Three Weddings And A Kiss (17 page)

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.

When she came up beside him, he spoke.

“You mentioned a hospital,” he said, moving on again. His voice was hoarse and unsteady. Exhaustion and inner distress were easy enough to diagnose. The distress itself was more difficult to analyze. He was not looking at her but watching the path
ahead,
and his long, wet hair hung in his face, concealing his expression.

“I have been trying to guess why you would come to marry a dying madman,” he continued. “You said you needed me. I assume it’s the money you need.” He gave a short laugh.
“Obviously.
What other reason could there be?”

That was rather a crass way of putting it. Nevertheless, it was true enough, and Gwendolyn had determined at the outset to be honest with him.

“I do need the money, to build a hospital,” she said. “I have definite ideas about how it should be constructed as well as the principles according to which it must be run. In order to achieve my goals—without negotiation or compromise—I require not only substantial funds, but influence. As Countess of Rawnsley, I should have both. As your widow, I should be able to act independently. Since you are the last of the males of your family, I should have to answer to no one.”

She glanced at him. “You see, I did take all the details of your present situation into account, my lord.”

He was looking straight ahead. He had pushed his sopping mane back from his face. She still couldn’t read his expression, but she saw no signs of shock or anger.

“My grandfather would turn over in his grave,” he said after a moment.
“A woman—the Countess of Rawnsley, no less—building a hospital with the family fortune.
All that money thrown away upon peasants.”

“Wealthy people don’t need hospitals,” she said. “They can afford to keep physicians about to attend every trivial discomfort.”

“And you mean to run it according to your principles,” he said. “My grandfather had a very low opinion of feminine intelligence. A woman with ideas of her own, in his view, was a dangerous aberrant of Nature.” He glanced at her, then quickly away. “You present me with an almost irresistible temptation.”

“I hope so,” she said. “There is not another man in England whose circumstances are more neatly suited to my aspirations. I grasped this almost immediately and was quite frantic to get here before you killed yourself. You see, I am much more desperate to marry you than you could possibly be to marry anybody.”

“Desperate,” he said with another short laugh. “I am the answer to your prayers, am I?”

The halfhearted rain was building to a steady drizzle, and lightning skittered at the edges of the moorland. Still, they were not far from the house now, and traveling on lower ground than before.

He seemed to be mulling the matter over.

Gwendolyn waited silently, resisting the urge to pray. She did not wish to tempt Fate into more practical jokes. It had already landed him in
a mire
.

She contented herself with a few cautious sidelong glances at the man she’d come to marry. The rain was washing some of the muck away, and even though his face was still dirty, there was no mistaking the nobly chiseled profile.

He was terribly handsome.

She had not expected that. But then, she was used to expecting the worst. The possibility of finding him attractive had not entered her calculations. She was adjusting those calculations when he spoke again.

“I came here to finish my time in peace,” he said. “I hoped that if I kept to myself in this isolated place and didn’t bother anybody, no one would bother me.”

“But we have come and turned everything upside down,” she said. “I can understand how frustrating that is.”

He turned to her. “Abonville won’t leave me alone, will he?”

“I shall do my utmost to persuade him to respect your wishes,” she said cautiously. She couldn’t promise Abonville would keep away forever, yet she did not want to use the duc as a threat. She did not want Rawnsley to feel he must hide behind a woman’s skirts. One of the most disagreeable aspects of being ill was feeling helpless and utterly dependent upon others.

“If I do as he asks and marry you, he’ll probably leave me in peace, at least for a time,” Rawnsley said. “The trouble is
,
I should have you about instead, and yet…” His gaze drifted to her leg, then upward. After studying her face for a brooding moment, he returned his attention to the track ahead.

“I have not had a woman in nearly a twelve-month,” he said tightly. “I had determined to put such matters behind me. Apparently, that species of saintliness is not in my nature, and a year is not nearly long enough to cultivate it. I should need decades, I suppose,” he said bitterly.

Gwendolyn had not come expecting the kind of “saintliness” he referred to. She had been prepared to go to bed with him and try to make a baby regardless of what he looked like or how he behaved. If it had not seemed like cruel and unusual punishment then, it could hardly alarm or disgust her now. If a long period of celibacy—and for a man, a year must seem like eternity—and a glimpse of her leg was swaying his judgment in her
favor, that
was fine with her.

“If you are saying you do not find me abhorrent,” she said, “I am glad.”

“You have no idea what might be demanded of you,” he growled. “You have no idea what kind of man I am.”

“Considering what I shall eventually gain by this marriage, it would be absurd, not to mention ungrateful, of me to fret about your personal flaws,” she said. “It is not as though I am perfect, either. I have made it clear that my motives are mercenary. You have seen for yourself that I am disobedient and sharp-tongued. And I know I am no great beauty. I am also obstinate. That runs in the family, especially among the females of my generation. The time may come, in fact, when you will view your loss of reason as a blessed relief.”

