Unwanted Wedding

by Penny Jordan

The whispered admission made his arms tighten slightly around her. Guard must be afraid as well, Rosy acknowledged, otherwise he would never have stressed the danger of their situation to her so strongly.

  ‘Well, there is one way we could get Edward off our backs—permanently.’

  Rosy tensed and lifted her head from his shoulder, staring up at him in shocked disbelief.

  ‘Tell the truth, you mean? Admit that we deliberately set out to deceive him? No…We couldn’t do that.’

  Rosy shivered as Guard suddenly released her, stepping back from her and turning his back on her, his voice familiarly harsh, his whole manner towards her hurtfully distancing.

  ‘No, you’re right, we couldn’t,’ he told her. ‘Look, I’ve got to go into my office, Rosy,’ he said crisply, glancing at his watch. ‘I’ll get back just as soon as I can. With any luck, Edward will be too busy transporting his confidential papers to hound you too much while I’m gone.’

  What had happened to the closeness, the warmth which had seemed to exist between them only moments ago? Rosy wondered, shivering slightly. Where had it gone?

  What she ought to be asking herself was where it had come from in the first place, she told herself tiredly when Guard had gone. And if it had actually existed at all, or if she had simply imagined it.

  There was quite definitely no history of any emotional rapport between them—far from it—and yet she could have sworn, when Guard had taken hold of her, that he had genuinely wanted to comfort her, to reassure her, to be close to her.

  Guard wanting to be close to her? Now she was letting her imagination run away with her.

  No doubt in reality he was cursing the day he had ever been foolish enough to agree to marry her.

  ‘I just hope you appreciate what we’re doing for you,’ she whispered to the house, gently touching the panelling as she opened the bedroom door.

  ‘There’s something about a proper bed made up with proper bed-linen,’ Mrs Frinton exclaimed in satisfaction as she stepped back to admire both her own and Rosy’s handiwork.

  The four-poster bed, along with every piece of furniture in the room, including the panelling, had been polished; the windows had been cleaned; the brass taps on the huge Edwardian bath and basin rubbed to a shine and, finally, the bed made up with linen sheets, blankets and a traditional hand-embroidered bedspread.

  Because of the bed’s width, it had taken both of them to make it up, and Rosy grimaced inwardly at Mrs Frinton’s comment, remarking that modern duvets certainly made life a lot easier.

  ‘You’d have a hard time getting a duvet for a bed this size,’ Mrs Frinton responded. ‘Big enough for a whole family, it is.’

  A family. A small shadow touched Rosy’s eyes as she glanced down at the bed.

  There was a hollow, empty feeling inside her, a hard, painful sense of being very alone, of not having anyone close to her for her to share her life with. It was a feeling she had never experienced before, a feeling of which, she recognised on a small frisson of disquiet, she had first become aware this afternoon, just after Guard had removed the protection of his arms from around her body.

  When her grandfather had made his will, he had wanted the house to stay in the family, to be lived in, to be loved by his descendants.

  Guard would love it and live in it, Rosy told herself firmly. Guard would protect the house and eventually his children would grow up here.

  Guard’s children, but not hers. Hers would only know of the house through her memory of it.

  The intensity of the desolation that swept over her frightened her all the more because she wasn’t entirely sure what was causing her misery—the thought of her children not growing up at Queen’s Meadow, as she had done, or the thought that Guard’s children would.

  And yet she had never previously felt possessive about the house, far from it. About the house, or about Guard?

  The small frisson became a deep shudder, a small, painful flowering of knowledge unfurling inside her, which she quickly and fearfully tried to smother with a flurry of small-talk to Mrs Frinton.

  It was just Edward’s presence in the house that was making her so anxious and unhappy, she told herself. That was all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘WELL, now, I expect you two will want to be left on your own.’

  The only smile Edward gave Rosy made her stomach heave with loathing.

  ‘Well, don’t hang about, then, Margaret,’ he ordered his wife, his pseudo good humour quickly disappearing as he turned away from Rosy and glared across the dinner table at his wife.

