Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) by Donna Lea Simpson Page A

out alone to a shed off the stables, retrieving a beat-up hat and canvas bag. He was going to go fishing, and he was going alone .
     
    • • •
     
    True was glad Lady Leathorne had declared a day of inactivity. It was hot and humid, and she did not want to spend the day in enforced games or sports. The sky was lowering and dark after luncheon; Arabella had gone back upstairs to lie down—humidity always gave her a headache—but True needed to get out of the house, needed to be alone for once. She was aware that she still had come to no decision regarding Mr. Bottleby’s proposal, and she must decide soon. He was leaving for the north in a little over a month and a half, and he had wanted to marry before that. They would need three Sundays for the banns to be read, but other than that she did not anticipate much in the way of a wedding celebration.
    Marriage! True slipped from the house with her oldest bonnet—or at least the oldest one she had brought with her—on her head and a basket on her bare arm. She had come to know Lea Park and took a shortcut toward the river where she had promised to gather some cress for the cook. Would she really marry after all these years?
    Mr. Bottleby—Arthur she would have to call him if she accepted his proposal—was a good man. He genuinely felt the call of the church. Her father had been impressed, in the time the young man had been his curate, by his fervor and true devotion to the downtrodden. His methodistical leanings had disturbed Mr. Becket, but still, both father and daughter had agreed that Mr. Bottleby was the best kind of man of God, one who really believed in Him and wanted to do His work.
    And did his proposal mean that she was chosen by God, as he was, to do His work? She didn’t know. She enjoyed helping the people of her village, doctoring the sick when they couldn’t afford medicine, instructing the children when the teacher of the village charity school was sick, visiting the elderly. As her mother had died when True was just twelve, she had taken the duties of the vicar’s wife upon herself, and now it felt like second nature to her. Marrying Mr. Bottleby and going north would mean new challenges, new people to care for, by the side of a man she truly respected, but it was a familiar role, one she knew herself to be capable of and trained for. But in thinking of marriage to Mr. Bottleby she found herself focusing almost entirely on the challenges of the job ahead and ignoring what marriage to the man would mean. She liked him. She esteemed him. She respected him.
    Was it wrong to want love and . . . and passion, too?
    Inevitably, thoughts of passion led her back to Lord Drake. He was everything Mr. Bottleby was not: gallant, handsome, a soldier who had proven his courage on the battlefield. His kiss had left her feeling weak in the knees. She was drawn to him, and wanted so very badly to soothe his troubled brow.
    But it was not her place. Even if, by some miracle, he fell in love with her, they were socially so far apart as to be on opposite sides of a stone wall. Well, perhaps not opposite sides. Her father was a gentleman, an Oxford man, and though not rich was a member of the landed gentry, and her mother had been related to a baron and a marquess. So she was not completely removed from his social sphere, though she was certainly his inferior in standing.
    It did not change her upbringing, though. Wycliffe Prescott, Viscount Drake, needed a wife of breeding, a woman who had been raised to grace the position of countess. He did not need a vicar’s daughter who knew about making preserves, haggling with the butcher, and doctoring villagers with her own herbal remedies. True knew how to run a household—a very small household—but she would be lost if she had to plan a party for two hundred!
    She had been wandering through the meadow on a meandering route toward the river. Her destination was in sight, and she headed down the sloping bank toward the