She shoved the thought away. “What you’ve just told me makes it all the more important for you to find another woman. As I’ve said to all other suitors, I simply will not marry.”
“I know. All of Quebec knows. That’s why I’m here, talking only to you. I don’t want to marry either.”
She’d never heard such a lie. The captain had an animal vitality about him. She sensed it, tingling upon her skin. “Captain, I am not so big a fool to believe that.”
“I’ll explain.” He jerked his chin toward the densest part of the crowd. “Do you know that young woman in the corner?”
She didn’t have to look to know he spoke of the pretty brunette. “She’d make you a very good wife.”
“Three months ago she was married.”
“Please don’t insult my intelligence, sir.” She and the women had spoken before the opening of the salon. Every woman in the room was single. “Madame Bourdon would never allow that.”
“I said shewasmarried. She is no longer. The wedding happened, there were witnesses. But a week later, the union was annulled.”
“I don’t believe it.” No priest would allow an annulment after the marriage was consummated.
“You haven’t been in New France for long, have you?”
“I’ve been here for weeks.”It feels like forever.
“Here, old rules don’t always apply. Or they’re stretched to fit to new situations. That young woman isn’t the first King’s Daughter to end a marriage. She requested an annulment because her new husband fled into the wilderness only hours after the ink dried on his trading license. He wanted a license, not a wife.”
She paused, unnerved. Madame Bourdon had spoken an odd warning before men came pouring through her doors.Beware the fur traders, she had said.Some will stay in the settlements, but others want only the license and will abandon you forever for the wild.
She murmured, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because both of us must marry. And yet both of us want to be free.”
No truer truth had ever been spoken. She hated the little cell they had put her in, without even a prayer book to occupy her mind. She hated the silence, the idleness, and most of all, the loneliness.
“I’m offering you freedom, and an annulment.” He lowered his voice. “But first you must marry me.”
CHAPTER TWO
Lucas had expected a different kind of woman.
He’d heard a lot about her in the taverns, where men talked freely when they didn’t have a cup to their lips or a whore on their laps. They spoke of the hunt and Mohawk movements and new trails blazed westward, but mostly they speculated about the King’s Daughters fresh off the autumn ships, the rosy-cheeked French women who reminded them of their mothers and sweethearts and the world they’d left behind.
They had called this girl a living, breathing icicle. They’d said she was a winter gale that propelled men away as surely as Mishipeshu, the horned creature of Ojibwa legend, who tossed canoes upon the waves of the Great Lake. She rejected every man who begged for her hand in marriage, which made her perfect for his plans.
“You,” she said in a rasp of a voice, “are mad.”
In more ways than you will ever know.
“Have you come here on a wager?” Her eyes were as dark a blue as a northern twilight. “Has it become a challenge among you tavern-dwellers, to be the man who tries to marry the northeast wind?”
“I don’t gamble.” A useless pastime, only for men who relied too much on luck.
“So this isn’t a gamble, this mockery of a proposal?”
“It’s an honest proposal. It serves both our purposes.”
“And how is that? A wife is a man’s property. Once we make vows, I’m helpless to compel you to do anything, even wipe your boots.”
“I’m a man of my word.”
“So you’ll forfeit your conjugal rights?”