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Chapter 2

C HAPTER 2

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune;

to lose both looks like carelessness.

—Oscar Wilde

Cab Cox was also the sort of fellow who had never had to wait for anything—opportunity was always well-mannered enough to come calling at his immaculately polished front door.

Which was why Marigold was determined to never be amongst those hammering on his proverbial knocker. She resolutely avoided him—he was stationed like a lighthouse in a tailcoat, guarding the entrance to the bar—and instead slipped into the boathouse in Isabella's flamboyant wake, a sleek catboat in the tow of a far more eye-catching yacht.

Yet, even with such rectitude, Marigold was instantly mobbed. The ghastly rumor had already been put about that her parents had left her destitute, and everyone seemed to want to get a good last glance at the inimitable Marigold Manners. She pasted on her fashionable, crocodile smile—all bright teeth and cynical eyes—and put up her chin, steeling herself against that curious, demeaning pleasure people seemed to take in the misfortunes of others.

But she needn't have worried—this sliver of Boston society seemed singularly devoid of anything too much like pity. Perhaps it had been bred out of them. Condolences were murmured as an afterthought while her hand was solicited as a dance partner.

"Bad luck, that, old thing. Care for a spin?"

"Terrible news, but you do look divine."

"I say, Marigold, mourning becomes you."

And so she danced, handed off from one sporty, turkey-trotting gentleman to another, until a firm voice asserted itself. "You look run off your feet by those mashers." Cab Cox managed to find the soft skin on the inside of her glove-clad elbow to lead her outside under the awning-covered porch.

"Cab. What a surprise," she lied as he led her toward a wicker armchair. "It's been an age. What have you been doing with yourself?" she queried, all careless, surface civility.

"What's expected of me, naturally." His smile was so subtly derisive, she might have imagined it.

The truth was, she had assumed he would quite naturally do what was expected—gladly take over his father's law firm, marry a beautiful, well-bred debutante from an equally well-bred family, settle into the family estate on the south shore, and raise a nonvulgar number of beautifully towheaded children, who would eventually follow in their parents' expensively shod footsteps.

Everything she herself wished to avoid.

"I'd ask what you've been doing with yourself," he continued, "but the gossips are full of it—my condolences on the loss of your parents. It's never easy, is it, no matter how estranged you were."

Marigold felt her smile slip at the earnest, almost angry sympathy in his tone. She might have expected consideration—Cab was raised to be a gentleman—but not such fellow feeling. "Cab, how did you know? But I forgot that your father passed away recently. My condolences to you too."

"Thank you." He signaled a waiter to bring them a bottle of champagne. "Let's drink to the graceful art of surviving."

She impulsively reached for his hand. "That sentiment is too much like truth to be easy banter. I had no idea."

"That's the trick of it, isn't it?" he allowed. "The never letting on."

"Cab. I'm so sorry."

"As am I." He gave her hand a sympathetic squeeze, but he withdrew quickly enough to deflect any further foray into emotions better left unsaid by pouring the champagne into two wide-mouthed crystal coupes. "To better days."

"Better days," Marigold murmured before she let the cool bubbles dazzle her tongue. "Ooh. That tastes divine." Another luxury she would have to give up. But not just yet. Tonight, the champagne was exactly what she needed—forgetfulness in a glass.

"Here's to dear old Boston." She raised her coupe. "Home of the bean and the cod—"

"Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God," Cab finished with a dry laugh. "Such is our world."

"I wish it weren't our world, so strict and narrow. So narrow-minded." She poured another. "I want my world to be … larger somehow. More expansive."

Cab's laugh held just enough scorn to please her. "Don't we all."

"No!" she disagreed, before she waved her glass at the rest of the party. "They're all quite content to be ‘cold roast' Bostonians, resting comfortably upon generations of good breeding and bushels of old money. None of them want it to be any different."

"But you do." He leaned forward as if he might say something more before he seemed to change his mind. "Then a different New England toast." He held up his glass. "To a willing foe and sea room," he toasted.

"Yes!" Such astonishing fellow feeling. She covered her awkwardly reawakened attraction with another toast. "And to luck," she added, "which I'm going to need as much as sea room."

"Ah, yes—I had forgotten your plans for Kefalonia."

Trust Cab to get the details right. Even if they were now wrong. "Not this summer, I'm afraid," was all she allowed before she stilled her bitter tongue with champagne.

"I say." Cab grew serious, his frown marring the perfection of his broad brow. "Is it true, then? Isabella's been putting it about that you're going to have to throw yourself on the mercy of relatives."

