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“When I was at school I had a group of…friends. We weren’t necessarily that close, but we were united in feeling a certain way. The twelve of us were very young and yet ridiculously bitter for that age.”
Louisa slid off his lap, and sat on the opposite side of the hot tub. She’d had told him before that she’d been angry when her parents had sent her away, and he’d acknowledged he felt the same. Anger, however, was very different from bitterness and, of course, his Louisa noticed the difference immediately.
“Bitter? That your families were rich enough to send you all to an elite boarding school? Struggling with too much privilege?”
Sebastian leaned forward to put his hand on her hip under the water, toying with the knotted string that tied her bikini bottoms in place. If anyone else tried to tease him like this he would have considered it rude. Louisa, however, had slipped past his every defense.
“Women, mostly,” he said truthfully.
Louisa gave him an unimpressed look.
He shrugged and continued his story. “All of our parents were divorced. None of us had much experience with dating, and those few experiences had not gone well. It felt,” he rolled his head back, looking up at the brilliant blue sky, trying to conjureup the bitterness he’d felt in his youth. “It was already feeling like girls were after our money rather than us.”
Louisa took a sip of her champagne, her face blank. He suspected that Louisa loved him despite his money, not because of it.
“I have the feeling you’re going to tell me something terrible,” she said lightly.
“That’s because you’re a pessimist.”
“Ok, so what did this group of bitter young men do?”
“We set up a tontine.”
“What’s a tontine?”
Her tone was still light, but he could hear her growing frustration. He wondered if he’d been mistaken to bring this up. It was such a small thing really, it was just that he was sure she understood him perfectly and she would understand this too.
“It’s a bet, traditionally everyone puts money in the bank and then the last surviving member of the group gets all the money.”
Louisa’s eyes widened slightly and she covered her discomfort by taking a gulp of champagne.
“But,” Sebastian continued placidly, “This wasn’t anything so dark. We set up a little fund, a very little fund actually. Each man loses his bet when he gets married, the winner of the tontine is the last man still unmarried.”
Louisa’s lips twitched in amusement.
“Is there a time limit to this bet?” she asked.
It was a good question, and how clever of his fiancee to immediately question the details of the contract. In this case, though, there were no details, no clauses with wiggle room. It had been dreamed up with all the simplicity of schoolboys.
“No time limit. It lasts our whole lives. No-one from the group has got married. I’ll be the first. The first to bow out and lose my stake.”
Louisa pursed her lips, and he found himself suddenly nervous. Would she understand why he was telling her this? The tontine was not a big deal, he’d happily marry her tomorrow. But he’d be even happier if he married her after winning the tontine - however impossible that sounded.
“I don’t like the sound of you losing anything,” Louisa said. He felt a muscle in his jaw unclench, of course Louisa understood him!
“It’s not a serious thing…” Sebastian began. “Although it felt very serious at the time, I suppose. Marrying you is far more important than winning a schoolboy bet.”
The look Louisa gave him was pure mischief. “I’m not sure I’d feel right starting our married life like that.”
Right from the start, the two of them had bonded over their competitive nature.
Life for Sebastian had always been about competition - a constant fight against his peers, his rivals and the entire world. When he’d met Louisa he knew that here, finally, was someone on the same team as him.
“It’s not a big deal,” he demurred. Surprisingly, now that he’d told her about the tontine, and she’d acknowledged the importance of it, he found he cared even less about losing. Even the fact that he would be the first out of the bet, the first to lose, bothered him less.
“No,” Louisa said, reaching to put her champagne glass down on the side of the tub. “We can’t start out our married life by taking a loss. At least, at the very least, not without trying to do something about it.”
Sebastian snorted. He knew that would have been his reaction too, if their positions were reversed. That fighting drive united them. However, he didn’t see any way of avoiding the inevitable.
