Heart's Blood(51)

"My actions have put you at risk. My honor would crack into pieces if I did not make that right."

Pearl bit her lip, that little up-and-down crease forming between her brows as the thinking gears turned over in her mind. Grey could almost hear them tick.

Her lips turned down, tightened, thinned, as her nostrils flared, as if emotions piled up behind them, held back only by the increasing tension of her lips. He would deal with tears if they could keep Pearl from breaking apart.

"But it isn't necessary!" she burst out. "Why tie yourself down, why tie me down this way for something that isn't necessary?"

"It might be. It only takes one time, you know."

"It might not."

"True. But marriage isn't always a thing of necessity. Isn't it also a thing of choice? Of preference?"

She snorted, an indelicate sound. "You wouldn't choose me."

"Who says I wouldn't?" He reared back, indignant.

"I say. The whole world says. I am of indifferent birth. My father was a merchant, for God's sake, who lost everything he owned and drank himself to death. I'm impoverished, uneducated, small of stature, and indifferent in looks. You don't want me."

"Shall I show you again just how much I do?" Grey pulled her to her feet and against his body in one smooth, forceful motion. He didn't want to jar her, except to her senses. He caught her gaze, put all the desire he'd been fighting since he woke in her bed into his eyes, into his hold on her. Then, the instant before his control broke, he set her carefully away from him, retaining only a grip on her hands.                       
       
           



       

He had to clear the thickness from his throat before he spoke. "I don't care about my own bloodline, so why should I care about yours? As a sorceress, you won't be impoverished for long, and we are dealing with the education issue. You have enough education to learn magic. Harry had to learn to read first, so you're ahead of him when he began. What does height or lack of it have to do with anything at all? And you are a beautiful woman who does not know her own appeal."

She looked too astonished to respond.

So he spoke again. "Besides, I like you. We get on, don't we? Famously, in fact. Isn't that another excellent reason for marriage?"

She stared up at him another endless moment, her hands somehow still clasped in his. When she spoke, it was again almost too quiet to hear. "But what about love?"

Grey let his knees crumble, feigning a body blow. Love. A female's last-ditch stand against reason. "What about it?"

"You don't love me, do you." It wasn't a question.

"Nor do I love you. It won't hurt your feelings to say so. But what if-what if there is someone out there you fall desperately, passionately in love with, and you're already married to me?"

"I am two years past thirty and haven't yet found such a paragon." Grey brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. "You are the first woman I've found that I've liked well enough not to break out in hives at the thought of marriage."

She sputtered with laughter as she snatched her hands back and propped them on her hips. "You are impossible."

"I know." Grey shrugged. He could feel his nonchalant armor locking into place around him. "I am impossible and incorrigible. I stay up all night communing with spirits and sleep through all my appointments the next day. I am careless and forgetful of those who are depending on me. I have no sense of responsibility and I haven't met a rule yet that I haven't broken. I will be a terrible husband and likely a worse father. I am sure you are wise to refuse me."

Pearl was looking at him now with an expression he couldn't read. She didn't have many of them. Usually her feelings stamped themselves all over her face, but this was one he didn't know.

"I haven't actually refused you yet," she said.

"You haven't?" Grey perked up from hidden resignation to the faintest glow of hope.

She sighed. "No, I haven't. Because you're not actually that bad. You are impossible and incorrigible, but you're also unoffendable and unflappable. If you stay up with your spirits, you let me stay up with you, and you only forget the unimportant appointments. Like with bootmakers, or taking tea with the neighbors."

"Fortunately, they've all stopped wanting to take tea with me." A smile broke out on his face, driven by his rising hopes.

"You are incredibly, astonishingly, irrefutably responsible. So responsible, I'm exhausted trying to keep up with you, though it is true that the only rules you keep are your own. But those rules you adhere to with absolute rigor. You probably would be a terrible husband, but I am sure that I would be an awful wife. All that submission and obedience?"

