In Love With a Wicked Man (36 page)

“Oh, yes, set me down,” said Kate gratefully. “My arms were numb but they’re just prickling now.”

Gingerly he did so. When her feet hit the ground, Edward held her at a distance, his gaze sweeping down her, as if she were a fragile piece of porcelain. An instant later, Anstruther drew his massive horse around the cottage, throwing up mud and bracken.

“Kate, lass, are ye hurt?” he demanded, flying from the saddle.

“No, no,” said Kate, dragging a hand through her hair. “Just filthy and a little nauseous. He clapped some sort of drug over my face.”

“Weel, did he now?” Anstruther reached back his booted foot and swung it hard at Reggie’s arse.

Reggie squealed at the blow, and tried to sit up.

“Aye, ye glaikit fool,” Anstruther grunted. “I’ve wished to do that an age now.”

“I can’t believe you’d kick a man when he was down, Anstruther,” said Edward dryly.

“Aye? Well, I can’t believe you dinna aim a tad higher and save me the trooble.” Anstruther was looking at the burning cottage. “Flushed him out and picked him off, eh? It wanted a new roof in any case.”

Edward smiled at Kate and shrugged. “I’ve been in a mood to burn something down today,” he remarked. “It was this or Heatherfields.”

He had settled one arm around Kate’s waist, and seemed deeply disinclined to let go.

On a sigh, Anstruther bent down and hauled Reggie up onto his good leg. “Weel, hop along ye game-legged eejit,” he said. “You’ll be wanting Fitch and his scalpel, I reckon.”

“What’s best done with him afterward?” Edward mused. “Truss him up like a Christmas goose and haul him before the justice?”

Reggie looked on the verge of tears now. Anstruther chewed on his lip a minute.

“I say we just get rid of him,” said Kate flatly.

“Aye?” said Anstruther hopefully. “And bury him where?”

Kate gave a bark of laughter. “No, Anstruther, just make him go away,” she said. “Haul him down to Southampton and put him on a ship bound for some hellish hot, midge-infested island.”

“I can recommend Ceylon,” said Edward dryly.

“
Hmph
,” said Anstruther. He was rummaging through his saddlebag. “I’ll have him shut up in the village jail for now,” he said, extracting a length of rope and a large canteen.

“Thank you,” said Edward. “Kate, my dear, I had better wait and let the worst of the fire go out. Will you—”

“I will be fine,” she said firmly, taking the canteen from Anstruther. “I’m staying. Thank you both. Thank you ever so much for rescuing me.”

Reggie having been well bound with the rope, the big Scotsman hefted him up with very little help from Edward, and tossed him sidelong across the saddle, his expression resolute. But the rope had hardly been needed; Reggie had fallen into what could only be described as a state of utter despondency, and all the fight had gone out of him.

Edward led Kate around the cottage and up the hill. From this vantage point one could see the ancient roof burning briskly, but there was no wind to carry the flames, and no place, really, for it to go, given the damp. But the surge of anger he’d felt upon seeing Kate bound and filthy had rushed through him and left him almost sagging with relief.

Kate found a thick patch of grass in the lee of the hill and sat down on a sigh. “Do you know, for an instant there I feared Reggie might really shoot me,” she said, tucking her legs beneath her. “It came as rather a shock, really, for I’d imagined him too useless to seize initiative.”

“Reggie has been seized by insanity,” said Edward—who knew, he imagined, just what sort of madness Kate could inspire in a man’s heart.

She looked up and smiled at him, then held up a hand. “Come, sit down,” she said softly. “There’s nothing to be done for a time.”

Instead he went down on one knee and, having extracted a handkerchief from his coat pocket, soaked it with the canteen and began to gently wipe the dirt and soot from Kate’s face. “You look a fright, Lady d’Allenay,” he murmured, dabbing gently at a scratch on her temple. “I would still like to take a horsewhip to that dog.”

“I’m tempted to let you.” Kate lifted her chin for his ministrations, and when he was finished, she took a long drink from the canteen. Then, in a wonderfully unladylike gesture, she spit it some distance into the grass. “
Bleh!
” she said. “I think he gave me chloroform.”

Edward held her gaze for a long moment, then laid his handkerchief aside. “Kate,” he said quietly. “Oh, Kate, I ought never have let you from my sight.”

