The Plain Bride by Chasity Bowlin
CHAPTER FOUR
Sinclair stared at his reflection in the washstand mirror as he tied his cravat. He didn’t need the mirror to tell him he looked like shite. He felt it all the way to his bones. Drunkenness had not robbed him of his memory in this case. Every second of the night before now played over in his mind. It had been the stumbling in the darkness—drunk, disoriented, so cocked up he didn’t know his right from his left. He’d gotten himself turned around and wandered into the vicarage, traumatizing the innocent daughter of the local parson rather than climbing into the bed of a woman who was well acquainted with the appetites of men.
“Christ almighty,” he muttered. And he still couldn’t remember her name. Alice. Anna. Alma? “Why the devil do so many female names start with the letter A?”
With his cravat done, he straightened his waistcoat and headed for the door. He paused there to take a steadying breath and then made his way below stairs to the drawing room, where he would greet his new wife and try to figure out how they were going to manage. Annulment was not outside the realm of possibility. He could certainly afford to set her up in a house somewhere and provide her a decent living.
With that thought uppermost in his mind, he descended the stairs and entered one of the few reasonably comfortable rooms in the entire house. She was already there, seated in one of the straight-backed chairs that flanked the fireplace. Dressed plainly in a simple gown of some muddy, indeterminate color, he took his first honest look at her when he wasn’t either dead drunk or miserably hungover.
She was not a beauty. Passably pretty would be a description applied to her by some. But she was the sort of woman who, in a crowded ballroom amongst other ladies, would disappear. That had little to do with her features and far more to do with her demeanor. Quiet, reserved, and self-contained, she was the sort who would have enjoyed her wallflower status, free from all the expectations of inane chatter.
Under his regard, she never squirmed. But when she’d had enough of it, she did lift her chin as she said, “I am not a specimen to be studied, sir.”
“Sinclair. My name is Sinclair. As we are now married, I cannot imagine a reasonable excuse for not utilizing it. Sherry?” he asked, crossing the room to where a tray of libations had been placed.
“I do not care for it, thank you.”
Prim, proper, poised. Judgmental. “Ah, there’s the good vicar’s influence. I can hear it in your disapproval.”
“What you hear is my distaste for sherry. If you choose to interpret it as more than that, I cannot be responsible for it.”
“What is your name again?” he asked, as he poured himself a drink.
“Althea.” There was certainly a note of exasperation in her voice then.
“Althea,” he repeated, testing it on his tongue. Looking back at her, he shook his head. “No. That won’t do. You most certainly are not an Althea. Don’t you have some sort of nickname or diminutive that your friends and family use?”
“I have no friends. And my father, the vicar you hold in such dislike, is my only family,” she admitted.
He considered it carefully. “Thea, then. I shall call you Thea. Surely I can remember it if it is of my choosing.”
“One would think,” she intoned sourly. “I am not a dog, sir, to be renamed at the whim of whomever happens to be responsible for feeding me.”
Ignoring her displeasure at his choice of shortening her name, he moved back to the settee near where she had perched on her chair with precise and rigid posture. “Tell me, Thea, what shall we do about this mess?”
“This mess? Do you mean our marriage?” she asked. At his nod, she shook her head in dismay. “How in heaven’s name should I know what to do? You, with your drunkenness and poor sense of direction, have wrought this entire debacle.”
“Well, it isn’t entirely my fault,” he insisted. “You are the one who screamed, after all.”
She parted her lips, her eyes narrowed and her chest heaving with temper. Her cheeks flushed with it as well. And in that moment, she was, he thought, more than just passably pretty. In a fit of temper, she was actually quite lovely. Or perhaps he was simply a perverse creature incapable of appreciating a woman who didn’t loathe him.
After a second’s hesitation, she reined in her temper and calmly stated, “I will not be goaded into a divorce or annulment. I doubt there is anything you might do that would make my life so unbearable as the incessant abuse and poverty of the vicarage. Even if this house is a mausoleum to decay.”
He couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face at her acerbic reply. “You are remarkably astute, Lady Mayville…Thea.”
“I warn you, my lord, I will not be humiliated by being cast out to live separately either. Perhaps after a time, arrangements can be made. But I have been humiliated by your carelessness enough as it stands,” she stated. “I am not what you wished for in a wife, and you, sir, are most assuredly not what I wished for in a husband. But we must, for the time being, make the best of it.”
“And what consequences will there be if I do not come to heel?”
She smiled tightly. “I shall hire servants to clean your house. I shall hire workman to paint and paper your walls. I shall devote my every moment to undoing your willful neglect of this home.”
It was just devious enough to earn his grudging respect.
“Let us have dinner, Thea,” he murmured, “and ponder our now-linked fates.”