“Miss—miss…Hell, I can’t remember,” he said. “I know it isn’t Trent, but—”

“The name is Adams,” she said. “Gwendolyn Adams.”

He scowled. “Miss Adams, I should like to know whether you are trying to convince me to marry you or to kill myself.”

“I merely wished to point out how pointless it is, in the circumstances, to quibble about our respective character flaws,” she said. “And I wished to be honest with you.”

A wicked part of her did not wish to be honest. She realized he was worried about his male urges clouding his judgment. The wicked part of her was not simply hoping the urges would win; it was also tempting her to encourage them with the feminine tactics other girls employed.

But that was not fair.

They had turned into the narrow drive leading to the stables. Though the rain beat harder now, Gwendolyn was aware mainly of the beating of her own heart.

She did not want to go away defeated, yet she did not want to win by unfair means.

She supposed the display of her limbs—however much her immodest mode of riding had been dictated by the need for haste and the unavailability of a sidesaddle—constituted unfair means.

Consequently, as they rode into the stable yard, she headed for the mounting block.

But Rawnsley was off his horse before she reached
it,
and at the gelding’s side in almost the same moment.

In the next, he was reaching up and grasping her waist.

His hands were warm, his grasp firm and sure. She could feel the warmth spreading outward, suffusing her body, while she watched the muscles of his arms bunch under the wet, clinging shirtsleeves.

He lifted her up as easily as if she’d been a fairy sprite. Though she wasn’t in the least anxious that he’d drop her, she grasped his powerful shoulders. It was reflex.
Instinctive.

He brought her down slowly, and he did not let go even after her feet touched the ground.

He looked down at her, and his intent yellow gaze trapped her own, making her heart pound harder yet.

“The time will come when I will have no power over you,” he said, his low tones making her nerve ends tingle. “When my mind crumbles, little witch, I shall be at your mercy. Believe me, I’ve considered that. I’ve asked myself what you will do with me then, what will become of me.”

At that moment, one troubling question was answered.

He was aware of the danger he was in. His fears were the same as those she felt for him. His reason was still in working order.

But he continued before she could reassure him.

“I can guess what will happen, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because I’m the man I always was. A death sentence has changed nothing.” His hands tightened on her waist. “You should have left me in the mire,” he told her, his eyes burning into her. “It was not pleasant—yet Providence does not grant all its creatures a pretty and painless demise. And I’m ready enough for mine. But you came and fished me
out,
and now…”

He let go abruptly and stepped back. “It’s too late.”

He was in no state to listen to reassurances, Gwendolyn saw. If he was angry with himself and didn’t trust that self, he was not likely to trust anything she said. He would believe she was humoring him, as though he were a child.

And so she gave a brisk, businesslike nod. “That sounds like a yes to me,” she said.
“Against your better judgment, evidently, but a yes all the same.”

“Yes, drat you—drat the lot of you—I’ll do it,” he growled.

“I am glad to hear it,” she said.

“Glad, indeed. You’re desperate for your hospital, and I’m the answer to your maidenly prayers.” He turned away. “I’m desperate, too, it seems. After a year’s celibacy, I should probably agree to marry your
grandmother
, Devil confound me.”

He strode down the pathway to the house.

3

D
orian made straight for the library, the red-haired witch close on his heels.

He flung the door open.

Abonville was pacing in front of the fireplace.

Genevieve was reading a book.

Bertie was building a house of cards.

Dorian strode in and paused a few feet from the threshold.

Abonville stopped short and stared. Genevieve laid aside her book and looked up. Bertie leapt from his chair, the cards flying about him and fluttering to the carpet.

“By Jupiter’s thunderbolts!” he cried. “What’s happened to you, Cat?”

“Your cousin drove me into
a mire
,” Dorian said levelly. “Then she fished me out. Then we agreed to wed.
Today.
You may stand as my groomsman, Bertie.”

The two elders did not so much as raise an eyebrow.

Bertie opened his mouth,
then
shut it. He
retreated
a pace, his brow furrowing.

Dorian bent his gaze upon Miss Adams, who had advanced from the doorway to stand beside him. “Any objections, Miss Adams?” he asked. “Or second thoughts?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “The ceremony may take place whenever you wish.”

“I understand that everything has been prepared for speedy nuptials,” he said. “If you’ve the preacher somewhere about, we can do it now.”

He turned his stare upon the trio of relatives, bracing
himself
for an outburst of hysteria.

They believed he was a madman. He knew he looked like one. The rain had merely diluted his coating of mire ooze, which streamed from his sopping garments onto the carpet.

No one uttered a word.

No one moved.

Except the witch, who paid no more attention to her relatives than if they’d been the statues they were doing a splendid imitation
of.

