She frowned. “But you said yourself, you have the habit of command.”
He stared wildly at her. How could she even think of marrying someone else? “I’ll change,” he said.
“No, you won’t.”
He swallowed. “Probably not enough for your liking, but I promise you I’ll try.”
She frowned, puzzled and disturbed by his apparent determination to marry her. “It actually sounds like you want to marry me. Why?”
He gave her a blank stare. “Why?” he said in a strangled voice.
“Yes, why? You’ve known me less than ten days. Why would you want to make a convenient marriage with a woman you hardly know, who doesn’t want to be married, and who won’t promise to love you or obey you?
It was a good question. He ran a finger around his collar. He cleared his throat. His mind was completely blank. “Er—”
The dinner bell rang. “Dinner,” he exclaimed gratefully and gestured toward the door. “Aunt Gosforth hates to be kept waiting.”
She didn’t move. “When you’ve answered my question.”
Gabe searched for an answer that would satisfy her. The truth would frighten her off, make her run a mile. He knew because it had frightened him half to death.
Outside he could hear people coming down the stairs, gathering in response to the dinner bell.
“Gallantry,” he said at last. “Pure, disinterested gallantry. I can’t bear to see a woman and child in distress. And I have no plans to marry anyone else. If a convenient marriage is the price of your safety, it’s a small price to pay.”
She eyed him thoughtfully. “And you don’t mind that I will not promise to love or obey you? That for me it will just be a—a chess tactic?”
“No, I don’t mind that at all,” he lied with conviction.
She hesitated, then held out her hand. “Then let us shake on this agreement; we shall make a convenient marriage, a paper marriage, and we shall be completely honest with each other from the start.”
“Absolutely, honesty from the start,” Gabe agreed, uttering the lie with aplomb.
He had no intention of letting it remain as a paper marriage. He felt a slight pang of guilt at lying to her, but repressed it. It was almost the truth.
For some reason she was fearful of putting herself into the hands of a man. Obviously the fault of that clod Prince Rupert.
She needed to learn that with Gabe, she was safe.
Gabe’s position was clear also; just not wholly and completely stated. He would try to change his autocratic ways—or at least to listen to her views. He would protect her and her child with his life. And he would marry her.
He could hardly repress the surge of fierce emotion at the thought: his wife.
He grasped her outstretched hand and shook it. “But that’s not the way to settle a bargain such as this,” he said. “I’m a traditionalist.” And he drew her into his arms.
She stiffened warily and stretched her head back away from him. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? What’s the expression: seal the bargain with a kiss.”
“But we shook on it.”
“Yes, and now we’ll kiss.” He could just take the kiss, he knew, but until now, all their previous kisses had been surprised out of her: stolen. Now, suddenly he wanted a simple, honest kiss from her, a kiss to make a bargain on, a kiss that bore a promise.
“We don’t need to kiss,” she insisted, her spine braced in resistance against the arm he’d slipped around her back.
He still held her right hand in his right hand, the handshake caught between them. His knuckles grazed her breast. He didn’t think she’d noticed.
He noticed. A good part of his attention was on that faint teasing graze of skin against cotton, with warm, soft breast beneath.
