Caleb growled.
His friend would just… shrug?
“I should replace your ass.”
His only friend in the world snorted. “You couldn’t find someone.”
Caleb stopped midstride and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Yeah, that’s fair enough,” he muttered. “Where’s the damned file?” And why hadn’t he paid more attention to it? All blame fell squarely with Caleb, who’d been too busy to attend those important details.
Wade rushed to fetch a brown leather folio from a sheet-draped sofa. “I had no idea, Caleb,” he said when he returned with the folio in hand. “None. Nothing in her application mentioned anything about her family or her birthright, or any of it.”
Either way, being irate with Wade, who couldn’t really be blamed, wasn’t going to fix this mess of a situation he found himself in.
Caleb plucked the file from the other man’s hand, and reaching inside, bypassing the actual advertisement, he withdrew the notes and sheets of paper about his business arrangement.
A business arrangement that all this time had involved, of all people, Claire Poplar. As farcical as the situation was, it’d almost be laughable if it weren’t so damned miserable.
Caleb unfolded a note and read the words written in a delicate, careful scrawl.
Dear Mr. Harrison,
I have never done anything like this before, and given the circumstances, I trust neither have you. As you will see in the attached pages, I meet a number of the criteria listed in your requirements for a wife. I would also mention, though I’m not an artist, I spend much of my time alone sketching and painting, and will relish the opportunity to have the freedom to do that without the usual constraints placed upon me as an unmarried woman.
Caleb paused and glanced squarely at his friend.
“I… thought another solitary artist might be the way to go,” his friend murmured sheepishly, knowing precisely the part Caleb had stopped upon. “She likes her time. You like yours.”
“You were hoping to partner me with someone who possessed shared interests,” he said tersely.
Color splotched Wade’s cheeks, and he moved back and forth on his feet. “There might have been that, too.”
Of course there had. Giving his head a furious shake, Caleb finished reading.
I know this isn’t the most romantic of arrangements, for either of us, and yet, what it potentially offers has a different romantic allure.
Yours, C Ralpop
Ralpop? Her damned name backward. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
His friend held out a hand. “Surely you see from looking through that file that she was a perfect match for you and what you were looking for.”
Oh, hell. It’d all been there. Not that it was Claire, per se.
“I don’t see that,” he snapped. Caleb folded the note along its neat crease and pointed it his friend’s way. “I said no shared interests.”
Except, he’d had a responsibility to take more of a role in all of it. He’d have seen what Wade had failed to note, the wistful quality of the author, the veiled hints of romanticism contained within these lines. And he’d have run as far and as fast away from this applicant as his legs could have carried him, and then he’d not be here, and neither would she.
You’d also not have known these past days together either.
Yeah, that was true, and it probably would have been for the best. No, it would have been. Strangely, though, he found himself oddly bereft at thinking of these days having never happened.
Cursing, Caleb reorganized the pile and made to stuff all those damning papers back inside the folder, but paused. Holding on to that note, he stuffed it inside his jacket pocket and returned the rest to their proper place.
Wade was already there, waiting with an outstretched hand, readily anticipating Caleb’s need to be free of the file.
“What the hell am I going to do?” he demanded, his voice entreating to his own ears.
“Yeah, there’s the exhibit in France,” his friend said. “As it is, you’re going to be late.”
The exhibit in France?
Caleb lowered his brow, and then it occurred to him just what his friend was saying and what he’d thought Caleb had been speaking about. Because yes, that should be and would be the expectation—his art was his everything, and this marriage was to have freed him up. He was to depart soon for Paris.
Only, that wasn’t what he’d been thinking about or talking about.
Her face flickered to his mind’s eye, as she’d been upon their arrival, her blue eyes almost luminescent as she’d studied the keep with a mix of sadness and hope. And then the sight of her as she’d come to the same horrifying realization Caleb had. Before she’d stalked off as proud as if she were, in fact, the owner of this crumbling pile of stone.
“I meant about the damned need for a wife to oversee this property,” he said, scrubbing his hands up and down his face. This land was supposed to fill his pockets so he could live freely for his art.
How damned… callous it all sounded as he repeated those words silently in his mind.
“You can always marry her,” his friend ventured.
Caleb snorted. “Yeah, right. Next?”
“Hear me out,” Wade persisted. “She’s in the market for a husband. You’re in the market for a wife. She fits all the requirements you and I put forward. So… why not? She’s—”
He cut him off this time. “She’s Poppy’s sister-in-law, and worse…”
She was a romantic. She might claim to be content with a business arrangement, but the woman he’d come to know these past days had spoken about love and had dreamed of it. She wanted more for herself. As she should. She deserved it.
But he couldn’t give her any of that.
“What?” his friend pressed him.
“There’s also the matter of the fact that we’d kill each other.” Even if they got along some of the time, they were oil and water.
“But—”
“It’s done,” Caleb clipped out between clenched teeth, effectively putting an end to Wade’s attempts at marrying him off to Claire.
“All right.” Wade inclined his head. “Now, what are you gonna do with her?”
Yes, there was that, because she was now his responsibility. Caleb frowned. For some reason, it felt wrong to think of Claire in that way. Yes, that’s what this had started out as. But over these past days together, she’d become something of a friend—and a lover. As such, her well-being and his need to see her settled was about far more than her connection to Poppy or any sense of obligation Caleb felt to her sister-in-law.
“I’d sent word for her brother, but that was before I realized—”
“That you were the prospective bridegroom?” his friend interrupted, a laugh bursting from the other man’s lips. “Why, it was as though, even subconsciously, you were trying to stop yourself from marrying the girl.”
He lifted his middle finger. “Go to hell. I was going to say before she confirmed that her brother is looking after their other sister.”
Understanding dawned in Wade’s eyes. “Ahh. I got it. So there’s no one coming, then.”
“No.” Which meant they were going to have to find another way to get Claire back to London and the comfortable life awaiting her there. “At least, not yet.”