Unwanted Wedding

‘Guard.’ Rosy exclaimed weakly, her hand going automatically to her throat to protect the small pulse beating so frantically there. ‘I…I didn’t think you’d be back until much later.’

‘I shouldn’t have been,’ Guard told her, ‘but I couldn’t bear to be away from you any longer.’

Rosy gaped at him. She could feel her skin burning. What was Guard trying to do to her? He must know as well as she did that—

She froze in shock as he crossed the hallway, dropping the briefcase he had been carrying with a small, heavy thud as he took hold of her, holding her so tightly against his body that she could feel the strong bite of his fingers against her flesh; her face was buried against his chest, any verbal response she might have wanted to make smothered, as he murmured throatily, ‘God, I’ve missed you.’

Rosy gulped in air nervously.

‘Have you told Edward our good news yet, my love?’

Their good news? What good news? Rosy jerked protestingly against Guard’s strong hold, lifting her head, the impulsive words clamouring for utterance.

But she never got to say them. Instead, the swift descent of Guard’s head and the hard, totally unexpected warning pressure of his mouth on hers stopped her.

Guard holding her. Guard kissing her. Kissing her? Was that what he was doing? It didn’t feel much like a kiss. She opened her eyes and looked anxiously into his. They were still that unfamiliar, heart-thumping, pulse-racing amber colour, and the mouth that had clamped so firmly on hers, silencing her, somehow didn’t feel anything like she might have imagined Guard’s mouth might feel if she had ever actually allowed herself to wander into the pitfall of such dangerous imaginings, which she hadn’t… It felt…it felt…

A dizzying wave of sensation hit her as Guard’s mouth moved slowly over hers.

Her eyes were still open and so were his, almost hypnotising her into obeying the silent commands he was giving her. She could feel her mouth softening beneath the sensual impact of his, her whole body relaxing, melting into his, relaxing and yet at the same time being invaded by a peculiar and unfamiliar frisson of sensation.

To her horror, Rosy could actually feel her nipples hardening and peaking. With a small cry of protest she tore her mouth away from Guard’s.

‘You’re right,’ he agreed, as though she had spoken. ‘This isn’t the time or place.’

His voice sounded soft, a husky purr that made small shivers of sensation run up and down her spine. He reached out and touched her mouth with his thumb.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

Dizzily, Rosy dragged her gaze away from Guard’s face and turned to look at Edward.

‘Hasn’t Rosy told you?’ Guard asked politely. ‘She and I are getting married. I’ve sorted out the special licence,’ he told Rosy softly, turning away from Edward, ignoring the anger emanating from him, the questions he was asking, behaving, Rosy recognised enviously, as though Edward simply wasn’t even there, as though the two of them were completely on their own, as though…

‘The wedding will be just the way you wanted it to be. Very small, very quiet. In church…’

In church! Rosy tensed, but this time she managed to hold back her shocked words.

‘You can’t do this,’ Edward was blustering angrily beside them. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what the pair of you are up to. Don’t think I won’t—’

‘Edward…’Without raising either his voice or his head, and still looking directly at her, Rosy marvelled, Guard had managed to silence Edward’s outpourings and to get his attention. ‘I think it’s time you left,’ Guard continued evenly. ‘I’ll show you out.’

Now Guard did move away from her and at another time Rosy might almost have been amused by the chagrin in Edward’s expression and the confusion of his friend, who was demanding to know exactly what was going on and why Edward had brought him out on such a wild-goose chase.

‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ Edward warned Guard threateningly, before turning to leave. ‘You aren’t married yet, and besides—’

‘Goodbye, Edward,’ Guard interrupted him suavely, firmly closing the front door.

‘Did—did you mean that?’ Rosy asked him, dry-mouthed in the heavy silence that followed Edward’s departure. ‘About our getting married?’

‘Yes,’ Guard told her calmly. ‘What is it, Rosy?’ he asked with an abrupt return to his normal, mocking manner towards her. ‘Having second thoughts?’

Rosy glanced towards the staircase and then up at the chandelier and shook her head numbly, not daring to trust her voice to make any vocal reply.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DOES it have to be a church ceremony?’ Rosy asked Guard uncomfortably, uncrossing her leggings-clad legs and getting up from her chair to go and stand in front of the library window.

