The Mad Earl's Bride (3 page)

It was impossible to rage at Abonville properly while trying not to distress Bertie, who was so thrilled about his best friend marrying his favorite female cousin.

“It’s only Gwen,” Bertie was saying, misconstruing the issues, as usual. “She ain’t half bad, for a girl. Not like Jess—but I shouldn’t wish m’sister on anybody, especially you, even though you’d be m’brother then, because I can’t think of anything worse than a fellow having to listen to her the live-long day. Not but what Dain can manage her—but he’s bigger than you, and even so, I daresay he’s got his hands full. Still, they’re already shackled, so you’re safe from her, and Gwen ain’t like her at all. When Abonville told us you was wanting to get married, and he was thinking Gwen would suit, I said—”

“Bertie, I wasn’t wanting to get married,” Dorian broke in. “It is a ridiculous mistake.”

“I have made no mistake,” said Abonville. He stood before the door, his distinguished countenance stern, his arms folded over his chest. “You gave your word, cousin. You said you recognized your duty, and you would marry if I could find a girl willing to have you.”

“It doesn’t matter what I said—if I did say it,” Dorian said tightly. “I had a headache when you came, and had taken laudanum. I was not in my senses at the time.”

“You were fully rational.”

“I could not have been!” Dorian snapped. “I should never have agreed to such a thing if I had. I’m not a damned ox. I shan’t spend my last months breeding!”

That was a mistake. Bertie’s round blue eyes began to fill. “It’s all right, Cat,” he said. “I’ll stick by you, like you always stuck by me. But you must have promised, or Abonville wouldn’t have said you did, and talked to Gwen. And she’ll be awful disappointed—not but what she’ll get over it, not being the moping sort. But only think how we could be cousins, and if you was to make a brat, I could be godfather, you know.”

Dorian bent a malignant glare upon the accursed duc. This was his doing. He’d filled Bertie’s head with the kinds of ideas he was sure to set his childish heart on: standing as groomsman for his dying friend, becoming Dorian’s cousin, then godfather to imaginary children.

And poor Bertie, his heart bursting with good intentions, would never understand why it was impossible. He would never comprehend why Dorian needed to die alone.

“I’ll stick by you,” he’d said—and Bertie would. If Dorian wouldn’t wed his cousin, Bertie would stay. Either way, Dorian wouldn’t stand a chance. They would never let him die in peace.

Once Dorian was no longer capable of thinking for himself, Bertie—or Abonville or the wife—would call in experts to deal with the madman.

And Dorian knew where that would lead: he would die as his mother had, caged like an animal . . . unless he killed himself first.

But he would not be hurried to his grave. He still had time, and he meant to enjoy it, to relish his sanity and strength for every precious moment they remained.

He told himself to calm down. He was not trapped. It only seemed that way, with loyal, dim-witted Bertie on one side, prating of godchildren, and Abonville on the other, blocking the door.

Dorian was not yet weak and helpless, as his mother had been. He’d find a way out of this so long as he kept a cool head.

H
ALF AN HOUR
later, Dorian was galloping along the narrow track that led to Hagsmire. He was laughing, because the ruse had worked.

It had been easy enough to feign a sudden attack of remorse. Given years of practice with his grandfather, Dorian had no trouble appearing penitent, and grateful for Abonville’s efforts. And so, when Dorian requested a few minutes to compose himself before meeting his bride, the two guests had exited the library.

So had he—out the window, through the garden, then down to the stables at a run.

He knew they wouldn’t pursue him to Hagsmire. Even his own groom wouldn’t venture onto the tortuous path this day, with storm clouds roiling overhead.

But he and Isis had waited out Dartmoor storms before. There was plenty of time to find the cracked heap of granite where they’d sheltered so many times previously, while Dorian beat back the inner demons urging him toward the old habits, the illusory surcease of wine and women.

Even if they searched, his unwanted guests would never find him, and they would give up awaiting his return long before he gave in. He had not yielded to his private demons or to his grandfather, and he would not yield to an overbearing French nobleman obsessed with genealogy.

