Page 41 of Seven Swans a Swimming

Nathaniel opened his mouth, but Arabella spoke before he could. “How dare you speak to Nathaniel like that!”

Lord Cartier stared at her, pink splotches of anger rising in his cheeks. Arabella could see she had offended him but could not stop, could not permit anyone to speak to Nathaniel like that.

How dare he! How dare anyone speak harshly to a man who had done nothing but care for living things for his entire life?

“Nathaniel Cartier is a great man,” she told the stunned Lord and Lady Cartier. “How dare you criticize him for seemingly not enchanting me—when he has done far more than that!”

“Arabella…” Nathaniel muttered under his breath, still not looking at her.

But she did not heed him. She knew what he was concerned about, that she would reveal that they had tasted of each other’s delights before they had been wed.

But that was not what Arabella had meant, and she continued on, fire rushing through her body, her temper finally matching her red hair.

“This gentleman was not someone that I immediately understood,” Arabella said in a clear voice, reaching for Nathaniel’s hand. She found it, somehow, she did not know how. “I believed him proud, arrogant, unruly, and utterly disinterested in both me and a marriage match.”

“I thought you were supposed to be defending me?” muttered Nathaniel.

Arabella could not help but smile. She looked at him, the man she would give everything up for, the man she was defending proudly, and saw a twitch of a smile on his face as he met her gaze.

“I have grown to understand him now,” said Arabella in a softer voice. She was hardly aware of what Nathaniel’s parents were looking at now. She was more interested in looking at Nathaniel. At the man who had captured her heart. The man whose conversation was surprising and unusual and who had been honest with her.

And loved her. She knew that, though the words had not been said. He loved her, loved her entirely. As she was.

“I must defend him, for he will not defend himself,” said Arabella quietly. “Nathaniel was unsure of me, and I of him. The marriage had been arranged long before we could even be conscious of such a thing, and we had little information of each other. We did not know—we could not know whether this arrangement would be a success.”

“But the birds, the animals!”

Arabella looked at Lord Cartier, who had spluttered those words. “And what of them?”

“You must admit, my dear,” said Lady Cartier in a low voice. “It is not…not usual for a gentleman, let alone a man of rank and title, to have found such an interest. It does not…worry you?”

Arabella stared. “How could it worry me that the man I wish to marry cares deeply? That he sees pain and wants to halt it, sees injury and wants to cure it? You think that would make melesslikely to care for him?”

Nathaniel’s hand squeezed her own, and Arabella took heart from it. He did care for her, even after her father’s letter cast a shadow of a doubt over her own affections.

“A gentleman who wishes to bring healing to the world is one to treasure, not censure,” Arabella said passionately. “I do not understand you at all! Why did you not permit him to study, to take his innate skills far beyond what they are? I see Nathaniel, and I see a man who is already so much more than any other man I have ever met, and I…I love him.”

She swallowed as she spoke, but the last few words escaped her lips. And really, they should have done before, days before.

The moment she had known she had fallen deeply in love with Lord Nathaniel Cartier.

The moment she had known she could not live without him. That this arranged marriage, though it had started in a strange way, was everything she wanted now in the world.

But she could not entirely wipe out the stain of the letter from everyone’s memory.

“But your father’s letter is quite clear,” said Lord Cartier, picking it up and glancing at it. “‘This engagement is cancelled. It is over. Send me back my daughter.’ What say you to that?”

Arabella took a deep breath. If she had not been so hasty as to write the letter in the first place, then she would not have found herself in this mess—but as it was a mess of her own making, there was only one thing for it, as Nathaniel would say.

To unmake it.

“I wrote to my father halfway through my visit to Oxcaster Lacey,” Arabella said as calmly as she could manage, tightening her grip on Nathaniel’s hand as though terrified he would attempt to escape her. “I was…I was lonely. I was afraid. Nathaniel and I had not yet spoken from the heart. We had not managed to understand each other.”

“A fault that was entirely my own,” Nathaniel said in a low voice.

“Not at all,” Arabella said. “I think we both bear the blame there. I was too quick to judge, too swift to see the smock and the dirt, and not the man underneath.”

A grin crept across Nathaniel’s mouth. “That you were.”

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