A Country Flirtation Read online

  A Country

  Flirtation

  Valerie King

  ***

  A COUNTRY FLIRTATION

  By Valerie King

  Kensington Publishing Corp. edition 1998

  Copyright © 1998, 2013 by Valerie King

  All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in whole or in part, scanned, photocopied, recorded, distributed in any printed or electronic form, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Formatting and cover by Bella Media Management.

  First Edition eBook

  Published at Smashwords.

  ***

  Dear Reader,

  A COUNTRY FLIRTATION was first released in 1998 and what very few people know is that this book was a turning-point for me as a writer. I remember consciously working hard to make this story exactly what I wanted it to be, more so than any book before. All these years later, while lightly editing the manuscript, I was absolutely smiling throughout the narrative. I’d forgotten the humor I’d included, or how the heroine falls so hard for Ramsdell right from the outset and how he complements her so perfectly.

  A COUNTRY FLIRATION, therefore, was a joy to write way back when and a pleasure for me to read fifteen years later!

  The story puts us smack in the middle of a family of five sisters and Constance Pamberley, our heroine, is the eldest. She’s twenty-nine, she’s been caring for her very sick mother as well as her sisters for many years, and her heart belongs to her home, Lady Brook Cottage. But Viscount Ramsdell’s sudden arrival, as he crashes his curricle onto her property, threatens to change the predictable and dedicated order of her daily routine.

  As many of you know, I write and have been published in several genres, including Regency Romance, Contemporary Romance, Paranormal Romance, and Western Historical Romance, though the pseudonyms vary at times.

  When I first started thinking about releasing my backlist, I knew I wanted to add a few touches here and there to each story, nothing major, but sufficient to modernize the style for a new readership.

  I hope you enjoy this lightly revised and edited version of A COUNTRY FLIRTATION and the Regency world that I came to know and love so many years ago!

  Enjoy!

  To learn more about Valerie King and to sign up for her newsletter go to http://www.valerieking-romance.com/

  COMING SOON: GARDEN OF DREAMS releases in the fall of 2013. You’ll find an excerpt at the end of this book!

  ***

  Chapter One

  The sound of splintering wood and screaming horses penetrated the serenity of Constance Pamberley’s sleep one early July morning. She opened her eyes, uncertain, precisely, of what had awakened her. She listened, but heard nothing untoward.

  Perhaps she had imagined the sounds. She hoped so, for if she was not greatly mistaken, the same sounds had attended the numerous coaching accidents that had beset Lady Brook Cottage for the past several years.

  She lay in the bed of her childhood, content, at ease with the world, and, as always, letting the excitement of the day build within her before settling her bare feet on the cold wood of her bedchamber floor. She extended her arms over her head and indulged in a catlike stretch.

  Somehow, amid the difficulties of her existence—which were numerous—she had learned to take great pleasure in each day, knowing that the sun wouldn’t set without presenting at least one surprise to enliven even the dullest of homey chores. For Constance, life was an adventure to be lived out in the unexpected twists and turns of fate, of things spiritual, things temporal, of things known and things unlooked for. Of course, what made every manner of ill endurable was that she was the present owner of Lady Brook Cottage and would be until the day she died. Of additional succor was the fact that no genteel country house within a twenty-mile radius of Lady Brook could boast so fine a cook as the old brick mansion possessed.

  She smiled thinking that perhaps without Cook, life wouldn’t be such a fine adventure, that perhaps a delectable apricot tartlet or a flaky pigeon pie was the true source of every present happiness.

  She chuckled to herself. Such were the ridiculous notions that made her life bountiful.

  If she had any wish at all, however, she found she occasionally longed for someone, for a man, with whom she could share her sense of the absurd. Such an alliance would leave her truly wanting for nothing.

  She was the eldest of five beautiful sisters who were woven into the fabric of a dozen surrounding neighborhoods as intricately as a medieval tapestry. The Pamberley ladies of Lady Brook Cottage were essential to their small part of Berkshire. There was not a lack in the countryside that the ladies failed to put right—posies for the infirmed widows who lived above the candle shop, pots of honey for an old sailor dying of consumption, delicate watercress to tempt the appetite of a waiflike girl in nearby Wraythorne, the only surviving child of the blacksmith, whose family had been decimated by scarlet fever two winters past.

  A distressed whinny caught her ear. Her bedchamber overlooked the front drive of the ancient house, and so it was when she heard the horse’s cry, she knew she had not imagined the crashing sounds that had awakened her.

  She threw back her bedcovers and slipped from her bed in order to determine which carriage and driver had come to mischief on her property. The bend in the road that led to the front drive of Lady Brook was very sharp, and if a traveler did not pay heed to the handmade wood sign which her gardener, Finch, had made only last fall to give warning to potential danger, an accident could easily ensue.

  She crossed her bedchamber and pushed back the somewhat threadbare draperies of a faded chintz that had hung in symmetrical diligence over her windows throughout her nine and twenty years. Drawing back the shutters, she saw at once that her darkest suspicions were correct. She shook her head in dismay but not surprise at the sight of the cut and limping horses struggling in harness, the low wooden fence torn from its nailed posts, and the still form of a man lying facedown at the exact point where her beautiful purple petunias met a neatly scythed lawn.

