Mary Balogh - The Proposal

“I had sex with you,” he said.

He had said that before, and then they had got distracted by a discussion of whether she had found it pleasant or more than pleasant.

“And that means you ought to marry me?” she said.

“Yes.” He gazed steadily at her.

“Is this your middle-class morality speaking?” she asked him. “But you have had other women. You admitted as much to me at Penderris. Did you feel obliged to offer them marriage too?”

“That was different,” he said.

“How?”

“Sex with them was a business arrangement,” he said. “I paid, they provided.”

Oh, goodness. Gwen felt dizzy for a moment. Her brother and her male cousins would have forty fits apiece if they were listening now.

“If you had paid me,” she said, “you would not be obliged to offer me marriage?”

“That’s daft,” he said.

Gwen sighed and looked toward the fireplace. There was a fire burning, but it needed more coal. She shivered slightly. She ought to have asked Lily for a shawl to wrap about her shoulders.

“You are cold,” Lord Trentham said, and he too looked at the fireplace before striding over to the hearth and bending to the coal scuttle.

Gwen moved across the room while he was busy and sat on the edge of a leather chair close to the blaze. She held her hands out to it. Lord Trentham stood slightly to one side of the fire, his back to it, and looked down at her.

“I never felt any strong urge to marry,” he said. “I felt it even less after my years at Penderris. I wanted—I needed to be alone. It is only during the past year that I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that I ought to marry—someone of my own kind, someone who can satisfy my basic needs, someone who can manage my home and help in some way with the farm and garden, someone who can help me with Constance until she is properly settled. Someone to fit in, not to intrude. Someone on whose private life I would not intrude. A comfortable companion.”

“But a lusty bed partner,” she said. She glanced up at him before returning her gaze to the fire.

“And that too,” he agreed. “All men need a vigorous and satisfying sex life. I do not apologize for wanting it within a marriage rather than outside it.”

Gwen raised her eyebrows. Well, she had started it.

“When I met you,” he said, “I wanted to bed you almost from the beginning even though you irritated me no end with your haughty pride and your insistence upon being put down when I was carrying you up from the beach. And I expected to despise you after you told me about that ride with your husband and its consequences. But we all do things in our lives that are against our better judgment and that we regret bitterly forever after. We all suffer. I wanted you, and I had you down in that cove. But there was never any question of marriage. We were both agreed upon that. I could never fit in with your life, and you could never fit in with mine.”

“But you changed your mind,” she said. “You came here.”

“I somehow expected,” he said, “that you were with child. Or if I did not exactly expect it, I did at least shape my mind in that direction so that I would be prepared. And when I did not hear from you, I thought that perhaps you would withhold the truth from me and bear a bastard child I would never know anything about. It gnawed at me. I wouldn’t have come even then, though. If you were so much against marrying me that you would even hide a bastard child from me, then coming here and asking was not going to make any difference. And then Constance told me about her dreams. Youthful dreams are precious things. They ought not to be dashed as foolish and unrealistic just because they are young dreams. Innocence ought not to be destroyed from any callous conviction that a realistic sort of cynicism is better.”

Is that what happened to you?

She did not ask the question aloud.

“A wife from the middle classes would not be able to help me,” he said.

“But I would?”

He hesitated.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is not your only reason for wishing to marry me, though?” she asked.

He hesitated again.

“No,” he said. “I had sex with you. I put you in danger of conceiving out of wedlock. There is no one else I want to marry—not at present, anyway. There would be passion in our marriage bed. On both our parts.”

“And it does not matter that we would be incompatible in every other way?” she said.

Again the hesitation.

“I thought we might give it a try,” he said.

She looked up again and met his gaze.

“Oh, Hugo,” she said. “One gives painting a try when one has never held a brush in one’s hand before. Or climbing a steep cliff face when one is afraid of heights or eating an unfamiliar food when one does not really like the look of it. If one likes it, whatever it is, one can keep going. If one does not, one can stop and try something else. One cannot try marriage. Once one is in, there is no way out.”

“You would know,” he said. “You have tried it already. I will take my leave, then, ma’am. I hope you will not take a chill from your soaking and from standing in here in a dress designed for summer rather than early spring.”

He bowed stiffly.

He was calling her ma’am; she was calling him Hugo.

“And one tries courtship,” she said and looked down again. She closed her eyes. This was foolish. More than foolish. But perhaps he would continue on his way out of her life.

He did not. He straightened up and stayed where he was. There was a silence in which Gwen could hear that there had been no abatement in the force of the rain.

“Courtship?” he said.

“I could indeed help your sister,” she said, opening her eyes and examining the backs of her hands as they lay in her lap. “If she is pretty and has genteel manners, as I daresay she does, and is wealthy, then she will take well enough with the ton even if not with the very highest echelon. She would take well, that is, if I were to sponsor her.”

“You would be willing to do that,” he asked her, “when you have not even met her?”

“I would have to meet her first, of course,” she said.

Silence descended once more.