“You’ll be more comfortable after you have a bath,” she said.
“And something to eat.
And a nap.
I know you are exhausted.”

Every muscle in his body ached. He could scarcely stand upright. “I can be comfortable later,” he said, darting another defiant glance over the mute trio. “I want to get married.
Now.”

“I should like to wash and change, too,” she said. She stepped nearer and rugged at his soggy shirt cuff. “It will take time to send for my maid and my clothes, as well as the minister. They are all waiting at the inn, along with our solicitors. The lawyers must come, too, so that you can sign the settlements. You don’t want to be waiting about for everybody in wet clothes, I’m sure.”

Lawyers.

Chill panic washed through him.

They would examine him to make sure he knew what he was doing. Very recently, the Earl of Ports-mouth’s fourteen-year marriage had been annulled on grounds he’d been of unsound mind when it was contracted. Miss Adams would not want to risk an annulment and lose all
claim
to his fortune and the title whose influence she needed.

But if they found him unsound…He shuddered.

“Look at you,” she said sharply. “You’re shivering, my lord. Bertie, do stop gaping in that fish-like way and come and make
yourself
useful. Take your stubborn friend upstairs before he collapses, and tell the servants to ready his bath and find him something to eat. Genevieve, you will send to the inn for what we need, won’t you? Abonville, I wish to speak with you.”

No one uttered a protest, not so much as a syllable.

Bertie hurried toward him, took the bemused Dorian by the arm, and steered him back through the library door.

Moments later, when they reached the stairs, Dorian saw Hoskins dart through the servants’ door and hasten to the library.

He wondered whether the witch had cast a spell over the lot of them.

“Shouldn’t dawdle if I was you,” Bertie warned. “If Gwen catches us hanging about, she’ll take a fit, which I’d rather she didn’t, seeing as how she took one already and my ears are still ringing. Not but what she was right. We
wasn’t
listening proper, was we?”

He grasped Dorian’s arm and tugged. “Come along, Cat. Hot bath, Gwen said, and she got that right, too, by gad. You look like what the cat dragged in, and meaning no offense, but you smell like I don’t know what.”

“I told you she drove me into
a mire
,” Dorian said. “What do you expect a man to smell like after a soak in a reeking bog?”

Unwilling to be dragged up the stairs by his overanxious friend, Dorian shook off the helping hand and started up on his own.

Bertie followed. “Well, she wouldn’t’ve had to chase you, would she, if you hadn’t gone and bolted,” he said. “Couldn’t think why you’d do it. I told you she wasn’t like Jess, didn’t I? I told you Gwen was a good sort of girl. Did you think I’d let them shackle you to any beastly female? Ain’t we friends? Don’t we look out for each other? Well, I should think so, or at least I did, but then you
was
away a long time and never told me where you was. But you never
was
much for letters, and I never was much good at answering ’em anyhow, and I figured you didn’t hear yet I was back from Paris.”

They had reached the landing. He gave Dorian a worried look. “But it’s all right now, ain’t it? Mean to say, if you
was
looking at her over the breakfast table, you wouldn’t cast up your accounts, would you?”

If he were looking at her over the breakfast table, he would probably leap on her and devour her, Dorian thought. Even now, he wondered how he’d managed to keep his hands restricted to her waist after seeing the soft, dazed expression in her eyes when he’d helped her dismount. No woman had ever gazed at him in that way. Under that look, reason, conscience, and will had simply melted away, leaving him defenseless and nigh trembling with longing. Even now, merely recalling, he could not summon up a fragment of common sense.

“I like her…eyes,” he told Bertie. “And her voice is not disagreeable. She does not seem silly or missish. She seems a capable, sensible girl,” he added, recollecting the terrifying efficiency with which she’d extricated him from the mire.

Bertie’s worried expression vanished, and he broke into the amiably stupid grin that had softened Dorian’s heart toward him years ago.

“There, I knew you’d see it, Cat,” he said. “Sen-sible’s the word. Tells you what’s to be done and says it plain so you always know how to go about it. And when she says she’ll do it, Gwen goes and does it. Said she was going after you, and we
was
to stay put and keep our mouths shut tight and stay out of her way. And she did it and you come back and said you’d have her, and now we’re all in order, ain’t we?”

He’d had his life in order before, Dorian thought: everything in hand, his short future so carefully planned. Kneebones had promised, and he could be trusted to keep his part of the bargain: laudanum, as much as Dorian needed to keep him quiet, to let him die in peace.

Now there was no telling what would happen. He could tell his bride what he wanted, but he could not make her do it. He could exact promises, but he couldn’t make her keep them. Before long, he would have no power over her.

But he could not keep his mind on the future because he could not drive out the recollection of the melting look in her green eyes. All he could think of was the night to come and the little witch in his arms…

Oh, Lord, and if his mind failed and he hurt her—what then?

For Bertie’s sake, he manufactured a smile.

