Deceiver

by Nicola Cornick

  "You will have no difficulty in finding a man if you are not too particular," he agreed unpleasantly. "There are plenty such hopeless souls in here."

  At last he had driven her to breaking point. He saw the moment when Isabella's composure snapped.

  "I am desperate, too, you know!" The words burst from her and she could not erase a quiver of grief from her voice. "I am very tired of struggling—" She stopped, and Marcus saw her make a huge effort to steady herself. She was turning away, shielding her vulnerability from him. She pressed her hands together tightly. "This is nothing to the purpose." Her voice was muffled. "I think that I should leave."

  Marcus put his hand on her arm. It was too late. It had been too late from the first moment she had made her outrageous proposition. He was damned if he was going to permit her to offer herself to some other debtor, and exchange a bottle of wine in return for a scrawled signature on a marriage certifi­cate. If anyone were to wed her, it would be him, and then he would take great pleasure in turning the tables and taking set­tlement for everything that she owed him. She was his—at least until all debts were paid.

  He looked at her. She had not moved but, despite her still­ness, her heart was in her eyes. Marcus's world shivered, spun and settled on a different axis.

  "I will do it," he said. "I will marry you."

  CHAPTER THREE

  When she had been seventeen, Isabella had dreamed of marrying Marcus Stockhaven. This marriage, however, was not the stuff that dreams were made of. In deference to the occasion, Marcus had paid two shillings to a fellow prisoner to borrow a clean shirt but there had been no hot water for him to shave. The chapel was gloomy, with no floral decoration to brighten the atmosphere. There were no guests and no one to dance at the wedding. It was, in short, a miserable business.

  The priest had to be prized away from his brandy bottle. He glanced at the special license with vague interest and looked with a great deal more energy at the fifty guineas Isabella proffered to encourage his participation.

  Marcus was also scrutinizing the special license as they stood before the altar in the Fleet chapel. His brows rose infinitesimally as he scanned the lines.

  "Who is Augustus Ambridge?" he asked. "As your future husband, I feel I have the right to know."

  "Oh. . ." Isabella felt confused. She had forgotten that she had been required to supply the name of a bridegroom in order to purchase the marriage license in the first place. Lacking any inspiration, she had chosen the first name that had come into her head, that of a gentleman who had been an admirer of hers in the two years of her widowhood, but whose intentions had never been either permanent or honorable.

  "He is a. . .friend," she said.

  Marcus's brows rose farther. "A friend? I see."

  "Not that sort of friend," Isabella said. She could hear the thread of defensiveness in her tone and wondered why she felt the need to explain herself to him. She owed Marcus no in­formation. He was to be her absentee husband only and, under the circumstances, it mattered nothing to him how she com­ported herself, since he could do nothing about it. Yet some­thing in that steady dark gaze compelled her honesty.

  It always had. The feeling unnerved her.

  "He is merely an acquaintance," she said. "I have a great many such."

  "I see," Marcus said again, and Isabella had to bite her tongue to prevent herself from pleading her innocence. That was not the way she did things. Never complain, never explain. Those were the tenets of royalty.

  Looking at Marcus, at the hard, uncompromising line of his mouth and the forbidding light in his eyes, she wondered how such a man could have ended by being incarcerated in the Fleet. If such a thing had happened to Ernest, it would have been no surprise at all, but Marcus was deep where Ernest had been shal­lower than a muddy puddle, strong where Ernest had been weak, perceptive where Ernest had been worse than insensitive. Or, more to the point, Marcus had been all of those things when she had known him before. Twelve years could bring many changes in a man. She must remember that she knew nothing of him now.

  She fidgeted with her cloak to conceal her nervousness and distract herself from the thought that she was making a very big mistake. She had wanted to meet, marry and part, remain­ing a stranger to her husband at all stages of the process. Yet already she had broken her own rules. She felt more deeply involved than she had ever intended to be.

