Page 33
Nine
Still in the drawing room
After ten or fifteen painfully slow tick-tocks of the mantel clock
“Married?”
Georgine gaped at Robyn as if he wore boots upon his ears.
She closed her mouth with an audible snap.
Really.
Had he taken leave of his senses and packed them off to Bath?
“You. Cannot. Be. Serious.”
She shook her head a tad too vigorously, and her shoulder twinged in protest.
“I do not wish to cause offense, Robyn, but I absolutely am not tootling down matrimony’s lane because of a nasty chinwag. In truth, I have never wanted to marry.”
Georgine could summon any number of reasons for becoming snared in the parson’s mousetrap, but trotting down the aisle for fear of tattle someone might spread?
No, thank you.
Still, she’d never seen amiable, easy-going Robyn so, well…in high dudgeon and frothing like a teapot on the boil.
In truth, she had never witnessed him in a pelter before.
She couldn’t deny his genuine concern, but to conclude marriage was their first option?
Flimflam and fiddle-faddle.
“Come, Robyn. Be honest. You do not want to marry any more than I do.”
Her words sounded harsher than she had intended.
The edges of his mouth and eyes flexed the merest bit at her bluntness. “I’ve always intended to wed someday.”
“What I mean is, neither of us is interested in an arranged marriage. Of course, you will marry.” He would make an excellent husband. Just not hers. “Someone you choose because you love her.”
His features remained unchanged, but something flashed in his eyes and disappeared before she could identify it.
“I agree an arranged marriage is not ideal, but believe me, Georgine, there are worse things.”
Robyn shoved aside the fashion periodicals strewn on the tea table and sat upon the polished surface. Such earnestness creased his handsome face as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, that for the first time, a sliver of genuine alarm sluiced through her.
God above.
He is absolutely serious.
And that frightened the stuffing out of her far more than peering down the barrel of a gun had mere weeks ago.
Marriage was forever.
Women seldom escaped unhappy unions, and once they said, “I do,” they became little more than chattel, forced to bend to their husband’s every whim and desire.
If they didn’t?
