Simply Unforgettable

His mother had warned him that it would snow before the day was out. So had his sisters. So had his grandfather.

So indeed had his own common sense.

But since he rarely listened to advice—especially when offered by his family—and rarely heeded the dictates of common sense, here he was in the midst of a snowfall to end snowfalls and looking forward with less than eager zeal to spending the night at some obscure country inn in the middle of nowhere. At least he hoped he would spend it at some inn rather than in a hovel or—worse yet—inside his carriage.

And he had been in a black mood even before this journey began!

He looked hard at his woman passenger after he had climbed inside the carriage with her, everything that needed tending to having been accomplished. She was huddled beneath one of the woolen lap robes, the muff he had rescued from the other carriage and tossed in a couple of minutes ago under there with her, and he could see that her feet were resting on one of the bricks. Huddled was perhaps the wrong word to describe her posture, though. She was straight-backed and rigid with hostility and determined dignity and injured virtue. She did not even turn her head to look at him.

Just like a dried-up prune, he thought. All he could see of her face around the brim of her hideous brown bonnet was the reddened tip of her nose. It was only surprising that it was not quivering with indignation—as if the predicament in which she found herself were his fault.

“Lucius Marshall at your service,” he said none too graciously.

He thought for a moment that she was not going to return the compliment, and he seriously considered knocking on the roof panel for the carriage to stop again so that he could join Peters up on the box. Better to be attacked by snow outside than frozen by an icicle inside.

“Frances Allard,” she said.

“It is to be hoped, Miss Allard,” he said, purely for the sake of making conversation, “that the landlord of the next inn we come to will have a full larder. I do believe I am going to be able to do justice to a beef pie and potatoes and vegetables and a tankard of ale, not to mention a good suet pudding and custard with which to finish off the meal. Make that several tankards of ale. How about you?”

“A cup of tea is all I crave,” she said.

He might have guessed it. But, good Lord—a cup of tea! And doubtless her knitting with which to occupy her hands between sips.

“What is your destination?” he asked.

“Bath,” she said. “And yours?”

“Hampshire,” he said. “I expected to spend a night on the road, but I had hoped it would be somewhat closer to my destination than this. No matter, though. I would not have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance or you mine if the unexpected had not happened.”

She turned her head then and looked steadily at him. It was quite obvious to him even before she spoke that she could recognize irony when she heard it.

“I believe, Mr. Marshall,” she said, “I could have lived quite happily without any of the three of those experiences.”

Tit for tat. Touché.

Now that he had more leisure to look at her, he was surprised to realize that she was a great deal younger than he had thought earlier. His impression when his carriage passed hers and again on the road outside had been of a thin, dark lady of middle years. But he had been mistaken. Now that she had stopped frowning and grimacing and squinting against the glare of the snow, he could see that she was only perhaps in her middle twenties. She was almost certainly younger than his own twenty-eight years.

She was a shrew, nevertheless.

And she was thin. Or perhaps she was only very slender—it was hard to tell through her shapeless winter cloak. But her wrists were narrow and her fingers long and slim—he had noticed them when she took the muff from his hand. Her face was narrow too, with high cheekbones, her complexion slightly olive-hued, apart from the red-tipped nose. Put together with her very dark eyes, lashes, and hair, her face invited the conclusion that she had some foreign blood flowing through her veins—Italian, perhaps, Mediterranean certainly. That fact would account for her temper. Beneath her bonnet he could see the beginnings of a severe center part with smooth bands of hair combed to either side and disappearing beneath the bonnet brim.

She looked like someone’s governess. Heaven help her poor pupil.

“I suppose,” he said, “you were warned not to travel today?”

“I was not,” she said. “I hoped for snow all over Christmas and was convinced it would come. By today I had stopped looking for it. So of course it came.”

She was not, it seemed, in the mood for further conversation. She turned her face firmly to the front again, leaving him no more than the tip of her nose to admire, and he felt no obligation—or inclination—to continue talking himself.

At least if all this had had to happen fate might have provided him with a blond, blue-eyed, dimpled, wilting damsel in distress! Life sometimes seemed quite unfair. It had been seeming that way a great deal lately.

He turned his attention back to the cause of the black mood that had hung over him like a dark cloud all over Christmas.

