Page 10 of Lady Like

Alexander splashes cologne onto his jaw, then retrieves a neckcloth from where it’s draped over the bedpost. “I’ll be out until the wee hours, I’m afraid. A dance at the Argyll Rooms.”

“A dance?” She flops backward onto the pillows. “Oh hell, are you in London because you’re looking for a wife?”

He grimaces. “Not by choice, believe you me. More an obligation my father thinks I have put off long enough.” He straightens his jacket, then gives himself a long, admiring look in the mirror.

“Perhaps I could just marry you,” he says as he reaches up to fix his hair.

“Spare me from the miserable grind of the Season.”

Harry smiles, watching as he fingers the thick locks at the nape of his neck. Then suddenly she finds herself thinking…

Well, why not?

If she and Alexander were betrothed, her search for a spouse would be over before it had begun.

They’d dance together once or twice at public balls, be seen riding in Hyde Park, and no one would think it anything but love when he proposed marriage a few convenient days before the coronation.

And surely the prince couldn’t find anything unsuitable about a duke.

Within their holy bonds of matrimony, she could do what she liked, and so could Alex.

As husband and wife, they would have good conversation, maybe sex sometimes, but it would never be odd to introduce him to her lovers at the breakfast table.

She wouldn’t ask him to give up gambling and drinking and late nights at clubs, and he would never raise a fuss if she did the same.

She’d still need to exercise some discretion, but at least the enemy would not be lurking in her own home under the guise of a suitable match.

Crikey, Harry thinks. Has she just solved marriage?

Alexander retrieves a fresh pair of boots from the wardrobe, then comes to sit on the side of the bed beside her as he pulls them on.

She slips a hand around his stomach, then into the waistband of his breeches, crooking her thumb and first finger around the shaft of his cock.

Alexander’s hands slip on the buckles. “You devil,” he murmurs, and leans over to kiss her, his mouth spiced with cardamom tooth powder. She bites his lip.

“Harry,” he murmurs. “I think I have a proposal for you.”

“How interesting.” Harry slides into his lap, straddling him with her arms around his neck. “I have one for you as well.”

“I suspect mine is a bit more…” His eyes stray from her face to her breasts. She can feel him getting hard against her. “Unconventional.”

God but her heart is pounding. Is she the first woman in England to go pudding brained over a marriage of convenience?

She is already imagining what she’ll paint over that fat angel on the ceiling of her new manor.

She’ll throw the windows open every morning and read Shakespeare in the sunlight.

She’ll take Havoc for long walks on grounds that are hers and let him piss wherever he likes.

She’ll only see Alexander when one of them needs a friend—or a shag.

And then Alexander says, “Harry, would you ride Matthew in the Milton Derby steeplechase?”

Harry had been so ready to cry Yes, yes, a million times yes! she has to swallow several times to force the words back down her throat. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a novelty race,” Alexander says. “So all the jockeys are ladies. But they’re quite the competitive bunch, and it’s no easy win. The lass who was going to ride him took a fall in training and won’t be in the saddle again until at least August, but the race is in June.”

And suddenly, Harry finds the face she had been so fond of mere moments ago so aggravating she wants to slap it. She slides off Alexander’s lap and falls backward onto the pillows.

“I know it’s sudden,” he continues, oblivious.

“But I’ve been going mad over finding someone who can manage Matthew.

He’s no challenge for the professional jockeys, but most women can’t handle him on the hedges.

And it’s rather important to me that he performs well, this being his first outing.

I’ll surely have money on him. As will some of my friends.

” He pauses, then pats her knee over the blankets.

“But here I am going on. You had something to ask me?”

Harry raises her head. Alexander’s eyebrows knit in concern and yes, that jawline is sharp enough to halve fruit, and perhaps she is still under its spell, for she still asks, “Will you marry me?”

Alexander coughs, loosens his tie, then loosens it further. “Pardon?”

“I need to marry as a matter of some urgency,” Harry says. “And if you’re also on the prowl, we might as well help each other.”

