The Marriage Wager Read online

  When the play began, Emma leaned forward and prepared to enjoy herself. She really did love the theater. Plays had been a diversion and a solace even at the worst times of her life, and she always found herself able to forget her troubles in the unfolding story.

  The actors began. Emma rested her elbow on the rail and put her chin in her hand, mentally ticking off the list of characters—an innocent young heroine, a stalwart hero, a wicked old aunt, an unwanted suitor. All too familiar, she thought, disappointed by the quality of the first speeches. It seemed this would be a very commonplace performance.

  Then something odd happened. Emma blinked, wondering if she had really seen it, and decided she couldn’t have. Or it was an accident, a mistake. The actors moved around the stage, declaiming their too-predictable sentiments over the heads of the audience. There was another oddity, and a third that left Emma openmouthed with amazement. She turned to see if the others had noticed anything. Sir Oswald looked sleepy and extremely bored. Colin’s mother appeared impatient, her eyes drifting from the stage to the crowd, searching for acquaintances. Emma glanced at Colin. His violet eyes held a glint of deep, sardonic amusement, and a smile was tugging at one corner of his mouth.

  “Did you see…?” she whispered.

  “I did indeed,” he replied before she even finished the sentence. “A most unusual performance.”

  They turned back to the stage, and in the next instant, both of them burst out laughing.

  “You two are very gay,” said Colin’s mother. “I don’t see that this play is so amusing. Indeed, I find it rather irritating.”

  “I believe the actors agree with you, Mother,” said Colin, “or perhaps they just dislike each other intensely.”

  “Did you see the one playing the judge stick out his foot to trip the old lady?” asked Emma.

  “She set the point of her heel on it,” agreed Colin. “Remarkably agile for her age. I thought he cursed her most creatively.”

  Emma laughed again. “And then all the actors had to make it part of the play. That tall one playing the hero is beginning to look quite desperate.”

  “Don’t see anything funny about it,” muttered Sir Oswald. “Damned disgraceful performance, I say. Actors more interested in scoring one another off than in entertaining the audience.”

  Emma and Colin looked at each other, identical wry humor in their expressions. Had anyone ever shared her reactions so precisely? Emma wondered. So often in the past she had been made to feel that she was out of step with others, or unreasonable. She felt a tremor of emotion, and looked away from him.

  When the curtain fell at the first interval, the folds of cloth were received with more enthusiasm than the previous scene. Some people were leaving, Emma noted, but when Sir Oswald suggested that they might do the same, a protest sprang to her lips.

  “No, no, we must see this through,” Colin objected before she could voice it. “I have an intense curiosity about what they will do next. Do you think they will make it through the entire play?”

  “I don’t know about the young heroine,” said Emma. “She looked about to explode just before the curtain.”

  “We cannot miss that.”

  “No, please,” she replied, smiling at him.

  Sir Oswald grunted. “Let us have some refreshment at least,” he grumbled, rising a little stiffly from his chair.

  The four of them strolled together down to the crowded anteroom, where those who did not care to stay in their boxes greeted their friends and examined the fashions of the other theatergoers. Colin went to procure wine. His mother and Sir Oswald were hailed by a group of acquaintances and turned to join their chattering circle. Emma stood just behind them watching the animated crowd as if it were another drama.

  “I don’t understand what is going on in this play,” a woman to her left was complaining. “It makes no sense.”

  “The young girl ain’t bad looking,” she caught a dandified gentleman murmuring to his crony. “Believe I’ll slip backstage afterward and get an introduction.”

  Did anyone in this audience share her amusement about the way the actors were behaving? Emma wondered. Only Colin, she thought, with an inexplicable wistfulness. She looked around for him, and saw that he was still waiting for the wine.

  “Good evening,” said a smooth, hateful voice near her ear.

  Emma turned to face Count Julio Orsino.

  “Seeing you here, I thought I would pay my respects,” he added.

  She said nothing.

  “Are you enjoying the play?” Orsino asked as if they were amiable acquaintances. “Not a very good one, I fear, eh?”

  “Go away.”

  “My dear baroness—”

  “And stay away from me,” Emma added through clenched teeth.

  “But you are left here all alone,” he responded with patently false solicitude. “I cannot—”

  “I am not alone.”

  “Indeed? Shall I fetch your friends for you?” He scanned the crowd.

  Emma grew uncomfortably aware of Sir Oswald and Colin’s mother close behind her, and of the fact that Colin himself must be making his way back to them. She did not want them to encounter Orsino. If the count thought he could force her to make introductions, he was sadly mistaken, she thought, her jaw clenched. He had still not understood who he was dealing with. If he insisted on a public demonstration, she would give it to him. Trembling with outrage and tension, Emma stood very straight and silently turned her back on him, giving him the cut direct. Anyone who saw would know that she was refusing to acknowledge the acquaintance. It was the most obvious and humiliating insult she could offer Orsino. And how he deserved it, she thought defiantly. This would show him that he must get out of her life, because Emma was certain that if he did not, something dreadful would come of it in the end.

