“You are the most beautiful bride,” Georgina said. Tears shimmered on her cheeks.
“As beautiful as you, when you married Jack?”
“Oh, ever so much more beautiful! I wore a rumpled carriage dress over the anvil at Gretna Green.” Georgina dried her eyes, and turned to pick up a nosegay of roses that matched the hair wreath. “Here are your flowers, Lizzie.”
“I picked them from the garden just this morning, Lady Elizabeth,” said Daisy.
Elizabeth inhaled deeply of their sweet, early summer scent. “They are perfect. This is a perfect day.”
“And it has only just started!” Georgina checked her own reflection in the mirror, straightening her feathered hat and smoothing the bodice of her pale yellow silk gown. “It can only grow more perfect as it goes on. Such as when you see Nicholas waiting for you at the church.”
Elizabeth giggled into her flowers.
A knock sounded at the door. “Elizabeth?” Peter called. “Are you quite ready? The carriage is waiting.”
“Come in, Peter,” she answered.
Peter entered the room impatiently, shaking his watch by its gold chain, but halted abruptly at the sight of his sister standing there.
“Elizabeth,” he said softly. “You are the very image of your mother.”
Elizabeth smiled. She was not a bit like the blond Isobel, even in her stunning new gown, but it was a very nice thing to hear. It seemed to bring her mother closer to her on this most important day. “Thank you, Peter. And you look very like your father, even that waistcoat you are wearing. I have never seen you wear red brocade before!”
“It is a festive day, is it not? A time for new beginnings. Ivory satin just didn’t seem appropriate.” He took her arm and slowly, as if afraid she would pull back, kissed her cheek. “If my father were here, he would be filled with pride at the thought of escorting you down the aisle. I hope that you will accept me in his stead.”
“I would be delighted if you would give me away.” She gave him a small, ironic smile. “After all, if it were not for you, Peter, I would never have met Nicholas, and this day could never have happened.”
“Touche,” he said, with an answering smile. “I know that you are not certain of your feelings toward me, Elizabeth.”
“Peter, I ...”
“No, please, let me finish. I know that I have a great deal of work in my future to make you forgive me completely, for us to make a new sort of friendship. But I do love you, Lizzie. I want to be your brother again, if you will allow me to.”
“I want that, as well,” Elizabeth answered slowly. “I cannot say that the past will be fully forgotten. But, God willing, the future will be a long one, and we will have many new roads to travel together. And my children will have great need of their uncle.”
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Thank you. I vow that I will never cause you to doubt me again.”
“I do believe you. Now, we should not keep the vicar waiting.”
“No. We have a wedding to attend.”
The stone Norman church in the village was full, every pew taken and a few unfortunate latecomers standing at the back. Lady Haversham, her poodles, and all her pink lace-clad daughters had claimed one pew all for themselves. The Misses Allan had left off their black just for the occasion and wore dark green.
On the bride’s side of the church, a flurry of artists from Italy and London and Paris were seated in a sea of bright colors, laughing and gossiping and finding out who had gained what plum commission.
Yet even they fell silent as the organ swelled with the processional, and Georgina swept down the aisle with her bridesmaid’s nosegay held elegantly before her.
Then Elizabeth appeared, her fingers clutching Peter’s arm, her eyes only on her bridegroom, unhindered by a veil.
Nicholas was the most handsome she had ever seen him in his blue coat, his smile wide and white as he watched her come to him, as he took her hand in his, and kissed her cheek much to the disapproval of the vicar.
Then Mr. Bridges intoned, “Dearly beloved ...”
And Elizabeth smiled.
The Spanisk Bride
To the finest mentors a fledgling writer
could ever ask for—Tori Phillips,
Karen Harbaugh, Linda Castle, and Martha Hix.
I truly could not have done
this without all your help and advice.
Thank you!
Prologue
Spain, 1811
“I pronounce you man and wife. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Carmen Montero, known in her Seville home as the Condesa Carmen Pilar Maria de Santiago y Montero, trembled as the priest made the sign of the cross over her head. Her fingers were chill in her bridegroom’s grasp.
It was done. She was married.
Again.
And she had always sworn to herself that she would never again enter the unwelcome bonds of matrimony! She had relished her widowhood, the freedom to live as she pleased, apart from restrictive Seville society. The freedom to work for the cause of ridding Spain of the French interloper.
Her husband, Joaquin, Conde de Santiago, had been good for nothing in life. She shuddered still to think of his cold cruel hands, his rages when, every month, she was not pregnant with a son and heir. At least in death his money had proved useful, working to help free Spain from the French.
Yes, she had sworn never to marry again.
Yet she had not foreseen that there could be anything like this man in the world.
When she had first seen Major Lord Peter Everdean, the Earl of Clifton, her heart had skipped a beat, just as in the silly novels her friends had slipped into their convent school so long ago. Then it had leaped to life again. He was just as handsome as she had heard whispered by her friends at balls in Seville, the Ice Earl, as the ladies gigglingly called him.
But it had not been only his golden good looks that drew her. There was something in his beautiful ice-blue eyes: a loneliness, an isolation that she had understood so deeply. It had been what she had felt all her life, this sense of not belonging.
