Ever His Bride (40 page)

“I missed you, Hunter. And dinner was
tedious. As will be Lady Meath’s stand of Chinese bamboo.”

“But we must both do our duties to our hosts.
Your shawl, madam.” As Hunter reached up to drape it over her
shoulders, a small book fell out of the folds, and her gaze raced
to the floor after it.

He stooped to retrieve the book, but she was
there before him, blocking his way with her palm laid across it. He
put his hand over hers, trapping it against the back of the
musty-scented volume. Her smile had fled, replaced by a flush of
panic.

“I’ll get it, Hunter.”

His heart stuttered, his world reeled to a
stop. A lover’s message locked between the pages? A tryst in the
planning? Nothing less could have caused her sudden pallor.

“Allow me,” he said through his teeth—through
a flash of impotent, baseless anger.

“It’s nothing, Hunter,” she whispered, her
eyes downcast and ashamed as they never were when she spoke to him.
“Just an old book.”

She was lying. And like a madman driven
toward the brink of a cliff, he yanked her precious book from under
her hand and stood up, raising a dank, mildewed darkness between
them. She rose more slowly, but took a step deeper into the
cloakroom, away from him.

He couldn’t still his fingers, or catch
enough air.

Not a lover. Please, God, anything but
that.

He rode a chill as he turned the book over in
his hands.

“It’s what I found it today, Hunter, at the
school.”

Her whisper boiled like the demon sea, and
the years washed over him, dark and fetid and stifling, swept him
away from the shore. He was a child again, crammed into a
sweltering room with fifty other wretched children; struggling
again to make sense of the letters, trying all over again to incant
the spell that would transport him out of that hell.

He knew the book’s faded red cover as he knew
the map of scars across the breadth of his hands. The stilted vine,
deeply embossed and trailing down the spine and across the face of
it; the smudged, pencil-drawn train wheels in each of the
corners.

“Your name is written inside, Hunter.”

But he already knew it would be. His hands
shook like a drunk’s as he opened the cover.

There it was. The indictment. The evidence of
his fraud, and the instrument of his demise.

Hunter Claybourne.

The stink filled his nostrils, came rolling
out of his gut.

“No one else knows about it, Hunter. No one
but me.”

She touched his hand, and the pain shattered
him.

“Damn you!” He jerked his arm away and turned
from her, but she came to him like a shadow; stood behind him,
ready to slip her accusations between his ribs—so ready with her
incisive inquisition.

“Hunter, please.” Her voice was caressing—the
soft-spoken Judas.

He couldn’t look at her. She knew all about
him, knew what he was and what he had been.

“Hunter, it’s nothing but a book.”

“Just a book, Miss Mayfield? Then why bring
it here among my enemies?”

“Your enemies, Hunter?”

The book was still in his hands, fused there,
new fingerprints meeting old, fiercely cold and piercing him. “Did
you plan to brandish it in front of them?”

“How dare you think that! I would never do
such a thing!”

“You wouldn’t threaten me with exposure?” He
turned toward her, dread solidifying to certainty as ice poured
through his veins, as he pressed her backward against the unsteady
wall of coats and camphor. “Not even to regain your father’s
railway—”

“Hunter Claybourne, I ought to slap you for
that!”

She tried to shove past him then, but he took
hold of her arm. He wouldn’t be toyed with. She wanted something
from him, but her plan must have gone awry.

“If it isn’t the railway, then what is it,
Miss Mayfield?”

Her eyes had grown large and as innocent as a
false April morn, the kind that coaxed tender buds, only to kill
with the next day’s frost.

“I want you to stop calling me ‘Miss
Mayfield.’ I’m your wife. Felicity Claybourne.”

And then he finally understood. The thing she
had hated him for from the beginning—their marriage. The one he’d
forced upon her. Well, then, she could have it. He slid his hand
down the column of her slender throat, then wrapped his fingers in
the strand of pristine pearls and pulled her close.

“Will it be a divorce. Miss Mayfield, or a
quick annulment? The choice, it seems, is yours.”

She obliged him with a scowl. “I don’t want
either, Hunter. I want to see Lady Meath’s glasshouse.”