  An endless moment passed when she heard nothing of the crowd around her. Then a subtle movement ruffled the hair curling onto her cheek. “You would be well advised to come and see me,” whispered Orsino, his lips almost brushing her ear. “I have been very patient. I have endured your contempt. But that is at an end now. If I do not hear from you by tomorrow, believe me, you will regret it.”

  He withdrew. Emma felt rather than saw him walk away from her. A few people standing nearby gave him curious glances, followed by more furtive, sidelong looks at her. Her hands were shaking, she noted dispassionately, and acknowledged to herself that she was afraid of Orsino. She had seen too much of what he could, and would, do.

  A wineglass moved into her field of vision. “Here you are,” said Colin.

  Emma started violently.

  “Did I startle you? I beg your pardon.”

  She took the wine.

  “Who was that you were talking to?”

  She looked up at him, and then quickly away. “I? No one. I wasn’t talking to anyone.” She drank from the glass, keeping it steady with some effort.

  Colin examined Emma’s averted face. He had distinctly seen her engaged in conversation with a sallow, foreign-looking fellow in rather flashy clothes. He had seen her turn away from him, and seen the man lean in to whisper something that had made Emma turn a bit pale. The man had had an air that he didn’t like in the least—full of intangible warning signs that one learned with experience. Emma should not have any contact at all with that sort of man.

  But she had had a great deal of contact with that sort of man in her earlier life, he remembered. Colin frowned. It occurred to him suddenly that Emma might have things to hide from the years she had spent with Edward Tarrant. “The stocky fellow with the yellow waistcoat,” he prompted, unwilling to let this drop.

  “Oh.” Emma drew in a breath. “Oh, him. He was just asking, uh, how to reach the third tier of boxes.”

  If her manner had not been so agitated, he might have believed her, Colin thought. He watched un
knowable emotions pass across her beautiful face. Clearly, she had been upset by the appearance of this fellow. And even more clearly, she was not going to tell him why.

  The realization disturbed him profoundly.

  “Not familiar with the theater?” he couldn’t help adding.

  “What? Oh, no. I… I believe he was from out of town.”

  He knew her. She could not be concealing anything dishonorable. But why, then, didn’t she tell him what was going on?

  He wanted to force her to, Colin realized. He wanted to say that it had been obvious from her expression that the man was no stranger, and that he had said something that upset her. He wanted to demand that she confide in him, and perhaps more important, that she explain why she had hesitated to do so.

  But he didn’t quite dare. He had known about her past when he married her, Colin thought. She had certainly made no secret of it. He had taken it on as part of their bargain. He had no grounds for complaint. Their sane, sensible arrangement did not give him the right to know what she did not wish to tell him. But some fierce, wounded part of him remained completely unconvinced by this rational argument. He wanted her to turn to him. The intensity of his need shook Colin and made him quickly try to wall it off behind practiced defenses. He simply wanted to protect her, he told himself. There was nothing wrong in that. It was his proper role as her husband. He took a deep breath. He would look into the matter of this unknown man quietly himself, he decided. And then they would see.

  The bell rang, calling them back to their seats. They were standing in a crowd overpopulated with eager gossips, all of whom could sniff out a tidbit better than the finest foxhound, Colin told himself. It was no place for any sort of private conversation. Emma would never consider sharing confidences under this sort of malicious scrutiny.

  For some reason, he felt considerably relieved. And all he wanted just now was to see that worried frown disappear from her face. “One of the waiters told me that the man playing the judge has been jilted by the older actress, who is infatuated with the young hero,” he said as he offered his arm to escort her back to their box. “And he is wavering between her and the ingenue. The whole cast is in an uproar about it.”

  “Reality intrudes into art?” Emma managed.

  “With a vengeance, apparently. Quite literally in this case.”

  She smiled, and Colin felt an odd tightening in the region of his heart.

  “Perhaps they have sorted things out in the interval,” she offered as Colin’s mother and Sir Oswald joined them in walking upstairs.

  “I must admit that I hope not,” he replied. When she met his eyes, he raised one brow.

  “Me, too,” she admitted, with another, easier, smile.

  When the curtain rose again, it was immediately clear that the cast of the play had not resolved its difficulties during the pause. Their faces were set in anger as they pronounced the lines of what had been billed as a lighthearted comedy. When one of the men was required to take a lady’s hand and bow over it, it was obvious from her look of pain that he crushed her fingers between his. In turn, when she was pouring him a glass of wine, she deliberately spilled it down the front of his knee breeches, leaving an embarrassing stain. His show of teeth in response was feral. “He looks as if he would dearly like to bite her,” Colin commented, and was rewarded by another sputter of laughter from Emma.

  After that, things only got worse. Cast members stepped in front of one another, spoke lines from completely different plays, and took every opportunity to interfere with their colleagues’ parts. The action became a muddle, shifting at the whim of the last speaker, who forced the rest to scramble for a comprehensible response to whatever he chose to say. Emma and Colin found themselves pulled into a guessing game; with each speech, they vied with one another to whisper the name of the play from which the words had originally come. In ten minutes, they counted six unrelated titles.

  “Not Hamlet again,” protested Emma a few minutes later, wiping tears of laughter from her cheek. “The man playing the judge seems to have memorized every line of it.”

