Lord Holt Takes a Bride

by Vivienne Lorret

  No matter how she felt about him, this was certainly a nice gesture. “I never expected something like this, and from Mr. Woodbine of all people.”

  Her father issued a grunt that she interpreted as him sharing a similar sentiment. Then he reached down and took them, holding the necklace aloft and bidding her to turn around with an impatient shooing motion.

  When she did, she saw the card lying underneath. Reaching for it, she flicked it open as her father fastened the strands.

  My dearest Ophelia,

  Let this token of my love be your companion. Let each perfect pearl kiss your neck in my absence.

  After I’ve married that cow and performed my dreaded duty for this one day apart, I shall be yours forever more.

  With undying ardor,

  B

  Winnifred’s eyes blurred. She wasn’t sure if the tears stinging her eyes were from disappointment or from fury.

  “Wait,” she managed on a choked whisper. “I need to send this back.”

  Her father clucked in disapproval, continuing to fuss with the clasp. “Nonsense. Refusing your husband’s gift is no way to begin a marriage. If he wants to spoil you, then let him.”

  A hot tear slipped from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek as she issued a papery laugh. “They’re not for me.”

  And before her father could say a word, she showed him the card.

  His hands went still, and he said nothing for a moment.

  Then he continued his task and gruffly stated, “Your dowry paid for these all the same. It will serve him right to see them on you. And in the future, he will learn to be more discreet.”

  He fastened the pearls to her neck. The prettiest shackle one could ever imagine.

  Winnifred felt another tear slide down her cheek as she tossed the card into the box and closed the lid. Wiping the tracks away, she made three decisions.

  One—those would be the last tears she would ever shed over Mr. Woodbine.

  Two—she refused to live the rest of her life being treated like a sack of money.

  And three—she was going to run away from her wedding.

  Chapter 5

  Hands full of skirts and lungs collapsing from strain, Winnifred rushed down the church steps. The light drizzle made her mad dash even more perilous. And she wished that she’d agreed to Jane’s original plan. A pigeon distraction might have afforded her more time. As it was, she only hoped that her ruse of needing a moment to cast up her accounts would keep her parents waiting near the vestry long enough for her to escape.

  Seeing the promised carriage beside the pavement, Winnifred jerked open the door and leapt inside.

  She never expected to find Jane’s cousin asleep, sprawled out and taking up half the carriage. Tripping over his foot, she fell forward in a crunch of taffeta and tulle, her curls tumbling over her face.

  “Easy now, sweets, or my Thoroughbred will never leave his stall,” he murmured in a low, drowsy drawl that caused a peculiar heated shiver to race through her.

  She wasn’t even sure what he meant. Though Jane had remarked on a number of occasions that her cousin, Mr. Pickerington, wasn’t the brightest candle in the chandelier. So, it was likely nonsense.

  Winnifred might have asked him to repeat himself, but then his eyes opened. They were dark and warm as an August midnight. And her heart began a queer rhythm, tripping hard and fast along the inner wall of her ribcage, while the outer wall strained against her corset lacings.

  For an instant, she couldn’t breathe at all. Couldn’t seem to move away from the hard, lean body beneath her, not even when she felt his hand at the curve of her waist.

  He lifted his other hand to brush the hair from her face. Never in her life had a handsome man gazed at her with this foreign, half-lidded intensity. A pointed frown, perhaps. A passing glance, certainly. But not this.

  At their close proximity, she could count every one of his minky lashes as well as the dark whisker stubble emerging along the angular cut of his jawline and the shallow cleft in his chin. Beneath the straight slope of his nose, his broad mouth appeared firm and smooth like a sculpture of a Greek warrior. Yet a slightly dusky hue gave his lips warmth. And she had a surprisingly wayward notion to test what they would feel like against her own.

  He is Jane’s cousin, she reminded herself, mentally wagging her finger.

  With musings like these racing through her mind, she supposed it was fortunate that no other man had scrutinized her so thoroughly or she might have ended up like Prue.

