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“We have already had this argument,” she scolded.
“Then let us have a new one when we meet again.” They both sobbed once, and the tears rushed in.
“I have packed your trug, and it is ready with your trunk.” Timothy sniffled. “One trunk, honestly, how will you cope?”
“How shall I cope, without my truest friend?” When she decided to have feelings, she discovered, she did not go about it halfway. She had them all at once.
Her brother stood back; he did not let go but took the opportunity to give her a shake. “Very well, I suspect, for you have your fated mate.”
“Who would have ever thought?” Tabitha accepted his handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.
“I would have if I had known to think it. For you deserve all the good the world has to give.”
“As do you.” Tabitha took his face in her hands. “I wish you students and books and community and friends and, most of all, the love of your life.”
“If you say so, then it will be.” Their eyes filled with tears again, and Tabitha was certain she was going to blub like a baby but for the approach of a certain duke.
Alwyn cleared his throat. “Mr. Barrington, I neglected to do you the honor of asking for your sister’s hand.”
The threat of tears was banished in an instant. “My what now?”
“Your Grace, I appreciate your respect for the proprieties, but you must know my sister’s hand is hers to give herself.” Timothy offered one of his sharklike grins. “Gardy loo, mon bone omee. You’ll make her happy and keep her that way, or I’ll know the reason why.”
Alwyn replied in kind, the lingo sounding like so many languages all mixed up into one, she had no hope of making head or tails of it.
“We must go before I lose my nerve.” This pronouncement received incredulous looks from Alwyn and Timothy; Tabitha tugged hervera amorisaway before his disbelief resulted in more incomprehensible discourse, and after one last embrace of her brother.
She and Alwyn reached the edge of the village green and Tabitha cast a longing look over her shoulder. If any place had ever felt like home, it was this one. She had no idea what lay ahead and wondered at her willingness to leave Lowell Hall behind—until she leaned into the man next to her.
Tabitha took her mate’s hand. “Alwyn,” she said, “I choose you.”
He squeezed her hand, then kissed the back of it. “Tabitha,” he rumbled, his voice resounding with that of his lion, “I choose you.”
Hand in hand, the Duke and Duchess of Llewellyn took their leave for now, though not forever.
As they made their way to collect their things and avail of the Lowell state coach, His Highness was heard to say it was time to turn his sights on the next couples in line to mate…
Start from the beginning of the Shapeshifters of the Beau Monde series—a delicious mix of Regency romance and shapeshifting adventure from Susanna Allen
Available now from Sourcebooks Casablanca
One
February: the Season, London
It was a veritable crush.
In the year 1817, with the Napoleonic Wars well and truly won and the American Colonies well and truly lost, nothing less than an utter squeeze would do, not when the hostess was the Countess of Livingston and well able to put the wealth of her husband’s earldom on display. The ballroom was spacious, framed by its gilded and frescoed ceiling; impressive with its shining wall of mirrors; fragrant from the banks of hothouse flowers set about the vast space; and yet… Nothing about it was unlike any other ballroom in London, where hopes and dreams were realized or dashed upon the rocks of ignominy. Packed to the walls with the great and good of the Englishhaute ton, the society ball was as lively and bright as any before it and any that would follow.
Despite having traversed a well-trod path of lineage and reputation all their lives, the guests gave themselves to the event with an abandon that appeared newly coined. They came to the dance, and to the gossip, and to the planning of alliances and assignations with the energy of girls fresh out of the schoolroom and young lords newly decanted from Eton and Harrow. Those undertaking the lively reel threw themselves into it as though it were the first opportunity they had to perform it; the watchers congregated at the sides of the dance floor observed it as though they’d never seen such a display in all their lives. Though the room was lit by more than two thousand candles in crystal chandeliers, shadows lurked in the farthest corners; the gloom was not equal, however, to the beauty of the silks and satins of the ladies’ gowns or to the richness of their adornments. As the multitude of jewels and those eddying skirts caught the light, the setting looked like a dream.
Unless it had all the hallmarks of a personal nightmare. Alfred Blakesley, Seventh Duke of Lowell, Earl of Ulrich, Viscount Randolf, Baron Conrí, and a handful of lesser titles not worth their salt, found the Livingstons’ ball to be an unrelenting assault of bodies, sounds, and most of all, scents. This last was a civilized term covering a broad range of aromas that encompassed the pleasant—perfumes, unguents, and those hothouse arrangements—to the less so, among them the unlaundered linen of the less fussy young bucks and the outdated sachets used to freshen the gowns of the chaperones. If he wouldn’t look an utter macaroni, he’d carry a scented handkerchief or, in a nod to the Elizabethans, an orange studded with cloves. Whilst either would save his sensitive snout from the onslaught of odors, it would defeat the purpose of his presence this evening.
As usual, said presence, after an absence of five years, was causing a flurry of gossip and conjecture. With jaded amusement, the only amusement he was able to muster these days, and without appearing to do so, he eavesdropped on the far-ranging theories regarding his person that were swirling around the ballroom, much as the dancers spun around the floor itself. If the gossips only knew how acute his hearing was, they might hesitate to tittle-tattle…
“My Lord, he is divine,” last year’s premiere diamond of the first water sighed.
“That chiseled face, that muscular form.” Her friend, at best a ruby, fanned herself vigorously.
