Chapter Ten

November 27, 1812

Frederick should have known, the instant that Edie rushed into the coffee house, Mrs. Teagan quite a few steps behind her, that something was wrong.

There were three clues.

Firstly, he was starting to learn the contours of her face. Looking beyond the beauty, there was a sharpness about her eyes when Edie truly was indignant, and he could see the crinkles on her forehead even from where he was sitting.

Secondly, there was the way she wrenched off her scarf with a terribly bad temper the instant the door closed behind her. A gust of snow fluttered in just in time. It was fortunate, indeed, that the gentleman who had come in behind her was at least three feet back, or he may have been accidentally garroted by the knitted implement.

And thirdly, and perhaps most obviously, there was the way Edie shouted across the coffee house—

“It’s outrageous!”

Heads turned.

Frederick had never been one to be surprised at being looked at. It was part and parcel of being who he was, after all, and he had learned swiftly to ignore the pointed looks and muttering.

However, it did not appear that Edie had yet hardened herself to such an experience.

Eyes downcast and struggling out of her pelisse as she wove her way around the tables in Don Saltero’s Chelsea Coffee House, Edie let her frown grow deeper, her cheeks even pinker, as she dropped into the chair opposite him.

Mrs. Teagan, her own face red from the cold, hastily sat two tables away at the nearest open seat, allowing them a modicum of privacy as she removed her gloves and pelisse. A modicum, anyway, though the tone of Edie’s voice did nothing to dispel the staring of those around them.

“Absolutely outrageous!” Edie said firmly, as though continuing a conversation they had already started. “It shouldn’t be allowed!”

Frederick waited for a moment for her to explain, but Edie was swiftly distracted by her gloves, which did not appear to wish to come off her hands, and the way her hat had slipped indecorously from her head.

“—can’t believe it,” Edie was muttering as she finally freed herself from her winter outwear. “Can you?”

“Believe… what?” Frederick asked hesitantly.

She glared, then her expression softened. “It is pleasant to see you.”

He grinned inanely like a fool, before he recalled himself and looked at his coffee cup. It wouldn’t do for there to be even more gossip about him flowing about London. He didn’t need to make a fool of himself in public.

“It is pleasant to see you, too,” he said quietly.

His words were mainly lost in the long, heavy breath Edie exhaled. “I should have expected it.”

Frederick was once again bewildered. “You should always expect me to be pleased to see you.”

It was perhaps a little more open than he had expected, but he did not know why Edie appeared so confused. “I beg your pardon?”

“I think I need to beg your pardon,” Frederick said with a laugh. “Shall I order for you?”

“What?” Edie said, distraction mussing her voice.

He stifled a smile.

It had been her idea to meet here. She had suggested it only yesterday, when they had both been gawped at while they’d stood at the sidelines of Viscount Walden’s ball. Lord Stewart had described it as the perfect place “to be seen,” and they were most definitely seen.

Frederick had only been invited because of the engagement, he knew, and Edie had suddenly been aware of just how many people had been staring at them.

“Quite blatantly, too!” she had hissed last night.

“You’ll have to get accustomed to it,” Frederick had told her with a laugh, before adding hastily, “I mean… you know. Until this engagement is over.”

It had been the perfect opportunity for her to say…

What, he did not quite know. Something deep and meaningful. Something about this attraction they felt, that they had felt from the moment they had first met. It was not as though they had held back…

“I’ll… I’ll stop. If you want to.”

“Don’t stop.”

“We will simply have to find a place to meet where we aren’t gawped at,” Edie had said, elegantly applauding the musicians as a dance ended. “I like Don Saltero’s Chelsea Coffee House—do you know it?”

Frederick had known it and had arranged to meet her there the following day at two o’clock. After lunch, he reasoned, but with enough daylight for them both to return home in the light. Respectably.

Apparently, however, this was not the right place. Edie was causing a great number of glances their way, which only increased as she spoke loudly once again, her voice trembling with feeling.

“It should be illegal!”

