Chapter Seven
Rose lay in the most comfortable bed she could remember in a long time, brushing her fingertips across a genuinely silk bedspread, staring at a ceiling that wasn’t cracked or full of mold…and wondered.
Was she truly about to do this?
Oh, meeting Samuel’s family had been fine. All she’d had to do was channel the role, and the rest had been easy. It had in fact been rather pleasant, seeing them all tease the tall, charming man who was so easily undone by his own sister.
And now she was lying in bed, in a bed he was paying for, trying to sleep on the night before her wedding.
Her wedding to a man she barely knew.
Her wedding to a man who did not love her.
Her wedding to a man who had already decided how to set her aside.
It was perhaps not the tale that one would tell upon a stage…but was it truly the best story for her?
It was not as though there were copious other roles knocking on my door, desperately begging me to return to the theater, Rose reminded herself forebodingly.
No. It was this opportunity, or the option of begging on the streets.
Rose’s stomach turned. Well, perhaps it was not that dramatic. But still. As she lay here, in borrowed finery—precisely how Samuel had perfectly calculated her measurements, she did not like to guess—in a bed that was far too comfortable to sleep in, wondering what the future would bring.
And that was despite knowing quite certainly that tomorrow would bring her wedding.
Do you, Rose Morgan, take this man…
Rose sat up in bed, her stomach now churning so violently that it was impossible to remain horizontal.
Oh, she had acted in plenty of wedding scenes.
It was hardly a play if there was not a wedding at the end—or at the very least, in the middle.
She had been the bride, more often than not.
She had worn the silk gowns, the jewels.
She had simpered and smiled and professed joy.
She had worn any number of wedding rings…
which had all been slipped off and returned to the props master within minutes of the curtains closing.
But not this time.
This time, she would speak her own name in the vows; the ring placed on her finger would not be so easily removed; and the husband she stood before, vowing all sorts of things like honor and duty, would not be a fellow cast member but a real man.
Not that the others weren’t real, but—but in a way, they weren’t.
And she had never met a man half so real as Samuel Chance.
“Rose?”
Rose started, reaching for the knife that…that was not there. Of course, she had not thought to place it beneath her pillow as she had always done in her rooms before. Well, one never knew who else had a key, even if she was paying the full rate for the room.
“Rose?”
Rose swallowed. She’d almost forgotten she was not alone in here.
That there’d be someone to stop an intruder if it came to that, despite her not having her knife.
The gentle tapping at the screen that the pair had dragged to separate the bed from her future husband’s temporary sleeping arrangements on the hotel sofa would surely not be heard from the corridor, but it echoed around her mind like cannon fire.
“Rose, are you awake?”
This was ridiculous. She could talk to the man. She could always talk to people!
So why was her throat dry and her tongue immovable?
The screen shifted; she could make it out even in the midnight black of the night. It slid slowly, and without any noise, but it was definitely moving.
And she should not have been nervous. Hell, the man had made it perfectly clear that there was to be absolutely none of that sort of thing, or else the annulment would be almost impossible to secure—and it wasn’t as though they wanted to actually remain married to each other.
The very idea!
She did not want a man who didn’t seem to think her good enough to be his marchioness in the long term.
Still, a flicker of unexpected elation rushed through her as the screen disappeared entirely and Samuel Chance, newly the Marquess of Aylesbury and very soon to be her husband, was outlined in the space left behind.
“Are you awake?” he whispered.
Rose snorted with hardly repressed laughter. “I am now.”
“Sorry, I—damn. Sorry.”
Her laughter could not truly be described as repressed now. The man appeared to have tripped over her umbrella, one of the few things that had made it through her adventures since she had left home all those years ago. “What do you want, Samuel?”
For a heart-stopping moment, Rose was almost certain he was going to say something salacious—and she would perhaps even allow it.
Well, it had been a long time since she had felt the touch of a man. One whom she wanted to touch her, at any rate; all those idiots holding her waist on the stage most certainly did not count.
“Can we… Can we talk?” came his whispered reply.
Rose slipped out of bed immediately. The very idea of talking here, while she was sitting in bed!
No, there was only one direction that led to, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow herself to be seduced the…the night before her wedding! Marriage of convenience or not, she was going to allow herself at least a modicum of dignity.
