Read Online Perchance to Marry by Celine Conway - Free Book Online

“You’re helping me in something that I feel is very necessary just now, and worth while. We can depend on Carlos Suarez, as my grandmother’s doctor, to slow down her natural impulses. You’ll have to take the talk of celebrations and a wedding in your stride. If you were in love with me—I mean if you had a crush as a girl sometimes does on a man who’s older—it would make things awkward and uncomfortable for us both. But you haven’t, thank heaven; you even feel a little enmity for me, though I can’t think why. Still, perhaps it’s as well.” He paused and looked at her speculatively. “Anything in particular you’d like to know about things here, and me?’
    She shook her head. “I’d rather not know anything at all.”
    A smile made his voice slightly mocking. “That’s not true. I saw the little daggers come into your eyes when Dona Inez thanked you for not marrying me in England. That’s what you hate most about this situation, isn’t it? The fact that you’re being mistaken for someone else?” He shrugged and tacked on laconically, “You’d better hear about it.”
    “I’ve naturally gathered that you were engaged to someone in England,” she said offhandedly. “Perhaps I hadn’t better be told any more than that.”
    “It’s important that you realize where you stand,” he said. “The engagement existed, but it wasn’t official, in any sense. She’s an actress—not a particularly good one, but quite lovely and sparkling. She had a small part in a West End play, and it was understood between us that I’d be there when the play came off and would arrange to bring her here. When I got to London she told me the play was going to America and she had the chance to go with it. So that was that.”
    “She broke it off, as casually as that?”
    His shoulders lifted in a half foreign gesture. “I dare say she thought she could have the glamor and me too. She sailed within three days. I went to stay with friends in Yorkshire, but there was nothing to keep me in England, so I came home.” He closed her fingers over the handkerchief wadded in her palm. “I made my first questionable decision when I chose the cruise instead of returning as usual by air. However, you and I met and McCartney spread the glad news ... and here we are, temporary fiancés.”
    She lowered her head. “You seem oddly unmoved by what happened to you in England. Yet it must have been a blow.”
    “It didn’t happen catastrophically.” He sounded cynical as he went on, “Even as we parted Nadine told me she was desperately in love with me. She also said that if I loved her I’d let her have the wonderful experience of acting in America before we married.”
    “That could be true.”
    “Not for me,” in hard tones. “The woman I marry will consider me first, right from the start. Still, I’m grateful to Nadine Carmody. She’s completely put me off English women.” He smiled, quite charmingly. “That doesn’t include you and your mother, Sally Sheppard. I may marry a Spaniard, but I’m pretty sure no Spanish woman would do for me what you yourself are doing for me now.”
    “You saved us from a nasty predicament in Barcelona,” she said coolly, “and you’ve promised to help us become established here. It’s an exchange of favors, that’s all.” She hesitated. “I’m horribly afraid that when your grandmother hears the truth she’ll have a relapse.”
    “We’ll guard against that. When she’s a little stronger you’ll have to seem restive, as though living here in the house doesn’t suit you. I’ll find you a villa that you can share with your mother. That way, you can gradually break off seeing Dona Inez, and when she’s more or less prepared for it, I’ll tell her you feel you’re not sufficiently in love to marry.”
    “She’ll ... hate me.”
    “It’s possible, but there’s already been groundwork in that direction.” With a shrug and a very slight movement away from her he