“What is it you want, then, Mrs. Claybourne?
Your share of my staggering wealth? If that’s the case, you’ll have
to play along for a while. One word of my ignoble past, and these
scions of Britain will desert me quicker than rats off a blazing
ship. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“I don’t want your money, Hunter! I would
never say anything to anyone. You must trust me.”

“Trust you?” He dropped his hand; it had
begun to shake again. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her eyes,
that sea-storm green he’d come to crave. He wanted to believe her;
he wanted that more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

“Claybourne! Here he is, Meath.” It was Lord
Oswin, laughing gaily. “Ah ha! Enjoying a private moment with your
lovely bride, I see.”

Hunter froze. Shame and guilt and
blood-scorching anger melted muscle to bone.

“Who can blame the man?” Lord Meath’s voice
seemed to come from some great distance.

He turned slowly, feeling exposed and
groveling. “Your pardon, milord—”

“Heedless love, Claybourne. Suffered it once
or twice myself. I envy your youth, and again I applaud your choice
in wives.” Meath winked as if he understood this woman and the
measureless power she had over him.

“I’m afraid I’ve kept my husband from his
brandy, your lordships.” She patted Hunter’s elbow as if he were
her gouty grandfather, then sauntered past him out of the
cloakroom. “Please forgive me. The catch on my shawl has stuck, and
Hunter was about to fix it for me. Perhaps you could help me, Lord
Oswin. Over here in the light.”

There she was, preparing him for his death
scene. The book had grown heavy in his hand, its moldering breath
roiling up his arm in gray tendrils. She’d left him to dispose of
it, hadn’t snatched it back. But she didn’t need to. A whisper into
the proper ear, to her publisher, or to one of her reporter
friends— to Lord Meath, himself—and the truth of his birth, his
coming of age in the squalor of Bethnal Green, would make the front
page of the
Times.

He felt a peculiar recklessness in watching
her flirt with Meath and Oswin. The disaster hadn’t happened yet,
but it would, and she would be the agent. The book wouldn’t fit
into his jacket pocket, and he’d brought no overcoat of his own.
Carrying it on him was no longer an option, if he meant to keep his
mind on the evening’s events. He would give her back the means to
his destruction; it seemed the only way.

“Allow me, gentlemen,” he said, stepping
between the men.

She seemed confused when he slid the book
back into the pocket of her shawl. Let her wonder at his motives;
let her wonder how this evening would end. He closed the catch at
her neck and led her to the garden door.

“Do what you will, my dear wife,” he
whispered into the silky curls at her temple. He even set a kiss
against her cool skin. “But be prepared for the consequences.”

“I’d very much like to kick you, Hunter. But
I’m afraid of breaking my toe.” She fixed an angry scowl on him,
then hurried after the other ladies.

“Come man, we’ve important business to
discuss.” Meath stood at the hallway and raised a beckoning
hand.

And Hunter passed through the parlor door, a
fake and a fraud.

“Brandy, sir?”

The footman’s servile bow denounced Hunter,
made a mockery of his deceitfully high station. Come morning, they
would all know. His wife would stumble somehow, would use his
weakness against him.

But he couldn’t let his thoughts wander from
the moment. Ruin might be close at hand, but much was riding on
this night, spent in the company of these ranking officials of the
Board of Trade.

He took the brandy from the footman and
scanned the room. Focus had been an integral part of his
survival—that ability to concentrate on the structure of a problem,
to pinpoint risk and consequences. As he had done as a young boy,
sitting in the corner of a coffeehouse, learning the shipping news
and investing his hard-earned cash in a ship’s cargo, then
re-investing those profits, living on what he could steal, what he
could measure.

And now his life, his fortune was in the
hands of a scheming enchantress. His fault. He’d allowed her to
unfocus him, to send him careening off track. Had set him up with
this mindless, unexpected contentment, and then yanked him backward
to the time of his greatest shame.

“Pittman’s resignation becomes effective at
the end of the week.” Meath clanged the bowl of his pipe against
the back of the fireplace screen.

Focus, he needed focus. Meath looked
gregarious tonight.

“And I was much impressed, Claybourne, with
your presence of mind at the accident. A glowing report from the
inspectors.”

