Page 27 of To Woo and to Wed
“I thought so, Mama,” Alexandra said, a trace smugly. Her gaze sharpened on Sophie. “What do you think, Sophie?” She clasped a hand to her breast. “Two sisters, struck by tragedy in their first marriages, both finding love once more, stepping forward into their futures side by side, in the very same church!” West was surprised a band of trumpet players did not materialize to accompany the moving picture she painted.
“Er,” Sophie said, casting him a look of vague horror.
Seeing that she was floundering, West stepped into the breach. “What an intriguing idea,” he said, as diplomatically as he could manage.
“Does that mean you agree?” Alexandra looked at him eagerly. Considering that Alexandra’s eventual marriage was the goal of this ruse they’d concocted, he didn’t want to risk ruining the entire damned thing, even though a double wedding was decidedlynotwhat he’d agreed to, in his initial conversation with Sophie. He was beginning to think they should have discussed this a bit more.
“I don’t know—”
“But, West!” Alexandra said, wringing her hands. “What could be more joyous than two sisters celebrating a second chance at love, together?” She batted her eyelashes.
West cast Sophie a helpless look.
“We’ll consider it, Alex,” Sophie said, rescuing him. “But in the meantime,” she added hastily, raising her wineglass, “perhaps a toast?”
West clutched his own wineglass the way a drowning man mightgrab a life raft, and joined the rest of the group in a hearty round of congratulations.
Internally, however, he continued to wonder: What, precisely, had he and Sophie got themselves into?
As the afternoon progressed, he had increasing cause to ponder this question; the conversation, mercifully, turned to other topics, and for a while he was spared from doing much more than nodding encouragingly and having a lengthy discussion with one of Sophie’s brothers-in-law about cricket. (He saw Sophie making a determined effort not to laugh at one point, no doubt recalling the moment she had nearly maimed him during their most recent attempt at a cricket match in Cornwall, and he cast a dark look in her direction, which she pointedly ignored.)
He might have known this respite would not last; eventually, the group broke up, with Sophie, a couple of her sisters, and all the gentlemen except West and Lord Wexham engaging in a spirited game of pall-mall. West would ordinarily have joined in, but the sloping lawns at Riverton Hall were deceptively uneven, as he’d noted on the walk up the steps from the dock, and he thought it might be wise to spare his leg.
Sophie had cast him a brief, concerned look, but he waved her on and she was mollified enough to scamper after the twins to help them set the course. It was her natural tendency to fret, he knew; as the eldest of five sisters, she’d spent much of her life doing just that. It was part of the reason he was not married to her, in fact—and to have her fretting overhimmade some sort of dark, complicated feeling rise up in his chest, one that he did not fully understand and did not care to examine too closely.
Lord and Lady Wexham, meanwhile, were regarding their daughtersand their husbands with expressions of mingled fondness and mild concern. (The latter was, in West’s opinion, somewhat justified, considering that at the moment Harriet was setting up a pall-mall stake in a location that offered a decent chance of a player tumbling into the river.) Maria, however, settled herself next to him with an inquisitive look on her face that warned him that whatever was about to come out of her mouth might not be a question he wished to answer.
“Are you actually going to marry my sister this time?” she asked, without the merest hint of a pleasantry to soften the blow of the question. This should not have been surprising, based on everything Sophie had ever told him about her closest-in-age sister, and he paused before responding, studying her thoughtfully. She and Sophie bore the strongest resemblance of any of the Wexham daughters; both had similar shades of blond hair and nearly identical brown eyes, though Sophie’s face was softer and Maria’s a bit more angular, giving her the appearance of being the elder sister, despite being two years Sophie’s junior.
“As this is the first time we’ve been betrothed,” he said mildly, “I don’t think ‘this time’ is an entirely fair choice of words.”
Her gaze on him was sharp. “You might not have been officially betrothed, years ago, but everyone expected you to wed. And then you… didn’t.”
“Indeed.” His voice was ever-so-slightly more curt than he generally permitted himself to sound; as far as he was aware, Maria had no idea that his father had threatened her reputation, should he and Sophie wed, so it was not fair to take out his irritation on her. But she had certainly known at the time that her actions that spring had been risky and foolish, for all that she’d only been eighteen. “I will certainly endeavor in the future not to inconvenience anyone with alife-threatening injury and resulting infection, lest your sister take it into her head to run off and marry someone else in the interim.”
He regretted the words almost immediately; he did not need the speculative gleam in Maria’s eyes to tell him that he’d said too much.
“Do you mean to tell me that it wasSophie’sidea to marry Bridewell, then?” There was a note of barely concealed eagerness to Maria’s voice that West imagined a Bow Street Runner might experience upon stumbling across a particularly good lead in the hunt for a criminal; he remained uncertain as to whether he or Sophie was the criminal in this metaphor. This was why he disapproved of metaphors.
He opened his mouth, then hesitated. What had Sophie told her sisters? He didn’t wish to betray any revelations she wouldn’t be comfortable with, but…
But, had the entire Wexham family considered him to be a villain for the past seven years? The thought bothered him more than he would have expected, like a loose thread on a sleeve that he couldn’t prevent himself from tugging at.
“If you’d like to know why your sister married Bridewell,” he said mildly, “I think you should ask her yourself.”
Maria peered at him more closely. “Doyouknow why?”
“More or less.” Never from Sophie herself, though—a fact that vexed him more with each passing hour spent in her company.
Damn it, he’d thought he could do this—could put the past behind them. Could do her this favor, seize the opportunity to teach his father a lesson while he was at it. Could listen to her laugh, feel the warmth of her hand in the crook of his elbow, converse with her, without allowing his every conscious thought to become fixated on her—on them—on the history they shared, and how it had all gone so terribly wrong.
But he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake.
Before Maria could ask anything further, there was a great shout of laughter and he and Maria turned their heads to see Harriet and Betsy clutching each other, giggling helplessly as their husbands attempted to fish the ball out of the reeds in the shallow water at the riverbank.
Sophie glanced over in West’s direction, a look of resigned amusement on her face, and her eyes caught his for a moment—and in that moment, there was an expression of such intimacy, such knowledge, that West knew a second of uncanny certainty that this was what marriage to Sophie would have been like, that alternate life that usually felt so distant and yet which, in this moment, felt eerily close, as if only the thinnest of veils separated it from his true existence.
She felt, looking at him like that, like his fiancée in truth, not merely as a ruse. And he did not know what to do with the hopeless longing that he felt in that moment.
