Goddess of the Hunt (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #1)

Jeremy winced. Lucy sniffed loudly, and he took another slow sip of whiskey. She could not cry, he wanted to remind her. That was the rule—Henry’s single exercise in authority. He’d allowed the chit to run rough shod over them every autumn, tagging along on their hunting and fishing excursions, parroting their curses, even taking nips off their flasks—under one condition. Lucy was not to cry. In eight years, he had never seen her shed a single tear. He prayed she wasn’t about to start now. If there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was a crying woman.

He stole a glance at her. Damn it, her chin was quivering. “You’re not going to start weeping, are you?”

“No.” Her voice quivered, too.

Jeremy busied himself adding wood to the fire, stalling for time.

Curse Toby. This was all his fault. He’d always made such a pet of the girl. Every autumn, Lucy clung to Toby like a tick on a hound. He baited her hooks and taught her bawdy Latin conjugations. He brought her flowers and wove her crowns of ivy that went straight to her head. His Diana, Toby called her. Goddess of the hunt.

Goddess he may have dubbed her, but the worship was all on Lucy’s side. A young girl’s harmless infatuation—that was all it had seemed. Obviously, to Lucy it had seemed much more. And now the task of disabusing her of all those romantic notions had somehow fallen to Jeremy. Just his luck. But also fitting, he supposed. If he’d ever harbored a romantic notion, which was doubtful, he’d been disabused of it long ago.

He clapped the dust from his hands and reclined in his chair. In his most magnanimous tone, he began, “Now, Lucy, you must understand …”

“Don’t, Jemmy. Don’t you dare speak to me as if I were a child. I ought to have come out two seasons ago. If only Marianne weren’t perpetually confined. Perhaps I am not a genteel lady like Sophia Hathaway. But I’m not a girl any longer, either.”

She stretched a bare foot toward the fire and absently flexed her ankle. The sinuous grace of the motion caught Jeremy’s gaze. Caught it, and trapped it. He couldn’t look away. She circled her foot idly, her skin glowing golden in the firelight. His eyes swept upward, tracing the sweet curve of her calf to where it disappeared under her dressing gown.

Then Lucy shifted, crossing her legs. Red velvet fell like a theater curtain, abruptly ending the show. A swift blow of disappointment caught Jeremy in the chest. The sensation drifted downward, mellowing to the familiar ache of thwarted desire. God, this night was simply rife with surprises.

“I suppose you’re not,” he muttered, tearing his gaze away and giving himself a mental shake. “Very well, let us speak as adults. You can begin by dropping that childish nickname and addressing me in a proper fashion.”

“You mean by yourtitle? I don’t even remember your old one, let alone the new.” She looked up at the ceiling.

“You can’t possibly expect me to call you ‘my lord,’ Jemmy.”

Jeremy sighed, abandoning any effort to soothe. “Then let us be perfectly plain. Toby is going to marry Miss Hathaway.”

“But he can’t! It isn’t fair!”

He snorted. “Spoken like a girl, Lucy.”

She ignored him. “I’ve always known I would marry Sir Toby Aldridge, ever since the day we first met.”

“That’s absurd. The day you first met, you were twelve years old.”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven, then. And Toby shot at you.”

“He didn’t shoot at me. He shot at a partridge I startled. He didn’t know I was there, because—”

“Because you were following us after Henry forbade you,” Jeremy finished impatiently. “Yes, yes. I remember it clearly.”

Too clearly, he added in silence. He remembered everything about that day in painful detail. The glaring afternoon sun, the acrid odor of gunpowder. But he especially remembered the sounds. How could he forget? A frantic staccato of wingbeats, the crack of Toby’s gun, a piercing shriek. The dreadful silence as all four of them charged through knee-deep brambles, only to find Lucy sitting in a clearing, unharmed and unrepentant.

Ensuing years had proven that near miss to be the beginning of a pattern. Lucy Waltham was always flirting with disaster, and therefore Jeremy had always avoided Lucy. He didn’t want to be in the vicinity when disaster inevitably struck.

With a sniff, she reached out and took the glass of whiskey from his hand. Her fingertips grazed his wrist. So much for safe distances.

She rested her chin on one knee and stared morosely into the amber-brown liquid. “What does Sophia Hathaway have that I haven’t?”

“Besides impeccable breeding, accomplishment, and a dowry of twenty thousand pounds?” He extended his hand to retrieve his drink.

She downed a generous swallow of whiskey before relinquishing the glass. “She doesn’t love him.”

“More girlish fancies. This is marriage. Love is hardly required. They get on well enough, and their families will approve. She has wealth but no title; he is a baronet. It’s a fortuitous match for them both.”

“Fortuitous?”She narrowed her eyes. “Only you would speak of marriage as a prudent business arrangement.”

“It isn’t only me. It’s society. Love matches like your brother’s—they are the exception, not the rule. Ladies who insist on romance end up disappointed. You’d realize the truth of this, if only you—”