The Marquess (30 page)

“He calls himself O’Toole,” she argued,
puzzled. How could one not know if someone was a brother or not?

“He calls himself a number of things. We stayed with a
family named O’Toole several times. They had a passel of redheaded kids
and spoke with a brogue wider than the sea. Michael rather fancied himself as
one of them. The father was an Irish charmer. I’ve punched him more often
than not for insinuating our mother would commit adultery, but the truth was,
she and my father fought like cats and dogs. She followed him around the
country, but they didn’t always live together. They left me behind often
enough. She came home with Michael one of those times.”

“But he’s at least your half-brother, and your
mother was married to your father at the time. He has every right to call
himself a Lawrence. There are certainly enough families in London where every
child has a different father, but the married name sticks.”

Gavin gave another laugh. “You haven’t seen the
Lawrences. We all look alike. The family traits are very distinctive. That,
more than anything, has convinced Michael he’s not our father’s
child. The fact that my mother claimed to have found him under a cabbage leaf
and denied giving birth to him didn’t help matters any. My father called
him our little orphan. Of course, both my parents were liars extraordinaire.
They were perfectly capable of denying his birth so they could deny adultery.
He’s my brother as far as I’m concerned. Michael’s opinion is
another question altogether.”

Dillian lapsed into silence. She hadn’t meant to
unbury so many secrets. She’d led an unpleasant childhood, but at least
she’d had a mother who loved her until she died and a home to call her
own until her father died.

She’d resented her father’s preoccupation with
soldiering. His companions had raised her as much as her father had. He’d
left her destitute and homeless at his death because he’d never cared
enough to provide for her should he not live forever, as he’d apparently
expected to do. But she didn’t think her father had ever lied to her or
denied her existence.

“Sometimes, our lives seem to be some celestial joke,
don’t they?” she mused aloud.

She heard amusement in his reply. “Celestial? Or
satanic?”

“Well, considering where we’re likely to go when
we die, I suppose the devil is in charge now. But that doesn’t explain
our childhoods.”

He gave her a quick glance as the carriage rumbled into the
darkened streets of a small village. “You’ll not go to the devil
for a little carnal pleasure, I assure you, or most of mankind would inherit
hell.”

Dillian liked the way he said that. His voice took on a
velvet timbre that licked along her spine and made her feel his words in the
bottom of her stomach. She didn’t dare look at him. His thoughts would
follow too close to her own. She’d never thought she would anticipate the
pleasure of lying naked in a bed with a man, but she did. She wanted Gavin
touching her.

Instead, he halted the horse outside an inn where one room
still shone brightly and the sounds of merriment echoed from within.

Gavin swung down from the driver’s seat, then held his
hands out to catch Dillian as she picked her way down from the high perch. He
held her waist briefly, but put her aside as soon as her feet touched the
ground. She wanted more, but she couldn’t expect it. He already slogged
through the swampy morass of a courtyard toward the inn, leaving her to follow
as she would.

Cursing ungallant Yankees and their one-track minds, she
hurried after him. She didn’t deceive herself into thinking the arrogant
marquess would take a room at this lowly inn and enjoy her company for the
night. No, the damned man had decided to find a magistrate, and magistrate he
would have, whether he had to raise one from the dead or a warm bed to do it.

When she caught up with him, he already conversed with the
innkeeper. Absently, he circled her waist and held her by his side as if she
belonged there. She wanted to smack him, but the innkeeper must think her his
wife or his doxie. She preferred the former, and wives didn’t generally
smack their husbands.

The innkeeper nodded his head toward the tavern, and giving
a respectful tug of his forelock to Dillian, he lumbered toward the light
streaming from the attached room. Gavin remained where he was, proving himself
too proud to enter a common tavern. She supposed he adopted the pose on
purpose, but she didn’t like it much, not any more than she liked the
hood with which he concealed his face.

“Let go of me,” she hissed when the innkeeper
disappeared into the other room.

