Page 85 of A Tempest of Desire
“Don’t get accustomed to this. I won’t be attending any more balls with you. This isn’t where I belong.”
“You belong in the sky, chasing after rainbows.”
“I’ll be back at it soon. My basket should be ready in two weeks.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry. That time frame probably means nothing to you.”
“You can come to my residence and mark it in my diary. I’ve discovered when I turn the pages, I create a visual image of the day getting nearer. It gives me an idea of how time passes.”
“I can’t accept your offer to pay for it, though.”
“I give gifts to my friends.”
“Tonight is the last gift I’ll accept. And it is a gift. Growing up, I always dreamed of attending a ball as glamorous as this one.”
“Eventually your father would have had to tell you the truth.”
She nodded. “I’ve often wondered when he might have done it. What other lies he might have spun. But here I am where I always thought I would be. I’m trying to memorize everything so I can share it with my mother. She still believes I’m a seamstress. I’m not ashamed of what I do, Langdon, but I don’t know how she would take it.”
“I should think she’d be proud of you.”
He caught the sight of a tear glistening in her eye before she blinked it away.
She’d worked hard to increase her value, not realizing she’d been valuable all along.
“I did have a nefarious reason for bringing you tonight.”
She arched a brow. “Oh?”
“Mmm. All of my immediate and most of my extended family are here. It seemed the appropriate place.”
“For what?”
“To ask you to marry me.”
Marlowe wasn’t certain which one of them had stopped first, but suddenly they were standing in the middle of the dance floor, people waltzing around them.
She was certain she’d not heard correctly. In addition to the orchestra playing, a cornucopia of noises echoed around the room, loud enough to affect a person’s hearing. Many kept a hand cupped around an ear in an effort to hear more clearly. Or perhaps it was simply that in her more recent fantasies, he’d asked for her hand—and she was presently dreaming. She would soon awaken with an emptiness in her soul.
Still, whether dream or reality, she asked, “I beg your pardon?”
His grin was small, tender, and very nearly apologetic. “I don’t want doubt regarding how precious you are. How deserving you are of any dream you’ve ever dreamt. I want you for my wife.”
She nearly released a sharp bark of laughter. “Have you forgottenwhatI am? The portrait the newspapers have painted of me? If you married me, you’d be shunned, cast out of this upper tier of Society. Langdon, I’ve nurtured my reputation. I’m fit to be a man’s mistress, not his wife.”
He studied her for what seemed eons before nodding, as though acknowledging to himself a decision made. “Then be my mistress.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it.”
She looked around frantically, not certain if she was searching for the answer or an escape. She loved him too much to burden him with any of this. Her reputation. The gossip. And she loved him too much to be with him when he married. “I can’t share you. I won’t share you. Therefore it would be only until you marry, but it would be too hard, too hard to see you walking away from me into another’s arms.”
“I’ll never marry.”
He said the words with such finality that she was taken aback. “Of course you’ll marry.”
“And be unfaithful to you? I think not.”
What was he on about? It was to his wife he’d be unfaithful. “Once you marry, I’ll move on.”
