Chapter 14 #2
Maybe Neil wasn’t tumbling into the past more often. Maybe he’d been doing it all along—and was only now figuring that out.
For all the bloody good it did him. What had Sayyid called him back in Egypt? A wali—the Islamic term for someone gifted by God, like a saint.
If Neil were a saint, he was an utterly useless one.
With all this musing, Neil had gone conspicuously quiet. Thankfully, Constance didn’t seem to notice. She seemed a mite preoccupied herself.
She hopped up to sit on one of the rails, her legs dangling over the floor. She wore a pair of delicate leather sandals, her toes peeking out from under the hem of her sari.
They were very nice toes, Neil noted distractedly.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Constance mused, swinging her perfect toes. “Ten years ago, you were Ellie’s stick-in-the-mud older brother, and I was a pest setting beetles loose in your sock drawer. And now here we are.”
“Here we are?” Neil echoed confusedly.
“Friends,” Constance pressed back impatiently. “Aren’t we?”
Neil wondered absently at her question. Were they friends?
Constance had grown from the danger gnome into an exceptional woman bursting with intelligence, courage, and principle.
Neil had become remarkably fond of her in the relatively short time since they had become reacquainted.
In fact, she fit into his life so naturally that he found it hard to imagine how he had gone through so many years without her.
Of course, they were friends… even if Neil’s brain occasionally spat up random, awkward thoughts about how pretty she was.
Like now, as the gilded threads of her sari shimmered where they framed the curve of her hips.
Neil yanked his attention from Constance’s hips. “Obviously. Yes.”
The words were a bit lacking after all the extra time it had taken him to answer, so Neil pushed them a bit further. “You know I’m here for you, Connie.”
The response was solidly friendly.
Constance’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “It’s funny that you should say that, Stuffy… because as it happens, I need to ask you for a somewhat unusual favor.”
A thrill of warning danced along Neil’s spine. “A favor?”
“Nothing too dramatic, I promise,” Constance quickly assured him.
Neil did not feel very assured—but it would hardly have been friendly of him to admit that. “I’m happy to help. What do you need?”
His attention hitched once more on Constance’s elegant toes. He could glimpse the perfect turn of her ankle above the strap of her sandal.
“Just for us to become engaged for a little while,” Constance replied lightly.
Neil’s thoughts stuck on how Constance’s ankle must necessarily lead to the firm, strong curve of her calf. “What’s that?” he asked blankly.
Then his mind caught up, and the columns of the pavilion tilted dangerously.
Just for us to become engaged.
Constance hopped down from the rail. “Not for real, of course. We’d only be pretending—but at least that would stop my family from throwing suitors at me. They are determined that I must marry before my next birthday, which is only four months away, as you know perfectly well.”
“November twelfth,” Neil blurted out automatically. His head was still spinning as he struggled to absorb Constance’s words.
A pretend engagement. Between him and Constance.
The spinning burned away in a rush of righteous indignation. “Hold on—determined that you will marry? What does that mean, exactly?”
Constance didn’t seem to hear him. “And now it appears that Aai has decided to take sides in the matter. You know how Aai gets when she has set her mind to something. She is terrifyingly effective. But if I’m able to convince the family that I’m already getting married, it would give me time to think of a more permanent way to diffuse the situation. ”
“But what are they threatening to do?” Neil’s voice rose. “Marry you off to the next bounder who comes along?”
Constance arched a brow at the blazing heat in his tone. “I don’t believe that’s precisely what they have in mind.”
“Then what the devil do they have in mind?” Neil stormed across the pavilion. “What else does it mean, exactly, to compel someone to become married?”
Constance looked wryly amused as he paced the ground in front of her. “I believe the intention is to push me to stop being quite so particular and agree to select one of the available gentlemen for myself.”
“Because that’s a bad thing? Being particular about who you’re planning to spend the rest of your life with?” Neil whirled on her. “Back in Puri, you said the men who courted you acted like you were some prize they wanted to mount on the wall like a bloody hunting trophy.”
Constance watched him with barely concealed curiosity. “A good few of them, certainly.”
Neil’s voice echoed off the dome of the pavilion with considerable force. “How can your parents think it’s acceptable to pressure you into marrying someone who’s going to treat you like that?”
“I suppose they think I’m being overly picky.”
He jabbed a finger at her. “But are you opposed to marriage?”
