CHAPTER SEVEN #2
"Can't I? I've been so focused on what I wanted …what I refused to accept, that I didn't see what was happening right in front of me. My mother has been carrying this burden alone, and it's destroying her."
"She hasn't been alone. You've been here. I've been here."
"Yes, being very noble and honorable and accomplishing nothing." Harriet pressed her palms against her eyes, fighting the tears that threatened to spill. "We need a solution, Sebastian. A real solution. Not someday, not maybe, not if the mining rights pan out. Now. Today."
Sebastian was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful.
"There is one option we haven't discussed."
"If you're about to suggest Davies again…"
"Not Davies." Sebastian took a breath. "Me."
Harriet's hands dropped from her face. "What?"
"You could wed me."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and impossible. Harriet stared at him, certain she had misheard.
"I know," Sebastian continued, his voice gaining steadiness as though he had rehearsed this speech, "that this is not what you want.
I know you've made your feelings on the subject abundantly clear.
But the practical reality is that a matrimony between us would solve your immediate problems. My fortune is sufficient to settle all your family's debts, with enough remaining to restore the estate.
Davies would have no grounds for legal action.
Your mother would have security and peace of mind. "
"Sebastian…"
"I'm not asking you to love me." The words came out flat, almost clinical.
"I'm not asking for anything except the chance to help your family in the only way that seems to be left.
We could maintain separate lives, if you prefer.
Separate households, even, once the initial scandal dies down.
You would have complete freedom to do as you please. "
"You're describing a business arrangement."
"I'm describing a practical solution to an impossible problem." Sebastian's jaw tightened. "I know it's not romantic. I know it's not what you dreamed of as a girl. But your mother is ill, your family is facing ruin, and I have the means to prevent both. That has to count for something."
Harriet opened her mouth to refuse…the word was right there, ready to be spoken, as it had been when Davies proposed.
But something stopped her. Maybe it was the memory of her mother's pale face, her trembling hands, and the physicians' grim warnings.
Maybe it was the exhaustion of fighting a battle she could never win.
Maybe it was something else entirely, something she wasn't ready to examine.
"Why?" she asked instead. "Why would you do this?"
A brief emotion played upon his face, but it was extinguished in an instant, leaving no trace for the curious eye.
"I told you. Your family has been more of a home to me than my own ever was."
"That's not enough. That's not a reason to shackle yourself to a woman who…" Harriet stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence.
"Who doesn't love me?" Sebastian's smile was crooked, bitter. "I'm aware. But as I said, I'm not asking for love. I'm asking for the chance to help."
"And what do you get out of it? A reluctant wife? A matrimony of convenience with a woman who's made no secret of her distaste for the arrangement?"
Something shifted in Sebastian's eyes. "I get the satisfaction of knowing your family is safe. That your mother will recover. That you won't have to sell yourself to a man like Davies." His voice dropped. "Is that not enough?"
Harriet wanted to say no. She wanted to refuse, as she had refused Davies, and walk away with her pride intact. But her pride was a luxury she could no longer afford. Not when her mother's life hung in the balance. Not when the alternative was watching everything she loved crumble to dust.
"I need time to think," she said.
"Of course." Sebastian stepped back, giving her space. "Take whatever time you need. The offer stands."
He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing in the empty corridor. Harriet watched him go, her heart a tangled mess of emotions she couldn't begin to sort out.
Sebastian Vane had just proposed to her. Not out of love, he had made that painfully clear, but out of duty, obligation, some misguided sense of responsibility to Richard's memory.
It should have been easy to refuse. It should have been the simplest thing in the world.
So why did she feel as though she was standing at the edge of a cliff, about to step off into the unknown?
***
Harriet spent the rest of the day at her mother's bedside.
Lady Fordshire slept fitfully, rousing occasionally to ask questions that Harriet answered with carefully edited versions of the truth. Yes, they had returned from Davies Hall. No, there was nothing to worry about. Everything was being handled.
