Kieran Kramer - When Harry Met Molly

She loved Penelope. Yes, Molly did, even though she wanted to marry Roderick, too!

It was all so confusing. At that moment, she loved and hated her family all at once, and she needed someone to hug her and tell her everything would be all right.

Mama, her heart cried. Help me!

But Mama had long since gone to heaven.

Nevertheless, Molly waited. She waited for Mama or the angels or somebody to make things seem less horrible. But Penelope didn’t step in and tell Papa to let her stay. No one did. Not even Roderick—and she’d written the poem for him.

The wretch.

The crowd was silent again. Harry turned to leave, his hand gripping his nose.

“Go,” Lord Sutton told Molly. Then he looked toward Cousin Augusta. “See that she’s taken home immediately and put to bed.”

“Of course,” Cousin Augusta said, and pushed her glasses up her nose. “No presents for you tomorrow, missy. This Christmas incident shall never be forgotten, not as long as I draw breath.”

Cousin Augusta was a mean old bat. And just yesterday, she’d wandered about the house looking for her glasses when they’d been right on her nose!

Molly fell in line with Harry.

“I hate you,” she whispered to him.

“The feeling is mutual,” he said quite cheerily.

And with those parting words, the two young troublemakers walked away from the people they loved best, both of their futures gravely altered by a single act of passion, both of them believing they were alone and destined to be alone—

Forever.

Lord Harry Traemore knew the man next to him in the private room at his club in London—Lord Wray, who’d slithered to the floor and begun snoring—might appear to most passersby to be passive, even sleeping. But Harry and his old schoolmates from Eton, their reasoning skills gently manipulated by rather copious amounts of brandy, realized this prone position of Wray’s was actually his attempt to bravely endure his fate.

After all, Wray was to be married in the morning. And everyone knew his future wife was…

Exactly like his mother.

“I’m sad,” Harry’s friend Charles Thorpe, Viscount Lumley, said, an empty snifter dangling from his hand. “A good friend’s freedom is being taken away.”

Lumley was rich as Croesus, with the most twinkling blue eyes Harry had ever seen and a grin that could light up Vauxhall Gardens at midnight better than any fireworks.

“It’s not right,” said Captain Stephen Arrow. His naval uniform, crisp and distinguished with its gold braid and buttons, offset the casual manner in which he sprawled in his chair. “He put up a good fight, didn’t he?”

Harry sloshed some brandy into his mouth. He couldn’t even taste its flavor anymore. His tongue…it felt numb. And his lips, for that matter. It wasn’t often he drank this much—contrary to the stories told about him, which he did nothing to deny.

But tonight was different. Tonight he felt the brush of the nuptial guillotine close to his own neck. He didn’t want to marry. Not for a long, long time, not until he was truly cornered by familial obligation. And as far as he knew, that would likely never happen.

Harry was simply a spare. Only if his robust older brother Roderick somehow stuck his spoon in the wall before his wife Penelope produced a son—the next heir to the House of Mallan—would Harry’s potential as a bridegroom begin to matter. Penelope had already produced four daughters—his splendid little nieces Helen, Cassandra, Juliet, and Imogen—so it couldn’t be long now before she gifted Roderick with the son the whole family craved, even prayed for.

Because it wouldn’t do, Harry knew from whispers in the servants’ hall and the perpetually disappointed expressions on his parents’ faces, for disgraced Harry—the returning war hero who was not a hero but should have been—to be merely one person away from inheriting the ducal title.

No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Which was why Harry was so averse to marriage in the first place. Why take on yet another person in his life who would only disdain him?

Wray smacked his lips and shifted on the floor.

“At least he’s out of his pain,” said Nicholas Staunton, Lord Maxwell, in that unruffled tone of his. Cool, mysterious, and rather unconventional despite his strong aristocratic lineage, Maxwell, Harry was well aware, was unlikely to voice an observation unless he were truly moved to do so. He raised a quizzing glass and observed Wray further. “I understand he’s had a hell of a year. Dozens of debutantes and their mothers chasing him without cease.”

“Poor sod,” said Harry, looking down at Wray. “He was even thrown into a carriage by two masked thugs and almost forced to elope with the Barnwell girl, but he leaped out on the London Bridge and nearly got run over by a coach-and-four instead.”

