Any Groom Will Do

by Charis Michaels

  Cassin began to trail behind her, admiring her as she admired the beauty of her home.

  Brevity, remoteness, and formality, he reminded himself. It was unfair to encourage an intimacy that he could not reciprocate—possibly for years.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “It was nice of Tessa and Joseph to attend the wedding. It shouldn’t matter, not really, but I missed my friend Sabine.”

  “Yes,” Cassin agreed, cautiously following. “Besides your servants and your mother, Tessa and Joseph were the only guests with whom I was acquainted.”

  While he was in London, Cassin’s partners, Joseph and Stoker, had both agreed to marry Willow’s two friends. The combined income from the girls’ three dowries was more than £100,000. This meant the partners had the money they required for the guano expedition and he could now comfortably provide for Caldera through winter.

  “It’s sweet, really, how well Joseph and Tessa get on,” Willow was saying. “But I’m not surprised. She has always been acutely attuned to falling in love. A love match was at the forefront of her mind, even when I was writing the advertisement.”

  “Well, I was shocked. Joseph enjoys a pretty girl as much as the next man, and there have been many girls in his life, but he’s had a very rigid stance on marriage. It was a goal, but a very distant one. Now he claims three weeks was all it took to fall madly in love.”

  Willow had wandered down the great hall to a sweeping stairwell that rose in a gentle curve to the next floor. Cassin followed five steps behind.

  “They were inseparable at the wedding, weren’t they?” Willow said. She reached the stairs and began to climb, whispering to the dogs. “Beaming. Mostly at each other.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” he said. He paused at the bottom step and watched her. He called, “Joseph had been the most anxious to reach Barbadoes, and now he’ll be the last to leave England.”

  “The wedding Tessa’s parents are planning cannot be rushed. They’ve invited all of Surrey and half of London.”

  “Meanwhile, Stoker and your friend Sabine were married alone before a vicar. After just two days.”

  “Also not a surprise,” said Willow. She paused at the top of the stairwell and looked at him. Slowly, warily, against his better judgment, he began to climb. Brevity, remoteness, and formality.

  “I believe there was some real urgency there,” he said, “considering the abuse of the uncle.”

  “Yes, and thank God,” said Willow. “We knew Sir Dryden was hateful, but Sabine had concealed how violent her uncle had become.”

  “Apparently the man had her locked in a cupboard on the day Stoker called to meet her,” said Cassin. “Well, we needn’t worry; this will not happen again. Stoker rarely makes a fuss. When he is motivated to assert his displeasure, it is typically not with words. And it is not soon forgotten.”

  “I know Sabine was grateful, even if she asked to be taken to my aunt in London and left alone. There again, I am not surprised. She has been so cautious and solitary since her father died. Despite Mr. Stoker’s assistance, she is distrustful of strangers.”

  “Hmmm,” said Cassin. “Stoker himself is solitary soul. He is naturally suspicious of everyone, especially women. I would have been glad to see him at the wedding, but he detests social gatherings, and he would have been a foreboding presence, alarming old women and frightening children.”

  Cassin stopped climbing two steps from the top. He looked up to her. “Where are you going?”

  She gestured down the corridor. “Perry has fallen behind on packing. I’ve no choice but to lend a hand. I am anxious to get underway as soon as possible.”

  Cassin looked down the corridor. He’d already followed her too deep into the house. Now he was upstairs, facing a corridor lined with what could only be family bedrooms.

  Packing, he thought. Packing had the ring of monotony and labor. This was . . . endurable. And he’d learned quickly that any scenario including her maid, Perry, was as devoid of sexual tension as Christmas morning.

  Willow and the dogs began down the corridor, and he took a deep breath and followed, passing a series of closed doors. Brevity, remoteness, and formality, he chanted again in his head, but the words had lost their meaning. He could think of little more than the nearness of her.

  “Willow?” he called suddenly. His voice was too loud. He cleared his throat. “I plan to return to London tonight.”

