“On this, we are agreed.” Cassin sighed. He thought of his castle and family and tenants, of the rapidly approaching winter.
She took another step back. Mr. Fisk could be heard talking softly to the horse. Cassin thanked the man and mounted.
The horse danced and spun. Cassin whipped around, staring at her. Her auburn hair lifted on the breeze. She shaded her eyes with her hand.
“Until tomorrow, perhaps,” she said.
Cassin could not find words to say good-bye, so he nodded, promising nothing, denying nothing. Then he kicked in his heels and was gone.
CHAPTERSIX
“He won’t be back,” Willow told her maid, Perry, the next morning. “Not this morning. Not ever, in fact.” In the wake of the earl’s departure, reason and reality poured in and Willow’s optimism had dissolved.
She paced a straight line from her bed to the dressing table and back again. Perry sat in the window seat, sewing a button on Willow’s lavender day dress.
“Gone forever,” Willow repeated, pausing to look out the window over Perry’s head. “And I cannot believe I didn’t see it. But I do see you, Perry, and I see that delicate purple dress. Absolutely not. I cannot work in the purple dress.”
Perry shook her head and continued to sew.
“It’s pointless to make a fuss when no one will come,” Willow went on. “I want practical, not fragile, when I work.”
“Practical?” Perry sighed, biting off the thread with her teeth. “Pretty is what matters today.”
“Today is no different from yesterday,” Willow said, cringing at the memory of the plain blue day dress in which she’d received the Earl of Cassin. “And even if he did come—which he will not—my appearance is of little consequence. An arrangement between us could never work. Yesterday I was . . . I was carried away. I did not think. How canImarry anearl?” This had been the first devastating question to come to her. She took a seat at her dressing table and began to work a brush through the wild curls of her hair, more chaotic than usual after a sleepless night.
“ ’Course you can, my lady,” said Perry, standing up and giving the dress a shake. “You’re the daughter of an earl yourself, aren’t you? So clever and pretty. I think you are very well matched to his lordship.”
“It makes no difference if we are matched, Perry. We are not a pair of candlesticks. But don’t you see? An earl will require an heir. All men want an heir, but a nobleman absolutely must have one. It was ridiculous of me to carry on as I did yesterday, considering my unsuitability in this regard. If he returns—which, I feel certain, he will not—he will be sure to leave again as soon as I tell him. Of this I am certain.” She held the brush still, watching herself say the words in the mirror.
“I say hewillcome.” Perry brought the dress to Willow and began maneuvering it over her head.
“Yes, but you also believe it will snow on Christmas. And be sunny and warm on Easter.” Willow’s words were muffled through the fabric. Her head emerged. “And it never happens, does it?”
For once, Perry was quiet, preoccupied with the fifty tiny lavender buttons running the length of Willow’s spine. Or perhaps Willow had convinced her. Now she needed only to convince herself.
He will not want me,Willow repeated in her head.
She’d said it a hundred times in the night, and she would say it a hundred more. The Earl of Cassin had seemed too perfect because hewastoo perfect. Even if a nobleman could overcome the outrageous arrangement of the marriage—a very substantialif—he would never get around the fact that she could not give him an heir.
It was cruelly ironic that she had devised a plan to produce an unaccountable non-husband husband—someone desperate enough to overlook her barrenness—yet the first viable applicant had literally beenbornunable to accept. Even for a marriage of convenience. Even for £60,000.
To Willow’s great frustration, unexpected tears began to close her throat, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Really, what had she expected, given the limitations of her body?
“Oh, don’t cry, my lady!” trilled Perry. She crouched at Willow’s feet and, grabbing hold of the lavender hem, vigorously fanned Willow’s skirts in and out, like a sail in the wind. Willow yelped and grabbed the bedpost.
She reminded herself thatthiswas why she had avoided men her entire life—this useless, tearful spiral of self-pity. She never moped or felt sorry for herself when she was occupied and diligent. Rarely, if ever, did she think about men and how much happier she always was for the distance.
Until now.
Until theone man, literally among hundreds of men she’d ignored and by whom she was likewise ignored, turned up and reminded her why she never bothered. Until now, when suddenly she wanted to bother very much.
A knock at her bedroom door yanked her attention from the bedpost,
“Do you mind, darling?” said her mother’s voice from the corridor. The door swung wide to admit her mother, Lady Lytton. “You won’t believe what’s happened.”
“My lady,” said Willow, taking two steps toward her. The countess rarely, if ever, came to Willow’s bedroom.
“Abbott sent a maid to fetch you,” said the countess, “but I sent her away and came myself. It’s not every day a gentleman calls on my daughter.” She waved a calling card in her right hand.
