Page 71 of Bad Luck Bride

He tried to call on her, several times, but whenever he sent up his card with a footman, she refused to see him. He appeared at her door, unannounced, but she slammed it in his face. He tried letters. They went unanswered, even after he began paying a delivery boy to put them directly in her hand. He even tried a telegram. All to no avail.

When he read that she was attending a charity ball, he bought a voucher and attended it, too. But she refused to dance with him and didn’t even bother to invent an excuse. She just turned him down flat and ordered him to leave her alone.

He knew he could not comply with that order. He would not.

She’d said marrying him would be a mistake, but he didn’t see it that way at all. Marrying Kay felt absolutely right. He’d known that from the moment the proposal had come spilling out of his mouth. And his certainty didn’t stem from any of the logical, practical reasons he’d given her. Nor did it stem from any sense of guilt or pangs of conscience. She was right that he’d taken her decision to marry Rycroft out of her hands, but he didn’t regret it. Not a jot. He should, but he didn’t. He just had to convince her not to regret it, either. A dim possibility at present, but as he’d told her, he was not giving up. Not by a long chalk.

That kiss had proved that despite all the years that had passed, despite all the resentments and misunderstandings and pain, the passion between them was still there, hotter than ever, though it was not quite the same sort of passion it had been then.

What he felt now, he realized, went far beyond the wild, crazy attraction he’d felt for her in his youth. This was, he realized, a deeper feeling. It was the passion of knowing without a doubt that Kay was his woman, but also of being willing to shoulder the responsibilities that came with that knowledge. Kay was wrong to say he’d never grown up, because he had. He knew now that to protect and cherish and provide for Kay was his destiny, and that meant far more than merely providing an income to support her. It meant standing by her side until he was laid in the ground. In otherwords, he was in love with her. In fact, he’d never stopped loving her, and all his efforts to deny that fact had been futile.

She didn’t feel the same, but he could not let that deter him. This time, there would be no walking away. No believing the worst. No letting some man move in and take his place because he’d been foolish enough and naïve enough to leave her behind. Not this time.

Still, after a week of being cold-shouldered, Devlin knew more than determination and learning from past mistakes would be needed if he was going to win her over. The problem was that the scandalmongers were determined to shred her to ribbons in the meantime, and watching it happen was almost more than he could bear.

By the end of the first week, the news of Pam’s elopement with Rycroft had given way to stories about Kay, and those stories were nearly identical to the dreck she had predicted they would print. They regaled the public with her supposed lack of attractions as a girl, a take that baffled and infuriated Devlin as much now as it had fourteen years ago. They dredged up the elopement, of course, and her broken engagement to Giles. Some made her an object of pity, while others deemed her nothing more than a desperate, grasping spinster.

By the end of the second week, the gossip columns were mocking her for being unable to keep any man long enough to walk down the aisle.

As bad as it was, none of it seemed to change Kay’s mind about marrying him, however. And he didn’t know whether to be frustrated by that or glad of it. He didn’t want her to marry him merely to stop the merciless onslaught, but he did want it to stop, and he knew the only way to make it stop was to soften her stance, get pasther pride, and persuade her to change her mind. But what could he do? Keep writing letters, sending flowers, and inserting himself in her path? Or was there something else he could do that he had not yet tried?

He knew from painful experience that pushing Kay too hard was a recipe for disaster. He’d done that fourteen years ago, and it had ultimately cost him the only woman he’d ever loved. Now, he was doing all the things suitors were supposed to do, and that wasn’t working either.

What he needed, he realized, was a new plan of campaign, and allies to help him.

Allies. He considered the word.Allies.

Setting aside the latest edition ofTalk of the Town, he finished his breakfast, got dressed, and headed for the Mayfair Hotel.

14

In any crisis of life, there were always one or two things to be thankful for.

Etiquette required that Kay return the wedding gifts that had come in and inform the invited guests that the wedding had been canceled, but she was not required to explain why. Not that an explanation was needed anyway, not with her name splashed across every paper in town.

Kay didn’t read the articles. In a slew of fresh tears, her mother provided her with all the details every morning at breakfast, whether she wanted them or not. Josephine was a brick, of course, constantly asking how she could help, offering to keep her company, and inviting her along for any social occasion possible, insisting she was welcome. Kay, however, refused all these kind gestures, assuring Jo that she could be of the most help by carrying on with her season, especially since that meant Mama would have to chaperone her and wouldn’t be glued to Kay’s side, regaling her with recriminations and woeful prognostications of the dire future that awaited them. Jo, much to Kay’s relief, appreciated her point and kept Mama occupied as much as possible.

In the fortnight following the infamous elopement, Kay also discovered and rediscovered who her true friends were, and predictably, they were not the paragons of society she’d been bowing and scraping to all these years.

Idina wrote, inviting her for a sketching holiday to Ireland, an offer she found both amusing and touching. She knew Idina had never had any talent for drawing, nor any interest in it, but she appreciated the kindness behind the offer and told Idina so. She wanted, however, to remain in town for Josephine’s season, and declined the invitation. But she also expressed the hope that she and her old friend could see more of each other from now on, and to her happy surprise, Idina responded by inviting her and Jo to come for a visit after the start of the grouse, an invitation she happily accepted.

Some well-meaning and not so well-meaning acquaintances also came to call. Some were motivated by kindness, she knew, but others had more unsavory motives, and Kay soon wearied of all the sympathetic tut-tutting and thinly veiled curiosity about Wilson and Lady Pamela’s shocking elopement, and despite all the years of effort she’d put in trying to win over these people, she soon began asking the Savoy footmen bringing up their calling cards to say she was not at home. In doing so, she discovered that turning them away was not particularly difficult. Climbing back up the ton’s social ladder was probably a lost cause for her now. And, more important, she’d lost the impetus to try, for she found all this false sympathy irritating and the ghoulish curiosity distasteful.

There was, however, one person who called on Kay who knew instinctively what would do her the most good. One evening shortly after the news hit the papers, Delia arrived at her door with twobottles of the Mayfair’s best claret, a box of French chocolates, and a tray of éclairs. She enveloped Kay in a heartfelt hug, asked in an offhand way if she wanted to talk about it, and upon receiving a resounding no, proceeded to open the wine and regale her with humorous tales of life as the general manager of a hotel. And though drinking that much claret and eating that much confectionery in one sitting caused Kay to wake the following morning with rather a headache, her friend’s visit helped enormously to revive her spirits.

She did not speak with Devlin. Not that he didn’t try. He called, he wrote, he approached her at a ball and asked her to dance. He even sent a telegram, of all things, but she steadfastly ignored these attempts to gain her attention.

She was still angry at him for the high-handed kiss that had thrown her life into this mess. But she also knew that by not shoving him away and slapping his face, she might have given him cause to believe he had a gentlemanly way to make up for his most ungentlemanly actions. And she wasn’t about to let the scoundrel have such an easy way to ease his conscience.

After she pitched his ridiculous telegram in the trash, a week went by with no other word from him, and she hoped he’d given up. But two weeks to the day after she’d refused his proposal, the Savoy brought a delivery to her door, one that made Kay realize Devlin had not given up at all.

“Heavens, what’s all this?” Magdelene cried, causing both Kay and Josephine to look up from their afternoon tea.

“Delivery, my lady,” a male voice said from the corridor.

“What is it, Mama?” Kay asked. She leaned first one way, then the other, but from her seat at the table, there was no way to see past her mother into the corridor beyond.

“Something for Josephine, I think,” Magdelene turned to her youngest daughter, her face lighting up with delight. “It seems you have acquired a most ardent admirer, my dear.”

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