The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

Sam touched her ring again. It was surprisingly delicate, very different from Ricki’s elaborate gold and ruby family heirloom that chafed her fingers and which she’d lost in the canal the day Maria drowned. The moment Edge slipped the ring on her finger at the vicar’s command the world shrank and hushed, like the moment birds chirping raucously in a tree at dusk settled suddenly into the calm of night. She’d still wobbled when they’d kneeled and his hand had caught hers and just for a moment he’d shown an emotion, even if it was worry.

Married.

Again.

Edge was now her husband.

‘My dear, dear Sam. I’m so very, very happy.’ Janet clasped Sam’s hand almost convulsively, her other hand pressing a now-mangled handkerchief to her eyes. She’d cried quietly throughout the brief ceremony in the drawing room of the British consul general’s house, nestling under Poppy’s arm. ‘You both deserve happiness after all you have been through. I know you were forever at daggers drawn when you were young, but sometimes that is the best way. You know the worst of each other which is so much more than most couples do when entering matrimony, you know.’

That much was true, Sam thought as she patted Janet’s hand. She was still too shocked to do more than smile at the people who had joined the impromptu congratulatory toast that followed the brief ceremony. Behind her smile her mind kept echoing with the same thoughts.

Married. Again. What have I done?

This was either a most brilliant move on her part or an impulsive recipe for disaster. This time she had climbed something from which she could easily fall and break her neck.

She squirmed with the same mix of excitement and terror that hadn’t let her go since she’d entered Edge’s tent. She’d expected him to throw her out on her ear with a good lecture at worst or with a stolid ‘I am flattered by your proposal but you are clearly suffering from desert fever, now go to sleep like a good girl’.

She should be content, happy. Edge might be a trifle...difficult, but he was good, conscientious, intelligent. Even kind when he let his shell fall away. Not to mention as handsome as sin and could kiss as if he had traded something very valuable to the devil for that skill.

There was no reason to be shaking with fear.

Yet she was.

‘Lady Edward, my warmest congratulations!’ The consul general joined them, beaming. ‘Are there any more Sinclairs for us to wed here in Cairo? We are most willing to continue in this pleasant vein.’

Spoken aloud the words sounded even more foreign than in her mind.

Lady Edward.

In the past that name had plagued her—it sparked twists of pain and the image of a golden-haired beauty waltzing in Edge’s arms under the light of a thousand candles. When her girlish hopes for her own marriage to Ricki turned to ashes she realised that image had goaded her into seeking a male version of the perfect and charming Theodora Wadham. She’d latched on to Ricki’s golden curls and infectious laughter, his pleasure in dancing the night away, his adoration of her... She’d been too young to see how much of that pleasure had been fuelled by wine and how much of his adoration fuelled by a need to possess the prize others sought.

Ricki’s perfect image faded fast, but not Lady Edward’s. At night as she lay under Ricki’s heavy body waiting for it to be over, her mind tortured her with images of the golden sylph in Edge’s arms, being loved in a manner utterly different from Ricki’s heedless, drunken pawing... Eventually even those images faded and she just lay there.

Until the day Ricki taunted her once too often with her insipidity and coldness and the truth came roaring out of her—that she never had or ever would love him, that she’d married him only because she wanted a home and family and could never have that with the man she loved. Even now that memory was a taste of purgatory—her venom spilling out and then the realisation that despite his drunken clumsiness and childish posturing her husband actually cared. But it had been too late. There had been no taking back the truth.

‘More champagne, Lady Edward?’

Sam accepted the glass from Sir Henry, watching her husband over its rim.

Her husband.

That tall, handsome, serious-looking man listening to Poppy and the vicar with a slight smile softening the sharp-hewn lines of his face. Despite his outward calm, he exuded a raw but leashed power. She could see the other guests watching him as they might watch a wild animal only half-tamed by years of captivity, fascinated but wary that any moment he might forget his civilised veneer and succumb to an atavistic urge to devour. Not that he seemed to notice. Even as a young man he’d been just as unaware. She’d overheard her brothers ribbing him that this was why his mistresses were usually older than he—it took a mature and determined woman to make it absolutely clear they were interested.