The Marriage Bargain Read Free

with a sharp, piercing pain, into his flesh.
    He realized with a shock that he had been hit and was falling backward. This was not the way the Ternion should end.
    Then, as if time stood still, Spence thought of his wife. He remembered her youth, her vulnerability, her gratitude when he’d married her—in name only. He opened his mouth to beg Blake and Wolfe protect her, because now he could not. The only sound that came from his mouth was a moan.
    Emma,
he thought as his head seemed to explode against something hard on the ground.
Forgive me.

Chapter
TWO
    M y lady, two gentlemen to see you!”
    Emma Keenan, Countess of Kellworth, jumped to her feet at the footman’s quick approach. The weeds she’d just pulled from the vegetable garden scattered at her feet.
    “To see me?” Wiping the dirt from her gloves, she caught Tolley’s apparent urgency. Whoever these visitors were, they could not have arrived at a worse time. She looked more like a field hand than the lady of the manor.
    “Yes, ma’am.” Tolley sounded worried. “Mr. Hale said to fetch you straight away and to make haste.”
    Such dispatch from the elderly butler did not bode well. Poor Mr. Hale tended to move at the pace of a lame snail. For him to request speed suggested a matter of great importance.
    At one time she would have been certain such unusual callers would have come to tell her that her husband had been struck dead on some battlefield, but she knew Spence to be in London at present. His cousin had informed her of that fact.
    Shaking out her skirt, Emma nearly ran to keep up with Tolley, who undoubtedly took Mr. Hale’s word very seriously. As they crossed through the kitchen gardens to the house, the out-of-breath footman could tell her nothing more about the callers. She and Tolley entered the house from the back, and Emma hung up her wide-brimmed hat and her apron on a hook by the door. She removed her muddy half boots and slipped her feet into the worn pair of shoes she’d left there earlier.
    “Tell Mr. Hale I shall be there directly,” she told Tolley, before dashing up the servants’ stairs to her bedchamber.
    Her maid, Susan, nearly as ancient as Mr. Hale, dozed by the window, a piece of mending in her lap. She woke with a snort when Emma closed the door.
    “There are callers, Susan. I must change.”
    “Callers, ma’am?” It took several seconds for the maid to move her stiff limbs out of the chair.
    “I must dress quickly.”
    But Susan could move only so fast, so Emma unfastened the laces of the shabby dress she wore to work in the garden and pulled it over her head. She washed her face and hands and removed one of her better dresses from the clothes press. While the maid’s arthritic fingers slowly worked the buttons, Emma stuffed her hair into a fresh cap. It wasn’t until she was halfway down the main staircase that she remembered the lace of her sleeves was sadly frayed.
    Mr. Hale waited for her in the hall, looking very somber, so unusual for him. He typically was cheerful and the most pleasant butler she’d ever encountered, though she could probably count that number on the fingers of one hand. “Two gentlemen in the drawing room, ma’am.”
    “Who are they, Mr. Hale?”
    His brow furrowed. “Friends of the earl.”
    Spence’s friends. Her heart quickened at the thought of her husband. She mentally kicked herself for it. After these three difficult years, the mention of his name ought not turn her into a besotted schoolgirl.
    The gentlemen must be here by mistake, that was it. They must think Spence in residence at Kellworth, not realizing how unlikely a prospect that would be. Spencer Keenan thought nothing of Kellworth. Or of his wife.
    Emma hurried into the drawing room, one of the few rooms where the furniture was not covered with sheeting against the dust and dirt.
    Two tall gentlemen turned at her entrance, one fair-haired and quite handsome, the other dark and forebiding. Both looked to be in shock, as