  "You will see that I have crossed out Augustus's name," she observed, pointing to the document and adopting a crisp attitude to mask her feelings of vulnerability.

  "So that I may insert mine?" Marcus said, scowling. "I think that probably stretches the legality of the situation."

  Isabella twitched the license from between his fingers and handed it to the priest. "The license is legal enough and with another hundred pounds the wedding will be recorded properly in the register. The marriage certificate will be enough to satisfy my creditors."

  Marcus took the quill from the desk and wrote his name above that of Augustus Ambridge on the license. He scored out the other man's name- with another thick black line, although it was already obliterated. His face was grim and Isa­bella's heart sank. This felt terribly wrong and suddenly she was not sure that she could go through with it She found that she was shivering and shivering, like a dog left out in the cold. She folded her arms tightly to try to comfort herself.

  "Do you have any paper?" Marcus asked the priest

  The old man looked startled, as though Marcus had re­quested some unacceptable privilege. After a moment he trotted across to the dingy side chapel, returning with a sheet of rough parchment that he handed over with a look that implied another sum of money would now be in order. Isabella sighed and passed across two shillings, which disappeared into the pocket beneath the dirty surplice.

  Marcus dipped the quill in the ink pot and scribbled a few lines, dusting the paper with sand to dry it. He handed it to Isabella.

  "Take this. I would not wish there to be any ambiguity."

  Isabella frowned as she scanned the paper. He had written a few curt lines to the effect that he was prepared to take complete responsibility for the debts incurred in his wife's name. If anything was destined to make Isabella feel even more squalid and money-grubbing than she already did, it was these few lines. They emphasized the commercial soul of the agreement in a manner that left no room for sentiment

  "Witnesses?" Marcus said. There was a clear note of im­patience in his voice now.

  Isabella's heart sank still further. That was the one thing she had not considered.

  "I had not thought—" she began. She looked over her shoulder. The jailer was standing behind them looking hopeful. No doubt he thought there was another few pounds in it for him, both in acting as witness and in keeping quiet about it afterward. Perhaps he could even rustle up one of his colleagues to be the other signatory to the marriage lines. Hys­terical laughter bubbled in Isabella's throat. Married in the Fleet, with a turnkey as witness and the priest half-drunk on the brandy she had supplied as part of the bribe. . .how ill-fated could a wedding be? She pressed a hand to her lips to suppress her amusement.

  The jailer rubbed his palms on his dirty trousers, whistled up one of the other warders and came forward as the priest beckoned. Marcus took her hand. His touch was impersonal and yet a flicker of awareness ran through Isabella like a flame through tinder, catching in an instant and distracting her thoughts from everything but him. She almost snatched her hand away, so acute was her response to him. She knew that he would be able to feel her trembling, and felt as vulnerable as though she had been stripped naked. This was not how it was meant to be, with her emotions at the mercy of this man.

  The service began. It seemed to Isabella that they were racing through it, for a Fleet wedding was never going to be a long and languorously romantic affair. There were no lin­gering glances of affection between bride and groom or in­dulgent smiles from the chaplain. There was a tense silence broken only by the mumbled words of the serv
ice, Marcus's decisive tones as he made his responses and Isabella's own, more hesitant words of commitment. At one point she faltered, engulfed by memories of her first marriage twelve years earlier, and Marcus's hand tightened on hers as he turned to look at her. She thought that she would read impatience in his eyes, but when she looked up at him, he was watching her with a strangely speculative interest. She drew on the shreds of her courage and straightened, repeating her vows in a stronger tone.

  "Do you have the ring?" the priest asked.

  Isabella shook her head. She had not remembered that she would need one and since she had pawned all her jewelry to meet some of her debt, she could not have provided one anyway. She heard Marcus sigh with resignation. A moment later he had taken his signet ring off and placed it on the open pages of the priest's Psalter. Isabella shot him an agonized look.

  "You cannot give me your signet ring!"

