“Might I carry your bag, then?”
“Ah, so you are to be the solicitous sort of husband?” She tried for humor again, and this time, he caught on.
“I suppose so,” he said with a crooked grin as he stepped around her to grab the bag that lay packed on a chair. An actual grin on the stoic Andrew Langford’s face. It transformed his already handsome visage to something rather boyish. She liked it. A great deal.
“Why are you looking at me in that way?” Andrew had paused and was staring at her as she stared at him.
“I was just thinking about how handsome you are,” she said, slipping a hand around his upper arm and leaning in, trying not to notice just how solid the muscles beneath his coat were. “How lucky I am to have captured myself such a pretty husband.”
He spluttered. “Did you sleep well last night, Sophie? I fear our horse ride yesterday may have jostled you overmuch.”
The horse ride. Yes. For some reason, her cheeks heated at the reminder. Goodness, but maybe more than just the appearance of her life had changed overnight. She didn’t feel at home in her own body anymore.
Andrew opened the door for them, using the hand that also held her bag, and doing so with impressive speed. He glanced out, then led her into the deserted hallway, eyes back on hers in a questioning manner.
She shrugged a shoulder, playing off her internal warfare as nothing above trifling. “I am simply grateful to you for saving me. I think I must have been unaware just how much the last week had been weighing on me. I feel lighter now.”
He stopped at the edge of the hall, just shy of turning onto the landing. Those clear blue eyes focused on hers, flitted away, then back. “I need to tell you something about that, Sophie.” He swallowed. “You need not feel such gratitude to me.”
Her brows lifted at his evident discomposure. “I cannot see how I should not,” she returned. The man was quite literally altering the course of his life for her.
He adjusted his hold on her bag. “It is only that this benefits me as well.”
Huh. She released his arm, turning so she could see him better.
He adjusted his cravat.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
Look at him how? She was only curious. “How does it benefit you?”
He scratched the back of his neck. “You see, there was this wager with some of my school friends. Ridiculous, really. The stupid stuff of young, frightened men… but I have to marry soon or else I would owe my friends a small fortune.”
Her brows pulled together. “You wagered on your own marriage?” She’d never have taken him for a betting man. With his background in banking and mathematics, he would know better than most how unreliable those probabilities could be.
“Not exactly. Or, well, yes, I suppose so. The last of us to marry owes a forfeit to the rest, and I suppose you could say the gauntlet was rethrown just last week.”
Sophie processed that, lips bit together. Did it change how she felt about him helping her? Marginally—but only because it made her feel less in his debt. This was a mutual benefit to them both. A marriage in name only, both to reach their goals.
A business transaction, such as he would enact at his bank.
It all made sense to her now. Andrew was logical and honorable. He saw a friend in need and a logical solution to both of their problems, and acted accordingly.
Something squirmed in her at that, which was highlyillogical. She should be relieved, not… dismayed? No, she was not dismayed in the least. Of course not.
She shifted, meeting his eyes, which flickered with anxiety. “Very well,” she said.
He squinted at her. “That is all?”
“Thank you for telling me.”
Still, he did not move, except to shift his feet. “You do not feel that I’ve used you ill or otherwise?”
“Ought I to?”
“I certainly hope not.”
She smiled. “Then I do not. Now, based on how each of our exchanges has been whispered, I imagine you do not wish to wake the household on our way out?” Did he have a poor relationship with his family? She did not recall them being estranged—quite the opposite. But a great deal could happen in six years. After all, she’d become a true mathematician, taught at a school, been mistakenly given a job under the impression she was a man, and, evidently, been married twice—both falsely.