  How did pretty women bear these types of gazes on a daily basis? And was it any wonder that so many of them succumbed to a scoundrel’s charm?

  Of course, Jane never said anything about her cousin being a rake, so she shouldn’t worry about that. But when he expelled a heavy liquor-soaked breath, she started to question if Jane knew everything about Mr. Pickerington.

  “You’re foxed,” she accused. “And you smell like a rum pot.”

  Taking his state into account, Winnifred came to the immediate conclusion that inebriation was the likely reason for his slow perusal. On a huff of abashment, she wiggled back to her own side of the carriage.

  “Peculiar. I never imbibe to excess.” He frowned, the flesh above his nose puckering to a V between his dark brows.

  “Well, you certainly picked a fine time to begin. We don’t have an instant to waste.”

  Of course, I wasn’t in a terrible rush while sprawled on top of him, she thought wryly. Hiding a guilty blush on her cheeks, she turned to the window facing the church.

  View impeded by the blind, she went to lift it, only to have the crusty tassel come apart in her hand. As she flicked it to the floor, she hoped the rest of the carriage was in better condition.

  So far, no one was rushing down after her. At least . . . not yet. And when she looked back toward Mr. Pickerington, he didn’t seem to be compelled to make haste. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Shouldn’t we be . . . getting on by now?”

  His lips curved in a slow grin and, this time, his thorough hedonistic gaze drifted over more than just her face. The pulse beneath the flesh of her throat rabbited with a shameful degree of wanton excitement.

  Then he shook his head. “My apologies, sweets. I wish I had the coin to afford you. Alas, I do not. Nor do I ever mix business with pleasure. In my opinion, carnal delights should be uninhibited and unconstrained by the obligations of monetary transactions.”

  “Whot are you—”

  Oh. Understanding dawned at once and her heated pulse turned decidedly cool. Apparently, Mr. Pickerington imagined that the only recourse for a young woman who’d just cut ties with her parents was solicitation, of all things!

  Outraged, Winnifred sat up straighter and wagged her finger at him. “You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m not going to become a harlot or a street . . . strumpet. Jane said you were slow-witted but, honestly, I didn’t realize she’d left me in the hands of a proper buffoon.”

  She darted another glance through the carriage window. Any moment now, her father would be red-faced and dashing down the stairs.

  He’d never forgive her.

  “Oh, this was a mistake,” she lamented. “I knew it all along, and yet there was no other way. And no going back either. I just made certain of that.”

  “Jane?” her carriage companion asked with a slow blink as if he’d never heard the name before.

  “Your cousin, of course! Honestly.” He was about as sharp as a wooden sword. She knew she should be patient with someone clearly mentally deficient, but panic was starting to set in. “Do you think it possible for us to continue this . . . introduction en route since my father is doubtless discovering my absence and bound to burst upon us at any moment?”

  That seemed to spark some life into him and he called to the driver.

  Then, at last, they were off.

  Winnifred tried to calm her nerves by taking in a deep breath, but was forestalled by her dam
nable corset and the busk threatening to crack apart her ribs. So she tried to stretch out her legs, only to nudge something with the toe of her slipper. Looking down, she saw that it was an empty bottle.

  Had he consumed the entire contents this morning while waiting for her? Well, that was certainly alarming. Jane likely didn’t know about this either.

  Strangely, he didn’t appear the drunkard. Just to be sure, however, she indulged in another perusal.

  Lifting her eyes slowly, she took in his lean form, noting the appealing way his leg muscles bunched beneath a pair of buttery buckskin breeches as he stretched out. Then he lifted his arm to scrub a hand through layers of dark, wavy hair and his coat parted over a maroon waistcoat, tailored to his flat middle and broad chest.

  He likely wasn’t one of those gentlemen who required the aid of a corset to diminish a paunch. And beneath her gloves, her fingertips tingled with the desire to discover the answer for herself. Would he look like a Greek statue there as well?

