Chapter 6 #2
“Emma, he thinks of me as little more than a child. He’s used to bold American women. Ones who know how to…to entice men. I’m too fragile for him. He says he’s afraid to break me, but I’m terrified of the moment when he finds out I’m already broken.”
“Hush, you.” Emma squeezed her close. “You mustn’t talk like that. You’re not broken, darling, you’re simply uncompleted. You’re a young woman who has yet to finish becoming who she was meant to be. Certainly, you can’t be broken before you’re even made.”
Filled to the brim with gratitude, Rosaline leaned into her sister’s embrace, resting her head on her shoulder. “You’re so kind, but—”
Emma’s hand clamped over her mouth as the click of several finely cobbled heels on the parquet floors filtered up through the staircase banister.
Another pair of women, or perhaps a trio, had paused on the floor beneath the dark landing on which the Goode sisters perched, to indulge in a bit of gossip.
“…size of his hands is positively obscene,” one said under her breath. “They were as callused as my land-keeper’s.”
“Aren’t you and your land-keeper lovers?” Another lady added syrup to her sneer to make it more palatable, Rosaline supposed.
“Only because I hadn’t met Mr. Elijah Wolfe yet,” said the first before a rip of fabric announced that she’d opened her fan. “In my experience, men who look like that fornicate like animals. They’ll shape you into the most vexing positions and pound you past all semblance of sanity.”
A third companion simpered. “When have you ever come into contact with a man like that? God doesn’t make his ilk in our Empire.”
“Oh, he sends us a few, though one does have to search carefully, and often in Scotland.”
“I wonder if he’s as ruthless in bed as he is in business,” the second woman sighed. “I worry for the wife.”
“She’s an odd little mouse, isn’t she? They seem so ill matched. It appears to me a marriage of convenience, or perhaps of circumstance.”
“Which means he’ll be in the market for a mistress…”
The atmosphere veritably vibrated with excitement as Rosaline’s stomach seized and twisted so violently, she pressed a hand to her mouth, afraid to be sick.
Emma surged to her feet, fists curled into balls of wrath. “I’m going to put a stop to this.”
“Don’t.” Rosaline seized her hand and pulled, leveraging her help to stand. “Don’t make a scene. It’s just a bit of gossip.”
She wanted to feel as tranquil about it as she conveyed, but both her body and her mind were dizzy with a dervish of emotions and anxieties.
Though she’d known her husband all of a dozen days, and had interacted with him seldom in that time, the thought of him taking a mistress was untenable.
Especially them. Those women who had already guessed she was too much a mouse to please him.
Was it an opinion her husband shared?
“Rosaline…” Emma stepped down a stair and faced her, bringing them eye level as she was several inches taller and more regal. “Has anyone discussed the wedding night with you?”
“It’s generally thought among our family that this will be a marriage in name only.”
Emma’s steady eyes searched her own. “Is that what you truly want?”
Gulping, Rosaline shook her head. “I want what our sisters have. Affection, passion…but I don’t think Mr. Wolfe is the kind of man who—”
“Hang what kind of man he is,” Emma said with a quiet but fervent passion.
“You are one of the loveliest women on this green earth. It was why Uncle Reginald hid you from everyone. It was why he was critical and malicious toward you over the rest of us, because he didn’t want you to realize your worth.
Rosaline, he was going to sell you to a wealthy bidder to marry, and your revenge is that you ended up with one of the wealthiest men in the world, and he doesn’t get a penny. ”
That brought a faint smile to Rosaline’s stiff features. She had more reason to hate Uncle Reginald than even her siblings realized.
“I kissed Mr. Wolfe,” she confided. “And he seemed to enjoy it. But then he…well, he hasn’t spoken to me since.”
“Then speak to him, Ros,” Emma said with an eye roll.
“Make him take notice. We women are expected to spend all our lives waiting for a man to tell us what to do next. To wait and be available at his pleasure. Well, I know I wasn’t born with male parts, but this is me giving you permission to stop hiding up high where no one can see you.
Go to your husband. Let him look at you.
He won’t be able to help but be impressed. Enamored, I dare say.”
“He hasn’t looked at me all day,” Rosaline lamented.
Emma regarded her as if she’d sprouted horns. “What nonsense are you talking? Granted, he’s been attempting to remain furtive, but when he looks at you, Rosaline, even my breath catches in my throat. I’ve seen starving men staring at a tenderloin with less longing.”