  “And he appears to find much of it very apt,” agreed Colin, laughing out loud yet again as the older actress turned a killing glare on the actor in question.

  Half-eaten apples, crumpled playbills, and random bits of refuse began to land on the front apron of the stage, thrown by disgruntled patrons in the pit. The ingenue, irritated beyond bearing by what was happening, deliberately kicked one piece of fruit back out into the audience, rousing an ominous mutter. The play’s hero grabbed her arm and jerked her roughly around to face him, speaking his romantic lines to her through gritted teeth.

  “This is dreadful,” said Colin’s mother, though she was smiling by now, too. “Come, let us go.”

  “Don’t you want to see how it comes out, Mother?” asked Colin, his voice shaking with laughter.

  “It will end in a riot,” she replied positively. “And I do not want to be trying to find my carriage in the middle of it.”

  On stage, the ingenue lost control. Putting her hands on her hips, she confronted the audience and said “Beast!” to a burly man with a striped handkerchief tied around his neck who had just called out an insult. The man responded with an even grosser evaluation of her character and morals and the performance in general.

  “That tears it,” said Colin.

  The young actress began picking up the things that had been thrown onto the stage and hurling them back into the audience. After a moment of frozen consternation onstage, one of the younger actors joined her, while the rest began to edge their way into the wings, hoping to escape notice. The crowd in the pit surged and roared like the sea, and then twenty arms were raised to throw.

  “Perhaps we had better go,” said Colin.

  “Couldn’t we just hide behind the curtains here in the box and watch?” asked Emma, her eyes twinkling.

  A stray apple core flew past, barely missing the feather that adorned the dowager baroness’s hair.

  “A strategic retreat,” declared Colin. “Come, Mother, Emma. If you will give the ladies your assistance, Sir Oswald, I will take rear guard.”

  Many of the other denizens of the boxes had come to the same conclusion, and when they reached the theater entry, it was crowded with fashionable patrons trying to get to the door. As they struggled through the crush, the volume of noise rose steadily behind them. They were outdoors and getting into the carriage when a mob of young men burst from the theater and went racing off down the street yelling and waving bits of cloth that looked remarkably like satin petticoats.

  “Damned apprentices,” said Sir Oswald. “They’re a menace. Something ought to be done.”

  “Indeed,” replied Colin, his voice unsteady. “Perhaps they should let them criticize plays for the newspapers.”

  Emma laughed.

  “It is all very well to laugh,” grumbled Sir Oswald. “But I don’t know what the world is coming to when a pack of rabble is free to run the streets brandishing, er, undergarments. And probably looting as well.”

  “Oh, I think they’ve already got what they wanted,” said Colin.

  The older man snorted.

  ***

  Fits of laughter continued to break out between Emma and Colin throughout the drive home. “I had a great deal of sympathy for that young actress,” said Emma as they entered the house and walked up the stairs together. “I would have wanted to throw things if I had been in her situation.”

  “Very understandable,” Colin agreed.

  “But my aim would have been better,” she assured him. “I would have hit that vulgar man who shouted the insults right on his big red nose,” she added.

  “I haven’t the slightest doubt of it.” They had come to the door of her bedchamber, and Colin hesitated. After yesterday, he was not, he realized, entirely sure of his welcome. The idea was unsettling an
d annoying. He just wanted everything to be as it had been. “We laugh at the same things,” he pointed out.

  “Yes,” Emma agreed, the laughter still lingering in her eyes and around her mouth.

  “That is not so common in my life,” he added.

  “Nor mine. What does that say about us? I wonder. Do you think our comic sense is warped?”

  Looking down at her, Colin felt a tide of powerful emotion rise, frightening in its intensity. He couldn’t put a name to it, though he knew it was all centered on Emma. “I was… a bit hasty last night,” he tried. “I did not mean to offend you.” Looking into her dark blue eyes, taking in her beauty, so familiar but always somehow a surprise as well, he could not stop himself from raising his hand to touch her cheek.

  Emma put her own hand on top of his.

  With an inarticulate sound, he pulled her into his arms and crushed her against him. To his infinite relief, Emma slid her arms around him.

  Reaching behind her, Colin found the doorknob and opened the door, easing them both through it into her bedchamber. When it was safely closed behind them, he bent and kissed her glancingly, like the brush of a butterfly’s wing.

  Emma let out a sighing breath.

  He kissed her again. His hand caressed her neck and shoulder, then ran down the ruby velvet of her gown to her waist.

  Emma murmured his name very softly.

  He continued these soft, quick kisses for some time, letting his hands float all over her body. When she followed his lead, slipping her hand inside his shirt and caressing his skin with the same light touch he was using, Colin shuddered with a fierce, exultant mixture of triumph and desire.

  He loosened the fastenings of her dress, and it pooled scarlet on the carpet. Drawing back a little, he stripped off his coat and shirt and neckcloth. Emma ran her hands very lightly over his muscled arms and chest, making his breath catch. His skin was as hot as Emma’s felt. His kisses grew more urgent now, but still quick and glancing over her lips and neck and shoulders.