The Heiress Bride - Catherine Coulter [33]
“I’m fine now. It’s just a matter of building back my strength.”
“This is all very strange.”
He eyed her, the flamboyant girl who didn’t seem to have a fear of anything or anyone, who looked at the world as if it were hers to rearrange and reshape just as she wished. Life, in his brief experience, had a way of knocking that out of one. He found himself rather hoping it wouldn’t be knocked out of her for a good long time. She was strong, no fluttering miss, and for that he was grateful. A fluttering English miss would never survive Vere Castle and all its denizens, of that he was sure. Just then he saw a hint of panic in her eyes, and it was that small sign of vulnerability that kept him quiet. She would find out quickly enough.
Then she was laughing and smiling again, even at Mr. Mole, the ostler of the White Hart. When he made a leering comment to her as they were leaving, she merely turned to him and frowned. “It is a pity, sir,” she said, “that you must needs be so disagreeable and show so little breeding. My husband and I stopped here only because he is ill. I assure you that we will never come here again, unless he is ill again, which is unlikely because—”
Colin laughed and took her hand.
He soon became markedly silent, and Sinjun left him to his thoughts. He continued silent through the day and the evening and into the next day. He was preoccupied, frankly absent from her, and she decided to allow him the peace to work out whatever was bothering him. What bothered her most was that he had ordered two bedchambers for them, without explanation. She’d left it alone.
It was late the following afternoon, as the carriage bowled toward Grantham, that he turned to face her in the carriage and dropped the boot. “I have given this a lot of thought, Joan. This is difficult for me, but I must do it, to absolve myself of a veritable little bit of my guilt. I abused your brother’s hospitality by slipping out like a thief in the night with his sister. No, no, keep quiet. Let me finish. In short, I cannot justify what I’ve done, no matter how hard I try to rationalize it. However, there is one thing I can do that will hold some honor, that will help me live with myself. I won’t take your virginity until our wedding night.”
“What? You mean I’ve left you to yourself, been silent as a punch bowl, and over the past day and a half all you’ve come up with is that bit of arrant nonsense? Colin, listen, you don’t know my brothers! We must, that is, you must make me your wife and this very night, else—”
“Enough! You make it seem like I’m going to torture you, for God’s sake, rather than preserve your damned innocence. It isn’t nonsense, arrant or otherwise. I won’t dishonor you in that way; I won’t dishonor your family in that way. I was raised to hold honor dear. It’s in my blood, in my heritage, generation upon generation of it, even through all the killings, the savage battles, there was honor somewhere lurking about. I must marry quickly to save my family and my holdings, you know that well enough, and to protect them from the damned raiding and lying MacPhersons, but one thing I don’t have to do is be a rutting stoat on an innocent girl who isn’t yet my wife.”
“Who are the MacPhersons?”
“Damnation, I didn’t mean to mention them. Forget them.”
“But what if Douglas catches us?”
“I will handle it when and if it happens.”
“I understand about honor, I truly do, Colin, but somehow it’s more than that, isn’t it? Do you dislike me so much? I know I’m too tall and perhaps too skinny for your tastes, but—”
“No, you’re not too tall or too skinny. Just leave it be, Joan. My mind is made up. I won’t take your virginity until we’re wed, and that’s that.”
“I see, my lord. Well, my lord, my mind is also made up. I fully intend for my virginity to be but a memory by the time we reach Scotland. I don’t think it reasonable to think