by Lynn Kerstan
The Runaway Bride
By Lynn Kerstan
The Runaway Bride
Copyright 2012 Lynn Kerstan
Published 2012 by Lynn Kerstan
Smashwords Edition
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Table Of Contents
The Runaway Bride
Bonus Excerpt: The Rake and The Spinster
Bonus Excerpt: The Golden Leopard
Bonus Excerpt: Gwen’s Ghost
About The Author
The Runaway Bride
“I,” John Corbett informed the world at large, “am a happy man.”
Ricco, having listened to similar declarations for the past several miles, expressed his indifference with an inelegant snort.
John’s good humor remained undiminished. “Your time will come, old boy. I’ll see to it myself. Prime English stock, no expense spared, and you can make the choice yourself. Meantime, it’s my turn, so pick up the pace, will you? Fifty miles to London . . . and the woman of my dreams.”
The grin, permanently carved across his face since he had met Penelope, widened at the thought. He’d seen enough of war and death to appreciate his good fortune, and was so busy counting his blessing that he nearly turned from a side road onto the path of a thundering coach.
“Back, Ricco.”
The enormous bay, battle-trained and smarter than most men John knew, retreated several yards.
A youngster with more capes on his coat that wits in his head had taken up the ribbons, snapping the tommy at the straining wheelers’ flanks until they lurched into a gallop. John swallowed his anger. Reckless boys, lathered horses, and irresponsible coachmen were none of his business. As the stage hurtled past, his keen eyes picked out the legend Blazing Star on the panel and lifted with casual interest to the open window. His heart skipped several beats.
Conditioned to action, he moved without thinking, chucking Ricco after the coach at a slow trot. “Looks like a slight detour,” he advised the horse.
What the devil was she up to? In ten days and twenty-two hours, on the thirty-first of May, Penelope Wright was to marry him at St. George’s in Hanover Square. It was all arranged, signed, and delivered. He’d advanced her repugnant father several thousand pounds to cover expenses, including the bridal trousseau and an elaborate ceremony and reception. The baron had insisted that only the best would do for his cherished firstborn child.
Now the firstborn was taking herself out of London on a common stage, for unmistakably that had been Pen’s face in the window. John swore fluently. A family crisis was the only explanation he wanted to acknowledge, but she’d no relations beyond her father and sisters and thus could not be rushing to the bedside of an expiring uncle.
One hellishly cold winter, when his regiment was forced to bivouac in an open field, he had wakened to find his hair frozen to the ground. That same fierce cold gripped him now as he considered the two reasons Pen might bolt days before her wedding,
He, of course, was one of them, but she had seemed to like him well enough. If she objected to the marriage, why the devil hadn’t she said so when he proposed? Or the next day, which was the last time he’d seen her until a few minutes ago?
A lot could happen in a month, he reflected. He should never have given her a chance to think things over and change her mind. But what the hell did he know? All his friends had advised him to get out of town and stay out of sight until the last possible moment. Females in the throes of wedding preparations would trample any man bacon-witted enough to wander underfoot.
Besides, he’d not seen Walford since his last extended leave more than six years ago, and his predecessor rarely parted with a shilling for repairs. Surely duty required him to make certain his new home was fit to welcome a bride.
The trouble was, John had little experience of civilian life and none at all as a peer of the realm. The youngest of four sons, he always figured to end his days a crusty bachelor officer, entertaining subalterns with war stories at regimental dinners. But his brothers fell like duckpins, the heir in a hunting accident, his successor of influenza, and Edgar by strangling on a hunk of tough mutton.
Suddenly plain John, the military boy who played with toy soldiers before he could walk, was Viscount Walford and heir to a sizable fortune. Even so, he declined to sell out until Bonaparte was stowed on Elba, but everything went at full speed after that. Less than a week after returning to England he met Penelope Wright and tumbled head over ears in love.
Pen was everything he’d fantasized about during the long years in Portugal and Spain and France. Once, on a ride into the countryside while recovering from a minor wound, he’d come across huge fields of sunflowers that seemed to stretch as far as the horizon. They stood tall and bright, frank and open, blazing with light. Mesmerized, he sat for hours, watching the flowers swing slowly as they tracked the sun across the sky. That day was the happiest of his life, until the first time he saw Pen.
Like the sunflowers, she was magnificent. Her wide smile lit up the ballroom. Her thick hair, every shade of sunlight from pale dawn to amber sunset, made his fingers burn to uncoil the heavy knot clamped at the back of her neck. Even her freckles reminded him of sunflower seeds.
She was three-and-twenty, on the shelf everyone said, on the town only to chaperone her incomparable sisters. He thanked his stars London men were blind, deaf, and dumb. He could scarcely believe his good fortune in finding her, and the little time he managed to spend with her confirmed his every wish. Pen was intelligent and witty, hot-tempered and sensible, and given to odd flights of fancy that intrigued him.
