Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 01] (31 page)

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Authors: Desperately Seeking a Duke

BOOK: Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 01]
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Rafe slid from his fine white horse and stumbled on the cobbles before the cathedral. He would have ridden his wonderful, beautiful horse directly into the apse if he’d thought he could, for his own legs didn’t seem to work terribly well at the moment.
As it was, he limped and lurched and staggered through the great doors and into the back of the enormous church—
Directly into a great crowd of onlookers who stood because there was no more room left to sit. The church was absolutely packed and it took Rafe several precious minutes to pardon and excuse and sometimes shove his way through the throng.
He could hear the clergyman giving instructions. The ceremony had already begun! With the last of his desperation, he flung himself through the crowd to find himself stumbling freely down the aisle. His legs gave out and he dropped to his knees.
“Phoebe!” His voice was too weak. He coughed. “
Phoebe!”
He tried to blink away the exhaustion blurring his vision. Far in front of him he saw two figures standing before the pulpit—one large and dark, one small and white. The white one turned at his rasping cry.
“Rafe ?”
He heard the murmurs begin around him. Hands came to aid him to his feet. More hands helped him down the aisle. Good Samaritans or spectators who wanted to see the rest of the show—it hardly mattered. At last he stood before them, weaving ever so slightly.
His brother and the woman he loved, standing together before a priest. It hurt—God, it hurt!
Calder stared down at him. “My God, Rafe! Where have you been?”
“I’ve been imprisoned in a root cellar for the past fortnight !”
Calder regarded him for a long moment. “You look as though you clawed your way out inch by inch.”
“I would have dug myself out of the grave to come back for Phoebe …” He turned to her. “I know what you must have thought …” God, it hurt to look at her, to see the darkness in her eyes. She was so pale, with circles beneath her eyes and hollows beneath her cheeks. She looked awful.
She’d never been so beautiful to him.
“I love you, Phoebe. I love you more than I ever knew it was possible to love anything. I know you think it was only desire—” She started to protest. He held up his hand. “I should have told you I loved you that first night. I should have proposed immediately when I pulled you into my arms to dance you away from the champagne you spilled—”
“I knew it!” Tessa snarled from the audience.
Deirdre and Sophie turned as one to glare at her. “Shut up, Tessa!”
Phoebe never took her gaze off Rafe. “May I speak now?”
“Not yet.” He moved to stand before her. “I owe you so much more than I can ever give you.” Kneeling nearly made him lose consciousness, but he blinked away the gray
fog. Reaching into his shirt, he pulled out a battered rose, a poor wild thing from a roadside bramble patch.
He extended it to her with a bow. “Come away with me, my lady,” he rasped. “I have a valley of exquisite beauty beknownst only to me …”
“Is this Lord Raphael?” The Archbishop of Canterbury stepped forward. “My lord, are you aware that the ceremony has already taken place?”
“No—” Rafe shook his head. “Yes—I mean … what did you say?”
It was over. He turned tortured eyes to Phoebe. She was staring at the crumpled rose in his hand. There were tears upon her cheeks.
She knelt on the floor with him to take the rose. “Your poor hands,” she whispered. “What have you done to yourself ?”
“This is most unorthodox, my lord.” The archbishop reached one hand inside his voluminous robe and withdrew a folded paper. “I was under the impression that you were not supposed to be here today.”
“But …” Rafe could not bend his mind around this disaster. “But I asked her first.”
His voice was weak, even to him, but Phoebe nodded and stroked the blossom across her cheek. “Yes. You did.”
“You ought to have thought of that before you signed this proxy, my lord,” the archbishop went on stuffily. “I do not approve of these hasty marriages. I told your brother and your wife as much, but his lordship and her ladyship insisted—”
Rafe stumbled to his feet. “What—wait—” He held up his hand. “Proxy?”
Wife?
“Yes, Rafe.” Calder stepped forward to take the paper from the archbishop’s hand. He unfolded it and displayed it to Rafe, all the while sending him a significant glare that
Rafe recognized from a lifetime of semi-allied brotherhood.
Don’t muck this up!
