JMcNaught - Something Wonderful by User

his hands into his pockets. The silence scraped against her raw nerves as he stared rigidly out across the lawns, his profile harsh, forbidding. She knew he was thinking hard for some way out of marrying her, and she also knew that beneath that tautly controlled facade of his there was a terrible, volcanic rage—a rage that was undoubtedly going to erupt against her at any moment. Shamed to the depths of her being, Alexandra waited helplessly, watching as he lifted one hand and massaged the taut muscles in his neck, his expression becoming darker and more ominous as each second ticked by.
    He turned so abruptly that Alexandra took an automatic step backward. "Stop behaving like a frightened rabbit," he snapped. "I'm the one who's caught in a trap, not you."
    A deadly calm settled over Alexandra, banishing everything but her shame. Her small chin lifted, her spine stiffened, and before his eyes Jordan saw her put up a valiant fight for control—a fight she won. She stood before him now, looking incongruously like a proud, boyish queen in refurbished rags, her eyes sparking like twin jewels. "I could not speak in the other room," she said with only a slight tremor in her voice, "because my mother would never have let me, but had you not asked to speak privately to me, I intended to ask to speak to you."
    "Say what you have to say and have done with it."
    Alexandra's chin lifted even higher at his chilling tone. Somehow she had let herself hope he would not treat her with the same brutal contempt he'd treated her family. "The idea of our marrying is ludicrous," she began.
    "You're absolutely right," he snapped rudely.
    "We're from two different worlds."
    "Right again."
    "You don't want to marry me."
    "Another bull's-eye, Miss Lawrence," he announced in an insulting drawl.
    "I don't want to marry you either," she retorted, humiliated to the core by every unkind word he said.
    "That's very wise of you," he agreed caustically. "I'd make an exceedingly bad husband."
    "Moreover, I do not wish to be anyone's wife. I wish to be a teacher, as my grandfather was, and to support myself."
    "How extraordinary," he mocked sarcastically. "And all this while, I've been harboring the delusion that all girls yearn to snare wealthy husbands."
    "I am not like other girls."
    "I sensed that from the moment I met you."
    Alexandra heard the insult in his smoothly worded agreement, and she almost choked on her chagrin. "Then it's settled. We won't wed."
    "On the contrary," he said, and each word rang with bitter fury. "We have no choice, Miss Lawrence. That mother of yours will do exactly as she's threatened. She'll bring me up on public charges before the Court. In order to punish me, she'll destroy you."
    "No, no!" Alexandra burst out "She won't do it. You don't understand about my mother. She's—ill—she's never recovered from my papa's death." Unconsciously, she caught at the sleeve of his immaculately tailored grey jacket, her eyes imploring, her voice urgent. "You mustn't let them force you to marry me—you'll hate me forever for it, I know you will. The villagers will forget the scandal, you'll see. They'll forgive me and forget. It was all my fault for stupidly fainting so you had to take me to the inn. I never faint, you see, but I'd just killed a man and—"
    "That's enough!" Jordan said harshly, and felt the noose of matrimony tighten inexorably around his neck. Until Alexandra began to speak, he had been searching madly for some means of escape from this dilemma—he had even been ready to seize on her assurance that her mother was likely bluffing. He had, in fact, been preparing to start listing all the reasons why she would hate being married to him—only he had not counted on her selflessly pleading with him not to sacrifice himself on the altar of matrimony for her sake. He had also managed, temporarily, to forget that she had killed a man to save his own life.
    He stared down at the proud, pathetic child before him in her shabby