by Merry Farmer
“I need to look at the carriage,” she said, not necessarily to Lady Aoife. “I need to see what happened.”
She stepped away from Lady Aoife, feeling horrid for doing so, since the poor dear had no one else’s shoulder to cry on. But a sense of urgency filled Marie. She had to see the wreckage up close. There had to be a way to prove that the disaster hadn’t happened because of the bolts Christian had loosened. The whole thing couldn’t be his fault, it just couldn’t.
She made it halfway across the expanse of grass separating her from the twisted metal and splintered wood before two men whom she didn’t know rushed forward to stop her.
“Stay back, my lady,” one of them said. “It could still be dangerous.”
“But I have to see,” Marie pleaded with them. “I have to check the bolts.”
“No, my lady,” the other said.
“Yes!” Marie shouted. She began to struggle against them in earnest, shouting, “Unhand me! Let me go!”
“Hush, Marie.” The command came from Shannon.
Marie turned, startled to see her oldest sister there at the scene of the wreck. She launched toward Shannon, grabbing her sister’s arms as she reached her. “We have to examine the wreckage,” she said. “Christian thinks he caused the accident. We have to determine whether his prank is the reason the carriage fell apart. He won’t be able to live with himself if it was his fault.” Her face crumpled at her last statement as grief swelled within her.
“Christian tampered with the carriage?” Shannon asked, eyes wide.
Marie swallowed hard, then nodded tightly.
“Then perhaps the very last thing we want is to examine the wreckage,” Shannon whispered. “If he did cause it, he might be guilty of murder.”
Marie thought she might be sick. Of all the ways God could have punished her for the sin of lust and the wickedness of everything she and Christian had done, subjecting Christian to even the whiff of an accusation of murder was the very last thing she expected. What would people say if he really was to blame? Would they accuse him of doing away with his father and brother as a way to gain the Kilrea title? She’d heard Lord Boleran refer to Christian as “my lord” and inform him he was the new earl. Would that alone be enough to raise suspicion?
“No,” she whispered, more as a denial of those potential accusations as anything else. She pivoted sharply, searching Christian out. He had climbed into the farmer’s wagon and was helping the doctor settle his mother in the nest that had been made for her.
As if he could sense her, he glanced up and met her eyes. Marie lurched forward, as if she could go to him and somehow make the whole situation better. But the blankness of his expression held her back. He was overwhelmed, beyond feeling anything. She could see that as plainly as if she held him in her arms and the two of them were whispering to each other in bed. All she could do was to put every ounce of the love she felt for him more strongly than ever into her look and nod at him, letting him know she was there for him.
He nodded back, but that was all he could do before the doctor commanded his attention. As soon as he looked away, Marie’s heart sank. She couldn’t shake the feeling that a terrible wall now divided them.
Chapter 7
The terrible feeling in Marie’s heart and gut persisted for days. It kept her up nights, tossing and turning and scrambling to remember as many details of the wreck as she could so that she could exonerate Christian. He couldn’t have been the cause of the fatal accident, he simply couldn’t have. It was just a harmless prank, a bit of fun. Life was supposed to be fun and filled with laughter…wasn’t it?
Twined together with her anxiety about the accident was a worry of a different sort. The morning she and Christian had spent together had been magnificent. She’d known full well that she liked Christian, but kissing him so freely and making love to him had been exquisite. His body was every bit as wonderful in action as it had been to look at. Being with him that way had confirmed the one thought that pulsed louder than any other in her mind or her heart. She loved Christian. Yes, the feelings had come on quickly, but she was sure of them. Christian was the only man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
He also wasn’t replying to the numerous letters she’d sent him in the three days since the accident. Worse still, those letters had come back unopened. That couldn’t be his doing, could it? Surely, some servant or solicitor had taken it upon themselves to deflect all of Christian’s communications, seeing as he had suddenly been weighted down with the responsibilities of the earldom and his mother’s continued dangerous health.
