Scandalous Brides

by Amanda McCabe

Peter also rose to his feet, somewhat stiffly, and attempted to come to her aid. “Carmen, I never . . .”

  He held out his hand to her, but she did not see it, stumbling back out of the clearing.

  “Oh, Peter!” she cried. “Do not say you are sorry again! I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Then please, let me ...”

  She turned away from him and scooped up her hat and gloves from where they lay on the ground. “I must be alone right now, must—think. But we will speak later, Peter, I promise. It is only that—oh, it is nothing!”

  Then she rushed away to where the others were gathered beside the tower, brushing past Huntington and Deidra with only a distracted nod.

  She did not even notice the balled-up, smeared note that had fallen from her hand, only to be found by a very puzzled Peter.

  His face darkened as he read it, a rushing fury thundering in his ears. “By damn,” he whispered.

  “Lord Clifton?” Deidra asked softly. “Is something amiss?”

  He forced himself to look up at her serene face, and smiled tightly. “Not at all. Lady Deidra. Not at all.”

  “I do not understand women in the least!”

  Elizabeth looked up from the menus she was perusing to blink at her brother in surprise. He very seldom came into her personal rooms at all, let alone unannounced, to throw himself into a chair and make odd pronouncements.

  “You, Peter? Not understand women?” she said with a snort. “I can scarce fathom that. They are always flocking about you so.”

  “That does not mean I understand them; quite the opposite. The more I meet, the less I understand. And why should women want to flock at all?” He leaned his head back against the satin cushions of the chair, and closed his eyes. Yet he could still see Carmen by the stream, her dark hair tousled, her lips red from his kiss. The image seemed emblazoned on his eyelids, there for all time. “And Carmen de Santiago is the worst of the lot.”

  “Ah, yes.” Elizabeth nodded sagely. “I often said the very same when I first met Nick—men are unfathomable, and Nicholas Hollingsworth is the very worst. I still think that, on occasion. That is what love does to a person, I suppose.”

  “Love!”

  “Yes. You love Carmen. There is no use in denying it.”

  Peter could feel a blinding headache coming upon him, born of having to deal with females, whether they were mercurial wives-who-weren’t-wives, or too wise sisters. He shook his head slowly. “I was not going to deny it. I do love her. I have since I first saw her, and I suppose I never truly stopped. Even when she was dead.”

  “Then, what is wrong?”

  “I do not know!” Peter slapped his open palm against the arm of the chair. “It is Carmen. Every time it seems we may become close again, every time I try to understand her, she shies away like a skittish colt. She runs from me.” He remembered Carmen in Spain, on that afternoon by the river. How she would spin away from his arms, laughing, beckoning, her long curtain of hair spilling about her. It seemed she was still doing that. “She was always elusive as water, so intent on her independence. She always said she would never be as helpless as she was with her dreadful first husband again. Perhaps it is only the same thing now.”

  “Hm. Perhaps.”

  “But she knows I am not him! And somehow it seems—different now. She seems rather desperate, in some way.”

  “Well, she is Spanish. You can hardly expect her to be a predictable little English rose, like Lady Deidra. She has had a very difficult time these last years, just as you have. She is not one to trust easily, especially in the appearance of happy times at last. You know what that is like, brother, because you are just the same.” Elizabeth tapped her fingertips thoughtfully against her desk. “Perhaps your only real difficulty lies in a lack of communication. Perhaps Carmen thinks that you still mean to marry Lady Deidra, and that you are just trifling with her emotions.”

  Peter snorted. “How absurd! How can I possibly marry someone like Lady Deidra when Carmen is alive? There is no other woman for me in the world but her.”

  “Yes, but does Carmen know that? You were not very kind to her when she first appeared in London. You made it obvious that you had made a new life without her, that you had nothing but contempt for her.”

  “I never felt contempt,” Peter protested. “I was only—confused. But that is all changed now! Everything has changed since she came back into my life. I felt frozen before, but now . . .” His voice fell away, unable to give words to his tumult of emotions. He held out his hands helplessly. “It has all changed because of her.”

  “I know that, Peter,” said Elizabeth. “Does Carmen, though? She is as lost and confused as you are.”

  “Then, what can I do?”

