A Most Unsuitable Groom

“Not in my mind, I’m not,” Mariah told him honestly. “In my mind, I’m committing murder upon your person, in several unlovely and definitely painful ways. But as long as you’re here, now you may button me again. Please.”

“Ah. Please. How can I possibly refuse?”

Mariah stood still, fuming as he began buttoning the shift, from bottom to top. His fingers kept brushing against the skin of her back and for some reason that incidental contact—please let it be incidental—served to tighten her nipples, so that she felt her breasts to be actually straining against the material.

Which was nothing compared to the way her insides reacted when, finished with the buttons, he put his hands on her shoulders, then bent to lightly brush his lips against her nape. “Thank you, again, Mariah, for William.”

She whirled around to push him away, completely forgetting that she was still standing within the puddle of her night rail, and ended by crashing against his chest, her hands on his shoulders to support herself.

“My God,” Spencer said, his senses swimming as he looked at her; that swirl of living fire that was her hair, those bewitching green eyes. “How in bloody hell could I have forgotten you?”

“I…I don’t know. As you said, I took advantage of you,” Mariah said, closing her eyes as his hands slipped down to cup her waist. “Don’t…don’t do that.”

“We’re to be married,” he reminded her, his concentration centering on her full, slightly parted lips.

“And?” Mariah asked, arching one brow at him. “You sound as if you’re purchasing a horse. Pay the price, and I’m yours to…to do anything with?”

Spencer removed his hands, held them up at his sides in mock surrender. “Clearly we don’t know each other very well yet, do we? Will you feel better if I tell you that I don’t believe marriage makes you my possession?”

Mariah stepped out of the tangle of night rail and walked to where her robe hung over the back of a chair. “Yet you said I could leave, but William would stay. I think we should see this marriage for what it is, don’t you? It will be for William. As for anything else?” She slipped her arms into the robe and turned to face him, the material of the robe held tight over her breasts. “I should wish to be recovered from William’s birth before we even discuss the idea of marriage again.”

At the moment, Spencer believed he would agree to anything. His palms still burned from where they had made contact with Mariah’s soft skin, so pale beneath his tanned hands, and the mere thought of her creamy breasts, how she had seemed to be holding, weighing them in her cupped palms—as if offering them to him, or at least that’s how he’d always remember that sight—would probably haunt his nights. “You want time, Mariah. I understand that. How long?”

She shrugged, wondering how much time she could reasonably ask for without daring his refusal. “A month? Two?”

He nodded. “A compromise, then. Six weeks, Mariah. But we will be married.”

“For the child,” she reiterated.

“For whatever reasons may occur to us. The gutting me like a deer, Mariah, will remain negotiable,” he replied, and then turned his head as Callie knocked lightly on the door and then reentered the room. “Callie, help Mariah finish dressing, please.”

“You say that as if that wasn’t what I was doing when you first stumbled in here and sent me out of the room,” his sister reminded him. “Or have you forgotten that?”

Spencer rolled his eyes. “No wonder Court calls you his unholy terror,” he said before bowing to Mariah. “Don’t overtax yourself, madam. Good day.”

“I’ll be very careful, sir,” Mariah shot back at him. “Just as you will be careful to knock next time you come to visit, and then wait for my permission to enter my chamber.”

The door had slammed on Spencer’s back before the last words left Mariah’s mouth.

She looked at the closed door for a few moments and then at Callie. She raised her eyebrows.

Callie raised her own eyebrows.

The corners of their mouths twitched as their eyes danced.

And then the two of them laughed out loud.

“Did you see his face when he first came barging in here?” Callie said, wiping at her eyes as their laughter subsided. “I thought he was going to swallow his own tongue.”

“Well,” Mariah said, removing the robe, “I was standing there, holding on to myself, just as brazen as you please. Oh, Lord, Callie, what am I laughing at? He dressed me! I’m so embarrassed. Mortified. Quickly, help me on with my gown before I’m tempted to crawl back under the covers, never to show myself again. As it is, I’ll never be able to look at the man again.”

“I don’t know. He certainly was looking at you,” Callie said, helping Mariah into her gown. “Turn around and let me button this, if I can see the buttons through my tears. Mariah, I’m so glad you’re here. With Morgan gone, we’re so stodgy and boring these days. But I think that’s about to change.”

Mariah slipped into her shoes and walked across the large room to the dressing table where Onatah had laid out her brushes. She sat down in front of the three-piece mirror and fairly goggled at herself. Look at her hair! She looked like a wild woman. Why hadn’t Spencer run screaming from the room, convinced he’d been compromised into wedding a witch?

She picked up a brush and began attacking the mass of hair that fell well past her shoulders, waving so wildly that it was almost as if only half of her face could peek through to the world. Which might not be too terrible, if she didn’t want to look at Spencer. “It’s all so thick and heavy and a terrible nuisance. I should have Onatah just cut it all off,” she said as Callie picked up another brush and began working on the left side of Mariah’s head.

“Cut this beautiful hair? Are you mad? I’ve never seen hair this color. It’s so alive. It’s like…like a candle flame. I heard Spencer the other night when he thought I wasn’t listening. He was telling Rian that he remembered your hair. ‘Like fire in the sunlight,’he said. It’s not like Spence to be poetical.”

