Lord Holt Takes a Bride

by Vivienne Lorret

  Lord Waldenfield,

  I regret to inform you that unforeseen circumstances have forced my errand out of London. Rest assured, however, that I will adhere to every letter of our bargain and bring the delivery safely to your sister’s in Yorkshire.

  Sincerely,

  Holt

  “My errand . . . the delivery . . . You wrote about me as if I were a parcel and not a person.”

  “I didn’t want to damage your reputation by using your name should the letter fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Whyever should you worry? A ruined heiress would be a windfall for you after all your efforts. A ready fortune tied up with ribbons. Though I don’t imagine you bargained for the journey to take so long, or the added ordeal of pretending to be my . . . friend.”

  “Winn, you know better. Everything has changed.” He took a step forward. But her father held out an arm in front of him and Asher stayed where he was.

  Standing between them, her father eyed them shrewdly. “And I said I would only pay you if you returned her wholly unspoiled.”

  Dimly, she wondered if Asher had thought of this moment. Of how he would suddenly confess that they’d been intimate in order to cement a marriage with an heiress.

  Sometimes you must do whatever it takes to have the life you want, he’d once said to her. No matter the cost.

  Her cheeks heated with hurt and fury. But her blush was likely misconstrued as maidenly shyness. “Which I am, of course. After all, what man would look at me and see anything more than a means to an end?”

  “If that is the case,” Father said with a nod, “then Mr. Woodbine informed me that he would still have you. But in a quiet ceremony and without a wedding breakfast. There would be no need to bring attention to the situation, after all.”

  “Not now, Julian,” Mother said, her brow knitted with worry lines as she looked at Winnifred and tucked a curl behind her ear. When their gazes met, it was as if she could see the truth, but she didn’t say anything.

  Asher clenched his jaw, a muscle ticking in the corner. “Winn, I need to speak with you. In the garden.”

  She knew what he would say. Or rather, what he might say. He could so easily manipulate her into believing . . . well, just about anything, apparently.

  And because she loved him, she wanted to give him one more chance to prove who he truly was—the Asher Holt she thought she fell in love with, or the Marquess of Shettlemane’s son.

  “Father, so that we can have this matter settled and out of the way, might you pay Lord Holt first? I should like to retrieve a shawl from upstairs before I go into the garden.” Then she turned to Asher with almost too much hope stinging the corners of her eyes. “I’ll meet you there in a moment.”

  She watched as his fingers curled around the thick roll of pound notes thrust into his hand before he strode outside.

  While Mother and Father lingered in the foyer, arguing in hushed tones, Winnifred walked upstairs. She heard the abbreviated step of her aunt close behind.

  “Your father’s at it again. He did the same with me, finding a man who was willing to take pity on me after my accident but turned into a veritable scoundrel.” She expelled a weighty huff. “Don’t let my brother put doubt in your mind. Go out to the garden and settle this matter before it stews too long between you. Get it all out in the open. Tell him how you feel. How he has hurt you by not revealing the truth to you. Then, hear him out. There are always two sides to a coin, my dear.”

  Winnifred agreed with a reluctant nod and put a borrowed shawl over her shoulders.

  She told herself not to despair. After all, Asher couldn’t touch her the way he did, or look at her with such tender affection, if he didn’t love her. Right?

  Avoiding another encounter with her parents, she went down the servants’ stairs and out the back way.

  Yet when she walked to the garden, Asher was nowhere to be found.

  She called his name, but there was no answer. She even walked to the singing garden. He wasn’t there either.

  Frantic, she ran back to the empty promenade, then around to the front of the house, and nearly collided with a gardener, who was picking up broken shards of a clay pot.

  “Oh, forgive me,” she said, her voice quavering. “Did you happen to see Lord Holt venture this way?”

  “Apologies, miss, but I don’t know anything about Lord Holt.”

  Then, she supposed, it was possible that he was still inside. Perhaps he’d been waiting for her at the bottom of the main stairs . . .

