[The Inconvenient Matches series is comprised entirely of stand alone novels that can be read in any order]
Raphael St. Alexander, Viscount Carlisle, has only one goal: track the man who betrayed him in Belgium and bring him to justice. Forever chan...
Twelve (but very nearly thirteen) year-old Sylvia Heartwood had a very terrible confession; she was certain she was in love with Raphael St. Alexander, Viscount Carlisle. The same Raphael she played in the mud with. The same Raphael who never let her win at tag. The same boy whom she had seen without his two front teeth when they had fallen out.
It was ridiculous, really, particularly when you considered the fact that a sixteen-year-old boy really wasn't all that interested in spending time with girls three years and four months younger than him. At sixteen, Raphael had matured into what Sylvie was sure was the absolute epitome of masculine beauty.
He had grown rather tall over this last year at Eton, approaching six feet, which he was likely to cross as he had a few more years of growth ahead. His hair, black and sleek, was cut to the fashionable length and he had recently started dressing in clothes tailor-made with the finest materials. Many years later, she would look back and laugh at how biased her perception had been of that gangly boy who was playing at being a man. In retrospect, he had been gangly, his gait awkward as he had not become accustomed to the sudden extension of his limbs.
But her spectacles had been enchanted with the magic of first love and all she saw was the man of her dreams.
It had happened so unexpectedly but Sylvie was sure of it nonetheless. As they had grown, Raphael and she had spent less and less time together as he and Thomas got up to whatever it was that young men did. Raphael would rather spend time with girls closer to his own age. Older than her, prettier than her, and certainly more.....developed. And it had stung a bit only because Sylvie was awkward and wore spectacles and liked to read about astronomy and history as much as she liked to talk about ribbons and bonnets. She was not exactly wealthy in the friends department, so seeing Rafe grow distant was just a little hurtful.
That was what it had been until two nights ago; friendship. And then everything had changed.
Raphael knew of her love for both history and astronomy, so he usually let her have his books and notebooks whenever he was done with them after a term at Eton. He had found her in the library with her face scrunched up in confusion at the notes because she couldn't make heads or tails of his writing or his calculations. He had a bad habit of skipping steps during the sums because he could do them in his head.
He had pushed her glasses up her nose and then her heart had done something it had never done before; it skipped a beat.
Then he had sat down and explained the calculations to her instead of going riding with Thomas, and that was it, Sylvia's heart was his for the taking.
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Raphael took a deep sigh as he tried not to expire of secondhand embarrassment, as he invariably did any time his mother and father were in the vicinity of one another. He watched as his father bent over backward to please his mother as she regarded him with the chilly indifference she reserved only for her former husband.
"Sarah, would you care for tea? Sandwiches? Cook made the lemon biscuits you liked," his father blabbered as his mother's face settled into a grimace as if she could not bear to be around him. Likely, being in Carlisle was already trying for her; the place where she had met and married the Marquess of Lindsey. By all accounts, it had been a love match until it had gone terribly wrong only three years later, and now his parents were among the only five couples in the last decade to have been granted a divorce. Not to mention the only two that had been allowed to remarry after the humiliating public spectacle that a divorce was. It was why his mother and stepfather had moved to Italy; to live their days in peace, away from the scrutiny of English society.
Raphael had not known it was a strange thing for his mother and father to not be married until he had started spending more time in England and found that many children of peers did not wish to be associated with him. To him, it was just the way of things; his stepfather had married his mother when he was only two years old, so he had been in Raphael's life for as long as he could remember.
Things had only gotten worse at Eton where Raphael had often found himself to be the target of hazing in his first year. Divorce was a shame, you see, even for a child who had nothing to do with the events that had taken place before he could even form full sentences. He was viewed as an outsider, someone to be ridiculed, excluded, and bullied.
And then he had learned to talk with his fists. That had shut down the most vocal of his bullies but Raphael still did not have many friends. Then he learned how to cajole and joke and charm until he managed to become the ringleader of a bunch of troublemakers. If you acted like you cared for nothing, then no one had any power over you.
"No, my lord, I only came to collect our son. We ought to be on our way, I do not wish to keep my husband waiting,"
Raphael watched as his father flinched at her words; even after all these years, his mother refused to use his Christian name. It was a deliberate move on her part to purge herself of the intimacy that she had once shared with the man sitting in the chair across from her.
He had found a bunch of letters in his father's study once, letters that his mother had written when they were engaged and then during the first year of their marriage.
My beloved James,
My dearest heart,
My love,
My darling husband,
That was how they had all been addressed. Clearly, there had been genuine emotion between them at one time.
And now look at them.
They never told him what happened, though his fellows at Eton used to have a plethora of choice words for his mother who had remarried two months after the divorce was granted. He did not understand it, if love was real, how could his mother have walked away from his father? How could her father have let her walk away?
She was not a cruel person at all, but the worst of her seemed to come out whenever she was with him. And his father? It felt as though he had left his dignity at the door whenever she was near. How could love become something so entirely ugly? Something that could turn a kind woman cruel and a proud man so obviously desperate?
Whatever the case may be, Raphael swore to himself right there and then that he would never fall in love.
