“Stop!” she cried, bringing her hands to her heated cheeks.
Oh, this cannot be happening!
Her reputation, already hanging by a thread because she lived alone in a crumbling manor with her sisters, tugged rather violently. Mrs. Portman and Mrs. Goodley stared at Georgianna as if she were a rare creature with three heads, spewing fire from the mouth.
“Whatever is he saying?” Mrs. Goodley demanded.
How could she justify being in his bed? The earl spoke with such certainty that this memory was real, no one would believe her denial.
“Miss Heyford—” Mrs. Portman began in shrill accents.
“He is my husband.” Georgianna gasped, then slapped a hand over her mouth, horror burning through her in icy chills. The desperate lie had leaped from her before she had even analyzed the sense of it all. But there was no other way out or she would be irrevocably ruined. “Youare my husband!”
A choking sound came from the earl, then a harsh bark of laughter. “Married? Toyou?”
“Surely this is not true,” Mrs. Goodley whispered. “How would she have met him?”
Georgianna surged to her feet, ignoring the tittering ladies behind her, and pinned the earl with a glare. “What do you mean by that, Daniel?”
She was quite deliberate in the use of his name, and he reared back his head as if slapped. The ladies looked between her and the earl, but she kept her regard pinned upon him.
“Is that your name, sir?” Albert asked carefully, as if he did not know what to make of everything.
“It feels right,” he said with chilling politeness, his accent clipped and precise. “But I would not have married a woman so…”
“So what?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“Soplainand obviously below me in every regard.”
Her lips parted, but no words emerged.The wretched beast. Georgianna gave him a tight smile. “Ohdarling, you do recall some things. That my station was below yours in every regard was the main objection of your family. But your aching,desperatelove for me and my plainness saw us marrying only a few days ago after enduring throes of love and longing for a few days.”
The earl looked at her as if she was a raving lunatic, and Georgianna did wonder at her sanity at this time.
“Throes of love?” he demanded in an icy bite, narrowing his gaze.
Mrs. Goodley clapped her hands, her expressive gaze delighted. “Was that why you were away from Crandell, Miss Heyford? We had all wondered about it and made enquiry of the younger Miss Heyford, who remained tightlipped as to the reason for your absence. How terribly romantic, even if a bit hasty.”
Her gaze dropped with deliberateness to Georgianna’s tiny waistline, and she wanted to cry. There was no doubt in her mind a rumor would start to circulate that she was with child. She cast a beseeching glance at her cousin, and he sprang into action, urging those two meddling wretches from the small space. He begged them to practice discretion for the sake of all parties involved, and if Georgianna had not been caught in the earl’s probing gaze, she would have rushed from the room and added her voice to Albert’s.
“An aching, desperate love, you say?” he asked dangerously softly.
She clasped her hand at her waist. “Yes.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I say you are a damn charlatan. I know enough of myself that I would not be caught in no damn throes of love.”
“Please inform me why I would even need to pretend to be married to a boorish lout such as yourself?” she demanded tightly.
That tart demand seemed to deflate his anger and send him into deep retrospection.
“Who are my family? I must write to them immediately.”
Georgianna’s heart lurched. “We never got around to discussing your family and their locations, caught in our throes of love.”
The earl made a rough sound of disbelief. “What is my name?”
“Daniel.”
“All of it!”
