“It was a bee,” Kate practically wailed. “Just a bee! Surely we can’t be forced to marry because of a bee!”
Her outburst was met with silence. She looked from Mary to Lady Bridgerton, both of whom were gazing at her with expressions hovering between concern, kindness, and pity. Then she looked at Anthony, whose expression was hard, closed, and utterly unreadable.
Kate closed her eyes in misery. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Even as she had told him he might marry her sister, she’d secretly wished he could be hers, but not like this.
Oh, dear Lord, not like this. Not so he’d feel trapped. Not so he’d spend the rest of his life looking at her and wishing she were someone else.
“Anthony?” she whispered. Maybe if he spoke to her, maybe if he just looked at her she might glean some clue as to what he was thinking.
“We will marry next week,” he stated. His voice was firm and clear, but otherwise devoid of emotion.
“Oh, good!” Lady Bridgerton said with great relief, clapping her hands together. “Mrs. Sheffield and I will begin preparations immediately.”
“Anthony,” Kate whispered again, this time with more urgency, “are you certain?” She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him away from the matrons. She gained only a few inches, but at least now they weren’t facing them.
He gazed at her with implacable eyes. “We will marry,” he said simply, his voice that of the consummate aristocrat, brooking no protest and expecting to be obeyed. “There is nothing else to do.”
“But you don’t want to marry me,” she said.
This caused him to raise a brow. “And do you want to marry me?”
She said nothing. There was nothing she could say, not if she wanted to maintain even a shred of pride.
“I suspect we shall suit well enough,” he continued, his expression softening slightly. “We’ve become friends of a sort, after all. That’s more than most men and women have at the beginning of a union.”
“You can’t want this,” she persisted. “You wanted to marry Edwina. What are you going to say to Edwina?”
He crossed his arms. “I never made any promises to Edwina. And I imagine we’ll simply tell her we fell in love.”
Kate felt her eyes rolling of their own volition. “She’ll never believe that.”
He shrugged. “Then tell her the truth. Tell her you were stung by a bee, and I was trying to aid you, and we were caught in a compromising position. Tell her whatever you want. She’s your sister.”
Kate sank back down onto the stone bench, sighing. “No one is going to believe you wanted to marry me,” she said. “Everyone will think you were trapped.”
Anthony shot a pointed glare at the three women, who were still staring at them with interest. At his, “Would you mind?” both his and Kate’s mothers stepped back several feet and turned around to afford them more privacy. When Mrs. Featherington did not follow immediately, Violet reached forward and nearly pulled her arm out of the socket.
Sitting down next to Kate, he said, “There is little we can do to prevent people from talking, especially with Portia Featherington as a witness. I don’t trust that woman to keep her mouth shut any longer than it takes her to return to the house.” He leaned back and propped his left ankle on his right knee. “So we might as well make the best of it. I have to get married this year—”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you have to get married this year?”
He paused for a moment. There wasn’t really an answer to that question. So he said, “Because I decided I would, and that’s a good enough reason for me. As for you, you have to get married eventually—”
She interrupted him again with, “To be honest, I rather assumed I wouldn’t.”
Anthony felt his muscles tense, and it took him several seconds to realize that what he was feeling was rage. “You planned to live your life as a spinster?”
She nodded, her eyes innocent and frank at the same time. “It seemed a definite possibility, yes.”
Anthony held himself still for several seconds, thinking he might like to murder all those men and women who had compared her to Edwina and found her lacking. Kate truly had no idea that she might be attractive and desirable in her own right.
When Mrs. Featherington had announced that they must marry, his initial reaction had been the same as Kate’s—utter horror. Not to mention a rather pricked sense of pride. No man liked to be forced into marriage, and it was particularly galling to be forced by a bee.