“It would be a lot easier for me to partake in this conversation,” Frederick said hastily, taking her hand and lowering his own voice in the hope she would follow suit, “if I knew what we were talking about.”

Edie went crimson. Why, he could not fathom. Then she looked at their hands.

Their hands. Or rather, his hand over hers, on the table. And neither of them was wearing gloves.

Frederick swallowed, hard. He could feel every inch of her hand, the throb of her pulse, the gentle shift of her fingers as they moved behind his own. Oh, this was intimacy. This was what he wanted, to touch her.

And she did not move away. Though Edie’s face was pink, she had not removed her hand from his. She left it there, warm and ready for—

Edie removed her hand from the table, pulling it out from under his. For a moment, he thought he was going to attempt to catch it with his own, pull it back, make her touch him.

But he did not. He was hardly a rake.

“Here,” Edie said quietly, rummaging for a moment in the reticule she had placed in her lap, then thrusting some paper at him. “Look at this.”

Frederick unfolded the paper gingerly as though it were liable to catch fire if he were not careful. The way she had been handling it, it could very well have been dangerous.

“A coffee, three pastries, and as many sugar cubes as you can give me.”

Startled, Frederick looked up. “I beg your—ah.”

A lanky serving man of the Don Saltero’s Chelsea Coffee House bowed, clearly startled by the demands of the lady, and swept away, stopping at Mrs. Teagan’s table next.

“Look at it.”

Frederick blinked. “I beg your—”

“What is distracting you this afternoon?” Edie asked, her frown finally softening as she examined him more closely. “You seem quite… preoccupied.”

Distracted. Preoccupied. Yes, that’s one way of describing it.

How could he tell her that with each passing interaction they shared, he was starting to wonder if this pretense could not be something… more?

More than false. More than a sham. More than a convenient way for Edie to save her reputation while escaping the bonds of matrimony with him?

For they would not have been bonds to him. Quite to the contrary, the idea of being tied to Edie for the rest of his life… it did not fill him with fear, or anything like what his brothers had complained about for years.

Complained, that was, until they had fallen in love.

Frederick pushed aside the thought and cleared his throat as he looked at the paper Edie had handed him.

It was today’s copy of the Whispers of the Ton . He hadn’t picked it up—newspapers were much more his style. His attention drifted over the paragraphs hinting at so-and-so’s affair, or that Lord You Know who could no longer afford to send his son to Eton, until it settled on a paragraph Edie had circled, several times, with a pencil. With increasing vehemence, judging by the indentation on the paper.

Followers of this year’s flourishing rose will be startled to know that it is still dangling off the arm of the scandalous Viscount P, a most undeserving man who nevertheless appears to be appreciating its petals. Though the flourishing rose looked stunning in a gown of cerise just two days ago, the possession of such a flower has done no favors for the ill-born gentleman. Is it possible that the shine of owning such a thing is already starting to fade? Has even he realized there must be some fault in a treasure that could not land a match by Season’s end? It’s hardly going to bloom any brighter as the years go on…

Frederick jaw was tight by the time he’d reached the end of the paragraph.

It was hardly complimentary, but that was the nature of the scandal sheet, wasn’t it? Whispers of the Ton was hardly known for its approving descriptions of anyone.

He looked up. Edie’s expression was a glower.

“It’s unpleasant,” he said quietly.

“Unpleasant! It’s—oh, thank you,” Edie said hastily as the serving man returned with a tray. Upon it was a cup of steaming coffee, a plate of several pastries, some of which looked dusted in chocolate, and the largest bowl of sugar cubes Frederick had ever seen.

They halted their conversation as the man gently deposited his burden onto the table and looked expectantly at Edie.

“That will be all,” she said lightly as she reached out to pop a sugar cube in her mouth.

Frederick grinned. “Sweet tooth?”

“Far too sweet,” Edie said after swallowing the sugar cube almost, as far as he could tell, in one. “Now, aren’t you outraged?”

