The Marriage Ring by Cathy Maxwell

change of attitude toward me between last night and today?” she challenged.
    “It’s not because I was warned off of you, Miss MacEachin,” he assured her. “Quite the contrary, my uncle urged me to give you a poke .”
    The word offended her. She leaned back into her corner. “How godly of him.”
    He noticed her move away. “Don’t worry. Your virtue is safe with me. And what my uncle is really saying is that you aren’t the sort of woman a man asks to wear his marriage ring.” He raised his paper again.
    Grace knew that. It had been made painfully clear several times in her life. She’d lived beyond the pale of respectability. At times rebelliously so.
    What caught her off guard was that Mr. Lynsted’s saying it rankled.
    He was her enemy. She should celebrate that he found her not to his exacting standards of a wife. After all, what did she care?
    “I wouldn’t consider marrying you ,” she informed him as if they’d been discussing the matter.
    He concentrated on his paper.
    “Not only is your family guilty of destroying mine,” she continued, “but I wouldn’t want someone with your priggish manner.”
    She glanced over to him. Was it her imagination, or did his fingers tighten on the paper?
    Grace waited a good long moment before repeating herself. “Did you hear what I said?” she asked the newspaper. She laced her fingers together, happily preparing to annoy the devil out of him. “I said you were priggish. Priggish, priggish, priggish. ”
    The newspaper came down.
    “It is not priggish to have standards ,” he informed her, the outrage light in his eyes definitely bringing out the green. “In fact, it is a necessity—but then, you wouldn’t understand because you don’t have any.”
    “I do have a standard—truth,” she insisted haughtily. “It’s the only one that matters.”
    That remark hit home. “I wouldn’t be making this blasted trip if I didn’t seek truth.” He started to bring his paper back up but Grace had enough.
    She grabbed the top of the paper with her hand, bringing it down, crumpling it. She’d bored a hole into his arrogance and she wasn’t about to relent.
    “So what are your standards for a wife?” Her action had moved her from her corner of the coach, bringing her closer to him.
    “What do you care?”
    “I don’t. I’m merely making conversation.”
    Annoyance flashed in his eyes. She tamped down a smile of triumph.
    “She won’t be an actress,” he muttered. “Or a Highlander .”
    “Am I being insulted?” Grace wondered. “I ask a simple question and you slur me?”
    “There is nothing simple about your questions, Miss MacEachin. You are baiting me, plain and simple. You enjoy mocking me. Now here is the truth, the woman who wears my marriage ring will be all a gentlewoman should be. She’ll be reserved, conservative, genteel, well-bred—”
    “And boring ,” Grace assured him.
    “She won’t be boring.”
    “She will,” Grace pronounced with the voice of experience. “Because you can’t make a list and order a wife to fit your personal specifications before you meet her. Wives don’t come that way. They are people and people are always complex and challenging. Or is that something your uncle and father didn’t warn you about?”
    The lines of his mouth flattened. “You go too far.”
    For a moment, she feared she had. This was no blustering male or one who could easily be controlled. There was steel in this man. Courage. Resolve.
    Qualities she admired.
    And he was ignoring her for his own reasons…reasons she sensed he did not want her to know.
    “Marriage is a partnership of lovers,” she said, holding his gaze. “And if there is one thing I’ve learned in my”—she paused, searching for the right word—“ adventurous life, a mysterious element known as romance can never be valued too highly.”
    “I’m romantic enough, Miss MacEachin,” he replied tightly.
    And she had to let him know he was