His grandfather was dying. Oh, he was not exactly at his last gasp or even languishing on his deathbed, and he had made light of the verdict his army of London physicians had passed on him when he had gone to consult them in early December. But the fact of the matter was that they had told him his heart was fast failing, that there was nothing any of them could do to heal it.

“It is old and ready to be turned in for a new one,” his grandfather had said with a gruff laugh after the news had been forced out of him and his daughter-in-law and granddaughters were sniffling and looking tragic and Lucius was standing deliberately in the shadows of the drawing room, frowning ferociously lest he show an emotion that would have embarrassed himself and everyone else in the room. “Like the rest of me.”

No one had been amused except the old man himself.

“What the old sawbones meant,” he had added irreverently, “was that I had better get my affairs in order and prepare to meet my maker any day now.”

Lucius had not had a great deal to do with his grandfather or the rest of his family during the past ten years, having been too busy living the life of an idle man about town. He even rented rooms on St. James’s Street in London rather than live at Marshall House, the family home on

Cavendish Square

, where his mother and sisters usually took up residence during the London Season.

But the shocking news had made him realize how much he actually loved his grandfather—the Earl of Edgecombe of Barclay Court in Somersetshire. And with the realization had come the knowledge that he loved all this family, but that it had taken something like this to make him aware of how he had neglected them.

Even his guilt and grief would have been quite sufficient to cast a deep gloom over his Christmas. But there had been more than that.

He just happened to be the earl’s heir. He was Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair.

Not that that in itself was a gloomy fact. He would not have been quite normal if he had hated the thought of inheriting Barclay, where he had grown up, and Cleve Abbey in Hampshire, where he now lived—when he was not in London or somewhere else with his friends—and the other properties and the vast fortune that went with them, even though they must come at the expense of his grandfather’s life. And he did not mind the political obligations that a seat in the House of Lords would place upon his shoulders when the time came. After all, ever since the death of his father years ago he had known that if life followed its natural course he would one day inherit, and he had educated and prepared himself. Besides, even an idle life of pleasure could pall after a time. Being actually engaged in politics would give his life a more positive, active direction.

No, what he really minded was that, in the opinion of his mother, his married sister and possibly her husband too—though one could never be quite sure with Tait—his three unmarried sisters, and his grandfather, a man who was soon to become an earl also needed even sooner to become a married man. In other words, an earl needed a countess.

Lucius needed a bride.

It had been as plain as the noses on all their faces, it seemed, except his. Though even that was questionable. He knew all about duty even if he had spent a large part of his life ignoring and even running from it. But up until now he had been free to do as he pleased. No one had even objected too loudly to his way of life. Normal young men were expected to sow wild oats, provided they did not descend too deeply into vice, and he had done what was expected of him.

But now everything was to change. And if one was to be philosophical about it, one would have to admit that duty caught up with most young men sooner or later—it was the nature of life. It had caught up with him now.

His relatives had all separately expostulated on the theme throughout the holiday whenever one, or sometimes two, of them could maneuver him into what they were all pleased to describe as a comfortable coze.

He had enjoyed more comfortable cozes over Christmas than ever in his life before—or in his life to come, he sincerely hoped.

The consensus was, of course, that he needed a bride without delay.

A perfect bride, if there were such a paragon available—and apparently there was.

Portia Hunt was far and away the most favored candidate, since it was next to impossible to find any imperfection in her.

She had remained single to the advanced age of twenty-three, his mother explained, because she fully expected to be his viscountess one day—and his countess eventually, of course. And the mother of a future earl.

She would make him an admirable wife, Margaret, Lady Tait, Lucius’s older sister, assured him, because she was mature and steady and had all the accomplishments a future countess would need.

She was still a diamond of the first water, Caroline and Emily, his younger sisters, pointed out—quite correctly, as it happened, even if they did choose to express themselves in clichés. There was no one more beautiful, more elegant, more refined, more accomplished, than Portia.

Miss Portia Hunt was the daughter of Baron and Lady Balderston and the granddaughter of the Marquess of Godsworthy, his grandfather reminded him—Godsworthy was one of his oldest and closest friends. It would be an eligible and highly desirable alliance—not that he was trying to put undue pressure on his grandson.

