Noble Destiny (26 page)

“Dearest Algernon says it's no one person. The wagers are on all the books at all the gentlemen's clubs…Charlotte, where are you going?”

She gathered her cloak from the chair behind hers, unable for a moment to speak. In a distant, isolated part of her mind she noted interestedly that her hands were shaking, although she was neither cold nor frightened. “Alasdair has taken our carriage; might I use yours?”

Caroline followed her friend to the hall behind their box. “Yes, of course you may. You don't look at all well; you really should go home and lie down.”

“I will go home when I've seen to this latest outrage.”

“See to it? You mean the wagers? How will you see to it?”

Charlotte pinned her summer cloak closed and collected her reticule and fan. A righteous anger filled her, giving strength to her purpose. She would not allow Dare to become the laughingstock of the
ton
. “I will see to it in the most expedient of manners—I shall go to the men's clubs and steal their betting books.”

Caroline fainted dead away.

***

An hour later Charlotte stepped down from the borrowed carriage, waving toward its interior as Batsfoam prepared to close the carriage door. “There are a number of books on the seat. Please have them brought to the kitchen and burned.”

“Books, madam?”

“Books, Batsfoam. Large ones, containing several pages, most of which are filled with foolish wagers made by even more foolish men who ought to know better.

Batsfoam glanced at the nearest book, which carried the name White's in a gilded, elegant script. There were at least seven more betting books he could see by the light of the carriage lantern. A rare smile touched the grim line of his lips as he gestured a footman to the task. “Eh…did no one see you while you were liberating the books?”

“They saw me, but I wore a domino, so no one knew it was me. Besides, the sort of men they employ at those clubs are not at all what I would call intimidating. Cowards, the lot of them. They positively whimpered when I brandished his lordship's dueling pistol. A baby could have stolen those books.”

“Ah. That was very clever of you to wear the domino, if I might be allowed to offer my humble and unworthy opinion.”

“Of course it was clever, you don't think I would do anything to make people talk, now do you? Is Lord Carlisle at work on his engine?” Charlotte asked as she unpinned her cloak and allowed Batsfoam to take it from her.

“He is.”

“Very well.” She paused for a moment as she stripped off her gloves, then shook her head at the pang of worry over her recent actions. “What's done is done.”

“Ma'am?”

No, she was being silly to worry. No one had the slightest idea who had so boldly pushed past the porters of the clubs and dashed in to steal the books. Thank heavens Matthew had filled her ears while growing up with tales of the betting books. For once, she was grateful he was such a wastrel. “And even if someone was to recognize me, there's my little project; surely that will take care of any speculation that might be rice.”

“Rice, ma'am?”

“Hmm?” She pulled her mind from worry about what would happen if word got out that she'd stolen the betting books and looked at Batsfoam before turning toward the stairs. “No, thank you. I'm not hungry, although I would like a cup of tea sent to my bedchamber. And don't forget to attend those foul books. I won't have my husband's manly instrument impugned.”

She paused when the butler appeared to have swallowed something wrong, advised him to have a drink of water, then made her way upstairs. With contortions that would do an acrobat proud, she managed to disrobe herself. Clad in Dare's cherry-red silk dressing gown—she preferred it over the demure blue of her own—she curled up on his newly refurbished bed with Vyvyan La Blue's book and made notes about which connubial calisthenics were most suited to pacifying a husband who was in a sulk. She was mulling over the relative merits of Upturned Flowerpot Upon an Alabaster Pillar versus Cantonese Archery when a tremendous explosion rocked the house.

The floor beneath the bed shook as if the earth itself trembled, and in the throb of noise that followed, the sharp tinkle of glass hitting the paving stones outside could be heard. Charlotte sat for a moment, dumbfounded by the shock of the explosion. Then she was on her feet, racing barefoot down the stairs, calling her husband's name, ruthlessly pushing everyone in her path out of the way. The glass in the kitchen windows was missing, wood and plaster and pieces of twisted metal everywhere. The door to the stairs leading to the subbasement hung drunkenly on one hinge, thrown backward toward the wall.

Someone called her name, but Charlotte ignored the warning, ignored the hands that reached to stop her. Heedless of the pain inflicted on her bare feet, she kicked debris off the stairs as she struggled to make her way downward, coughing and gasping in the thick cloud of coal and dirt and steam that filled the room. Her eyes streamed and burned as she searched desperately for Dare.

