A Most Unladylike Proposition - Chapter 1

London, July 1812

Diana Hughes was a lady. She was quiet, demure, and never raised her eyes above a man’s collar. She never laughed loudly and had even managed to contain her mirth to a polite smile when a hopeful, if bumbling, suitor had once compared her to his favourite dessert. (She might have been offended had she liked dessert less—or her suitor more.) She never ran or showed her ankles. She never displayed the extent of her education. She was the epitome of grace. The definition of good breeding. The pinnacle of unwed society ladies.

But tonight, at the Radcliff’s Masquerade Ball, Diana planned to be somewhat less of a lady.

For the first time in her eighteen years, she was going to throw caution to the wind—she was going to take what she wanted with her own two hands and damn the consequences. Because what she wanted was not so much, really…

Only a kiss.

Just for tonight, Diana planned to be young and reckless. She would dance and flirt with several handsome men, and perhaps, should her stars align, she would sneak into a dark room with a stranger and let him think he’d stolen a favour from her when, really, she’d be giving it away quite freely.

Her reason for doing so was perfectly understandable, if not quite logical: she was to be married.

Her intended, a young earl whom she would formally meet in the morning, had made her father an offer that he (apparently) could not refuse. Diana had not even been offered the courtesy of a formal courtship. According to her father, the Earl of Heather would make an ideal husband. First and foremost, at least in her father’s mind, her intended was an earl. Secondly, and for lack of a more polite way to say it, the earl was filthy rich. And while that may have been enough for her father, her mother had taken pains to assure Diana that James Blake was also quite the catch. He was eight and twenty (not five and sixty like the husband of her best friend, Clara). He was supposedly intelligent, quite handsome, and, as far as Lady Hughes could ascertain from the gossip mill, he did not have a reputation for being a spendthrift, a gamer, or a whoremonger. If her mother was to be believed, the Earl of Heather was, in fact, quite perfect.

And while Diana understood that a good match on the marriage mart was the ultimate goal for a woman in her position, for the first time in her life, she regretted that she had lived to always be so perfect. For while she had always known that she would be married, when faced with the looming event so suddenly, with no time to become acquainted with the fact let alone with her fiancé, she had to wonder: For whom had she always striven to be so flawless?

Her friends had all been kissed without discovery and the dire consequence of scandal. But while they had been flirted with and wooed and still gone on to make good (if not appealing) matches, Diana had been affixed to her overprotective mama’s side, always afraid of that terrifying inevitability that Lady Hughes called ‘scandal and imminent ruination’ should she step even her pinkie toe out of line. And now the result was that she was fated to spend the rest of her life with one man, a stranger, without even having known the rush of rebellion, the flush of indecent lust, or the thrill of potential discovery.

…Well, not if she had anything to do with it.

Tonight, her mother had stayed home with a headache, and Lady Hughes’s companion had offered to chaperone Diana to the Radcliff’s ball in her stead. Mrs. Smythe was a dear lady who had been a member of the Hughes household since before Diana had been born. Diana adored her. But she could also cede that Mrs. Smythe’s penchant for dozing off the moment she sat down would serve her ulterior motive very well…