An Infamous Marriage Read Online Free PDF

She stepped back and he followed, shutting the door behind him. She sat on the more rickety of their two old Hepplewhite chairs and indicated that he should take the sturdier one opposite. He even sat like a soldier on alert, perched on the edge of his chair as if ready to spring into action at any moment. Elizabeth had never been one to admire a red coat or dream of marrying a soldier. Tears threatened, but she fought them. If she broke down before Colonel Armstrong, he would feel obliged to comfort her, and she didn’t want such intimacy when she meant to push him away.
    “I know this is all difficult,” he said in a gentle voice at odds with his martial demeanor. “It is for me, too. I miss Giles. I thought he’d always be here for me when I’m obliged—when I come back to Selyhaugh. But we must begin to make our plans. I’ve less than a fortnight before I must leave for the south if I’m to make my sailing.”
    She studied him. It wasn’t only his martial profession that made him move so briskly and sit as though he could hardly wait to escape the chair’s confinement. Jack Armstrong was restless. He didn’t enjoy his visits home—she hadn’t missed that slip of his tongue. His energy called out to the part of her that had always felt hemmed in by her restricted life as a poor relation. But that didn’t make him the right husband for her. No one could be, not now.
    “I don’t expect you to marry me,” she said steadily. “I cannot hold you to a promise made under such circumstances.”
    If possible, that made him sit even more forward in his chair. His thick eyebrows drew together and his dark eyes flashed. “You may be able to ignore a deathbed promise, madam. But I cannot.”
    His voice was cold with contempt, and Elizabeth could no longer hold back a sob and a torrent of tears.
    Thankfully he neither berated her further nor attempted to comfort her. She wasn’t sure which would have been worse. She heard his chair creak as he stood, and a gentleman’s handkerchief, large, clean and plain, entered her blurred field of vision.
    She took it, dabbed at her eyes and concentrated on nothing but breathing until she was calm enough to speak. “He shouldn’t have asked it of us,” she said. “He meant it for the best, but it wasn’t right.”
    “Perhaps he shouldn’t have done it, but he did, and we agreed to it. I consider myself bound by my honor as a gentleman and an officer to keep my word.”
    “We don’t even know each other,” Elizabeth protested.
    “A great many couples marry on a slight acquaintance. We aren’t so unusual in that.”
    “You might not like me, once you know me. You might regret it.”
    “Not as much as I’d regret it if I didn’t keep my word.”
    She took a deep breath and brought up the argument she expected to convince him, since nothing else had. “You don’t know who I am, or what my family was.”
    He sat down and looked at her, his gaze level and devoid of any emotion she could read. “You were born Elizabeth Ellershaw, and you are from York, so I take it you are some relation of the banker there whose bank failed when he...”
    His voice trailed off. Brusque and military as he was, apparently he had a little tact. “When he became a thief, and then a suicide,” she finished for him. “Yes, Charles Ellershaw was my father.” Never mind that Father had only dipped into the bank’s funds when a private investment scheme of his had gone wrong, thinking he could replace the money before anyone missed it. Theft was theft. And suicide was suicide, too, though Father’s death had been ruled an accident for Mother’s sake, so he could be buried on hallowed ground. She had joined him there only months later, having wasted away in an excess of grief and shame that had been a subtler form of self-destruction.
    “I thought you must be,” Colonel Armstrong said.
    “You already knew.”
    “I did.”
    She rubbed her forehead, which was beginning to ache. “But