He rubs a hand over his neck, then says with painful gentility, “Harry.”

Harry’s stomach drops. Nothing good has ever followed such a tender intonation of a name.

Before he can gently direct her elsewhere, Harry hurtles herself onto the conversational footpath and cuts him off.

“It would be a marriage in name only. We needn’t be faithful or monogamous or even involved in each other’s lives. ”

Alexander collapses next to her on the bed, his boots leaving dark streaks of polish along the sheets.

Harry rolls over onto her side, propping her head on her elbows to face him.

“But we’d enjoy each other! I’ve always liked being around you—we get on.

We are both accustomed to our particular lifestyles.

If we wed, we wouldn’t have to compromise that.

We can even write it into the vows. Till death do us part, and until then let us never hold the other to a respectable time to rise from bed. What say you?”

Alexander rolls toward her, dinner jacket bunched up under his arm.

His immaculate cravat is starting to come undone, and Harry is struck by a sudden urge to reach out and fix it.

“You know I adore you, Harry,” Alexander says.

“But I need someone a bit more conventional. Or who can at least pretend to be. I’m already on the rocks with my father, and I’ve promised him I’ll find a suitable wife this Season. ”

“If it’s about an inheritance—” she starts, ready to tell him about the recent revelation of her parentage, but he interrupts.

“It’s not that. You simply don’t fall under any father’s definition of suitable.”

Her skin prickles. Suddenly she feels too exposed, and pulls the sheet up over her breasts.

Alexander frowns. “Have I upset you?”

“No,” Harry says, her tone at odds with the sentiment.

“Come, Harry, we both know you’re not the sort of woman one can take to church or home for tea. And you’d hate being made to do such things—you’d start to chew through the walls.”

“Weren’t you leaving?” Harry snaps.

“You’re right.” Alexander sits up, reties his cravat, then leans down for a final kiss. Harry knows it’s petulant, but still turns her head so his lips barely glance off her cheek. “You’re welcome to sulk here as long as you like.”

“I am not sulking,” Harry replies. “I’m pouting.”

“What’s the difference?”

“If you marry me, you’ll learn very quick.”

“Good night, Harry.”

“Good luck finding a suitable wife!” She rolls onto her stomach. She feels Alexander’s fingers ghost over her shoulders, but she ignores him, and a moment later, the door latches as he departs.

She lies in bed until the sky outside the window is black, wearied by the rapid slide from elation to despair.

Still, she doesn’t allow it to keep her company long—she has seen the only happy ending that might be written for this story, and she will not surrender hope so easily.

The prospect of marrying Alexander, however brief, has forced her to begrudgingly admit to herself that she not only wants the house and land and money, she needs them, lest she find herself watching her father’s coronation from a kip under Blackfriar’s Bridge.

Without her soul being the price, the best she can hope for is to marry someone outwardly respectable who will not ask her to change a thing about herself, nor run to the prince to report on his wife’s behavior.

And since the only man she can think of who fits the bill is Alexander, he must be convinced to marry her.

She stands and crosses to his dressing table. A card has been wedged into the space between the mirror and the frame, and she fishes it out. An invitation to a private ball hosted by the Majorbanks family this Friday. Harry sinks down onto the bench, snapping the card against her palm.

If Alexander needs a wife he can take on his arm to a ball, she’s prepared to show him she can be that woman.

She has no invitation of her own, but Collin knows the ton and Harry knows forgers.

She is almost certain Alexander will be tired of waspy girls in Grecian gowns before the second quadrille of the night.

And with whom will he seek solace? Whose very presence will be thrown into extraordinary relief by the contrast of so many dull, vapid women he imagines to be the sort he wants to marry?

She’ll wear a dress and a wig and paint her face—proof she can be prettied up and let out in public.

She may even bring a peafowl on a leash, if she can find one on such short notice.

Harry will be at the Majorbanks’s ball—gorgeous and suitable and goddamn irresistible. When she tells him the truth of her parentage, she’ll look every bit the part of royalty.

She and Alexander will be married by the coronation.