She’d been wary, which hurt him, although he could not be surprised. He’d bought his first commission at sixteen and spent all his life in the army. His manners showed it. When he spoke to her, words came out that bore no resemblance to those in his head. He kept looking over his shoulder to see who was saying them. He’d shed his uniform, but clearly the professional soldier was not so easily cast off. And that soldier had no address whatever.
Fortunately, Pen never ran short of words. She filled his aching silences with bright chatter, and he longed for the day when his tongue and brain joined forces to produce something intelligible in return. Meantime he was stiff as a post and dull as cabbage soup. No wonder she kept pushing him at her sisters, three nearly identical hothouse orchids he scarcely noticed once he’d met his sunflower.
Never one to bide his time, he approached her father and found him more than ready to part with any of his daughters—for a price. The baron assumed he meant to offer for one of the other girls, and there was s
ome confusion while that was straightened out. Then, with a vulture’s instinct for easy prey, Burnwich demanded and received an outrageous marriage settlement. Money changed hands, the date was set, and John left to ready a home for his wife.
Certain of his own feelings, he never thought to question Pen’s. Young women of his class married for advancement or money, and he could give her both, She would be a viscountess, wealthy, pampered, and wed to a man who adored her. What else could she possibly want?
Whatever it was, he thought grimly, she was on her way to find it. And that led to the second, the unthinkable, reason for her to bolt. Another man.
Turning off the road, he urged Ricco to a gallop across the fields, taking hedges in smooth jumps until he came to a fenced pasture enclosing at least fifty horses. Nearby, a busy posthouse was servicing a private carriage. Mr. Bowles, owner of the Notched Arrow, confirmed that London-to-Stroud coaches always stopped to change horses at his excellent inn. The Blazing Star was due within the hour.
John spent nearly ten minutes giving orders and paying handsomely to see them carried out. Then he settled himself in the best private parlor with a bottle of good claret to wait for his runaway bride.
***
Not long after the horn announced the coach’s arrival, John heard Pen’s voice in the passageway.
“I can’t afford a private parlor,” she wailed as the door swung open. “You don’t—”
When Penelope saw the tall man across the room, her mouth dropped. “Oh, no,” she muttered, staring at him from huge tawny eyes.
Mr. Bowles nudged her inside and beat a quick retreat.
John bowed. “Hullo, Pen. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Oh, no,” she said again. Her freckles blazed like pumpkins in a snowpatch. “How can you be here?”
He shrugged. “Good reconnaissance. Come inside, will you? The other passengers are gaping at us.”
Pen entered on stiff legs, dropping her bandbox and giving it a kick for good measure. “How did you know which direction I’d gone? I never said in the note.”
“Ah, the note.” John propped his shoulders against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. “I must confess I didn’t understand a word of it.”
She glared at him. “How did you get to be a colonel if you can’t read simple English? It was plain as day.”
“Not to me. Would you mind going over the details again?”
“Oh, this is beyond everything!” She began to pace off her frustration, careful to keep a distance from him. “No wedding. Gracious, you can’t have misunderstood that. I cried off. Papa got a note too, and I sent a notice to the Times. You jilted me.” Her lashes fluttered. “I did apologize. That part took hours to write, but I meant it. I really am sorry for embarrassing you, and for the money Papa spent. He won’t pay you back, I’m afraid.”
Glad of the solid wall at his back, John sifted through the disjointed explanation to the one bit he understood clearly. “I never jilted you, Pen.”
“Of course not. But I couldn’t make It sound like I’d run out on you, when you were the one run out on. From what I know about men, that would certainly have been insulting, so I made it seem that you called it off.”
“Pen, whatever causes a wedding to be canceled, in public release it is always the bride who jilts the groom. Always.”
“I got it backward? Oh dear.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “Maybe Papa will know the proper form and straighten things out.”
“Never mind that. From your note, I could not decipher exactly why you did not wish to marry me.”
“Well, that’s because I didn’t say. Pinfeathers! One would think you’d not even read the thing. We will not suit, Colonel Corbett. That is perfectly obvious, and I can’t imagine why either of us let things go so far as they did.”
Pen always spoke a beat ahead of her mind, which was a thing he’d delighted in, but now she seemed weeks ahead of logic, somewhere in the realm of totally incomprehensible female reasoning. He knew he’d never find her there.
And she was exhausted. Her straw bonnet angled over her left eye, and her forehead was moist with perspiration. He lifted himself away from the wall, took her elbow, and led her to a chair. “Sit,” he commanded.
With a mutinous glare, she obeyed. He untied the ribbons at her chin and lifted away the sad bonnet. Her thick hair was matted underneath. It must have been hot in that coach, he thought, wanting to kiss her.