Lies, all of it. But necessary lies, the kind that protected the people you loved from truths they couldn't bear.
As evening fell and the candles were lit, Harriet found herself studying her mother's face in the flickering light. When had she become so frail? When had the vibrant, commanding woman who had run this household for thirty years been replaced by this pale shadow?
It had happened gradually, Harriet realised. So gradually that she hadn't noticed until it was nearly too late. The stress of the debts, the grief of losing Richard, the endless worry about the future, it had all taken its toll, day by day, until there was almost nothing left.
She cannot survive another crisis.
The physician's words echoed in Harriet's mind, relentless and inescapable. Her mother needed peace. Security. The certainty that everything would be all right.
Harriet could give her that. All she had to do was say yes.
The thought circled in her mind like a hawk, never quite landing. Marry Sebastian. Become Lady Vane. Trade her freedom for her family's salvation.
Was it really so different from what she had refused with Davies?
Yes, whispered a voice in the back of her mind. It's completely different, and you know it.
Davies was cold, calculating, a man who saw her as nothing more than a means to an end. Sebastian was... something else entirely. Something she had spent seven years refusing to acknowledge, and was only now beginning to understand.
He had kept her poetry. He had spent hours searching through dusty documents to find something that might save her family. He had stood in a corridor and offered her marriage not because he wanted something from her, but because he wanted to help.
And last night, in the stable, he had said...
I did not refuse to buy you just to watch you sell yourself to someone else.
What had he meant by that? What feelings was he hiding behind his careful mask of duty and obligation?
It didn't matter, Harriet told herself firmly. Whatever Sebastian felt or didn't feel was irrelevant. This was a practical decision, nothing more. A solution to an impossible problem.
But if that was true, why did her heart race every time she thought of saying yes?
***
She found him in the library, of course.
It was nearly midnight, and the house had long since fallen silent.
Harriet had left Mary to sit with her mother and crept downstairs, drawn by some instinct she didn't want to examine too closely.
She knew she would find Sebastian here, in this room that had become their unofficial meeting place. She knew, and she came anyway.
He was standing by the window, staring out at the darkened gardens. He didn't turn when she entered, but she saw his shoulders tense slightly, as though he had been expecting her.
"You should be sleeping," he said.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep well. You know that."
"Neither do I, lately." Harriet moved further into the room, stopping near the fireplace where the embers still glowed faintly. "We seem to have that in common."
"We seem to have quite a few things in common." Sebastian finally turned to face her. In the dim light, his features were all sharp angles and shadows, his grey eyes gleaming like pewter. "Have you come to give me your answer?"
"I've come to ask you something first."
"Ask, then."
Harriet took a breath, steadying herself. "This afternoon, when you proposed, you said you weren't asking me to love you. You said we could maintain separate lives, separate households. You made it sound as though you expected nothing from me at all."
"That's correct."
"Why?"
Sebastian's brow furrowed. "I'm not sure I understand the question."
"Why would you offer to enter into matrimony with a woman who gives you nothing in return? Why would you shackle yourself to someone who, by your own admission, doesn’t love you and never will? What possible benefit could there be for you in such an arrangement?"
For a long moment, Sebastian said nothing. He stood by the window, his expression unreadable, and Harriet had the sense that he was wrestling with something, some truth he wasn't sure he wanted to reveal.
"Perhaps," he said finally, "I don't require benefits. Perhaps I simply want to help."
"No one is that selfless."
"You'd be surprised."
"Sebastian." Harriet crossed the room toward him, stopping just out of arm's reach.
"I need the truth. I need to understand what I'm agreeing to.
Because right now, this feels like charity, and I don't…
" She stopped, struggling for words. "I don't want to be your charity case.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life knowing that you wedded me out of pity. "
"It's not pity."
"Then what is it?"
The question hung between them, sharp-edged and dangerous. Sebastian's jaw tightened, and for a moment, Harriet thought he might refuse to answer.
Then he spoke, and his voice was rough in a way she had never heard before.