'My grandmother is even now planning a grand betrothal party for next week,' he said.
She grimaced. 'Then we must both leave Bath before then,' she said.
'It would be unsporting,' he told her, touching the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of a couple they were passing. 'All the invitations are being sent out today.'
'Dammit,' she said.
He laughed out loud. He had never before heard a lady utter such a word. He wondered if she had other such gems in her vocabulary and guessed she probably did.
'And my aunt has decided to stay for the party,' he told her.
She stopped walking and looked at him severely as if he were to blame-as to a certain extent, of course, he was.
'Double dammit,' she said. 'You appear to be enjoying yourself enormously.'
'I cannot help remembering,' he said as they resumed their walk, 'that things were looking grim last evening and that my aunt might just as easily have trapped me into announcing my engagement to Constance. I would far prefer to have you.'
'I am overwhelmed,' she said haughtily.
'Because you can be shed after a week or so,' he said.
'Like a worn coat,' she retorted.
'Unless you choose to hold me to the promise, of course,' he said, 'and make me marry you.'
'Heaven forbid,' she said.
'Will feigning a betrothal to me and a romantic fondness for me for a whole week be quite anathema to you?' he asked. 'Culminating in a grand party and then freedom and sanity again? Last evening you thought it might all be fun.'
'Last evening I did not think at all,' she said. She looked at him assessingly as they reached the river and turned by unspoken consent in the direction of the Pulteney Bridge. 'However, life in Bath is excruciatingly dull under normal circumstances.'
'It is,' he agreed. 'Shall we agree, then, to enjoy the less-than-normal-or more-than-normal-circumstances that the next week promises?'
She smiled slowly at him, the same slightly reckless light in her eyes that had appeared there last evening when he had asked her as a kind of joke if she would care to enter into a fake betrothal with him.
'Since it would appear that the week must be endured anyway,' she said, 'we might as well enjoy it, I suppose. Where are we going?'
'Sydney Gardens?' he suggested. 'It is rather far away, but not too far a walk for you, I seem to remember. I may even be able to find another serving girl there being accosted by a squirrel and impress my betrothed by rescuing her.'
'No, not the Gardens,' she said. 'Beechen Cliff. I have heard that it is a steep climb but that the view from the top is quite spectacular. I wish to go there.'
'Good,' he said.
At least dancing attendance upon Lady Freyja Bedwyn for the next week was not going to be boring. He had intended being on his way from Bath this morning. He was not on the whole sorry for the excuse to spend more time in her company. He found her amusing-and increasingly attractive.
Freyja did not play fair. She had done the Marquess of Hallmere an enormous favor, and she exacted payment in any way she could devise over the week following their betrothal announcement.
It was true that the Pump Room still had to be endured most mornings and the occasional concert or play or card party during the evenings. But she really did not mind those activities very much. At least the obligatory stroll in the Pump Room got everyone up and moving at a decent hour of the morning, and she enjoyed good music and lively acting and even the occasional game of cards. It was the rest of each day that had always been unbearably tedious.
Now the tedium was gone.
Each day she dragged the marquess off walking or riding. They clamored up Beechen Cliff that first day and up Beacon Hill and across the fields to the village of Charlcombe another day. They walked to the village of Weston one afternoon. They rode up Lansdown Hill and to Claverton Down. Even on the day it rained steadily from morning until evening she insisted upon riding as far as the village of Keynsham halfway to Bristol. Having a betrothed, she quickly discovered, was quite as good as having one of her brothers resident in Bath, since Lady Holt-Barron put up no protest about the propriety of their going off alone together so often.
But if truth were known, she enjoyed the marquess's company better than that of any of her brothers-and he enjoyed himself as much as she, she was sure. She enjoyed looking at him-he was undeniably one of the most handsome men of her acquaintance. And he was witty company. Verbally she could never get the better of him-or he of her. He never suggested to her that as a lady perhaps this walk or that ride might be too much for her. When she demanded the ride in the rain, he did not even so much as look surprised, though Lady Holt-Barron warned of all the dire consequences to their health of not simply taking tea in the Upper Rooms instead.
Freyja was not looking forward to the party at Lady Potford's, which was to be a grand squeeze of an affair since almost everyone with any pretension to gentility in Bath had been invited. She liked Lady Potford and did not relish the thought of such deception as the party would involve. But the more she saw of the Marchioness of Hallmere and Lady Constance Moore during the week, the more she realized that it would have been cruel indeed to have abandoned the marquess to what might well have been his fate-marriage with his cousin, who did not want him any more than he wanted her.
No, for this one week she was betrothed-again!-and she would act her part until the end and then retreat into her normal self and her normal life again when the party was over and the marchioness had left for Cornwall.
