Page 3 of The Inconvenient Compromise
“No,” she said. “Not really. I hardly know the Earl of Kenworth, quite honestly. He is simply who Charlotte chose for me to marry. She wanted the prestige of having a countess in her inner circle.”
“You could still be a countess,” he said. “Kenworth is not the only earl about.” Where the devil had that come from? Yes, he needed a wife, and he needed one quickly. But this girl was more trouble than she could possibly be worth.
Her head snapped around. “Who would marry me after this? Are you mad?”
“You ask if I am mad, and yet you let yourself into my bedchamber, climbed into my bed naked as the day you were born, on the strength of—what precisely made you think Kenworth was even here?”
She shook her head in dismay. “Charlotte asked the innkeeper if the earl was here. She never specified which earl. And now we’re done for.”
Lucian rolled to his back, folding his arms behind his head. “You could always marry me. I am an earl, after all.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and she eyed him somewhat speculatively. “A wealthy one?”
“If I get married within one month of inheriting the title, yes… very. Apparently, my now dead however-many-greats-it-was uncle was quite disturbed at the thought of the title going dormant,” he offered with a smirk. “He thought giving me the title and then offering to sweeten the pot with a fortune for getting both a wife and heir was the way to go.”
“You get a fortune for getting married?” she asked.
“A small one, yes, and another fortune upon the birth of an heir… and since it’s a Scottish title, said heir can even be a girl. No pressure to produce a son,” he offered helpfully. “I’m not Kenworth, but surely I will suffice.”
It became a moot point as the doors burst open, and Charlotte stood there with the innkeeper. She began immediately shouting about the ruination of her friend—long before she recognized that the man in the bed was not the Earl of Kenworth at all. When she did realize it, she began to stutter brokenly before falling silent. Regardless, it was much too late. The damage was quite thoroughly done.
Doors up and down the corridor began to open, and a few familiar faces from London society could be seen amongst them. Many were just traveling to London as the Season had yet to begin in earnest. As their current accommodation was one of the more respectable coaching inns along the London Road, it was full of people to carry the tale far and wide.
The innkeeper was gaping, sputtering, and shaking his head. After a moment, the man regained his composure enough to proclaim, “I run a clean establishment here. Respectable. I’ll not have goings-on like this here!”
Lucian sat up, the sheet falling to his waist. “My good man, we are surely not the only betrothed couple to have put the consummation horse before the ceremonial cart. Why, I already feel quite married in my heart to my dearest… what was your name again? Ah, yes. Fiona. My dearest Fiona and I cannot wait to be wed.”
TWO
Friday afternoon…
It was well after noon by the time they crossed into Scotland. Lady Bruxton had left, departing for London in a huff and refusing to speak a single word to Fiona. Not that Fiona wished to hear anything the woman had to say. She did not hold herself blameless as she had willingly gone along with most of Charlotte’s schemes, only drawing the line when she’d realized the woman was willing to go so far as murder. And now Fiona found herself preparing to marry a man she knew nothing about beyond the fact that he claimed to have inherited an earldom somewhere in the wilds of Scotland.And that to collect his fortune in its entirety, she’d have to provide him with an heir.That point had been made very clear. The very idea of it instilled her with terror—both the act of conception and the thought of childbirth.
“You aren’t much of a conversationalist,” he mused. “If we are to make this marriage work, that’s certainly a good tactic. Quiet wives are rarely problematic, after all.”
“And intelligent wives will not be baited,” she snapped. The man possessed not a single serious bone in all of his exceptionally large and exceptionally firm body. How could she possibly survive being married to someone she could never take seriously? Someone who would never take her seriously?
“Is that what I’m doing?” He asked the question in a languid fashion, his tone somewhat lazily amused. “Am I baiting you, Fiona?”
“What else would you call it?” She shifted on the coach’s seat, trying desperately to find a comfortable position. The last several days had been one coach after another—one terribly sprung, stingily upholstered coach after the next with long, endless days of traveling. All she wanted was to be back in London.Or to be able to go back and undo all that had occurred in the last week.
He sighed heavily. “Perhaps I am baiting you… but that is only because every other attempt made to engage you in conversation has failed miserably. Would it really be so terrible to have a conversation with me?”
She would have to do more than simply converse with him. After all, they were on their way to be married. It had never occurred to her, when she considered all the ways in which she might be married, that she would do so ‘over the anvil’ and under a cloud of scandal. With a heavy sigh signaling her less than gracious capitulation, Fiona asked, “What would you have us converse about?”
“Why you were so determined to trap Kenworth into marriage when you don’t even like the man,” he suggested with a shrug. “That’s a good place to start.”
There were a dozen reasons. To set her sister up for success, to spare her family the shame of being impoverished with no connections, to get away from her father, who would smile in public and snap their heads off with his foul temper in the privacy of their home. But she did not want to tell him those things. Giving him that sort of information would make her vulnerable, and Fiona wished very much to be no more vulnerable than she already was. So she answered simply, “That was who Charlotte chose for me. Every one of her ‘friends’— and I am intelligent enough to realize that we were never truly friends, so you need not point it out—is matched with a gentleman by Charlotte. She chooses them based on influence, wealth, and what she deems manageability. Kenworth, in her estimation, was very manageable.”
He laughed at that. “She clearly knew little enough of him. Kenworth is a bore but a stubborn one. Honorable to his very core. Kenworth was certainly not the man for you, Miss Fiona Trimble.”
She gasped, insulted to the very core of her being. “And what does that mean? I’m not the beauty Miss Stamford is, of a certain, nor do I have her fortune, but I would have been a perfectly respectable match for him! How dare you imply otherwise!”
“Respectable?” he began to laugh then—deeply and with great enthusiasm. “Respectable? You climbed naked as a newborn babe into my bed. You, my lovely bride, are not respectable at all!”
Fiona looked away, fixing her gaze on some point beyond the window. There was nothing he had said that she could refute, after all. She was not respectable. Not anymore. She’d allowed Charlotte Farraday, Lady Bruxton, to bully her into giving up the only thing a woman ever possessed that was worth anything at all—her reputation and her dignity. She had, indeed, climbed naked into the bed of a total stranger.His bed.Was it any wonder that he held her in such disdain?
Tears threatened. She bit back a sob, primarily out of frustration, and swiped angrily at her eyes. He didn’t deserve her tears, not with his callous words. It only hurt so much because it was true, she realized. “Well, you’ve made your opinion of me quite clear, my lord. Perhaps until we are required to speak before the vicar, we should refrain from conversing with one another at all.”