  Marcus looked unimpressed. "This is not the time and place to discuss it."

  "But I—"

  Marcus ignored her and turned back to the priest. "Proceed."

  He took the ring and slid it onto her finger, clasping his hand briefly around hers in an oddly protective gesture. The ring felt warm and heavy on Isabella's hand. It was too big for her—she fidgeted with it, turning it round and round on her finger. It was inscribed very plainly with four entwined letters. M. . .J. . .E. . .S. . . She traced the lines in the gold.

  It felt quite wrong to be taking Marcus's signet ring, wrong and too personal when she had wanted nothing more than his name on a piece of paper.

  The priest folded the Book of Common Prayer away under the sleeve of his dirty surplice. He had already scribbled the marriage certificate and now he thrust it at Isabella and waited for his fee, anxious for the matter to be finished. Isabella's fingers were shaking as she folded the document carefully and stowed it in her reticule. This was her liberty, the paper that spelled her freedom. Yet when Marcus had let go of her hand at the end of the service, she had felt more alone than ever, free but not comforted.

  Marcus was watching her. She thought that there was an element of mocking amusement in his eyes. No doubt he found her predicament comical, the scandalous Princess Di Cassilis obliged to marry a debtor. . .

  "Well?" he said.

  'Thank you," Isabella said, finding herself unable to look at him.

  "Do not mention it." Marcus was smiling but it was not the sort of smile that comforted her. "I do believe that in return you offered me something."

  Isabella met his eyes. Her errant heart skittered nervously. Her throat felt suddenly dry. Images of those long-lost evenings mingled in her mind; the tender touch of his lips against her damp skin, the dry salty scent of the sea mingled with old roses, the blazing heat of that summer. . .but the flames of that passion were long dead after many winters.

  "Some bottles of wine, the means to purchase some proper food and a few items to make life more tolerable?" Marcus prompted when she did not speak.

  "Oh, of course." Isabella could feel herself blushing at the vastly different direction her own thoughts had taken. She paused. Her purse was almost empty, but it was not that that held her back. To repeat the offer of such a crude inducement had seemed unthinkable after Marcus's angry rejection of it earlier.

  "I was intending to pay you," she admitted, "but I thought you had dismissed my suggestion."

  Marcus smiled again, with more genuine humor this time. "I am not so proud, I assure you. Besides, I thought that we had agreed that this is a business venture? We made a bargain."

  "So we did," Isabella said. She fumbled for the coins and pressed them into his hand. He tucked them away in his waist­coat pocket

  "And you must take your ring back," she added hastily, making to draw the gold signet ring from her finger where it had rested for such a short time.

  Marcus shook his head, taking her hand and holding the ring in place. "Keep it," he said. "Until we meet again."

  Isabella felt a pang of disquiet. "Will that happen?"

  "Assuredly."

  "But not until we are safely unwed."

  Marcus's smile deepened. "Of course."

  They stood looking at each other for a moment. Isabella felt strangely at a loss.

  "I suppose that I should go?" she said uncertainly.

  Marcus's voice took a mocking edge at her obvious dis­comfort. "I suppose that you should. It is, however, custom­ary to kiss the bride on the wedding day."

  Isabella's nerves jumped. She took two steps backward until her skirt brushed the wooden upright of the front pew. This time when she withdrew from him, he followed her. She put out a hand to ward him off.

  "As you have reminded me, this is a business arrangement, sir, and that was not part of the bargain."

  Marcus smiled at her again. It was a lazy smile, full of intimate challenge. She was not sure whether he was doing this out of revenge or devilry or simply to amuse himself, but his proximity was enough to shatter her composure. She wanted to escape but she could not move.

  The jailer was becoming restive and fidgeting behind them, anxious to get his man back to the cells. Marcus ignored him. He took a single stride forward, caught Isabella's arm and drew her to him, bringing the tips of her breasts up against the rough material of his jacket. He bent his head. His grip tightened on her arm. Then he was kissing her.