There would be no more submitting to Duty. The new Earl of Rawnsley would be dead in a few months, and that would be the end of the curst Camoys line. And if Abonville didn’t like it, let him uproot one of the French sprigs and plant him here, and make the poor sod marry Bertie’s cousin.

Because the only way she would marry Dorian Camoys, he assured himself, would be by coming into Hagsmire with the entire bridal party and the preacher, and even then someone would have to pin the groom down with a boulder. Because he would dive into a bottomless pit of quicksand before he would take any woman into his life now and let her watch him disintegrate into a mindless animal.

Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance.

Or so Dorian thought at first, until he noticed that the rumble didn’t pause, as thunder would, but went on steadily, and steadily grew louder. And the louder and nearer it came, the less it sounded like thunder and the more it sounded like . . . hoofbeats.

He glanced back, then quickly ahead again.

He told himself the recent confrontation had agitated him more than he’d suspected, and what he believed he’d just seen was a trick of his degenerating brain.

The ignorant rustics, who believed pixies dwelt all over Dartmoor, had named Hagsmire for the witches they also believed haunted the area. During mists and storms, they mounted ghostly steeds and chased their victims into the mire.

The hoofbeats grew louder.

The thing was gaining on him.

He glanced back, his heart pounding, his nerves tingling.

Though he assured himself it couldn’t be there, his eyes told him it was: a demonic-looking female riding an enormous bay. A tangled mane of fiery red hair flew wildly about her face. She rode boldly astride, a pale cloak streaming out behind her, her skirts hiked up to her knees, shamelessly displaying her ghostly white limbs.

Though it was only a moment’s glance, the brief distraction proved fatal, for in the next instant, Isis swerved too sharply into a turning.

Dorian reacted a heartbeat too late, and the mare skidded over the crumbling track edge and down the slippery incline—toward the quagmire waiting below.

T
H
E PALE MARE
managed to scramble back from the edge of the murky pit, but she threw off her master in the process.

Gwendolyn leapt down from her mount, collected the rope she’d brought, and climbed down the incline to the edge of the bog.

Several feet from where she stood, the Earl of Rawnsley was thrashing in a pit of grey muck. In the few minutes it had taken her to reach the bog, he’d slid toward its heart, and his efforts to struggle for footing where there wasn’t any only sucked him in deeper.

Still, the muck had climbed only as far as his hips, and an assessing glance told Gwendolyn that this patch of mire was relatively narrow in circumference.

Even while she was studying her surroundings, she was moving toward the mare, making reassuring sounds. She was aware of Rawnsley cursing furiously, in between shouting at her to go away, but she disregarded that.

“Try to keep as still as possible,” she told him calmly. “We’ll have you out in a minute.”

“Get away from here!” he shouted. “Leave my horse alone, you bedamned witch! Run, Isis! Home!”

But Gwendolyn was stroking under the mare’s mane, and the creature was quieting, despite her master’s shouts and curses. She stood docilely while Gwendolyn unbuckled the stirrup strap, removed the stirrup iron, and rebuckled the strap. She looped one end of the rope through the strap and knotted it. Then she led the mare closer to the bog.

Rawnsley had stopped cursing, and he was not thrashing about so much as before. She did not know whether he’d come to his senses or was simply exhausted. She could see, though, that he’d sunk past his waist. Swiftly she tied a loop at the free end of the rope.

“Look sharp now,” she called to him. “I’m going to throw it.”

“You’ll fall in, you stupid—”

She flung the rope. He grabbed . . . and missed. And swore profusely.

Gwendolyn quickly drew it back and tried again.

On the fifth try, he caught it.

“Try to hold on with both hands,” she said. “And don’t try to help us. Pretend you’re a log. Keep as still as you can.”

She knew that was very difficult. It was instinctive to struggle when one was sinking. But he would sink faster if he fought the mire, and the deeper he was, the harder it would be to pull him out. Even here, where it was safe, the soggy ground was barely walkable. Her boots sank into mud up to the ankles. Isis, too, must contend with the mud, as well as her master’s weight, and the powerful mire dragging him down.