She had been caught off-guard when he had arrived half an hour ago; nine o’clock on a Saturday morning was not exactly a time she was used to having visitors.

‘Visitors?’ Guard had drawled, as she had told him as much, hastily running the fingers of one hand through her tangled hair, while she surreptitiously tried to lick the small smear of jam from her toast off the fingers of the other.

In her grandfather’s day, breakfast, especially at weekends, had always been a semi-formal affair, served in the breakfast-room. But, since she had been on her own, Rosy had taken to eating in the large, comfortable kitchen. Mrs Frinton, who used to come in daily to clean and cook, was now only coming in once a week. Rosy felt guilty about allowing someone to cook and clean for her when she was perfectly capable of doing both herself.

‘My dear Rosy, you and I are about to be married, supposed in the eyes of the rest of the world to be desperately in love. What would seem odd to them is not so much my calling so early in the day, but the fact that I haven’t stayed here all night.’

Predictably and irritatingly, Rosy had felt herself starting to flush.

‘I have an extremely busy schedule, and there are certain things we need to discuss before the rest of the world learns our news.’

‘Why should anyone else be remotely interested in what we’re doing?’ Rosy had demanded crossly, as Guard followed her into the library. ‘Or by the rest of the world do you really mean all your girlfriends?’

The look Guard had given her had scorched her into wary silence.

Like her, Guard was dressed casually, but whereas her leggings and top shrouded the feminine shape of her body, Guard’s jeans, surprisingly well-worn with tell-tale patches of lighter colour on them, clung snugly to his body, outlining the hard, taut muscles of his thighs, revealing their maleness in a way which was normally mercifully concealed by his more formal business suits.

There was, Rosy was discovering, also something almost hypnotic about the way Guard walked—about the way the denim revealed the movement of those muscles. She had been relieved when he had finally seated himself in one of the deep library chairs.

‘Yes, it does,’ Guard answered her original question now. ‘Why the objection?’

‘Well, it’s just…’ Rosy shrugged uncomfortably, unwilling to betray herself to his further mockery by admitting that, while she was no regular churchgoer, she felt that it was somehow wrong to marry him in church when she knew—when they both knew—that their marriage was simply a convenient expediency.

‘Just what?’ Guard pressed her.

‘It’s just…just that a church wedding is so much more fuss,’ she fibbed lamely. ‘And…’

She could feel her skin colouring under the look Guard was giving her. This morning, in the sharp, clear daylight, it seemed impossible that those clear, cold eyes could ever really have burned with that heat, that desire…that intensity she had seen last night. Nervously she looked quickly away from him. She had told herself last night, after he had gone, that that interlude—that incident—was something she was simply not going to think about. Guard had done it for Edward’s benefit, and she supposed she ought to be grateful to him for going to so much trouble, but…

But it was something that most definitely must not happen again.

‘Stop hedging, Rosy,’ Guard told her sharply. ‘You don’t want to get married in church because it isn’t a “real” marriage. That’s typical of you and your muddled, ideological outlook on life. Try thinking things through from a more logical viewpoint. Like it or not, you and I in our different ways both have a certain standing in the local community. Edward isn’t going to be happy about what we’re doing, we both know that. There’s no point in adding fuel to the flames of his suspicions. A small, quiet ceremony is something we can get away with—just—particularly in view of the recent deaths of your father and grandfather. Not to have a church ceremony isn’t. And as for the fuss, you can leave all the arrangements to me. Which reminds me, you’d better have a word with Mrs Frinton and ask her if she’s free to come back here to work full-time.’

‘What for?’ Rosy asked him. ‘I’m only using a few of the rooms and—’

‘You may be, but after we’re married we’re bound to have to do a certain amount of entertaining. I have business associates who’ll want to be introduced to my new wife, and unless you’re proposing to give up your work at the shelter to be here full time—’

Give up her work at the shelter? ‘Certainly not,’ Rosy told him vehemently.

‘Good. So it’s agreed then. You’ll contact Mrs Frinton, tell her that we’re getting married and that I’ll be moving in here and ask her—’

‘You’re moving in here?’

