TWO
ROSY had automatically closed her eyes as she spoke, but in the silence that followed her stammered request she was forced to open them again.
‘What did you say?’
The words, evenly spaced out and ominously soft, were snapped out between Guard’s strong white teeth, and he was looking at her as though it was her bones, her body, he would really like to inflict that punishment on, she recognised nervously as she cleared her throat a second time.
‘I—I asked you if you’d marry me,’ she repeated quickly, suppressing her body’s physical instinct for flight.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’
He sounded very angry, Rosy recognised, which rather surprised her. She had spent most of the last few hours trying to envisage exactly what his reaction to her request was going to be. That he might be angry had never even entered her head. Amusement, mockery, contempt, disdain, an outright refusal—all of these things she had expected, but anger…
‘No, it isn’t a joke,’ she told him, adding grimly under her breath, ‘I only wish it were.
‘It was Peter’s idea,’ she continued doggedly. ‘I told him it was crazy, but he says it’s the only way we can stop Edward from inheriting the house and destroying it. You know the terms of Gramps’ will.’
‘I know them,’ Guard agreed, ‘but I hadn’t realised this place meant so much to you that you’d be prepared to fulfil them. What happened to all that insistence that you weren’t going to marry until you fell in love, until you were sure that your love was returned? Or was that just a girlish fantasy that faded in the reality of losing this place?’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Rosy told him angrily, ‘but…’
He had taken off his jacket and gone to stand in front of the huge, open fireplace which, along with the Grinling Gibbons carving on the stairs, dominated the hallway.
Guard suited the house, Rosy recognised, before hurriedly looking away from him. With his height and the aura of power and authority which he wore with much the same swagger and flair with which her original ancestor must have worn his cloak, he looked much more at home here than she did herself.
The large rooms, the dark panelling, overshadowed her. In looks and build she took more after her mother’s family than her father’s. Whereas most of the portraits of her ancestors showed stocky, sturdy-looking individuals, she was small and slender—thin, Guard had once disparagingly called her.
It was still her home, though, and a part of her, much as she was reluctant to admit it, would hate to see it destroyed. She was honest enough to recognise that, despite her own feelings towards Guard, the house would be safe in his hands.
‘But what…?’ he demanded. ‘But you love this place so much that you can’t bear to give it up? But you love me so much that…?’
He threw the last question mockingly at her, already knowing the answer, but Rosy still gave it to him.
‘No, of course not,’ she denied vehemently.
Why was he looking at her like that? Watching her with those hooded, eagle-sharp eyes that made her feel so uncomfortable.
‘So, you don’t love either the house or me, but you’re prepared to marry me to keep it.’
‘To save it,’ Rosy corrected him quickly, ‘from Edward and… And it would be an arranged marriage,’ she added carefully, turning her back slightly towards him. For some reason, she found it easier to talk to him like that. She felt safer knowing that he couldn’t see her face, and that she didn’t have to see his.
‘An arranged marriage. And it needn’t last very long. Peter said we could probably even get an annulment and that we need not— That we wouldn’t be—’ She broke off awkwardly, so anxiously conscious of the uncomfortable quality of his silence that unwarily she turned round to look at him.
‘We wouldn’t be what?’ he encouraged her mockingly. ‘Cohabiting…intimate…having sex…making love…?’
Rosy hated the way he almost caressed the words, rolling them over his tongue, purring over them almost, enjoying every second of her own discomfort, she was sure.
‘If that’s supposed to encourage me to agree, you don’t know very much about the male sex and its ego, Rosy. Do you really think that a man—any man—wants to stand up in court and tell the world that he isn’t man enough to take his wife to bed? Do you honestly believe that anyone, but most especially that repulsive cousin of yours, is going to believe the fiction that you and I are genuinely husband and wife when the very mention of the word sex is enough to turn you into a physical embodiment of the traditional, trembling, untouched virgin? Oh, no, my dear. If I were crazy enough to agree to this fraudulent marriage of yours—and it’s a very big “if”—in the eyes of the rest of the world it would have to look as though it was very much the real thing, even if that did mean that ultimately, you’d have to undergo the indignity of going through a divorce.’
Rosy’s heart had started thumping heavily as he spoke, but when she realised that he wasn’t, as she had expected, going to refuse her proposal outright, she stared uncertainly at him, her face still flushed from her earlier embarrassment. It was only Guard who made her react like that when he talked about sex, she admitted crossly. Not even when the teenage boys who used the shelter made what were sometimes extremely blunt and often crude comments did she get as embarrassed or self-conscious as she did with Guard.
‘But it wouldn’t be a real marriage,’ she insisted, turning round to focus watchfully on his face. You were supposed to be able to tell what was really in a person’s mind from their eyes, but that rule didn’t apply to Guard. She could never tell what he was thinking. ‘I mean, we wouldn’t be…’
‘Lovers,’ he supplied for her. ‘It would certainly be very hard to imagine. The only time I’ve ever held you in my arms, you damned near scratched my eyes out,’ Guard reminded her grimly.
‘You terrified me,’ Rosy defended herself. ‘Picking me up like that. It was dark and I…’
‘You were out clandestinely with Clem Angers, poaching your grandfather’s salmon.’
‘Clem had been promising to take me out for ages to show me the badgers’ sett. And then you had to interfere and spoil everything,’ Rosy remembered indignantly. ‘He had been promising me that he’d take me just as soon as I was sixteen.’
‘Really? I do hope you didn’t use that unfortunate turn of phrase when you were explaining what you were doing to your father. Sweet sixteen,’ he continued, ignoring the angry flush darkening Rosy’s face. ‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Just refresh my memory for me, will you, Rosy? How old are you now?’
‘Twenty-two almost,’ she told him impatiently.
‘Mmm…and presumably now well-experienced in the art of kissing, if nothing else. You certainly ought to be after the practice session I witnessed last New Year’s Eve at the Lewishams’ ball.’
Rosy’s flush deepened as she remembered the incident he referred to. One of the Lewisham cousins, a rather intoxicated, impressionable young man, who had been gazing adoringly at her from the other side of the
