Accidentally in Love by Claudia Dain

was an example worthy of emulation. To live free of all doubt and caution, to be able to say and do what one wished. If only Emeline had a marquis for a father, she would have turned out just the same. As things stood, she was at a severe disadvantage. It was most unfair. She did not know if she could bear it a moment longer.
    No, in fact, she could not.
    “Shall I guess at whether you are a disappointment to your father, Lord Raithby?” Emeline asked.
    Mrs. Culley gasped. Eleanor made a noise in her throat that had an amused flavor to it. Kit crossed his arms against his chest. Lord Raithby looked intrigued.
    That was something, wasn’t it?
    “You may,” Raithby said.
    “I should say,” Emeline said, casting her eye over Raithby’s form, and he truly was a remarkable looking man, though not quite a Greek god, “that you are a delight to everyone who knows you, your father, Lord Quinton, included.”
    Raithby grinned, his eyes shining like a cat’s. “Miss Harlow, shall we sit together for the performance? I do think they are about to begin.”
    “Lord Raithby, I would be . . . delighted,” she said, laying her hand upon his arm.
    She did not know what Eleanor or Mrs. Culley or Kit did in response to that. She kept her hand upon Raithby’s arm and her eyes upon Raithby’s face and let herself be led across the room to a seat, directly in front of the violinist and with a clear view of the pianist’s face.
    Let Kit swallow that down without choking. If he could.
     
     
    If Kit could have shaken her to pieces, shaken her until her hair fell from its too sophisticated upsweep, shaken her until her seams split, shaken her until her teeth rattled, he would have.
    Unfortunately, such things were frowned upon in polite company. If he had been in the midst of her brothers, in the fields of Wiltshire, far from the eyes of her parents or his, he could have accomplished it without interference. He could have done anything to her that needed to be done, anything at all that he wanted to do.
    Which was to shake some sense into her, some sense of decorum and caution and discretion. Only that. Nothing more than that.
    While he thought of all the things that he didn’t want to do to her, Lady Eleanor wandered off to another conversation, and his mother clutched his arm and held him fast. It seemed to him, suddenly, that his mother was always clutching at him. He resisted the urge to throw her hand back into her own keeping and looked down at her.
    “It is a fine thing you’ve done,” she said, “creating a connection between Lord Raithby and Emeline. It is up to her now, to see if she can hold his attention and win his regard.” Is that what he’d done? Is that what everyone wanted? “But you must now follow through on your introduction to Lady Eleanor,” she said. “Emeline has done you a good turn there. You must not let her efforts go for naught.”
    Is that what Emeline had done? Opened the door for him to pursue Eleanor Kirkland?
    It was most assuredly not. He knew that without thought, without deliberation, without logic. He simply knew that Emeline had not been throwing Eleanor Kirkland at his feet. Emeline might throw stones at him, but never another woman.
    “And now you are eager for me to marry?”
    “A woman as lovely as Lady Eleanor?” his mother said. “Of course I am, if you both suit.”
    “You believe that the daughter of a marquis is mine for the asking?” he said softly. The orchestra was about to begin, the large and well-appointed room in Melverley House dwarfing the occupants, and Emeline and Raithby were talking comfortably together. What could they have to talk about? And when had Raithby become so adept with women? “How can you think that Lady Eleanor would contemplate giving all this up to live in Wiltshire?”
    “She has to live somewhere, and why not in Wiltshire?” his mother said, smiling at some woman across the room as she spoke the words. “She can’t stay in her