2. Part II #2
“Miss Persephone,” he said, his voice huskier than he’d intended, and she jumped at the sound, her eyes widening at the sight of him lurking in the overgrowth.
“L-Lord Montague,” she sputtered, rising from the bench in a spill of yellow skirts. “W-what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” Alec’s mouth curled with amusement at her flustered state, so rare these days when every look, every word, every movement was carefully calculated. “My runaway bride. Tell me the truth, am I really so hideous that you could not stand to look upon me?”
“Yes,” she said, causing his eyebrow to raise. “I mean, no. I mean… you’re not what I expected.”
Nor are you, he replied silently.
“What were you expecting?” His arms slid behind his back as he stepped out from behind the sunflower, head canting slightly to the left. “An ogre?”
Her startled laugh, like chimes teased by an afternoon breeze, caught him off guard and caused his lips to twist into an odd, unaccustomed shape.
A smile.
For the first time in a long time, the infamously jaded Earl of Ashcroft was smiling.
Not a sneer.
Not a smirk.
But a true, genuine, crinkle-in-the-corners-of-the-eyes, sort of smile.
“Pray tell,” he drawled, placing his boot on the edge of the bench and leaning his forearm across his knee so that he and his fiancée, with the constellations of freckles and musical laugh, were suddenly, intimately, face to face. “Who did you think you would see when you came into the parlor?”
“Well… I… I thought I would… um… see a man.”
Alec’s second eyebrow rose to join the first. “I should assume so.”
“But,” she went on, her cheeks turning the same color pink as the fading roses behind her, “not such a handsome one. You’re… you’re…”
“Yes?” he asked politely, the stern grooves of his mouth twitching as he struggled to contain another smile.
Good lord, were the bloody things contagious?
Grin once like a besotted fool and that was the only expression he was capable of emitting for the rest of his life?
For the sake of his reputation, he hoped not.
“You’re entirely too attractive!” she exclaimed, and Alec found himself choking on a laugh.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” he countered.
“Not when I’m… I’m me, and you’re, well, you.” Her brow furrowed. “We don’t match, and everyone knows what happens when you try to hold books up with uneven bookends. They topple,” she said unnecessarily, and Alec’s smile was immediately replaced with a scowl.
It didn’t matter that his first impression of Persephone had been of an austere, rural sort of miss more suited for a barnyard than a ballroom.
He’d been wrong, and she was, too, if she thought herself incomparable to him.
Physical attributes aside, couldn’t she see that he was as rotten as they came on the inside?
Whereas she was sweet, and crisp, and shiny.
A breath of fresh autumn air in a world saturated with cynicism and scorn.
Just by being in her presence, he felt inexplicably lighter. As if his feet weren’t as heavily tethered to the ground as they’d been when he’d arrived. As if he could leap, nay, bound into the sky at any moment.
Was this happiness, he wondered? An emotion that had always eluded him growing up under the dark shadow cast by his father’s temper, and had continued to evade him into adulthood as his own shadows had festered and grown.
“We match if I say we match,” he growled, more harshly than he’d intended, and could have kicked himself when Persephone recoiled, her pretty cheeks paling.
“That is,” he amended in a marginally improved tone, “I’ve seen nothing that would dissuade me from believing we would be perfectly suitable as husband and wife. ”
“Perfectly suitable,” she repeated slowly, a mahogany curl dancing across her temple as her head tilted to the side.
Without thinking, Alec reached out and captured the errant tendril, pinching it between his index finger and thumb.
They both went very, very still, only the exhale of his own breath and the trill of nearby songbirds audible above the loud, persistent thumping in his chest. The sound of a heart, long dead, being brought back to life.
“Indeed,” he rasped, intimately, painfully aware of how close his mouth was to hers.
A few inches, and he could be kissing her.
But this was not a mistress to be ravished, he reminded himself, jaw clenching at the restraint it took not to simply take what he wanted.
This was an innocent. A tender young lady, na?ve to the arts of seduction.
A young lady he needed to like him, not frighten off into the bushes like a rabbit fleeing a hunter’s snare.
With all that in mind, Alec reluctantly released her hair and removed his foot from the bench. “I believe your mother was going to put out lemonade on the rear terrace,” he said, extending his arm.
Persephone stared at his sleeve cuff as if searching for hidden fangs before she tentatively extended her gloved hand onto his forearm and took a small step forward. “I do like lemonade.”
“Excellent,” he said, flashing her a rehearsed grin. Most women would have–and had–swooned at the very sight of it. But his bride-to-be only frowned.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said as they began to walk toward the house, following the same winding trail he’d taken into the maze past the unkempt garden beds and a cherub fountain that had gone dry.
“Do what?” he asked, lifting a drooping hollyhock out of their path.
“Pretend.” She flitted him a sideways glance. “If we are to be married, I should like us to be honest with each other at all times. That’s very important to me.”
“If?” he said, ignoring the twinge of guilt that nibbled at the edge of his frayed conscience.
Were he being completely honest, he’d have to admit what he was really doing here, and why.
Not just to honor a betrothal contract he’d had every intention of ignoring until his dying breath, but to use Persephone to claim his inheritance and then be rid of her the second he had what he wanted.
She wasn’t going to be his wife. She was going to be the means to an end.
But if he told her that, she wouldn’t marry him.
If he didn’t tell her, he’d be guilty of lying by omission to a woman who had just declared how essential honesty was to her.
It was an uncomfortable position to be in for a man who ordinarily didn’t care about anyone’s comfort but his own, and as they came into view of the terrace where Lady Montague was hovering over a crystal pitcher of lemonade, Alec ordered himself to remember why he’d come here in the first place.
He hadn’t ridden pell mell to this crumbling excuse of a country estate looking for love, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let himself be swayed from his mission by a pair of big, brown, guileless eyes.
Persephone may not have been what he was expecting, and his reaction to her was certainly a nuisance, but that was all he would permit it to become. A mild nuisance, easily swatted aside.
“While we are engaged, I should like us to get to know one another before we commit to marriage,” his fiancée said, her expression earnest and all the more adorable for it. “Don’t you agree?”
“But of course. I should like to learn everything there is to know about you.” Alec was relieved to find the lie came easily, as they usually did. No bothersome conscience to contend with. No annoying tweak of guilt.
Thank heavens.
It wasn’t until he had finished his first glass of lemonade and was waiting for the second to be poured that he considered perhaps it hadn’t been a lie at all.