one in the Season.
There was only Sir Vincent. She stared at the man who might become her husband.
“What kind of a marriage would it be?” Her voice wobbled.
“A normal marriage,” Sir Vincent said. “I have no heirs, as you know. I would be amenable to having children.”
“Ah.” Portia nodded, but her throat squeezed and constricted. “I couldn’t impose on you.”
“It would be no imposition.” Sir Vincent raked his eyes over her figure, seeming to linger over her bosom. His tongue—a pale pink—darted out over his thick lips, and Portia suddenly believed that he would indeed find it not an imposition.
She recoiled.
“It won’t be too different from our current circumstances,” he said. “We already live together.”
She nodded. “But you’re my guardian. My—relative.”
“I’m your father’s only cousin,” Sir Vincent said.
Her father’s only, older cousin.
And he would expect children.
He would expect a proper marriage.
“You’ve become quiet,” Sir Vincent said.
“I’ve—er—aspired to be quieter,” Portia said.
“Well, that should make Cranston happy,” Sir Vincent said. “Now that you’ll be the lady of the manor house, you’ll have more responsibility. No more stomping up the stairs.”
“I stomp?” Portia’s voice took on a higher pitch.
“Oh, everyone can hear it, my dear. You can’t pretend you’re ignorant to it.” He barked out a laugh. “Rather like the elephants when I used to go hunting in Africa.”
“Oh?”
He leaned toward her. “Perhaps we could visit Africa after we marry.”
Her eyebrows darted up. They couldn’t be planning their honeymoon. They absolutely couldn’t be doing that.
“Best place in the world is Africa,” Sir Vincent continued merrily, evidently unperturbed by her silence. “So many animals. So much game. So much hunting. We can fill this house with trophies.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary.” She shifted in her seat, and the spindles creaked against her sudden straining. The Sahara seemed to have swept into the library and inundated her mouth.
“If we’re going to kill them, we should have something to show for it.”
“Perhaps we don’t have to kill them,” she said, conscious her voice was hoarse.
He scrutinized her. “You mean to just go to Africa and look at the animals?”
Portia was silent. Sir Vincent shook his head decisively. “Absolutely not. My friends will think I wasn’t able to shoot anything. Dashed embarrassing that would be.”
“You haven’t asked me if I accept your proposal,” Portia said finally, determined not to argue with him about hunting, when she needed to tell him she didn’t want to marry him.
Sir Vincent frowned, and his forehead crinkled, like an old, yellowing map. “But why wouldn’t you? I’m a baronet. And you, my dear, would be a governess.”
“I might enjoy it,” she said.
“And know that you could have had your own children, but you didn’t want to?”
She shifted in her seat awkwardly, trying not to think about children she might have had if only she’d found someone to marry.
“You would always know that no matter how much attention you give to the children, that they would always favor their mother...” Sir Vincent mused.
“That’s only natural,” she said.
“But you’ll always think you could have had your own children, could have been the lady of your own manor house, could have been happy. I’m not so very terrible, am I?”
Portia shook her head. “O-of course not.”
Sir Vincent wasn’t terrible. He might be a man of a certain age, where his silver strands had been abandoned for white ones. He might never even have been handsome, perhaps embracing his older age, where he could blame the passing of time on an always unremarkable complexion and refer obliquely to the parties of his past, when in truth, he might have found his twenties dull, a series of nights with nothing planned.
But he was right.
He wasn’t the worst husband she could have.
He was unlikely to develop a habit of fighting and being argumentative between now and the wedding day.
Heavens, she was thinking as if it was a certainty.
Perhaps her dearest friends had married dukes, but they’d acknowledged their good fortune. There was no reason to bemoan one’s fate when one married a baron, even an elderly one.
Many other debutantes would be jealous. No one would question why she married him. Sir Vincent would not be the first man to marry his ward.
Still...
She’d never seen Sir Vincent....that way. It disturbed her that he might have seen her differently. For the first time, she didn’t consider herself lucky that Sir Vincent had been tasked with the position of becoming her guardian.
“I should have known I needed to marry,” she said.
Sir Vincent widened his eyes, and for a moment, Portia cursed