Free Married to the Viscount by Sabrina Jeffries Page A

temporarily?”
    “Because you have no choice. Apparently you prefer the scandal of having a common American wife to the scandal of having a thief and a fraud for a brother. Especially when the wife can be disposed of once she’s outlived her usefulness.”
    The bloody wench insisted on viewing this as something that helped only him. “You’ll benefit from this arrangement, too. When it’s over, you’ll own your father’s businesswhich I might point out was never possible before—and have plenty of money to run it. And you’ll still be able to marry. I don’t know why you’re complaining.”
    Her anger faded to sadness. “No, I guess you don’t.” Biting off more pear, she chewed it mechanically, her eyes staring blindly ahead. “Let me see if I understand you correctly—after our ‘marriage’ is severed, I’ll be free. But you’ll be married, at least in society’s eyes.”
    “Exactly.”
    “And that doesn’t bother you?”
    “Not at the moment, no.”
    He could reveal that he never planned to marry, but then she’d plague him with questions he still refused to answer. Or worse, she might regard his determination never to marry as a challenge.
    No, better to stick to his story about his busy career. Surely not even Abby would attempt to entice a man into continuing a marriage that might damage his future.
    “But eventually you’ll want to marry,” she said, tossing her pear core into the daisies behind them. “What then?”
    He thought fast. “I’ll tell everyone that you died. Who would know?”
    “They could find out easily enough.”
    “You let me worry about that. Since there’s no prospective Lady Ravenswood on the horizon at the moment, my first concern is to squelch all scandal.”
    “By having me pretend to be your wife.”
    “Yes.”
    A hint of mischief touched her face. “Ah, but how will you fit even a pretend wife into your busy schedule?”
    He shot her a quelling glance. “A pretend wife will not harangue me into dropping my activities to entertain her. A pretend wife will not divide my attentions from my work. A pretend wife will not turn my household upside-down in order to make it her own.”

    “In other words, a pretend wife will be entirely under your control,” she said dryly. “What an appealing prospect for me.”
    He bristled. “Will you do it or not? It’s a better prospect for you than any other.”
    She pondered that a moment, with her face turned east like a bloom seeking the sun. Why must she look so perfectly at home in his garden, among the chirping lapwings and blossoming lilacs? It made him want—
    “This pretend marriage of convenience,” she said. “What will it involve?”
    “I won’t expect you to share my bed, if that’s what worries you,” he retorted bluntly, half for her benefit, half for his.
    Judging from her shocked glance, however, he needn’t have worried about hers. Good God, did she really not know what she did to him?
    That was probably just as well. Mustn’t have her guessing that she tempted him. Women built cottages on less expectation than that. Bad enough that he’d have to be around her for weeks without being able to touch her.
    “Actually,” she said, blushing, “I was talking about more mundane wifely duties.”
    “I have a housekeeper, a butler, and other servants for those. I will expect you, however, to accompany me to the occasional social engagement to maintain the illusion. I’d want to start tonight by taking you to the theater. Nat and I were supposed to attend with his fiancée and her mother, but now—”
    “Yes—what about your brother? How will you explain his disappearance?”
    “I’ve already taken care of that.”
    “You can explain away an absence of days, weeks, even months?”
    “It won’t be months.” Please, God, don’t let it be months . How could he endure months of her teasing, her flirting, her alluring forbidden lips…“I’ve charged my best investigators with finding him.