No Marriage Of Convenience - No Marriage Of Convenience Part 3
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No Marriage Of Convenience Part 3

She would never have believed it.

Despite the fact that he looked more ready to lead them all in prayer or sell them his latest acquisition

from some far off port, given his family's reputation, she would have thought he'd already have tossedher paperwork aside and begged to have a private audience with her.Still, she mused, could she be so lucky that his cousin's fainting spell would distract him from returning to his sharp-eyed perusal of the contract?

"There, there, Cousin Felicity. Drink it slowly," Lord Ashlin advised his cousin. He slowly tipped theglass to the lady's lips.The brandy worked immediately as Lord Ashlin's cousin caught a hold of the glass and tossed down the entire contents in one large gulp-a maneuver that would have made a sailor choke and sputter. Cousin Felicity however just sighed and laid back on the settee, her hand resting dramatically over her forehead.

Riley wondered if the lady had ever been on the stage.

"My sincerest apologies, my lord," Riley said, hoping to soothe the man. "Hashim is rather proud of his injury and delights in showing it off."

She shot a glare over the Earl's shoulder squarely at Hashim.You needn't grin so much, you great fool.Hashim's shoulders shrugged slightly. Well, she asked for it.When would he learn that sheltered English ladies didn't usually see a mouth where a tongue had been cut out? Continuing to wave her handkerchief over the lady, she commented, "Why, she seems to be

coming to quite nicely."

"Oh, my. Oh, my," Cousin Felicity said, her eyelashes fluttering over her wide brown eyes. She started to sit up, but Lord Ashlin stopped her.

"Careful, Cousin. You've had quite a shock.""Oh, haven't I!" she said triumphantly, before falling back on the cushions again. "What a tale to tell. I'veseen Hashim's mouth! With my very own eyes. Why I'll be the envy of all my friends. I'll be the toast for some time." She reached over and clasped Hashim's hand, drawing it to her ample bosom. "I will be forever in your debt, sir. Forever."

Hashim bowed his head slightly and tried to extract himself from her grasp, but it appeared Cousin

Felicity was not about to let go of her newfound hero.

Riley's lips twitched with amusement at Hashim's obvious discomfort, until Lord Ashlin came to hisrescue."Cousin Felicity, release Mr. Hashim."The woman did, though with a great sigh of reluctance.Hashim fled to his post behind Riley's chair. Following Hashim's example, Riley retook her seat, carefully posing herself to her best advantage, head tipped, chest up, and posture straight.

Back in an upright position, Cousin Felicity adjusted her spectacles. "Oh, Madame Fontaine, it is such an

honor to have you in our house." The woman turned, her white lace cap fluttering. "Mason, Madame

does not make social visits, so we must count ourselves very lucky indeed."

"Well this is hardly a social call, my lady," Riley explained to her. "However, on some of my business matters, I find a personal touch makes the transaction go so much more smoothly," she added, her statement directed with a smile and a demure nod at Lord Ashlin.

It was one of her better poses, one she'd used with great skill in Romeo & Juliet, yet the man seemed

unaffected.Cousin Felicity, meanwhile, continued peering at her as if she were on display. "Oh, I can see now whythey call you 'Aphrodite's Envy.'" She turned to Lord Ashlin. "Wouldn't you agree, Mason? Isn'tMadame Fontaine the most tempting woman who's ever graced the world?"

He looked very much like Hashim had just a few moments ago. "Yes, cousin. Madame Fontaine is tolerably pretty."

Tolerably pretty?

Riley didn't know if she should be insulted or wonder if Lord Ashlin needed new spectacles.

One called sallow-faced debutantes with large dowries and title-hunting mothers tolerable.

Pretty described whey-faced dairymaids fresh from the country.

Never once since she'd taken the London stage and been dubbed "Aphrodite's Envy" by the young bucks of London had anyone described her as "tolerably pretty."

Her vanity, now that she had grown used to being the recipient of sonnets and tokens of affection, found

itself pricked at Lord Ashlin's vague praise.

Tolerably pretty, and from an Ashlin, no less! Rakes, reprobates, and wanton flatterers, the entire lot of them. And great patrons of the arts, well, rather actresses, opera singers, and ballet dancers.