‘Well, it is the normal thing for a married couple to live under the same roof,’ Guard pointed out to her sardonically. ‘Unless of course you want to move into my apartment. Although…’

His apartment? Rosy stared at him. When Peter had first mooted the idea of her asking Guard to marry her, she hadn’t been able to think very far past the ordeal of actually having to propose to him.

‘But we can’t live together,’ she began, panic suddenly beginning to infiltrate her voice. ‘We don’t…’

‘We don’t what? Oh, come on, Rosy…how old are you? You can’t be that naïve. You must have realised when you came up with this plan of yours to stop Edward inheriting this place that you could hardly convince the world that this is a genuine marriage if we’re living at separate addresses. Have some sense.’

Rosy could hear the exasperation creeping into his voice.

‘I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,’ she admitted weakly. ‘I just wanted—’

‘You just wanted to save the house from Edward. I know,’ Guard finished for her. ‘You’re twenty-two years old, Rosy. Isn’t it time you started to grow up?’ he asked her scathingly.

‘I am grown-up,’ Rosy responded indignantly. ‘I’m an adult now, Guard, a…’

‘A what?’ he asked her softly. ‘A woman?’

‘Yes,’ she told him fiercely, her eyes darkening with anger as she saw the look he was giving her as he crossed the room.

‘Turn round,’ he commanded, ‘and look at yourself in that mirror and tell me what you see.’

She was tempted to refuse, but the memory of how quickly and easily he had overpowered her the previous evening stopped her.

Reluctantly, instead, she did as he had demanded, staring defiantly not at her own reflection in the huge Venetian mirror over the fireplace, but at him.

How tall he looked in comparison to her own meagre height and how broad, the powerful, muscular structure of his torso clearly evident beneath the soft, checked woollen shirt he was wearing.

Her own top, in contrast, wide-necked and baggy, revealed all too clearly the vulnerable delicacy of her own bone-structure, the soft black wool somehow highlighting the translucency of her pale skin, the feminine curves of her breasts.

‘A woman! You look more like a child,’ Guard mocked her. ‘In years you may be a woman, Rosy, but you’re still hiding behind the attitude and looks of a child.’ He moved in front of her, his thumb-tip rubbing briefly against her mouth, its touch gone as she instinctively lifted her hand to his wrist to push him away, her eyes dark with shock and anger.

‘No lipstick,’ he told her. ‘No make-up of any kind.’

‘It’s Saturday morning,’ Rosy protested. What she didn’t tell him—what she couldn’t tell him—was that she had overslept, that last night she had been unable to sleep because…because…

She could feel the flesh of her bottom lip prickling sensitively where he had touched it; instinctively she went to catch it between her teeth and then stopped abruptly, remembering.

‘No make-up,’ Guard continued remorselessly, ‘clothes that hide your body, deliberately de-sexing it. Has any man ever seen your body, Rosy? Touched it? Touched you here?’

The fleeting touch of his hand against her breast made her tense in outraged protest, even while her body registered that there was nothing remotely sexual in his touch.

‘I don’t have to apologise to you or anyone else for not wanting to indulge in casual sex,’ Rosy defended herself angrily. ‘And just because I don’t jump into bed with every male who asks me, that doesn’t make me immature, or less of a woman!’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Guard agreed. ‘But the way you blush whenever I say anything with even the remotest sexual connotations, the way you back off from me, the way you so openly betray your inexperience sexually, they all say that you’re not a woman, Rosy, and they’ll certainly say that you’re not a married woman.’

‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?’ Rosy snapped at him, turning away from him so that he wouldn’t see either that she was blushing or that his comments had, for some odd reason, actually hurt her. ‘Unless you’re suggesting that I go out and find a man to go to bed with just so that I don’t embarrass you with my—my lack of womanliness…’

‘My God, if I thought…’

Rosy gasped as she felt Guard take hold of her, shaking her almost, and then releasing her just as abruptly, so that she didn’t even have time to open her mouth to protest at his rough treatment of her. She could hear anger in his voice as he told her, ‘This isn’t some game we’re playing, Rosy. It’s reality—and a damn dangerous reality at that. Have you actually thought of what could happen to both of us if Edward takes it into his head to bring a case against us for fraud?’

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