“Your choice of bride must be yours alone, Lucius,” he had said. “But if there is no one else you fancy, you might seriously consider Miss Hunt. It would do my heart good to see you wed to her before I die.”

No undue pressure, indeed!

Only Amy, his youngest sister, had spoken up with a dissenting voice, though only on the question of the candidate for perfect bride, not on the necessity of his finding such a creature somewhere within the next few months.

“Don’t do it, Luce,” she had said when they were out riding alone together one day. “Miss Hunt is so very tedious. She advised Mama just last summer not to bring me out this year even though I will be eighteen in June, just because Emily’s broken arm prevented her from coming out last year and so her turn was delayed. Miss Hunt might have spoken up for me since she intends to marry you and become my sister-in-law, but she did not, and then she smiled that very patronizing smile of hers and assured me that I would be glad next year when the focus of family attention will be on me alone.”

The trouble was that he had known Portia forever—her family had frequently come to stay at

Barclay Court

, and sometimes, when his grandparents had gone to visit the Marquess of Godsworthy, they had taken Lucius with them, and as like as not the Balderstons would be there too with their daughter. The desire of both families that they would eventually make a match of it had always been quite evident. And while he had never actively encouraged Portia after her come-out to sacrifice all other offers in favor of waiting for him to come to the point, he had never actively discouraged her, either. Since he was not of a romantical turn of mind and had always known that he was going to have to marry one day, he had assumed that probably he would end up married to her. But knowing that as a vague sort of future probability was altogether different from being confronted now with the expectation that it was actually to happen—and soon.

Indeed, a vague sort of panic had assailed him at frequent intervals all over the holiday. It happened particularly when he tried to picture himself in bed with Portia. Good Lord! She would doubtless expect him to watch his manners.

And yet another small fact that had darkened his mood even further was that he had distinctly heard himself promise his grandfather—it had happened when they were sitting together in the library on Christmas evening after everyone else had retired for the night, and a few glasses from the wassail bowl had mellowed his senses and made him really quite maudlin—that he would look seriously about him this coming spring during the Season and choose a bride and marry her before the summer was out.

He had not exactly promised to marry Portia Hunt, but her name had inevitably come up.

“Miss Hunt will be happy to see you in town this year,” his grandfather had said—which was a strange thing really as Lucius was always in town. But what the old man had meant, of course, was that Portia would be happy to see him dancing attendance on her at all the balls and routs and other faradiddle of social events that he normally avoided as he would the plague.

He was a doomed man. There was no point in even trying to deny it. His days as a free—as a carefree—man about town were numbered. Ever since just before Christmas he had felt the noose tightening ever more firmly about his neck.

“That coachman of yours deserves to be led in front of a firing squad,” Miss Frances Allard, that charmingly gentle lady, said suddenly and sharply, and at the same moment her hand clamped like a vise about Lucius’s sleeve. “He is going too fast again.”

The carriage was indeed slithering and sliding as it plowed its way through the heavy snow. Peters, Lucius thought, was probably enjoying himself more than he had in many a long day.

“I daresay you would say that,” he said, “since you have your own coachman trained to proceed at about half the walking speed of a gouty octogenarian. But what have we here?”

He peered out through the window and saw that the slithering had been occasioned by the fact that the carriage was being drawn to a halt. They had arrived at what appeared to be an inn, though it was a decidedly poor specimen of its type if this first glimpse of it was anything to judge by. It looked more as if it might be a community center for the drinkers of the village that must be close by than a stopping place for respectable travelers, but, as the old adage went, beggars could not be choosers.

The inn also looked somewhat deserted. No one had cleared any snow away from the door. The stables to the back of the building were shut up. No light flickered behind any of the windows. No reassuring plume of smoke was billowing from the chimney.

It was something of a relief, then, when the door opened a crack after Peters had yelled something unintelligible, and a head complete with unshaven jaws and chin and a voluminous nightcap—in the middle of the afternoon—peered out and bellowed something back.

“Time to wade into the fray, I believe,” Lucius muttered, opening the door and jumping out into the knee-deep snow. “What is the problem, fellow?”

He interrupted Peters, who was in the process of informing the man of his startling and quite uncomplimentary pedigree from his perch on the box of the carriage.

