Page 15 of To Woo and to Wed
“Do you?” he asked, offering her a half-smile.
She smiled back at him. “Do you think we could find a piece of statuary or a garden?”
His smile widened. “None appear to be immediately at hand,” he said slowly. “But if you’d permit me to escort you to the retiring room, I feel certain we can find an empty hallway that would serve.”
He tucked her hand into his elbow and, as he escorted Sophie from the room, gave thanks that Maria was right, and Lady Wexham was really not a very good chaperone at all.
Chapter Five
West had not realized hishearing would begin failing him at the age of one-and-thirty.
Admittedly, he thought he’d understood every word Lady Fitzwilliam had uttered up until this point perfectly well, but clearly some sort of alarming hearing loss had befallen him. Or, an even more disturbing prospect: Perhaps he had lost his mind. Did people now speak perfectly reasonable sentences to him, only for him to interpret them as bits of utter lunacy?
Because surely there had to be some explanation for the fact that Sophie Wexham had just asked him to marry her.
God, he’d even relapsed to the point of calling her by her maiden name in his thoughts—things were well and truly dire. Because he never allowed himself to think of her as such—not since he’d awoken after his curricle accident seven years ago, to the news that the young lady to whom he planned to propose had gone and married one of his school friends while he’d been lying in his sickbed with a badly broken leg and out of his mind with fever.
She was always—during the years of her marriage, and in the four years since she’d been widowed—Lady Fitzwilliam, both in voice and thought. Anything else felt far too risky.
“I beg your pardon?” The words were stiff.
“I’d like us to become engaged,” Lady Fitzwilliam—notSophie—said, her voice quiet, reasonable. “Not in truth, naturally, but merely for the rest of the Season, or perhaps a little longer—however long it takes Alexandra to see that I’m happy, accept Blackford’s proposal, and get married.”
“And you think that she won’t be made a bit suspicious by this sudden turn of events?”
Lady Fitzwilliam avoided his eyes. “Alex has always thought that you and I—that is to say—” She blew out a frustrated breath. “She believed that we might one day be wed, and so I think that she would likely view such an announcement as…”
“As us coming to our senses at last?”
“Essentially, yes.”
West was silent for a long moment, allowing his gaze to wander away from her toward the dancing flames in the fireplace. He was grateful for the faint hiss and pop of the fire, as it prevented him from listening to the sound of her breathing. He needed tothink—and he found this peculiarly difficult to do when he was in her company.
“It would all be for show,” Lady Fitzwilliam assured him, rushing to fill the silence. “It’s obvious that, given—well, given events of the past, any marriage between us would be completely impossible.…”
She was still speaking, but West had ceased listening.
Impossible.
She was right—of course she was right. He knew that, understood it logically. There was too much history there, too much hurt. They’d thought to marry once, and where had it left them? With West shattered by grief from the loss of his best friendandthe woman he’d been in love with, and with Lady Fitzwilliam married to another man,one he’d thought to call a friend. West and Lady Fitzwilliam, together, clearly left nothing but pain and destruction in their wake; there could be no future for them.
And yet, until this moment, and the sharp pain that gripped him at hearing her utter this assurance so calmly, with such quiet certainty, he hadn’t realized how desperately he wanted just that.
He wanted to marry her.
Still, after all this time, he wanted it so badly that it was like a physical pain within him. He’d suppressed it, these past seven years, not allowed his mind to dwell on her—had gone to considerable lengths to avoid any situation that would put them in the same room. But then she’d had that damned affair with Jeremy, of all people, last summer—and ever since, she’d crept slowly but steadily back into his life. And now he’d been forced to acknowledge something that had been lingering at the corners of his mind all along:
He. Still. Wanted. To. Marry. Her.
He was anidiot.
Which meant that the logical, correct thing to do—the course of action that would prevent any further heartache on his part—would be to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that he would not participate in her ruse. Surely she could find another way to ensure her sister’s happiness, one that did not involve lying to everyone they knew. One that did not involve him pretending the very thing that he still wished for above all else—that she had previously told him, quite clearly, she was unwilling to offer.
He opened his mouth to do just that—and then he paused.
And his conversation with his father earlier that morning suddenly came to mind, the threat that was hanging over him like a dark cloud: Marry or lose Rosemere.
And West, who was not a naturally devious man, felt a thrill of positively devious delight course through him.