A loud popping noise—followed by another pop and a creak—sounded from the logs burning in the fireplace.

The sound even woke Wray. He opened his eyes, gazed at nothing, and said, “No. I won’t eat my porridge. Please don’t make me,” before he went back to his snoring.

“God save his tormented soul,” Arrow entreated with great solemnity.

And then the bookcase opened. The one near the fire.

Yes, opened.

Harry rubbed his eyes.

“What the hell?” said Arrow.

Harry knew, of course, that every great house had a secret door to somewhere, but he’d no idea his own club did.

A buxom female—rather matronly in dress and age, actually—stumbled out from a dark passageway, a spitting candle in her hand. The curls at her temples had gone to gray beneath the half-handkerchief pinned to her hair, and her gown, while a pleasing midnight blue, couldn’t disguise her spreading hips. She placed the candle on the mantel, turned to the men, and curtsied.

“You’re a woman,” Lumley said slowly.

Considering the fact that women weren’t allowed on the club premises, Harry could forgive Lumley’s stating the obvious.

But before she or anyone else could respond, a man emerged from the opening behind the bookcase, as well—a portly man with a merry grin and a bottle of cheap gin in his hand.

“I’m dreaming,” said Lumley, shaking his head.

“Au contraire,” the man said, and proceeded to belch. “You most certainly are not dreaming, Viscount.” He patted his stomach, lifted the bottle to his mouth, drank, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Then he swayed.

“Oho!” he said, and chuckled when the woman grabbed his elbow.

“No dancing, Your Highness.” She giggled and took the bottle from him. “We need music for that.”

Long before she’d even set the bottle on a side table, every man in the room had stood—except for Wray, who was still fighting his battle against cruel Fate on the floor.

“Your Royal Highness!” Captain Arrow said, and saluted the swaying man. “Captain Stephen Arrow, at your service.”

By God, it was him. The Prince Regent himself. Harry almost saluted, too, but then he remembered he wasn’t a sailor, so he bowed deeply, right near Wray’s snuffling mouth.

Prinny rubbed his chin. “Yes, it is I,” he said. “My delectable companion and I were on our way to the secret bedchamber—”

There was a secret bedchamber at the club?

Harry and Lumley exchanged looks of shock. Maxwell ran his narrowed gaze over the bookshelf. Arrow remained standing at attention.

“Captain Arrow,” Prinny said with a huff of laughter. “At ease. Please. I can’t think when you look as though you’re about to call out orders to fire a hundred cannon at the Spanish fleet.”

Arrow’s shoulders relaxed.

And there followed a general lessening of tension in every man, Harry noted. Maxwell took a puff from his cheroot. Lumley grinned, and Harry uncurled his fingers, which he’d balled into fists at his sides.

Yes, Prinny was in his cups, but he was also in a good mood.

“As I was saying,” His Royal Highness went on, “Liza and I were passing through, and we couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, gentlemen.” He opened his snuffbox with a grand flourish, pretended to inhale some—everyone knew he really despised the stuff—and returned it to his pocket. “And I’m shocked—nay, dismayed,” he went on, “at the state of affairs in this room. Can’t be good for the Empire when its best and brightest are gloomy.”

He leveled an eye at Harry. “Yes, I include even you in that description, young man. Despite everything I’ve heard about your bedding the captain’s wife while your unit suffered an ambush, of all things”—Liza gasped—“you can’t be a complete disgrace if the Duke of Mallan is your father.”

Harry’s chest knotted. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he gritted out.

But inside, his heart grew harder. And smaller.

Prinny looked around assessingly. “We must correct this situation. What you need is hope—hope that you may avoid legshackles. And not just a vague hope.” His expression brightened and he raised his right index finger. “You’ll need a surety!”

“Yes!” Liza clapped her hands.

“We need to make it impossible,” Prinny said, “for any matchmaking mamas, silly debutantes, and conniving bettors to rob your bachelor days of their necessary frivolity. Who’s got a quill and paper?”

No one did. Harry wondered what the Prince was about.

A coach-and-four rattled by the window, and through the door, there were the regular sounds of club life: voices rising and falling, the scrape of forks and knives against plates, the clink of bottle against glass.