Still, they would do it, Gwendolyn assured herself. She looped the reins through one hand and grasped the stirrup strap and rope with the other.

Then she turned the mare so that she’d be moving sideways from the bog, and started her on the first cautious steps of rescue. “Slowly, Isis,” she murmured. “I know you want to hurry—so do I—but we cannot risk wrenching his arms from their sockets.”

H
E COLL
APSED AS
soon as he escaped the mire, but Gwendolyn had to leave him while she returned to the bridle path with Isis. Though the horse had been good and patient through the ordeal, she was restless and edgy now, and Gwendolyn was worried she might stumble into the mire if left unattended. One could not look after horse and master simultaneously.

By the time she’d settled Isis with Bertie’s gelding, retrieved a brandy flask from the saddlebag, and hurried back to Rawnsley, he had returned to full consciousness. To extremely bad-tempered consciousness, by the looks and sounds of it.

His black mane dripped ooze from the mire, and he was cursing under his breath as he shoved it out of his face and dragged himself up to a sitting position.

“Devil take you and roast you in Hell!” he snarled. “You could have killed yourself—and my horse. I told you to go away, curse you!”

A mask of grey-green slime clung to his face. Even under the mucky coating, however, his features appeared stronger and starker than in the miniature. This was a hard, sharply etched face, while the painted one had been sickly looking and puffy.

The rest of him was not sickly looking either. The earl’s bog-soaked garments clung to broad shoulders and back, a taut, narrow waist, and long legs—and every inch of that was solid muscle.

The reality was so unlike the picture that Gwendolyn wondered for a moment whether someone had played a joke on her, and this wasn’t Rawnsley at all.

Then he pulled off his mud-encrusted gloves and wiped the filth from his eyes with his fingers and looked at her . . . and she froze, the breath stuck in her throat as her heart missed the next scheduled beat.

Bertie called him Cat because, he said, that’s what all the fellows at school had called him. Now Gwendolyn understood why.

The Earl of Rawnsley’s eyes were yellow.

Not a human brown or hazel but a feline amber gold. They were the eyes of a jungle predator, burning bright—and dangerous.

Fortunately, Gwendolyn was not easily intimidated. The shock passed as quickly as it had come, and she knelt down beside him and offered the flask with a steady hand.

Her voice was steady, too, as she answered. “No self-respecting witch would go away on a mere mortal’s orders. She’d be drummed out of the coven in disgrace.”

He took the flask from her and drank, his intent yellow gaze never leaving her face.

“You may not know that all the best witches come to Dartmoor for their familiars,” she said. “A black cat is de rigueur. Since you’re the only one available—”

“I’m not available, and I’m not a damned tabby, you demented little hellhound! And I know who you are. You’re the curst cousin, aren’t you? Only one of Bertie’s kin would come galloping into a mire in that lunatic way and blunder about, risking a horse, as well as her own scrawny neck, saving a man from what she got him into. And I didn’t ask to be saved, Devil confound you! It’s all the same to me—I’ve already got one foot in the grave—or didn’t they tell you?”

“Yes, they did tell me,” she answered calmly. “But I did not come all this way only to turn back at the first obstacle. I am aware it is all the same to you. I realize the mire would have saved you the trouble of putting a pistol to your head or hanging yourself or whatever you had in mind. But you may just as easily do that later, after we’re wed. I regret the inconvenience, my lord, but I cannot let you die before the ceremony, or I shall never get my hospital.”

In the past, Gwendolyn often obtained satisfactory results from startling statements.

It worked this time, too.

He drew back slightly, and his furious expression softened into bewilderment.

“It is simple enough,” she said. “I need you, and you need me—although I cannot expect you to believe that at present since you know next to nothing about me.”

She glanced upward. “We are about to be inundated. We will need to find shelter—for the horses’ sake, I mean, since you won’t mind dying of lung fever, either. That is not altogether inconvenient. Waiting out the storm will give us a chance for private conversation.”