“It’s not?” Mariah asked, daring to open the drawers in the dressing table, then borrowing a dark green ribbon she discovered in one of them. She was so curious to learn more about the man who was to become her husband. “What is it like Spencer to be?”

“Angry,” Callie said, taking the ribbon and tying back Mariah’s hair in a thick tail at her nape. “He’s always angry. Papa says he’s got the passions of a hot-blooded man and chafes at the confines of Becket Hall, of how we live. There! Doesn’t that look pretty? Are you ready to go downstairs now, before Spencer finds Odette and tattles and you’re slapped back into bed?”

“Certainly,” Mariah said, rising to her feet and brushing down the front of her gown. “I’d like to go outside, if that’s possible. Breathe some sea air. The world should smell good after three days of storms.”

“Only if the Channel didn’t spit up something terrible from the bottom,” Callie told her, grinning. “We’ll use the front stairs. Odette never uses them, even though Papa told her she could. But he gave that up as a bad job years ago. Odette does what Odette does. She’s a mamba, you know. A real voodoo priestess. She’s taught me a lot, but says that I’m not a chosen one, so she won’t teach me more. Maybe she’ll teach you. She likes your hair, you see. Says it’s a sign from the good loa. Magical living flame. I wish I had magical living flame hair. Mine is just brown. So depressingly ordinary, and there’s so very much of it. If only it wouldn’t curl so, like a baby’s hair. I detest ringlets….”

Mariah let Callie chatter on as they walked and she examined her surroundings, as she’d been otherwise occupied the first time she’d entered the very large, impressive foyer of this huge house. Squire Franklin’s manor house had been the grandest dwelling she’d seen at home, and she’d lived in her share of small, cramped quarters, following her father to North America.

But Squire Franklin’s prideful possession paled in comparison to Becket Hall. Most anything would, she imagined. In fact, at least half of the Squire’s domicile would probably have fit comfortably in the foyer of Becket Hall.

They passed Edyth in the hallway, and Mariah asked if she would please sit with William for an hour. The woman’s smile was all the answer she’d needed to assure herself that the infant would be in good hands.

Odette had been kind enough to explain how Becket Hall was run, and the whole arrangement seemed very democratic. Almost American in the way everyone was free to do what he or she did best, and with responsibility placed on each person’s shoulders by that person him- or herself. Odette had also told her of the years of slavery in Haiti before the slaves had risen in their own version of the French Revolution and Ainsley Becket’s abhorrence for anything that even vaguely resembled forcing anyone to do anything.

Mariah would have thought that everyone would just lie about, doing nothing, yet Becket Hall was pristine, beautifully organized. And the maids, if they had to be given a title, sang as they worked.

Callie descended the wide, curving staircase slowly, looking back at Mariah every few steps, as if she might faint and topple on her, but then they were crossing the wide foyer and Callie’s slim shoulders seemed to relax.

“Papa is in his study most days at this time, reading all of the London newspapers that he has shipped to him, and everyone else is out and about somewhere—and Spence is probably hiding his head somewhere in shame. Do you want to see the drawing room first?”

“You seem to be enjoying your brother’s discomfort,” Mariah pointed out, smiling.

“Oh, yes, definitely. It’s lovely to not be the one Odette will be giving the hairy eyeball for this once. That’s what Rian calls the way Odette looks at us—the hairy eyeball. I have no idea what that means. Well, here’s the drawing room. You probably didn’t notice much of anything the night you arrived here.”

The furniture in the main drawing room was massive, much of it, Mariah believed, Spanish—she’d once seen a book of drawings on such things. The ceilings soared, the windows rose from the floor to nearly touch those high ceilings and the fabrics that covered those windows and the multitude of furniture in the drawing room were of sumptuous silks and vibrant brocades. She strained to take in the fine artwork hanging on pale, stuccoed walls and to count all the many vases of exotic flowers and acres of fine Turkish carpets spread out over gleaming wooden floors the color of dried cherries.

“All these flowers,” she said, cupping one perfect pink bloom in her palm.

Callie nodded. “We have a conservatory and Papa is always adding new flowers and plants he has shipped here. But it’s Jacko who cares for them. I’ll show it to you later, if Jacko says it’s all right. He’s very possessive of his babies. Not that he calls the flowers his babies, but that’s what Rian says.”

“Then I’ll wait for his permission,” Mariah said, continuing her examination of the large room.

None of the four immense crystal chandeliers, each hanging from a different coffered area of the ornate ceiling, had been lit, as all the draperies had been thrown back so that only sheer ivory silk panels with fleur-de-lis woven into them covered the windows that poured with sunlight.

One enormous glass-fronted cabinet placed between two of the windows displayed a collection of jade that was probably worth a king’s ransom. The far wall—it was very far away in this large room—actually had a highly ornamental black metal grille hanging on it, the entire piece nearly the size of a barn door. And yet it didn’t overpower the other furnishings. Little could.

“It’s humble,” Mariah said cheekily, “but I imagine that, to you, it’s simply home.”