“Good heavens, Marie. You’ve been holding that spoon halfway to your mouth for so long that I’m surprised your soup hasn’t evaporated,” Shannon said, snapping Marie out of her thoughts.
Marie blinked rapidly, lowering her spoon and letting it sink in her bowl of soup. She hadn’t had much of an appetite for the last few days anyhow. Who could think about food in such a dire situation?
She blinked again when she realized her sisters were all staring at her. Fergus and Henrietta had been invited out to luncheon, which meant the four of them had been left to their own devices for the meal. But instead of laughing uproariously over someone’s amusing story or plotting mischief, Marie’s sisters were unusually somber. And they were all studying her with varying degrees of worry.
“You’ve hardly eaten anything since….” Chloe bit her lip, shrugged, and finished simply with, “Since.”
“You’ve hardly spoken either,” Colleen said with a far more somber air. “Which is twice as concerning, if you ask me.”
“I haven’t had much to say,” Marie told them, her voice sounding hoarse and unused.
Shannon reached across the corner of the table and covered Marie’s hand with her own. “This is a trying time,” she said sympathetically, ever the eldest sister. “First, Fergus threw you into an engagement that you didn’t want and that was clearly unsuitable for you. Then, your fiancé is killed in an accident.”
“Not to mention that Marie was one of the first on the scene,” Colleen said with a little too much excitement in her eyes. Colleen always had had a fascination with the morbid.
At the moment, Marie didn’t appreciate it at all. “It’s not that,” she said, her voice dropping to a listless sigh. “I’m terribly worried about Christian.”
Her sisters all seemed to freeze for a moment. They exchanged looks that made it clear all three of them knew full well there was much more to the story than they’d been told.
“It’s kind of you to be concerned for Lord Kilrea,” Shannon said carefully. She eyed Marie closely, as if waiting to see how she would react to Christian being referred to by his new title.
Marie sent her a flat look in return. As much as she enjoyed games and merriment, she wasn’t in the mood for anything but the bald truth. “We’re lovers,” she blurted before she lost the nerve. It was technically true, even if their affair was new.
Her sisters reacted with varying degrees of surprise, and in Chloe’s case, delight.
“How exciting and delicious,” Chloe said, eyes sparkling. “Is he a good lover? Does he make you feel spectacular? How long does it take to do that anyhow? When do you—”
“Chloe, hush.” Shannon silenced her with a stern look. “Now is not the time to interrogate Marie about such things.” Her mouth twitched up in one corner. “Though any other time I would encourage every inappropriate question possible, if only as punishment for not telling the rest of us what you intended sooner.”
“It happened quite unexpectedly,” Marie told them, leaning stiffly back in her chair and fiddling nervously with the edge of her soup bowl.
“I’ll say.” Colleen stared at her with curious, narrowed eyes. “The two of you only met a month ago.”
“I suppose you could say it was love at first sight,” Marie sighed, biting her lip and feeling unaccountably sad at the prospect instead of delighted.
“I thought love at first sight
only happened in storybooks,” Chloe said with a dreamy look, leaning one elbow on the table and resting her chin in her hand.
“If I recall correctly, that first sight involved the sight of his prick,” Shannon said, one eyebrow arched.
Marie answered Shannon’s stare with a quelling look. “Christian Darrow is more than just a fine prick,” she said. “He’s a lovely, warm, open-hearted man. Whether we’d known each other one day or one hundred years, it would be the same. We knew at once we were meant for each other.” She supposed that was true, looking back on their meeting.
She wriggled uncomfortably in her chair as her sisters continued to stare at her. “And then Fergus had the audacity to engage me to his brother, and Christian’s father was mad enough to betroth him to Lady Aoife.”
“Both of which were terrible ideas,” Shannon said, nodding and gesturing for her to go on.
