Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (7 page)

His body roared to raging life, until she cocked the pistol that appeared as if by magic in her steady hand. “A man will swear to anything,” said she, “with a pistol to his ballocks. The good doctor is no exception.”

With him now in her sights, Larkin lowered said weapon toward
his
bollocks. “Get out.”

“Like your father’s henchman,” Ash said. “I expect your pistol is as empty as your threat.” No hoyden this, but a fantasy—beautiful, seductive, and all his.

Though he heard footsteps behind him, he stood so near, Ash moved swiftly forth.

“Wait! Milord! She has a pistol!”

Reaching for his bride, Ash turned toward the speaker … and a shot rang out.

* * *

Before he opened his eyes, Ash realized that he hurt everywhere. His head pained and pounded like a military tattoo, as did his eyes, his limbs, and especially his left butt cheek, like some unknown force stabbed a knife into it, over and over, again.

Finding himself flat on his belly, a position he detested, suggested that he’d been abandoned on a battlefield far from England’s shores.

Odd, for he’d dreamed the war had ended.

“My Lord,” he heard, barely above a whisper. “My Lord, are you awake?”

“Where am I, Grim,” Ash asked, his eyes too sore to open.

“In your bed, Sir.”

“What country? What year?”

“The master bedchamber at Blackburne Chase. In the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and eighteen.”

“The war is over, then? Good. I thought I’d gone for dead in battle.”

“Well … nearly. Do you not remember your wedding?”

“My bride jilted me before the wedding, Man, do
you
not remember? Found someone with more blunt, Ellenora did.”

“I mean your second bride, My Lord.”

“The actress? What
was
her name?” Ash managed to peel back an eyelid. “Bloody hell. What the blazes fell on me? Why does every part of me hurt?”

Grimsley held a cup of tea to Ash’s lips, for which Ash was supremely grateful. “You have two black eyes,” Grim said. “And assorted cuts.”

Ash nodded imperceptibly and swallowed dutifully. “I do not remember how it came about.”

“I see.” Grimsley appeared pained, portending some disagreeable duty. “You also have cracked ribs, according to Buckston, various scrapes and bruises, a minor gunshot wound in your ah, backside, and oh yes … a wife.”

Ash raised his head, groaned, and lay it down again. “Oh God, it’s coming back.”

“I was afraid it would, Sir.”

“She shot me? She actually pulled the trigger on a loaded pistol and shot me? Did she threaten the doctor, as she told me she did, so he would give me a false report? Was she telling the truth about that?”

Grimsley nodded with regret. “If Buckston had tried to examine her, he would not have been allowed to keep all his manly parts, he swears, and hopes you understand his predicament.”

“I shall beat her, as soon as I am able to raise my head.”

“She wishes to see you.”

“Not bloody likely.”

Grimsley stood his disapproving ground.

“Bloody hell,” Ash said. “Send her in then, but on
your
head be it.”

“Yes, My Lord. She is understandably afraid, My Lord.”

“And well she should be. She shot me, Man. And stop My Lording me.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Lark came in wearing a jonquil muslin morning dress ten years out of date, and three sizes too big, two silk rosettes hanging by threads upon her skirt. She still wore the mismatched pair of shoes in which she came to him, not quite dry after their bath.

Since Ash was forced to remain on his stomach, given the location of the wound she had inflicted, he saw her shoes best but decided to forget for the moment, what still needed improving. “Where did you get the dress?” he asked, looking all the way up at her, shocked anew by her beauty without the soot.

“It was either your mother’s or your grandmother’s.” She smoothed her skirts in an erratic, uncharacteristic movement, and dislodged another of the rose ribbon florets. “I believe Mim found this and another in the attic.”

Ash nodded with a clearer head than the night before, and realized, as he should have then, that perhaps his bride would need a bit of wooing before he tried to bed her again. On the other hand, would he survive another attempt? “Did you hear?” he said, testing her. “Some thief broke into the house during the night and shot me.”

“I shot you.”

“Hah! I did not think you would own up to it.”

“I own up to everything …”
Eventually.
Lark made a promise to herself in that moment that she
would
tell him about cheating him into marriage, but not today. Not until Micah arrived, at the soonest, or in a letter, after her death perhaps, at the latest.

“You do not appear so menacing in women’s clothes,” her surprised bridegroom said.

Which is why I wear men’s clothes, she thought. “I will remember that you are of the opinion the next time I wish to menace you.”

“I have created a fiend,” Ash said to himself. “But now that I see you clean with your honey curls tamed, I find that I can no longer, in good conscience, call you Arky. It smacks of an expression for casting up one’s accounts. As if I might say, “he’s had so much to drink he’s
arking
all over the place,” which I still feel like doing, by the way.”

