After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(19)
Miss Winters followed shortly. Her breathing was shallow and shaky. Her hands stretched and clenched, stretched and clenched. She seemed particularly pale, still in the gown she’d been wearing that afternoon.
It occurred to Adrian to wonder what Grayson would say of the affair.
You see? I told you’re too trusting.
Well. With a pistol trained on him, now might be a good time to admit that was true.
He’d trusted that a bishop of the Church of England wouldn’t force him to marry at gunpoint. That had seemed a perfectly reasonable supposition, honestly. He’d never heard of it happening before. And of course there was a first time for everything, he supposed, but why did he have to be the one to demonstrate the maxim?
He’d trusted that his uncle wouldn’t let him get into such a situation.
Probably his uncle had not known what might result.
Even now, standing in a church with the bewildering events of the day behind him, Adrian was still trusting that Miss Winters wasn’t a part of this plot.
He contemplated it now, eyeing her. If they suspected he was working with Bishop Denmore, maybe they’d thought to marry him off in order to have her report back what he knew, in which case…
The gun waved in her direction, and she gasped shallowly.
No. That was too untrusting. This wasn’t her fault.
“I do not consent,” he told them in place of his wedding vows. He needed that to be clear, for the sake of his own conscience. For the sake of his future.
The pistol waved in his direction.
He would give no wedding vows. He wasn’t married; he refused to be. Still, he made promises as he stood there.
He was not the sort to take pleasure in anyone’s downfall. This time, though? He refused to think of these wedding vows as binding, but he committed himself nonetheless. He promised his brother that there would be no cause to worry. He promised himself that he’d untangle himself from this ugly marriage.
As for Miss Winters… They’d judged her expendable, and they’d done their best to make her feel like she was worth nothing for one little mistake.
Adrian wouldn’t be her husband. He wouldn’t keep any of the promises they forced upon him—not in sickness, not in health, not for better, not for worse.
He made her his own promise, though, as they stood in the hall.
They thought we were expendable. They were wrong. Before we’re done, they’ll know that.
“Say it,” the rector said.
They don’t know who I am, but before I’m finished, they will.
“Say it.”
“I do,” Adrian said. And he would.
Chapter Seven
After the wedding, there was nothing to do but leave. Adrian and his new non-bride weren’t offered so much as a room for the night—no surprise there, Adrian supposed—just directions to an inn and their things, already packed for them.
The inn was miles away and it was already dark.
The night air was cold, and Adrian fell into a rhythm, walking and thinking, trying to decide on his plan of attack.
When he had been young, he’d visited his father’s family in Maine, where he’d met his great-great-uncle.
His great-great-uncle John had been born into slavery and had lived to see it undone. He lived still—or had the last time Adrian had heard.
He had sailed around the world. Nowadays, he stayed home, tending his garden, with great-great-uncle Henry.
There is no point getting angry at a bad hand, he had used to say. Especially if the dealer cheated when distributing the cards. Anger leads to mistakes.
Don’t get angry; that’s what they want. Get calm. They’ll never expect you to do that.
Don’t get angry; get creative. Take the hand you have and see whether you might not be holding something your enemy has overlooked.
Don’t get angry at the cards; get the dealer out of the game.
Easy to say when it was something other than the entire rest of his life at stake. All the more important to remember it now, when calm, creative plans seemed as distant as his parents, back in Maine with John and Henry.
Adrian had always found walking calming; he focused on it now, one step after another claiming the road until he felt his fury bleeding into resolve. Until the anger clenching his heart slowly started to loosen and he could feel the cold of the wind against the back of his neck.
Then he remembered that he had to return to Harvil in five days, that the designs for the china plates were unfinished, and that he was now married and stuck in a tangle with no easy way out.
He stopped walking. “Fuck.” That was when he became aware of something else—footsteps behind him. That noise, that swift scuffle and slide behind him, was Miss Winters. If he could call her that any longer.
He always walked fast; being angry had made him swifter still. He had a good eight inches on Miss Winters, and he had only a small satchel.
He’d been so angry he’d not really thought of her, scrambling after him with her luggage. She must have been half-jogging to keep up.
He stopped in the road and turned to the woman who had been forcibly joined to him in holy matrimony. In his anger, he’d allowed himself to look at her as a thing that had happened to him, but her eyes darted to his, then looked down the road. She wasn’t a thing, and this was why he hated being angry.