Page 70 of A Heart of Bluestone

Father confirms it. “A suitor has approached,” he tells me, “and inquired after your contract. No more than that,” he adds. “Yet I am… confident.”

I spit out the gum. It lands on the phonebook.

My feet smack down on the booth’s floor.

I lean forward, as if to better speak into the receiver. “What if I don’t like him? What if he’s ugly? Or cruel? What if I don’t want to?”

The look of outrage is slack on my face.

I’ve never actually been in this position before.

My contract is never optioned. It’s never inquired after. No negotiations, and thus no suitor that my father has picked out for me.

Someone who might be fat and balding and old and—oh gods, someone like Master Welham. He’s gentry, so I know it isn’t him, but still, could be a lookalike.

The deadblood married to Mr Monopoly.

My brain is fuzz.

It vibrates with the shredding of my memories, like I tear through them in search of the face of every male aristo I have ever met in my life, and then the names and fleeting mentions of the ones I haven’t met.

Father’s sigh is soft. Patient. “I deem him suitable, Olivia,” he says. “In all the ways that matter.”

Wealth, breeding, blood, power, all the ways that matter…

I scoff.

Father’s tut is unkind. “Do not chide me, girl.” After a pause, in which I’m just scowling at the phonebook, he adds, softer, “I expected you to be pleased about this news. I thought it happy.”

“Yeah, I love being told I’m going to be sold off to the highest bidder, and I don’t even know who that is. Just cattle at a market with diamonds and silk—”

“Enough,” he snaps, harsh.

I flinch in the booth.

My gaze drops, instantly, as though Father has jumped through the phone to scold me in person.

Still, that niggle, that snark, it curls my upper lip and hisses my voice, “Don’t I at least get a say in who?”

It’s his turn to scoff, but his is a breath of air, a breeze, not the crass choked sound I make.

“And who would you choose?”

My mouth puckers on silence.

I have no suitors in mind. Not for marriage.

Well… I sort of, might, maybe, have apotentialone.

Why else am I bothering with Eric Harling?

He’s actually quite fine a prospect. No wealth, of course. But he is charming, handsome, kind.

I could see him as a good husband.

But would he want me?

Eric has never made an offer on my contract. I don’t need to hear that from Father to know it. My contract is not available to the gentry, not until this moment, now that my contract is open for the final season.

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