Page 20 of Miss Harvey's Horribly Lovable Fiancé
“I want to be that important to you.”
“Esme,” he whispered. “Tomorrow I shall prove that you are.”
“And every day thereafter?”
He stilled, alarmed at her doubt. “Every hour thereafter.”
She burrowed into his embrace and sighed. “Oh, Giles. I want to be the best wife for you. I tried to prepare myself to be your bride but I doubt I am totally reformed. I apologized to my cousin Fifi, but there are others who think me selfish, greedy. I’ve heard some think my mother controls me.”
“And yet I’ve heard she did not want you to marry me.”
She pulled back, searching his face. “I’m sorry. It’s true.”
“Yet you accepted me.”
“I did.”
“So I’d conclude your mother does not control you.” He lifted her chin and looked into her sweet brown eyes. “I must tell you that in many ways, my father controls me.”
She clutched his waistcoat. “I marryonlyyou, Giles.”
“What he does, however, affects us. Me. You. He is truly selfish and greedy. Rapacious, more like.”
“I cannot care as long as he is far away,” she confessed. “He won’t come for the wedding and I am pleased.”
He brushed the bottom of her lower lip with his thumb. How it tore him to tell her this! “But he has not yet signed the agreement.”
She stepped back from his embrace. “Why?”
“He needs money.”
She swallowed, but eyed him in her canny way. “He’s extorting it from you?”
“He is.”
“And? Did you agree to his demands?”
“No.”
She inhaled sharply and ran a hand over her brow. “If he refuses to sign, is our marriage legal?”
“Once we exchange vows and we sign the church register, we are legally wed in the eyes of the church. You will be my wife by all that’s holy and in the eyes of men and women.”
She spun away. For a long minute she paced before her father’s desk. “But if he does not sign, our wedding is legal but the agreements are not?”
“Only the agreements between him as representative of the duchy and your father.”
She whirled toward him, her fine features wild with worry. “But Papa signed already! Didn’t he? I’m most certain he said he had. Oh, Giles!”
“I spoke with your father a while ago in the village.”
“You told him this?”
“Yes. All of it.”
“And he…? What did he say?”
“He is not happy.”