“Here!” a voice croaked from behind the remains of the heavy oak table Dare used as a worktable. “Joseph! Wills! Someone bring me a litter. And tell her ladyship—”

Charlotte was there in an instant, pushing Batsfoam out of her way so she could see her husband. He was covered in blood and black coal dust, dirt everywhere, shreds of wood and paper littering his body, small pieces of metal from the exploded engine piercing his skin.

Time seemed to stop and hold its breath as she knelt at his side, aware of the debris that pressed painfully into her knees, but uncaring in the face of the nightmare staring at her. Disbelief, fear, and anger all swirled around in her as Dare's blood seeped into a pool that soaked her legs. She gently touched the bloodied mess that was the right side of his face and shoulder, horror at the damage inflicted upon him mingling with joy that his chest rose and fell, indicating that he wasn't dead, he hadn't been taken from her…
yet
.

Dimly she was aware of Batsfoam shouting orders as he and the footmen dragged the larger pieces of twisted metal and wood from where they surrounded Dare. She shredded her night rail to bind the worst of his wounds, walking beside him, holding his hand tightly in hers as his unconscious form was carried upstairs. All the while her mind was spinning in a confusion of answerless questions. How could anyone survive such an explosion? How could his heart continue to beat after such a horrible event? How could he endure the loss of so much blood? A sob tore from her throat as she gazed at the broken body that was laid gently on his bed. How could she live without him?

His wife was the devil incarnate.

“Good morning, husband! Isn't it a lovely day?”

True, she didn't have horns or cloven hooves or smell like brimstone, but Dare was convinced she was a handmaiden of Satan, if not the Dark Master himself.

“Of course, you wouldn't know it's a lovely day outside since you sit here in the dark. I'll just open these curtains and let the sunlight in.”

Who else but the devil would derive such pleasure from his pain?

“You haven't eaten your breakfast. Dare, you must eat, you can't expect to regain your health if you don't eat.”

She was smiling at him, dammit, her dimples blaring away as she tried to coax him into eating. She was always coaxing him to do something or other. He didn't want to be coaxed, he wanted to be left alone. In the dark. With no bright blue eyes to remind him just how much he'd lost.

He wanted to die.

“Dare? I've made something for you.”

He closed his eyes…eye…and held his breath. If he pretended he was asleep, perhaps she'd leave him be. It had worked in a past. A couple of times. Not recently, though.

“Here it is! It's a new eye patch. Do you like it?”

Air moved in front of his face as if someone swung an object before him…an object approximately the size and shape of an eye patch.

An eye patch he needed to cover the gaping hole in his head where his right eye had once been.

“It wasn't easy embroidering your plaid colors, but I persevered, and I think the effect is really quite stunning.”

There he sat—eyeless, scarred, his right arm limp, a complete wreck of a man. Useless, that's what he was. No, worse than useless—pitiful. He was a pitiful, useless, half-man, one who had failed his wife at every possible level of husbandness.

“The sporran, I believe, adds a particularly cunning touch.”

Pitiful and pathetic, a shell, a former man, now good for nothing but sitting in the dark, taking up space, eating food that should go to better, more worthy, deserving men who hadn't ruined their lives and their wives' lives…
sporran
?

Dare opened his eye. “You put a sporran on an eye patch?”

Charlotte knelt at his feet, one hand resting on his knee. She held a red eye patch in one hand, decorated in such a manner that it looked like a miniscule kilt, complete with sporran. She must have worked for hours over it.

“Give it to someone else,” he heard himself say gruffly. “I don't deserve it.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I don't know any other McGregor who needs an eye patch.” Charlotte flashed those damned happy dimples at him again. Her hand tightened on his knee, sending a sudden flash of warmth up his leg, straight to his groin.

That was another way he was bound to disappoint her. She wanted children. She had enjoyed their liaisons in bed. Now she was shackled to him for life, a pitiful specimen of mankind who would never be able to fulfill even her most basic desires.

If he had any honor, he'd take a pistol to his head and end both their torments.

“Leave me,” he mumbled, leaning his head back against the chair and closing his eye.

“What did you say?”

“LEAVE ME,” he said more forcefully, opening his eye just long enough to glare at her.

She studied him for a moment, then leaned forward between his legs until her breasts were pressed against his groin, her fingers trailing down the grapevine of scars that marked the side of his face. “Are you in pain?”

