Chapter Eight
Samuel checked his pocket watch for the ninth time. Then he raised the small mechanism to his ear.
There was a very—very—quiet ticking noise.
Then he shook the timepiece irritably, tapping his foot and ignoring the inconsiderate echoes it made and lifted the pocket watch to his ear once again.
Tick, tick, tick.
The damned thing was definitely working, and even if it was slow, it was most definitely past ten o’clock. So why wasn’t she here?
Someone cleared their throat. “She does have the right day, doesn’t she?”
Samuel glanced up at the vicar, who was waiting patiently to his right, and tried not to glare.
It wasn’t the man’s fault they were being kept waiting.
It was his future bride, whom he had left hours ago in their shared hotel room to dress with assurances she would make her own way, who had decided that timekeeping wasn’t a required quality in a future marchioness. “She’s coming.”
She had better be.
Though it wasn’t a consideration Samuel liked the thought of, if Miss Rosemary Morgan did not appear and agree to become his bride, he had simply run out of time to collect the funds that could do so much good to so many people.
Perhaps he should have married her the day after he met her. Yes, that would have been far better: locking down the agreement and marching her to a church.
Samuel’s foot continued to tap on the stone-flagged floor.
Actresses! This was why people grew so irate with them: they were flighty, they could not keep to time, they did not even bother to attempt it. Oh, he should have known this was going to go wrong. It was the most outlandish thing he had ever done, and of course it hadn’t gone to—
Footsteps.
“Sorry,” whispered Miss Rosemary Morgan as she half-strode, half-ran up the aisle of the small church. “Sorry, sorry, sorr—”
“Where have you been?” hissed Samuel, not bothering to keep his ire back or his tongue in check. “You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago—goodness, you look beautiful!”
She froze, as if surprised to hear him tell her that. But she quickly focused on the task at hand. “I got talking to your mother!” Rose threw back at him through a tight smile as she inclined her head to the vicar and attempted to get her breath back.
Which was not surprising, considering the very tight bust of the blush pink gown she was wearing.
There had been absolutely nothing the woman could say to astonish Samuel.
Nothing except that.
“My—My mother? What were you doing talking to my mother?”
“I ran into her as I was leaving the hotel and she wanted to talk, and I could hardly tell her I was meeting you here to get married,” Rose said in an undertone, her expression unfractured in a mildly disarming manner.
She inhaled deeply, Samuel averting his gaze and only managing to see the rise and fall of those tremendous breasts from his periphery vision, and then remained silent.
“Umm,” said the vicar.
Samuel turned back to the two of them and treated the vicar with a brief grin. “There. Right. Here we go—marry us.”
It appeared that was not acceptable. Rose rolled her eyes, her smile somehow became genuine, and she turned to the man and placed a hand on his arm.
“I do not believe we have met, sir,” she said cordially, and Samuel was horrified to see her squeeze the vicar’s arm in a most… Well. Comforting way. “My name is Rosemary Morgan, and I am delighted that you will be the one marrying me.”
The vicar’s face quickly turned purple. “I—um—not marrying you but marrying you, erm—”
“Oh, I see.” Rose laughed delicately and her merriment echoed around the small church and made it…warmer, somehow? “How amusing!”
Samuel stood transfixed as the woman flirted—flirted!—with another man. Another man, right in front of him. Another man right in front of him, when the man in question was a man of the cloth! And married himself! And near eighty!
Besides, they were running out of time.
He pulled out his pocket watch and glared at the hands on the face. They should have been married twenty minutes ago. It was ridiculous that they were standing around, just talking about—
“—and the temperatures really have dropped, haven’t they?” Rose was saying conversationally. “Honestly, I thought last week we’d have snow, the way the frost was creeping up the windows in the mornings.”
“Can we get on?” Samuel snapped.
Tension shot down his arms like lightning and he hated the sound of his voice, but it was done and he could not take it back.
This is not me.
The thought was unpleasant, indeed, and not one he could ignore. He was never this brusque, this demanding of people’s time—but they had agreed to be wed at eleven o’clock, and it was half past the hour. Did she not see that?
Resisting the urge to lift his pocket watch and dangle it before the woman’s face, even if his mother apparently carried half the blame, Samuel said quietly, “I mean…I would greatly like to be married. Rose?”