  She shook her head. “Not again,” she murmured.

  Over the past several months, five such accidents had disturbed the peace of Lady Brook, bringing an equal number of young gentlemen to the portals of the mansion. More than once she had wondered if the spirit of Lady Brook, resonating in every mellowed, rosy brick of the rambling house, had been for years beckoning, from all parts of the kingdom, beaus for her comely yet somewhat isolated sisters. Another absurdity? Perhaps. Probably. Undoubtedly.

  She heard the sounds of her sisters scurrying about in the hallway, calling to one another about the man lying prone among the petunias. She knew that the poor fellow would be quickly attended to by a number of capable feminine hands. Her own duty, therefore, was turned away from the gardens and toward the less noble occupations of sending for the head groom. Stively would know precisely how to tend to the injured horses, while his stable boy—a lad of fifteen by the name of Jack Smith—would be sent to fetch Dr. Deane from the next town of Four-Mile-Cross.

  However, she would not, under any circumstances, perform these tasks in her nightgown.

  She restored the shutters and quickly stripped off her nightclothes to don a patched linen shift, a serviceable gown of faded peach jonquil—which, during her London Season ten years e
arlier had been a very fetching walking dress—silk stockings tied up with embroidered garters, and half-boots of polished kid that bore a number of ugly scars but which had also been quite a la mode the year of her come-out ball. She quickly brushed out her long, light brown hair, tied it into a loose knot atop her head, surveyed and approved of her appearance, and went immediately to the kitchens, where she informed the butler of the accident.

  “What, again?” he queried, a pinch between his brows. He finished sipping his tea, clattered the cup on its saucer, and scratched at his balding pate. “I told Finch not to put up that fence. Better for the horses to crash through the shrubbery, I said, than a fence. I told him so again and again.”

  Constance smiled. “Yes, Morris, you gave him sage advice. But he was more interested in protecting my petunias, I’m ‘fraid, than in considering the fate of an overeager whipster who ignored his elaborate sign.”

  Morris, who had been with the family from the time her father, now deceased, was a boy, set aside his copy of The Times and prepared to take up his duties. He instructed one of his two underlings to come with him to attend to the stranger and informed the other to prepare a surgery for the doctor in the buttery. “And, Thomas, bring along the slats and canvas. We’ll be needing to cart him in here, I ‘spect.”

  Constance, satisfied that suitable arrangements were under way, left the house by way of the kitchen door. She skirted a wide, neat vegetable garden in which Cook was busily admonishing a hardworking kitchen maid to get every weed that might choke the roots of her prize broccoli plants, and hurried to the gate that led to the stables. She caught Stively and stable boy Jack just as they were leaving the carriage house to determine for themselves which horses of their neighbors had found themselves in mischief.

  “No, no. Nothing so simple,” she said. “I’m ‘fraid there’s been another accident.”

  “What, again?” Stively queried.

  Constance nodded. “I think once we get this unfortunate fellow tended to, if he’s not broken his neck, we ought to consider hiring Mr. Bellows to widen the curve and straighten out the lane a bit. If the truth be known, we should have done so years ago.”

  Stively’s countenance stiffened. His face grew alarmingly red. “You can do so if you wish, Miss Pamberley, but you’d as lief hire the schoolmaster or . . . or the beekeeper to do the job as well or as timely.” Stively had no patience with Mr. Bellows, who, in his opinion, had more hair than wit and was an obnoxious bagpipe. That Mr. Stively and Mr. Bellows were leading scorers on opposing cricket teams may have added to the head groom’s poor opinion of his adversary, but Constance was not inclined to make this observation. Mr. Stively would never be moved from his opinion of Mr. Bellows, and that was that.

  She let the subject drop and addressed the stable boy.

  “Jack,” she called to the young man, who had quickly stripped his cap from his head at her presence.

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Pray saddle Old Nobs and ride to Four-Mile-Cross—no, stay a moment. You had best take Lord-a-Mercy. He is quicker off the mark than Nobs, and the fact is, you’ll have to press him the entire way to Four-Mile-Cross. We’ll be needing the doctor as quick as the cat can lick her ear.”

  Jack’s face began to glow, and his eyes lit with the wonder of angels. “Lord-a-Mercy? Yes, Miss Pamberley. Oh, indeed, yes!”

  She adjured him, “Be careful—no cramming him at fences or the like. Stay to the lanes, and when you’ve come back, Morris will reimburse you for the tolls. Have you enough for the tolls?”

  Jack colored a trifle, then lifted his chin. “That I ‘ave, miss.”

  She had regretted her words the moment they left the tip of her tongue. She knew Jack had ambitions and that he was careful with every tuppence. The truth was, from the time he had arrived to serve on her estate some five years past, he had put her strongly in mind of another stable boy, Jaspar Vernham, who had gone on to make his fortune in India since leaving Lady Brook. Jack showed every likelihood of following in Jaspar’s footsteps. However, she could hardly retrieve her thoughtless query, and merely nodded for him to go. She then wheeled around and left Jack to the supreme enjoyment of riding the best of her horses all the way to Four-Mile-Cross. No doubt he would be the envy of his friends for weeks to come.

