Never Fall for Your Fiancee

Chapter One

LATE NOVEMBER 1825 …

The trouble with lies is they have a tendency, if not well managed, to catch a man out. Hugh’s out-of-control, grossly overembellished falsehood was like a snarling, rabid dog about to sink its foaming teeth into his behind, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it.

He stared at the letter again, pathetically hoping he had misread his mother’s flamboyant, sloping handwriting—but alas, he was doomed. She had booked passage from Boston to leave on the first and, if the tide and the current and the trade winds complied, intended to be in Hampshire for Christmas. Which meant he had received her blasted letter far too late to put a stop to it, no doubt on purpose, as his mother, stepfather, and a whole heap of trouble were currently bobbing somewhere ever closer on the Atlantic Ocean. Worse—if indeed things could get worse—there was only one purpose to their spontaneous and wholly unwelcome trip.

They were desperate to meet and become better acquainted with his fiancée now that she was finally out of mourning.

The fiancée who didn’t exist.

“Let’s face it, you’re done for.” His best friend, Giles, the unenthusiastic heir to a dukedom, was an eternal pessimist. He popped his eighth biscuit into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully as he stared at his ceiling. “Perhaps now is a good time to run away? Take an extended tour of the Continent and only return once they have sailed back. Your stepfather is a businessman, is he not? In my experience, all businessmen are so dreadfully dull they cannot bear to leave their business alone for prolonged periods of time.”

“If I run, I might as well tell my mother everything. Unsupervised, she will dig and dig until she has fully excavated the whole truth and then I shall never hear the end of it. Might I remind you, I only invented Minerva in the first place because she threatened to come home and help find me a bride. You have no idea how tenacious that woman can be. She has become quite obsessed with my happiness since she went and married for love.” Hugh screwed up his face with distaste. “She has it in her head I will never be truly happy unless I am shackled to the woman of my dreams. If that woman is not Minerva, then she’ll find me a replacement quicker than you can say ‘I do.’”

“Well, at least your lone surviving parent wishes for you to have a blissful union. My father is determined to foist a duty bride on me, and despite my repeated assertions to the contrary, presents me with a suitably uninspiring candidate at least once a week. I’ve developed an irrational fear of Hyde Park now, as he has sucked all the joy out of my riding there. And Rotten Row used to be such a fruitful place to meet like-minded ladies.”

By “like-minded,” Giles meant discreet, open to a dalliance, free and easy with their favors, and desirous of no permanent complications. One of the many reasons he and Hugh had always been such good friends was their similar taste in women and abhorrence of permanent attachments.

“You know I sympathize—but can we please focus on the most pressing problem in hand. My problem. What am I going to do?”

“Well, if you are not prepared to run, you are going to have to face the music, old boy. I hear confession is supposed to be good for the soul. Unless you can conjure up a fiancée in the next few weeks.”

Not at all helpful. “Because there must be at least a hundred proper young ladies in Mayfair who would be delighted to be my temporary betrothed and dragged across the country to spend Christmas in dreary Hampshire.”

“Why does she have to be proper?”

“Because Minerva is proper! That’s how I created her. My mother wouldn’t settle for anything less, and frankly, seeing as she is a figment of my imagination, crafted to serve a necessary evil, I purposely made her the sort of paragon which every mother would want for their son.”

“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive!’”

Hugh glared at his friend. “Must you quote the theatre while I’m in the midst of a crisis?”

“I adore the theatre.”

“I came to you for help. Some guiding words of wisdom because you are supposed to be my best friend. So far, all you’ve done is eat an entire plate of biscuits and tell me I’m done for.”

“You are done for.” Giles waved a fresh shortbread at him. “I gave you my infinite words of wisdom when you started this mockery of a sham two years ago and you blithely ignored them all.”

Even more unhelpful. “You agreed Minerva was a stroke of genius at the time!”

“Indeed I did. Because it was a stroke of genius and it made me very jealous. If only my father lived across an ocean so I could invent a fiancée … And I must say, you have a flair for effusive prose, which I lack. Those poignant letters you wrote during her long battle with consumption, where you stalwartly sat at her bedside and read to her, silently praying for a cure while cursing the fickle finger of fate, brought a tear to my eye, I don’t mind telling you.” The remnants of biscuit number nine disappeared before his friend wagged a chastising finger. “But you must also recall I was all for her tragic death. By then she’d more than earned it, the poor thing. Consumption is such a romantically lingering disease and you could have played the heartbroken hero. That would have bought you a few more months at the very least. Yet you dragged it out interminably. Expressly against my good advice that all good things must come to an end.”

“I couldn’t kill her then! If I had, I’d have been right back where I started and vulnerable to my mother’s rampant matchmaking again. She was about to buy passage on a ship to help console me at the end!”

But Hugh knew he was right. Despite meticulously projecting a flippant and shallow exterior to the world, Giles was annoyingly right more often than he was wrong. Hugh huffed out a breath in surrender. He’d overdone it, and now his precarious house of cards was in danger of collapsing in a heap. “All right, the miraculous recovery might have been a bit far-fetched.”