A Marriage of Inconvenience Read Free

amuse myself making more money.”
    “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks you’d be better off if you were poorer,” Anna said. “So what would you have me do? Marry some fortune hunter who’s up to his ears in debt, so I won’t be so dreadfully rich once I’ve fished him out of the River Tick?”
    He rolled his eyes. “No. But marry an officer, a diplomat, a politician—only let him be a Whig, as you love your brother. Someone with a profession you can help to advance, someone who might show you a bit of the world.”
    Anna paused by the mantel and studied a small portrait of their father as a young man. Father had lived in India from the time he was fifteen until he was forty, amassing a fortune and gaining a title for his commercial and diplomatic accomplishments. The portrait had been painted there, by an Indian artist, and was so stylized that but for his cat-green eyes you could hardly tell he was an Englishman.
    “I miss Father,” Anna said. “I wish he’d lived long enough for me to see him with something other than a child’s eyes. And I wish I’d known Mother at all.”
    “I miss them, too.” He had known them little better than she had. He had been four when Mother died bringing Anna into the world, fifteen when their father had succumbed to a lung complaint and made James the second Viscount Selsley.
    He remembered the day after Anna was born quite distinctly, with the strange clarity that attended his scattered early recollections. He had been sitting terrified in the nursery, sobbing in his nursemaid’s arms. They had kept telling him that his mama was gone, never to return, and he had not understood and had been so very frightened.
    Then his father had walked in, a little squirming bundle cradled in the crook of his arm. James had looked at him and realized that Father was sad, frightened and alone too.
    Father had sat on a low chair and beckoned to him. “Wee Jamie, I have something to show you.”
    Mama had called him Wee Jamie in her lovely Scottish accent, so James had wept fresh tears. But he’d obediently slid off Nurse’s lap and approached his father.
    “This is your little sister,” Father had said.
    James hadn’t wanted a sister. He’d wanted his mother back. “She’s very red and ugly.”
    At that Father had smiled a little. “No more than you were, son, when you were only one day old. She’ll turn prettier in time.”
    “She’d better.”
    “She will. Now, Jamie, your sister, here—her name is Anna—she needs you to be a very good big brother. She’ll never have a mother, only us, so you have a very important job. You must always guard and love and protect your sister, so she won’t be alone.”
    Almost twenty years later, James understood how skillfully his father had managed him. It would have been easy for a little child to resent the new baby, even to blame her for his mother’s death. Father had known him well enough to know that telling him Anna was his responsibility would prevent such a reaction. James still felt a duty to watch out for his sister, even though their aunt and uncle, the Earl and Countess of Dunmalcolm, had proven affectionate and devoted guardians to her since their father’s death.
    “Will our aunt and uncle ride with us this morning?” he asked as they proceeded through an echoing marble hall toward the rear entrance of his house, closest to the stables.
    “I shouldn’t think so,” Anna replied. “We arrived so late last evening that I’m sure they won’t make an early morning of it. And Aunt Lilias was never much of a horsewoman. She hasn’t ridden in years.”
    “Good. We can have a proper gallop, then.”
    She fairly skipped down the steps leading toward the stable yard. “I can hardly wait. I’m sick of riding sedately through the park at the fashionable hour. London really is a bore. Not the place itself, of course, but the Season. I hate to think of going through it again next year. Maybe I’ll spare