He was surprised to note he had an erection. He had assumed he wasn't capable of one any longer, but the warmth of her soft breasts pressed against him, coupled with the faint lavender scent that teased his nose and the erotic glide of her fingers down his face, stirred him as nothing had in the past month since the accident.

“No pain,” he answered hoarsely, hope springing to life within him. If he could bed her, at least he would be of some use. He could give her pleasure, give her children, give her something to make up for the hell he had dragged her into.

She was no longer looking at his injuries, now she was looking at his mouth with an avidity that bespoke her own awareness of him. Heat blossomed within him as he leaned forward to capture her mouth, to taste her again, to sink into the warm haven her mouth offered. He slid one arm around her waist, pulling her tight against him, while the other hand ached to cup the back of her head, tipping it backwards, leaving her lips parted, waiting to be plundered…

He stared with humiliation at his right arm. It hung limply at his side, refusing his order to tangle his fingers in Charlotte's golden curls. He couldn't even lift the leaden weight of it enough to put his arm around her.

“Dare?”

He let his left arm drop from her waist, slumping back into the chair, closing his eye against the disappointment—and worse, pity—he was sure to see in her eyes.

“Dare? Is something wrong?”

What a wretched end he had come to. Despair wailed within him as he realized that even if he had been able to will his injured arm into working properly, he couldn't pleasure his wife. No woman in her right mind would want such a pathetic mockery of a man to touch her.

“Husband, I realize you are frustrated because the strength hasn't returned to your arm, but Dr. Milton did say that he believed exercising it would help you regain the muscle you lost. Would you like to do a few of the exercises now? After you're done, I would be very happy to sit on your lap and kiss you.”

He was only fooling himself to think it would be otherwise. “Leave me be, Charlotte.”

“But, Dare—”

“Get out, woman! Why must you always be fluttering around me? Can't you see I don't want you?”

“But I want to help—”

“All I want from you is your absence!”

His words were hurtful, intended to cause pain, spoken with cruelty since he knew that was the only way he could drive her from his side. He fully expected her to snap back at him, to hurl harsh words at his scarred face, to run sobbing from the room. What he wasn't expecting was for her to press herself against him and kiss him gently on his lips.

“I love you, Dare. I always will.”

He kept his eye closed tight against the tears that rose with her words and held his breath until he heard the door close behind her. With the soft click of the lock, he released his breath and stared dully at the rug beneath his feet.

The last thing he could bear was for her to see him cry.

***

“I am back, Batsfoam.”

“So I can see, my lady. How was Mr. Crouch?”

Charlotte unburdened herself of her spencer. “Saddened that my plan for distracting Society by means of the mortal embarrassment of Lady Brindley has been permanently delayed, but he agreed that I have more important things to tend to now than worrying about what people say. The visit to Dr. Milton was less pleasant. Has my husband eaten?”

“I regret that he has not, my lady.”

Charlotte paused in the act of removing her gloves and looked closely at the butler. His habitual air of misery had been missing the last four weeks, as if tending to his wounded master had relieved him of his own self-absorption. Batsfoam had worked just as hard as she had to keep Dare alive those first few weeks, spelling each other so one could rest while the other sat with Dare and made sure the fever that set in didn't claim his life. It had been a long, tortuous fight, but after two weeks they silently celebrated their victory when Dare's fever broke and he quickly began to regain his strength.

Until the last week, when melancholy and depression set in.

“Has he left his bedchamber?”

“He went to his study.”

Batsfoam's eyes were dark with apprehension. Charlotte frowned as she pulled off the second glove. What was in Dare's study that had Batsfoam so concerned? Dare hadn't left his bedchamber since he was carried upstairs, more dead than alive. Surely the fact that he left his room to go to the study was a good sign.

She frowned over the memory of the morning as she headed for the stairs. He had told her he didn't need her. He'd rejected her attentions, couldn't even bring himself to kiss her when she pressed against him, but she had seen the self-loathing in his eye and knew he was wallowing in an endless well of self-pity. The physician had told her Dare had healed physically, but his mind was now the cause of worry… “Damnation! His pistols!”

She leaped up the stairs, her heart pounding madly. Why hadn't she had the sense to hide his pistols? The answer echoed in her head as she cleared the top step and turned to race down the long hall.

She never thought he'd be despondent enough to contemplate taking his life.