Chapter 2

“O
H NO,
YOU
don’t,” Dorian said. The words came out in croaks. His throat was raw from shouting the objections she’d been so stubbornly deaf to.

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he staggered to his feet. Staying upright proved even harder than getting up.

Mires, it turned out, didn’t simply swallow you. His mother had failed to explain that they chewed first. They tried to suck the skin off your bones and crush your organs and muscles into jelly. Every inch of his body, inside and out, was throbbing painfully. He ignored it.

“There will be no private tête-à-têtes,” he said, grasping her arm and marching her to the incline. “We have nothing to say to each other. I am taking you back to the house, and then you will go back where you came from.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. Her voice remained level, and she made no effort to free herself from his grasp.

He let go abruptly, wishing he hadn’t grabbed her slim arm in that oafish way. She had no choice but to follow him, unless she meant to take up residence in Hagsmire.

He started up the slope alone.

After a moment, she followed. “Why did you bolt?” she asked.

“I took a lunatic fit.” He trudged on.

“That often happens when one converses with Bertie for any length of time,” she said. “Sometimes I have to shake him. Otherwise, he will go on and on and lose track entirely of what he’s saying, and one can grow quite giddy trying to follow.”

“I’m very fond of Bertie,” he said coldly.

“So am I,” she said. “But he is miraculously stupid, isn’t he? Cousin Jessica says he was born with his foot in his mouth and has been unable to get it out since. I suppose he must have made the most harrowing vows of eternal devotion to you. He was blubbering into his handkerchief when he came out to tell me you’d bolted. So there was no getting an intelligible explanation out of him. And Abonville said only that he’d made a terrible mistake, and Genevieve must take me back to the inn.”

“Obviously you heeded Abonville no more than you did me,” Dorian said irritably. “The words ‘go away’ appear to have no meaning for you.”

“If I always did what I was told, I should never accomplish anything,” she said. “Fortunately, Abonville is aware that I do not blindly obey orders. And so, when I said I must go after you, and my grandmother agreed, he took Bertie back into the library, and they made direct for the brandy.”

They had reached the bridle path. Dorian wanted to get on his horse and ride so he wouldn’t have to listen to her, but his leg muscles were giving way.

His hair was thick with mire ooze, and the cold slime dribbled down his neck. Thanks to the slime, he stank to high heaven. He was too tired and shaken to care.

He staggered to a boulder and sat down and stared at his sodden trousers while he waited for his respiration to slow and his brain to quiet.

“It would appear there has been a misunderstanding,” she said.

He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t keep her distance from him when it must be obvious to her by now that he was deranged. It was certainly obvious to him.

He pushed a hank of soggy hair from his eyes and looked up at her. Though she didn’t appear as demonlike as she had before, galloping after him, she still looked like a witch. A young witch, with her sharp little nose and chin and narrow, uptilted green eyes—and the hair, the wild mass of red hair. It wasn’t even a normal red but a strange maroon, glinting fire even in the gloom of the approaching storm.

All the same, strange as she was, Dorian couldn’t believe he’d actually mistaken this young Englishwoman for one of Satan’s handmaidens.

He should not have let himself become so overwrought, he reproached himself. If he had stayed with the two men and argued patiently and rationally . . . but he hadn’t. Instead, he had run away—from temptation, yes, but they would think he’d fled a mere girl—and now they would have no doubt he was a lunatic. Abonville would probably have him examined and certified non compos mentis.

“Damn me to hell,” he muttered.

“I don’t mean to plague you,” she said, “but I cannot work out what happened, exactly. What did they say about me that made you bolt? I have been wracking my brains, but all I could think was that Bertie—”

“I didn’t know what to do with him!” he snapped. “The silly sod wants to stay with me—to the tragic bloody end—and I’ll never get rid of him without resorting to violence.”
Then they
’
ll lock me away,
he added silently.

“I can make him go away,” she said. “I’m one of the few people who can actually communicate with him. Is that all?”

