Marianne's Marriage Of Convenience

“Yeah, we’re really married. Since three o’clock this afternoon. Unless we’re still dreaming,” he added.

Rita brought two steaming cups of coffee and discreetly melted away. Marianne raised her cup to him. “Happy Anniversary.”

“It’s too soon for that, don’t you think?”

“Not at all,” she murmured. “We’re old married folks now. We’ve been married for a whole three hours.”

“Four hours,” Lance corrected.

Rita popped up again. “Steak?”

They both nodded.

“Fried potatoes?”

Another nod.

“Peach pie?”

“Oh, yes,” Marianne murmured.

“My stars,” Rita blurted out, “you two are predictable as blackberries in the summertime. Oughtta have a long and happy life together.” Humming, she headed toward the kitchen.

Marianne downed a gulp of her coffee. “Lance, I—”

“You don’t need to say anything, Marianne. I understand.”

“Say anything about what?”

Lance wished his head would stop spinning. “About...well, about tonight.”

Marianne looked blank. “Tonight? I wasn’t going to say anything about tonight, Lance. I was going to thank you again for my wedding ring. It truly is lovely.”

Now his heart was pounding right along with his head. That ring really meant something to her. Not in a month of Sundays would he have thought Marianne Collingwood would be sentimental about anything except an oven full of baking apple pies and a full wood box. Women were sure surprising.

Correction, Marianne was surprising.

They ate in almost total silence because Lance couldn’t think of a single sensible thing to say to his bride. Once, she requested that he pass the salt, and later he asked if she wanted chocolate ice cream on her peach pie. Then they lingered over coffee until her eyelids began to droop, and by the time she had drained her cup down to the shiny bottom, he was about ready to jump out of his skin.

He kept remembering Rooney’s question about a honeymoon, and whether he and Marianne would be having one. Now the big fat question that kept bumbling around in his brain was different. Would he and Marianne be having a wedding night? In the same hotel room? In the same—he gulped—bed?

He’d bet a stack of shiny gold bars she didn’t remember that tonight he would be moving into her hotel room. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became she wasn’t thinking about tonight. The next problem was how to get from here, in the dining room, to there, her hotel room.

Just ask her, I guess.

“Marianne, if you’ve finished your coffee, shall we, um, go back to the hotel?”

She glanced across the table at him. “Yes, let’s,” she said, her voice drowsy.

All the way across the hotel foyer to retrieve the key from the desk clerk his nerves felt jumpy as a roomful of grasshoppers.

“We moved your luggage from your old room to Miss Collingwood’s room, Mr. Burnside,” the clerk said.

“It’s Mrs. Burnside now,” he corrected. “We were married this afternoon.”

“Oh, I know, sir. Everybody in town’s been talking about the big doings over at Rose Cottage. Congratulations!”

“Thanks, Hal. And thanks for moving my luggage to her room.”

Now Marianne was wide awake. “What did you say?”

“Excuse me, ma’am. I understand you two got married this afternoon.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice unsteady. “We did.”

The clerk reached over and dropped the room key into Lance’s open palm. “Mr. Burnside, Mrs. Burnside. Congratulations again. And sleep well,” he added with a smile.

Marianne looked up. Oh, my Lord, we are married, she thought. And tonight we will be sleeping in the same room together.

Of course “together,” you goose.

She stared into Lance’s oddly tense face. For some reason it was hard to adjust to being married. She glanced down at her left hand. With a wedding ring and everything.

Lance took her elbow and guided her up the stairs to the second floor. When they reached the landing he laid a hand on her arm and brought her to a stop. “Marianne?”

“Y-yes, Lance?”

“You didn’t really think about...this part of being married, did you?”

She pivoted to face him. “N-no, I didn’t.”

“You wanted me to marry you, remember?”

“Yes.”

“So I did.”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “You did.”

He drew in a careful breath. “Well, you didn’t think much beyond the wedding, I guess. About what would happen afterward, did you?”

She bit her lip. “I—I thought I would go to the bank and claim my inheritance.”

He studied her for a long minute and then bent toward her. “I mean what did you think would happen tonight?”

Right before his eyes Marianne Jane Collingwood changed from an efficient, hardworking boardinghouse taskmaster into a shy, unsure-of-herself girl.

“I didn’t think about tonight,” she said slowly. “I suppose I just thought it would be a marriage of convenience until...”

“Until what?”

She looked everywhere but at him, at the patterned carpet runner on the floor, the blue-flowered wallpaper on the ceiling overhead, at the hotel room key in his hand. Finally she looked up into his eyes.

“Until...until you kissed me.” Her eyes darkened to an unforgettable shade of green, like a dew-misted meadow.

“Yeah?”

“Something changed when you kissed me,” she confessed.

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