Sin and Sensibility (41 page)
Read Sin and Sensibility Online
Authors: Suzanne Enoch
Oh, goodness
. “Have I, now?”
“Yes, you have. I lo—”
The common room door slammed open again. Before she could even gasp, Valentine shot to his feet, pulling her behind him. She could feel the tension in his shoulders, every muscle taut and ready to defend her. To protect her.
But he didn’t move. Taking a breath, Eleanor peeked around his shoulder. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
His calculations had been off by approximately nine and a half hours, but Valentine had been correct. Her brothers had caught up with them.
D
amnation, Valentine thought as he fought for control over both his temper and the dizziness slogging through his brain. For the Griffin brethren to have any worse timing, they would have had to have caught him and Eleanor naked.
“Sebastian,” Eleanor gulped, gripping Valentine’s hand tight enough to leave a mark.
The duke stood just inside the doorway, his brothers ranged on either side of them. After the first second, though, Melbourne’s attention shifted to the broken furniture, strewn-about bread and tea, and the three men bound and stretched out on the floor.
“Shay, gather anyone who might have heard what happened in here,” he said quietly, pulling his pocketbook from his coat and handing it over. “Make certain they don’t know anything.”
Charlemagne nodded, taking the billfold and vanishing back into the main part of the inn. Valentine opened his 360
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mouth to say something typically witty and dry, but all he could think of was ordering Melbourne to stay the hell away from Eleanor and himself. Considering his wrenched shoulder and throbbing skull, he wasn’t up for another three-on-one battle at the moment, but he kept his fists clenched, waiting. No one was going to stop him from making Eleanor his.
“What the devil is going on?” Zachary demanded, moving farther into the room.
“A misunderstanding,” Valentine supplied, shifting a little to keep both brothers in sight.
“That’s a bit of an understatement, I’d say,” Zachary shot back. “And it would be worse if you hadn’t squeaked the damned stair. Jesus, Deverill, you stole our sister.”
“Yes, you should really get that stair fixed,” Valentine returned.
“I think everyone should calm down,” Eleanor said, tightening her grip on Valentine’s arm.
“And I think Deverill should move away from you, unless he wants more of whatever’s been handed him already.” Zachary’s fists clenched.
“I hope you can back up your mouth, boy,” Valentine bit back. “Stay away.”
“You—”
“Zachary,” the duke interrupted. “We’re going to try to be civilized about this. Questions and answers. Not accusations.”
“And what if we don’t like the answers?” the youngest Griffin brother returned.
“Then we’ll still have time for being uncivilized.” Melbourne righted one of the intact chairs. “Why don’t we all sit down?”
Valentine would have refused, but he could feel Eleanor 362 / Suzanne Enoch
shaking beside him. Aside from that, as much as his head hurt, he was ready to fall to the floor. With a tight nod he handed Eleanor to the bench on the near side of the table and then carefully seated himself beside her, keeping close enough that he could hold her hand, and far enough that he still had room to move quickly if one of the brothers tried to jump him.
“I can explain,” Eleanor said unexpectedly.
The duke lifted an eyebrow. “Please do, then. Keeping this in mind, of course.” He pulled a folded note from his pocket. “I doubt you’ve read it, so I’ll tell you. It says that you’ve been kidnapped by Deverill, and that he is taking you to Gretna Green with the idea of marrying you to keep you from my,” he looked down, “my ‘overstuffed, self-important ignorance’ of your needs.”
“I left voluntarily,” she blurted, flushing.
“So the note is a lie, and this is an elopement?”
“I kidnapped her,” Valentine put in. Whatever happened, Eleanor loved her brothers. He wouldn’t allow her to drive a wedge between them, even for his sake. “I couldn’t sit by and watch you force her into a—”
“—a life of misery?” Melbourne finished. “A little dramatic, I think. Especially for you. You’re a pragmatist, Deverill. And a cynic.”
“I was going to say a common, ordinary life,” Valentine countered.
“But I asked him to help me in the first place,” Eleanor interrupted again. “This is my fault. Don’t be angry at Valentine. He saved me.” She glanced over at Cobb-Harding, mumbling in a pained, muffled tone. “He saved me.”
“Oh, stop it, Nell,” the duke cut in. “Deverill doesn’t look after anyone’s skin but his own. Everyone knows that.”
Sin and Sensibility / 363
“Yes, they do,” Valentine agreed, anger threatening to overthrow the calm he’d forced on himself. “So why would you choose someone as jaded and irresponsible as I am to watch over your sister in the first place?”
Charlemagne slipped back into the room and tossed the billfold back to Melbourne. “Taken care of,” he grunted, striding over to stand beside the fireplace. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing yet. Melbourne was about to explain why he would select someone unacceptable to guard his sister,”
Valentine said, before Zachary or Sebastian could color the conversation with their version of events.
“I didn’t,” the duke said slowly.
Even Shay looked puzzled. “You didn’t what?”
“Select someone unacceptable to guard my sister.”
“I beg to differ,” Zachary said with a snort. “Jesus, Melbourne, he kidnapped her out of our house in the middle of the night! And you consider him a friend. I say we call for the constable and have all four of them dragged before the bar and carted off to Australia.”
Valentine ignored the insults, instead looking at the duke for a long moment. A hundred conversations, a dozen scenarios, played through his mind. He’d known Melbourne for a long time, and he’d never seen him make a false step, misjudge a business proposal or a partner.
No, by God, the duke had known precisely what he was doing when he blackmailed Valentine into the middle of this mess.
“You were matchmaking,” Eleanor gasped. Evidently she’d been coming to the same conclusions. “You were trying to put Valentine and me together.”