“Not on principle.”
Neil threw up his arms. “Then why would they assume you aren’t reasonably and intelligently assessing the merits of the potential candidates that you’ve been introduced to?”
Constance’s eyes danced with humor. “They likely think I’m too young to know any better.”
“So you’re too young to know any better, but old enough to be compelled into precipitously binding yourself to a person who would have an inordinate amount of power over you for the rest of your life.”
Constance’s mouth twitched with a barely suppressed smile. “You realize you sound like Ellie right now.”
“She’s my sister,” Neil retorted. “It’s not as though I’ve never listened to her.”
“I had no idea you were such a liberal thinker.”
“It’s not liberal to state obvious facts!”
Constance patted his arm soothingly. “Of course, it isn’t. So—what do you think?”
“About what?” Neil frowned, momentarily confused.
“Pretending to be engaged with me,” Constance replied. “Just for a little while! As soon as I’ve figured out a better strategy for escaping their scheme, we’ll find a way out of it.”
Neil’s righteous anger crashed into a muddle of worry. “How does one find a way out of an engagement?”
“You just break it off,” Constance airily assured him.
“But… what do we tell everyone?”
“That we changed our minds.”
Neil’s thoughts moved through cake batter. “Have you ever known of someone who called off an engagement before? Was it really that simple?”
Constance shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”
Neil felt a low thrill of alarm. “What does that mean?”
“Well, Albert Harper ran off with his fiancée’s cousin.”
“I see.”
“And then there was Richard Lattimore,” Constance continued. “He turned out to have a load of gambling debts.”
“Right,” Neil returned, unease creeping up his spine.
“Nobody ever gave a reason for why Mr. Lang broke things off with Miss Caffrey—but everyone simply assumed that he found someone with more money.”
Neil stiffened with indignation. “That fellow sounds like a rotter.”
Constance’s face fell with dismay. “They all ended up sounding like rotters.” She shook her head. “I take it all back. We can’t have a fake engagement.”
“Hold on—I didn’t say that,” Neil pushed back. “I just think we need to consider all the possible—”
“No.” Constance took up his place pacing across the pavilion floor. “Don’t you see? Even if we made it clear that it was a love match, and not that you had seduced me to get your hands on my fortune—”
“That I what?” Neil burst out with a lurch of mortification.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure we could have convinced them,” Constance assured him with a dismissive wave of her hand.
Her words sparked a wicked curiosity. “How would we have done that, exactly?”
“But it doesn’t matter,” Constance pressed on, ignoring his question. “I’ll have to find another stratagem for escaping Aai’s marital machinations. I won’t be responsible for branding you a rascal and ruining your future marriage prospects.”
“My marriage prospects?” Neil stared at her, his mind struggling to keep up. “I am an unemployed archaeologist from a family nobody has ever heard of.”
Constance set her hands on her hips. “Don’t be silly. You have a great deal to offer a potential wife.”
“Like what, exactly?” Neil asked, bewildered.
“All sorts of things!” Constance studied him with frank curiosity. “Haven’t you any interest in being married?”
Neil adjusted his collar. It suddenly felt a bit tight, even though he had left his bow tie back in his room. “I suppose I’ve always assumed that I would marry, once I met the right person.”
“What would the right person look like?” Constance pressed with a note of avid interest.
Neil’s mind blanked of everything but hair like polished ebony, enormous brown eyes, and a gorgeously curved body with knives strapped to it.
“No idea,” he blurted out.
Constance was clearly dissatisfied with his response. “But what’s in your ‘wife space?’”
“My ‘wife space?’”
“You know.” Constance waved an impatient hand. “The place in your life that a wife would fit into. What do you imagine she would do all day while you’re off being scholarly? Make you dinner? Paint watercolors? Manage your household?”
“What household? In Canonbury, there’s just Sylvia who does the cooking and a girl who comes in three times a week to clean. But neither of them requires much managing. Sylvia knows what she’s doing better than Mum does.”
Constance gave an exasperated huff. “Then what do you expect your wife to do all day?”
“Whatever she wants to?” Neil returned uncertainly.
Constance considered him thoughtfully. “You have really given no thought at all to what role a woman might play in your life?”
Neil’s mind was abruptly flooded with thoughts of one role he had most certainly imagined a woman playing in his life.
Very vividly imagined.
Not that anyone had played that role for him as of yet.