Pen stretched her legs in a distinctly unfeminine gesture and wriggled her feet. After seven hours crammed like a sausage between a pig farmer and a hard wooden panel, all her muscles ached. And she badly needed to use the necessary, although she’d been forestalled by that brute of an innkeeper. Crossing her knees, she curled onto her side in the large padded chair.
She was mortified, but that was nothing new. It seemed that wherever she went, she was out of place, and no one who met her family could credit that Penelope was half sister to the Three Graces. As fate had it, she’d not been granted even a quarter of their slender loveliness. They were graceful and petite, she was long-legged and gangly. They had creamy, flawless complexions, whereas she was blotched with freckles no amount of lemon juice could diminish. They were gifted with sleek, mink-dark hair, while her wild mane of unruly curls was the color of dirt.
She stared at her clenched hands, unable to look at John again. How had she ever imagined this handsome man might really want her? His hair and eyes were brown as roasted chestnuts and he was wonderfully tall, with shoulders so wide they made her feel graceful instead of big and awkward. He’d been awkward when they danced, she remembered, stumbling over his enormous feet every time the figure brought them together. For all her great size, one of the few things she did well was dance, and he offered to take lessons so as not to shame her.
She remembered a great many things from their first meetings and had been granted a month to think them over when he left “on business.” Enough to realize she could not marry him.
Why in perdition was he here, and how in blazes did he know where to look? She’d thought him miles from London, unlikely to read her note for days, yet he’d managed to beat the Blazing Star to this remote inn. It never occurred to her than anyone would follow or care where she’d gone, but men were damnably reluctant to let females escape while they still had some use for them.
She heard the clink of ice and looked up. John was holding out a tall glass of lemonade. Her mouth felt dry as wool, but she dared not swallow any liquid. “I can’t,” she murmured feeling heat rise to her cheeks.
He studied her for a moment and left the room abruptly. When he returned, a buxom serving maid followed, gazing at him with patent admiration. “Pen, I’ve requisitioned a private billet for you. While you wash up and catch your breath, I’ll order dinner.”
She stood. “Yes. Thank you. But I can’t stay for dinner.”
He gave her his “colonel” look. “On no account will you continue your journey on a public coach, young lady. The driver has been instructed to go on without you.”
Pen grabbed her bandbox. “He can’t do that! I paid for that ticket, and I’ll be on the coach when it leaves.”
“Not,” he said mildly, “past me.”
In spite of her threat, he made no move to stop her as she vaulted out of the room.
“All ready, outside and in,” called the guard as he swung to his place.
“Let ’em go, then,” the coachman shouted. Postboys jumped out of the way.
Pen watched helplessly as the Blazing Star rumbled out of the yard. A cloud of dust billowed over her.
“Ten minutes, to be exact,” John commented in a pleasant voice when she stormed back into the parlor. “It’s a matter of pride, for coachman and innkeeper alike, to be precisely on time.”
She wanted to hurl her bandbox at him. “My luggage,” she informed him, “is on the coach. I hope they’re proud of that.”
“Relax, Pen. Your bags are upstairs, and the hot wa
ter I ordered for you is getting cold.”
His deep voice was perfectly calm, but she recognized a command. “This is only a temporary delay,” she warned. “Coaches stop here all the time, and I’ll board any of them I choose.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner,” he said firmly. “This young woman will show you to your room.”
From the set of his jaw, discussion was over. Weariness settled over her like a heavy cloak as she stumbled upstairs.
Sure enough, her meager luggage was waiting in a clean, pleasant chamber. Curtly dismissing the maid, who introduced herself as Betty and seemed inclined to stay and talk, Pen hurried behind a wooden screen to use the chamberpot. Then she flung herself on the canopied bed to contemplate the vagaries of fate. The leaf-green curtains and quilted counterpane, crisp and scented with lilac, were the nicest she’d ever seen. This was, she suspected, the best room at the inn, but why such a treat when she could not enjoy it? Drat the man! He should have confined her to the root cellar, which suited her mood and her crimes.
She banged a clenched fist against the bedcovers. Men never saw things exactly the way one imagined. She’d thought John would be as glad to escape the marriage as she was sorry, but here he was to plague her. And her father had been equally contrary. Instead of being delighted to marry off his unmarriageable daughter, he’d tried to convince her that John really wanted one of her sisters. Men made no sense whatsoever.
Some few of them did place a large store on honor, though. Especially soldiers. Maybe John thought he was committed to her because he’d shoved a betrothal ring on her finger and muttered something about being captivated by her loveliness and charm. He’d spoken the words by rote, like a multiplication table, but at the time she was too stunned to care. This handsome, dashing man wanted to marry her. Her! For the only time since her breasts began to develop, she’d felt shy. He’d had to prompt her for an answer.
