“Why? So you could call on me?” She shook her head and a few strands of hair fell out of her rather untidy coiffure. The deepbrown lock contrasted with her pale skin. “You can’t. I’m already spoken for.”
His stomach knotted. “What do you mean?”
“I’m engaged.” Matthew tripped on a stone, but caught himself. The young lady next to him stopped, looked him up and down, and must have assumed he was all right, for she continued. “I acquired my fiancé just the way you mentioned earlier. By trade. My family is trading a lot of money for the title he will someday hold, in hopes that their grandson will be a baron.” The knot in his stomach hardened into a rock. This day couldn’t have gone any worse. She scrunched her face together, which didn’t make her look any older. “Interesting, isn’t it, how the world works? If you have enough money you can become whatever you wish.”
“You…” His voice was mostly steady. “Are marrying a baron?”
“Well,” she shrugged. “He isn’t a baron yet, but he will be.”
“Mr. Harrison?”
Her eyes widened and the corners of her lips rose up in a smile. “Do you know him?”
He scoffed. This could not be happening. “A bit.”
Miss Bateman swallowed and glanced back at the church. Was she looking for him? For the first time since he opened his eyes and took in her appearance, she looked nervous. “Is he kind?”
Was he kind? What kind of question was that? Of course he was kind. He was no monster.
But as he stood over her, something sickening opened in the pit of his stomach. This was the woman he was betrothed to. She was pleasant looking, she was missing neither teeth nor hair, and she didn’t seem slow-witted either. But she was so blasted young.
And scared.
And in a week’s time she would be expected to be in his bed.
The sickness in his middle tightened into something unforgiving. Nothing about this young child being strapped to him made him a kind man. He glanced at her again. Her head didn’t even reach his shoulders. Her eyes were wide and rimmed with timidity. Blast, but Mother was going to be disappointed in him. Not that it would be the first time.
Staying and going through with this marriage would make him a monster, but with the banns already read and her family counting on the marriage, leaving could be even worse.
“No,” he answered honestly. “He is not. He is a coward and a rotten son. You would be better off without him.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked away from her.
“Wait!” she called out from behind him, but he didn’t respond.
It would be at least an hour before church finished. He jumped in his family’s carriage and instructed Williams to take him home. At one point, he thought he heard laughter and someone calling his name, but he ignored it. He’d steeled himself for almost anything. He could have stomached an ugly wife. He could have even managed a dull one. Clumping uneven legs? Honestly, not a problem at all. If he loved her, the sound of her walking would have become sweet to his ears. It was a strange realization. His wife’s looks and wits had been so important to him up until this point.
His carriage pulled away from the church and he caught one last look of the churchyard. It truly was a peaceful place. It would have been a nice place to be buried. But he wasn’t going to find out.
He was willing to do almost anything to preserve the Bridgewater name, but his fiancée looked like she still belonged with a governess, and he couldn’t marry a child.
CHAPTER 2
Lucy heldher younger sister’s hand as Mr. Harrison’s carriage raced away from the churchyard. They’d called out to him, but he’d run away from Helena too quickly. Perhaps sending Helena to speak to him while pretending to be Lucy hadn’t been her most brilliant plan.
“He was good-looking, wasn’t he?” Lucy asked Helena. She’d seen him well enough from behind the oak, but maybe she’d missed something…a large scar or terrible teeth, perhaps?
“He was. You must have been able to see that from your hiding place. But, Lucy, he didn’t look well when he left.”
Lucy laughed. “I shouldn’t think so. I wouldn’t have married him if he had been excited to marry a thirteen-year-old.” A tickle of excitement ran through her fingers. The last few weeks of having her future planned by Mama and Papa had left her exhausted with unease. But the moment she saw the man who was to be her husband pass her in the church, she felt her first spark of hope.
First of all, he wasn’t horrible looking or slovenly. He was the opposite: well-dressed and handsome, even if he looked younger than she’d imagined. Being young wasn’t a problem—it wassimply a surprise. A surprise that had sent hope soaring where before she’d only felt unease.
Secondly, he’d left the church. At last, she would be able to control a minuscule part of this arranged marriage—how she would first meet Mr. Harrison. She turned to Helena. “You were brilliant—absolutely brilliant. Did you see the way his jaw dropped when he thought he was going to have to marry you?”
Helena chewed on her lip as she unpinned her hastily-put-up hair. “But I think we truly worried him.”
Lucy shrugged dismissively, but Helena’s nervous lip-chewing gave her pause. What if her trick angered Mr. Harrison? She knew virtually nothing about the man except that he would be a baron one day. Her parents—especially Helena’s father—were bound and determined that one of their daughters would marry into the peerage. Lucy had only been three years old when her widowed mother had married James Bateman, and she had almost no memories of the scant living they’d had before then. Even though Helena was her half-sister, and took after her father, the two of them couldn’t have been any closer. In fact, Lucy had agreed to this marriage so that, in the future, Helena would have some choice of her own. Not that she would have ever admitted that to Helena.