Now perhaps she had found a place she could belong, even in the midst of war. Perhaps they both had.
Carmen peeked up through her lashes at the man beside her, only to find him watching her intently, a faint smile on his lips.
She smiled slowly in return, once she could catch her breath. The only word that could describe Peter was beautiful. He was as elegant and golden as an archangel, his fair hair and sun-bronzed skin gleaming in the candlelight of the small church. His broad shoulders gave a muscular contour to his red coat and his impossibly lean hips looked charming in tight-fitting white pantaloons. His rare smiles enticed women the entire length of Andalucia, and every place he went.
Now his ring was on her finger. Tall, skinny, bookish Carmen. This extraordinary man was her husband, her lover, even her friend.
It was all suddenly overwhelming, the incense in the church, the emotions in her heart. She swayed precariously, only to be caught in her husband’s strong arms.
“Carmen!” he said. “What is it?”
“I just need some fresh air,” she whispered.
Nicholas Hollingsworth, Peter’s fellow officer and their only witness, hurried down the aisle ahead of them to throw open the carved doors. “She is probably exhausted, Peter,” He pointed out. “She rode all day to get here!”
“Yes,” Carmen agreed. “I am just a bit tired. But the air is a great help.”
Indeed it was. Her head was clearer already, in the cool, dry night. She leaned her forehead against her husband’s shoulder and closed her eyes, breathing deeply of his heady scent of wool, leather, and sandalwood soap.
“I am a brute,” he murmured against her hair. “You should have been asleep these many hours, and here I have insisted on dragging you before the priest.”
Carmen laughed. “Oh, I do not think I mind so very much.”
/> “It was past time for the two of you to make it respectable,” Nicholas said. “You have been making calves’ eyes at each other for weeks, every time Carmen comes into camp. It was quite the scandal.”
“Untrue!” Carmen cried, laughing. “You are the scandal, Nick, chasing all the señoritas in the village.”
“I do not have to chase them! I stand still and they come to me.” Nicholas saluted them smartly, and turned to make his way back down the hill to the lights of the British encampment. “Good night, Lord and Lady Clifton!”
Carmen and Peter watched him go, silent together in the warm, starlit night, and in the sense of the profundity of the step they had just taken.
They had known each other only about two months, in intermittent visits Carmen made to the various encampments of Peter’s regiment. Yet Carmen had somehow known, the moment she had seen him, that he was quite special.
“I remember when I first saw you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. The day I rode in from Seville to speak to Colonel Smith-Mason. You were playing cards with Nicholas outside your tent, in just your shirtsleeves. Most improper. The sun was shining in your hair, and you were laughing. You were quite the most handsome thing I had ever seen.”
“I also remember that day. You were riding hell-for-leather through the camp, on that demon you call your horse. You were wearing trousers and that ridiculous hat you love so much.” He laughed. “I had never seen a woman like you.”
“Hmph, thank you very much! I will have you know that that hat is the height of fashion right now.”
“I stand corrected, Condesa. But I could not believe that anyone so very lovely, so refined, could be a spy.”
“I am not a spy,” she corrected him. “I simply sometimes overhear useful information that could perhaps aid you in ridding my country of this French infestation.”
“So that is not spying.”
“No. It is—helping.”
Peter laughed, the rumble of it warm against her. “Then, I am very glad indeed that you have decided to help us. You, my dear, could be a formidable foe.”
“Not as formidable as you.” Carmen fell silent, turning her new ring in the moonlight to admire the flash of the single, square-cut emerald. Peter had told her that the ring had been his mother’s, who had died when he was a small child. “This war cannot go on forever.”
“No.” Peter’s hand covered hers, tracing the ring with his thumb. “Are you sorry now, Carmen, that we married so hastily? Are you having second thoughts about sharing your life with mine after the war?”
“No! Are you?”
“Of course not. You are the only woman I have ever loved.”
Carmen’s brow arched doubtfully. “Really?”
His laugh was rueful. “I did not say the only woman I have ever known. You would see that for a sham immediately. But you are the only woman I have ever loved.”
“Then, you did not ask me to marry you out of some sense of obligation, after—well, after what occurred last week?”
“Are you referring to the fact that we anticipated our wedding vows?” Peter clicked his tongue. “My dear, how indelicate!”
Carmen couldn’t help but blush just a bit at the memory of that night, when, tipsy with brandy and kisses and a dance beside a river, they had fallen into his bed and done such incredibly wonderful, wicked things. Peter’s hands, his sorcerer’s mouth ...
A giggle escaped.
“No,” Peter continued. “I married you because I think it is so charming that, despite the fact that you can ride and shoot like the veriest rifle sergeant, you still blush at the mention of the, ah, small preview of our marital bed.”
“Small, querido?”
“Well, perhaps not so small.”
“No.” Carmen smiled. “Yet have you thought of after the war, when we must leave here and go to England, and you must present me as your countess?”
“Of course I have thought of it! It is almost all I do when we are apart. It will be wonderful. I have a sister and an estate that I have neglected these many years, so we must go there as soon as we can.”