Marie’s face heated, and she couldn’t meet her sisters’ eyes. “The trouble with being a sensitive, open-hearted man is that Christian was angry over the deal his father made for him. He had a plan to force his father into calling the marriages off. That plan began with a prank that he believed would ensure his father didn’t make it to the engagement party.” She swallowed hard. “He loosened all the bolts on the underside of his father’s carriage.”
As expected, all three of her sisters gasped. Shannon looked wary, perhaps remembering the conversation she and Marie had had immediately after the accident.
“He didn’t mean to do them any harm,” Marie continued with a sudden burst of energy, needing to defend him. “The mischief wasn’t supposed to be fatal, and I don’t believe it was. I was there when he tampered with the carriage. I saw what he did with my own eyes. I don’t believe he did enough to cause the sort of damage I witnessed at the site of the wreck.”
“But Lord Kilrea believes he’s responsible,” Shannon said in a hushed voice.
Marie thanked God that her sister was clever enough to understand the workings of human emotions and guilt. Even so, Marie shook her head and said, “He is not responsible. He didn’t kill his father and brother. I know it, but he doesn’t. I have to find a way to prove to him that the accident wasn’t his fault.”
“How do you propose to do that?” Shannon asked.
Marie shook her head and shrugged restlessly. “I don’t know. I tried to examine the wreckage right after the crash. If I could have just taken a look at the broken axel, checked to see if the bolts were loose or tight and if the breaks happened where everything was fastened together or somewhere else.” She felt foolish attempting to explain the construction and workings of the underside of a carriage when, in truth, she didn’t know any more about it than she did about the insides of a clock.
A thoughtful look came over Shannon’s face. “If everything I’ve been told was true, Lord Boleran was the first at the scene.”
“Yes, he was,” Marie said miserably.
“And he stayed behind to supervise the removal of the bodies and the wreckage of the carriage,” Shannon went on.
“He did,” Colleen said with an unusually fierce scowl. “At least, that’s what I heard.” Her cheeks colored suddenly and she avoided her sisters’ eyes.
Shannon turned her attention to Colleen. “You have something of an acquaintance with Lord Boleran, do you not?”
Colleen crossed her arms and stared darkly at Shannon. “What are you getting at?”
Marie’s interest perked slightly. She hadn’t realized there was any sort of connection between Colleen and Lord Boleran. All signs were that there was not only a connection, there was a story.
“Colleen can go to Lord Boleran and ask him what he observed about the carriage,” Shannon said, as though the solution were obvious. “With any luck, Lord Boleran will know where the wreckage is now, and Marie can take Lord Kilrea to inspect it.”
“I’m not wasting a moment of my day seeking out Lord High and Mighty to ask him about carriage wreckage,” Colleen said with a surprising amount of vehemence.
“Not even for the sake of your sister and her handsome and wounded lover?” Chloe asked her with a teasing grin.
Colleen clenched her jaw tightly for a moment, then blew out a breath, letting her arms drop as she did. “Oh, all right,” she sighed. “For Marie and for poor Lord Kilrea. But I won’t stay to pass the time of day with the Marquess of Snobsbury.”
“Thank you,” Marie said, her spirits lifting a bit. “Anything Lord Boleran can tell you that might serve as proof that the carriage wrecked for some reason other than the bolts Christian loosened would be glorious.”
“In the meantime,” Shannon went on, facing Marie, “you need to eat something before you wither away into a useless slip of nothing. Men don’t like to take sticks to their bed.”
Marie let out a soft laugh and picked up her soup spoon. Her appetite was well on its way to returning, but she didn’t feel completely settled yet.
As soon as luncheon was over and the sisters split to go about their own business, she headed out to the stables, where her bicycle was kept. If Christian wouldn’t receive or read her letters, she’d have to speak to him in person, no matter what it took. She mounted her bicycle and sped off down the road toward Kilrea Manor. With a month of practice behind her, she considered herself an expert bicyclist, which meant she had no qualms at all about peddling as fast as the wind, in spite of the fierce glares she received from several people along the road.
