Page 11 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

When he spoke at last, his voice had dropped a few more octaves, leaving her feeling very strange indeed. "All right, then. I have a proposal for you."

She turned to look at him, very startled. "I beg your pardon?"

He had the grace to look rueful. "Forgive me. I had forgotten that the English take that particular word rather more literally than I intended. Let me rephrase. I have a deal to offer you."

She studied him with the careful attention of a woman who had survived twenty-one years of London society largely by refusing to sign anything without reading it twice. "What kind of a deal?"

"Three days," he said, and there was something in his tone now that was both lighter and heavier than before, the voice of a man who had given this speech not nearly enough thought. "Give me three days of your time. Three days, and I will show you everything you have taken for granted. All the wonderful things love can actually be when it is not being delivered by such an inferior and passionless man."

She stiffened. "You cannot be serious."

"I have never been more serious in my life," he said, without apology. "Three days, Miss Bingley. And if at the end of them you are still entirely certain that the shelf is where you belong, I will most likely be too far away to ever bother you about the subject again."

She looked at him for a long moment. The garden was very quiet around them, and somewhere inside the house the orchestra had moved on to something brighter and more insistent than before. "And what," she said slowly, "do you get out of this arrangement? It sounds rather a great deal more inconvenient for you than for me."

He smiled. It was, she thought with no small degree of irritation, really a very good smile. "Your company," he said simply. "Which is, if this evening has been any indication, the most genuinely entertaining thing I have encountered since I arrived in England." He paused, and something in his expression shifted into candor, almost boyishness. "I confess I had rather higher expectations of the country. I had been told there would be a great deal of wit and culture and stimulating conversation, and instead I find myself surrounded by very beautiful architecture and very dull people, and I am beginning to suspect the problem is not with the places I have been visiting, but with the company I have been visiting them in."

"So you want me to provide you with entertainment," Caroline said flatly.

"I want," his words were pure honey as he spoke, "the pleasure of your company. There is a difference."

She regarded him with the sort of measured deliberation usually reserved for choosing a new gown or deciding whether a cousin’s infant was, in fact, as charming as its mother claimed. Behind her, the party continued in a cheerful swirl of music and laughter, all of which felt terribly far away after seven days spent crafting sensible explanations for why she would never see him again, why she ought not think of him, and why none of this should matter in the slightest. And yet here she stood, thinking of all of it, and finding the shelf to be a markedly less appealing prospect than it had seemed an hour earlier.

It was, quite frankly, vexing.

“You leave at the end of August?” she asked, in a tone that did not so much inquire as announce her expectation of the answer.

“The first of September,” he confirmed, calm and unapologetic. “I have been away from New York for two months of travel already, and there are obligations that will not wait much longer.”

“So this is not”—she chose her words with meticulousness, as any sensible woman would when negotiating terms—“a courtship.”

“No.” His voice was unwavering. “It is an arrangement. Between two people who might each be looking for something the other can offer. You wish for proof that the shelf is the correct destination. I wish for excellent company for the remainder of my stay in England.” His gaze sharpened, warm and assessing. “And if the proof turns out to be rather less definitive than you expect, than I dare say you should benefit the most from this.”

Something in Caroline’s chest shifted. It was not the grand, sweeping collapse of her good sense that she might have feared, but something far smaller, far quieter. A single knot loosening. A breath she had not realized she had been holding. Something that felt, quite annoyingly, quite impossibly, like hope.

Caroline Bingley did not want to die alone as a spinster. If nothing else, because she simply could not stand the idea of looking upon her mother’s smug face down in hell after her own timely demise.

“Normally,” Edward went on, and there was now a glint in his eye that she suspected she would eventually find either irresistibly charming or utterly insufferable, “I would only need one day—no, one hour to afflict a woman with desires. But I think you may require a little more convincing than most.”

“That,” she said, after a moment in which she could not summon a single appropriate word, “is the most outrageous thing anyone has said to me in my recent memory. And someone told me just the other day I was past my prime at twenty-one.”

“And yet,” he murmured, watching her as though the outcome of the entire evening rested upon her next breath, “you have not said no.”

She looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment, then at the garden, and then at the warm spill of light from the windows behind them. She had been sensible for as long as she could remember. And she could not, for the life of her, recall a single instance in which such sensibility had rewarded her. What was the point anymore? It was not possible for her life to become any more degrading.

“Very well, Mr. Reinhart,” she said, quite pleased to hear that her voice remained impeccably steady. “I accept your deal. Show me the wonders of love. And in exchange, you may enjoy the incomparable pleasure of my company for whatever remains of your time in England.”

He stared at her, and the expression that crossed his face was equal parts startled and delighted, like a man who had expected to win and was still unreasonably pleased to find the prize in his hands. It was an expression she would find infuriating on anyone else, but found to be natural on his own features.

She turned back toward the ballroom, composing her features into something suitably serene, and thought that she would give love exactly one more chance. Just one. And if the whole enterprise dissolved into disaster, as everything of this nature had done before, then at least she would be done with it forever, and the shelf would be waiting, and she would know with absolute and irrefutable certainty that she was making the right decision.

She found this thought considerably less comforting than she had expected. Which was, she supposed, rather the problem.

Caroline Bingley sighed. It was time for her to give one last chance at love.

Chapter 6

August 8th