  She’d touched one of those once in a museum. Jane, Ellie and Prue had all taken turns while the others kept watch. And Winnifred had marveled at the rippled bands of muscle.

  She’d had scandalous dreams of that statue for a fortnight. And now she was having positively brazen thoughts about Jane’s cousin, wondering if he would feel the same. Shameless!

  “Your father a tyrant, is he?”

  Guilty, her gaze jerked up to his face. She hoped the meager light in the carriage would conceal her blush.

  “Not entirely,” she answered quickly, pretending their thoughts were in tandem. “He isn’t one to shout or to raise his hand when an opposing argument is set before him. However, he has a knack for turning conversations into mazes, and, before you know it, you’ve agreed to whatever he wanted in the first place.”

  At first, her companion nodded in understanding. But, suddenly, he sat forward, his expression marked with—what she could only describe as—startled disbelief, as if she’d given him most unwelcome news. Then he lowered his face into his hands.

  “Just so we’re perfectly clear, your name is . . .”

  She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Poor addlebrained man. Clearly, she’d confused him with too many words at once. For his sake, she would do better to keep her sentences shorter. “Miss Winnifred Humphries.”

  “Yes, of course.” He lifted his head and eased back against the squabs. The drowsiness had abruptly left his gaze and he studied her with a fresh, sober intensity as the carriage bumped along the cobblestone streets. “And to where am I escorting you on this fine morning, Miss Humphries?”

  She glanced to the window, beaded and blurry from rain. All the color seemed to be washing away from London, leaving behind charcoal sketches of brick buildings and box windows that crowded the streets to a suffocating degree.

  This was not what she would consider a fine morning at all. Especially considering what she’d just done. “Surely Jane told you.”

  “Afraid not.”

  Feeling a pinch in her side, she shifted on the bench and thought back to the parlor a week ago, and mentally skimmed through the pages. “Come to think of it, I didn’t read that far into the plan. I suppose we ought to drive to your aunt and uncle’s house and discuss the rest with Jane.”

  “Mmm . . . perhaps,” he said, thoughtfully grazing a thumb over his bottom lip. “But wouldn’t that be the first place your father would look?”

  A surprisingly sound argument for a simpleton. She was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of it first. Then again, she’d been momentarily distracted by that thumb of his.

  All his fingers were long and lean like the rest of him. Elegant, even. Yet that thumb was slightly rounded toward the top as if it had a purpose, like playing an instrument or holding a paintbrush. She was strangely intrigued by that thumb and those lazy sweeps across his mouth. And, once more, her own lips tingled.

  Jane’s cousin, she reminded herself in a singsong voice inside her head.

  Winnifred cleared her throat. “Perhaps you’re right. Yet that would rule out Ellie’s home as well. Besides, it wouldn’t be good to involve my friends, regardless.”

  “You could always return home.”

  She shook her head, adamant. The motion caused the necklace to snag the fine tendrils at the back of her nape and she winced. This was the third time it had pulled her hair since she’d put it on. Hateful necklace.

  “No. My father would only force me to marry Mr. Woodbine.”

  “Woodbine, you say? Brown hair, big ears? Always brags about inheriting a dukedom the minute his great-uncles kick off?”

  She offered three succinct nods, thinking of the current Duke of Tuttlesby and his two younger brothers, each of them octogenarians separated by two years. One would imagine that a dukedom would soon be in hand for Mr. Woodbine and he’d be able to ignore his family’s wishes and marry Lady Stanton. Yet, after having survived wars and fever when most of their family had not, the uncles’ proven longevity and vigorous constitutions left no guarantees. In the meantime, the third usurper had a mistress he wanted to lavish with riches. Which brought Mr. Woodbine to his current position and she to hers.

  Irritated, she lifted her arms to unfasten the necklace—a near impossible feat when she could scarcely move in this dress.

  “Well, I’m sure he isn’t all that bad. Here,” Jane’s cousin said, moving lithely to the bench beside her.