“You have been doing your duty for your country ‘these many years.’ Surely your family must understand that?”
“Yes, but it does not make it any easier to be parted from them. Sometimes, when I cannot sleep at night, I think of them, Elizabeth and Clifton Manor. I can almost smell the green English rain ...” His voice trailed faintly away.
Carmen looked out over the lights of the camp. She had never been to England, or indeed anywhere but Spain. It was all she knew, warm, sunny, tradition-bound Spain. How would she fare in a new, English life?
She leaned her head against his shoulder, her eyes tightly shut. “Will they like me at your home? Will your sister like me?”
Peter tipped her chin up with one long finger, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Elizabeth will love you; you are very much like her. They will all love you at Clifton. As I do. Believe me, darling, it is much easier to be an English countess than a Spanish one, and you have done that wonderfully. You must not be afraid.”
Her jaw tightened. “I am not afraid.”
Peter laughed “Excellent! I knew that a woman who does the things you do could not possibly be frightened of the English ton.” He kissed her lightly on her nose. “Are you ready to return to camp?”
“Oh, yes.”
The encampment was uncharacteristically quiet as they made their way hand in hand to Peter’s tent. A few groups of men played desultory games of cards around the fires. Outside the largest tent, Colonel Smith-Mason stood with some of his officers, talking in low voices over a sheaf of dispatches.
Peter glanced at them with a small frown.
“Do you think there is something amiss?” Carmen whispered. She had lived long enough with the intrigues of war to know that events could change in an instant, but she had hoped, prayed, that her wedding night at least could prove uneventful.
Outside the bedchamber, anyway.
“I do not know,” Peter answered, his watchful gaze still on the small group. “Surely not.”
“But you do not know?”
He shrugged, “We have more important things to think of tonight,” he said, bending his head to softly kiss her ear.
Carmen shivered, but waved him away. “No, you must find out. I will wait.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes. Go on. We have many hours before dawn.” He kissed her again, and she watched him walk away, his polished buttons gleaming in the firelight. Then she turned to duck into his tent. Their tent, for that night.
It was a goodly size, but almost spartan in its tidiness. The cot was made up with linen-cased pillows and a blue woolen blanket; a stack of papers and books was lined up exactly on the table, and the chairs pushed in at precise angles. His shaving kit and monogrammed ivory hairbrush were flush with his small shaving mirror. The only bit of personal expression was in the miniature portrait on a small stand beside the cot: of his younger sister, Elizabeth. Next to it was a portrait of Carmen, painted when she was 16, which she had given him as a wedding gift.
Carmen laid her small bouquet of wild red roses beside the paintings and went to open her own small trunk, which had been brought there while they were at the church. In it were the only things she had brought away on her journey from Seville: two muslin dresses and a satin gown, a pair of boots, rosary beads, men’s trousers and shirts, and a cotton nightrail that was far too practical for a wedding night.
She slipped out of her simple white muslin wedding dress, and took the high ivory comb and white lace mantilla from her hair. She brushed out her waist-length black hair. Then she sat down on the cot to wait.
She was quite asleep when she at last felt Peter’s kiss on her cheek, his hand on her back, warm through her silk chemise. She blinked up at him and smiled. “What was it?”
“It is nothing.” He sat down beside her and gathered her into his arms. He had s
hed his coat and shirt, and Carmen rubbed her cheek against the golden satin of his skin. “There were rumors of a French regiment nearby, much closer than they should be.”
“Only rumors?”
“Yes. For tonight.” He wrapped his fingers in her loose hair and tilted her face up to his, trailing small, soft kisses along the line of her throat. “Tonight is only ours, my wife.”
“Oh, yes. My husband. Mi esposo.” Carmen moaned as his mouth found the crest of her breast through the silk. Her fingernails dug into his bare shoulders. “Only ours.”
The bridal couple was torn from blissful sleep near dawn by the horrifying sounds of gunfire, panicked shouts, and braying horses.
Peter was out of bed in an instant, pulling on his uniform as he threw back the tent flaps.
Carmen stumbled after him in bewilderment, drawing the sheet around her naked shoulders. “What is it?” she cried. “A battle?”
“Stay here!” Peter ordered. Then she was alone.
Carmen hastily donned her shirt and trousers, and tied her hair back with a scarf. She was searching for her boots when she heard her husband’s voice and that of Lieutenant Robert Means, a young man she had sometimes played cards with of a quiet evening. And fleeced regularly.
“By damn!” Peter cursed. “How could they be so close? How could they have gotten so far without us knowing?”
“Someone must have informed them,” Robert answered. “But we are marching out within the quarter hour.”
“Of course. I shall be ready. Has Captain Hollingsworth been alerted?”
“Yes. What of ...” Robert’s voice lowered. “What of your wife, Major?”
“I will see to her.”
Carmen stuck her head outside the tent. “She will see to herself, thank you very much! And what are you doing running about unarmed, husband?” She rattled his saber at him.
“Carmen!” Peter pushed her back into the tent. “You must ride into the hills and wait. I will send an escort with you.”
Scandalous Brides Page 18