  ‘There’s still a lot of stuff to be sorted out. How on earth you manage to be so useless I really don’t know.’

  Rosy tensed with angry resentment on Margaret’s behalf as the older woman’s thin, sallow face flushed and she immediately and awkwardly stood up, hurrying to obey her husband’s demands.

  Automatically, Rosy tried to help her, pushing her own chair back and saying quickly to her, ‘Why don’t you leave it until tomorrow, Margaret? I’m not due to go down to the shelter until the afternoon, so I could give you a hand, and I’m sure Mrs Frinton wouldn’t mind helping us out as well—’

  ‘The shelter…’ Edward’s eyebrows rose as he rudely interrupted Rosy. ‘Dear me, I should have thought Guard would have put a stop to your going down there. With all the riff-raff who use the place, there’s no knowing what you could—’

  ‘They are not riff-raff.’ Rosy cut him off angrily. ‘None of them wanted to be made homeless, Edward; none of them wanted to have to depend on others, on the State for charity and…’

  She tensed as Guard reached for her hand, wanting to snatch her fingers out of his grasp but not quite daring to do so. Her work at the shelter had always been a slightly sensitive issue, especially with her grandfather, who had been inclined to be old-fashioned in his views, and Rosy suspected that Guard shared both his and Edward’s opinion that what they were trying to achieve with the shelter was a waste of time and money.

  Defensively, she tried to pull her hand out of Guard’s, unwilling to hear him adding his criticism to Edward’s, but instead of supporting Edward as she had anticipated, he said firmly, ‘Rosy is quite right, Edward, and these people deserve not just our sympathy but our practical support as well. But quite apart from that, even if I did not share Rosy’s belief in what she does, I would hardly have the right to interfere. Rosy is my wife—an equal partner in our relationship. I respect her right to make up her own mind about what she does and does not do. After all, if there isn’t mutual respect and trust between a man and a woman, how can there be love?’

  Rosy turned round to look at Guard in astonishment. She had never expected to hear him express such views. They were so completely alien to the Guard she thought she knew; the Guard she had always dismissed as domineering and arrogant.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she just caught sight of Margaret’s face with its wistful, unhappy expression.

  Poor Margaret. How tragic to be married to a man like Edward, and how even more tragic if she had actually once loved him.

  The small incident stayed in her mind and when she and Guard were eventually on their own she turned impulsively to him and asked him uncertainly, ‘Did you mean what you said earlier? About…about believing that…that loving someone means respecting and trusting them?’

  The thoughtful look he gave her made Rosy wish she had not raised the issue.

  ‘That’s a first for you, isn’t it?’ Guard asked her drily. ‘Actually acknowledging that I might have thoughts and feelings instead of…?’

  ‘Instead of what?’ Rosy pressed.

  He simply shook his head and told her calmly, ‘Yes. I do believe that respect and trust go hand in hand with love—with genuine love, that is, not the far more common and ephemeral lust that so many people confuse it with.

  ‘Loving someone means loving them as they are, accepting them as themselves, wanting them to be themselves instead of trying to change them to fit
into our own preconceived image of what the person we love must be. It means loving them because of the person they are, not in spite of it…’

  He frowned as Rosy gave a small shiver and asked her softly, ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Rosy lied, knowing that she dared not allow herself to look directly at him just in case he saw the emotion in her eyes and guessed how much his words had affected her.

  Would anyone ever love her like that, so completely and so honestly?

  It shocked her that it should be Guard of all people who had described love to her in exactly the same terms as she would have chosen herself; Guard who, had she been asked, she would have insisted quite unequivocally could not possibly have understood—never mind shared—such ideals.

  ‘You look tired,’ she heard Guard telling her. ‘Why don’t you go to bed before Edward decides to inflict his company on us? He’s probably had enough of bullying Margaret.’

  ‘Do you think she once loved him?’ Rosy couldn’t resist asking quietly.

  ‘Him? No,’ Guard told her decisively, shaking his head. ‘The man she might have been deceived into thinking he was? I suspect, unhappily for her, yes. Poor woman…’

  ‘I wonder why she stays with him when he’s so horrible to her.’

