To Charm a Naughty Countess (Matchmaker Trilogy) by Theresa Romain

Author:Theresa Romain [Romain, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

For Michael, the fortnight following his encounter with Caroline was an agony of solitude. In the third week, he left London.

Out of sheer stubbornness, he waited until the beginning of August so that he would not be the first to depart the City. He would not have anyone say he turned tail and left before the end of the season, much good it had done him. He still had no wife and no money. In fact, he was even more impoverished than when he’d come to London, for he had given Caroline his secrets and his trust.

The journey back north, taken at the greatest speed Michael’s aged carriage could manage, nonetheless left him too much time to think. At first he was able to smother his worries with work, scrawling notes with a pencil stub whenever the light permitted. But dusk came early. Rather than light the lamps and look ahead to Lancashire, Michael sat in the dark of the rattling carriage and thought of London—and Caroline.

He thought he had forgotten the feeling of sanity slipping from his grasp, of his world tipping and falling, knocking him flat and breathless. But as soon as the panic had struck, it was like meeting a lifelong enemy, ever-known, ever-despised. Eleven years was not too long between such episodes.

And somehow, they were always tied to Caroline.

He grimaced as he stared out the window of his carriage at a sliding, cold rain that obscured the fallow fields outside. A rain that pitted the roads on which he drove, turning country passes into slippery troughs of mud.

For the second time in his life, he left London behind, but this time he would not forget it. He had seen the kindnesses and comforts threaded through the shallow chaos of the beau monde, and he saw the value of moving easily within that world.

Now that he had slept with Caro, he understood the soaring joy of physical passion. But he also understood the pain of complete vulnerability. Business before pleasure, Caroline had said. That was his way, and he would not be permitted any other. The realization, the rejection, had shaken his body to its very marrow. The panic of this prison he had built for himself—it had threatened to unmake him, even as she watched.

Though he little resembled the caricatures of the scandal rags, they weren’t entirely wrong. The everyday tasks that came easily to others—talking of the weather, dancing, laughing, flirting, lovemaking—were a struggle to him. Perhaps he really was mad, just as the ton said. Just as his own father had believed.

The carriage lurched heavily, knocking Michael’s head against the window. He wished it could jolt free his unpleasant thoughts. They seemed to be wearing a groove in his brain as deep as the ruts in the road.

The relief of homecoming was delayed for endless dull days in a carriage, long nights in coaching houses. The land seemed wilder, rougher, bleaker than he remembered. After the macadamized streets of London, the sodden, mucky roads were bone-jarringly rough under his carriage’s old, groaning springs.

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