Gavin hugged her tighter, and raised his hand to caress the
lower curve of her breast. “Not likely. If it weren’t for our
friend out there, I’d have you upstairs and in bed so fast you
wouldn’t know what hit you until I came inside you. Prepare yourself,
woman. I’ll have you before this night’s over.”

“You’re a disgusting, immoral, perfectly
obnoxious lecher with no sense of decency, propriety...”

The innkeeper reappeared trailing a disheveled, slightly
drunken man of middle age. His rotund figure spoke of many nights in this
tavern, but his eyes twinkled with interest rather than drunkenness as they
perused the odd couple at the inn’s entrance. Only then did Dillian
realize how her ancient gown and Gavin’s hooded cloak must appear to
others. Damn and blast the man, he had her dressing as archaically as he did.

“Caught a knight of the road, have you?” the
magistrate asked, nodding his head knowingly. Or perhaps his head just
naturally bobbed.

“I wish to question him. I suspect he and his cohorts
intended to kidnap my wife.” Gavin placed Dillian proprietarily next to
the inn desk and prepared to walk out, leading the magistrate after him.

Dillian refused to remain where placed. She hurried in their
paths.

As the two men strode toward the carriage, her gaze caught
on a furtive shadow near the paddock. With a shout, she directed their
attention toward a man mounting a horse just on the other side of the fence.

“That’s him! He’s getting away!”

Gavin cursed as he raced toward the paddock, pulling his
pistol from his pocket as he did so. The magistrate wandered with curiosity to
investigate the waiting carriage, but Dillian already knew what he would find:
nothing. She broke into a run across the muddy yard as Gavin grabbed the mane
of the nearest horse and hauled himself upward, riding bareback as he took off
after the fleeing figure.

A pistol barked, and she could see the flash of a firing pan
against the night sky. A third horse and rider broke out of the shadows,
following the escaping prisoner. To Dillian’s horror, she saw
Gavin’s horse rear and fling its rider to the ground. The last she saw of
him was his dark cloak billowing against the night sky.

Screaming, she raced in his direction, forgetting the
magistrate, forgetting the escaping highwayman, forgetting whoever it was who
had freed him. She saw only the specter of Gavin’s body flying through
the air, smashing into the ground at an awkward angle. She saw the horse
trotting back toward the barn and food. She couldn’t see Gavin.

Ignoring the tears streaming down her cheeks, she cried, “Where
the devil are you, you stupid man!” as mud sloshed over her slippers and
up her dress. The paddock was worse than the courtyard. She slid and barely
avoided landing seat first in the mire.

Recovering rapidly, she raced toward the place where she had
seen him last. “I’ll kill you if you’re not dead already,”
she shouted, hitting a particularly smelly pile that wasn’t mud.

She wanted to kill him. She wanted to die. She
couldn’t imagine how they would fare without the marquess helping them.
She didn’t want him dying on her account. She damned well wasn’t
finished with him yet.

She didn’t know how much of this she muttered as she
climbed the other side of the fence and found his cloaked figure pushing out of
the mud on the far side. She just heard his chuckles and fought the urge to
shove him back down again.

“You gamble-gated clod, I suppose you think this is
funny!” She stalked toward him, placing her hands on her hips rather than
grabbing his hair and pulling him up to hug him to death. She had never learned
a great deal about expressing affection from her father’s friends. She
did know a great deal about insulting them into getting up when they were down.

“Immensely funny.” Then with a strength Dillian
hadn’t expected, Gavin grabbed her arm with his muddy hand and jerked her
down on top of him. “Absolutely hilarious.” Pushing her flat on her
back in the mud, he kissed her until she could say nothing more.

“I can’t arrive at Blanche’s townhouse
wearing this,” Dillian muttered, picking at the coarse cotton skirt
irritating the flesh above her stockings. A decent petticoat would have helped.
The maid they’d bought the garments from apparently wasn’t given to
wearing undergarments.

Gavin gave the sagging neckline of her bodice a look of
interest, and she sent him a baleful glare. He apparently enjoyed the show so
much he forgot to keep his hood pulled around his face. Her nipples ached in
response to his heated gaze.