“You drink too much, which is why you feel the roiling need.” Lark knelt, all skittering nerves, beside his bed, at amazingly close eye level with the man about whom she had dreamed for years. She had forgot the beauty in his pale gray eyes, the way his mahogany hair flowed as if from that one remarkable point upon his brow. She wished she dared move that lazy lock from his eyes.

“Why Arky?” he asked. “‘Tis a terrible nickname.”

She agreed with half a nod. “When I was a babe, the word Larkin emerged from my small mouth as Arky. It stuck.”

His teeth were perfect, his smile deadly. “Unfortunate,” he said.

“So is your drinking and gambling. Is that why no woman would have you?”

“What?”

“Why were you jilted? Your friends made the task of finding a bride for you sound impossible.”

“Because society women are aware of my situation.”

“And should this situation concern
me
?”

“No, for it is better, by far, than the one I took you from.”

“Most situations would be, but I did fear you would hurt me last night.”

“So
…
you hurt me, first?”

Lark regarded her hands and fisted them to hide her broken nails. “It is the only way I know. You were deep in your cups when I peeked in, and not in your right mind.”

He granted as much with a grimace. “Perhaps we should become better acquainted for the nonce, while I recover, without drink, so that we may form a more prudent opinion of each other for the future.”

“I bathed again this morning,” she said, surprising him, by the look of him.

“I am prodigiously pleased to hear it. You will not be required to chase pigs here, by the way. We leave that to others. But I would be delighted if you bathed regularly.”

“Now that I am here, what will I be required to do, besides bathing, I mean?”

“Be my wife … and all that entails.”

Lark remembered the way he looked, and she felt, after he gave her his shirt in the maids’ room, her cheek against his naked chest with that mat of hair that appeared coarse but felt the way silk must. She shivered. “I do not understand the meaning of “all that entails.”

“We will address it in time, and when I am no longer indisposed with a gunshot wound, we shall try again.”

The skittering inside her trebled. “Try what?”

“Becoming better acquainted, to begin with. Fair enough?”

Lark hesitated. “Fair, I suppose, to begin with.”

They learned more about each other as they played cards through the first week of his recovery, because Ash liked to gamble and Lark appreciated every opportunity to test her skill without cheating.

She usually only cheated people who deserved it, of course, the same with picking their pockets, and she usually never shot anyone. Ashford was an exception in every way.

Marrying him had been another exception, with something greater than integrity in the balance. In her eyes, Micah’s future made Ash—the best man she knew, when not in his cups—fair game, or foul, however you regarded the issue. Besides, he had admitted to being desperate for a wife, so she had done him a favor, had she not?

“I cannot believe I am admitting this,” he said, at the end of the second week, “but I am sick unto death of gambling.”

Lark stopped shuffling her cards. “The stakes are likely not high enough,” she said.

“I had Grim bring some books. Perhaps you would read to me?”

“I, ah, have a scratchy throat from screaming last night,” she said in panic. “Perhaps, you could read to me?”

At the beginning of what Lark expected to be his third week of recovery, she found him in his chamber, dressed and champing at the bit, handsome as ever, and attempting to walk with a cane. “I must escape this room,” he said. “Have you toured the house yet?” He offered his free arm.

Lark took it and felt the heat of his nearness to the pit of her belly. “I wandered a bit, but the house is so large, I feared becoming lost. “I have noticed, however, that there are several paintings missing. Did you realize?”

“What makes you think so?”

“The squares of bright wallpaper here and there.”

Ash winced. “I had not thought them so obvious. The large library painting paid my father’s gambling debts. The one from my study satisfied his tailor. The three in the south parlor replaced five cottage roofs. The one over my bed shall be shortly sold to pay my voucher to your father.”

Lark nodded. “Good, then you have
not
been robbed.”

“Only by my father and my own stupidity.”

Lark grimaced inwardly, certain his regret
must
extend beyond losing the painting to being stuck with her. “I have spent some time outdoors,” she said to steer him from the conclusion. “Yesterday, after you took your medicine and slept, I stumbled upon a field of wild lavender, in blues and purples, just coming into flower, a breathtaking sight.”

Ash nodded. “One of my mother’s favorite spots, mine as well. She used to dry the flowers and place them in vases about the house.”

“Would she mind if I did so?”

“Not at all. I miss the scent about the place. Let us start our tour with the house, however, shall we, for I do not think I can walk quite as far as the lavender field today. I’d like to take you to the attic, so as to find you more gowns. You may think two will do, but until I can arrange to have a new wardrobe made for you, I would like to see you with more.”

Ash could barely raise the leg on his wounded side the height of a step, so Lark hooked his cane on her wrist and placed an arm about him. He gave her a sidelong glance as he leaned upon her and they started up. Did he doubt her sincerity? After last night, who could blame him?