The Proposal by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh [Balogh, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2012-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

G

wen had been feeling angry and so sad that she hardly knew how to draw one breath to follow another. She had felt insulted and grieved. She had longed to make her escape from the library and the house, to dash through the rain to the dower house in her overlong dress and on her weak ankle.

But even the dower house would not have been far enough. Even the ends of the world would not have been.

He had looked like a stern, dour military officer when she came into the library. Like a cold, hard stranger who was here against his will. It had been almost impossible to believe that on one glorious afternoon he had also been her lover.

Impossible with her body and her rational mind, anyway.

Her emotions were a different matter.

And then he had announced that he had come—as if she must have been expecting him, longing for him, pining for him. As though he were conferring a great favor on her.

And then. Well, he had not even made any attempt to hide the motive behind his coming to offer her marriage. It was so that she would use her influence to introduce his precious sister to the ton and find a man of gentle birth to marry her.

He must have been hoping that she was with child so that his task would have been made easier.

She stood with her hand on the door after he had dismissed her—he had dismissed her from Neville’s library. She was that close to freedom and to what she knew would be a foolish and terrible heartbreak. For she could no longer like him, and her memories of him would be forever sullied.

And then it occurred to her.

He could not possibly have come here with the intention of telling her that his sister needed an invitation to a ton ball and that therefore she must marry him. It was just too absurd.

It was altogether possible that he would look back upon this scene and the words he had spoken and cringe. She guessed that if he had rehearsed what he would say, the whole speech had fled from his mind as soon as she stepped into the room. It was altogether possible that his stiff military bearing and hard-set jaw and scowl were hiding embarrassment and insecurity.

It had, she supposed, taken some courage to come here to Newbury.

She could be entirely wrong, of course.

“Lord Trentham,” she asked the door panel in front of her face, “was your sister your only reason for coming here?”

She thought he was not going to answer. She closed her eyes, and her right hand began to turn the knob of the door. The rain pelted against the library window with a particularly vicious burst.

“No,” he said, and she relaxed her hold on the doorknob, opened her eyes, drew a slow breath, and turned.

He looked the same as before. If anything, his scowl was even more fierce. He looked dangerous—but she knew he was not. He was not

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