He couldn’t let her feel that way. Not when he had the perfect opportunity and every honorable reason to make her problems his own. To make Susanna his own. Right now, this very morning. He’d been thinking on the possibility all night, but now the decision simply clicked within him. Crisp and clear as the sound of a pistol being cocked.
“Don’t worry. About anything.” He stepped back a pace, heading in the direction of the house. “I’m going to leave my cousin here to grovel before your ladies. Make him fall on his knees, if you would. I’m off to have a talk with your father.”
“Wait,” she said, turning back to him. “You promised not to involve my father. You gave me your word.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” He turned away. “I’m not talking to him about the militia. This is strictly to do with you and me.”
Susanna watched him as he walked toward the house, wondering if she’d understood him correctly. Did he just say he meant to speak with her father? About the two of them?
If he intended that the way it sounded . . .
“Oh drat.” She picked up her skirts and gave chase.
She caught up to him just as he reached the house’s side entrance. “What do you mean,” she asked, panting, “that you’re going to speak to my father? About us? Surely you can’t mean that the way it sounds.”
“Certainly I can.”
A footman opened the door for him, and he walked through. Leaving her on the threshold with no further explanation. Teasing, cryptic man.
“Wait just a minute,” she called, chasing him down the corridor. “Are you referring to”—she dropped her voice to a scandalized whisper—“marriage? And if that’s the case, shouldn’t you be talking to me first?”
“What we did last night renders that conversation rather irrelevant, don’t you agree?”
“No. No, I don’t agree.” Panic struck her in the breastbone. She put a hand on his arm, arresting his progress. “You’re going to tell my father. About last night.”
“Not in so many words. But when I offer for you so abruptly, I wager he’s going to gather the reason why.”
“Precisely. And if my father gathers the reason why, everyone will. All the ladies. The whole village. Bram, you can’t.”
“Susanna, I must.” His jade-green gaze captured hers. “It’s the only decent thing to do.”
She threw up her hands. “Since when do you care about decent behavior?”
He didn’t answer, only turned and walked on. This time, there was no stopping him until he’d turned down the rear corridor and halted in the entry of her father’s workshop.
“Sir Lewis?” He rapped smartly on the doorjamb.
“Not now, please,” her father replied, his voice hazy.
“He’s working,” Susanna whispered. “No one disturbs him when he’s working.”
Bram only raised his voice. “Sir Lewis, it’s Bramwell. I need to speak with you on a matter of some urgency.”
Good God. Susanna urgently needed to knock some sense into this man.
Her father sighed. “Very well, then. Go on to my library. I’ll meet you there in a moment.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Bram turned on his heel without further comment, making his way toward Sir Lewis’s library. Susanna stood there for a moment, dumbstruck, wondering whether her best hopes lay in reasoning with Bram or distracting her father. Perhaps she ought to simply run upstairs, pack a valise, and abscond to a small, uncharted territory. She’d heard the Sandwich Islands were lovely this time of year.
The idea was tempting, but she took her chances with the library. Bram stood grim and monolithic in the center of the Egyptian-themed room, looking like a man awaiting his own funeral.
“Why on earth are you doing this?” she asked, shutting the door. Obviously, not because he wished to.
“Because it’s the honorable thing. The only thing I can do.” He released a curt sigh. “I should not have done what I did last night if I weren’t prepared to do this today.”
“But don’t I enter this question at all? Don’t you have the slightest regard for my feelings in the matter?”
“I have every regard for you and your feelings. That’s the point. You’re a gentlewoman, and last night I took your virtue.”
“You didn’t take it. I gave it. Freely, and with no expectations.”
He shook his head. “Listen, I know you’re full of modern ideas. But my own views on marriage are more traditional. Or medieval, as you’re so fond of saying. If a man deflowers a gently bred virgin in a public square, he ought to marry her. End of story.”
End of story. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She might not be so panicked at the idea of marrying him—in fact, the prospect might make her dizzyingly happy—if he saw their wedding as the beginning of a story. A story that included love and a home and a family, and ended with the words “happily ever after.”
But he didn’t, as his next words made clear.