Chapter Three #2
It had been easy to ignore his feelings when he avoided her.
Distance gave him a clear advantage. But the gravity of love proved inescapable.
It was like he’d been standing in front of a boulder for a decade, his muscles the only thing stopping its weight from giving in to the downward pull.
But this marriage… God, he’d have a right to seduce her, a right to love her.
It would be the thing to kick his knees in, to set the boulder rolling again.
It would flatten him in a second.
“We simply will not marry.” Her head appeared around the side of the screen, stormy eyebrows and all.
“Of… course not.” He’d joined the game this evening to acquire a wife who did not want children, not a friend he’d lusted over once .
The rest of her body appeared from behind the screen, her simple blue gown sagging, the bodice empty. She’d not unbound her breasts. His hands twitched. He clasped them behind his back.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “What are we to do? If you had stayed home, or at your club or the brothel, or wherever you were, I would be engaged to Beckwith right now.”
“Be glad you’re not,” he muttered.
“Would be better than this. I need a house! And a husband. How will I get it now?”
“The usual way, I suppose. What you should have done to begin with, Caro. Put yourself on the market.”
“You may not have noticed, but my reputation is not… wifely.”
He had noticed. Deuced entertaining, it was, too.
Caro could be no one but herself. A viscount’s granddaughter who’d been dragged about the world and raised to make that world better any way she could.
A radical’s daughter and a radical in her own right.
He’d wondered why she’d been hanging about London this Season.
She had little in the way of family, only a newly married older stepsister.
And Felix had heard that the current viscount, her uncle, wanted nothing to do with either of them.
Sought to distance himself from their ideals.
Caro had ingested Wollstonecraft with her mother’s milk and abolitionist pamphlets with fairy tales. Odd that she should now seem to crave a less radical life. Her father’s death had truly hurt her, then, ripped her open, and she was using whatever she could to sew herself back together.
He understood that. Too well. Fellow feeling didn’t mean he’d marry her, though.
She swung toward him, turning on her toe, and presenting him with her back. “Tie me up, please.”
Had those words ever not made a cock twitch when said with the red, red lips of a pretty woman?
The back of her neck was slender and graceful beneath thick, dark hair coiled like a crown atop her head.
Little curls danced at her nape, a temptation for fingers that remembered pulling braids and flicking earlobes.
Her earlobes . Little morsels. The newly unfolded painting of Miss Caroline Maxwell—it changed how he saw every bit of her. No girlish flower any longer. Now a luscious fruit he wanted to bite into.
His hands were unclasped before he gave them permission, and they were caressing the edges of her gown just as quickly, tying her up. To get her out of sight, of course.
No gown could hide her scent, however. Soap and…
How in hell could a woman smell like wildflowers?
Like those little pink and yellow blooms that dotted the field behind his grandfather’s house.
The scent of them must have soaked into her skin.
They’d laid there for hours. Her telling those silly riddles.
Him pretending to read. Sun and soil, the fresh, sweet scent of wildflowers rising in the summer heat around them; he’d never forget that smell.
Did she bathe in pink and yellow petals? Grind them up for her soap?
Caro in a bath of pink petals… God, what an image. He inhaled deeply.
She stepped away from him as he finished the last tape. “Thank you.” Brusk, no nonsense.
“I hear you’ve earned a moniker.” Any topic of conversation to distract him from the feeling of her still alive in his fingertips.
“Don’t you dare say it.” Her finger became a saber, stabbing at his chest.
“London’s Most Stubborn Lady.”
She sighed and dropped dramatically onto a nearby low couch. “Fools. As if stubbornness is a character flaw.”
“It’s not?” He hovered, his body casting a shadow over her face as she rested her head against the back of the couch.
She closed her eyes. “Of course not. I know what I want, and I go after it.”
“With your plans .”
Her eyes popped open. “This one did not work out quite as I wished it to. You’ve ruined my plan.”
“What was this one about, then?”
“It does not matter.” Each word the equivalent of a sigh.
So lost. The need to soothe her sadness like swallowing a firecracker—dangerous.
“I just wanted to wed. To have a house outside of London where I can be alone. That’s all.
A spot of renovation to keep me busy.” She peeked up at him.
“Something to do.” Heaven and hell and all the world in between those…
whisky-colored eyes that would be his undoing. They wavered, watery.
Tears.
“We’ll marry,” he barked. Down went the firecracker. Gulp. Boom . Where had it even come from?
“We cannot!”
“Why not?” No backing down now, and… maybe not the worst idea, either. Usually, his impulses ended well. At the very least, no one had died yet.
Surely enough time had passed since he’d lost his heart to her.
Yes, his body had decided to pick up where it had left off, and yes, his heart could roll all the way down the hill if allowed.
But he simply would not allow it. “Why not?” he said again, pulling her to her feet.
“I have a house I do not go to, where you can be alone. That’s what you wanted. And you are what I want, too.”
Her cheeks flushed bright pink between one breath and the next.
Hell. He heard it now. You are what I want .
What a fumble. “I meant… I joined this game because the winner was promised an absent wife. If you promise to visit my grandfather with me a few times a year, I’m happy.
That’s why I’m here, why I wish to marry.
For him.” The old man wanted grandchildren, too.
Hated to disappoint him, but he’d have to.
Children were quite out of the realm of possibility.
“Us… marry? You and I?”
“We will merely continue as we have been for so many years—strangers. But we’ll share a name.
” Ten years ago, he’d disappointed her, refused to give her what she’d asked for because he’d been afraid.
But now he could make up for it. He could give her this—a marriage between strangers, a house to be alone in, a chance to work through her grief in whatever odd way she apparently needed to. “You live your life, and I live mine.”
Her hands, still held in his, flinched, twitched. “Are you sure?” In the candlelight, her thick braided crown of mahogany hair glinted.
No. Not sure at all. “Yes.”
She leapt to her feet, strode to the door, and threw it open. “Mrs. Dove-Lyon, we’re ready to discuss the marriage settlement now.”