“Parker and his missus has gone away and not come back yet,” the man shouted. “You can’t stop here.”

Peters began to give his unbidden opinion on the absent Parkers and on unshaven, bad-mannered yokels, but Lucius held up a staying hand.

“Tell me that there is another inn within five hundred yards of this one,” he said.

“Well, there ain’t, but that ain’t my problem,” the man said, making as if to shut the door again.

“Then I am afraid,” Lucius said, “that you have guests for the night, my fine fellow. I suggest that you get dressed and pull your boots on unless you prefer to do some work as you are. There is baggage to carry inside and horses to attend with more on the way. Look lively now.”

He turned back to hand down Miss Allard.

“It is a relief at least,” she said, “to see your ill humor turned upon someone else.”

“Do not try me, ma’am,” he warned. “And you had better set your arm about my shoulders. I’ll carry you inside since you did not have sense enough this morning to don proper boots.”

She favored him with one of her shrewish glares, and it seemed to him that this time the reddened tip of her nose did indeed quiver.

“Thank you, Mr. Marshall,” she said, “but I shall walk inside on my own two feet.”

“Suit yourself,” he told her with a shrug and had the great satisfaction of watching her jump down from the carriage without waiting for the steps to be set down and sinking almost to her knees in snow.

It was very hard, he observed with pursed lips, to stalk with dignity from a carriage to a building several yards distant through a foot or more of snow, though she did attempt it. She ended up having to wade, though, and flail her arms in order to avoid falling after one inelegant skid just before she reached the door, which the nightcapped occupant of the inn had left open.

Lucius grinned with grim amusement at her back.

“We picked up a right one there, guv,” Peters commented.

“You will keep a civil tongue in your head when referring to any lady in my hearing,” Lucius said, bending a stern gaze on him.

“Right you are, guv.” Peters jumped down into the snow, looking quite uncowed by the reproof.

“It looks as if I may indeed have my ale,” Mr. Marshall said. “And it looks as if you may have your tea if we can get a fire going and if there is tea hidden away somewhere in the kitchen. But I despair of my beef pie—and my suet pudding.”

They were standing in the middle of a shabby, cheerless taproom, which felt no warmer than the carriage, since there was no fire burning in the hearth. The servant who had opened the door to them and then not wanted to allow them inside despite the inclement weather came lumbering in with Frances’s portmanteau and deposited it on the floor just inside the door together with large clumps of snow.

“I don’t know what Parker and the missus will have to say when they hears about this,” he muttered darkly.

“Doubtless they will hail you as a hero for hauling in extra business and double your wages,” Mr. Marshall told him. “You have been left here all alone over the holiday?”

“I have,” the man said, “though they didn’t leave till the day after Boxing Day and they are supposed to be back tomorrow. They give me strict orders not to let no one in here while they was gone. I don’t know about no double wages, but I do know about missus’s tongue. You can’t stay here the night and that’s flat.”

“Your name?” Mr. Marshall asked.

“Wally.”

“Wally, sir,” Mr. Marshall said.

“Wally, sir,” the man repeated sullenly. “You can’t stay here, sir. The rooms ain’t ready and there ain’t no fires and there ain’t no cook here to cook no victuals.”

All that was painfully apparent to Frances, who was about as deeply sunk into misery as it was possible to be. Her only consolation—the only one—was that she was at least alive and had solid ground beneath her feet.

“I see that a fire is ready laid in the hearth here,” Mr. Marshall said. “You may light it while I go outside to bring in the rest of the baggage. Though first you will provide the lady with a shawl or blanket so that she may remain moderately warm until the fire catches. And then you will see about getting two rooms ready. As for food—”

“I will step into the kitchen myself to reconnoiter,” Frances said. “I do not need to be treated like a delicate burden. I am no such thing. When you have finished lighting the fire in here, Wally, you may come and help me find what I will need to produce some sort of meal that will satisfy five people, yourself included.”

Mr. Marshall looked at her with both eyebrows raised.

“You can cook?” he asked.

“I do need food and utensils and a stove if I am to succeed,” she told him. “But I have been known to boil a kettle without causing the water to turn lumpy.”

For the merest moment she thought that the gleam in his eyes might be amusement.

“That was beef pie in case you did not hear it the first time,” he said, “with plenty of onions and gravy—without lumps.”

