The Marriage Wager Read online

  “You are Arabella Tarrant?” he asked, thinking that this Tarrant, at least, did not seem to fit the profile he had been given.

  “Oh! Yes. I beg your pardon. I am so… Edward’s aunt, you know. I believe I had the honor of meeting your mother at a ball years ago. Not that she would remember me, of course, but I thought at the time how—”

  “What is going on?” Colin asked, recognizing that she would veer off onto irrelevancies unless he intervened.

  Arabella clasped her hands together on her chest and assumed an excessively pained expression. “You will have to excuse me, my lord,” she said. “I am all at sixes and sevens. There has been such scolding, and running hither and thither, and that creature Ferik keeps bellowing at my maids. I really do not think he is a suitable servant for—”

  “Yes, yes,” interrupted Colin, losing patience. “May I speak to Lady Tarrant?” One of his discoveries today had been Edward Tarrant’s knighthood, which he had found both incongruous and annoying.

  “Yes, that is why I wrote to you. Emma is leaving, you see, and I… I thought she… that is, you… er, that the two of you should talk before she goes.”

  “Leaving this house?” asked Colin. He was very much in favor of that. It was not only shabby, but as far as he could see it was totally disorganized as well. And he wished Emma’s association with the Tarrant family cut as soon as possible.

  “No, no, the country. England. She planned to take the boat to France tonight, but…” Arabella’s timid glance grew sly. “I, er, managed to hinder her preparations a bit.” Her thin features took on a sanctimonious expression. “I don’t know what may have passed between you, but I thought you should at least say farewell,” she added.

  Colin looked at her. She was not the sort of person he encountered in the normal course of things. But his life seemed to have toppled right out of the normal course, he thought wryly. “Thank you,” he said.

  Arabella beamed at him. “Very happy to be of service, my lord.”

  He sighed. It was clear he would pay for this favor in some as yet unstated manner.

  “Ferik,” cried Emma’s voice from the back of the house. “Have you found them, Ferik? If not, hang Jim by his toes over the cookstove until he tells you what he has done with those trunks.”

  “Yes, mistress,” replied the deep voice, in a tone that said the giant interpreted her orders quite literally.

  An inarticulate squawk of protest followed this threat. “Oh, dear,” said Arabella. She wrung her hands. “I had better go and see…”

  “Why not tell her that I am here?” Colin suggested.

  “Yes. Yes, I will. One moment.” She scurried out.

  There was a short silence, then Emma’s voice came again, saying, “What? What have you done?”

  The silence that followed was thick and ominous. Colin felt his lips twitch as he imagined the confrontation. By the time Emma swept into the room a few minutes later, he was having to work hard to suppress a smile.

  Her appearance sobered him, however. In a traveling dress of dark green, with long sleeves and a high neck, Emma looked coolly elegant. Her jaw was set, and her eyes frosty. She was breathtakingly beautiful, and formidably angry. “Have the trunks turned up?” he could not help asking.

  She gave him a glare. “They have, now that Arabella has accomplished her purpose.”

  “You intended to leave England without even telling me?”

  “I didn’t see that it was any of your concern,” Emma snapped. The last few hours had frayed her temper beyond mending. Having to face Colin and the jumble of feelings he roused was the crowning touch to an infuriating day.

  “So I was to be left to face the gossip and conjectures while you fled abroad?” asked Colin.

  “Yes!” she cried. “This whole muddle is your fault. If you had not said we were to be married—”

  “I didn’t say so.”

  “Well, implied it then,” said Emma through gritted teeth. “If you had not spoken in such an impulsive and irresponsible way—”

  “Then your father would not have put the notice in the Morning Post, neatly closing the trap,” he finished.

  Emma flushed crimson. “Exactly so,” she replied. His use of the word “trap” was the final straw. She wanted to scream with frustration.

  With a swift gesture, he conceded the point. “So, you are running away?” he asked.

  Emma turned from him, walking across the threadbare carpet to the empty hearth and gripping the mantelpiece so hard her knuckles whitened. “I am not running away,” she said when she could master her temper again. “I am simply returning to the Continent after a visit home.” Her voice wavered slightly on the last word.

  “Returning to what?” he asked her.

  Emma shrugged and said nothing.

  “Did Tarrant leave you provided for?”

  A great wave of weary bitterness washed over Emma. Things had been so easy for this man. He had no idea of the kind of life she had been forced to lead. “Edward left me a skill with cards,” she responded icily. “And a most thorough knowledge of the gaming houses where money is to be won. I shall manage quite well, thank you.”

  A picture of her in those sorts of places rose in his mind with appalling vividness. As an officer, he had often had to haul one or the other of the men in his regiment from such dens. “No,” he said.

  Emma ignored it. “If there is nothing further, my lord St. Mawr, I am eager to get on the road.”

  “No,” he said again, all his protective instincts alerted.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He could not allow it, he thought. He could not let all her vibrant life be leached away in the smoky gray rooms of gaming hells. He could not think of her enduring insults and privation, forced to depend on an activity she hated for her very bread. It was intolerable.

  “There must be some other choice,” he said.

