by Merry Farmer
As swiftly as the storm broke, it was over. Phin collapsed above her, and the two of them lay tangled in each other’s arms, panting and stunned. Even before he finished catching his breath, Phin kissed her neck and cheek repeatedly, then found her mouth and kissed her some more.
“Marry me,” he said, his hips still lodged tightly against hers. “We’ll have a Christmas wedding. Or sooner, if you’d like. Everything will be all right, you’ll see. We will—”
He stopped when Lenore wriggled away from him, pushing him back as gently as she could. Her hands felt like lead weights as she struggled to right her clothing and put herself back together. She couldn't look him in the eye when she said, “I can’t marry you, Phin.”
“But—” He rocked back, tucking himself back into his trousers with distracted movements as Lenore stood and buttoned her blouse. “I don’t understand.” He got to his feet with her, straightening his glassed—which had been knocked askew in their activity—and pushing a hand through his hair. “You just said you loved me.”
“I do love you, Phin,” she said, wincing as she forced herself to meet his eyes. “But I can’t marry you.”
Phin’s confused expression pinched to momentary anger, then settled into frustration. “Is this because of Freddy? Because of your engagement to him? I can assure you, Freddy won’t mind if we marry at all. In fact, I rather think he is a champion of our cause.”
“It’s not because of Freddy,” Lenore said, alarmed at how hoarse her voice had become and how close she was to tears. She’d run and run from what she’d done in Laramie, and now she couldn’t run anymore.
“What is it, then?” Phin blinked, his shoulders dropping. “Is it…is it because I’m destitute?” The vulnerability in his voice and in his eyes was like a dagger in Lenore’s heart. “I know I haven’t presented the full truth of my circumstances to London society, but I was under the impression that it didn’t matter to you.”
“It doesn’t,” she said, her throat squeezing tight. She’d miscalculated badly in letting Phin past her defenses. The picnic and the lovemaking had been a terrible idea—one of far too many terrible ideas she’d had in the last year. “It doesn’t matter at all. I love you more than I can say, more than any man I’ve ever known. But I can’t marry you.”
“Why not?” he demanded with all the sweetness and irritation of a petulant child who had been denied a toy.
“Because I’m—”
She gulped, feeling sick. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t say it. Even though she knew she had to. As much of a rank coward as it made her, the fear of disappointing him, or enraging him, and of seeming like a horrible person in his eyes was too much for her to bear.
She picked up her skirts and turned to run away from him in the most cowardly way possible. It was the lowest moment of her life, and she was certain she would weep bitterly about it for years to come, but she couldn't face the truth, couldn’t face the way she’d let her lies drag on for far too long, and couldn’t face the way Phin would hate her once he knew.
“Lenore!” he called after her. He didn’t follow her immediately, though.
She dashed back down the hill, nearly tripping over roots and tufts of grass a few times as she went. She followed the light from the Mercer house to lead her home. When she was more than halfway there, she glanced over her shoulder and spotted Phin chasing after her, the picnic basket on his arm. She picked up her pace, but by the time she reached the yard beside the house, he’d nearly caught her.
“Will you please stop and tell me what’s going on?” he asked as Lenore dashed into the kitchen.
The relative brightness of moving from night to the cheerily-lit kitchen startled her for a moment. Hazel and the girls were at the table, grouped around a set of papers that had their full attention.
“I can’t tell you what’s going on,” Lenore whispered to Phin once he raced into the kitchen and all but slammed into her. She nodded to the girls.
But instead of looking baffled over Lenore and Phin’s sudden reappearance, all three of Phin’s sisters had wide eyes and wary looks. All three of them stared directly at Lenore. Only then did Lenore realize her document box lay open on the table and the papers the girls were reading were hers.
“Is this true?” Gladys asked with a puzzled look that turned into a frown as she stared at the marriage certificate in her hand. “Are you really married to someone else? Are you Mrs. Bartholomew Swan?”
Chapter 12
The entire room seemed to freeze as though they would all be trapped in that moment of time forever. For a moment, Phin couldn’t breathe, wasn’t sure his heart was even beating. Gladys might have been prone to fits of fancy, but she wasn’t a liar, and she held what looked like some sort of official document in such a way that Phin could just make out the names on it.
When his lungs began to burn, he sucked in a breath and strode across the room in silence to take the document from Gladys’s hands. Not a soul in the room moved or made so much as a peep, Lenore especially. Her eyes were round with the same sort of fright Phin had seen in them in Trafalgar Square, when she’d first spotted Swan. He could feel that fear in his bones as he glanced from her to the parchment in his hands.
There it was, in black and white. The document was a marriage license issued in Laramie, Wyoming, wedding Bartholomew Swan to Lenore Garrett on the twentieth of April, eighteen eighty-six. The signatures were a bit sloppy, as if they were written in haste, but the seal imprinted in one corner looked as official as anything the high courts in London could produce. Phin suddenly understood that the fear that had been in Lenore’s eyes days before hadn’t been because she was frightened for her life, she was terrified because she knew her deception was about to be found out.