“You may have to settle for a poached egg,” she said, “if there are any eggs.”

“At the moment,” he said, “that sounds like a worthy substitute.”

“There are eggs,” Wally said, his voice still sullen as he knelt to his task of lighting the fire in the taproom hearth. “They are supposed to be for me, but I don’t know what to do with them.”

“One would hope, then,” Mr. Marshall said, “that Miss Allard does know and is not merely indulging in idle boasting when she promises poached eggs.”

Frances did not bother to reply. She pushed open the door that she guessed led to the kitchen while he went back out into the snow to help his coachman unload the carriage.

The building was chilly and cheerless. The windows were small and let in very little light even though there was so much whiteness outside. Her feet inside her boots were wet and cold. The inn was not dirty, but neither was it sparkling clean. She dared not take off either her cloak or her bonnet lest she freeze. There was no one to see to her needs except for one slovenly, lazy serving man. There was no one to prepare a hot meal—or even a cold one for that matter. And she was alone here with one bad-tempered, ill-mannered gentleman and three crotchety menservants.

The situation was decidedly grim.

She was expected back at the school today. The girls would be returning for the new term the day after tomorrow. There was much work to do before then if she was to have her classes all ready for the following morning—she had deliberately not worked over Christmas. There was a pile of French essays by the senior class waiting to be marked and an even larger pile of stories—in English—from the junior girls.

This whole turn of events with its resulting delay was more than grim. It was a total disaster.

But as Frances first looked about the kitchen and then explored tentatively and then more boldly in drawers and cupboards and pantry, and finally went in search of Wally and ordered him into the kitchen to clean out the ashes in the large grate and build another fire and light it, she decided that practicality was the only sane way of dealing with the situation.

And perhaps looking back on this day from the safety of school once she finally got there, she would see it after all more in the light of an adventure than a disaster. She might even find something funny in the memories. It was hard to imagine such an outcome now, but she supposed this might well be considered an adventure of the first order.

Now if only she were stranded here with a handsome, smiling, charming knight in shining armor . . .

Though this man was certainly one of the three, she was forced to admit. Her first impression of him had been wrong in one detail. He was exceedingly large, but he did have a handsome face, even though he liked to ruin it by frowning and sneering and cocking one eyebrow.

He doubted she could poach an egg. He had spoken of beef pie as if it might be something she had never even heard of. Ha! How she would love to deal him his comeuppance. And she would too. She had amused her father and everyone else in his household by spending hours in the kitchen, watching their cook and helping her whenever she had been allowed to. It had always seemed to her a marvelously relaxing way of using her spare time.

She examined a loaf of bread that she found in the pantry and discovered that though it was not fresh enough to be eaten as it was, it would be appetizing enough if toasted. And there was a wedge of cheese that someone had had the forethought to cover, with the result that it looked perfectly edible. There was a slab of butter on another covered dish.

She sent Wally outside to the pump to fetch some water, filled the kettle, and set it to boil. It would take some time, she estimated, since the fire was only now crackling to life, but it would be worth waiting for. In the meanwhile, there was probably enough ale in the inn to slake the thirsts of four men. Indeed, it was her guess that Wally had consumed little else in the time since he had been left alone at the inn. Certainly there was no sign of any dishes having been used or any food handled. And he had probably done nothing else but stay warm in his bed, too lazy even to light a fire for comfort.

Mr. Marshall was in the taproom when Frances went back in there. A fire now burned in the hearth, making the room look altogether more cheerful, though nothing could save it from ugliness, and he was in the process of moving a table and chairs closer to the fire. He straightened up to look at her.

He had removed his greatcoat and hat since she last saw him, and she almost stood and gaped. That he was a large gentleman she had seen from the first. She had also thought of him as a heavyset gentleman. But she could see, now that he stood before her, clad in an expertly tailored coat of dark green superfine with fawn waistcoat and pantaloons and dry Hessian boots with white shirt and neatly tied cravat, that he was not heavyset at all but merely broad with muscles in all the right places. His powerful thighs suggested that he was a man who spent a great deal of time in the saddle. And his hair without the beaver hat looked thicker and curlier than she had imagined. It hugged his head in a short, neat style.

He was a veritable Corinthian, in fact.