  His hands were already lifting, his fingertips skimming lightly over the susceptible flesh at the back of her nape before she could utter a protest. An instant later, the weight of the necklace slithered down her breasts and fell in a succinct patter to her lap. The corner of his mouth curled in a scoundrel’s grin. Then he resumed his position on the opposite side.

  “Thank you,” she said as if asking a question, her voice somewhat confused and breathless. She wasn’t quite sure if she should be alarmed by the deftness of his hands or if she should take notes for the primer.

  Those thumbs were certainly capable. A man with such skills might take other liberties if she wasn’t careful.

  Then again, she was plump Winnifred Humphries. And it had been proven that the only thing appealing about her was her father’s fortune. So she needn’t worry.

  She scowled down at the pearls and thought about the missive from Mr. Woodbine. What might have been a lovely necklace now only reminded her of his cruel cow remark. “Believe me, my betrothed is even worse once you get to know him. Which is why I am here in this carriage instead of at the church.”

  “But the question is, to where are you going?”

  “Oh, how am I supposed to know?” she asked crossly, shaking the strands at him. “I didn’t know I was running away from my wedding until this morning. So you’ll simply have to give me a moment to think this through.”

  He eased back against the squabs again and smirked at her as if he believed she was the simpleton. “Make up your mind quickly, sweets. After all, the carriage driver will demand payment, and I don’t have any coin.”

  “You don’t?”

  He shook his head.

  Drat. Winnifred didn’t either. Whenever she went somewhere it was with her family’s drivers. She never carried money with her—she charged what she needed to her father’s accounts. Rather than giving her pin money, he preferred an itemized account of what she purchased from week to week. It had never been an inconvenience . . . until now.

  “Seems to me, the only sensible thing would be for you to go home. Your parents will likely worry otherwise.”

  Spoken like a man who didn’t know her parents a wit.

  She skewered him with a glare. “As I said before, I closed that door today. And why are you peculiarly eager to send me home, hmm? Have another bottle of rum under the bench that needs a quick guzzling?”

  “I was just thinking that it would be a pity if the driver decided to hie us back to the church, that’s all.” His lips curved in a cold smile that only enhanced his attractiveness with ap
pealing creases bracketing his broad mouth. Even squinting at her didn’t lessen the effect. When his lashes crowded together, his eyes glinted like onyx.

  Winnifred decided then and there to be rid of him, and the sooner the better. She didn’t need the distraction.

  Rolling the strands methodically through her fingers, she came up with a plan. “Money won’t be a problem. I’ll simply offer the driver this necklace.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said, and with more force than was warranted. But on the bright side, his smugness disappeared behind a frown.

  With a flick of her wrist she twirled the pearls, catching his attention. “I can do whatever I like. They’re my pearls.”

  “Are you so spoiled, so determined to have your own way, that you’d give a family heirloom to a stranger?”

  “Believe me, I have no sentimental attachment to this shackle. It was a gift from my betrothed—”

  “Then you should definitely keep—”

  “—to his mistress,” she said, relishing the sight of his mouth snapping shut, even if her pride was sorely wounded. “The parcel arrived at my father’s townhouse by mistake this morning.”

  “But how did you know . . .”

  “There was a card.” She didn’t elaborate further. Torture wouldn’t make her reveal the humiliating words she’d read. “Regardless, I shall be more than happy to make use of them. So, if you wouldn’t mind hopping out at your earliest convenience, I have a journey ahead of me.”

  He looked out at the rain and then back at her—or her necklace, rather. His jaw was clenched and a muscle twitched beneath the unshaven scruff of his whiskers.

  “I have a better idea,” he said. “I know a jeweler who’ll give you a fair price. Then you’ll have coin enough to take you anywhere you choose to go, and some to spare, I’d warrant.”

  Hmm . . . that was a better idea. And surprising, too, coming from a simpleton.

  “Very well. Take me to your jeweler.”