The Arrangement (14 page)

“And I am marrying
you,
” she said breathlessly.

So that it would be easier to set herself free of being one of life’s victims? Though there was always more than good fortune involved in the shedding of self-pity. Sometimes, self-pity was so ingrained in people that nothing could persuade them to take joy out of living.
Was
Miss Fry self-pitying? He did not know her well enough to answer his own question.

“I cannot see you,” he said. “I have only heard you—and touched your hand and felt it within my arm. I have smelled the faint fragrance of your soap. I would know you a little better, Miss Fry.”

He could hear her draw a breath through her mouth.

“You want to … touch me?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

Not with any lascivious intent. He hoped she would understand that. He could not bring himself to say it aloud.

She was close to him, though she did not immediately touch him, and he did not reach for her. He could hear the rustle of fabric and guessed that she was removing her bonnet and perhaps her cloak too. He heard the slight scrape of his cane against the bars of the stile. She must have hung her garments beside it.

They were standing to one side of the stile. He hoped they were far enough over that they were in the shelter of the hawthorn hedge and invisible to anyone passing along the lane. Not that it was ever a well-used lane.

She had moved to stand in front of him. He could sense her there. And then he felt her fingertips featherlight against his chest. He raised his hands and found her shoulders. They were small and thin and yet sturdy. He slid his hands in until he felt the warm, smooth flesh of her throat. He could feel her pulse beating steadily beneath his left thumb. His hands moved up the sides of a slender neck, over small ears, and into her hair—thick and soft and curly and really very short, as she had said it was.

She looks like a boy…

He bent his own head closer. The soap fragrance he had noticed last evening was coming most noticeably from her hair. She must have washed it recently. He could feel the warmth of her breath against his jaw.

He explored her face with his fingertips. A smooth, rather broad forehead. Arched eyebrows. Eyes that were closed—sometimes brown, sometimes hazel, she had said. With auburn hair. But he was no longer interested in color.

She had long eyelashes. A short, straight nose—but he could feel no resemblance to a button. Warm cheeks as smooth as rose petals, with well-defined cheekbones. A firm jaw, tapering to what felt like a pointy little chin.

“Heart-shaped,” he murmured.

With his hands cupping the underside of her jaw, he found her mouth with his thumbs. Wide. With soft, generous lips. He ran his thumbs lightly along them and kept them resting against the outer corners.

She had not moved or uttered a sound. Her facial muscles were relaxed. He hoped that the rest of her was too. He did not want to embarrass or frighten her. But his fingertips were his eyes.

He moved his head forward again until he felt her warmth and her breath against his face. She neither drew back nor voiced a protest. He touched his lips to hers.

It was not really a kiss. Merely a resting there. A feeling. A tasting. A recognition that they had agreed to a betrothal just a short while ago.

Her lips trembled against his for a moment and then relaxed again. She did not really kiss him either. But she rested against him. Accepted, perhaps, that they would belong together.

He drew back a little, raised his hands to her hair again, ran his fingers through it, and took a half step forward to draw her face against his cravat. He slid one hand down along her spine to draw her against him.

Small. Thin, or at least very slim. No really discernible curves, though he did not—would not—explore her body more intimately with his hands. He did not have the right. Not yet.

She yielded to his touch without pressing against him. Her hands held his coat on either side of his waist.

And they stood there like that, for how long he did not know.

She had described herself accurately. She was not voluptuously shaped. She might even, as Martin had said, look like a boy. She was surely not beautiful or even pretty. She almost certainly did not have the sort of figure that would draw male eyes. But, feeling her warmth and the softly yielding pressure of her body against his, and breathing in the soap scent of her, he did not care a single damn what she looked like.

She was to be his, and though he knew his mind would run the gamut of misgivings when he was alone again later, he felt curiously … moved by her.

“Miss Fry,” he said against the top of her head—but that sounded all wrong when he was holding her, getting to know her in a manner more intimate than with a mere passing acquaintance. “Or may I call you Sophia?”

Her voice when she answered was muffled against the folds of his neckcloth. “Will you call me Sophie?” she asked. “Please? No one ever has.”

He frowned slightly. There had been some pain in that plea. No, perhaps not
pain
exactly. But some yearning, surely.

“You will always be Sophie to me, then,” he said. “Sophie, I believe you are pretty. And before you protest that it is not so, that your glass tells a different story, that I would say no such thing if I could
see
you, let me add that a pearl probably does not look so very remarkable either while it is still hidden inside its shell.”

He heard a soft gurgle of laughter against his chest, and then she drew free. A moment later he felt his cane against the back of his right hand and took it from her.

Had he said the wrong thing?

“We should walk down by the river,” she said, “and perhaps sit on the bank. I shall make a daisy chain, and you can insist that the daisies are as lovely as the most costly of rosebuds. What shall I call you, my lord?”

“Vincent,” he said as she busied herself, presumably with putting her cloak and bonnet back on.

He smiled. Perhaps what he was doing was not so very rash after all. He had the distinct feeling that he might grow to like her—not just because he was determined to do so, but because…

Well, because she was likable.

Or seemed to be.

It was too soon to know for certain. Would she grow to like him? Was he likable?
He
thought he was.

It was too soon to know if she agreed with him.

And it was too soon to think about the long-term future he had so rashly offered. It always was. The future had a habit of being nothing like what one expected or planned for.