  “Although I can tell you,” the gardener called out as Winnifred started to walk away, “I saw a curricle heading back down the drive just a few minutes ago.”

  She stopped in place, weighted with dread.

  All the blood and warmth drained from her in one icy deluge. And in that moment, she had the answer she never wanted.

  Asher Holt was only a scoundrel, after all.

  Chapter 25

  Asher groaned, his head splitting. He reached up to soothe the raw, throbbing ache at the back of his skull, only to realize his hands were tied. So were his arms and legs.

  Not this again.

  He squinted at the cranium-shattering sunlight streaming in beneath a familiar curved black hood. The trees beside the speeding curricle were nothing but a passing green blur.

  The last thing he remembered was storming toward the garden. He’d been distracted by the weight of the money in his pocket and wishing he hadn’t taken it. He should have shoved it back into Waldenfield’s hand. But just as he’d been about to march back inside to do that, he’d heard the crunch of steps behind him.

  Caught movement out of the corner of his eye . . .

  The next thing he knew, he was here on this hard, black-painted bench.

  He sat up clumsily as a pair of geldings plodded the earth beneath its hooves with a deafening rumble. They might as well have been stomping directly on his skull.

  What had they hit him with?

  “He’s awake again, Lum,” a voice said from over his shoulder, riding on the boot. “But he seems a mite punch-drunk. I don’t think you should’ve knobbed him with that clay pot. He’s been in and out for hours.”

  Hours? Winn would believe that he’d abandoned her.

  “Ah, he doesn’t mind, do you, Holt? We’ve been down this road a time or two before,” Lum said with a gravelly chuckle. Asher started to bite at the knots on his wrists. Damn, the bloody things were tight. If he managed to break free and leap out of the speeding gig without killing himself, he’d have to cut the bonds loose.

  Then he remembered, he didn’t have his knife anymore.

  There were so many things he didn’t have anymore, like his dignity. But he refused to lose Winn, too.

  “Oy! Stop straining against those binds. You’re only going to get yourself killed and we won’t get paid.”

  “Then take me back to Avemore Abbey.”

  Behind him, the other one added, “Well, if we did go back, then we can grab the heiress, too.”

  “Shut it, Jamey. The marquess said that if we couldn’t nab the heiress, then he’d think of another way to extort Waldenfield.” Lum reached out and shoved a burly arm hard against Asher’s throat. “I’m warning you one last time to stop your wriggling. We’re only a couple hours away from Seabrooke’s hunting lodge, where Shettlemane is waitin’, and he doesn’t want your face bloodied.”

  Asher dragged in a breath as Lum lowered his arm. He hated to imagine what his father would try next.

  “Then again,” Lum said with a cruel grin, “I might well tell him that I had no choice in the matter.”

  The last sound Asher remembered for quite a while after that was the way Lum’s knuckles cracked when he made a fist.

  By the time he awoke, he was no longer inside a rocking curricle, but lying on the floor in front of a blazing fire in a broad stone hearth.

  Unfortunately, he was still restrained. The rope digging into the flesh of his wrists was on a short tethe
r to the ropes around his lower legs, and he wasn’t able to stand or stretch out. He could sit, at least, but his head spun with the attempt.

  Even so, he wasn’t too dizzy to notice the darkness of late evening enshrouding the room, the shift of the polished Hessians next to him, and the signet ring that caught the firelight as a hand thrummed lazily on the arm of the chair.

  “You’ve sunk to a new low, Father. Surely you didn’t find it necessary to accost and restrain me,” he said, cringing at the volume of his own voice and the popping of his sore jaw, courtesy of Lum.

  “You put the men on a merry chase,” the marquess said with a dismissive shrug. “And commandeered their curricle. I honestly didn’t know what you might do if I’d simply asked you to join me.”

  “I’d have told you to rot in hell.”

