Page 1 of Too Wylde To Tame
PROLOGUE
Miss Charity Wylde was waiting as patiently as was possible for her. In truth that was not very patiently, at all. Her cousin had been browsing the shelves and stacks of books at Hatchard’s for what seemed like ages. For herself, Charity had already selected her own book, paid for it and paced the length of the store four times over. Cordelia was always one to mull things over. She was as deliberate and plodding as Charity was impetuous and prone to impulsivity.
It didn’t help matters that it was an unseasonably warm day for Spring. Inside the shop, with the closed windows, the throngs of people and the dust that was inherent to a bookstore—it was cloying. Unable to tolerate it for another moment, Charity made for the door and the relief of not so fresh air beyond it. It was perfectly proper, after all, she reasoned. Cordelia had a maid inside with her. One of their aunt’s many footmen was waiting outside to cart their purchases and Charity would remain in full view of the windows. She just needed to breathe.
It felt as if the muslin of her day dress was made of steel, and it was slowly squeezing the life out of her. Or that might have been the full corsets that her mother insisted she wear, as simple short stays did not provide enough correction for her too plump figure.
She’d begun to feel that way more and more frequently. Trapped. By her clothing. By the city itself. But it wasn’t the dress. It wasn’t even the city or the crowds. What Charity felt closing in on her was the crushing weight of expectation. The last letter she’d received from her parents had indicated as much. With Felicity married months earlier and the end of the Season looming, she was expected to have a husband or at least a betrothal. If she failed to produce either, then her first London Season would be her only London Season and she would return to Bath, humiliated.
Raucous male laughter pulled her from her troublesome thoughts. She glanced to her left and saw a group of gentlemen emerging from an establishment that—while she did not know precisely what took place within—she knew it was an indecent sort of place. How could it be anything else? It was eleven in the morning, the men were still dressed in their evening clothes and the lot of them appeared to be thoroughly foxed. In truth, their behavior was so beyond the pale that she was tempted to go back into the dusty, heated confines of the bookshop. But she was too late in making that decision. The gentlemen, if indeed they could be termed such, had already caught sight of her. Their leader—or the one she could only presume held that ignoble position—looked at her with a speculative and possibly even cruel gleam in his eyes. She knew that look. Every childhood bully she’d ever encountered had worn it just before they tormented her cousins, her sister or herself.
“What do we have here? A plump little partridge all alone,” he mused loudly as he headed for her.
Charity did not acknowledge him. Nor did she run timidly back inside. That was what he wanted, after all—to bully her, to see her cower. So instead, she simply stared straight ahead, ignoring him entirely.
Not satisfied with that, the gentleman paused only a few feet from her, his friends coming up behind him. “A bit fleshy for my tastes, but pretty enough I suppose,” he assessed her. “Prettier if she’d smile. Give us a smile, won’t you?” His friends laughed and jeered, egging him on. Not that he appeared to need it.
Charity refused to be baited by them. They weren’t the first such cads she’d ever encountered in her life. They would hardly be the last either. With her posture completely rigid and her eyes locked on a spot across the street, she simply pretended they weren’t there. In her peripheral vision, she could see the footman moving toward her, but she held a staying hand in his direction. He was alone, after all. Just one of him to four drunken louts. Even given how foxed they were, the odds were too great. Not to mention that, based on their state of dress, they were supposed to be gentlemen. The law would look very unkindly upon a mere servant who dared strike someone of a higher class.
“Perhaps she can’t hear,” he suggested to his friends. “And mayhap she’s blind also. I can’t think of any other reason for a fat spinster to ignore the kind attentions of a gentleman. Can you?”
“Maybe you should do something to get her attention,” one of his cronies suggested, then guffawed loudly.
The first gentleman stepped closer to her. He blew out a puff of air that reeked of tobacco and spirits. It was close enough that it ruffled the tendrils that curled just beneath the brim of her bonnet. At that Charity turned to him with a glare, “Leave me be.”
“She speaks!” He exclaimed in mock surprise. “Not deaf. Not blind. Just not very nice.”
“Nice? Have you done aught to deserve nice? Hardly, sir. You are nothing more than a drunken lout surrounded by others of your ilk. You may wear the trappings of a gentleman but you are not one. Now, for the last time, leave me be!”
He grabbed her arm, his grip bruising. All pretense of amusement, cruel as it may have been, was gone from his face. His eyes were cold and hard—the eyes of a predator. “You’re quite the mouthy one, aren’t you? No one speaks to me that way.”
“Kent!”
The shout, in that very familiar voice, prompted him to drop her arm and step back. Charity glanced over her shoulder to see her brother in law, Lord Phinneas Merrick, Viscount Randford, approaching. He’d just exited a shop down the street. That the man who had accosted her was known to him wasn’t a surprise. After all, Phinneas knew everyone. And it seemed the man knew him, as well, since he unhanded her immediately and stepped back.
“Viscount,” the man he’d called Kent acknowledged.
“Charity,” Phinneas said, ignoring the man’s greeting pointedly. The cut-direct. And right there on the street for everyone to see. “Are you all right?”
“I’m quite fine, thank you.”
“She had stumbled and I came to her aid,” Kent lied.
“I am not blind and I could see perfectly well what was going on,” Phinneas replied, still speaking just to her. The skepticism in his tone was impossible to miss. “Charity, I will see you inside the shop to collect your cousin before I escort you both home.”
“Thank you, Phinneas. That would be much appreciated.”
Leaving the group of so-called gentleman on the sidewalk, they retreated into Hatchard’s. No sooner had they crossed the threshold than Phinneas said, “Oliver Kent is not to be trusted, Charity.”
“Oh, that is quite obvious,” she said. “I had no wish to speak to them. I was only outside because it’s so unbearably warm in here. And then they… appeared. All of them acting like bullies in a school yard.”
Phinneas frowned. “They are a bit more dangerous than that, Kent being the worst of the lot. If he ever approaches you again, just leave. Go wherever other people are, preferably people who outrank him in society. The only things that surpass his cruelty are his dishonesty and social ambition.”
Charity placed her hand on his arm. “Have I told you how glad I am that my sister married you? Not just because you were wonderful enough to come to my rescue just now, but because there are so many wolves in sheep’s clothing in society—men like Mr. Kent who will smile prettily in a ballroom and corner you when he thinks no one is watching. It is an endless relief to me to know that she found a good man.”
“I’m glad I married her also… because I love her madly and because I have an entire new set of relations whom I equally adore,” he offered with a smile.
“Do not mention this to Cordelia. She’s a bit of a worrier,” Charity urged him.
