How To Rescue A Rake (Book Club Belles Society 3) by Jayne Fresina

you still had them.”
    “Do you not wonder, Mama, how long I would have kept those affections, even if I had married him? He was, after all, affianced to another woman less than a fortnight after I ended our engagement.”
    “He only did what a proud man must do to save face after being humiliated.”
    “But I think—”
    “A man as well settled as William needed a wife, Diana. It is the natural instinct in the male creature to seek out a worthy mate as quickly and efficiently as possible. If he is sensible and capable of affording a wife, he knows it is his duty.”
    With her mother’s voice slowly fading, Diana’s mind returned to Nathaniel’s dangerous, forbidden kiss. Most unwise. Not in the least sensible. Certainly not dutiful.
    Her gaze fixed on the kitchen window above her mother’s head, Diana observed the first tickle of rain against glass. The thick heat was at last breaking and the storm that had hovered for most of the afternoon was finally set free from the threatening clouds.
    She set her sewing on the table. “I’ll close the parlor window, Mama. I had it open to air out the room.” On a spring day, one of Diana’s greatest pleasures was opening windows to let in the sweet scent of blossoms. If she had her way, the windows would always be open. Her mother, however, preferred the chalky fragrance of potpourri and protested that an open window let in more flies and odors than it did fresh air. Especially when the dairy farmer, Mr. Gates, had just driven his herd to the meadow by taking a shortcut past their cottage and down the Bolt.
    “I should send you to our cousin Elizabeth, now she is settled near Bath, and see what she can make of you,” said Diana’s mother sharply. “A change of society—and one that is vastly improved—would do you good. Besides,” she said, sighing heavily, “there is nothing here for you now. Just those ridiculous novels. They do naught but inspire a head full of dreams.”
    Thank goodness for those books , thought Diana.
    She left the kitchen, entered the silent parlor, and walked to the open window. She hovered there for a while, reluctant to close it just yet, breathing in the outside air. Even speckled with damp it had a good fragrance, full of life and rejuvenation.
    Her thoughts wandered back again to the summer afternoon when William Shaw had stood in that parlor with her for the last time.
    * * *
    “Miss Makepiece…Diana?” After an engagement of two years William had still hesitated to call her by her first name. “I’m not certain I heard you correctly.”
    Tearing her gaze from the music sheets on the pianoforte, Diana had looked at him and repeated, “I’m sorry. I cannot marry you.” She’d been struggling desperately for a way to put it kindly, and in the end, simple felt best.
    The man standing before the cold, empty hearth straightened his shoulders, snapped the case of his fob watch shut, and looked at her with a slightly furrowed brow. “But…you are four-and-twenty, Miss Makepiece,” he had said with the ponderous solemnity she might expect from a doctor announcing she’d acquired a terminal disease. It was rather uncharitable—not to mention impolite—of him to point out her age, she thought. “Your looks will not last forever.”
    Diana wondered what her mother would have made of that lapse in his much-lauded manners.
    “What other prospects can you have?” he’d muttered, shaking his head. “You will be quite sunk without me.”
    Diana had replied civilly, “I know you will soon recover from this disappointment.” After all, it wasn’t as if she would bring any fortune to the marriage, and if he was only marrying her to gain some benefit from a connection to grand relatives in Oxfordshire—as she suspected, having witnessed some of his humiliating attempts at social climbing—he must be better off without her. “And you will find a wife to make you far happier than I ever would.”
    When William left the house for