Marigold's cheeks heated. "I'll have to speak to Isabella—it isn't like her to be so indiscreet." She tried to muster what she could of her usual panache. "I'll think of something."

"Of course you will—you're the accomplished, incomparable Miss Manners. I should expect nothing less."

His pronouncement prompted a giddy mixture of pleasure and gratitude. While she had always believed in herself, she had never dreamed anyone else might share her outsized confidence—it had seemed too much to ask of her parents and certainly far too much to ask of a man as perfect as Cab Cox.

"Cab, you needn't try to be so transparently kind—it smacks of pity."

"Nothing to pity, Marigold. Plenty to admire. But you don't like being admired."

"Nonsense," she countered. "Everyone likes to be admired, and I am no different."

"But you want to be admired for being an accomplished academic and a rational New Woman."

"Just so." An accomplished, thirsty New Woman, who couldn't think of what to say to such an astonishingly understanding man until after she had finished her drink. "Don't you think the world would run a great deal smoother," she mused as she refilled her glass, "if one could pick one's family in a rational manner?"

"Naturally," he agreed. "Isn't that what a marriage is—choosing one's intimate family?"

"And that is what is wrong with marriage," she said airily, because she was the incomparable Miss Manners and a New Woman even if she were a wee bit tipsy. "It's all the fashion to allow the heart to make that choice instead of the head."

"And we must be thoroughly logical," he agreed. "But is it true, what Isabella said? That you require assistance from sympathetic relatives?"

Marigold took another ruminative sip before she sputtered to a stop. "Oh heavens, Cab! I hope you don't think that because the Coxes and Manners are distantly connected through some long-dead, grim Pilgrim ancestor, I was angling for you to take me in!"

"And why not?" Cab leaned forward as if he wanted to make sure she could hear him—or make sure that no one else heard. "Mother adores you—as anybody with an ounce of sense would. She would love nothing more than to have you with her at the house in Cohasset."

The mention of mothers put a damper on whatever strange hopes might have stirred within Marigold at the first part of his declaration. "Thank you, you're very kind to offer, but no." She made sure her voice was calm but firm. "While the Oaks is lovely and your mother an absolute lamb, I'd have absolutely nothing to do. Nothing to think. Nothing to feel."

Nothing to accomplish .

"You must understand how it is—I need a change from—" She shrugged and waved her champagne coupe at the whole of Boston twinkling in the gaslit night across the Charles. "From all this."

All this being everything she had lost—her past as well as her future.

"I suppose I do understand." Cab took a deep breath and sat back. "Feel that way often enough myself."

"Do you really?" Had she misjudged him? It really was unfortunate that he was so handsome, for he was otherwise a sensible, unobjectionable, right-thinking young man. And he did dance divinely. "Take a turn with me, will you, Cab, for old times' sake?"

"Love to."

She took the hand he offered, and they glided into a lively two-step that was just the thing to banish her incipient blues. But when the orchestra changed tempo and added another note to the rhythm, Marigold found herself being twirled into the slower three count of a waltz.

And urged subtly closer to his chest.

Cab danced as well as he did everything—with unhesitating skill—and it was everything Marigold could do not to let the champagne go to her head and say stupid, sentimental things. Not to let her head rest upon his broad, exquisitely tailored lapels and give in to the impulse of the moment.

But she was, as he had just reminded her, the accomplished, incomparable Miss Manners, and it wouldn't do to rest her head against anyone's chest, even one so nice as Cab's. Because if she let herself rely on him once, what was to keep her from relying upon him again and again, falling back into the clubby, closed society to which she'd been born? Setting aside all her ambitions and accomplishments for suffocating social ease?

No. No matter how relying on Cab would solve most of her more pressing problems—especially her more pressing bills—she could hardly set up housekeeping with the unforgivably handsome man. Even with the presence of his doting mama as a chaperone, the matchmaking mothers of Mayflower-obsessed society would tar and feather what remained of her good name in great Bostonian style—with cold, calculated innuendo.

No. "I want something different."

"Be careful what you wish for, Marigold." Cab's voice rumbled down to her. "It's a strange, illogical world out there."

"Well, it's strange and illogical here as well," she said before her cheek seemed to rest of its own accord against the sleek lapel of his tailcoat. "And I can't stand the idea of leaving my fate in someone else's hands."

"So you'll take it in your own? I don't believe in predestiny any more than you do—we make our own fate by our choices. But—"

"But you're a man," she objected. "And just by dint of your sex, you get so, so many more choices. It just isn't fair."

"No," he finally answered. "That isn't fair. But such—"

Marigold sighed and finished for him. "—is our world."

But not hers for much longer.

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