“I daresay that if we like each other I will sponsor her,” she said, looking at him again. “But it will quickly become known who Miss Emes is, who her brother is. You will probably be surprised to find yourself quite famous, Lord Trentham. Not many military officers, especially those who are not born into the upper classes, are rewarded for military service with titles. And when people learn who Miss Emes is and who you are and who is sponsoring her, it will not be long before word will spread of our meeting in Cornwall earlier this year. Tongues will wag even if there is nothing for them to wag about.”

“I would not have you the subject of gossip,” he said.

“Oh, not gossip, Lord Trentham,” she said. “Speculation. The ton loves nothing more during the Season than to play matchmaker or at least to speculate upon who is paying court to whom and what the outcome is likely to be. Word will soon have it that you are courting me.”

“And that I am a presumptuous devil,” he said, “who ought to be strung up from the nearest tree by his thumbs.”

She smiled.

“There will of course be those who are outraged,” she said, “at you for your presumption, at me for encouraging it. And there will be those who are charmed by the romance of it all. There will be wagers made.”

Both his jaw and his eyes hardened.

“If you really wish to marry me,” she said, “you may court me through the coming Season, Lord Trentham. There will be ample opportunity—provided, of course, your sister pleases me and I please her.”

“You will marry me, then?” he asked, frowning.

“Very probably not,” she said. “But a marriage proposal is made after courtship, not before. Court me, then, and persuade me to change my mind if you do not change yours first.”

“How the devil,” he asked her, “am I to do that? I do not know the first thing about courtship.”

She smiled with the first genuine amusement she had felt for a long while.

“You are in your thirties,” she said. “It is time you learned.”

If he had looked hard-jawed before, he looked positively granite-jawed now. He gazed steadily at her.

Then he bowed again.

“If you would care to inform me after you have arrived in London,” he said, “I will wait upon you with my sister, ma’am.” “I shall look forward to it,” she said.

And he strode from the room and closed the door behind him.

Gwen sat gazing into the fire, her hands clasped very tightly in her lap.

Whatever had she done?

But she was not sorry, she realized. It would be … fun to launch a young girl upon the ton, especially a girl who was not of it. It would brighten the Season for her, make it different from all the rather tedious ones that had gone before it. It would rid her of the low spirits that had been dogging her. It would be a challenge.

And Hugo would be paying court to her.

Perhaps.

Oh, this was a colossal mistake.

But her heart was thumping with something very like excitement. And anticipation. She felt fully alive for the first time in a long, long while.

Lauren joined Gwen in the library ten minutes later. She closed the door quietly and seated herself on a chair close to Gwen’s.

“We saw Lord Trentham stride away from the house in the pouring rain,” she said. “We waited for you to come back upstairs, but you did not. You refused him, Gwen?”

“I did, of course,” Gwen said, spreading her fingers in her lap. “It is what you all expected, was it not? And wanted?”

There was a slight pause.

“Gwen, this is me,” Lauren said.

Gwen looked up at her.

“I am sorry,” she said. “Yes, I refused him.”

Her cousin searched her eyes.

“There is more,” she said. “He has been the reason for your depression of late?”

“I have not been depressed,” Gwen protested. But Lauren just continued to look steadily at her. “Oh, I suppose I have been. I have been realizing that life is passing me by. I am thirty-two years old and single in a world where it is not comfortable to be single. Not for a woman, anyway. I have been thinking of looking for a husband in London this year. Or at least of considering anyone who cares to show an interest in me. Everyone in the family will be delighted, will they not?”

“You know we all will,” Lauren said. “But how would this decision have made you so low in spirits that you do not even want to talk?”

She definitely looked hurt, Gwen thought. She sighed.

“I fell in love with Lord Trentham when I was in Cornwall,” she said. “There. Is that what you want to hear? I … fell in love with him. And I discovered just ten days or so ago that I was not with child by him, and I was hugely relieved and mortally sad. And … Oh, Lauren, what am I going to do? I cannot seem to get him out of my mind. Or my heart.”

Lauren was gazing at her in silent amazement.

“There was a chance,” she said, “that you were with child? Gwen?”

“Not really,” Gwen said. “The physician told me after I miscarried eight years ago that I would never have children. And it happened only once in Cornwall. But that is not really your question, is it? The answer to your real question is yes. I did lie with him.”

Lauren leaned forward in her chair and reached out to touch the back of Gwen’s hand with her fingertips. She rubbed them back and forth before sitting back again.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell everything. Start at the beginning and end here, with your reason for rejecting his marriage offer.”

“I have invited him to court me during the Season,” Gwen said, “with no guarantee that I will say yes if he renews his addresses at the end of it. That is not very fair of me, is it?”

Lauren sighed and then laughed.

“How typical of you to start at the end,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”

Gwen laughed too.

“Oh, Lauren,” she said, “how could I have resisted love all these years only to fall for an impossibility at the end of it all?”

“If I could fall in love with Kit, considering my frame of mind when I first saw him,” Lauren said, “and considering the fact that he was behaving most scandalously, stripped to the waist in the middle of Hyde Park for all the world to see while he fought with two laborers simultaneously and was using language that shocked me to the core—if I could fall in love with him anyway, Gwen, then why would you not fall in love with Lord Trentham?”