“I rather like it,” he replied, turning his
attention back to the horse as the carriage rolled down the road in the broad
light of a new day. “I’m having second thoughts about our plan. I
think I would much prefer taking you with me as my simple country mistress. I wonder
if Mellon has decent bathing facilities in his London house?”

Dillian sent him a look meant to be angry, but she flushed
all over as she followed the direction of his thoughts. The simple pan of water
they’d stood in last night to cleanse the mud off had led to some
activities she hadn’t thought possible. She had taken a shameless man to
her bed. And her bath. The memory of him standing there naked, dripping water
and soap, still aroused her. She wouldn’t imagine what he could do with a
real tub.

“I would be of little use ensconced in your bedroom as
a mistress and nothing more,” she said scornfully, then blushed even more
as she realized what she’d said. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He gave her a laughing look but didn’t take advantage
of the opening she’d left him on the number of “uses” he
might find. She liked his eyes when they laughed like that. They looked brown
now and not the deep black she’d thought them. “I’d be of
little use to Blanche,” she amended hastily.

“And I wouldn’t get much done, either,” he
admitted. “So we’ll put ourselves in cousin Marian’s hands
and hope for the best.”

Traveling in daylight, with the constant traffic of horses
and wagons on this main highway, they had little to fear of the prior
night’s highwaymen. But as they drew close to the mudflats on the
outskirts of London, in sight of the brown smog hanging over the city, Gavin
pulled the carriage off the road. Dillian looked up at him questioningly.

“My cousin Marian lives in an area well traveled by
the
ton
. I don’t want it generally known that I’ve arrived
in company with a woman. Stay inside the carriage until I can send a maid out
for you. The two of you can exchange shawls or whatever, and you can come in
the house carrying one of your bags, as if you were the maid returning to the
house after fetching something I’d sent for.”

Dillian gave him a scathing glance at this role of
maidservant, but she saw no better alternative. Reluctantly, she allowed him to
help her down from the driver’s seat and install her inside with the
shades drawn.

The exchange went as smoothly as planned, the maid remaining
inside the carriage while a groom drove back to the mews to park it. Dillian
assumed the servant slipped from the carriage then and returned to the house
while she and Gavin faced the amused and heavily pregnant Marian Montague, the
marquess’s cousin.

“My word, the two of you look like something from a
village costume ball. Gavin, you cannot go about London in that Gothic cloak.
You look like a smuggler escaped from Cornwall. And those trousers!” She
covered her mouth to hide her laughter, and shook her head when the marquess
growled and stormed around the room, examining her enormous collection of
bric-a-brac.

“I didn’t come here to become a fashion plate.
This is serious business, Marian. Now, put a cap on it. Miss...” He
hesitated over the name he should use for Dillian but remembered the one they
discussed in time. “Miss Reynolds is your only concern. There must be no
appearance of a relationship between us, so you cannot be seen together. We
merely want your advice.”

The strangeness of the situation had kept Dillian silent.
She felt like a peasant next to Marian Montague’s dark loveliness. She
could certainly see the Lawrence resemblance. No pink-and-white miss this. Rich
brown hair dangled in elegant curls around a complexion of creamy tan,
accenting a wide rosy mouth that laughed frequently. She liked the dancing
highlights of eyes that matched Gavin’s almost exactly.

Throwing his anxious, pacing figure a quick look, Dillian
dived into the conversation without permission. “I need only reach Lady
Blanche’s house. She keeps a caretaker and his wife to look after things.
I can send one around to the modiste. I just cannot conceive of how I can
communicate with his lordship. I do not go about in society on my own. I can
see the solicitor, and I’m certain Neville will storm the threshold at
some date so I may ask about the missing papers. But how will Lord Effingham
and I communicate?”

Dillian felt odd calling Gavin by his title. She had scoffed
and called him beast and other names, but she had never addressed others when
speaking of him. The intimacy between them was so fresh in her mind, that this
formality was awkward. From the fierce dark look he sent her, she assumed he
felt the same.