  ‘He’s probably damaged her sense of self-esteem and self-worth to such an extent that she can’t leave. And then, of course, there are her sons.’

  ‘He’s such a horrible person. He likes hurting her, bullying her…’

  ‘Yes,’ Guard agreed, adding warningly, ‘And that is nothing compared with what he’s likely to want to do to us if he ever discovers the truth about our marriage.’

  Rosy gave a small shiver.

  ‘Don’t, Guard,’ she begged, her apprehension showing in her eyes.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Guard reassured her. ‘There’s no reason why he should find out, not if we’re both…careful…’

  ‘I never thought he’d do anything like this,’ Rosy whispered. ‘Move in here and—’

  ‘Stop worrying about it,’ Guard told her. ‘You’re supposed to be a deliriously happy bride, remember?’

  Rosy gave him a wan smile.

  ‘I suppose it could be worse,’ she agreed, forcing another smile. ‘After all, if we were really in love, having Edward or anyone else here would be the last thing we’d want…’

  ‘The very last thing,’ Guard agreed softly.

  For some reason that Rosy couldn’t quite define, something in the way he was looking at her and the tone of his voice suddenly made her heart skip a beat and her face flush slightly.

  ‘You’re right,’ she told him huskily, ‘I should go to bed. I am tired…’

  ‘I’ll be an hour or so yet,’ Guard responded. ‘I’ve got one or two things I need to do.’

  ‘Good—goodnight then,’ Rosy mumbled awkwardly, avoiding looking at him as he held the door open for her.

  She was halfway down the upper corridor when she heard Edward calling her name. Immediately she tensed, taking a deep breath before turning round.

  ‘Having an early night?’ Edward asked her mockingly as he reached her.

  Somehow or other, Rosy managed to stop herself from responding in the way she would have liked, saying quietly instead, ‘I thought Margaret looked very tired at dinner tonight, Edward. It must be quite a strain for her, having to move over here at such short notice.’

  ‘Oh, she likes to make a fuss about nothing,’ Edward responded dismissively. ‘She’s like that. Where’s Guard?’ he asked inquisitively.

  ‘He had one or two things to do downstairs,’ Rosy answered.

  The way Edward was looking at her made her feel both uncomfortable and angry at the same time.

  ‘Not getting tired of you already, is he?’ he taunted. ‘You’ll have to watch him, you know, Rosy. A man with his reputation…’

  ‘Guard chose to marry me,’ Rosy responded fiercely. ‘Any past relationships he might have had are exactly that, Edward—past.’

  She felt rather proud of her response and it certainly seemed to rattle Edward.

  ‘What are you doing here on this floor anyway?’ she demanded, seizing her advantage.

  ‘I was just on my way down to collect some of the stuff we unloaded into the garages earlier,’ Edward told her. ‘I want to get everything inside as soon as I can. It will take me at least a couple of hours yet to move it all. You know, Rosy, you really should have thought a little harder before you rushed into marriage with Guard. You’re taking a very big risk, you know.’

  Rosy could feel her heart starting to pound anxiously.

  ‘What—what do you mean?’ she challenged Edward, hoping that he wouldn’t see the nervous guilt in her eyes.

  What was she going to do—to say—if he told her that he knew why she had married Guard? Why had she let him corner her like this when Guard wasn’t here? Why had she…?

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Edward told her softly. ‘Oh, I can understand why you fell for him. Guard certainly knows how to handle a woman, but then of course he’s had a lot of practice…But have you asked yourself this, Rosy—why has he married you?’

  ‘Because he loves me,’ Rosy replied instantly.

  Just for a moment she had thought that Edward had actually guessed the truth.

  But even if he hadn’t, it was obvious that he suspected something, Rosy acknowledged as she turned on her heel and left him.

  With only the lamps on in the bedroom, the large room looked surprisingly intimate and cosy.