Anger of a sort Phin had never known pulsed through him. He’d understood the concept of betrayal in theory, but up until that moment, he hadn’t realized how deeply it could cut. He set the marriage license deliberately on the table and drew himself to his full height, unable to look at Lenore. He’d trusted her with his heart, with his body, and with his future, and she’d lured him along, teasing and tempting him into making a damn fool of himself when pride was the only thing he felt he had to his name at times.
“I—” Lenore started, shifting restlessly on her spot. No other words came out, though, and she pressed her hands to her stomach as though she were feeling ill. “Phin—” She took half a step toward him.
“Girls, I think it’s time you went to bed now,” Phin said, deliberately turning away from Lenore to fight the piercing pain in his chest. “You’ve been up quite long enough for one day.”
To their credit, Gladys and Amaryllis slouched out of their chairs, sending wary looks to both Lenore and Phin, and shuffled out of the kitchen without a word of protest. Phin hated how pale and distraught they looked, as if he couldn’t protect them any better than he’d been able to protect Lenore, or himself.
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” Lenore said, her voice small and thin. “I—”
Phin walked right past her when she approached him. “I’ll settle the girls for the night, and then we’re going to talk.” He turned to Lenore with his last words, meeting her eyes with a flare of bitterness that left a bad taste in his mouth.
Lenore gulped and took a step back, but Phin didn’t linger where he was to see what else she would do. Hazel stayed with her as he continued to the hall and followed the girls upstairs, but he didn’t hear a word from the kitchen once he’d left it.
The girls were too old to need much in the way of help getting to bed, but Phin needed the few minutes of domestic tranquility the task provided to gather his thoughts and calm his anger. Yes, he was hurt. He was furious that the woman he’d made love to so passionately not more than an hour before, whom he’d pledged his heart and his life to, had been married to another man the entire time he’d known her. The betrayal he felt demanded to know what kind of a woman would throw herself around so glibly.
The tiny voice of rationality that attempted to poke up through the pain he felt whispered that she was a woman who was genuinely afraid for her life. Not even the wickedest of wantons could fake the sort of terror he’d seen in Lenore’s eyes before their flight from London.
“It’s my fault,” Gladys said, sniffing and bursting into tears as Phin sat on the side of the bed she was sharing with Amaryllis to tuck the two in. “I went into my room to fetch clothes for tomorrow and I remembered Princess Lenore’s box. I wanted to know what was inside.”
“Now you know,” Phin said, his voice full of gravel and sadness as he pulled the bedcovers up over his sisters’ shoulders.
“I thought Princess Lenore was going to marry you,” Amaryllis added in a tiny voice. “I wanted her to.”
“So did I,” Phin confessed with a sigh.
Admitting as much out loud loosened a bit of the anger that had him clamped so tightly. He had wanted to marry Lenore, almost from the moment he met her, if he were being honest with himself. How many times had he lain awake at night contemplating how perfect her cleverness and boldness were? How many times had he tossed himself off while imagining how delightfully wicked she was? As it turned out, all of the things he admired most about her had their dark sides.
He stood and leaned over to kiss his sisters’ foreheads. “Go to sleep and dream of fairies and chocolates,” he told them.
“Can I dream of baseball?” Amaryllis asked as Phin took a step back.
His chest seized up all over again. Lenore could have been such a beautiful part of his family’s life, not just his life. She could have brought them the sort of joy they’d been lacking for too long. It felt as though someone had died.
“Dream of whatever you’d like,” he said before blowing out the lantern on the bedside table and leaving the room.
He took a moment just to breathe when he stepped out into the hall, before heading back down to the kitchen. No good would come of letting his passions have free reign. He was hurt, but he owed it to Lenore to let her explain.
She was seated at the table, staring at her important documents as she put them back into their box. Hazel busied herself at the stove, making tea, by the look of things. As soon as Phin entered the kitchen, Lenore glanced up at him, looking utterly miserable. Her eyes were rimmed with red, as though she’d been crying.
“You lied to me,” Phin said, opening the conversation that needed to happen the way a physician cut open a body to begin an operation, though he kept his tone calm as he spoke.
“Not on purpose,” Lenore said, rising from her chair so fast she nearly tipped it backward. “I knew I would have to confess eventually, but—”
“Eventually?” Anger got the better of Phin, and he marched across the room to stand close enough to tower over Lenore. Hazel glanced warningly over her shoulder at him, but he ignored her. “When was eventually in your mind? When we were standing at the altar? Or did you intend to be a bigamist?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t have let it go that far.” Lenore edged away from him, wringing her hands as she began pacing the room. She took several deep breaths, each one seeming to build courage within her. At last, she said, “I want to assure you right now that marrying Bart was an act of self-preservation. I did not, nor could I ever in a thousand years, love the man. And the marriage was never consummated, for your information.”
Those new facts hit Phin like drops of water hitting a hot pan. They sizzled and burned, but they didn’t cool his anger at all. “I do not take kindly to being played for a fool,” he growled.
“I never played you for a fool,” Lenore insisted, her strength nearly back to full force. “Though, while we’re on the subject, it seems awfully rich for a man who makes his living publishing erotic stories that are thinly-veiled references to real men and women of the aristocracy to complain about being played for a fool.”