She shook her head sadly. "Impossible. But you would be an amazing father. What a child needs most is to be loved, and you would never stint on that."

Grey waited for her to continue. He didn't believe everything she said, but he adored hearing it. And she hadn't yet given him a definitive answer, had she?

"So?" He couldn't wait. He captured her hand again for another kiss. "Is it to be yes, then?"

She sighed, but left her hand in his, curling her fingers around to hold it. "A qualified one."

He gripped her hand tighter. She couldn't get away now. "What qualifications?"

"I will agree to marry you, if it becomes necessary. Necessity to be agreed upon by both of us."

"Agreed. But we are, as of this moment, engaged to be married."

"Which we will keep to ourselves, unless and until necessity arises to share the information."

"But we are engaged." He wanted to hear the actual words coming out of her mouth.

She gusted another deep sigh. "Yes, Grey. We are engaged to be married."

He let out a whoop, wrapped Pearl up in his arms and twirled her around. His honor remained unsmirched. He set her down again and kissed her, a long, thorough, possessive, engaged kiss. His hands reacquainted themselves with the lithe little body beneath the flannel wrapper. He kept forgetting just how small she was. Her spirit made her seem so much larger.

Only the sharp knocking at the door and the rattling of the doorknob kept him from taking the kiss further. Grey knew who was there, and he carried Pearl with him to answer it.

Elinor stood on the landing, without Harry for once, her hair falling down from its tidy braids, fingers stained with herbs or berries, and smoke coming out her ears. Before she could smite him with the lightning in her eyes, Grey grinned at her and spoke.

"Wish us happy, Elinor darling. Pearl and I are to be married."

Pearl smacked him on the arm. "You promised not to tell."

Elinor pushed her way into the room and slammed the door behind her.

"This isn't necessity?" Grey goggled at Pearl, rather more than the situation strictly required, and pointed at Elinor. "Do you want to see me beheaded? Besides, if you'll recall, I agreed to the terms of the engagement, but I never said I wouldn't tell. Frankly I am pleased as punch to be engaged to you and I don't care who knows it."

He followed a random thought astray, nattering on out of habit, letting thoughts fall out of his mouth as they came to him. "Pleased as punch. That's an odd-sounding turn of phrase, isn't it? How can punch be pleased? It's punch. Rum and lemons and such. And if it's the other sort of punch they mean, a punch in the face-well, that doesn't sound very pleasing at all, does it? I am-am pleased as a child with a new toy."

He frowned. "No, that doesn't sound right, either. Pearl isn't a toy, she's a person. A charming, brilliant, delight of a person. I am pleased as-as . . . Hmm . . ."

Pearl smacked him again, and he made a great to-do out of the injury, but she was laughing beneath the scowl, so that was all right. Elinor didn't look half as dangerous as she had, and that was better. What she looked was confused.

"You are engaged to be married? And you're laughing?" She looked from one of them to the other. "Oh-" She nodded wisely. "I see. It's a joke."

"No joke, Elinor, my dear. Pearl has agreed to do me the very great honor of becoming my wife." Grey bowed, then captured Pearl's hand yet again-she kept taking it back-and pressed a fervent kiss to its back, resisting the temptation to make a tease of it. He would tease about other things, but not this.

"Pearl?" Elinor looked at his young apprentice, searching her face. "Did you really say you would marry Grey?"

Pearl heaved a deep and breathy sigh, but she nodded. "Yes, I am afraid I did. But I thought he promised to keep it a secret." She raised her hand as if to swat his arm again, but desisted.

Grey frowned. Did she not care enough to abuse him any longer? "It was necessary to tell Elinor, my dearest. She knows I did not leave after I brought you home. It is probably necessary for the servants to know, and Harry, and likely we will have to inform I-Branch as well."                       
       
           



       

Elinor sank into the nearest sitting room chair. "This is a disaster," she moaned, dropping her head into her hands.