Indeed he was nothing short of devastatingly gorgeous, Frances thought resentfully, remembering fleetingly all the amusement she felt every time she overheard the girls at school giggling and sighing soulfully over some young buck who had taken their fancy.

Yet here she stood, gawking.

Nasty gentlemen, she thought, deserved to be ugly.

She moved forward to set the tray down on the table.

“It is only teatime,” she said, “though I suppose you missed luncheon as I did. The kitchen fire will be hot enough for me to make a cooked meal for dinner, but in the meanwhile toast and cheese and some pickles will have to suffice. I have set some out on the kitchen table for the men too and have sent Wally running to the stables to fetch Thomas and your coachman.”

“If Wally is capable of running,” he said, rubbing his hands together and eyeing the tray hungrily, “I will eat my hat as well as the toast and cheese.”

Frances had dithered in the kitchen about whether to join Mr. Marshall in the taproom or stay there for her own tea. Her inclination was very much to stay in the kitchen, but her pride told her that if she did that she would be setting a precedent and putting herself firmly in the servant class. He would doubtless be content to treat her accordingly. She might be a schoolteacher, but she was no one’s servant—certainly not his.

And so here she was, alone in an inn taproom with Mr. Lucius Marshall, bad-tempered and arrogant and handsome and very male. It was enough to give any gently reared young lady the vapors.

She finally removed her cloak and bonnet and set them down on a wooden settle. She would have liked to comb her hair, but her portmanteau and reticule had disappeared from inside the door, she could see. She smoothed her hands over her hair instead and seated herself at the table that had been pulled forward.

“Ah, warmth,” she said, feeling the heat of the fire as she had not yet done in the kitchen, where the fireplace was much larger and slower to heat. “How positively delicious.”

He had seated himself opposite her and was regarding her with narrowed eyes.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You are Spanish? Italian? Greek?”

“English,” she said firmly. “But I did have an Italian mother. Unfortunately I never knew her. She died when I was a baby. But I daresay I do resemble her. My father always said I did.”

“Past tense?” he said.

“Yes.”

He was still looking at her. She found his gaze disconcerting, but she was certainly not going to show him that. She set some food on her plate and took a bite out of a slice of toast.

“The tea will be a while yet,” she said. “But I daresay you would prefer ale anyway. Perhaps you can find some in here without having to disturb poor Wally again. He has had a busy afternoon.”

“But if there is one thing he is good at and even enthusiastic over,” he said, “it is the liquor. He has already given me a guided tour of the shelves behind the counter over there.”

“Ah,” she said.

“And I have already sampled some of the offerings,” he added.

She did not deign to reply. She ate more toast.

“There are four rooms upstairs,” he said, “or five if one counts the large empty room, which I assume is the village Assembly Room. One of the smaller rooms apparently belongs to the absent Parker and his missus of the formidable tongue, and one is a mere box room with a single piece of furniture that may or may not be a bed. I did not sit or lie on it to find out. The other two rooms may be described in loose terms as guest chambers. I purloined sheets and other bedding from the large chest outside the landlady’s room and made up the two beds. I have put your things in the larger of the rooms. Later this evening, if Wally can keep awake so long, I will have him light the fire in there so that you may retire in some comfort.”

“You have made the beds?” It was Frances’s turn to raise her eyebrows. “That would have been something to behold.”

“You have a wicked tongue, Miss Allard,” he said. “I might have seen a mouse or two setting up house beneath your bed, but doubtless you will contrive to sleep the sleep of the just tonight anyway.”

And then suddenly, looking across the table at him, trying to think of some suitably tart rejoinder, she was assaulted, just as if someone had planted a fist into her stomach, with a strong dose of reality. Unless the absent landlord—and, more to the point, the landlady—arrived home within the next few hours, she was going to be sleeping here tonight quite unchaperoned in a room close to that of Mr. Lucius Marshall, who was horribly attractive even if he was also just plain horrible.

She lowered her head and got to her feet, pushing out her chair with the backs of her knees as she did so.

“I will go and see if the kettle is boiling yet,” she said.

“What, Miss Allard?” he said. “You are allowing me the final word?”

She was indeed.

As she hurried off into the kitchen, her cheeks felt suddenly hot enough to boil a kettle apiece.