Confusion sketched over her face. “Edward, I can’t see how it’s—”

But the sentence was cut short, for he had caught her in his arms. “Kate,” he whispered into her hair. “Oh, Kate, my love. I could not bear it should anything ever happen to—”

“Nothing did,” she interjected, pushing herself a little away so that she might look up at him. “Nothing happened, Edward.
You
came
. And Anstruther came. And Reggie is an ass.”

“I should never have left you.” His eyes were locked to hers now, his hand cupped tenderly around her face as he pondered what he might have lost. “Not with that lunatic on the loose.”

Kate broke the gaze, and turned away. “You didn’t abandon me, Edward,” she said. “I believe we made—perhaps foolishly—a mutual decision that you should go.”

“Kate,” he rasped. “Kate, love, look at me, please.”

She did so, her eyes wide and honest in the sunlight.

“Kate,” he said again. “
Was
it foolish?”

“Oh, Edward!” she said, her voice very small. “I lost my temper and I said things I ought not have said.”

He set a finger to her lips. “And I was not honest with you, Kate,” he said. “As soon as I remembered about Annie, I should have told—”

“No.” She shook her head. “I was mad at Mamma—and perhaps even
that
was wrong—but I certainly had no right to demand—”

“I give you the right,” he said swiftly. “I give you the right, Kate, to demand of me whatever you need, now and ever after. It’s not as if I don’t trust you. It
is not.
It never has been. It’s just that Annie is a part of my life that I’ve always . . . well, reflexively clouded, is the best way to put it.”

“It’s not my business,” she said, her lips thinning.

He took both her hands in his. “It
is
,” he said, squeezing them. “But Kate, I did not lie to you. Annie is not mine; I was a world away in Ceylon when she was conceived.”

“Oh, Edward!” Sadness sketched over her face. “And you loved Maria so much!”

“I suppose.” Edward swallowed hard and felt the cold uncertainty inside him again. “It’s so hard to know, when one is young. I was a hotheaded young fool, certainly, and she—well, like so many young girls, she loved the romance. The pursuit. The
drama
.”

“The drama?”

He smiled faintly. “I expect you wouldn’t understand,” he said. “You were not melodramatic, I’d wager, when you were seventeen.”

Kate laughed weakly. “No, I was painfully practical,” she said. “But many girls do love to swoon over tragedy.”

“And I was Maria’s tragedy.” He drew a deep, slow breath, then let it out again. “Kate, do you want to know? Shall I try to tell you what happened, as best I can?”

She gave a feeble shrug. “We do have time to kill.”

“Aye, we do at that.”

Edward stared down at the fire for a moment, contemplating how to explain what he barely understood. “I met Maria at Brighton one summer,” he began. “I told you her father was horrified when I tried to court her. I was bold and impulsive then, and enraged that he found me unacceptable. And, as it would with any young man, that rage served only to make me more determined to have her.”

“It is often thus, I believe, with young men.” Kate smiled faintly. “What form did your determination take?”

“When Maria vowed she loved me, I insisted she refuse the marriage her father had arranged,” he said. “I told her to wait for me; that I’d make myself worthy and somehow pay off her father’s debt, then no one could deny us.”

“And that’s when you joined the army, you said,” Kate murmured.

He nodded, still staring at the flames. “Yes, but a few months into it, Kate, real life settled in and I began to wonder if I was that much in love, or if I was just angry over being denied. I was always angry, Kate, in those days.”

“I expect you were,” said Kate almost defensively. “You had been through a great deal. You’d been torn from your family—from your mother and your brother—and left to make your way in a harsh world.”

“It makes for a pretty excuse, I daresay,” he replied. “In any case, Maria wrote constantly, waxing over her father’s cruelty. How dreadful and overbearing her intended was. How stalwart and brave she was, crying herself to sleep every night. But there was something . . . something beneath all the words that began to trouble me.”

“Enjoyed it rather too much, did she?” said Kate knowingly.

He winced a little. “I became uneasy,” he admitted, “and I’m still not sure why. Perhaps I felt unworthy of such a noble sacrifice, or perhaps the drama wore me down, but I began to debate the wisdom of my obstinacy. It didn’t help that, before I left England, her mother had accused me of coming between Maria and their neighbor. She claimed Maria had been happy about the match until I came along.”

