Chuckling softly, Emma said, “I think it's best that youdogo and see Whitmore. Ask him, to his face, if he truly had no intention of marrying you, and I trust you have enough intuition to see through his lies.”
Sitting up, Cecilia thought the suggestion over. It would give her closure to know the truth coming from the source itself.
“What time is it?” She asked.
“One in the afternoon,” Emma replied.
“It’s time I sought out Gabriel once and for all,” Cecilia said hotly, getting up. “Help me find a dress.”
Cutting through the heated liquid of his bathhouse, Cassian reveled in the fiery temperature of the swimming water. The exercise calmed him, focused his erratic thoughts into a sensible line.
He’d already petitioned the Archbishop for the Special License, but that was as far as he’d gotten.
The bathhouse he’d had remodeled like an ancient Roman bath, decorated with replicas of Roman columns at each corner of the large rectangular pool.
His engineers were miracle workers too, making sure to fashion the pool with grates where heated coal could be placed under the furnishing to warm it. There was ingenious plumbing that took fresh water in and a valve that let the used water out into the pond beyond the house.
He got to one end of the pool and, with a quick flip, swam off to the other end. In the fleeting moment when he resurfaced for air, he heard the bathhouse door open and feet padding to him. Only when he got to the end of the pool did he hold onto the edge and shake the water from his head.
“What can I do for you, Somerton?” he asked.
Benjamin’s patent leather boots shone in the dim light. “Nothing much,” he grunted. “I just thought you’d like a friend to talk with.”
Hauling himself out of the pool, Cassian reached for the towel he had sat nearby. After drying off, he pulled on his robe. “The weather’s been lovely, hasn’t it?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “That is not what I am talking about.”
“Why not?” Cassian said blithely. “We could go to the countryside and have a hunting party?”
“With your new bride in tow?” Ben asked dryly. “I have heard a lot of stories about Lady Cecilia of late, but I am sure her being a sharpshooter is not one of them. Surely you know that everyone is talking about you and the good lady.”
“I’d be disappointed if they were not,” Cassian shrugged. “Bunch of civilized savages. Half of them are most likely spinning lies about us having an affair behind Whitmore’s back and that the kiss was the outcome of our liaisons.”
“I have not heard that one yet, but I will keep an ear out for it,” Ben replied. “Look, I know you were heading away from London for a while—”
“England,” Cassian corrected. “And not for a while. I had everything lined up to leave forever, and now all this…” he gazed at the plaster molding around the room. “Now I have a wife.”
“Scared?”
“Not exactly,” Cassian murmured while cocking his head to the left. “What I feel is… an unfathomable, sickening sense of dread that has carved a crater of inevitable doom and despair inside my gut.”
“And here I thought you were not the poetic sort,” Ben teased, “That almost rhymed.”
“Har, har.” Cassian mocked. Moving to a chair near the other side of the room, he sat.
Leaning on the wall near him, Ben asked, “It can’t be all that bad, can it? You are about to marry one of the most sought-after ladies in the ton. Surely you cannot despise that.”
“It is notwhoI am marrying that is the issue,” Cassian rolled his neck. “'Tis the fact that I am marrying at all that unsettles me. I am sure you know that a lot of gents have been bitten by the matrimonial infection, but I am impervious to the poisonous fangs.”
“Putting the marriage part to the side,” Ben pressed. “I know you and Lady Cecilia have a connection—”
“She despises the very air I breathe,” Cassian snorted. “That will make the best of marriages.”
“The only reason she hates you is because you gave her a reason to,” Ben added sagely. “You were like a mischievous boy tugging her pigtails, only magnified by ten. I can bet you she took so deeply it stayed with her for all these years.”
“And I’ll have a lifetime of apologizing and she’ll never forgive me,” Cassian said, his lips twisting, “For the taunt that night and for trapping her in a marriage she does not want. Which proper lady wants to be leg-shackled to a rakehell until she goes gray?”
“That’s the very thing,” Ben pressed on. “The church allows you to be married and have the marriage annulled in sixty days after the ink is dried. As long as it is not—”
