Page 2 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

Caroline smiled back at him. It was not a friendly smile.

"How tremendously kind of you," she said, "to take such an interest in the management of my future. I confess I had not realized until this very moment what a remarkable gift for self-delusion you possess. Most men of your particular variety of mediocrity at least have the good manners to keep it hidden in polite company."

The smile vanished as though it had never been there.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I imagine you do," Caroline replied with impeccable sweetness. "But I am afraid I cannot give it. What I can offer is this. I would sooner reside in a ditch than accept any offer from a man whose most striking characteristic is his unwavering certainty that he is worth more than rubbish. Good evening, Lord Gillsberry. Do take care not to stumble over your own overinflated self-regard on your way back inside."

Caroline turned and walked briskly away with what little remained of her dignity.

She made it a full six steps before the composure she had stitched together with such admirable determination began, at last, to slip.

It was not the anger that posed the true difficulty. Anger was simple. Anger was simple and required very little tending. It was the quiet things beneath the anger, that caused trouble. The part of her that had heard the word substantial and had recognized it. That had heard it and understood, beneath all the fury, was hurt.

Caroline rounded the corner of the balcony at a pace that was now almost certainly faster than dignity would ever endorse.

She was not crying. She was absolutely not crying. Her eyes were watering because the night air was cold, and that was the beginning and end of the matter. She dared anyone to imply otherwise.

She did not see the man until she walked directly into him.

The collision was impressive in its force. Caroline, who was by some regards a very delicate and fragile creature struck something that felt remarkably like an wall and promptly lost her balance. She had just enough time to contemplate the mortifying inevitability of the ground rushing up to meet her before a pair of strong arms caught her by the waist and steadied her with an ease that was frankly insulting in its effortlessness.

"Careful," a voice said.

It was a decidedly appealing voice. Low, with a rough edge that vibrated somewhere near her sternum in a way she felt was entirely unreasonable. At the same time she became acutely aware of the large hands holding her waist, and of the fact that the man they belonged to was exceptionally tall and, from her current vantage point, appeared to be exceptionally everything else as well.

Caroline Bingley had encountered a great many handsome men in her life. She had assessed them with her usual cool demeanor and had found, as a rule, that mere handsomeness was not especially interesting to her.

This was not, it seemed, going to be one of those occasions.

"Forgive me," she managed, her voice surprisingly steady, which was rather impressive given the circumstances.

The man looked down at her, and his expression was not at all what she might have expected from someone nearly toppled by a woman careening around a corner. He did not look startled or affronted. He looked, instead, quietly amused.

His eyes were dark and keen, and they regarded her with a level of attention she found herself wholly unprepared to manage.

"A man of that particular ilk," he said, his tone warm with admiration, "is hardly deserving of your tears, my lady. Especially not after you dispatched him with such effortless grace.”

Which meant, of course, that he had just heard every single word of her latest humiliation ritual.

Caroline opened her mouth and discovered, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, that she had nothing whatsoever to say.

He lifted one gloved hand, moving with deliberate gentleness, and brushed away the stray tear from the corner of her eye.

The touch was feather light, almost nothing through the leather of his glove, yet it felt like something far more significant. Caroline felt her breath falter, felt her thoughts scatter in wild and unreasonable directions, and for one mortifying, bewildering moment she simply stared up at a man she had never met while the party murmured around them and the London night pressed close.

Then her mind, which was typically far more dependable, returned with a rush.

She was standing on a semi-private balcony in a highly improper position with a man whose name she did not even know, who had just borne witness to the single mortifying conversation of her recent memory, and she was allowing him to touch her face. She had clearly taken leave of her senses somewhere between Lord Gillsberry's wretched proposal and the cold night air, and she very much needed to reclaim them.

The heat that rose in her cheeks was, she insisted to herself, nothing more dramatic than the natural consequence of a thoroughly mortifying evening. It had nothing to do with the good looks of the man that was still holding on to her.

"I-" she began dumbly.

"Miss," the man interrupted, and his voice held a glimmer of something far too close to amusement, which was precisely what she could not endure at that particular moment.

Caroline stepped back. She did so with all the dignity available to a woman who had been discovered crying on a balcony and whose complexion had obligingly transformed into the shade of a particularly vivid peony. It was not an impressive amount of dignity. Even so, she gathered it about her like a cloak, lifted her chin, and bestowed upon him an expression she had spent years refining for maximum effect.