Page 29 of How To Woo A Wallflower

Chapter Fourteen

‘If you think I am going to leave you alone in the dark, you can think again, madam.’ Jasper did not care if this was the mews behind her house or that she was quite capable of looking after herself or that the Avondale carriage might return with her family at any moment. It would be a cold day in hell before he abandoned her to this back alley at night. ‘I am still seeing you to your garden and I will not be swayed from that. As you so forcefully pointed out two days ago, friends are there beside you no matter what.’ The stubborn minx couldn’t argue with her own logic. ‘I would take you all the way to the back door if I wasn’t scared Freddie might shoot me.’

He also couldn’t deny that he was in no hurry to be rid of her either. There had been something wonderful about riding in a nondescript hackney through the quiet back streets from Russell Square to Mayfair. Talking about nothing in particular and everything in general. Unchaperoned. Unjudged. Unwatched. Unburdened.

All most likely unwise in its impropriety but he hadn’t cared about that when he had insisted, nor did he care about it now. After the day he had had—the week, the month—being with Hattie right now was a balm to his battered soul. It also, bizarrely, felt like a new beginning although he had no clue of what beyond the next chapter of his life.

‘But what if somebody sees you?’ For a woman who claimed to care little for propriety, when it came to the crunch, the cracks in that bravado began to show.

For all her assertions to the contrary, she cared about her reputation because she understood that the loss of it would likely have catastrophic consequences for her future. Scandals were always worse for the woman as he and Cora had learned first-hand. The press had been relentless uncovering her past and smearing it over the gossip columns, until the whole ton had finally known how she had earned her living in the docks. Nobody cared to consider the motives for that act of desperation. Those truths about the cruel ways of their world were not something the aristocracy wished to learn. Not when it was always easier to look down their noses and cast judgement rather than develop a social conscience.

Jasper cared deeply about Hattie’s reputation too and wouldn’t intentionally harm it for any reason. Yet a selfish part of him was still wounded by her concerns of total ruination by association because clearly he wasn’t the sort of man she wanted to be trapped with. Which hurt a great deal when he was coming to think that Hattie was exactly the sort of woman he wouldn’t mind spending eternity with.

Where the blazes had that thought come from?

His heart raced while his mind quickly rationalised what had made him think such an outrageous thing, and then slowed when he could justify it all with the handy excuse of tonight. He hadn’t known how to help Izzy but Hattie had been his rock and he had clung to her, and so, by default, it stood to reason he was feeling particularly close to her right now. It had nothing to do with her arm feeling so wonderful in his that he never wanted her to let go. Or his ongoing and inappropriate attraction, which he was determined to conquer for her sake, although he felt that keenly tonight thanks to the intimacy of their current situation and the odd lift in his mood after the peculiar behaviour of the heavens earlier.

‘They won’t see me, Miss Nervous, because it is pitch black out here with plenty of shadows to hide in if need to do so arises, so you shall be spared the awful chore of being compromised and forced into marrying me.’ And why the blazes had he said that? And why had the comment sounded so petulant, all of a sudden, when he was in no position to be thinking of her in that way anyway?

Because his emotions were all over the place, obviously!

Hopefully?

Jasper was a wreck.

An exhausted, raw and vulnerable shell of his usual self. Who bizarrely felt lighter and more himself in this precise moment than he had since he had first discovered Cora had died. A ridiculous emotional contradiction which made absolutely no sense if he analysed it in any detail.

Therefore, he decided he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t judge himself so harshly, would instead ignore it all just for tonight and not overthink his feelings for Hattie at this precise moment as they were likely as transient and unreliable as his oddly buoyant mood was. All part and parcel of this unusual and exhausting day.

They circumnavigated a jagged pothole as they neared her back gate and her hand tightened around his elbow while their bodies brushed from shoulder to hip. To his shame, Jasper couldn’t pretend he didn’t enjoy that too despite his best efforts to ignore it. The unusual circumstances and friendship aside, there was nothing platonic about the way his nerve endings reacted nor the manner in which his eyes kept wandering her way and feasted when she wasn’t looking. If he wasn’t a walking scandal about to happen, if he had reconnected with her over a month ago when everything hadn’t gone to hell, Jasper was in no doubt he would have pursued the overwhelming attraction irrespective of her brother’s warnings.

He would have had to.

Because everything about Hattie drew him like a magnet, from her kind heart and clever brain to her pert bosom and delicious peach of a bottom. Enough, perhaps, that, if his circumstances had been different, he would have been tempted to seriously consider courting her in the official sense. Surrender his heart and plight his troth.

That had never happened to him before.

He had never met a woman who made him contemplate that sort of a future. One filled with familiarity and family, of companionable days and sultry nights.

Sultry nights!

So much for easing up on himself when such incendiary and inexcusable thoughts most definitely needed reining in when he had her so inappropriately to himself in such an opportunity-rich setting!

It wasn’t sensible to contemplate sultry nights in this deserted alleyway in his addled state, not even hypothetically, when she was too near, he didn’t want to leave her and his body was already responding.

‘I never asked—what do your family think you are doing tonight?’ A change of subject might get his mind back on the noble path and away from its out of control and ungentlemanly whirring. ‘When I could have sworn tonight was the night for Lord and Lady Brampton’s annual ball.’ A ball which was one of the cornerstones of the Season and which nobody who was anybody ever missed.

She instantly cringed. ‘Half an hour before they left, I told them I was in so much agony I couldn’t possibly go as I could barely stand.’ Between their side-by-side bodies he felt her hand pat her own thigh. ‘And because they all walk on eggshells wherever my dratted leg is concerned, nobody questioned the outrageous lie. I went to bed and pretended to be asleep, and as soon as they were gone, I crept out the back and hailed a hackney.’

She hung her head as if she had committed high treason. ‘I am appalled at myself for manipulating their concern for me to suit my own ends. I even avoided Jim and the infirmary today so that I could attend my mother’s latest dreadful Keep a Ragamuffin Warm in Winter knitting party where I sowed some subtle seeds to her and my sister-in-law Dorothea that my injury was bothering me. I didn’t want my meddling brother accusing me of making it up to avoid another awkward stint on the wallflower chairs or being cornered by Lord Boredom wishing I was somewhere else.’

Even the dark could not hide the bleakness in her eyes before she waved that away, and he felt guilty for abandoning her when she hadn’t abandoned him, irrespective of whether or not that was the best thing to do to protect her from the ton’s censure. ‘But at least I am now four dreary society functions and almost two weeks of hell down and only have another six months of purgatory to go.’

‘I wish I could save you from them.’ Not because he owed her at least that, because that was a given, but because he understood tonight was their last hurrah. Neither of them had referenced it but they both knew all her clandestine, charitable visits to his house and shopping trips could not continue and he had been rightly banned by Freddie from dominating her time and risking her reputation in public.

He was doing the right thing by putting her needs above his own, but Lord, he was going to miss her.

‘I do not need saving but...’ Then she grinned, a naughty, sinful, alluring grin which re-awoke his overwrought and suggestible frayed nerves—or more specifically one particular nerve ending—with a bang. ‘Should you happen to accidently on purpose burn the Duchess of Laindon’s Grosvenor Square town house to the ground tomorrow at around eight, it would be much appreciated. Especially as I’ve used the excuse of my dratted leg up now thanks to you.’

---