“Outraged? I don’t think so,” he said reflectively. “I have a savory preference myself. My cook makes these delightful—”

“I don’t mean the sugar cubes—I mean what they wrote about me, about us!”

Frederick shrugged. “You get used to it.”

Not that he ever had done. The first week he had come to town—why, he must have only been about nineteen years of age—he had been astonished and hurt to discover that those with whom he had spoken so politely had turned to gossip about him the moment his back had turned.

That had been years ago. He was older now. Wiser. Harder.

But Edie, innocent as she was, had never endured such a thing until the Season had ended and she’d remained without a match. “It’s contemptible!”

“You will get used to—”

“I don’t think anyone should have to put up with such a torrid amount of drivel!” Edie sipped at her coffee, licking her lips and dislodging the last crumbs of sugar that had remained there.

Frederick shifted in his seat. He was most definitely not thinking about those crumbs that had clung so eagerly to those pink lips. Not at—

“You aren’t offended, then?” Edie said, her voice hesitant as she selected another sugar cube.

He glanced again at the paper.

… the scandalous Viscount P, a most undeserving man who nevertheless appears to be appreciating its petals… ill-born gentleman…

His jaw was tight again, but he pushed past it. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Or heard before. Or had shouted at me across a crowded dinner table, when the ladies had departed and the men were in their cups.

Frederick did not bother to say it. There was no reason to upset Edie any further. In truth, she looked far more upset than he had expected.

“I have never been spoken of in such a manner,” she said quietly, her voice finally dropping below the humdrum of the Don Saltero’s Chelsea Coffee House.

And Frederick’s stomach twisted.

Damn it to hell, why had he not thought of that? It was all very well for him, he was accustomed to such rudeness. Not that Society thought of it as rudeness—that was the trouble. They saw nothing wrong with casting aspersions on his character because they did not see their rudeness as aspersions. They merely assumed it was all true.

But Edie—she had surely never endured such cruelty. An engagement to him would have only amplified any gossip about her remaining unwed months after the Season’s end. It was still a failure, in Society’s eyes, to find oneself engaged to wed a bastard.

“You must have encountered rudeness before, in a small way,” Frederick said quietly, empathy for her pouring through him. He would not point out the intended insult at her reaching November before she’d found a match. “The first time you entered Society, for example.”

“I was judged then, to be sure, even with the eventual ‘honor’ of the title of flourishing rose. And, well, my first Season was later than most ladies’,” said Edie, just a hint of pain in her voice.

“Truly?”

He had not thought to ask her age before, though she did not seem too young. He did not imagine he would have found a lady fresh from peeking behind her governess’s skirts so captivating.

“My father kept me at home, at Woodhurst. We were out of the way of things there and I suppose… “ Edie bit her lip. Frederick tried not to look at her lips, and failed miserably. “Listen to how they talk about me—it! It!”

“It is not complimentary—”

“I am not an object to be merely looked at, passed about to gawp at, treated like a thing! First, they say I have gone too long without a match, then they question the value of the match I—” She cut herself short.

A cup of coffee rising unsteadily to her lips, Mrs. Teagan grimaced as her eyes darted across the room at those all around them still looking at her charge, but she did not get up to tell Edie to calm herself.

Frederick stared at the woman in front of him. Edie’s shoulders were shaking, actually shaking with the strength of feeling with which she had spoken.

Her voice had been clear, her intonation exact, and she’d spoken with such determination that she had accidently crumpled the pastry she had been holding into pieces.

He had very little experience with ladies.

Oh, not like that. He was hardly an innocent; even though his reputation had never really been intact and his title was, in some sense, perfunctory, there had always been a woman who would accept kisses and a swift tumbling. Frederick was not that inexperienced.

But he had no sisters, no mother since he had been three years of age. The women in his life were… well. Servants. His housekeeper, Mrs. Kinley, did for him very well, and Cook was a delight. The single housemaid at Pernrith House was polite and quiet and worked hard, and… and that was it.

