Page 49 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
The words wound through Lizzie’s head on an endless loop as she watched Imogen direct the footmen. There had been a great deal of work done while she and Luke had been at the church—being married—but still there was so much to be done. Fully half of the trunks to be loaded upon the cart that had arrived earlier belonged to him; all those things he had so recently called down from London. Her things comprised a single trunk, perhaps two.
“It’s done, then?”
Lizzie startled at the realization that Willie had come up alongside her.
“Yes, it’s done,” she said softly.
“And ye saw the license?”
“I signed it.” With a hand that had trembled straight through forming the letters of her name. A sense of impending doom had hung over her shoulders like a cloak and she had known—known—that it had been a mistake to marry him. A man she had known only a handful of weeks. A man whose character was questionable at best.
“Yer father oughta given ye away,” Willie said, his lips pulling into that crotchety frown with which she was so very familiar. “Don’t care much for his lordship m’self,” he said, “but leastwise he’s doing right by all o’ ye. More than I could say of some what owed ye better. Ye just—” He hesitated, pulling up his shoulders. “Don’t fall in love with him,” he said. “He ain’t the sort to appreciate it none.”
It was nothing she didn’t already know, and yet the soft warning still chilled her to the bone. “I won’t,” she said, striving to inject a certainty into the words that she did not feel. “I’m not so foolish as that.”
“’Course ye are,” he said. “Else I wouldn’t be here, now, would I? Ye got a soft heart, and it’s a credit to you, it is. Ye could love an adder past the point of catchin’ its fangs. But there’s a danger in lovin’ someone who won’t ever love ye back.” Willie set one hand upon her shoulder and squeezed, and the gesture felt so comforting, sofatherly, that for an instant it brought a wash of tears to her eyes. “Ye guard that soft heart, Miss Lizzie. A man like him’ll break it without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Lady Ashworth.”
The fine hairs at the nape of Lizzie’s neck prickled at the advent of the words, which had sounded not so much like a mild correction as they had a threat. In the bustle of the household packing, she had not heard Luke appear. Though he wore a smile that could pass for careless, there was a tightness to it, a cutting sharpness that sent a shiver skittering down her spine.
Willie’s mouth pursed into a disapproving scowl. “She has always been Miss Lizzie—”
“Yes,” Luke cut in, making a show of idly adjusting his cuffs. “And now she isLady Ashworth.” There was a proprietary tone to the words, as if he meant to use them as a reminder of to whom she owed her allegiance. Which was, in his opinion, to the man whom she had married—and to him alone. But he waited for neither acknowledgment nor agreement; he simply extended one hand to her and said, “We’re going ahead.”
“What? But the packing—”
“Can be completed in our absence,” he said smoothly. “Willie, I trust that you and Imogen can manage the remainder between the two of you? My staff will convey you and your belongings to my home in London thereafter.”
“Now, see here—”
“Willie, please.” Lizzie placed one hand gently upon his arm. The verylastthing she needed at the moment was for the two men to come to blows over something so foolish. What an ignominious beginning to a marriage that would be. To Luke, she said, “Couldn’t I have just a few minutes more?”
A muscle jumped in his cheek, that wretched smile sharpening. “Five minutes,” he said, his voice grating through his teeth. “And not a moment more.” He turned for the door, somewhat stiffly. “I’ll await you in the carriage.”
Lizzie did not mistake it for anything other than an order.
∞∞∞
Luke had never known that five minutes could be so grueling to endure. It seemed to him that a decade had elapsed in the waiting between when he’d left Lizzie and Willie in the foyer until at last she appeared on the drive and a footman handed her into the carriage.
She settled on the seat opposite him, tucking the skirts of that wretched yellow dress and twisting the ostentatious ring that sat upon her finger. “I don’t see why I couldn’t have stayed a bit longer,” she groused, flicking back the curtains to take one last look at her home.
Luke slammed his fist against the roof of the carriage, and there was the snap of the reins just a moment before the carriage lurched into motion, the sudden movement causing Lizzie to sway in her seat. “Because I didn’t wish it,” he said. “I’ve rusticated in the countryside long enough. And you’ll want to be properly introduced to the household in advance of your family’s arrival.”
And he’d never been so bloody eager to debauch a woman in a moving conveyance, but that sounded like the sort of thing a man ought to keep to himself. At least a newly-married one with a bride that almost certainly had not even the slightest inkling of the fact that she was about to be debauched.
Her hands settled in her lap, the right placed over the left, those dark brows drawing together. “But did you have to be so rude to Willie?”
Of course he hadn’t. But he had not liked the old man’s implications, nor had he liked the dread that had, however briefly, flitted across Lizzie’s face. “He does not advise you on matters concerning our marriage,” he said. “It’s not his place.”
“He was being kind,” she said.
“He was beingmeddlesome.” It didn’t matter that he had no desire to love or to be loved; he did not need the complication of the old man whispering divisive nonsense into her ear. She didn’t need to be reminded of the terms of their marriage. Women tended to set stock in things like love, and eventually to note its absence. But they could have a good marriage without it—ifshe refused to have her head turned by such things.
Her hands curled into one another, and her chin tilted up. “Nonetheless, I think—”
