The Last Hellion (28 page)

"Organizing that wedding must have been like preparing for Waterloo," Lydia murmured. "It was very grand. The church was packed to bursting, and there were even more people at the wedding breakfast."

"And she has expensive tastes, according to His Lordship."

"Well, we shan't be very grand." Lydia studied her reflection in the glass.

"Except for my hair. How elegant you've made me—from the neck up."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

But that was only appearances, she thought. And now even she wasn't sure who she really was.

Fancy yourself a great lady, do you
? Papa had asked so mockingly all those years ago. That's all it had been, evidently: a fantasy on Mama's part that she was a Ballister. Otherwise, surely, Lydia would have detected something—surprise, annoyance, even amusement—in Dain's dark countenance. But all he'd done was look her over very briefly, reserving his attention for his erstwhile schoolmate Ainswood.

Obviously, when Sellowby had made the comment, after Dain's wedding, about spying a female who might have stepped out from the Athcourt portrait gallery, he'd merely discerned a vague resemblance from a distance, Lydia decided. Up close, the resemblance must have proved vague indeed, since this day he'd seemed no more struck by her features than Dain had been.

Maybe that was it. Perhaps Mama had seen the previous Lord Dain at a procession or stepping out from his carriage. At a distance, she might have perceived a resemblance to Lydia, and subsequently built a long fictional story upon it. Lydia could hardly be surprised. Her own inspiration for
The Rose of
Thebes
had come from a gossipy newspaper article describing Lady Dain's betrothal ring, a large cabochon ruby surrounded by diamonds.

"I don't think the duke cares what your hair looks like," Tamsin said, drawing Lydia back to the present. "I'm sure he would have wed you on the spot, as you were, your sopping hair in your mud-spattered face and your bonnet a wet lump dangling from your neck."

"He was hardly Beau Brummell himself," Lydia said, rising from her chair at the dressing table. "In any event, he was wetter than I and bound to fall ill standing about in dripping clothes during the ceremony. I didn't wish to spend my first Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

days of marriage nursing him through a lung fever." She turned to meet Tamsin's gaze. "You must think me mad, or at least capricious."

"I think it was a mistake to call your feelings for him 'a schoolgirl infatuation' or

'mating instinct' or 'the delirium of lust,' as you've done." Tamsin chuckled softly. "I had the feeling he might be beginning to grow on you—"

"Like a fungus, you mean."

"It's no use pretending you don't care for him," Tamsin went on. "I saw you leap from the carriage without a thought for the storm, that deranged gelding, or anything but the Duke of Ainswood." She grinned. "It was ever so romantic."

"Romantic." Lydia scowled. "I shall be ill."

"That's bridal nerves." Tamsin moved to the door. "I daresay he's in a worse state than you are, and undergoing agonies. We had better let the minister put the pair of you out of your misery."

Lydia lifted her chin. "I am not subject to nervous fits, Miss Impertinence. I am not in any sort of misery. I am perfectly composed." She stalked to the door. "In a short while I shall be the Duchess of Ainswood, and then"—she glared at Tamsin—"the rest of you peasants had better look out."

She swept from the room, a laughing Tamsin following.

Thanks to Dain, Sellowby, and Trent, Vere was in a fair way to being driven distracted. None of them could hold his tongue for half a minute and let a fellow think.

They were gathered in the small dining parlor reserved for the nuptials.

"I'm telling you, it's the oddest thing," Trent was saying, "and how you can't see it is beyond me only maybe it were on account she were the worse for the rain and mud and her own mother wouldn't recognize her—"

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"Of course I recognized her," said Sellowby. "I had seen her outside the church after Dain's wedding. One could hardly fail to notice a handsome young woman of such statuesque proportions. She seemed a fair flower among the weedy clump of journalists. Not to mention that female scribblers are scarcely thick on the ground, and there could be only one Lady Grendel. Even at a distance, her appearance was striking."

"That's what I mean," Trent persisted. "The tall fellow with the golden curls I seen—"

"I shouldn't call it gold," Dain interrupted. "I should say flaxen. And not a curl in sight."