Rosaline’s eyes widened. “Truly?”
“Stop being a ninny and go,” Emma urged with the sort of fond impatience only elder sisters seemed to employ.
Rosaline descended the stairs on unsteady feet, wishing she’d not insisted upon taller heels to make her seem less comically short beside her husband. The floor seemed extra slippery. The ground beneath her threatened to fall away at any moment.
Both literally and figuratively.
She paused in the entry to the ballroom to search for Eli, feeling a hundred or so sets of eyes upon her as well as a thousand pinpricks of trepidation.
There.
He was so easy to find, standing both taller and wider than most men.
As his back was to her, she took a moment to gaze at him. To watch the light streaming through the windows glance off the tamed mane of his dark hair. To appreciate the lines of him, breadth and depth and length all scrupulously tethered by toughened sinew and unimaginable strength.
His skin weathered by the elements and painted by even brief encounters with the uncompromising Nevada sun, he was positively swarthy, surrounded by her famously pallid countrymen.
A circle of gentlemen had gathered around him, their heads pressed close as they discussed something so intently, she was loath to interrupt.
“Congratulations again, dear sister,” Emmett said, kissing her cheek. “You make the most ravishing bride. Have you seen Emma?”
“Don’t you mean Lucy?”
His smile turned to ash, though he fought to cover it most valiantly. “I’ve danced with her thrice, now. Any more would be obscene.”
With a sympathetic squeeze of his arm, Rosaline directed him to the stairs and drifted through the crowd of strangers. Some added their well wishes, and others simply stared as if she were a Hydra sprouting more heads than was proper.
It didn’t matter.
They didn’t matter. She knew so many of them wished to be attached to her husband’s fortune. And now she realized just how fervently many of them would wish to share his bed, as well.
As she approached Eli from behind, several of the men redirected their appreciative gazes down toward her rather than on the debate her husband was immersed in.
His broad back was tense, his voice guttural and gravely as he gestured to the scowling, portly man across from him.
“The salient point here is that tungsten is the strongest of any natural metal, and is used to alloy steel to make it stronger. American architects and construction giants are ravenous for it as they race to build structures as tall as the Tower of Babel itself. More stories than you can possibly imagine. You’ve no idea what a treasure that cache in Devon truly is, Mr. Crompton, but I’m telling you now—”
“That’s Lord Crompton to you, young man.” The Baron shook his jowls in outrage.
“Maybe to your nationals, but I claim no man as lord.” Eli stated this without gravitas or ire, but simple fact. “Regardless, what I was saying—”
“The cheek of this upstart colonial!” Lord Crompton’s pate, visible beneath his dearth of sparse silver hair, darkened from red to purple.
“How dare you presume to tell me what to accept into my own refineries. You’ve not an ounce of legal bearing and certainly no breeding or family connections to speak of.
Were I a younger man, I’d teach you some bloody respect.
I’ve been in this business for five and twenty years! You were scarcely out of the nursery.”
“I was picking iron out of stone with my own bare hands by then.” Dark color also climbed from beneath her husband’s collar, belying his controlled intonation.
“And I invite you all to tell me who has more credibility, a man who has amassed the holdings and fortune I have in the course of a single decade, or a man who’s been in the trade twice as long, and is barely solvent enough to keep his machinery in working order or his employees paid decent wages.
I don’t give a dusty fuck if you’re an aristocrat, an autocrat, or a bureaucrat, if you want my respect you have to earn it first.”
Even Rosaline joined in the gasp at Eli’s frank and grievous assessment.
He didn’t know. He didn’t realize that he’d levered what was possibly the two most heinous insults at the man in the space of a handful of sentences. One didn’t mention personal finances in public and one certainly didn’t make light of another man’s title.
Ever.
Crompton looked as if his head might pop like a grape beneath the pressure of his fury.
When he spoke, droplets of froth and spittle spewed from his lips.
“Irrespective of what you Americans have in undeserved resources, you’ve yet to learn that dignity and nobility cannot be bought.
And neither can my refineries! I’ll consign them to hell before I see them sullied by your tungsten, you insufferable—”
Rosaline stepped around her husband, inserting herself into the circle of perhaps a dozen men before she could think better of it. She hated the attention of so many, and yet she felt as if it were this, or a real-life gunfight in the streets at high noon. Er, in this case, half past five.
That, or the Baron would suffer an apoplexy on her wedding day.