“Lady Charlotte!”

She ignored Batsfoam's cry and flung herself into the small room at the back of the house that Dare used as his study.

He sat in the darkened room before the empty grate, a bottle of whiskey at his side, one of his dueling pistols lying across his knee. With a slow, ominous movement, his head turned until he was looking at her. Her breath caught at the dulled look of hopelessness in his dark blue eye. He had given up. Dr. Milton had warned her that men either fought to live, or gave up and just wasted away. Despite all her care and love, Dare had chosen the latter path.

Well, he would have to think again! Charlotte stood before her husband, her hands fisted, anger like none she'd ever known filling her at the sight of the pistol on his lap. She loved him—he couldn't just give up like that! He loved her, too. Didn't that mean he would do anything for her?

“If you kill yourself, I will
never
forgive you,” she yelled. “Never, do you understand? Never! I will make your life a living hell, or just you see if I don't!”

He blinked at her, then smiled a grim sort of smile that made her hand itch to slap it off his face. But she couldn't slap him—he'd been grievously injured. A good wife didn't slap her husband when he'd suffered a most traumatic event like surviving an explosion.

“If I am dead, you can hardly make my life a living hell.”

The crack of her hand meeting his cheek shocked both of them. Batsfoam, standing in the doorway, gasped in surprise before suddenly grinning as he quietly backed out of the room and closed the door. Dare stared at her, disbelief written on his face. Slowly he set the pistol on the table at his elbow and one-handedly pushed himself out of the chair.

Charlotte refused to give ground to him. She stood where she was, pressed against him, her head tilted back to give him a glare to end all glares.

“You slapped me,” Dare growled.

“Yes, I did. And I enjoyed it,” she answered defiantly. It was true—she had enjoyed slapping him, a fact that should have shamed her, but the sad reality was that she was fed up with his self-pity. Dr. Milton had told her that very afternoon that unless Dare stopped pitying himself, he would likely not survive another month. Considering the pistol, she doubted if he would last even that long. “Indeed, I enjoyed it so much, I think I will do it again.”

The second slap brought some color to Dare's face, but best of all, it also brought a murderous glint to his eye. Charlotte could have danced a jig at the sight of that emotion—until then, only apathy and despair had been present in his lovely eye.

“I have been wounded, madam. Do you take so much pleasure in my pain that you must add to it?” Dare asked between clenched teeth.

“Well, of course I do,” she answered, raising her chin another notch, secretly smiling at the look of indignation plainly visible on his handsome face. “That's why I have not left your side these last four weeks. That's why I sat up all night, every night, for two weeks while you raged with fever. That's why I bathed you, changed your bandages, took care of your personal needs, fed you, wept over you, and pleaded with you to not give up, begging you to fight the fever until you returned to me. That is why, until today when I called on the physician you refused to see, I have not stepped foot out of this house since the accident. I did all that because I take
so
very
much
pleasure in your pain.”

He had the grace to look ashamed, but it wasn't enough. The time had clearly come for him to make the decision, and by God, if he didn't make the right one, she'd make it for him.

“I will not go through the nightmare of having to pick out and train another husband,” she told him, poking him in the chest as she did so.

“Train?” he snarled. “Do you liken me to an animal that must be trained to be made habitable?”

“I liken you to a man who is extremely pigheaded and obstinate, and hasn't a clue about what really matters in life. Until you realize just how blessed you are to have me as your wife—”

“I do realize how blessed I am…was,” he shouted back at her, his face flushed with anger. “You are the loveliest, most amazing woman I know, dammit! I love you!”

“Then you had better start acting like it!” she said in a volume that a less-refined person might label as yelling.

“God damn you, woman, how can I? I'm crippled! Near blind! I'm worthless in every bloody respect! I have no money, no title, no social standing left to me, and now the last thing I had—a body worthy of worshipping you—has been destroyed. The only way I can show you I love you is to rid the earth of my pitiable presence and leave you free to marry a man who can give you what I can't.”

She slapped him again, not very hard, but hard enough that he tensed his jaw, narrowed his eye, and grabbed at her wrist to keep her from repeating the action. She had to admit she greatly enjoyed shocking him out of his attack of self-pity. “How dare you! How dare you insinuate that the only reason I married you was for your money or title or social standing or your handsome face!”

He leaned forward until his hot breath fanned her face. “Can you honestly say you didn't marry me for those things?”