This thought was a tad undermined by the way she slipped on the stockings she had unceremoniously dropped at the side of the bed, but she managed to retain her balance. Just.
“I have a better idea,” Rose said brightly. “Are you dressed?”
There was a moment of silence on the other side of the bed. Then, “‘Dressed’?”
“You have five minutes.”
Five minutes was all she would need, Rose knew, to pull on her thickest gown, find a pair of shoes, and tug on her pelisse.
Five minutes was not enough, sadly, to formulate a plan that would make sense to a man who was evidently worldly enough to creep into a woman’s side of a screen partition and make such a racket tripping over that woman’s umbrella that his question ‘Can we talk?’ could surely only have one meaning.
But she did recall a conversation with Miss Margolotta, six years ago. A conversation in which Miss Margolotta, after a whole bottle of red wine, had told Rose the story of how she had managed to distract her third husband…
“I’m ready,” came Samuel’s whisper. “But where are we—”
“Follow me,” returned Rose with a half-smile—one he surely could not see. “And remain silent.”
Say what you want about strange men who proposed and planned to pay you a great sum of money to marry him for a year and a day, Rose could not help but think dryly as the two of them crept down the sweeping staircase and out of the front door of the hotel.
They knew how to move quietly. Why, Samuel Chance must have crept into dozens of women’s bedchambers to—
She pushed the thought out of her mind and slipped her hand through the man’s arm. “Right. That’s better.”
“Better is a relative term,” muttered Samuel, shivering in the chill night air. “What precisely did you have in mind?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to talk to you while I was lying in bed,” Rose said. “We put up the screen for a reason, I thought. That could lead to…”
She did not finish her sentence. Unfortunately, the dratted man seemed to notice.
Samuel’s face broke into a broad grin. “Lead to what?”
“Never you mind,” Rose said firmly, directing him across the empty street toward the sea.
She could always tell where it was. Perhaps it was her wandering nature, her desire to see the world, her inability to stay in one place for very long. Her father had always said—
“What is it?”
Rose swallowed. Somehow, they had ceased walking, and Samuel was looking down at her, his eyebrows drawn together as he studied her.
Dear Lord, what had she done?
As though he could read her mind, Samuel said quietly, “You—You stiffened, all of a sudden, as though you had seen a ghost. Are you quite well?”
‘Seen a ghost’? No, thought Rose ominously. I’ll never see that man again.
“Merely an errant thought,” she said brightly, as though she frequently reacted bodily to thoughts. She began to walk again, tugging him closer to the sea. “Come on.”
“It did not appear to be merely an errant thought,” said the irritatingly perceptive man on her arm. “What were you thinking of?”
Rose should not have said it. “Not what, but whom.”
There it was: the sea. Even in the darkness of night, she could make out the cresting waves, smell the salt in the air, feel the—
“He hurt you, then.”
Rose swallowed. Samuel’s voice was… well, strange. He was not demanding a response; indeed, it was a statement and not a question that he had uttered. When she glanced up at him, his face was strangely impassive, as though he were not curious at all but merely making conversation.
And yet as she opened her mouth to speak, hardly knowing what on earth she would say to him, Samuel’s nostrils flared.
Rose closed her mouth. She was not about to reveal all her torrid past to a man she hardly knew, and one who would be exiting her life very definitely in just over a year.
No, best to tell him the basics—the absolute truth, no lies, but nothing else—and leave it at that.
Rose inhaled deeply as she pulled Samuel onto the sand. “Yes. My father. I don’t see him now, and I have not for a long time.”
Strange… Just uttering the words felt like poison was being sucked out of a wound that had been left to fester entirely too long. Had she even spoken about him these last eight years? Had her lips even formulated his name?
Samuel’s hand covered her own on his arm. “I did not wish to ask—I mean, about who ought to be giving you away tomorrow.”
Rose’s laugh was bright and harsh and even she winced to hear it. “Oh, that man gave me away a long time ago.”
“He abandoned you?”
Their shoes met with water and Rose halted, desperate to avoid this conversation and yet somehow, there was a trust, an openness she could find with this man that she had never found before.
It was a most disconcerting feeling.
“Rose?”