There were his sisters-in-law, but he hardly knew Doris. Alice and Florence were polite, perhaps even kind, but neither engaged with him with any sense of warmth.

Precisely why a woman would not wish to be described as—what was it? Blossoming, and a flourishing rose, and all that—Frederick had no idea.

It was most confusing.

“You look muddled.”

Frederick started. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?” Edie shot back as she helped herself to another pastry.

“I don’t know how to describe it… look beyond my words into my true meaning, I suppose. Into the silences. Read my expression.”

There was a strange sort of knowing look on the woman’s face. “I just know you.”

Forced to shift again in his seat, but this time because there was a most inconvenient pressure in his breeches, Frederick tried again. “It’s not the most pleasant way to speak about someone, but you’re not just an object, Edie.”

“Really?” She arched an eyebrow. “What was your first opinion of me?”

Knowing it was a trap but not sure how to escape it, Frederick said simply, “That you were beautiful.”

Edie leaned back in her chair with a sigh of disappointment.

“I don’t see why that is so terrible!” he protested, shoulders tight. Why did it hurt so much to sadden her? “You are beautiful. It is hardly something I can avoid!”

“Yet I did not ask you what your first impression was of me, but your first opinion ,” Edie pointed out, eyebrow still arched. “Yes, many people’s first impression of me is my beauty, and I cannot, will not begrudge them that. It is natural to see the surface at first glance. But I never get a second glance.”

Frederick felt as though he was starting to see the shape of what she was trying to say. “You mean… that people do not get to know you.”

“My beauty has always held me back,” Edie said seriously.

He scoffed at first, an instinct he regretted the moment he saw her face. Taking a sip of coffee quickly to hide from the ferocity of her gaze, he found it was no less severe when he lifted his head.

“I am always discounted, always labeled as ‘beautiful’ and then never investigated further,” Edie said quietly. Her hands were around her own coffee cup, twisting it round and around. “I can think of no one who has ever bothered to… to get to know me. For myself. Is it any wonder I did not secure a match before Season’s end?”

Frederick stared, unable to help himself.

Dear God. It was perhaps unbelievable that someone like himself and someone like Miss Edith Stewart had so much in common—but they did.

“Yet here I am. With a title I did not earn, or even seek to receive.”

Here he was, hating that people discovered his parentage and could therefore look no closer at his personality, his character, his true feelings… and here Edie was, experiencing much the same thing.

True, it was her beauty and not ill-repute that held people back from knowing the real person underneath. But that was surely a mere detail.

All the isolation he had felt, she felt too. From a different cause, but the consequences were much the same.

No wonder she felt so strongly about this.

Frederick could not help but grin. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Patently, that had not been what Edie had been expecting him to say. Slightly caught off-balance, the flare of her nostrils softening, her eyes rapidly blinking, she said, “I… What do you mean?”

“Well, I am hardly everyone’s first choice of dinner guest,” he said lightly. “If you looked around, you’d notice half the place is staring—your chaperone included—and half the place is attempting not to.”

He watched as Edie’s head turned from one way to the other. There was suddenly a great deal of clearing of throats about the place. A couple hastily left. One person coughed awkwardly. Mrs. Teagan quickly stared down at her cup, perhaps unable to think of a way to encourage Edie to handle the scene any more gracefully.

When Edie turned back to face him, her cheeks were pink. “I see what you mean.”

“People do not bother to get to know us,” Frederick said in an undertone, far more feeling in his words than he had expected. “For differing reasons, yes—but it still happens. We both feel alone, ostracized by things out of our control, not our choice. And you… you rail against it. I think it’s been so long for me, I’ve quite forgotten that I should hate it.”

Edie’s flush did not disappear. “I had not considered it like that.”

“I… I have never met anyone like you,” Frederick admitted, his pulse skipping a beat. “Whom I could truly talk to.”

God, how had he not noticed how lonely he had been? How had he not seen how alone he had become, solitude encircling him like a cloak?

And now… now he had Edie.