  She followed in Stively’s wake, heading down the avenue that led to the front of the mansion. She walked briskly, her long stride eating up the distance rapidly. She was the tallest of her siblings, a fact that had perhaps been the prime reason she had not as yet found a suitable mate. She was a Long Meg, something that had troubled her no small degree when she was still in the schoolroom and about to enjoy her first London Season.

  As the years had worn on, however, her height had lost its dread and had become a source of great pleasure for her. For one thing, she was immensely gratified at being able to look Marianne’s lovesick and usually frantic beaus directly in the eye when she needed to warn them away from her sister’s wretched flirtations. For another, she delighted in plucking apples from the upper branches of the orchard trees which Celeste—a year younger than Marianne—could not reach.

  She loved that she sat taller in the saddle than even Katherine, who was the finest horsewoman in three counties, and nothing pleased her so much as being able to reach books on shelves that her youngest and most studious sister, Augusta, found impossible to procure without a footstool or ladder. She had come to be proud of her height. She carried herself with dignity, and secretly adored the fact that some of the villagers had taken to calling her The Gentleman.

  She was also proud of having received no fewer than eight offers of marriage since having left the schoolroom so many years before, and only one from a man shorter than herself.

  Eight, and all eligible partis.

  Eight, and not a one that had remotely touched her heart.

  She sighed at the reminiscence, unable to comprehend fully why her heart was so stubborn. As she marched toward the front of the house, she recalled vividly to mind how her fifth suitor, an elegant man who had also crashed his light racing whisky in the front yard of Lady Brook, had suggested to her that her loyalties to her mother, to her sisters, and to her home would never allow her to properly love a man. She wondered now if this much was true.

  What was the truth, after all?

  Only one of her eight suitors had been unworthy of her hand in marriage. Lord Upton had been at the time, and was even yet by all accounts, a libertine of remarkable proportions. His marriage proposals had only followed her refusal of his offer of a carte blanche. What a dreadful creature he had been!

  But the others had been, one and all, good men, worthy men, devoted men. Still, she had rejected them because her heart would be fastidious. Or was her heart merely too full of her duties to family and property that she couldn’t love?

  Regardless, at nine and twenty, though hardly an antidote, Miss Constance Pamberley was, most regrettably, a confirmed ape-leader.

  She did not repine at her single state. Not by half. She lived fully and experienced great joy in managing her estate, in caring for her widowed mother, who was also infirmed, and in providing a home for her four younger sisters as well. Indeed, should she never leave Lady Brook Cottage, she would die content. She wanted for nothing except an income to make a hundred much-needed improvements in the house, in the surrounding gardens, in the outbuildings, in the home wood, and in the several fields attached to the estate. Money was all that the Pamberley ladies needed. That, and a serious realignment of the treacherous corner that had caused yet another accident near the petunia border.

  When she rounded the row of rangy rhododendrons, lush from their recent spring growth, the scene before her appeared so familiar as to seem unreal. Pieces of the low white fence, constructed to give way in case of just such an accident, lay scattered about the lawn and the flower bed. All of her sisters were in their robes and mobcaps. Augusta, the youngest, peered into a book. She was probably consulting an apothecary�
��s volume for the treatment of unconscious victims. Katherine was examining one of the horses’ fetlocks along with Stively. Marianne was kneeling on the grass, supporting the poor young man’s head on her lap, and bearing a most beatific expression on her pretty face, while Celeste was adjuring Finch and Morris not to cut the boots off the young gentleman if they could possibly help it.

  “Though they are dusty,” Celeste was saying as she peered closely at them, “they are clearly of the finest quality.”

  Augusta joined in the present controversy. “You should check each leg and ankle for swelling.” She turned a page. “But do not tug on the boots until you are certain the leg is uninjured.”

  Morris looked up at her and rolled his eyes. He had had more years’ experience than could ever be put into a book. He began a careful exploration of the man’s legs as Constance joined the circle surrounding him. She watched his careful hands, then turned slightly at the sound of pounding hoof beats. Jack, astride Lord-a-Mercy, sailed past the row of statuesque elms, waving his hat to her just before he turned into the lane. The injured horses lifted noble heads and shivered as Jack guided the fine bay north toward Four-Mile Cross. The hoof beats died quickly away.

  Constance returned her attention to the stranger, only this time her gaze landed squarely on his face and she gasped. “Good heavens,” she said. “I have never seen a more beautiful countenance. If he were not dressed in a coat and breeches, I would have supposed him not of this earth!” The young man had a delicate appearance, an alabaster skin, fine features, and loose, blond curls brushed a la cherubim, a style wholly befitting a man whose face brought images of Michelangelo’s works strongly to mind.

  Marianne lifted glowing green eyes to meet her gaze. “Is he not magnificent? I do hope he is injured sufficiently to require his staying in our home for at least a fortnight.” Her thoughtless words brought every eye upon her. She had the grace to blush. “I—I mean. Oh, dash-it-all, what a stupid thing to say. I do beg pardon, Constance. I wasn’t thinking.”