They scarcely knew each other! He was far too gorgeous for her and she was far too gently bred for him. More importantly, this wasnotwhat they’d agreed to.
Hannah opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.
How was she to stop this, except by confessing that everything she’d said and done in the past month had been one great lie? And then she would never get Papa here. She couldn’t risk it.
While Hannah was still stewing, Jane and Eli returned home with Gloria and rejoined the group in the parlor. They were all obliged to rise to greet them, and in the commotion Hannah slipped beside Mr. Corbyn for a precious moment with no one watching.
“What are you doing?” she hissed in his ear.
“Don’t worry,” he shot back, his words so soft she had to strain to hear them. “If you pay me what we agreed, I’ll do my part. This is just insurance in case things go the other way.”
Hannah could scarcely speak, forcing the words out through numb lips. “Whatother way?”
Thatshouldn’t even be a possibility! They wouldn’t be talking about it if he hadn’t raised the issue. But she’d forgotten to keep her voice down in her shock, causing everyone in the room to look.
“Is everything all right here?” Eli asked, his eyes guarded.
“Perfect.” Corbyn had the nerve to smile, though the quirk of his lips didn’t bring any warmth to his eyes. “We were just settling up the terms of our engagement.”
Ten
“What happened?”
“Are you engaged?”
“What did their house look like?”
The moment he walked in the door, Marian and James pounced on him with their questions like two excitable kittens sharing the same frayed string.
“Enough. Let me breathe first.” Silas waved them away as he undid his cravat and shrugged out of his tailcoat, which had begun to feel confining about three hours ago.
Marian took the trappings of refinement from his hands to speed his progress, but made no move to take them to his bedroom.
“Could you please hang those up?”
“I’m not your maid.” She snorted. “Stop trying to distract me and tell us what happened.”
Silashadbeen trying to distract her, and suffered a pang of regret that it hadn’t worked. He’d spent the entire journey home imagining how they might take the news that he was engaged—at least on paper, once the announcement ran. James was going to be insufferable.
A bare recitation of the facts was probably best, if there was no way around it. Silas resolved to lay out his situation in the briefest possible terms.
“She wants me to pretend to want to marry her and then behave so badly that her mother will have no choice but to press her to release me. I asked her for another two hundred pounds in exchange. Her mother’s putting an announcement in the papers, and I’ll need to attend a few society events to play my part.”
He didn’t mention the way he’d haggled for a portion of her dowry if the marriage went ahead. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of his actions—really, it was nothing more than self-preservation, lest he find himself unable to escape the net Miss Williams had woven around them both—but there was simply no need to mention it. It wasn’t likely to come to pass.
He was more than capable of mucking things up so badly that Mrs. Williams would reverse course and forbid their marriage. Hannah Williams must have sensed as much, or she would never have chosen him.
She knows I have some practice destroying my own life. Was that why she’d kissed him? Had she sensed his potential for wanton destruction even from their first acquaintance?
James whooped at this news, oblivious to his brother’s darkening mood. “Two hundred pounds! Blimey. Do you think she’ll really pay?”
If she doesn’t, that’s what the dowry is for. The thought brought him little comfort. Silas didn’t want to know how far he was willing to go. With a minimal amount of effort on his part, the issue would never arise.
How hard could it be to make a fool of himself?
Marian observed him with more trepidation than James, her hazel eyes wary. “How do you feel about all this?”
“It’s everything we wanted.” Silas took his coat and cravat back from Marian, striding to his room to put them away. He’d said everything that mattered. There was no need to dwell on it.