"A pale gold," Sellowby agreed. "Reminded me of—"

"That fellow, the cavalier one which m'sister—"

"The Comte d'Esmond," Sellowby continued. "Not the same eyes, though. Hers are a lighter blue."

"And she can't be French," said Dain.

"I didn't say she were French, only that were the word they used for 'em which has something to do with horses, Miss Price says, bein'
cheval
—"

"The rumor I heard," Dain went on, as though his brother-in-law weren't there,

"was that she was born in a Borneo swamp and reared up by crocodiles. I don't suppose you know the facts about her background, do you, Ainswood? I am not certain Borneo has crocodiles."

"What the devil do I care about her background?" Vere snapped. "What I want to know is where the curst parson's got to—and whether the bride means to come down to the wedding sometime in this century."

It had taken him but half an hour to bathe and dress, snarling at Jaynes the whole time. That had left His Grace another hour and a half to cool his heels waiting Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

for his duchess-to-be, and fretting all the while that she'd taken ill and was quietly expiring of a putrid sore throat while his friends nattered on about the precise color of her hair and eyes and whether there were crocodiles in Borneo.

"Maybe she's having second thoughts," Dain said with a mocking half-smile Vere was itching to punch off his arrogant countenance. "Maybe she agreed to wed you while in a state of shock, and has since come to her senses."

"I agreed to wed him out of pity," came a cool feminine voice from the doorway.

"And out of a sense of civic duty. We can't allow him to run amok upon the public byways, breaking up carriages and alarming the horses."

The four men turned simultaneously toward the speaker.

Vere's dragoness stood in the doorway, garbed from neck to toe in black, and buttoned within an inch of her life. When she entered, the bombazine rustled suggestive whispers.

Miss Price trailed behind her, and the preacher brought up the rear.

"I'd better find my wife," Dain said, heading for the door. "And you are not to so much as think of starting without us. I must give the bride away."

Grenville's eyebrows went up.

"They drew straws," Vere explained. "Trent is groomsman, and Sellowby is charged with guarding the door, to keep out the crowd of noisy drunkards."

The crowd had been herded into the large public dining room, where they entertained themselves by singing ribald songs and terrifying the hapless travelers who'd paused here for shelter from the storm.

"Your friends were denied the entertainment of witnessing your spectacular race finish," said his dragoness. "I cannot believe you mean to deprive them of this spectacle as well."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"I promise you, Grenville, they're in no state to appre-date it," he said. "Half of them couldn't tell the bridegroom from a wine barrel at this point—and the majority would rather be near the wine barrel."

"It is a solemn occasion," the minister added sternly. "The holy state of matrimony is not to be entered into lightly, nor—" He broke off as Grenville's glacial blue gaze settled upon him. "That is. Well." He tugged at his collar.

"Perhaps we might take our places."

The nagging, frustratingly faint thought or memory or whatever it was teased Vere once more. But Dain and his wife entered in the next moment, and Lord Beelzebub took charge, as he was everlastingly wont to do, and ordered this one to stand here and that one there and someone to do this and another to do that.

And in another moment, the ceremony began, and then all Vere could think about was the woman beside him, about to become his, absolutely… and forever.

The bride and her attendants had withdrawn hours earlier, but it was midnight before Vere's friends allowed him to escape from the post-wedding orgy, and this was only because someone—Carruthers or Tolliver—had a bevy of trollops delivered. At that point, Dain decided the married men were free to depart if they chose. Though Trent wasn't a married man, he left with them, still trying to make Dain listen to some incomprehensible theory or story or whatever it was about Charles II and courtiers and cavaliers and Lucifer only knew what else.

"I know it were at your place," Trent was telling his brother-in-law as the three men ascended the stairs. "In the picture gallery, which must be at least a mile long, and he were in the alcove and Jess said he were her favorite—"

"The gallery is one hundred eighty feet long," Dain said. "As Ainswood will attest. On the day of my father's funeral, I set up one of the portraits of my sire Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

upon an easel and proposed an archery contest. You recall, don't you, Ainswood?