  The pressure of his lips was no more than a whisper against hers. Even so, it was enough to cast Isabella back into the past, where the memory of his kiss had been locked away along with all the other tumbling images of passion. She had hidden those feelings from herself and from others for so long and now they were stirring, threatening to break out. So much for dust and ashes. Any tenderness there had been between them might be long gone, but the attraction still flared as hot as ever. It terrified her.

  She made a small, incoherent sound and tried to put some space between them, but suddenly Marcus's arms were about her and his mouth moved over hers with an expert thorough­ness that stripped away every vestige of defense. The sensual heat washed through her, burning her up, scorching her to the tips of her toes.

  No one had ever kissed her the way Marcus had. Ernest had indulged in a few cursory embraces before getting down to the consummation of their marriage but his lovemaking had lacked any tenderness. In all honesty, it could hardly be dig­nified with the word lovemaking. A less appropriate descrip­tion would be difficult to find.

  Ernest had not courted her; he had bought her. Bought her, taken what he wanted, tried to mold her to his tastes. And when she had proved less than satisfactory, he'd claimed that she had reneged on their bargain, and they had continued in a hollow sham of a marriage until he died. No indeed, there had been precious little romance and no true passion in Isa­bella's life. Until now.

  She trembled in Marcus's arms. The touch, taste and desire mingled as he kissed her, then released her a little only to reclaim her mouth once again. Isabella's body roused from what felt like a long sleep as she felt the hardness of him, his strength and control. Then it was all over and he let her go with an abruptness that plunged her back into darkness.

  The atmosphere between them was blistering. Marcus's face was shadowed but in his eyes burned a flame that seared her.

  "You should not have—" she began.

  His expression was hard. "It needed to be done."

  "Time to go," the jailer said from behind them. He fingered the money in his pocket suggestively. "Unless you would prefer to stay a while longer, madam? A cozy cell for the two of you to celebrate wedlock?"

  Wedlock. It sounded very final.

  Marcus raised an eyebrow in inquiry. Isabella wrenched her gaze away from him. "No," she said. "No, thank you."

  Marcus turned away from her without a further word and fell into step before the jailer. He did not look back. Isabella listened as their footsteps faded away and the door of the chapel swung silently closed behind them. For one mad moment, she wanted to run after Marcus and drag hi
m back, make him stay with her. But he had gone. That was it. It was all over.

  The priest touched her arm.

  "You will be wanting to be away from this place, ma'am. Allow me to escort you out."

  Isabella followed him in something of a daze through the warren of shadowed corridors and out into the daylight. The door clanged shut, leaving her out on the street. The air was bright and the afternoon was loud with the vibrant noises of the city. She felt very odd, light-headed and confused, as though she had awoken from a vivid dream, a dream laced with sensuality and long-buried desires. Except that this had been no dream. She was legally married to Marcus Stock­haven—or perhaps illegally, given the circum-stances of their wedding. The thought made her heart clench with emotion.

  His signet ring felt heavy and unfamiliar on her finger. She wondered why he had not pawned it to buy himself more comfort. But a man's pride was a delicate thing and maybe selling off the family's arms was a step too far, even for a debtor in dire straits. He could scarce be said to have graced the Stockhaven name with his behavior.

  He had not sold his signet ring but he had given it to her. Isabella felt a passing regret for the fact that she could not wear it. Nevertheless, she would keep it safe, and once the marriage had been annulled she would send it back to him. No matter that he had said they would meet again. She knew it would be better—safer—never to see him.

  She could feel the marriage certificate stiff in the reticule beneath her arm. She was free and she was secure from arrest, and surely that had to be the most important matter. Yet as she walked quickly out of the labyrinth of alleys that snaked about the Fleet, a deep feeling of disquiet possessed her. She wondered why she was so anxious. After all, Marcus was locked up in debtor's prison and she was at liberty to carry on as though nothing had happened. She had exactly what she wanted.