“Oh, yes,” Rose said blithely, not even bothering to remove her hand from the vicar’s arm. “But the vicar and I were just saying, this weather, isn’t it frightfully—”
“Yes, I am sure it is,” Samuel interrupted, heat now cascading through him as his irritation grew. “On with the wedding.”
Without thought, for thought would surely have prevented him from doing something so utterly foolish, he leaned forward, took Rose’s hand off the poor vicar’s arm, and grasped it inflexibly.
He had intended to do so as a gesture of readiness for marriage. Was that not what one did, during a wedding ceremony? Hold the bride’s hand?
The last few months had provided him with sufficient family weddings to know, after all, and Samuel was almost certain his sister Lilianna had done such a thing with Taernsby.
And yet despite the utterly natural—in his mind—action, Rose was…flushing. Like an innocent.
Samuel swallowed. They had not had… well, that conversation. They did not need to. He had been perfectly clear that they—that he and she—well, it was not a real marriage. It would not need to be consummated, or at least, it most certainly should not be consummated.
One’s previous experience in such matters, therefore, were entirely uninvestigated.
But… Well. Rose was an actress. Everyone knew what actresses were like. Samuel himself had not gallivanted in that direction, but he’d heard his cousin Zander chatter about such things and it appeared that, in London at least, any actress’s skirts could be lifted with a sufficient amount of coin.
Rather like what he was doing.
But Rose was flushing like—well, like a debutante. Like an innocent.
Surely not.
“You appear to be a little warm, Rose,” Samuel said in a slightly strangled voice, hoping to give her the chance to fan herself—or at the very least, get her cheeks out of control.
And he’d thought the woman could act! He frowned. Was this an act? She didn’t need to put on a performance for a vicar they’d never see again, though.
“Oh, yes, a little warm,” said Rose gratefully, glancing at the vicar with an embarrassed look and lifting her unencumbered hand to fan wholly ineffectively at her now-blazing-red cheeks.
The vicar smiled indulgently. “A wedding service can take the ladies like this, my lord. Such innocent doves…”
“Well, not for much longer,” said Samuel bracingly. “Time to get this over with.”
The instant the words were out of his mouth, he realized that they had been the wrong words.
Rose’s mouth twisted as her eyes narrowed. “I do not believe we are in so much of a rush that—”
“Yes, we are,” Samuel said firmly, trying to communicate with the set of his jaw and the look in his eye that they were most definitely in a rush, and it was her fault they had been delayed in the first place.
Well, hers and his mother’s. But his mother wasn’t here right now to snap at.
Not that he would have snapped at her. Not that she would have been here. Oh, it was all just so aggravating!
“But surely, a few minutes won’t matter?”
“What is the point in waiting? We just need to—”
“In fact,” interrupted the aged vicar with a weary look, his jowls particularly droopy, “the marriage cannot proceed.”
Samuel froze. Then he turned, very slowly, on his heels. “I beg your pardon?”
‘Marriage cannot proceed’? What on earth could be the problem?
He had procured the damned license, and a great deal of money and a significant favor it had cost him too, made the effort to find a bride, introduced her successfully to the family—as his wife, to be sure, but that would be rectified soon—so there was absolutely no reason to delay!
“‘Cannot proceed’?” Rose’s breath hitched. To her credit, she appeared just as disheartened as Samuel felt. “Whyever not?”
“Because, my dear lady,” the vicar said sternly, as though they should really have thought of such a thing, “you have no witnesses.”
Samuel’s shoulders sagged. Witnesses. Blast, yes, he had entirely forgotten. The last… Well, all the family weddings he had attended over the last few months had all been packed affairs—it had been a mite difficult to keep people out. Gossiping Society matron Lady Romeril, for example.
But though he had rolled his eyes at the sheer number of attendees Lilianna had invited, there had been a practical purpose.
A wedding needed witnesses.
Samuel caught Rose’s eye. Evidently, she had not thought of such a thing, either.
“Witnesses,” she said quietly.
“Yes, the whole thing requires—”
“Two people, if I recall?” Rose said brightly, as though she could easily whip up a few people from her reticule. “I remember when I married Romeo—”
“I—I beg your pardon?” the vicar began.
“—and when I married Demetrius, and King Lear too in a very awkward revisionist adaptation,” Rose continued as though the vicar were not speaking. “It was always two. Would two witnesses be sufficient?”
The vicar was gaping but just about managed to nod his head.