  His father’s gaze dipped to the black cravat—which was admittedly a little tattered, a little less than before, but still served its purpose—and he sneered. “Soon enough, I’m sure. In the meantime, I plan to live in a manner fit for a man of my station. And you may just prove to be worth all the trouble you’ve brought me of late.”

  “And what about the trouble you’ve—”

  Asher stopped himself before wasting his breath. He understood the workings of his father’s mind enough to realize that he’d likely concocted a fantasy where he had all of Waldenfield’s money and it was going to buy him everything he never knew he wanted until now.

  “Take me back to Avemore Abbey,” he said. “We’ll get all this settled before you garner any grand ideas about me marrying an heiress. It isn’t going to happen.”

  Because if Winn would even hear him out . . . if she forgave him . . . and if she agreed to marry him, then he’d beg Waldenfield to make certain that she was no longer an heiress.

  A flash of irritation lit his father’s eyes. “Waldenfield won’t want a scandal and, with you disappearing from the abbey, he’ll already start wondering whether or not you can be trusted to keep quiet. His accounts will be ripe for the plucking by the time he returns to London.”

  “You don’t believe you have the power to blackmail a man with Lord Waldenfield’s money, do you? He can pay people to keep things quiet, or even to invent an entirely different story.”

  “Perhaps, but that’s why I plan to visit him. On your behalf, of course.” With a tilt of his head and a condescending teacher-to-pupil nod, the marquess flashed a grin. “I’ll offer him a bargain for keeping silent about the possibility of a child.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  Those lips curved again, eyes flashing with cunning delight. Then he clucked his tongue. “Have I taught you nothing about letting your emotions get the better of you? I’m ashamed. Thought you’d tamed that tell when you were just a lad.”

  Asher schooled his features. It was like lowering an old blind over a window. Even so, it was too late.

  “But you’d have been careful, I’m sure,” Shettlemane continued. “Wouldn’t want to take the risk of her thinking that you’d trapped her into marriage, after all. No, you’d have wanted it to seem like marriage was her choice.”

  He despised the way his father twisted everything to sound so tawdry and underhanded. “I’m not like you.”

  “And yet you were the one who kidnapped the girl in the first place. Brilliant plan. Not even I have ever ventured so low.”

  “Who told you I kidnapped her?” But even as he asked, he already knew the answer. Portman.

  Asher swallowed down a rise of bile and guilt burning the back of his throat. Every decision he’d made since the beginning fell under his own moral scrutiny. And he hated himself.

  “When your driver returned to London without you inside that old carriage, I had the men ask him a few questions.”

  In other words, they beat it out of him. “What happened to Portman?”

  Shettlemane scoffed. “He’ll live. But I had to sack him, of course.”

  “He isn’t in your employ.”

  “Oh, but he is. In fact, your driver and all your servants are paid through the monies earned on Ashbrook Cottage land. And you happen to be looking at the new deed-holder. You see, the trustees and I recently came to a mutual understanding.”

  “You finally found a way to manipulate them to do your bidding,” Asher accused. “What was it—a wager, a threat, or something more despicable?”

  He chuckled. “It wasn’t anything I’ve done. This was all your doing. When they saw the threadbare state of Ashbrook Cottage, most of the furnishings gone”—he dared to cluck his tongue—“they agreed that you’re no longer fit to live there.”

  “They know very well who sold the furnishings. Now, what is the truth, if you even know how to speak such a foreign tongue.”

  “Whispers, my dear boy, about you absconding with a rich debutante, whose father has yet to invest his money in their bank. And since we’re all about to be family, I said that I could scratch their backs if they scratched mine.”

  Asher had known what his father was capable of and yet this still came as a shocking blow. He’d thought the trustees were above reproach. That when he sailed off, Ashbrook Cottage would be waiting for his return.

  But even they had a price, apparently.

  Would he ever be free of Shettlemane’s manipulations? Even as a child he’d known this was a never-ending struggle.

  He wanted to howl with rage, curse the heavens for handing him such a worthless father. But what would that solve? Nothing. He’d tried for so long to honor his mother’s memory, to be the man she’d wanted him to be. But it only kept him locked in a prison of his father’s making.