“Of course, you recall the marriage proxy that you signed so that I could take your place at the altar when you became
unavoidably detained,”
Calder said. “This is your signature, is it not?”
The agreed-upon response to this signal were the words, “Yes. Absolutely, Father” or “Master” or “Professor.”
Rafe looked at the proxy. It
was
his signature, and a hell of a lot better job of forgery than those clods who’d held him prisoner.
Wife.
His Phoebe.
His wife.
It was a mad, impossible trick. It was a fantastic, outrageous gift. Joy rose in him, as glorious as the palace fountain. He nodded slowly. “Yes. Absolutely, Your Grace. That is unmistakably my signature.”
Calder turned toward the archbishop. “There, you see? My brother was only a bit disoriented from his obvious ordeal. Let us finish this.”
“Wait a moment!” Phoebe held up her hand this time. “I don’t want to finish this!”
She turned to Rafe with both fists planted on the hips of her exquisite gown. Even dressed as she was, she looked furious and spirited and entirely prepared to take her argument right down to the carpet if necessary.
God, she was superb!
Rafe smiled at her lovingly. “You’re going to make me pay for thinking you’d wed Calder, aren’t you?”
She glared at him. “You have no idea. As if I could ever marry Calder in truth!”
“I probably ought to take offense to that,” Calder said mildly. They ignored him.
“Then shall we start over?” He rose shakily to his feet. “Calder, give me your coat, will you?”
She interrupted, muttering something. He stopped. “What?”
She disposed of her bouquet, tossing it over her shoulder to the avidly watching crowd, and turned to face the archbishop with only the tattered rose in her hand. “Now I’m ready.”
The archbishop looked appalled. “But my lord, we’ve already completed the ceremony. Am I to wed them
again?
”
Calder waved a hand. “I’ll pay twice your fee. Call it a wedding gift.” He stalked away to sit in one of the pews. Phoebe saw Deirdre turn in her seat to give Calder an assessing look.
Then Phoebe turned away from the crowd of astonished wedding guests and back to Rafe. He stood before her now, hesitant hope shining in his eyes.
“You haven’t said ‘yes’ yet,” he said.
Phoebe tilted her head back and gazed up at him. “Don’t you need a ring?”
He paled. “Er … I’ve been trapped in a root cellar for days.”
“Rafe,” Calder drawled. “Catch.”
Something glittered through the air, shining double in Rafe’s weary vision. He caught it somehow, then grinned at the familiar weight of the gold in his hand. His signet ring.
Apparently, he was a Marbrook still.
“Rafe, will you marry me now?”
He smiled down at his lovely bride.
The one.
Forever.
“What’s your hurry?”
She gave him a sultry look from beneath lowered lashes. “Just you wait, Lord Marbrook. In half an hour, you’ll be mine forever.”
He blinked. “You mean, there’s more to you than I’ve already seen?” It quite boggled the mind.
She laughed out loud. “Oh, Rafe, you’re going to need crutches and a tonic when I get through with you—if you survive me at all.”
The archbishop was listening, scandal alive on his furrowed face. Rafe grinned a bit giddily. “She’s going to marry me,” he told the man. “Again.”
The archbishop shook his head in wry warning. “I hope you’ve made your will, my lord.”
Rafe raised their clasped hands to kiss the back of hers. “Everything I have is hers,” he said, gazing into those bottomless depths of blue. “Everything.”
She grinned back, a blissful, wild smile that set his heart free at last. “I’ll take it,” she says. “I’ll take it all.”
“So Sir Pickering declared that we had to prove ourselves by our own merits,” Phoebe said into Rafe’s naked chest. “I could not tell you, or I would ruin it for all three of us. I could not do that to Sophie and Deirdre, even if I was willing to forgo the fortune. But you are family now, privy to our darkest secrets.”
Rafe had gone pale, which was quite an accomplishment considering what she’d just done to him before she’d begun her story. Her jaw still ached.
“Twenty-seven thousand pounds?”
“I think it is closer to twenty-eight thousand. Stickley and Wolfe are quite the miracle workers.”
Stickley and Wolfe.
Why did that suddenly remind her of something unpleasant?
No. Ridiculous.