What had happened to this one? Riley wondered.

He held the sharp look of a Lloyd's advisor, able to add a column of numbers in his sleep. After all, she

only wanted to make a down payment on the money she owed him, not let on that he was due a lotmore.Money she didn't have.And much to her growing irritation, he'd picked up precisely the page he'd just set aside moments before. As she watched him scan the document with an efficient gleam, her pulse raced. Perhaps after he threw them out into the streets, she and the company could stage a play dedicated to him-The Curate and the Actress.

It would do well in the country, she thought, as she watched with a sinking heart as one of his brows rose with an elegant arch and a smile curved at his lips.

Oh, she was in trouble. They'd be lucky if they had enough left over to stage a puppet show.

"Are you familiar with the conditions of this loan?" he asked.

Riley tipped her head back and smiled sweetly, hoping the look would succeed in dazzling him out of his

current line of inquiry. To her annoyance, it didn't seem to distract him in the least.

A handsome nobleman impervious to her charms?

Oh, she was in more than trouble.

"Well, I think so..." she faltered, stalling for time. Maybe if she lifted the edge of her skirt a little and revealed a bit of ankle-goodness knows, that fair sight had kept the printer in abeyance for over four months.

But before she could put her plan into action, he frowned at her ever so slightly, rustled the papers with an important air, and spoke. "This contract shows that you owe me the opening night receipts from a fortnight ago."

Her hands curled into tight balls. "We've had some unforeseen difficulties which have prevented us from opening on time. I assure you, we will be in full production within a month. And then you shall have your money."

"What, and have you run up more bills in the meantime? No, that will never do." Lord Ashlin shook his head, sending one of his golden brown locks straying out of its mercantile and orderly queue-giving him a rakish air and lending her hope that he truly was an Ashlin, not some foundling foisted onto the estate to maintain the lineage, as she was starting to suspect.

"Besides," he continued, "with your payments overdue, that puts this loan in default. According to this paragraph here," he said, pointing to a subsection in small print, "I'm entitled to collect the total amount due immediately, with penalties."

"But I have no more cash, other than what I've brought," she replied too quickly.

This appeared to stop him for a moment, until he glanced over at the gold-filled pouch on his desk. "Then you'll have to find some other means of raising it. Perhaps your theatre company has props or costumes which can be sold?"

Riley looked down, pausing for a moment to prepare for the performance of her life. There was too much at stake here, and she'd do anything to save her theatre-from Lord Ashlin and the other problems which had plagued her these past months.

Searching her repertoire of characters, she glanced once more at Lord Ashlin and settled into what she hoped would be a role to touch even his stony heart.

Slowly raising a handkerchief, she dabbed at the corners of her eyes delicately, adding a small sniff and a quiver to her lips.

"I...I...I only meant my meager offering as a token of kindness for the immeasurable consideration your brother bestowed upon the arts. Think of his memory, my lord. This play, our production, is a memorial to him-his charity, his fine works, his dedication." She looked upward at the plaster ceiling, a pleading glance meant to evoke the most benevolent of emotions, while her fingers clutched her handkerchief to her breast. "Now I fear my gesture is lost on his successor and will be the ruin of my poor beloved company." She dropped her gaze to the wool rug, not daring to hope her speech had worked.

From the sobbing and sniffling across the room, his cousin had more than enjoyed the performance.

"Oh, Mason, you can't close Madame Fontaine's theatre," the woman wailed. "We would be shunned by everyone in London." She turned to Riley. "Madame Fontaine, please forgive my cousin. He's been at Oxford these many years and doesn't understand how things are done." She turned back to Lord Ashlin, shaking her finger as if he were a recalcitrant schoolboy. "What would people say? It just isn't done! Not at all."

"Cousin," he said, "Madame Fontaine owes us a great deal of money. Money better spent...well, say, on the girls. For all that finery and those lessons you think are so necessary for finding husbands."

"That much?" Cousin Felicity replied in awed tones.

He nodded back at her.

