Marion Lennox - The Last-Minute Marriage

But she wanted to run.

Or did she?

‘Marcus…’

‘I’m serious.’ He reached her and his hands came out and caught hers. They were much bigger than her hands-much stronger. She could feel their strength and she could feel the urgency behind the strength.

She’d been holding her crutches. As he caught her hands, the crutches fell away-which made her feel even more helpless than ever.

‘Peta, we can do this.’

‘What…what?’ She could scarcely muster a whisper.

‘We can marry. As you turned away just now I saw it. Your aunt’s will has an out. You need to marry before Wednesday and you can. You can marry me.’

‘But…you don’t want to marry me.’

‘Of course I don’t. I don’t want to marry anyone. But that’s just it. Because I don’t want to marry anyone then I can marry you.’

‘That’s stupid.’

‘No. It’s sensible.’

‘Why is it sensible? How can it be sensible?’ She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Or simply to run. This big man with the smiling eyes was looking down at her with an expression that said he had all the answers to her problems right here. She just had to trust him.

Trust him? She didn’t know him. She pulled on her hands but his hold tightened.

‘Peta, it can work.’

‘How can it work? How can it possibly work?’

But fifteen minutes later, when he’d calmed her down sufficiently to listen, she was starting to concede that it just might.

‘I’ll have my lawyers sift the will this afternoon,’ Marcus told her. ‘But if that’s all you need-to be married-then I’m happy to oblige.’

She sat across the table from him. They’d found the first coffee shop they could; they’d sank into two deep armchairs and they hadn’t moved. Peta felt as if she’d been hit by a sledgehammer.

‘But…you only spilled my lunch,’ she managed. She felt as if all the wind had been sucked out of her. ‘You hardly ravished me. You hardly destroyed my honour or my marriage prospects. And here you are offering to marry me. Why?’

‘I don’t like Charles Higgins.’

‘Then kick him out of your building. Put salt in his water cooler. Cut off his supplies of waistcoats. Whatever. But not this. You’re offering to get involved up to your neck.’

But he was shaking his head, smiling. ‘No, I’m not. I’m simply offering to get married. That’s all. A simple ceremony. We do the deed. Despite what the lady on the street says, we draw up a pre-nuptial agreement saying we have no recourse to each other’s property after divorce, and then we go our separate ways. After your estate has been settled, we’ll divorce. My lawyers can take care of that. Apart from the one simple ceremony, we need never have anything to do with each other.’

‘But-I still don’t understand.’ She looked up from the mug of coffee she was cradling and met his look head-on. His smile just deepened her sense of confusion. ‘Okay, you don’t like Charles Higgins,’ she said. ‘That’s not a reason for doing this. Not for you. It’d solve my problems, and that’s so important to me that I’m almost tempted to fall in with your crazy plan. But there has to be a catch. There must be. What do you want in return?’

He hesitated.

She watched his face. It was a good face, she thought, somehow forcing herself to be dispassionate. It held strength and warmth and humour. A girl could do a lot worse than marry a man like this. Especially as the marriage would last a whole five minutes.

But it was crazy. It was!

It seemed, though, that it hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment offer. He was really thinking.

‘It’d be something good to do,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know whether you can understand that, but it’s important to me.’

‘No. I don’t understand. Explain it to me.’

‘I’d like to help.’

‘By playing King Cophetua to my beggar maid?’ She flushed and stared down into her coffee dregs. ‘I’m sorry. That was ungracious of me.’

‘But it’s how my proposition makes you feel?’

Her chin jerked up at that and she met his gaze, startled. ‘Yes. It does. You understand.’

‘That it’s a lot harder to take than to give? Yes. I know that.’

‘And I know nothing about you.’

‘Peta, I come from a background where there was nothing to do but take,’ he told her. His eyes held hers, steady and strong. Telling her he was speaking a truth that was important to him. ‘We had no choice. My mother was a welfare recipient and I had to fight anyone and everyone to get where I was-and accept help from all sorts of people I’d rather not be indebted to. So… I’ve spent a lifetime getting to the other side of that divide and now I’m in a position to give. It doesn’t mean, though, that I’ll expect gratitude or undying devotion. Just a simple thank you and then we’ll get on with our lives. And one day when you’re on the other side of the divide you might be able to do the same for someone else.’

‘Like…take a good deed and pass it on?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘It’s some good deed!’ She was sounding a bit hysterical, she decided, but then she thought, why shouldn’t she sound hysterical? Maybe she was hysterical.

‘Peta…’

‘Mmm?’

‘Let’s just marry and move on.’

‘How on earth can I marry you?’

‘Easy. We get ourselves a licence and we marry. There are formalities we need to go through but I’d imagine if I throw a bit of money and power at those formalities they’ll disappear. I don’t have the best legal team in New York for nothing. You said we have until Wednesday.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘That’s the day after tomorrow. No sweat. We can do the thing easily.’

‘You sound like you do it once a week.’

‘I haven’t. I’ve never married.’

‘And if you meet the bride of your dreams next week?’

‘That won’t happen.’

‘Why ever not? Are you gay?’

That stopped him in his tracks. He very nearly dropped his coffee and, when he recovered, his mouth quirked upward in a grin.

‘No, Peta, I’m not gay.’

‘You needn’t sound so patronising,’ she told him crossly. ‘I can’t tell. You hardly wear a sign or something. What other reason can you have for not marrying?’

He hesitated. Considering. He was about to indulge in confidences, Peta thought, and she also thought: that’s something this man seldom does. What was it about him that made her know that he kept himself to himself? Entirely.

But he was breaking his rules now and his voice, when he spoke, had a reluctance that told her he didn’t have a clue why he was doing it.

‘My mother married four times,’ he told her. ‘Four times! And for every ceremony she was your traditional bride. She dressed me up as a pageboy, she glowed with excitement and she told me it’d be a happy-ever-after ending. But she chose losers. Every wedding threw us deeper into trouble. So I stood at the last of those ceremonies and I told myself it would never happen to me. I’d never take those vows. Some things are ingrained, Peta. I’m not about to change my mind now.’

She thought about that but it didn’t make sense. ‘So your mother wasn’t very good at getting married,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry. But there’s still a whole bunch of people in the world who think marriage is a very good idea.’

‘There were other things. Getting attached… I learned early that independence is better.’

‘Easier?’

‘Probably easier,’ he admitted, and she stared into his face and saw he really meant what he said.

Maybe it was the truth. Independence had a lot going for it. She’d heard. She’d never, ever had it.