  . . . your mother would have wanted you to be loyal to yourself as well.

  Winn’s whispered words filled his mind, soothing him and taking him back to their moments in the garden. She made him see possibilities where he’d been blinded by obstacles.

  She also made him realize that nothing should hold him back from the life he wanted.

  “Be warned. When we get to London, I’m severing ties with you,” Asher said with the cold certainty of a man who had reached the absolute limit. “Permanently. There’s nothing to keep me there, or in England for that matter.”

  “Hollow threats.” The marquess patted his pocket. “The last time you said the same to me, you were so incensed that you neglected to realize the money clip, with the winnings from your wager with Lord Berryhill, had slipped from your sleeve. I must say, this hatred of yours has been quite lucrative for me.”

  Stunned with pure animosity, Asher went numb, blood lumbering icily through his veins. He should have guessed it from the first moment. Should have known that his own father was more capable of robbing him than a pair of debutantes.

  But now there was no escaping the damning truth. Everything terrible that had happened to Winn had been all his own fault. And Asher was going to make it right, no matter what.

  Chapter 26

  It was Monday morning by the time Winnifred and her parents arrived in London. Aching from the two-day journey, all she wanted to do was curl up on her bed and sleep for a year. But she’d been home for less than a quarter hour when she heard raised voices and arguing below.

  An agonizingly familiar drawl rose up the stairs. “Lord Waldenfield, I implore you not to believe a word my father says.”

  Even though Winnifred’s mind was through with Asher, her heart beat excitedly. He was here!

  No, she thought, holding firm to her resolve to forget about him. He’d abandoned her. Had proven that he’d only wanted the money, after all. Not her.

  And yet, that foolish organ beneath her breast wanted her to give him just one more chance. Perhaps—the bu-bump bu-bump suggested—he had a good reason for leaving.

  Her mind harrumphed, not so willing to forgive. Without a word? Not even a missive scrawled on a scrap of paper?

  Very true, Winnifred thought, her hand white-knuckled on the railing. She’d walked halfway down the stairs without even realizing it.


  “As far as I’m concerned,” her father bellowed, his voice ringing out from the direction of his study, “both of you are encouraged to leave.”

  “Lord Waldenfield, it is hardly in your best interest not to hear me out,” another man intoned. He had the voice of a practiced actor on the stage—the kind of character who appeared effusively charming while hiding a dagger behind his back.

  The marquess, she thought. After all she’d heard of him, it was as if she knew him already.

  “I do not see how any matter of mine concerns you, Lord Shettlemane.”

  Her father usually spoke more diplomatically. However, he’d been cross for the entire duration of the journey home, glaring out the window at the countryside.

  Winn had tried to keep her tears silently to herself, but they rolled down her cheeks and she’d been unable to stop them. Father had gruffly given her his handkerchief. This only made her cry in earnest because she thought about Asher’s handkerchief, still tied around her shoe and hidden at the bottom of the trunk that Mother had brought to Yorkshire.

  “Lord Waldenfield is correct, Father. You needn’t spend another minute here,” Asher said tightly. “You’ve taken enough already.”

  Lord Shettlemane chuckled. “That is precisely why I am here. To see that amends are made for what has been . . . taken.”

  Winnifred held her breath, the intimation clear in the sly inflection. Had Asher told his father—

  No. Asher hated his father, and he would never confide in him.

  “As I said to you at Avemore Abbey, I have kept to the terms of our bargain,” Asher said quickly. “Your daughter is unharmed.”

  Unharmed? Ha! Tell that to her shredded heart. She’d been nothing more to him than a parcel to be delivered in exchange for payment.

  “I fear my son is playing the gentleman for your sake.” Lord Shettlemane tutted. “But you and I were once young men in our prime. And while it may be difficult for you to imagine your daughter in the hands of a renowned scoundrel, I’m afraid it will not be difficult for most of society.”