She didn’t much care to hear about her wicked ways later, though, so as she approached the Kilrea estate, she veered off the main road to take a more discreet, back way to the manor. That path led her along the lush, green valley that divided Christian’s property from that of his neighbor, Lord Garvagh. A spring ran the length of the valley, heading toward the sea in the far distance. Close to where it originated, a quaint springhouse had been built. A cluster of trees stood behind the springhouse.
Those trees were where she spotted Lord Garvagh and none other than Lady Aoife. At first, Marie wasn’t sure it was them. She was in motion, after all, and at least fifty yards away on the path that cut across the valley on the way up to the manor house. Lord Garvagh was easy enough to make out, with his distinct blond hair and strong build. It was Lady Aoife who came as a surprise to Marie. Though she only had a fleeting glance of the woman as she peddled past, Marie was certain Lady Aoife was in tears, speaking passionately to Lord Garvagh about something.
She only had a minute or so to contemplate the odd scene before huffing and puffing up the hill to the manor’s back gardens. All thoughts of Lord Garvagh and Lady Aoife vanished the moment she spotted Christian pacing along the back edge of the garden. Her heart lifted and sank, filling with joy at the sight of him, then sorrow at how miserable Christian looked.
“Christian!” she called out, somehow finding the strength to peddle faster up the last few yards of the hill.
Christian jerked and spun toward her. His expression was grave, but for one, glorious moment, it lifted at the sight of her. All too soon it fell again. He stood still, his shoulders squared in a way that was too stiff and didn’t suit him, as Marie rode closer. She had hoped he’d spot her, burst into relief, and run to her, but all he did was wait, his face pinched in misery, as she came to a stop, dismounted and abandoned her bicycle, then rushed toward him.
“Christian,” she panted, pressing a hand to her chest as she caught her breath. “I’ve been so worried about you. I sent you letters, but they were returned.”
“I didn’t deserve to read them,” he said, his voice tired and cracking.
Marie stopped short a few feet from him, blinking in surprise. “So you knew that I sent them? They weren’t returned by a servant or…or someone else.”
“I returned them,” he confessed. Even though he met her gaze firmly, there was something distant and hollow in his eyes, like he wasn’t truly there. His eyes were ringed with dark circles, as though he hadn’t slept well since the accident. His face was p
ale and wan, and a layer of dark stubble covered his chin, as though he hadn’t had either the time or the will to shave for days. Worst of all, the spark had gone out of his countenance.
“Oh, Christian.” Marie surged toward him, throwing her arms around him and hugging him for all she was worth. “I’m so sorry.”
He let her hug him, but that was the best that Marie could say. His body was rigid, and even though she couldn’t see how it would have been possible in so few days, he felt thinner, diminished somehow. It broke her heart to feel his sadness. No, it went beyond sadness, beyond grief, even. Poor Christian was tortured.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, swaying back but keeping her hands on his arms.
“It was absolutely my fault,” he whispered, his voice cracking with guilt and shame. “How could it not be?”
“I swear to you, Christian. I was there with you when you played the prank. You didn’t loosen enough bolts or tamper with the carriage enough for it to fly apart the way it did,” Marie insisted.
“And how would you know?” He wrenched away from her, his agony turning to anger, another emotion he didn’t wear well at all. “What do you know about carriages?”
“Nothing,” Marie confessed, letting her arms fall uselessly to her sides. “But I know everything about you, and you aren’t capable of murder.”
“You don’t know anything about me, Marie.” The look he sent her was probably meant to be withering, but it missed its mark. She had the innate sense that he was trying to put her off, either to discourage her or punish himself. “We’ve barely met. We hardly know each other.”
“I know more than enough about you to know you could never willfully hurt anyone,” Marie said firmly. She wasn’t about to let him chase her off.
Apparently, he had yet to catch on to her stubbornness. “You don’t know half of the wicked things I’ve done,” he said, taking a step closer to her that was meant to be intimidating. “You don’t know the things I did at university or the trouble I got into in Europe with my mates.”