He had to tell her. Had to reveal that somehow, something was happening deep within him making it impossible to consider this as just a farce. He did not want to force her to wed him, but if she could only…

“Edie,” he said, leaning forward. “Edie, I—”

“A letter for you, my lord.”

Frederick started. The serving man had inexplicably appeared by their table, and was holding—dear God, was that a letter?

“Goodness, I never knew the postal service was so efficient,” murmured Edie.

The serving man’s ears reddened. “It was sent to your residence, my lord, and your housekeeper recognized the seal and requested it be brought to you here.”

Frederick took the letter, completely bewildered. What on earth could be so urgent that Mrs. Kinley—

The moment he saw the seal, he knew why.

“Who is it from?” Edie asked curiously as the serving man from Don Saltero’s Chelsea Coffee House disappeared. “A friend?”

“Something like that,” Frederick said dryly.

The Lindow coat of arms was easy to make out, even through the smudging. So, George had sent him a letter. It was no surprise Mrs. Kinley had sent it on. This had never happened before.

“You don’t mind if I—”

“Go ahead,” said Edie, smiling as she leaned back. “I have my sugar cubes.”

Frederick ripped open the letter and cast his eye swiftly over it.

It was an apology. Of sorts.

Pernrith,

It was foolish of me to get into an argument at Cothrom’s. Bad form all round, you as well as me. I am sorry for it.

You don’t have to bother introducing me to Miss Stewart. I worked it out myself, and though I don’t know how you compromised her, I suppose the swift engagement was a good enough cover. Will you go through with it? You don’t have to tell me. Perhaps she will end the match soon enough, considering I haven’t heard of any witnesses stepping forth claiming to have caught the two of you alone.

If marriage does still interest you, however, my wife, Dodo, has a new acquaintance, a Miss Quintrell. I can introduce you. If you wish.

Or not. I don’t care much either way.

Lindow

Frederick could not help but chuckle ruefully as he folded the letter and placed it in his breast coat pocket.

Well, it was perhaps the nicest thing Lindow had ever said to him. Even then it was filled with ire, and irritation, and a clear wish not to write it in the first place.

Had Dodo, his wife, made him write it? Possibly.

The offer to introduce him to Miss Quintrell would, if Frederick had received it a month ago, been most intriguing. He wished to marry—he wanted a family. An introduction to a woman who might not mind his history would have been most welcome.

And now…

“Well?” Edie said promptly, curiosity finally overcoming her. “What did it say?”

Frederick smiled.

He was in too deep now. He couldn’t precisely tell how, but the idea of being introduced to another woman was complete anathema to him. He simply did not wish it.

The woman he wanted to know was seated right opposite him.

“It was a pleasant letter, then?” Edie prodded.

He snorted. Yes, there was no other woman for him. He certainly couldn’t tell her that, though, as there was no knowing what Edie Stewart might do. Run for the hills, probably. But until they had agreed on a time at which to end this sham of an engagement, he may as well enjoy the time they had.

“It is,” he said shortly. “And I believe we have spent sufficient time here to ensure our engagement is believed for another day. I have even sent to the engravers for samples for our wedding invitations, so we are fulfilling your father’s requirements.”

“Yes, we are,” she said quietly. “Aren’t we?”

Frederick nodded. “In which case… Well. I am sure you have other calls on your time. If… If you wish to leave… “

Don’t leave , he found himself willing her to say. Every moment with this woman was more and more precious.

Edie was smiling. “I’ll stay if you tell me what, precisely, is in that letter.”

“You are a very curious soul, aren’t you?” Frederick countered, tingling with the anticipation of the flirtation.

There had been no malice in his voice, and it was clear Edie did not take it as such. She smiled, eyelashes fluttering as she looked demurely at her coffee cup—but not for long.

“Yes, very,” she said openly with a light laugh. “I’ve never been able to stop myself from poking my nose where it’s not wanted. At least, not since… Well. You won’t want to hear about that.”

Frederick leaned forward, every inch of him wishing to be closer to her. To know her. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, it all began when our housekeeper decided… “