  She froze, mid-step. Her shoulders tensed.

  “You’ve said that your move to London was well in hand,” he said. “That Mr. Fisk would drive the wagon with your trunks, and you would travel in the carriage your mother has given you. I took you at your word and planned to ride ahead tonight.”

  She did not respond.

  “Will your mother find it odd that I don’t stay the night?” he asked the back of her head.

  Finally, she turned, searching his face, her wide blue-green eyes looking for something, perhaps, that she hadn’t heard him say.

  “My mother will be in the stable all night with the mare,” she said, and then she turned away. There was a closed door behind her, and she pushed it open. Dogs filed into the room at her feet.

  Cassin squinted into the brightness of the room beyond. It was airy and light, pale walls bathed in midday sun. White, so white.

  “Congratulations, my lady,” sang a cheerful voice from the floor. Perry knelt over a trunk. “Oh, and your hair . . . it still looks so beautiful.”

  “Go to the kitchen and have a piece of cake, Perry,” Willow said quietly. “The footmen will devour it, and there will be nothing left for you.”

  The maid’s head popped up at this suggestion, and she scrambled to her feet. She bobbed a curtsy to Cassin as she darted out the door. Five dogs followed in her wake.

  Cassin stared back at the room. A bedchamber. His wife’s bedchamber.

  His knees locked.

  I should run, he thought.

  I should follow the maid and leave for London now, just as I’ve said. She will be angry and disappointed but not heartbroken.

  Instead, he took a step inside. And then another, and another, and another, until he was in the bright, white room, which was dominated by a bright, white bed.

  He looked around as if in a daze. Every non-wooden surface was of the purist white or softest ivory. The bed—tall, wide, almost square, he’d never seen a bed like it—was a profusion of gauzy lace, fluttery canopy, and folds and flounces of heavily draped material. Cushions and coverlets abounded, white on ivory on white, velvet on linen on cotton. It was a like a soft platform designed for no other purpose than—

  He swallowed hard and looked away. Fluffy white carpets stretched across the floor. Low-slung eruptions of fluff, barely distinguishable as chairs, reclined before the fire.

  Taken together, it was an oasis of cool, beckoning, bedlike surfaces. A pasha’s tent, bleached to colorless layers of softness. The image of Willow’s bright auburn hair flashed in his brain, splayed out against all of that soft whiteness.

  He ran a hand through his hair, continuing to walk inside, step after thoughtless step. He was hit by the distinctly cinnamon scent of her. His mouth began to water; he heard his heartbeat drum in his ears.

  Willow, meanwhile, ignored him. She paced the floor in an energetic line, biting her fingertips to loosen her gloves. She yanked them off and tossed them on the back of a chair. She strode to a bureau and yanked the doors open wide. The shelves were bare except for a stack of folded yellow fabric, and she snatched it up, crossed to the open trunk, and deposited it carelessly inside. Each movement was quick and jerky. She did not look at him.

  “You’re cross,” he said, but he thought, Thank God. If she gave me even the slightest invitation . . .

  She returned to the bureau and yanked open a drawer. It was filled with what appeared to be silk stockings. She scooped up an armful and returned to the trunk.

  “Cross?” she asked slowly, affecting an expression of exaggerated confusion. She wen
t back to the bureau for another armful of silk. “Would I describe what I’m feeling as cross? No, I don’t believe I would. What I am feeling is . . . weary. So incredibly weary.” She was back at the bureau, yanking open another drawer.

  “Because of the wedding?” he guessed.

  “No. Not because of the wedding. I’m cross as you put it, because I am always the last to know,” she said loudly, scooping up a limp tangle of something silky and pink and striding to the trunk.

  “The last to know?” he repeated.

  He was trying to follow the conversation—honestly, he was—but he was transfixed by the strident, energetic, almost incandescent vitality of her. Her cheeks were pink; her bosom rose and fell. Her sculptured coiffure was beginning to erode under the agitated jerking and stooping and flinging. First one auburn tendril, and then another. Burgundy ribbon slipped loose and slid to the floor. A lock of hair fell across her cheek, and she blew it away. Cassin licked his lips.

