He crossed his arms, brushing the patches at each elbow with his rough, working man’s hands.
“Marriage to me raises your standing to something almost acceptable in polite company,” she continued. Her words were the punishing thump of a blacksmith’s hammer.
“Polite company? Out here in some godforsaken backwater?” he lashed out.
She swallowed at her own words thrown back at her.
“There isn’t much ‘polite’ company out here, princess. Other than Wildeforde, and somehow, I don’t see how marrying his fiancée is going to raise my standing with him. You have no use to me as a wife.”
She brushed a nonexistent loose hair from her brow. “I can run a household of fifty servants. I can host the perfect tea party.”
“Can you make tea?”
She sputtered.
“Can you light a furnace? Boil water? Cook a meal, mend a tear, clean a hearth?”
She flinched at each word.
“Do you have any skills at all?”
“I am an excellent watercolorist,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Well, I’m sure that will come in handy.”
He didn’t need a wife. And if he were forced into marriage, he wanted one who could help raise his sister to be a kind and useful woman, who wasn’t afraid to pitch in and get filthy next to everyone else on his estate.
“You’ve made your bloody point.” Lord Crofton had collapsed back into the chair and was pouring yet another drink. “Ten thousand pounds if you marry her tomorrow.”
Benedict’s throat constricted as if a noose were slowly drawing tight. If he married her, he was facing a lifetime of his father’s loneliness. If he didn’t marry her, she’d be ruined. He shouldn’t give a damn, but he did.
“I want the same terms as Wildeforde.”
“What?” his soon-to-be fiancée shrieked.
Her father spat out the brandy in his mouth. “You grasping—”
Benedict interrupted him. “He wouldn’t have accepted a penny less than thirty thousand. Your signature on paper will do.”
Crofton swore and stumbled across the room to Wildeforde’s desk, where he pulled out paper from a drawer and began to scribble.
Amelia stared at her father, incredulous. “What, no bonus if I successfully breed within a year? No extra compensation if my children are male? What if I run five furlongs in under a minute?” She turned to Benedict. “Would you like to see my teeth?”
He sighed. Devil help him if he were making the wrong choice. “He made the same negotiations with Wildeforde. Would you be complaining if I were a duke?”
“I would if he didn’t think to negotiate an allowance or have any money put aside for my own use in case you lose my dowry at the local fair bobbing for apples.”
He bit the inside of his cheek to hold back a retort.
Her father looked up at her. “Really, Amelia. Out here, what could you possibly do with an allowance?”
She pressed her lips together. Then she turned away to stare out the window once again. Had those been tears in her eyes? Or an illusion?
Her father thrust a scrawled note in front of him. He read it over slowly, folded it, and slid it into his jacket pocket.
“Crofton, Lady Amelia. I will see you Sunday morning.”
Snow was falling lightly outside, yet Amelia was ready to suffocate from the heat. The small church with its rough wooden pews was densely crowded, and the smell of unwashed bodies made her nauseous.
