What he should have done was finish it last night. But, fool that he was, he had thought a night’s sleep would make her more receptive to reason, and so he had gotten smashed to keep him from breaking her door down. He should have broken the door down. She was nursing her grudge anyway, so it couldn’t have made her any angrier. Bloody hell. He’d like to shoot the man who ever said women were malleable creatures.
For the moment, Anthony chose to ignore his wife, but perversely, he kept his arm around her. “So, Eddie, where’s the rest of your brood?”
“They’ll be along as soon as Charlotte can round them all up. By the by, she wants to give you and Roslynn a party, since we missed the wedding.Nothing too big, mind you. Just family and friends.”
“Why not?” Anthony agreed. “Might as well spread some of our happiness around.”
He smiled to himself as he heard Roslynn choke.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Icame by yesterday, you know, but you had so many guests—”
“So you just left?” Roslynn stopped buttering her muffin to stare pointedly at Frances. “I wish you hadn’t.”
“I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Fran, it was just his family, come by to meet me and wish him well. You would have been welcome, believe me, especially by me. Can you imagine how alone I felt, meeting the whole Malory clan?”
Frances said nothing for a moment. She took a sip of tea, fooled with the napkin on her lap, played with the pastry on her plate that she hadn’t touched. Roslynn watched her, holding her breath. She knew what was coming, what hadn’t been said yet. She was dreading it, especially now, when she was so regretting her hasty marriage to Anthony. And this was the first she had seen Frances since that marriage. When she had stopped by unexpectedly this morning, just as Roslynn was sitting down to breakfast, she knew she would be eating a dose of censure along with the cook’s tempting array of food.
She tried delaying the subject. “I hope you weren’t too worried the other night.” Hell’s teeth, was it only four days ago that she had woken up in Geordie’s clutches?
“Too worried?” Frances laughed bitterly. “You were taken from my own house. I was responsible!”
“That you weren’t. Geordie was just too tricky forus. But I hope you understand why I had to leave before you got back.”
“Yes, that I understand. You couldn’t stay with me after he had discovered your whereabouts. But that note you sent me two days ago.ThatI’ll never understand. How could you do it, Ros? Anthony Malory, of all men?”
Well, there it was, the question she had dreaded, the same one she had been asking herself. The answers just didn’t hold up, at least not for her, but she owed them to Frances.
“The night Nettie and I left, I stopped by here to see Anthony.”
“You didn’t!”
Roslynn flinched. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I did. You see, he had offered to help me when we were at Silverley. Regina’s husband didn’t know my gentlemen that well after all, but Anthony did. He was supposed to clarify certain rumors about them—well, anyway, after that run-in with Geordie, I had run out of time. I came here for a name, nothing else, just a name of the one man out of the five who was most suitable for me to propose to.”
“All right. That’s reasonable, I suppose, even if highly improper,” Frances conceded. “You were frightened, upset. You couldn’t have been thinking very clearly that night. So how could it have gone wrong? How did you end up with Sir Anthony instead?”
“He lied to me,” Roslynn said simply, her eyes fixed on the uneaten muffin still in her hand. “He convinced me that all five of my gentlemen were so unsuitable, I couldn’t possibly marry one of them. Oh, you should have heard some of the horrid storieshe invented, the regret he managed in the telling. I never once suspected that he might be lying.”
“Then how do you know—”
Roslynn laughed shortly. “He admitted it later, after we were married. Arrogantly confessed the whole thing.”
“The cad!”
“Yes, he is that.” Roslynn sighed. “But that’s not the point. That night I was already desperate when I came here, and then to be told that I was more or less back to the starting point, well, I truly didn’t know what to do.”
“So you asked him to marry you.” Frances drew her own conclusion. “Well, at least I understand now—or think I do. I suppose you felt you had no other choice.”
“That’s not exactly how it happened,” Roslynn admitted, though she decided then and there not to mention her seduction. Frances didn’t need to knoweverything. “Even then I didn’t consider Anthony as a solution to my problem. Hell’s teeth, I was ready to go home to Scotland and marry a crofter. It was Anthony who suggested I marry him instead.”
Frances’ mouth dropped open. “Hedid?” She collected herself quickly from her surprise. “Well, I naturally thought you would have…I mean, you did say before that you wouldn’t be afraid to make the proposal, that it would probably be necessary since you had so little time for courting. And here you had run out of time, so I naturally assumed…He really did?”
“Yes, and I was just as surprised. In fact, I thought he was joking.”
“But he wasn’t?”