  “Yes, the last to know,” she said, gathering up another armful from a drawer. “I am the last to learn of what . . . what . . . thing will happen to me next. Even now—especially now. After I’ve taken such great pains to make my own way. Meanwhile, you and every other man I know may do as he pleases.”

  She fished an empty velvet bag from the tangle of silk in the trunk and hauled it to the mirrored vanity. Pulling open the drawer, she began to drop brushes, hairpins, combs, and loose ribbon into the bag.

  “If you wish to go to London tonight,” she said, “you shall do it. When you wished to go to London after the proposal, you went.”

  The vanity drawers were full, and she removed every article without discrimination, tossing them all into the bag. When she leaned to dig deeper in the drawer, he was treated to a generous view of her straining neckline.

  “I sent you a note,” he managed to say.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “the thoughtful and informative one-line note. Thank you so much.” She dragged the velvet bag, now full, to the trunk and dropped it in. She marched to a small writing desk near the window and flung open the drawer.

  “If you wish to call upon my aunt,” she went on, “and interrogate her without my knowledge, you may.”

  “I could not leave the country without knowing you would be settled in suitable accommodation, Willow. Safe and provisioned for with the comforts to which you are accustomed here at Leland Park, and that is no small thing.”

  She pulled page after page of parchment from the desk drawer, scanned it, and then stacked it into one of two piles. “If you wish to sail Barbadoes and muck around in the bird droppings,” she went on, “you may do that. My brother has the same freedom. He’s gone to India, and we may not see him again for years. Sir Dryden may beat my friend Sabine until her eyes are black if he wishes.”

  “Careful, Willow, I’ll not be put in the same lot as Sir Dryden.”

  She continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Even Mr. Fisk comes and goes as he pleases. My late father, may God rest him, still lends his reputation and name to my mother. She relies on these to conduct the business of the stables, and he is dead.”

  She tossed the last of the parchment into the first stack and looked at him. “Meanwhile, I must ply, and wheedle, and wait and wait and wait, and pay you £60,000, and promise to take no lovers—ah, but wait! God only knows if you and I will ever be lovers. It’s out of the realm of possibility to apply some supposition to this.”

  One of the ribbons in her hair flipped across her nose. She made a shrill noise of frustration and took it by the end and yanked. This set off an avalanche within her coiffure, capsizing the highest braids. Long, roped plaits tumbled down her back, molting pins as they fell. She squeezed her eyes and pulled the ribbon again, harder this time, letting out an angered cry.

  “Willow, wait,” he said, and he crossed to her. “Stop. Allow me.”

  He was beside her in three strides, gently tugging the ribbon from her frustrated grip, running his fingers along the silk until he’d located the last tenacious pin. Working swiftly, gently, he removed every other offending pin, massaging as he went. Braids were loosened and released. Heavy, creased locks of hair dropped down to her shoulders. Gently, he scratched her scalp.

  Willow let out a soft, breathless sigh. Molten desire, which had hovered oppressively just outside Cassin’s consciousness, hit him with throat-closing force. He was swimming in the scent of her, the heat of her, the closeness of her lips, just a breath away.

  “I’m sorry, Willow,” he rasped, his best answer under the circumstances. His brain function was growing dimmer and dimmer. And then, “Turn around.”

  By some miracle, she complied. He reached for the braids and pins in the back of her head.

  “Yes, you are sorry,” she said softly. “And I am sorry. And we’re all so very sorry. And you are leaving Leland Park tonight—alone.”

  “I am trying to give you what you want,” he said. He could barely hear his voice over the rush of blood in his ears. With hands that shook, he sifted through her hair for more pins. “I am trying to get you to London.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are, and I should not be selfish. If I wait long enough and accept whatever last thing anyone deigns to tell me, then I shall eventually get some part of what I want. Lucky me. I should not be bothered that you get what you want, always, in every instance, on your terms, and in your own time.”