Cousin Felicity sighed. "Oh, how Freddie's dear girls do need those lessons. If only they possessed a bit more deportment, knew when to use their sweet smiles, or how to do the latest dance steps. 'Tis a terrible shame. I know our girls could be the talk of the town, what with the proper instruction and all. Imagine it, Mason, they would be able to make their entrance into a room and all eyes would turn on them. Why, with the right teacher they would be the most tempting creatures, the envy of..." The lady's voice trailed off as her bespectacled gaze fluttered, then turned slowly toward Riley.

The weight of the woman's last words hung in the room, until not only the lady's gaze, but the Earl's as well, had swung in her direction.

Cousin Felicity, for Riley couldn't think of her as anything other than that, was beaming again as if Riley had just deposited the Crown jewels in their study, rather than an odd sum of coins.

Lord Ashlin, on the other hand, was shaking his head, his face a mask of disbelief, as if his cousin had just proposed stealing the royal treasures in broad daylight.

Riley shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

"It's perfect, Mason," Cousin Felicity announced. "She is perfect. There isn't a man in London who can resist her, and who better to bestow a measure of charm and grace on our dear girls?"

Mason's head shook faster. "You are not proposing that I...that I let her...?"

"Proposing what?" Riley interrupted, having the strange notion she was about to agree with the prickly Earl.

"Oh, Madame Fontaine," Cousin Felicity bubbled. "You're about to render a service to our family that will be remembered for generations."

Chapter 2.

"R iley, my love, whatever took you so long? While you were out dilly-dallying with our dear patron, I've been working my fingers to the bone." Agamemnon Bartholomew Morpheus Pettibone the Third held up his smooth white hands, which had never borne a callus, let alone a hangnail, in their sixty-some years of avoiding manual labor. "Ah, what you've missed! I've been inspired, divinely so."

Riley took a deep breath. Whenever Aggie uttered the words "divine" and "inspiration" in the same breath, disaster soon followed.

"I heard him speak to me. I vow he guided my hand as I wrote," Aggie called out from his dressing table. "What lines he gave me! 'Twas like he stood right where you are, dictating to me. Ah, to be guided by the great Bard's spirit." He smiled at the memory of it. "And you off and about on that fool's errand of yours, missing it as you did."

Not more revelations from Shakespeare! Riley counted to ten and stepped further into the apartment they shared above the Queen's Gate Theatre. From the discarded costumes and scattered drawings of sets and sheets of scripts, Aggie was obviously going through a "character renewal," as he liked to call them.

Character chaos, Riley knew from experience.

Nor did it appear that her troop had completed their daily rehearsals, which Aggie had assured her he would direct in her absence. No, her friend was settled in front of his mirror, working on his makeup for his upcoming role as the humble woodcutter in their production of The Envious Moon.

Wrapped in a striped green silk dressing gown, a gift from an aging marchioness or some other rich elderly patroness Aggie had managed to bamboozle with his repertoire of false credentials, he was in the process of tucking his iron gray hair underneath a skullcap.

"Where is Nan?" she asked, looking about for their emigre maid.

"Petite Nanette?" He affected a phony French diction, all the while peering at his reflection in the mirror. "I fired her. Such an ineffective wench. No depth in her delivery. No joie de vivre. No presence. I'm starting to doubt she's French."

Riley groaned. "Aggie, she's a servant, not an actress." Aggie's dismissal would mean Nan had probably fled to her mother's cheap flat in St. George's Fields. Riley added to her list of things to do this afternoon a trip to Southwark, where she'd have to engage in a great deal of bribing to entice the greedy but efficient girl to return.

"We are better off without her!" he declared. "The inconsiderate chit refused to fix my tea before she left."

"Well, now that you've fired Nan, you'll have to fetch your own tea," she shot back.

At this comment, Aggie sniffed and began sorting the makeup items before him. "Whatever took you so long with our dear patron, Freddie? Now, there's someone with a presence, someone who knows how to make an entrance. If I've told him once, I've told him a thousand times, he'd make a fine actor."

Riley pulled off her hat and set it down on Aggie's dressing table covering his pots and paints. "Aggie," she said slowly. "When was the last time you saw your dear Freddie?"

Aggie tipped his head as he considered her question, looking her straight in the eye. Riley knew he was trying to gauge her mood and determine whether or not he could get away with lying.