  It was the bed that did it, Rosy decided. It looked…

  It looked…

  Hastily she averted her gaze from it. Well, what it didn’t look was as though it had been designed for one solitary celibate sleeper. Very, very much the opposite…

  Reluctantly, Rosy stepped out of the bath and reached for a towel. She had felt so luxuriously relaxed lying there, lapped by the soft, warm water, that she could almost have fallen asleep.

  Still smiling, she walked into the bedroom to collect her nightshirt, and then stopped, her smile disappearing abruptly as she remembered that her nightshirt, along with the rest of her clothes—and her underclothes—was still in her old bedroom.

  In all the fuss of getting this room ready, the anxiety of Edward’s unexpected and unwanted descent on them, she had completely forgotten about moving her things.

  She looked uncertainly at the bedroom door, nibbling at her bottom lip. Dared she take the risk of running down the corridor, dressed just as she was with a towel wrapped about herself, to retrieve her clothes, or should she get dressed just in case Edward saw her?

  She was still debating the matter when the bedroom door opened and Guard walked in.

  Rosy stared at him.

  ‘I thought you said you’d be a couple of hours,’ she reminded him, making sure that the towel was completely secure.

  ‘I did, but Edward was sniffing around making pointed comments about bridegrooms and neglected brides.’

  ‘Is he still there?’ Rosy asked him anxiously.

  ‘Yes. Apparently he’s got some stuff he wants to get upstairs tonight. Why?’

  Rosy grimaced uncomfortably.

  ‘I forgot to move my things from my old room.’

  Guard gave a small, dismissive shrug.

  ‘So you can move them in the morning. If he says anything, you can just tell him that there wasn’t time to move them before the wedding.’

  Rosy wriggled uncomfortably within the confines of her towel. ‘No,’ she contradicted him, ‘you don’t understand. I—I haven’t got anything. Anything,’ she repeated insistently. ‘My—my underwear, my nightshirt, they’re all still in my old room, and so is the bag I brought back from Brussels,’ she added unhappily.

  She winced as she saw the look Guard was giving her.

  ‘I just forgot all about it,’ she defended herself. ‘What with finding Edward here and then having to get this room organised. I’ll have to go
and get them.’

  ‘No,’ Guard told her sharply.

  ‘But I’ve got to have my nightshirt,’ Rosy protested, panicking. ‘I haven’t got anything to sleep in. It’s all right for you, you’ve got your things.’

  She and Mrs Frinton had unpacked the bag Guard had brought over from his apartment with some of his clothes in it, even though he had told them both wryly that he didn’t expect them to do so.

  ‘A new bride, Rosy,’ Guard informed her now, ‘does not leave her husband’s bed to go in search of a nightshirt, and to do so would be especially unwise in our present situation, with Edward still prowling about. No…I’m afraid that for tonight at least you’ll just have to sleep as you are—in your skin.’

  Rosy stared at him.

  ‘No,’ she choked. ‘I can’t…’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Guard contradicted her. ‘I do it all the time.’

  Aghast, Rosy glanced from him to the huge bed and then back again.

  ‘I am not sleeping with you in that bed without either of us having…With both of us…Without either of us having any clothes on,’ she told him primly.

  ‘Why not?’ Guard asked her calmly.

  Rosy stared at him in baffled confusion.

  What did he mean, why not? Wasn’t it obvious?

  ‘Well, because it just isn’t done,’ she floundered unhappily.

  Guard’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Is that so? It seems to me that you have some very odd views on marriage, Rosy. That, I can assure you, is exactly how it’s done.’

  He paused, watching her while she curled her toes protestingly into the carpet and the blush she could feel warming her body swept over her from head to toe.

  ‘There is nothing—nothing,’ Guard repeated softly, ‘which is quite so sensual, so pleasurable as the feel of skin against skin, body against body.’

  An odd, dizzying sensation seemed to have infiltrated her body and, along with it, a sort of aching, yearning need spiked with a bitter-sweet, sharp spiral of dangerous excitement. Skin against skin, Guard had said, body against body. He had not been speaking personally at all, so why did she suddenly feel hot all over, her imagination shocking her with mental images of their skin, their bodies…?