Page 87 of My Deceitful Duchess
“Sebastian—”
“I’ve added it backwards and forwards and backwards again, and it’s still not enough.” Sebastian raked his hand through his hair, and he looked so—sowreckedthat Jenny was overcome with sympathy.
“Ninety-seven is close enough,” she said. “I’ll advance you the last three percent.” She hadn’t realized he’d been keeping a tally, jotting down every bit of her he’d won back so scrupulously.
“It’s notenough,” he said. “We’ll have to put off the wedding.”
An incredulous laugh drifted from her throat. “Sebastian, we areat the church.” Everyone was waiting within already—their friends, their family. All except the bride and groom, who stood upon the steps. Engaged in an argument about whether or not the wedding would take place atall.
“I made a promise to you.” It was said with an air of desperation, threaded through with a note of failure. “I made a promise to you, and I will keep it.”
Jenny resisted the urge to stamp her foot like a child. “That’s simply too bad, for I intend to be marriedtoday.”
Sebastian heaved a sigh. “Jenny—”
“Cold feet?”
Jenny startled to the interjection of the voice, turned her head to see Mr. Beckett standing some feet away, watching them curiously.
“No,” Sebastian snarled. “What the devil are you doing here, Beckett? You weren’t invited.”
“Didn’t have to be. Can’t bar the public from a church wedding.” A wry sort of grin slid across his face. “Had to see it for myself, you know, whether or not you could bring a woman up to scratch. Wouldn’t have believed it, myself.” He nudged a pebble with the toe of his boot. “He’s an odd sort,” he said to Jenny. “Certain you want to go through with it?”
“Yes,” said Jenny, just as Sebastian said, “Ninety-seven percent certain.”
“Brave of you, to take him on,” Beckett said. “Can’t imagine another woman working up the nerve. You’ll have your hands full.”
Jenny bristled, prepared to take offense. “What do you mean bythat, sir?”
A shrug. “Only that he’s a strange one.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “What sort of man comes asking to borrow a cell, I ask you?”
“A cell?”
“In the Magistrates’ Court,” Beckett supplied. “Came round some time ago, asking if I would lock him in one for a month.” A dismissive chortle. “’Course, I told him off for it. Imagine,borrowingacell.”
“For what purpose?” she asked—but she already knew. And Sebastian stood there, his jaw tight with displeasure, as if Beckett had revealed something terribly personal.
“Since he’d putyouin one,” Beckett said. “I told him they weren’t to be used as penance—”
Jenny rounded on Sebastian. “You never told me this.”
“Of course I didn’t. He refused me. It didn’t matter.”
“Of course itmatters.” She seized the ring, wrenching it off of her finger to slap it into his palm. “Ofcourseit matters!” Her voice had risen so high, she knew it must be audible to everyone waiting inside. Probably she sounded like the worst sort of harridan; a shrieking shrew of a woman. “You are going to take that ring, and you are going into the church where you will place it back upon my finger and marry me.Today.”
His fingers closed upon the ring, brows drawn down in confusion. “It matters?” he said. “Three percent?”
“Onehundredpercent,” she choked out. “A thousand—a million—” A terrible little sob clung to the inside of her throat, and she cast herself into his arms, heedless of who might be watching. “You are never to do anything so foolish ever again!”
He didn’tquiteunderstand, she knew, even though his arms closed around her. One hand smoothed down her back in a comforting gesture, and she felt the slight jerk of his head toward the door of the church, heard the scathing sound Mr. Beckett made as he marched past them and through the doors.
“You can’t order me about,” Sebastian said. “You’re not my wife.”
A laugh eked its way out, and she withdrew just far enough to toy with the fluffy material of the cravat he had donned in deference to the wedding—despite the fact that he loathed them with every fiber of his being. “But I am going to be,” she said. “And then I shall order you about all I please.”
And she seized the snowy white material in her fist and dragged her groom to the altar at last.
∞∞∞