  He heard himself laugh—a coarse, bitter sound. “Is that what you think?” he growled, leaning down to whisper the words into her ear. “That I have everything that I want?”

  She sucked in a breath. The room was bright, and he could see the jumping pulse point in her pale, slender neck. It took every scrap of his weakening self-control not to drop a kiss on the spot, to feel the skin throb beneath his lips.

  “If that’s what you believe,” he went on, his voice a rasp, “then you are not paying attention. Or are more innocent than I thought.”

  She listed a little, swaying toward him, and let out a little sound of desperation or surrender.

  Cassin snapped. In one swift movement, he dropped his hands to her waist and spun her around to face him.

  “Because what I want,” he said, “what I really, desperately want has nothing to do with going to London or Barbadoes or the far side of the moon, and everything to do with picking you up, tossing you on that bed, and making you my wife in earnest.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Willow rarely, if ever, indulged in temper fits.

  Fits of temper solved nothing; they were largely illogical, and honestly, who in her life would indulge her? Her parents didn’t care, and Mr. Fisk cared so much that no temper was necessary.

  But today? Today, she bumped up against some unforeseen limit and burst through.

  Willow was a lifelong planner, a writer of lists, a packer of umbrellas on cloudy days, a tester of three shades of black paint before she committed to the perfect ebony. But how could she plan her life if she was only provided with the most pertinent details in the last moment?

  If only Cassin had mentioned that he would not spend even one night at Leland Park after the wedding, she could have prepared some excuse for her mother and relatives or planned to leave at the same time.

  It wasn’t a catastrophic oversight, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And the more she raged, the angrier she became.

  As a rule, her packing technique was orderly and thoughtful, but now her trunk was in shambles. It would have to be redone. Poor Perry. She’d veritably shouted at the maid to get her out.

  And now . . . this.

  “Are you ready to be my wife in every way?” Cassin breathed, looking at her through half-lidded eyes. “Is that why you’ve led me here?”

  “What?” she rasped, breathless. “I’ve led you nowhere. You followed me.”

  “We were having a conversation,” he said, “and you continued walking away.” His mouth was so close she could feel his breath on her skin. Shivers rolled down her
arms. She listed toward him, and he wrapped his large hands around her waist.

  “No,” she said carefully, fighting for lucidity, “a conversation would be something like, ‘Now that we’ve had the ceremony, how should we manage these next few days?’ And I would say, ‘I cannot say for sure, Cassin. What do you think?’ And you might have said, ‘Let us weigh the—’ ”

  He dropped his mouth to hers and kissed her.

  Consciousness took flight, spiraling upward, while their bodies snapped together like magnets.

  One minute she’d been having two sides of a hypothetical conversation, and the next he was kissing her, and oh good lord, yes . . .

  How she had missed the all-consuming feel of his kiss, the strength of his body pressed against her, the steadiness of his large hands gripping her. Without hesitation, she looped her arms around his neck.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” he panted, “I am incapable of conversing with you, sweetheart, because every sensible, provoking thing you say makes me stupid with lust.”

  “And all this time, I thought you were just stu—”

  He cut her off with a throaty laugh and another kiss. She laughed, too, laughed and kissed him, tangling her fingers into his hair.

  “Your bedroom is like a harem enclave,” he growled, pulling away to breathe.

  “It’s merely white . . . virginal,” she countered, seeking his mouth.

  He pulled away to laugh. “In no way is it virginal.” He widened his stance to grab her by the bottom and rake her against him, descending on her mouth again.

  The embrace was almost immediately familiar. The rare and precious contact they’d stolen before informed him of where his hands fit, of how to slide them down the curve of her waist until he reached exactly the right spot, of how to squeeze and grind her against him until she cried out in pleasure. She knew the angle at which to tilt her head, she knew that if she dropped her head back, he would move to her exposed neck, kissing and sucking and scraping her with the roughness of his beard.