In spite of everything, her sudden return to boldness as she whipped to face him, crossing her arms and glaring at him, shot pure desire straight through Phin. Dammit, but he loved her even now, knowing how false she was. She understood him, even his flaws.
“Those men and women of the aristocracy set themselves up for mockery by their ridiculous behavior,” he defended himself, his face heating as his conscience kicked him.
“Like Lady Agnes Hamilton?” Lenore arched one eyebrow at him. “Like our friend, Lady Phoebe? Their behavior is so ridiculous that they deserve to be mocked in your prose?”
“I never mock anyone,” Phin argued. “If you cared to actually read my stories, the heroines come off quite well.”
Lenore laughed sharply, and he flushed hotter.
“What I mean is that the female characters in my stories are always powerful seductresses, not hapless victims, as some writers show them,” he went on, feeling as though the entire conversation were spinning out of his control at an alarming speed. “But we’ve strayed away from the point. You lied about who you are.” He took a step toward her.
Instead of retreating, Lenore held her ground. “When did I ever lie?” she asked, tilting her chin up. “When did I ever claim that I was free to marry you?”
Her question hit him like a crack of lightning. In fact, she’d said explicitly on several occasions that she was not free to marry him. All the same, he said, “You lied by engaging yourself to Freddy. Married women do not generally become engaged to other men.”
“You know full well the nature of that arrangement,” she said, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Freddy and I never had the slightest intention of marrying.”
Phin rubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face and adjusted his glasses, scrambling for a way to gain the upper hand again. “Does Freddy know about your husband?” he asked with a burst of energy.
Lenore lowered her head and clasped her hands in front of her. “No,” she admitted. “He doesn’t. My father doesn’t know either.” She winced and rolled her shoulders. “Although he might now. But if he does, he hasn’t said anything in the letters he’s sent me. None of my friends or family in Haskell has so much as hinted at the subject.” She frowned as though contemplating that fact.
“How on earth could your father not know you were married?” Phin asked, feeling as though he might actually be close to the heart of the issue.
“We married in haste,” Lenore said, her expression wary, as though her words were a massive understatement. “In Laramie, during the conference Papa was attending. Papa was busy.”
“I see,” Phin said in a wry, almost mocking tone. He absolutely did not see.
Lenore glared at him, as though she took offense to his tone. “I told you that I found direct evidence, proof, if you will, that Bart had killed men and was planning to murder even more who opposed him and the WSGA.”
“You did,” Phin said, his jaw clenched.
“He threatened to kill me right there on the spot.” The color drained from her face, and her gaze lost focus, as if she were remembering the incident. “I begged him for my life. Truly, I begged.” Her eyes were round again as she glanced to him. “Bart wasn’t particularly inclined to grant it to me. He had his revolver out and pointed at my head. And believe me, when death stares you in the face that bluntly, you will do anything to stay alive.”
“And what did you do?” Phin’s fury was suddenly directed at Bart Swan more than at Lenore. Any man who would threaten a woman like that wasn’t worthy of the word “man”. If Lenore was telling the truth.
“I told him I’d marry him,” Lenore said, pressing a hand to her stomach again.
Phin stared blankly at her. “Why?”
“Because in America, a wife can’t testify against her husband in a court of law,” she said.
“Is that true?”
Lenore shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t know what the law in Wyoming says. But it was the best I could come up with at the time. Bart believed me, in any case. And not to be crass about it, but there were other things I could see he wanted from the arrangemen
t as well.”
“Did you sleep with him?” Phin found himself asking out of pure jealousy, before he could think better of it.
“I just told you that I didn’t, but your jealousy is flattering.” She sent him a sour grin. “I managed to convince Bart he would be safer if we married as fast as possible, which meant before any horizontal activity could take place. We went straight to the Laramie courthouse and were married on the spot.”
“And is that legal?” Phin had serious doubts.
“Anything is legal when the county clerk has a gun pointed in his face,” Lenore said in a hollow voice.
Phin wanted to hold onto the slim hope that Lenore’s marriage to Swan wasn’t actually legal, but the marriage license seemed to prove otherwise. Even if it was obtained under criminal circumstances, he had a bad feeling that any Wyoming court of law would uphold its legitimacy.
Legalities aside, the circumstances as they were in the present remained the same.
“You are married,” he said, scowling all over again and taking a step toward her. “You lied by omission about your married state. To me and to all of your friends. To your family, even.”
“And what else would you have had me do?” Lenore demanded. “Be killed by a bloodthirsty murderer? Would that have satisfied your sense of honor?” She matched his attempts to show dominance in the situation by moving closer to him, her chin tilted up, making her more beautiful than ever. “Would it have been better if I’d burst into tears or fainted instead of done whatever the hell I could to save my life and get away from Wyoming as fast as possible? If you ask me, changing my entire life on a dime by asking Papa to bring me with him to England, going with him without so much as making a quick jaunt home to say goodbye to my mother and my family and my friends, knowing I might not ever see them again, is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. So for you to chastise me for it, for you to have the gall to be hurt because I was so frightened and overwhelmed by what I’d done that I didn’t even want to think about it, let alone speak of it, is—”
