The Captain's Christmas Bride. ANNIE BURROWS

would.

      She lifted her head and met his furious gaze full on. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

      Defiance burned from her eyes—eyes that looked too big, too bright. And luminous with unshed tears.

      ‘I’d like to say plenty,’ he snarled. ‘But the sad truth is, the only words spoken between us tonight have already said it all. We are going to have to get married.’ There was no other way out. Not for him. His whole future depended on maintaining a spotless reputation. It wouldn’t have mattered so much during the height of the war. An able, hard-working, skilled captain would always have been able to get command of a ship. But now?

      And it wasn’t just his own career he had to consider. He couldn’t afford to become one of those officers who were only considered safe at sea. If it got about that he went about debauching unmarried, titled ladies he wouldn’t be welcome anywhere. Which would cast a cloud over Lizzie’s reputation, too. So far, his sister had done really well for herself. Sending her to that exclusive, expensive school had meant she was rubbing shoulders with girls from the best families. She’d even gained an invitation to this Christmas house party because of a connection to one of the Earl of Mountnessing’s nieces.

      But if word got out that her brother was a rake, what would that do to Lizzie’s standing in society? To her chances of making a good match?

      ‘No,’ Lady Julia whispered.

      She couldn’t marry this man. She was going to marry David.

      David.

      ‘No...’ she moaned as the truth hit her squarely in her midriff. David would never marry her now. He had such high ideals. He could never marry a girl he’d caught with her legs wrapped round another man’s waist. No matter how highly he’d esteemed her before.

      Alec squared his shoulders, remembering all the promises he’d ever made to his little sister. His promise that no matter how little they saw of each other, he’d always look after her. His promise that she would never go hungry, nor fear being made homeless. But most of all, his promise to be the kind of man on whom she could depend—unlike their scapegrace of a father.

      He’d kept his word all these years. And he wasn’t going to break it now. He’d always done whatever necessary to shield Lizzie from the worst excesses of their father. And now he was going to have to do what was necessary to shield her from his own excesses, tonight.

      ‘Ye cannot say no to me like that as though you have a choice,’ he snarled. ‘D’ye think I want to marry you either? Hell, you’re the last woman alive who would make a suitable wife for a man like me. You’re too young, too foolish, and entirely too untrustworthy to leave alone while I’m away at sea.’

      ‘How dare you—?’ she began, getting to her feet.

      ‘Don’t waste those hoity-toity manners of yours on me. We’re not in some drawing room now, where you can get away with looking down your nose at me, just because you think I’m uncouth.’

      Though she looked as though she would dearly love to answer back, she restricted herself to a toss of her head, and a disapproving sniff. Because he’d hit the nail on the head. She’d queened over the tea table too many times to be able to refute his accusation. She’d looked down her aristocratic little nose at him when he’d been rude to one of the dozens of simpering misses infesting her father’s house. Though being rude was the only way he’d found of fending them off. If he was polite, they kept on cooing over him. And batting their eyelashes at him. And sighing over his supposed heroic exploits, which they claimed to have heard all about.

      And trying to manoeuvre him underneath one of the kissing boughs.

      Julia alone had turned her nose up at him. He’d assumed it had been because she was too high in the instep to look twice at an impoverished sea captain, no matter how heroic the newspapers made him out to be. Instead, all the time, she must have been planning a far more effective stratagem than the others.

      ‘Though what kind of marriage you think we’re going to have when we come from such different worlds I cannot imagine.’ Alec turned from her and ran his fingers through his hair, before turning back on her. ‘You know nothing about me at all. So what on earth possessed you to make a play for me like this? I can only think it some kind of attempt to prove you could triumph where all the others had failed.’

      ‘You arrogant oaf,’ she hissed. ‘I didn’t make a play for you at all. I detest you.’

      ‘Then what the hell was all that...fondling about? You cannot deny you got me all primed up before leading me out here.’

      ‘No, but I didn’t know it was you under that wig!’ She pointed wildly at the heap of horsehair lying on the floor. ‘I thought it was Sir Isaac Newton!’

      ‘You were attempting to seduce a man who’s been dead two hundred years?’

      ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid. I mean the man who came to the masquerade disguised as Sir Isaac Newton, of course!’

      Of course. That made sense. She wouldn’t have looked so dejected if he had been the man she was trying to compromise.

      But, what kind of man came to a Christmas masquerade dressed as Sir Isaac Newton? What did Sir Isaac look like anyway? And then he realised.

      ‘That man who found us. He was wearing a full-skirted coat like this.’ Though he’d discarded his wig, and tricorne hat—had he ever been wearing one. ‘You mean to tell me he was the one you intended to seduce?’

      ‘I never intended to seduce him,’ she protested, clenching her fists as she squared up to him. ‘I thought we would just kiss a bit. And then Marianne and Nellie would find us, and because Nellie is an outsider, Father would agree David and I would have to get married.’

      ‘If kissing was all that had happened, it’s more likely your father would have paid the singer to keep her mouth shut and have taken a horsewhip to that David.’ Actually, he felt like taking a horsewhip to the man himself. The pompous bag of wind had marched out and left her lying in the arms of what any gentleman would have assumed was her seducer. What kind of man abandoned a girl, a sheltered, pampered innocent, just when she needed help the most?

      ‘He isn’t worthy of you,’ he growled, incensed now that, after the lengths she’d gone to in order to strong-arm him into marriage, all the ungrateful oaf had done was look at her as though she was something nasty he’d stepped in.

      ‘How dare you say that! Just because his parents have no title, and only modest means, it doesn’t mean he’s a nobody.’

      He hadn’t said the man was a nobody. So she must be reacting to arguments she’d heard from someone else about the pompous bladder of wind’s unsuitability.

      ‘He is the son of a gentleman,’ she carried on, indignantly.

      Though her anger was completely misdirected, at least she’d cast off that pitiful, dejected air that made him feel like a clumsy great gowk.

      ‘And one day, he will be somebody. He’s studying medicine. He’s going to make great discoveries and become famous! So I wouldn’t be throwing myself away on him. And anyway, I love him.’

      ‘Well, he doesn’t love you.’

      ‘How can you possibly know anything of the sort? Of course he does.’

      ‘No, he doesn’t. Or he wouldn’t have looked at you that way.’

      ‘What way? I mean—naturally, he was very shocked. And...and disappointed.’

      ‘But not devastated. Any real man who was in love would have attempted to strangle the man who’d got there first, not turn his nose up as if he’d smelled something bad.’

      She reeled as if he’d struck her. He firmed his jaw. Better to get her to face facts now, than have her mooning over the man for months. He’d far rather have her