“All?” he echoed. “No, that isn’t all. I want the lot of you gone. I don’t need Bertie about, sobbing the instant my tragic condition is hinted at. I don’t need Abonville telling me what’s good for me and what I ought to do. I’ve had a lifetime of that. And most of all, I don’t need a wife, damn and blast him!”

The demons in his breast cried that a wife was what he most needed, and conjured erotic images he hastily thrust away.

A pucker appeared in her brow. “That is odd. I should not have thought Abonville would misunderstand. His English is excellent. Or have you changed your mind about getting married? I do wish you would explain, my lord. It is very difficult to respond sensibly to a situation when one is so utterly in the dark.”

“I did not change my mind,” he said, beating back an insane urge to smooth the furrow from her young—too young—brow. “I vaguely remember Abonville’s and your grandmother’s visit—whenever it was—and his explaining how he and I were cousins about a thousand times removed. That’s all I remember, and it’s amazing I recall so much, considering I had swilled about a gallon of laudanum shortly before he arrived.”

Her expression cleared. “Oh, I do see now. Some individuals become extremely docile under the influence of opiates. You must have amiably agreed with every word they said—and all the while you had no idea what they were talking about.”

Thunder grumbled in the distance, and black clouds were massing above their heads. She appeared to heed the threatening weather not at all. She only watched him with quiet concentration. The steady green perusal was stirring a dangerous yearning in his breast. He beat that back, too.

“I tried to explain,” he said stiffly, “but he refused to listen to me.”

“I am not surprised,” she said. “He was sure to think the Rawnsley he encountered the first time was relatively sane—because that Rawnsley sensibly agreed with everything Abonville said. Today, when you disagreed, he was bound to ascribe it to a temporary fit of insanity.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” he muttered.

“Many people respond to seemingly irrational behavior in the same way,” she said. “Instead of listening to what you said, he probably tried to drum rationality into you by repeating his point over and over, as one drums the multiplication tables into children. Even medical experts, who ought to know better, believe this is an ‘enlightened’ way of dealing with individuals in an agitated state.”

She wrinkled her pointy nose. “It is most annoying. No wonder you lost your patience and dashed off.”

“That was a mistake, all the same,” he said. “I should have stayed and reasoned with him.”

“Waste of breath,” she said briskly. “Your mental balance is in doubt. The explanation must come from one whose sanity is not doubted. I will explain to him, and he will listen to me.”

She paused, looking about her. “The storm is not rushing upon us as quickly as I expected. For once, Providence shows some consideration. I should have hated going back without having the least idea what was wrong. Not that I am altogether happy with the answer. Still, one cannot hold a man to a promise made when he was not properly in his senses.”

Bertie had said she wasn’t the moping sort. Even so, the faint note of resignation in her voice made Dorian feel guilty. She had saved his life. Though he wasn’t at all sure he’d wanted to be saved, he could appreciate the courage and efficiency with which she’d acted. She’d also calmed him. She’d listened. She’d understood.

He looked away, wondering how much of an explanation he owed her and how much he could trust himself to utter.

A jagged branch of fire darted over a distant ridge. The heavens rumbled.

He brought his gaze back to her. “Does it not strike you as . . . morbid?” he asked. “That I should take a wife, now of all times?”

She shrugged. “I can understand how it might seem so to you. Yet it is not much different than a decrepit old man marrying a young woman, which happens often enough.”

It did happen, Dorian knew. Such a marriage meant a few months, perhaps a few years, of catering to a drooling invalid. The reward of a wealthy widowhood and independence more than compensated, evidently.

He was hardly the one to revile a woman for acting out of greed. It wasn’t as though he’d ever been a saint.

Moreover, he was aware that some women had remarkable powers of endurance. Was there so much difference, he wondered, between lying with a man who was as good as a corpse and lying with a drunken, lusting oaf, insatiable while the need was upon him and soddenly morose afterward?

That was the man he’d been, not so very long ago.

He shuddered—at the past and at what his future held if he yielded to his baser self and took what she offered.

“We had better start back,” she said. “You are tired and wet and chilled.”

