Free Lions and Lace by Meagan McKinney Page A

shock was so great, she could barely choke out the words. "You're—you're telling me to marry you?"
    "Are you in the position to say no?" He almost laughed when his gaze raked down her sodden, ruined dress.
    She turned from him, unable even to think. Every part of her seemed to have gone numb. This was like living a nightmare. The picture-perfect ending to a hellish night. She didn't want to ponder how far he might take this crazy idea because if her experience was any indication, the answer was as far as he wanted to go. Trevor Byrne Sheridan didn't retreat. That thought alone made her want to faint, to succumb to blessed darkness.
    "Surely you're not serious," she whispered, horrified.
    "No?" He picked up her crumpled biography and studied it with rapt attention.
    "You can't be," was the answer she clung to. This was madness. Utterly untenable, even from his point of view. After all, he was surely a papist, and she was most definitely not.
    He met her stare again. "This could be the best business decision I've ever made. I understand your uncle Baldwin Didier got rich off your connections, even if he did lose it all in the end."
    She angered. When would someone look at her and see something other than a way to make himself richer? "Marriage is not a business decision," she stated frostily.
    He almost laughed. "I beg to differ, Miss Knickerbocker. In your crowd, it's all business, right down to the pedigree."
    She was growing hysterical. If this man was becoming set on this insanity, she could see a long and difficult fight ahead, one she desperately wanted to avoid. "I was taught to believe marriage involves people and their emotions, not money and a ticker tape."
    "Must it?"
    His question left her astonished. She finally found her tongue and spoke slowly, as if that would make him understand. "Marriage is for a lifetime. There are things involved in marriage that cannot be compared to business—"
    "Such as?" He cocked one eyebrow, and for the briefest of seconds she could see the little hustler he must have been when he was a boy, the little hustler that had made him the enormously wealthy man he was today.
    She groped for an answer. Finding one, she held on to it like a lifebuoy. "Children," she gasped. "They're a consequence of marriage and cannot be treated like a business."
    He walked over to her and ran his finger beneath her chin, his touch raising her anxiety to dizzying heights. "I can see to it we won't have any children."
    She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. It was useless. "This has got to be some terrible joke. You cannot be serious. We don't love each other. We don't even know each other."
    He smiled darkly. "Think about it, Alana. The irony is priceless. You're the purest of Knickerbocker bloods. It's only fitting that you should be the sacrifice for what was done to Mara."
    "But I wanted to attend her debut, I tell you! My uncle locked me in my bedroom!"
    His answer was a disbelieving smirk, and he put a quick death to that topic when he said, "You know, the more I think about it, the more this arrangement suits me."
    "Marriage is not an 'arrangement'!"
    "Ours will be."
    "But it only suits you! What about me? I don't want to marry you!"
    "You don't want to marry a mick , is that what you're thinking?"
    The bitterness in his voice threw her. Cautiously she shook her head. "It doesn't matter that you're Irish, Mr. Sheridan. I won't marry any man I don't love."
    "Can you afford the luxury of refusing me? Where's that desperate woman who needed her pitiful fortune returned?"
    "Why would you want to do this? Is getting Mara a place in society so important to you that you're willing to sacrifice so much for it?"
    He gazed at her in her damp, clinging, peach-colored gown, and that lion in him didn't even attempt to hide the base desire for what he saw. His words came slow and easy. "Where's the sacrifice?"
    For the first time she knew his guard had slipped. She heard the brogue in his words, the softest