And Then He Kissed Her - Girl-Bachelor 01 (2007) by Laura Lee Guhrke

Author:Laura Lee Guhrke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Etiquette for Young Women, Fiction, Romance, Historical, General, Love Stories
ISBN: 9780061143601
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Virtue may be its own reward, but to my mind, that’s not much of an incentive.

Lord Marlowe

The Bachelor’s Guide, 1893

A s much as he hated to admit it, Harry knew that Emma was right. What he’d done at Au Chocolat would have hurt her reputation had anyone seen them. Despite his insistence to her that what he’d done had been harmless, he knew it wasn’t. A woman’s virtue could be so easily compromised. He didn’t care what people thought, but he was a man, and he was fully aware that for a woman, the consequences of what had happened could have been far more serious.

He knew he had to put things with Emma Dove back on the impersonal footing they’d had before. Instead of meeting with her, he used the excuse of other business obligations to avoid her. He sent her revisions to her by courier and communicated with her through Quinn.

Distance, however, did not prove the deterrent he’d hoped for. Time and again, he found his thoughts veering toward that afternoon at Au Chocolat, his imagination reliving that moment when he’d seen passion come alive in her face. He’d never seen anything like it before.

Until that moment, he’d never dreamt such a deep capacity for passion existed within the prim and proper Miss Dove. Now he knew the truth, but it did him little good. She was not the sort of woman to ever consider an illicit liaison, a fact he found so damned aggravating, his only choice was to redouble his efforts to stay away from her.

On a more positive note, his domestic life smoothed out a bit. Diana, it seemed, had finally accepted the fact that neither of the Dillmouth girls nor one of their Abernathy cousins was the special woman destined to capture his heart or get him to the altar. Their visit at an end, all four young ladies returned to Lord Dillmouth, much to Harry’s relief, and life within the Marlowe house hold returned to normal, at least in most respects.

Breakfast, however, remained the place to discuss the wonderful Mrs. Bartleby. Now that he had acquired her, Harry might have found this sort of conversation much more acceptable than he had when she wrote for Barringer, except that the women of his house hold were determined to learn that lady’s true identity. Having discovered that he had purchased the Social Gazette, and Mrs. Bartleby’s column along with it, they made every possible attempt to wheedle her real name and family background out of him.

Harry, however, was no fool. Though his sisters could be trusted with the secret, he had doubts about the other two women in his family. Despite her pretense of dignified restraint, Grandmama was a terrible gossip. As for his mother, heaven bless her, she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended upon it. Harry was determined to keep mum.

“How can you be so tiresome?” Louisa looked at him with disappointment. “She writes for you now, doesn’t she? I don’t see why you don’t just tell us who she is.

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