

To encourage regular correspondence, their parents had given each of them a writing desk—a wooden box, inside which could be stored quills, ink, and paper, with a slanted lid that served as a convenient surface for composing letters of all sorts—when the sisters had first left Dublin.

Well, not the first time they’d left Dublin. More accurately, the first time they’d traveled from home with permission.

In any case, the boxes had journeyed with them around the British Isles, ferried from Dublin to London and back again, and carted among Tavisham Manor in Berkshire, Hawesdale Chase in Westmorland, and Stoke Abbey in Shropshire, the various English country homes of their eldest siblings. Daphne’s had grown battered and worn over the years, stained with ink inside and out. Bell’s, still pristine in appearance, was at present stowed under her bed.

“Are you working on Miss Busy B.’s next column?” Bell spoke in something like a whisper. “What’s this month’s crisis?”

Daphne folded the still-damp pages of the essay together, lifted the writing desk’s hinged top a scant half inch, and slipped her papers inside. “I’m not at liberty to say. But you had something you wished to tell me, I take it?”

Bell gasped, remembering her mission. “You will never guess!” she repeated.

“I don’t intend to try.”

Despite a huff of annoyance, Bell couldn’t keep her tongue for long. “Gabriel invited Lord Deveraux to dinner.”

Daphne, who had still been twirling her pen in her fingers, felt the quill snap without having been conscious of closing her hand. “Wha—why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“To test his mettle, Cami says. It’s quite clear the man means to court you, and they intend to rake him over the coals before deciding whether to give him their blessing.”

“They. Cami and Gabriel, you mean?”