Accidentally in Love Read Free Page A

glass, his blue eyes mildly speculative. “You won’t find anyone this Season to interest you. A most uninspired crop.”
    There was something purposefully subversive about that. It was not like Raithby at all.
    “It’s early in the Season, not even June yet,” he said, feeling that he was being led off into the weeds on a hunt he had no interest in. Or hadn’t ten minutes ago. “Who knows what beauty may show her pretty head?”
    “Yes. Who knows?” Raithby agreed.
    They drank in companionable silence after that, the mood between them as cordial as it ever was. Raithby seemed off somehow, though Kit could not have said in what way.
    “Your mother is eager for you to marry?” Raithby said after an interval of several minutes.
    “Of course.”
    “My father is not eager for me to marry,” Raithby said.
    “Takes the sting out of it, I should think. I will do my duty, certainly, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any need to rush about beating the bushes of Society for a bride. A man should take his time, be prudent about it all.”
    It sounded very reasonable to him, saying it out loud that way. He might try just such a line with his mother. He couldn’t see an argument against it, as to that.
    “My father would agree with you,” Raithby said.
    “But you do not?”
    Raithby looked down at the space between the mahogany chair leg and the turned edge of the tabletop, lost in thought. “I should,” he said.
    “Of course you should,” Kit said. “It’s irrefutable, logical.”
    Raithby nodded, his gaze still on the empty space between chair and table.
    “Have you been in Town long?” Kit said, changing the subject very intentionally.
    Raithby raised his head. “Long enough.”
    Most mysterious. Equally perplexing.
    “And no one interesting, no one to arouse a man’s interest in marriage?”
    “Did I say that?”
    “You did. Most emphatically.”
    “True enough, then. The marriageable crop is uninspired,” Raithby said. “You shall not be tempted. No man could be.”
    For some strange reason, likely the strangeness of the entire episode, Kit felt he had to defend Emeline, who was in Town for the Season and was most certainly looking for a husband.
    The thought, never before put into words, even in his own mind, tickled at something entirely uncomfortable. He couldn’t think why. Certainly he wished Emeline every success and every happiness. Of course he did.
    “Are you acquainted with Miss Emeline Harlow?” Kit asked, doing his best to be a valiant friend, ignoring the tickle as unbecoming of him. “She is an old family friend; we grew up together like brother and sister, very nearly.” Raithby looked at him, a polite expression on his face. “She’s in Town for her first Season.”
    “And you’re offering her to me? I’m flattered, Culley. Most generous of you. But perhaps not entirely brotherly.”
    Kit bit back a sharp retort and smiled instead. “Hardly that. I am merely speaking highly of a woman I admire greatly. Would you like an introduction?”
    “I should be pleased to make her acquaintance. You will not be insulted if I do not make her an offer?”
    “Don’t be absurd, Raithby,” Kit said, his tone sharp despite his best efforts. “It will please her mother to have the introduction made and therefore it will please Miss Harlow.”
    “She sounds most . . . biddable.” It sounded almost like an insult.
    “She is,” Kit said. It still sounded like an insult. It also sounded untrue. Emeline wasn’t what one would term biddable. She was fun.
    Strange, but he would never have thought a woman could be fun, nor would he have thought it a desirable trait. Yet she was, and it was. In her, anyway. He wasn’t certain he wanted his wife to be fun.
    “You seem eager to foist her off on someone,” Raithby said. “Is something wrong with the girl?”
    “Not at all,” Kit said, sounding quite sharp, indeed. “Her mother and mine are close friends. We grew up side-by-side, as I