“As you say, Bertie,” he answered lightly.
“All in order and everyone happy.”

Some hours later, Gwendolyn was sitting on a stone bench in the Earl of Rawnsley’s garden, watching the blood-red sun’s slow descent over a distant hill. The storm had long since swept off to ravage another part of Dartmoor, leaving the air cool and clean.

She was clean and neatly dressed in the green silk gown Genevieve had brought her from Paris, and her unruly hair had been temporarily tamed into a relatively tidy heap of curls atop her head. She hoped it would still be tidy by the time Rawnsley emerged from his meeting with the lawyers.

Gwendolyn’s hair was the bane of her existence. The Powers that Be, with their usual perverse idea of a joke, had given her Papa’s hair instead of Mama’s.

She did not mind the color so much—at least it was interesting—but there was so much of it, a hodgepodge of twists and bends and corkscrews, each of which had a mind of its own, and all of them demented.

Her hair, which was the complete antithesis of her level, steady, and orderly personality, made it very difficult for people to take her seriously—as though being a female didn’t make that hard enough already. Thanks to the crazed mass of red curls and corkscrews, every new person she met represented yet another uphill battle to prove herself.

She wished wimples would come back into fashion.

She wondered what Rawnsley’s raven mane was like when it was clean and combed. She had not seen him since Bertie had taken charge of him.

She wondered why the earl kept his hair long, whether it was merely some odd masculine vanity or an act of defiance—against convention in general or, more likely, his straitlaced grandfather in particular. She could certainly understand that.

Rebellion did not explain, however, why the earl so little resembled his tiny portrait. The puffy face in the miniature had seemed to belong to a rather corpulent man. The one Gwendolyn had met hadn’t an ounce of excess flesh upon his six-foot frame. His drenched shirt and trousers had clung like a second skin, not to rippling rolls of fat, but to lean, taut muscle.

Whatever was wrong with him was obviously confined to the contents of his skull.

Gwendolyn watched the light of the lowering sun spread a red stain through the deepening shadows of the moors while she searched her mental index of brain diseases. She wondered what malady corresponded to the “crumbling” he’d mentioned.

She was considering aneurisms when she heard footsteps crunch upon the gravel path.

Turning toward the sound, she beheld her betrothed advancing toward her, his face set, his right hand clutching a piece of paper.

At that moment, medical hypotheses, along with all other intellectual matters, sank into the deepest recesses of Gwendolyn’s mind. When he paused before her, all she could do was stare while her heart beat an erratic rhythm that made the blood hum in her veins.

He wore a coat of fine black wool, whose snugly elegant cut hugged his powerful, athletic physique. Her glance skidded down over the equally snug trousers to the gleaming toes of his shoes,
then
darted up again to his face.

Cleaned of the mire’s vestiges, his countenance was pale, chiseled marble. The long black hair, gleaming like silk, rippled over his broad shoulders. A burning golden gaze trapped hers.

If she had been a normal female, she would have swooned. But she was not normal, never had been.

“Good grief, you are impossibly handsome,” she said breathlessly. “I vow
,
I have never experienced the like. For an instant, my brain stopped altogether. I must say, my lord, you do clean up well. But next time, I wish you would call out a warning before you come into view, and give me a chance to brace myself for the onslaught.”

Something dark flickered in his eyes.
Then a corner of his hard mouth quirked up.
“Miss Adams, you have an interesting—a unique—way with a compliment.”

The trace of a smile disoriented her further. “It is a unique experience,” she said. “I never knew my brain to shut off before, not while I was full awake. I wonder if the phenomenon has been scientifically documented and what physiological explanation has been proposed.”

Her eyes would not focus properly but wandered fuzzily downward again…and stopped at the piece of paper. The document snapped her back to reality. “That looks official,” she said. “Legal drivel, I collect. Is it something I must sign?”

He glanced back toward the house.

When his attention returned to her, the half-smile was gone, and his expression had hardened again. “Will you walk with me?” he asked.

The backward glance gave Gwendolyn a good idea of what the trouble was. She kept her thoughts to herself, though, and stood obediently and walked with him in silence down a path bordered by roses. When they reached a planting of shrubs that shielded them from view of the house, he spoke.

“I am told that, in view of my prognosis, a guardian ought to be appointed to oversee my affairs,” he said. His voice was not altogether steady. “Abonville proposes to act as guardian since he’s my nearest male kin. It is a reasonable proposal, my own solicitor agrees. I’ve inherited a good deal of property, which must be protected when I become incapable of acting responsibly.”

A stinging stream of indignation shot through her. She did not see why he must be plagued with such matters this day. All he needed to sign were the marriage settlements. He should not be asked to sign his whole life away in the bargain.

“Protected from whom?” she asked. “Grasping relatives? According to Abonville, there’s no one left of the Camoys but a few dithering old ladies.”