“Lies, I am sure,” said Kate defensively.

He looked up at her from beneath his lashes, his mouth twisting. “So I assumed . . .”

“But—?”

He sighed. “When I came home and found Maria dead, her mother flung Maria’s old love letters in my face,” he said. “Apparently, she had indeed written this man several. So I had broken up . . .
something
. I had not meant to.
I had not.
”

Kate set her hand to his cheek. “Oh, Edward, how were you to know?”

“She was young,” he said again. “I . . . I should have known. I should not have confused her. I should not have ordered her to wait, then gone away and left her. I felt then a little like I feel today—as if I had abandoned someone I cared for—and should have protected—at the very point danger edged near.”

“Oh, Edward. That is just not so.”

Kate was holding her hands in her lap now, clasped a little too tightly. Down the hill, the roof was still burning—well, smoking as much as anything—the dried and ancient beams destined to eventually fall in, he thought. He could feel Kate’s gaze upon him, steady and expectant. And yet he waited.

Waited for her to ask. As if that might absolve him.

“So who was Annie’s father?” she finally said.

“The man her father had betrothed her to,” he said. “He had become impatient, according to Maria, of waiting for what he’d been promised—what he felt he had
paid for—
so he came one day when her parents were out to ask her one last time. She refused him, she said, and he raped her. Then he hurled her love letters in her face—according to her mother—and told Maria that her duchess’s bastard could have the leavings, for hell would freeze over before he’d ask her again.”

“Dear God!” Kate drew an unsteady breath. “And her father did nothing?”

“She did not tell him,” said Edward, “or tell me, for that matter, until she found herself with child. By then the man had wed another. But what could her father have done? This neighbor practically owned him—his house, his farmland, Mr. Granger had mortgaged it all.”

“But that is dreadful!” Kate swallowed hard, her knuckles gone white now. “That poor girl. What did you do?”

“I wrote her and told her to claim the child was mine; to refuse to be swayed from that story,” he said. “It was madness, yes—but better, I thought, than the shame of having been raped. Wasn’t it? After all, it was my fault for interfering.”

“Oh, Edward! That simply is not so.”

“But I told her to hold fast
no matter what
,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Who was I, Kate, to tell her such a thing? I look back now, and realize that I barely knew her. I was just infatuated and angry. Petulant, really. It taught me well, Kate, that a man must be the master of his emotions, or they will bloody well master him. Worse, Maria had waited too long to tell me of the child. It took me weeks to get relieved of command and find a ship heading to England, and months to travel. And by the time I arrived . . .”

“By the time you arrived, she was gone,” Kate whispered hollowly. “She was dead, and there was only the child. And she had told everyone the child was yours.”

“Her parents knew it for a lie, of course,” he said with a shrug. “But they didn’t confirm or deny it. Instead, Granger maintained—and God help him, it’s remotely possible he was truthful—that Maria had been playing us both false. That she’d
given
herself to the man, trying to dangle us both, and he’d ruined her—with no ravishment involved—then refused to do the right thing to spite her.”

“Dear God!” said Kate. “But that is . . . that is . . . I have no words for what that is.”

“Try
confusing
,” Edward bitterly suggested. “Or the truth? Or a load of moonshine? Or was it just a weak and indebted man explaining away why he let his daughter be raped, and did nothing?”

“What did Mrs. Granger think?”

He shrugged. “She says she isn’t sure,” he admitted. “But she did have the love letters, so that much rings true. I challenged the man—tried to get at the truth—but he wouldn’t say. I slapped a glove in his face, but by then his own wife was with child. So in the end, I just shot him in the arm and went the hell back to London. He lived. Granger didn’t; he died, bitter and bankrupt, leaving Annie and his wife impoverished. That’s when I took over Annie’s care. Until then, I was not even permitted to see her.”

“Dear heaven,” asked Kate. “How does one take care of a child under such tragic circumstances?”

“I moved them to a village where no one would know about the scandal,” he said, “and bought a large cottage. I hired servants and a governess—it seemed the least I could do—and I told Mrs. Granger to tell people what she damned well pleased about me, and I honestly have no clear notion what she has said. I believe I’m called Annie’s godfather—a polite euphemism if ever there was one. I visit twice a year—though Mrs. Granger hates it, and truth be told, I hate it.”