“Because you are a rake? This was all a game, then?” Her tone, she realized, matched his own in flatness. “But a remarkably foolish one. What if you had won? You would have been stuck for life with a prim, respectable wife. A perfect lady. A perfectly dull lady. That is what I am, Lord Ravensberg.”
The sharpness of her pain was ridiculous. She had never respected this man or believed his preposterous flatteries. She respected him even less now. What did it matter that he had made a wager concerning her only because she was dull, dull, dull? For that was what dignity, gentility, and respectability added up to for him. And he was quite right. She was exactly what he thought her to be. She had always been proud of being a lady. She was still proud. So the pain was not valid. She was not really feeling it. Only anger—against herself more than against him. She had known from the start who and what he was. She had deliberately chosen not to listen to her family. She had wanted to assert her independence. And all the time she had been persuading herself that she was immune to his charm.
“No,” he said. “You do yourself an injustice. And it was not just a game. I really did— do—need a bride. Someone like you. But I should not have courted you with such . . . insensitivity. With such careless disregard for you as a person. I should not have allowed you, or any other lady, to become the object of a wager. You may be the perfect wife for me, but I would be just the worst possible husband for you.”
She should have risen to her feet then, the explanation given, and made her way back to the main path and the box where Mr. and Mrs. Merklinger waited. For very pride’s sake she should have left—and refused his escort. But she did not move.
“Why do you need a bride by the end of June?” she asked him. “That is less than two weeks away. And why a—a perfect lady?” She could not quite keep the bitterness from her voice.
“I had better tell you everything.” He sighed and took a step closer. But he did not sit down beside her. He set one foot on the wooden seat instead and draped an arm over his raised leg. His face, only inches from her own now, was as serious as she had ever seen it.
“I have been summoned to Alvesley for the summer,” he said. “My father’s principal seat, that is. My brother’s death almost two years ago made me his heir and forced me to sell my commission since he pointed out to me that I was no longer free to put my life at risk every day. My life was suddenly valuable to him, you see, even though he banished me forever the last time I saw him.”
“You did not wish to sell out?” she asked, noting the unusually bitter tone of his voice.
“As a younger son, I was brought up for a military career,” he said. “It was what I wanted anyway. And I enjoyed it, all things considered. It was something I did well.”
She waited.
“There is to be a house party in celebration of my grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday this summer,” he told her. “My banishment has been revoked. The prodigal is to be allowed home after all. He is to learn his duties as the future earl, you see. And one of those duties is to take a bride and set up his nursery. It is my father’s intention, in fact, to make my betrothal the central event of a summer of festivities. It is to be a birthday gift to my grandmother.”
All was beginning to make sense. Her respectability, her reputation as a perfect lady, made her a good candidate. She had been chosen with cold calculation. As most brides of her class were, of course. Had he been open about his intentions from the start she would not have been offended. There was nothing intrinsically offensive about them.
“The Earl of Redfield has instructed you to choose a respectable bride?” she asked. “Was it he who suggested my name?”
“No.” He tapped his free hand against the leg on which he stood. “Actually he has another prospect in mind.”
“Oh?”
“My dead brother’s betrothed.”
“Oh.” Lauren clasped her hands tightly in her lap. How very distasteful for both Lord Ravensberg and the poor lady, who was being handed from one brother to the next like a worn inheritance.
“And my own before him,” he said after a slight pause. “But when given the choice three years ago, she chose the heir rather than the second son, the mere cavalry major. Ironic, is it not? She might have had both me and the title. But I no longer wish to marry her. And so I decided to choose my own bride and take her with me when I go as a fait accompli. I wanted a bride to whom my father could not possibly object. Your name was suggested to me—not as someone who would surely accept, but as a lady of perfect gentility who probably would not. Hence the wager.”
Lauren looked at her hands in her lap. She was not sure he spoke the strict truth. She thought it more likely that she had been named as someone who would almost certainly accept his proposal with alacrity. Was she not a jilted, abandoned bride, after all? A woman past the first blush of youth who would surely grab with desperate gratitude the first man who asked? But if that were so, why would three gentlemen have wagered against his success?
But did it matter?
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “You have been the victim of my unpardonable lapse of honor. I owed you honesty from the start. I should have approached the Duke of Portfrey with my offer and been content with whatever he might have said. But it is too late now to court you the right way. You have done nothing to deserve such shabby treatment. Please believe me to be truly contrite and most humbly your servant. May I escort you back to the box?” He returned his foot to the ground and offered his arm.
She continued staring at her hands while he waited. Another crossroads. Yet there was nothing further to decide, nothing more to say.
Because you are a woman—a beautiful woman—and I am a red-blooded male. Because I desire you.
All a lie. And she was undeniably hurt by it. It had all been a ruse to lure her into accepting him and winning his wager for him.
But still . . . a crossroads.
“No, wait,” she said softly, even though he was already doing that—waiting to escort her out of his life. “Wait a moment.”
Kit watched her spread her fingers in her lap. She did not speak again for a long while. He felt damnably wretched. All he wanted to do, if the truth were known, was take her back to Mrs. Merklinger’s side and wait out the evening with all the patience he could muster. And to seek out his three friends in the morning to pay his debts before taking himself off to Alvesley.
He was deeply mortified to realize that in consenting to make a lady—a perfectly innocent lady—the subject of a sordid wager he really had tainted the honor he held so dear. It had seemed faintly amusing at the time, before she had become a person to him.
Another group was approaching along the narrow path, this one more boisterous than the couple before them. And they came right along even when they saw that they were interrupting a tкte-а-tкte. Kit sat down beside Lauren, and the four revelers walked past in loud silence, their eyes carefully averted, and then laughed and snickered before they were quite out of earshot. Kit stayed where he was.
“Will you go to Alvesley, then,” Lauren Edgeworth asked, “and betroth yourself to your former fiancйe after all?”
“I hope I may avoid that fate,” he said.
“Does she wish to marry you?” she asked.
“I very much doubt it,” he said. “She preferred Jerome to me three years ago.” Though one never quite knew with Freyja.
“I will make a bargain with you, Lord Ravensberg,” Lauren Edgeworth said, her voice quite steady and calm, “if you will agree to it.”
He turned his head to look at her, but her eyes were still directed downward at her spread fingers.