The future would take care of itself.

“W
ill you come to Covington House for tea before I return you to the vicarage?” Lord Darleigh asked when they were making their way homeward later. “We need to make some plans.”

We.

Nothing on the subject of their future had been broached during their walk along the river bank or while they sat there. He had talked about Barton Coombs and his boyhood here, and she had made a daisy chain, which he had touched and explored when she announced she was finished. Then he had taken it from her hands and looped it rather awkwardly over her head and about her neck after it had stuck on the brim of her bonnet.

They had both laughed.

That was what she had found so incredible—that they had laughed together more than once. Oh, and there were other things too, even more incredible. He had
touched
her. She knew he had done it only because he could not see her, but he had touched her nevertheless, with fingers that had been warm and gentle and respectful. And with his lips…

And he had held her. That had been most incredible of all. He had held the whole length of her body against his. And while there had been the shock of his hard-muscled maleness, there had also been the wonder—ah, the sheer
wonder
—of just being held. As if he cared. As if somehow she was precious to him. As if somehow she had an identity for him.

This had been an incredibly strange day. How could a day that had begun so disastrously—it had started just after midnight, when Sir Clarence and Aunt Martha and Henrietta had returned from the assembly sometime after her and had all come into her bedchamber without knocking, even though she was already in bed with the candle extinguished. How could a day that had begun that way end this way? And it was not even over yet. He wished to discuss their plans for the future over tea at Covington House.

Without a chaperon. She did not suppose that mattered, though. They were betrothed, and it was full daylight. They had not been chaperoned during their walk. Indeed, she had never thought of chaperons in connection with herself.

“Thank you,” she said.

She rather believed she was going to like him, and the thought brought tears welling into her eyes and a soreness to her throat. There had been so few people to like in the past five years and precious few even before that. Oh, and what sort of self-pitying thought was that! She had learned long ago that self-pity was also self-defeating. She had turned it to satire and had found an outlet through her sketches. There was nothing satirical about Viscount Darleigh, nothing to laugh at—not even the fumbling way he had draped the daisy chain about her neck.

She wondered if
she
was likable. She had never asked herself the question before.

When they arrived at Covington House, Mr. Fisk, Lord Darleigh’s valet, opened the door to them. His eyes held Sophia’s while the viscount asked him to bring them tea to the drawing room. His face was expressionless, as the faces of servants usually were. But Sophia read accusation, even dislike, in his eyes. She would have been intimidated by him even without that. He was taller and broader than his master and looked more like a blacksmith than a valet.

Sophia did not smile at him. One did not smile at servants. They would despise one. She had discovered that when she went to live with Aunt Mary.

The house, about which she had woven fantasies of family and friendship for the past two years, was more imposing on the inside than she had expected. The drawing room was large and square with some comfortable-looking old furniture, a big fireplace, and French windows opening out onto what must once have been a flower garden and was still neatly kept. There was a pianoforte at one end of the room and a violin case on top of it.

“Do have a seat,” Lord Darleigh said, gesturing in the direction of the fireplace, and Sophia made her way to an armchair on one side of it. She already recognized the slight tilt of his head when he was listening intently. He made his way unerringly to the chair on the other side of the fireplace and sat down.

“I believe we ought to go to London to marry, Sophie,” he said. “By special license. It can be done within a week, I would think, and then I will take you home to Gloucestershire. Middlebury is a vast, stately mansion. The park is huge and is ringed by farms. It is a busy, prosperous place. It is a daunting prospect for you, I know. But—”

He stopped as Mr. Fisk came in with the tea tray. He set it down on a small table close to Sophia, looked directly into her eyes, his own still expressionless, and withdrew.

“Thank you, Martin,” the viscount said.

“Sir.”

Sophia poured the tea and set a cup and saucer down beside Viscount Darleigh. She set a small currant cake on a plate and put it in his hand.

“Thank you, Sophie,” he said. “I am sorry. I did say
we
needed to make plans, did I not? And then I told you what they were.”

“Within a week?” she said.

Reality was threatening to smite her. She was going to leave here with Viscount Darleigh. They were going to go to London and get married there. Within a week. She was going to be a married lady—Lady Darleigh. With a home of her own. And a husband.

“It would be the best plan, I believe,” he said. “I have a close and loving family, Sophie. They are especially loving and protective of me because I am the only male and I am the youngest. And to top it off, I am blind. They would suffocate me if they were allowed to arrange our wedding. You have no family of your own to balance their enthusiasm, to fuss over and suffocate you. It would be unfair to take you directly to Middlebury.”

She had two aunts, two uncles, and two cousins, if one counted Sebastian, who was Uncle Terrence’s stepson. But he was right. She had nobody who would be interested in coming to her wedding, let alone helping to plan it.

“Sophie,” he said, “that bag you had with you in the church this morning. I was told it was not large. Did you leave most of your clothes and belongings at Barton Hall? Do I need to send Martin over there to fetch your things? Or did you bring everything?”

“I left behind a few clothes,” she said.

“Do you want them?”

She hesitated. She had almost nothing without them, but they were all hand-me-downs from Henrietta, and they were all ill-fitting. Some of them were shabby. She had her sketch pad and charcoal in her bag and a change of clothes.

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “Then you will have everything new. London is the place to buy whatever you will need.”