The Bridgertons Happily Ever After - By Julia Quinn Page 0,24
and what he had been all of his life, was the most well liked.
People liked him. They always had. He supposed it was because he liked most everybody in return. His mother swore he’d emerged from the womb smiling. She said so with great frequency, although Hugh suspected she did so only to give her father the lead-in for: “Oh, Georgette, you know it was just gas.”
Which never failed to set the both of them into fits of giggles.
It was a testament to Hugh’s love for them both, and his general ease with himself, that he usually laughed as well.
Nonetheless, for all his likeability, he’d never seemed to attract the females. They adored him, of course, and confided their most desperate secrets, but they always did so in a way that led Hugh to believe he was viewed as a jolly, dependable sort of creature.
The worst part of it was that every woman of his acquaintance was absolutely positive that she knew the perfect woman for him, or if not, then she was quite sure that a perfect woman did indeed exist.
That no woman ever thought herself the perfect woman had not gone unnoticed. Well, by Hugh, at least. Everyone else was oblivious.
But he carried on, because there could be no point in doing otherwise. And as he had always suspected that women were the cleverer sex, he still held out hope that the perfect woman was indeed out there.
After all, no fewer than four dozen women had said so. They couldn’t all be wrong.
But Hugh was nearing thirty, and Miss Perfection had not yet seen fit to reveal herself. Hugh was beginning to think that he should take matters into his own hands, except that he hadn’t the slightest idea how to do such a thing, especially as he’d just taken a living in a rather quiet corner of Wiltshire, and there didn’t seem to be a single appropriately-aged unmarried female in his parish.
Remarkable but true.
Maybe he should wander over to Gloucestershire Sunday next. There was a vacancy there, and he’d been asked to pitch in and deliver a sermon or two until they found a new vicar. There had to be at least one unattached female. The whole of the Cotswolds couldn’t be bereft.
But this wasn’t the time to dwell on such things. He was just arriving for tea with Mrs. Bridgerton, an invitation for which he was enormously grateful. He was still familiarizing himself with the area and its inhabitants, but it had taken but one church service to know that Mrs. Bridgerton was universally liked and admired. She seemed quite clever and kind as well.
He hoped she liked to gossip. He really needed someone to fill him in on the neighborhood lore. One really couldn’t tend to one’s flock without knowing its history.
He’d also heard that her cook laid a very fine tea. The biscuits had been mentioned in particular.
“Mr. Woodson to see you, Mrs. Bridgerton.”
Hugh stepped into the drawing room as the butler stated his name. He was rather glad he’d forgotten to eat lunch, because the house smelled heavenly and—
And then he quite forgot everything.
Why he’d come.
Who he was.
The color of the sky, even, and the smell of the grass.
Indeed, as he stood there in the arched doorway of the Bridgertons’ drawing room, he knew one thing, and one thing only.
The woman on the sofa, the one with the extraordinary eyes who was not Mrs. Bridgerton, was Miss Perfection.
Sophie Bridgerton knew a thing or two about love at first sight. She had, once upon a time, been hit by its proverbial lightning bolt, struck dumb with breathless passion, heady bliss, and an odd tingling sensation across her entire body.
Or at least, that was how she remembered it.
She also remembered that while Cupid’s arrow had, in her case, proven remarkably accurate, it had taken quite a while for her and Benedict to reach their happily ever after. So even though she wanted to bounce in her seat with glee as she watched Posy and Mr. Woodson stare at each other like a pair of lovesick puppies, another part of her—the ex
rainbows-and-angels part of her—was trying to hold back
her excitement.
But the thing about Sophie was, no matter how awful her childhood had been (and parts of it had been quite dreadfully awful), no matter what cruelties and indignities she’d faced in her life (and there, too, she’d not been fortunate), she was, at heart, an incurable romantic.