Using my dear Papa for target practice was sophomoric, you claimed. You assured me that I would find more satisfaction rogering that evil redhead, Charity Graves, in the master bedchamber. Having tested her yourself, you deemed her worthy of my efforts." He clapped Vere on the shoulder as they reached the top of the stairs. "Ah, well, my lad, those days are over. No more sharing trollops for us. We must make do with ladies, and only one apiece." He turned to Bertie. "Good night, Trent. Pleasant dreams."

"I say Dain, but you—"

Dain's deadly black stare cut him off.

Bertie tugged at his neckcloth. "That is. Well." He backed away from Dain.

"Mean to say, congratulations, Ainswood, and good night and much obliged, you know—groomsman. Honored." He shook Vere's hand, nodded at Dain, then fled to his room.

In the recesses of Vere's brain, the wispy something teased again, but his glance stole down the hall to the last door, behind which his duchess waited, and that hot awareness blotted out the vexing will-o'-the-wisp.

"My lady's expecting our brat sometime in February or March," Dain said, recalling Vere's attention to him. "It wants godparents. Perhaps you and your bride will accept the position."

It took Vere a moment to believe his ears, then another to digest the implications. Then his throat tightened. Despite time, separations, misunderstandings, and mills, he and Beelzebub were friends, still. "So that's why you were so eager to see me wed," he said, not altogether steadily.

"I was eager on several counts," said Dain. "But I will not make you stay and listen to my reasons. You have… responsibilities." He smiled faintly. "I will not Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

keep you from them."

To his horror, Vere felt the heat rise in his face.

"You are blushing, Ainswood," said Dain. "Today is truly a day of miracles."

"Go to the devil," Vere muttered, starting down the hall.

Behind him, he heard Dain's low chuckle. "If you find yourself stumped what to do, Your Grace," he called, "feel free to knock on my door."

"Stumped what to do, indeed," Vere answered without turning around. "I taught you everything you know, Beelz—and not half what
I
know."

He heard another of the satanic rumbles that passed for laughter, then the sound of a door opening and closing.

"Knock on your door," Vere went on under his breath. "Very amusing. Hilarious.

As though I'm not the elder and wasn't the one who brought you your first trollop." He rapped impatiently at the portal to his room. "Bloody damned know-it-all. Always was. Always will be. I should break his big beak for—"

His bride opened the door.

He was vaguely aware that she was still fully dressed, but he didn't pause to wonder about it. He entered, kicked the door shut behind him, caught her in his arms, and crushed her to him.

He buried his face in her neck. Her soft, thick hair tickled his cheek while her scent stole into him, and he drank it in greedily. "Oh, Lord, Grenville," he murmured. "I thought I'd never get away from them."

Her arms came up about him, but stiffly, and her long body vibrated tension. He lifted his head to gaze at her. Her face was pale and hard. Her eyes gave him back his own reflection and something else. Something dark and troubled.

"You're weary," he said, loosening his boa-constrictor grip. "It's been a very long Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

and tiring day."

"I'm not weary." Her voice throbbed. "I came straight here, and fell onto the bed and asleep before my head touched the pillow." She eased out of his arms. "I woke an hour ago. I've had plenty of rest. And time to think."

"Which left no time for changing into something more appropriate for the wedding night," he said, resolutely ignoring a fierce jab of the conscience he wasn't speaking to. He had rushed her into matrimony. He'd taken advantage of a moment of weakness. Very well, then. He was unscrupulous—along with depraved and obnoxious and the other et ceteras. That was his nature. "That's quite all right. I'll be happy to help you out of your armor." He brought his hands to the topmost button.

"I'm not prepared to consummate the marriage," she said stiffly.

"No problem." He unbuttoned the first button. "I'll prepare you."

She swatted his hands away. "This is serious, Ainswood. We must talk."

"Grenville, you know we can't converse for more than two minutes without quarreling," he said. "Let's not talk tonight, what do you say?" He started to work on the second button.

Her hand, very cold, clamped upon his. "My conscience will not allow me to be your wife," she said. "I want an annulment."

"Your conscience has lost its mind," he said. He kissed her straight, haughty nose. "This is merely bridal nerves."