  He had always had choices, Emma thought. He couldn’t even imagine what it was like to be beaten and squeezed down to one perilous path with nothing but dull misery ahead. Resentment made her speak more freely than she might have wished. “I am penniless, disgraced and disowned by my family, and alone,” she said with great clarity. “I have no choices.”

  The mixture of courage and despair he saw in the set of her shoulders and the firmness of her jaw moved Colin beyond common sense. “You will marry me,” he declared. “You will not return to that kind of life.”

  “Don’t speak to me as if I were a servant,” retorted Emma, her eyes flashing. “I shall do nothing of the kind. I wish you would stop this ridiculous talk of marriage.”

  Colin Wareham, Baron St. Mawr, was not accustomed to this sort of reaction. The men under his command had jumped to obey when he spoke in that tone. In London, he was used to fawning eagerness and delighted hope from any young lady he deigned to approach, let alone offer for. And though he despised such behavior with his whole heart, Emma’s attitude nonetheless provoked him. “Do you call it ridiculous?” he replied in a dangerously quiet voice.

  “Everyone in London must do so. Or worse. They would think you mad to form an alliance with me.”

  “If you care so much what people think, I’m surprised you don’t feel obliged to marry after the way your father found you in my house,” he said cuttingly.

  Emma gasped as if he had slapped her and flushed crimson again. “How dare you? When you deceived me in order to get me into that position!”

  “I did try—”

  “Letting me think you still had Robin’s notes when you had already returned them to him,” she accused.

  “I was about to tell—”

  “Playing the hardened gamester, so that I would think there was no other way to get them back,” she railed. “And all just to lure me—”

  “Will you be quiet!” shouted Colin.


  Startled, Emma closed her mouth and stared up at him. Colin, surprised by his own vehemence, gathered his scattered control. “This is exactly what happened that night,” he complained. And when she started to speak, he held up a hand to silence her. “I was trying to explain then, too, and you would not allow me to finish a sentence.”

  Emma struggled with herself, and managed to remain silent.

  Wareham’s lips twitched once again at the look on her face. “It was very wrong of me not to tell you,” he said. “I offer you my sincere apologies. But the thing was…”

  Emma raised her eyebrows.

  Just like her, Colin thought. Now, when he would have welcomed an interruption, she had nothing to say. “The thing was, I could not resist you,” he added. He couldn’t keep a caressing heat out of his voice.

  She met his violet gaze without wavering. “I was doing what had to be done to aid my brother,” she said coldly. “I excuse my actions on those grounds, and do not believe they were immoral.”

  “Are you denying that you enjoyed our embraces?” he asked incredulously. He remembered, all too vividly, the way her mouth had softened under his, and her soft, surprised gasp of pleasure.

  Now her eyes dropped. “I… I was taken by surprise…” she stammered.

  “And…?”

  “And nothing!” declared Emma.

  “I see.” He took a step toward her. “My memory of the incident is quite different. It seemed to me very far from nothing. Perhaps we should put the matter to the test here and now.”

  She backed quickly away. “That won’t be necessary.” She moved away from the fireplace and nearer to the door. “And in any case, it is really quite… quite irrelevant to this discussion.”

  “Irrelevant?” he exclaimed.

  Emma stood straighter and faced him directly. “Physical attraction is not a sound basis for a marriage, my lord. I have learned that lesson in my life, at least.”

  It took Colin a moment to realize that she was equating him with the miserable, and completely unlamented, Edward Tarrant. Rage, always slow to wake in Wareham, and all the more powerful for that very reason, engulfed him. “Enough,” he shouted. “We will not continue this pointless discussion. We will marry, and that is the end of it.” And then he would show her the difference, he thought, between himself and the contemptible Edward. “We may as well stand by the date your father gave the Morning Post. I see no reason for delay.”

  “My lord,” said Emma.

  “We will go down to Trevallan afterward, and then return for—”

  “Will you stop!” she cried.

  He scowled at her.

  “I won’t be forced into marriage by blind convention,” insisted Emma. “Nor will you be. I will not be any man’s obligation.”

  “You have completely missed the point—”

  Her dark eyes were afire. “Nor do I want your pity. I will not be pitied. In any case, this is all useless. I don’t wish to be married. It is… I am not suited to the state.”

  “Have you listened to one word I—?”

  “Why do you wish to marry me?” Emma broke in, as if it was a vitally important question to which he had not yet given her a satisfactory answer.

  “I should think that was obvious.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” she retorted, and waited.

  Colin tried to marshal a rational argument, but he found he was still too angry.

  “Perhaps you are mad,” she said after a moment. “But I am not. I will not marry on an insane whim, or out of some misguided sense of obligation. Please leave now. If you do not, I will have to ask Ferik to escort you out.” Emma hurried from the room. And as she did, without warning, a heavy pain like muffling cloth settled around the regions of her heart.

  Colin strode after her, then heard her speaking to someone else in the corridor, and stopped. His jaw and fists clenched, he stared into the mottled mirror above the mantel. He had handled this badly, he thought. It was so damned difficult to think when she began throwing accusations about.