“
What
?” Shay straightened. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would Melbourne think Deverill would ever commit to—”
“But he did,” Melbourne interrupted.
364 / Suzanne Enoch
Eleanor stood, her face white. “You can’t possibly be saying that you arranged all of this.” She looked down at Valentine, her hurt expression like a thousand knives in his chest. “You didn’t—”
“I didn’t know anything about it.” And if Melbourne’s smug assumption of the responsibility for everything that had happened continued, he was going to lose her. He gingerly stood beside her, forcing himself not to wince.
“And I don’t care. Whatever happened to this point to bring us here, I don’t care.”
“Valentine, I am tired of being manipulated. I am not going to tolerate another instant of this. How am I—”
Valentine kissed her. It had little finesse, but it stopped her argument. Slowly her mouth softened against his, and he deepened the kiss in response, sliding his hands around her waist. “Eleanor,” he whispered, lifting his head a little,
“I love you. I truly don’t care about the circumstances which brought it about.”
She blinked, lifting her gaze from his mouth to his eyes.
“What did you say?”
“Oh, just ignore us,” Zachary broke in. “You’re the ones who ran off to—”
“Shut up, Zachary,” Valentine interrupted, grasping Nell’s hand. “Eleanor, walk with me.”
“We’re not letting you out of our sight.” Charlemagne started across the room toward them.
“Then stop us,” Valentine said, lifting his chin.
“Let them go,” the duke broke in, before the fighting could begin again. “They know better than to leave without us.”
Valentine wouldn’t have wagered on that, but he didn’t say anything more as he led Eleanor from the room, Sin and Sensibility / 365
through the kitchen, and out into the small, simple side yard.
“Do you really think he masterminded all of this?”
Eleanor asked, facing him. “That he arranged for us to end up together?”
He shook his head. “I think he figured I’d be a good influence on you, and you’d be a good one on me. As for the rest, he couldn’t have had any idea.”
“I’m a good influence on you?” Eleanor studied his face. Somehow he looked even more handsome now, with his hair disheveled and his face bruised and bloodied.
It was as if with the polish gone, she could see the true value of the gem.
“Yes. Especially in the way you wanted your moment of freedom, but not in a way that would hurt anyone else.” He hesitated. “Responsibility isn’t something I’ve ever had much use for. I always thought it would feel like a shackle, or a noose around my neck. And then I realized that I felt responsible toward you, that I worried over what could happen, that I didn’t want you to be sad or disappointed. And it didn’t make my world feel smaller, Eleanor. Just the opposite. And I do love you.”
Eleanor cupped his face in both hands, leaning up to kiss him. She couldn’t help herself. He meant it. He’d said that he loved her, and he meant it. “I went swimming naked in a baptismal pond in the middle of Hyde Park,”
she said softly, chuckling against his mouth. “I went for drives without an escort, and I spoke about my interests to people without worrying what they might think.”
Slowly she kissed him again.
“And you can still do all of that, Eleanor. You don’t have to live a small life.”
366 / Suzanne Enoch
“I don’t think I could, with you.”
“With me?” he repeated, brushing hair from her face.
“This hasn’t been too much of an adventure, even for you?”
“Never. I’ve known what I wanted for my adventure—for my life—since the night you saved me from Stephen at the Belmont soiree. I just didn’t know whether it would be wise or not.”
“And now?”
“And now I know that you may be rather unconvention-al, but you’re also kind and caring and honorable.” Her smile deepened. “I do want to be like you, Valentine.”
“You are like me. In only the good ways, of course.
Marry me, Eleanor.”
She nodded, another tear running down her face. “I want to marry you. More than anything.”
He kissed her again, slow and feather-light. “Good.
Then let’s be off.”
Eleanor lifted both eyebrows. “To Gretna Green?”
“Melbourne thinks he knows everything. But I’ll wager he won’t expect us to continue with this particular adventure.”
She covered her mouth with both hands. Now that her brothers were there, now that she knew what she wanted, she’d just expected that everything would settle back into easy convention. Where Valentine Corbett was concerned, though, she supposed she shouldn’t expect anything but surprise. And that, for her, was perfection.
“Yes,” she agreed, laughing aloud. “Let’s go.”
A native and current resident of Southern California, SUZANNE ENOCH loves movies almost as much as she loves books. She once appeared on an
E!
special,
Star Wars Is Back
, as an expert on the romance in the
Star Wars
movies. Other highlights include winning her third grade spelling bee, receiving an
E.T.
poster and T-shirt in an alien-inspired poetry contest, and submitting a script for
The A-Team
(which was not why the series was cancelled).
When she is not busily working on her next novel, Suzanne likes to contemplate interesting phenomena, like how the three guppies in her aquarium became 161 guppies in five months.
Suzanne loves to hear from her readers, and may be reached at:
c/o Lowenstein-Yost Associates
121 W. 27th Street, Suite 601
New York, New York 10001
Or send her an e-mail at
[email protected]
.
Visit her website at
www.suzanneenoch.com
.
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SOMETHING SINFUL
DON’T LOOK DOWN
AN INVITATION TO SIN
FLIRTING WITH DANGER
SIN AND SENSIBILITY
ENGLAND’S PERFECT HERO
LONDON’S PERFECT SCOUNDREL
THE RAKE
A MATTER OF SCANDAL
MEET ME AT MIDNIGHT
REFORMING A RAKE
TAMING RAFE
BY LOVE UNDONE
STOLEN KISSES
LADY ROGUE
Coming in November 2006
The Exciting Contemporary Romance
BILLIONAIRES PREFER BLONDES
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIN AND SENSIBILITY. Copyright © 2006 by Suzanne Enoch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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