“I am an ordinary man. I did only what anyone
would have done in the situation.”

Oswin laughed and took another port off the
butler’s tray. “You are hardly what I would call an ordinary man,
Claybourne, given your extraordinary luck in business.”

“Thank you, sir.” Hunter willed his face to
remain immobile when he would have snarled at the man. Luck. Luck
was for amateurs, for dabblers. He had survived and grown because
he had planned every step of the way.

Meath chuckled. “Well, let’s get on with the
business of the evening, gentlemen. What we’re asking, Claybourne,
is if you’re amenable to a nomination to the position vacated by
Charles Pittman.”

Hunter granted Lord Meath a steady smile,
though his gut twisted and his lungs lacked air. “It would be a
pleasure, my lord. I am honored to be on your list of
nominees.”

Oswin clapped Hunter on the back. “On the top
of the list, eh, Meath?”

Meath slipped an imaginary piece of paper
from his breast pocket, scrutinized it with exaggerated drama, and
then looked up at Hunter. “By God, it’s seems that Claybourne’s is
the only name on my list.”

Everyone laughed, and Spurling lifted his
glass of blood-red port, then gave Hunter a nod. “To Hunter
Claybourne!’

Hunter raised his own glass and swept his
hollow gratitude around the room. He had no delusions that any of
the five gentlemen would continue their support if they knew they
were toasting a man who had begun his trade plucking spilled coal
and bits of wood from the foul mudflats of the Thames.

The talk turned to Hudson, to speculation on
whether the man ought to be jailed for fraud and misuse of funds.
Hunter had long ago distanced himself from the Railway King, had
looked on the man and his investors as fools, as standard-bearers
for calamity. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And would fall
again.

“What more could we have expected from a man
like George Hudson?” Meath stuffed his pipe from the humidor.
“That’s what comes of putting one’s trust in the likes of a linen
draper.”

“A linen draper!” The Compte de Auriville
snorted. “The man’s of common stock, to be sure. A lucky sod with a
bit too much cash in his shallow pockets. It was bound to
happen.”

A tradesman? How much greater would their
disgust be when they learned that fifteen years ago, Hunter
Claybourne had been picking their fat pockets on Threadneedle
Street?

He had always alluded to a Canadian father
and a beautiful English mother, tutors, travel, breaking from his
father’s export business when the man died. It had served as a
vague but believable cover for his private fortune. And no one had
ever questioned it. But now he would forever listen for the murmur
as he entered a room, fearing that the next rumor of outrage and
insolvency would be about him.

His life had become a waiting game.

Lady Meath’s glasshouse was humid and close,
and prickly with idle chatter about bamboo and orchids. Felicity
didn’t want to be there. She wanted to grab Hunter by the ear and
drag him home with her.

Blast that book for falling out of her
shawl!

She tried to keep up her end of the
conversation, which only seemed to make her the center of attention
among the women. They were all ladies with proper lineage, and it
didn’t seem to matter that she wasn’t. Hunter could certainly learn
something from them.

Lady Meath finally led them back into the
parlor to join the men, and Felicity gave up her shawl to the
butler, along with the evidence against Hunter. Lady Meath preened
over the chorus of praise from the other women and stood beside
Felicity as if they were fast friends.

Felicity chanced a look at Hunter. He made a
solitary and sullen figure at the hearth. His profile was rugged
and unchanged, but she longed for the warmth of his gaze, was
afraid of the cold disgust she would find there. It made her heart
ache that he didn’t trust her. They had come so far—

“Mrs. Claybourne was telling us about some of
the unique gardens she has seen in her travels. Come sit here,
dear.”

Lady Meath led Felicity to the chair nearest
Hunter. She could feel his gaze on her as she sat down.

“Cottage gardens mostly,” Felicity replied,
trying her best to look casual. “And castle grounds and the
occasional private estate. My father was a railway engineer.
Phillip Mayfield”

Lord Meath perked up. “I say!”

Then Felicity had to tell them of her
father’s career, all the while watching her husband out of the
corner of her eye. The hand that raised his glass of port was
steady as stone, unless she looked closely. His movements were
deliberate and pained. She wished they could leave.