“But to give all that up for me? I had no idea what I was asking of you.”
“It is nothing. I would take you if you were a rat catcher or a chimney sweep.”
He smiled. “Not quite that bad. I have something to tell you as well. Calder has agreed to let me take the reins at Brookhaven. He’ll be duke soon and he’ll have little time to run both Brookmoor and Brookhaven—and it will be many years before any son of his is old enough to take over.”
Phoebe rolled blissfully beneath him, wriggling with joy. “That’s wonderful! Maybe you’ll be lucky and he’ll have nothing but daughters!”
His gaze went dark as she writhed against him. “Be quiet, Phoebe-mine. There’s something I’ve been dying to do to you …”
Her eyes brightened. “Indeed, my master? What is tha—
Oh!”
Afterward, limp and perspiring, they lay draped across one another as they fought for breath.
“Goodness,” Phoebe panted, “I didn’t know I could bend that way!”
“I’ve always wanted to try that,” Rafe wheezed. “I saw it in a book of naughty drawings once.”
“Well, thank goodness for the arts!” Phoebe shivered with tiny bursts of continued ecstasy.
Breathless silence reigned for several minutes, until Rafe chuckled deeply. “I thought I would spew my wine when Somers Boothe-Jamison approached us at the wedding breakfast and inquired after Lady Nanditess!” He shook his head. “Poor bloke seemed rather smitten. It was cruel of you to tell him she’d just been married off to an elderly fourth cousin in the Highlands.”
“Nonsense. Cousin Harold happens to adore her, and her name, I’ll remind you.”
He laughed and rolled her onto his chest. “I adore you.”
She smiled. “The feeling is mutual, my lord.”
“Be my lady of the roses?”
She bit his chest gently. “Always.”
STICKLEY RAISED HIS glass to Wolfe. “We did it.”
Wolfe smiled. “We did.” Between them lay a sheet of paper … an agreement signed by Miss Deirdre Cantor that she had no intention of withdrawing the principal of the
trust and that she would be perfectly satisfied with the generous lifetime allowance afforded by the interest. The trust wouldn’t grow as quickly, of course, as under Stickley’s careful nurturing, but it would grow. Wolfe drank deep, then refilled his glass and topped off the minor sip that Stickley had taken from his glass. “To weddings!”
Stickley looked down at the agreement. “This isn’t really binding, you realize. If she’s to marry Brookhaven, then when he becomes Brookmoor, she’ll be within her rights to take it all.”
Wolfe shrugged. “Why would she? Turns out that Brookhaven has a pot full and as Brookmoor he’ll have plenty more, so what in the world would any lady need with twenty-seven thousand pounds?”
Stickley smiled smugly. “It’s closer to twenty-eight now.”
Wolfe punched him in the arm. “Stick, you old dog! You’re a marvel.”
Stickley smiled but rubbed at his arm in irritation. Now that the crisis was over, he couldn’t wait for Wolfe to go back to his ne’er-do-well ways and let him alone to run things properly. Look at him now, with his heels up scuffing the desk again!
Wolfe was gazing at the ceiling, humming tunelessly. After a long moment, he stood abruptly and plunked his glass on the desk, leaving a splash of wine on the blotter. “Well, Stick, it’s been a right pleasure working with you these past weeks, but I do have business of my own to attend to. If you’ll be so kind as to transfer my retainer …”
Stickley reached into his desk drawer and sailed the pouch through the air. Wolfe plucked it from its course and hefted it with satisfaction. “You’ve upped it again, haven’t you, Stick?”
Stickley nodded. “Of course. You’ve worked hard in the past weeks. It’s only right that you receive a larger share. I do hope you’ll enjoy … er … using it.”
Wolfe tapped a forefinger to his temple in an offhand salute. “Righto, General Stickley. Well, then, I’m off.”
When he’d gone, Stickley leaned back into his lovely tufted leather chair and breathed a long sigh of pleasure at the silence. Wolfe wasn’t all bad. He had most definitely come through in the midst of the madness … but it was good to have things back to normal.
And to think, they’d managed to do it all without stealing a dime!
Of course, Stickleys
never
stole.

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