Page 27 of Marriage Most Scandalous
What he was looking at was an insurmountable wall. He couldn’t break it. Margaret possibly could. She’d been accepted into the bosom of his family. She was close enough to Douglas that she’d gone above and beyond in her effort to “save” him, if he really needed saving. Maybe he needed saving only from himself. Bloody hell.
Sebastian would have liked to blame his father for this current state of affairs, but he couldn’t. All of it, every reaction and result thereafter, could rest only on his own shoulders.
He snarled as he got back up, disgusted with himself for rehashing what couldn’t be changed. He went in search of Margaret. They needed to finalize a plan so he could quickly accomplish what she’d hired him for and return to France.
She had refused to have dinner with him that night, which was why he’d gone to Edgewood instead. He wasn’t surprised. His behavior the previous night had been reprehensible. Deliberately reprehensible, but still, he hadn’t needed to be quite so insulting to get her to maintain her distance. She seemed to be having no trouble a’tall keeping her enmity high on her list of priorities without any help from him. Perhaps it was the other way around. He needed a reason to keep his hands off of her.
There it was, the crux of the problem. She’d walked into the dining room last night looking so incredibly soft and enticing in her peach velvet gown, and his attraction to her had instantly turned into lusty desire. She shouldn’t be able to tempt him like that. Her dislike of him should have been enough to put him off, but instead it was having the opposite effect.
He rapped on her bedroom door. There was light coming from under it, indicating she hadn’t retired yet. It was nearly a minute before she opened the door, though. The fluffy white robe she was clutching close to her throat suggested she’d kept him waiting while she put it on. Her hair floated loosely around it, very dark in the dim lamplight behind her. She was looking too bloody soft again, turning his thoughts in an intimate direction. Was she wearing anything under that robe?
“It’s rather late,” she said. “What do you want, Sebastian?”
Her curt, no-nonsense tone got his mind out from under her robe. “We need to discuss tomorrow’s agenda,” he told her.
“It can’t wait until the morning?”
“No. Waiting led to that unpleasant scene with Courtly today. I gathered from your splendid tirade afterward that you’d rather avoid any more like that.”
She made a tsking sound. “Very well, I’ll meet you in the parlor.”
“Don’t be absurd, Maggie. We’re married. Your servants won’t raise a brow if you invite me into your room. They’ll expect it, actually.”
“I told my housekeeper, Florence, about the marriage so she can turn away any well-wishing visitors tomorrow that we aren’t ready to deal with, but the rest of my servants aren’t aware of our supposed—”
“Yes, they are.”
She glared at him for taking that liberty upon himself but opened the door wider and walked back into her room to put some distance between them. She secured her robe more fully, tying it about her waist. Her hair was longer than he’d realized. Having seen it tossed about on the ship, it had been hard to tell that it reached her hips. Easy enough to see now since she was still giving him her back.
Her room was a surprise. He would have expected someone of Margaret’s gruff temperament to prefer dark, masculine colors to match her aggressive nature, but her walls were papered in pink roses, her vanity draped in white lace, her large bed covered with a lilac spread and fluffy silk pillows. The velvet drapes were a darker, bold shade of pink.
Numerous chairs were scattered about the room, upholstered in the same theme. Her plump reading chair was in purple and pink flowers, the seat of her desk chair in dark purple and red. The carpet was a red and pink floral swirl in a typical motif. The large bookcase that covered half of one wall was overstuffed with books attesting to his suspicion that she was also a bluestocking. All the wood in the furnishings was white oak. And there were flowers everywhere, in large vases on the floor, small vases on the tables, in pots near the covered windows, giving the room a pleasant scent. The woman really did like to garden.
Her desk was a working desk, cluttered with household account books and receipts, a few framed pictures, one of her sister Eleanor, whom he recognized. Sadness swept over him as he thought about her death. She’d been a charming young woman and so happy about her engagement to Giles. It bothered him that Margaret blamed him for her death.
Margaret’s back stiffened perceptibly when she heard him close the door behind him. She turned to face him. The white lace of her nightgown was revealed at the top opening of her robe. He was glad to see it. Imagining her naked under that robe would have kept him awake the rest of the night.
“We seem to be progressing rather rapidly, to have reached this point already,” she commented, her tone still showing her annoyance with him. “Weren’t you going to do some investigating first?”
He strolled across the room. He was heading to the comfortable-looking reading chair behind her, but when she scurried so quickly out of his way, he changed his mind and continued in her direction instead.
“A waste of time,” he said, “now that news of your marriage will be making the rounds. And I’ve taken the liberty of sending one of your servants to Edgewood with the news of your return ...with a husband.”
“You take far too many liberties,” she replied, still retreating from him.
“You hired me and will be paying a princely sum for my efforts to find out if there’s a plot against my father. Don’t quibble over the way I do my job. Now, in the morning, send a note to my father that you’ll be coming by for a visit with your husband.”
That got her to stop moving. “Am I to warn him who I married?”
“No, let’s get me in the door before he finds out. Otherwise, we might not find him home a’tall.”
“You really think he’d just leave, so he doesn’t have to deal with seeing you again?”
“Either that, or he will simply inform you that while you are still welcome, your husband isn’t, which will defeat the purpose of this farce.”
She sighed. “Very well. So once we arrive, what exactly do we tell them? How did we meet? Where did we marry?”
“In which country did you stay the longest during your travels?”
