The Heiress - Lynsay Sands [36]
“I would never treat a woman like Dicky has apparently treated Christiana,” he assured her solemnly. “And many men wouldn’t. I’m sure your father didn’t treat you or your sisters and mother poorly.”
“No, he was always a kind and loving man . . . except for his penchant for gambling us all into ruin every year or so this last while, he was wonderful,” Suzette added dryly. “And while I am glad to hear you say you would never treat a woman as Dicky does, I’m quite sure Dicky would have said the same thing before he married Chrissy. How is a woman to know what a man is truly like before they wed?”
When Daniel merely frowned, at a loss as to how to answer that, she shook her head. “I do not understand why we are even discussing this. There is no other way to gain the money needed to pay off Father’s debts. I need to marry. And you need to marry a woman with money. It doesn’t seem to me we have much choice. You know that. It’s why you came here tonight to tell me you had decided to accept my proposal. And I thought we were about to head for Gretna Green. Why are we now back in the house discussing these things?”
Daniel stared at her for a moment, the words on the tip of his tongue that he hadn’t come tonight to say he’d decided to marry her. However, she was now eyeing him with narrow-eyed suspicion, and he had no explanation for why he had come here tonight other than the truth. He simply couldn’t tell her that. Finally, he said, “We can’t simply ride out in the middle of the night without telling anyone. We agreed that I would give you my answer tomorrow and I think we should stick to the original plan.”
Daniel didn’t wait to hear her arguments to that, and he was quite sure she would argue, so turned abruptly on his heel and hurried out of the room and straight out the front door at a quick clip. He pulled the door closed as he went, but wasn’t terribly surprised to hear it open behind him before he’d got halfway down the sidewalk. However, he didn’t even glance back at her call and picked up his pace, practically running the rest of the way to the carriage.
“Home,” Daniel barked out to his driver as he jumped into the back of the contraption, then he pulled the door closed behind him and fell back on the empty bench seat as the carriage jerked forward. His gaze slid to the curtained windows at another shout from Suzette, but he resisted the urge to look and see if she’d stop and return to the house. He then glanced to the opposite bench seat and the blanketed bundle there. George. He still had to deal with the corpse and hadn’t a clue what to do with him.
Scowling, Daniel shook his head. Even in death George was trouble. If not for him, Daniel would never have been in Suzette’s room in the first place. He wouldn’t have been caught there by her, dallied with the girl and then thoughtlessly left his cravat behind. She then wouldn’t have chased him down to return it and certainly wouldn’t have wound up nearly giving him her virginity in the back of a damned carriage.
It was all George’s damned fault. It was also the dead man’s fault that he was now sitting there frustrated and still hard as a dead hen. If not for his presence in the carriage, Daniel would right that moment be planted deep inside Suzette and taking them both to the heights of pleasure. But he wasn’t, and was hard pressed not to give the dead man a good kick for it . . . Despite the fact that he should probably instead be thankful he had been stopped before he’d gone that irretrievable step.
Sighing at his own rather confused thoughts, Daniel leaned his head back and closed his eyes as he tried to bring some order to his mind.
He wanted Suzette. As a gentleman, he couldn’t have her without marriage. And he didn’t want her marrying someone else, like Garrison. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to marry her himself. They’d only met that night for God’s sake.
What he needed was more time to get to know her better, to see