She turned and moved toward her horse.

Dorian rose and followed, relieved that she sought no further explanation. Though he’d already said more than he wanted, he still wanted to tell her more, to explain. But that would mean describing the sordid life that lay behind him and the helpless imbecility that lay ahead. Better to leave it as it was, he told himself. She seemed to accept the situation.

They reached the bay gelding, and Dorian was so busy telling himself to hold his tongue before it got him into trouble that he didn’t pause to think but picked her up and set her upon the saddle.

Too late, he remembered it was a man’s saddle.

She swung her leg over and settled comfortably astride, naively exposing to his view several inches of feminine underthings.

Between the dirty draggle of her petticoats and the slime-encrusted boots, her muddy stocking hugged a slender, curvaceous calf.

Dorian backed away, silently cursing himself.

She didn’t need his assistance. He could have mounted his own horse and started for home and let her take care of herself. He had just escaped a mire. No one would expect him to play the gallant at such a time, and she was obviously not a helpless female.

He should not have allowed his mind to wander into the past. He should not have touched her or come close enough to notice what her legs were like. Already he could feel his resistance weakening, was aware of the excuses forming in his treacherous mind—the false promises he knew better than to trust. There would be no relief for him, or release, if he yielded to this temptation. There never had been before: only a temporary oblivion and self-loathing afterward.

He hurried to Isis and hastily mounted.

G
WENDOLYN
A
DAMS WAS
not the granddaughter of a famous femme fatale for nothing. Though she had not inherited Genevieve’s raven hair or heart-stopping countenance or subtly seductive ways, Gwendolyn had inherited certain instincts.

She did not have much trouble interpreting the Earl of Rawnsley’s expression when his exotic yellow gaze wandered to her leg.

She did not have much trouble, either, interpreting her own reaction when his gaze lingered at least two pulse beats longer than delicacy allotted. The hot spark in his eyes had seemed to leap to her limb and set a little fire to it that darted up under her petticoats and past her knee, teasing her thighs with its naughty warmth before it swirled into the pit of her belly. There it set off sensations she had heard of but never before experienced in her life.

She had never dreamed the mad Earl of Rawnsley would arouse such sensations, but then, he was nothing like what she’d expected.

She had read about quicksand and the agonizing pressure it exerted. She was sure he must feel as though he’d been run over by a herd of stampeding bulls. Yet he had picked her up as easily as he might pluck a daisy from the thin Dartmoor soil. Now she watched him swing his long, powerful body up into the saddle in one easy motion, as though he’d done nothing more tiring than pick wildflowers.

Puzzled, she followed the earl in silence down the narrow, winding track.

Rain was falling, but halfheartedly. The worst of the storm seemed to be rampaging in the southeast.

Rawnsley trotted on steadily, never once glancing back at her. If his horse had been fresh, Gwendolyn had no doubt he would have galloped out of Hagsmire in the same desperate manner he’d galloped in.

Abonville had—with the best of intentions, assuredly—thrown him into a dangerously agitated state. It was bound to happen again, and the duc was sure to make the worst possible decisions out of the best possible motives. She had seen it happen too many times: greedy physicians, eager to make heaps of money trying their ludicrous theories out on hopeless cases, and loving families blindly agreeing out of desperation.

But the medical experts were men, and with men, everything was a war of sorts. Doctors were bound to battle disease, at times, as though the victims as well as the illness were mortal foes. Then the physicians wondered why their patients turned hostile.

What Rawnsley needed was a friend. At present, though, thanks to Abonville—and poor, stupid Bertie—he viewed Gwendolyn as the enemy.

“Drat them,” she muttered. “Leave it to men to make a muck of things.”

She was silently reviewing her long litany of grievances against the male of the species when Rawnsley drew his mare to a halt.

Gwendolyn noticed that the track had widened. There seemed to be enough room to ride abreast.

Rawnsley was waiting for her to catch up, she realized with amazement. Her spirits rose, but only a very little bit. Experience had taught her not to leap to conclusions, especially optimistic ones.