  He drew in a deep, calming breath. She really was an extraordinary woman, he thought. After admitting that she was penniless and alone, still she refused a match that would bring her wealth and security and an assured position in society. She put her principles ahead of material gain with a fierce courage and integrity such as he had rarely seen in anyone—let alone a female. Colin saw again the flash of her eyes, the regal set of her head. He had no doubts now; this was the sort of woman he wanted for his wife.

  He took another breath. She had roused his fighting spirit. The iron courage and lightning power of decision that had supported Colin through innumerable military skirmishes rose in him. She would marry him. He would find a way to convince her that she must.

  Looking up at a sound, Colin found Arabella Tarrant in the drawing room doorway, looking pale and very disappointed. No doubt she had listened to the whole, he thought. “You must not let her leave tonight,” he said. “I will be back tomorrow morning, and I must find her here.”

  Arabella brightened visibly. “Yes, my lord.”

  “You think you can do this?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Once again, Arabella looked sly. She didn’t tell him that Emma had already missed the last coach to the coast, and there was no question of her leaving until noon tomorrow. It was far better if he thought she had delayed her and was correspondingly grateful. “You may count on me, my lord,” she added.

  “I do,” he replied curtly, and with a nod, he left.

  Arabella, whose hopes had been nearly dashed by the acrimonious exchange between the baron and Emma, rubbed her hands together in anticipation. Perhaps, after all, the cause was not lost. She might yet achieve her connection with Baron St. Mawr. She would use the rest of the evening to try to bring Emma to her senses. And if that failed—well, no doubt she would think of something else.

  ***

  At precisely the same moment, Colin Wareham’s mother was pounding one plump fist on the arm of her comfortable chair. “He is still avoiding me,” she raged. “I know he has received my notes, and he is ignoring them. This woman has bewitched him.”

  Her daughter Caroline, sitting on the edge of the sofa and wishing fervently that she could go home, did not bother to remind her that Colin often failed to appear the moment he was summoned. She certainly did not mention her opinion that their mother’s abrupt commands always seemed to annoy him a good deal.

  “He is ashamed,” the baroness concluded. “He is afraid to face me and admit that he has been entrapped by a scheming female. But I shan’t regard it. I shall save him anyway. Men are always completely helpless in these matters.”

  “Save him?” wondered Caroline. Guiltily, she prayed that Colin would not arrive while she was in her mother’s house.

  The baroness’s small, plump face looked triumphant. “I intend to discover all I can about this woman. I’m sure that there are things about her he does not know, which will break the spell she has put on him.”

  “What things, Mama?”

  “That is what I mean to find out,” answered the baroness impatiently. “Really, Caroline, you can be irritatingly dense.”

  “But how do you know…?”

  “I’m certain her life will not stand up to close scrutiny,” said her mother. “Colin has resisted every respectable girl I presented to him. Possibly he picked up low tastes in the army. But we will soon cure that!”

  Caroline received a vivid picture of how Colin would react to such interference. She shuddered quietly. “Mama, I must go home. Nicky is ill, you know. And Frederick is returning from the country today.”

  Her mother waved this aside. “I’m sure Wrotham can look after himself.”

  “But I wish to look after him,” replied Caroline, greatly daring.

  Seeing the stubborn set to her jaw, the baroness took
another tack. “Oh, very well, if you insist upon leaving me alone at this difficult time.” She let her head loll back in the armchair as if half fainting. “I suppose I can struggle along on my own. I know I must not spare myself. The honor of the family is at stake.”

  Caroline sprang to her feet, determined to take advantage of this small opening without feeling guilty. “Thank you, Mama. Good-bye,” she said, and fled before her mother could react to this defiance.

  The baroness sat up straight again and stared after her daughter with a mixture of outrage and disbelief that was almost comical. Then, seeing that she was really gone, she leaned back and began to tap her fingers impatiently on the chair arm. She didn’t like being left without an audience.

  Fortunately, it was only a few minutes before her dresser appeared in the doorway. “My lady?” she inquired.

  “Crane. Are you back already?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “What have you found out?”

  The servant looked smug. “A good deal, my lady.”

  “Come in and tell me at once.” The baroness leaned forward. She had sent her spy out into the underground of the haut ton, the interlaced network of servants who cared for its members. Crane maintained an extensive web of contacts in other households and always knew every disreputable piece of gossip before her mistress. The baroness did not doubt she had found out whatever this Emma Tarrant would most like to hide.

  Crane stood before her, head lowered, arms crossed at the wrist. She was the picture of demure submission, but the baroness knew what she demanded. “Sit down,” she said, giving it. “You must be worn out with walking.”

  Not deigning to smirk, Crane took a chair opposite her mistress. She enjoyed exacting such petty payments for her spying services. It confirmed her conviction that in asking, the baroness put herself on the same level as her dresser. “She was married to a very disreputable young gentleman,” she said.

  “Ah!” The baroness looked like a cat before a bowl of cream.

  “Sir Edward Tarrant,” continued Crane. “His father lost everything at Newmarket, and the son was known as a gamester almost before he was out of short coats. The whole family’s tainted with it. No one knows what has become of him, though it seems likely he’s dead.”