  “Talk to her, of course, you nodcock! Go to her, and tell her everything you have just told me. Hold nothing back. And, in exchange, you may hear some pleasant surprises of your own.”

  She held out her hand to him, and he clasped it tightly.

  “Can I do that?” he murmured half to himself.

  “You must. My brother, I know how you love to keep your own counsel, hide your emotions, but you must not do that now. Not if you want your wife, value your family. Do not be foolish, as I so very nearly was with my Nicholas.”

  “Of course you are right, as always.” Peter stood and kissed his sister’s cheek. “How did you ever become so wise, little Lizzie?”

  “Oh, I have learned a great deal from the travails of marriage! As, I hope, have you.”

  “Marriage is indeed a travail. But I will do as you say, and go speak with Carmen now. We have a great deal to discuss.” He reached into his coat pocket and touched the crumpled letter Carmen had lost. “A very great deal.”

  Elizabeth gave a small laugh. “Oh, Peter. If only you knew.” She looked back to her menus, but then called after him. “If you need an excuse to go to her chamber, just say I sent you to rehearse for the tableaux!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Carmen stared down into her trunk, at the jumble of gowns and underpinnings she had just tossed in. She hardly knew what she was doing, or why; she only had a desperate need to leave, to go to her daughter and hold her in her arms again, and know that she was safe.

  Carmen leaned her forehead against the edge of the trunk lid, suddenly dizzy. What was wrong with her? Why was she suddenly dashing about like an escapee from Bedlam? Because Peter had kissed her?

  It was not as if he had not done a great deal more than kiss her in the past!

  But such had always been the way when she was with him. She had always considered herself rather levelheaded, yet when she saw him she was not herself, not the cool, sophisticated condesa. She became giddy, giggly, uncertain, wildly ecstatic.

  She loved him, that was obvious. That had not, would never, change.

  She also loved her daughter and feared more than anything to lose her. It was not at all a rational fear—the chances of Peter snatching her away were slim indeed. But there it was. Isabella had been an enormous, unasked for gift at a time in Carmen’s life when she had seen nothing but fear and grief. Isabella had been her joy and her light for six years, and something in the back of Carmen’s heart feared that light could be snatched away as suddenly as it had been bestowed.

  She knew, of course, that Peter would have to be told of his child. She just did not know how.

  A knock sounded at the door. Carmen, thinking it must be Elizabeth come to see how she was after her swift departure from their picnic, straightened and wiped at her damp cheeks. “Come in!”

  It was not Elizabeth. It was Peter, utterly composed, unearthly handsome. Almost as if the untidy scene beside the stream had never occurred.

  Then she looked into his eyes and saw that they were no longer ice blue, but a stormy gray.

  As she just stared at him, unable to make her throat work to say a word, he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

  “I ...” he began, then stopped. His gaze dropped from
hers, moved around the room restlessly.

  The Ice Earl at a loss for words? Impossible! Carmen closed the lid of the trunk and sat down upon it, to await what he had come to say.

  “Lizzy told me to say I have come to rehearse for the tableaux,” he said at last.

  Carmen laughed, all her fright and tension melting away at his absurdity. “Oh, Peter! Then, where is your tunic? No, you cannot fool me.”

  “No. Of course I did not come to discuss my sister’s silly party games.” He leaned back against the door, his eyes still wary as he watched her. “I wanted to say that if I did or said anything to offend you, then I am deeply sorry.”

  “We are a strange pair, Peter,” she sighed. “After all we have been to each other, we should be beyond so very many apologies.”

  “So we should. But things are rather—complicated between us. I should not have rushed at you in that manner.” He grinned at her halfheartedly. “You were always as changeable as the wind.”

  She smiled in return. “As were you. My unpredictable, dashing English major. It was why I married you.”

  “My unpredictability? And here I thought it was for my dashing regimentals.”

  “Because you understood me, as no one else, not even my parents, ever could! You never attempted to change me, to make me more ladylike or something.” Carmen pleated the fabric of her skirt restlessly between her fingers, lost for a moment in memories of those heady days of first love. She looked up suddenly and saw from the rare softness on Peter’s face that he, too, was thinking of the same things.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “that I dashed away from you this morning. I am tired, I suppose. I have been a bit, well, unsteady of late.”

  “I think I know why that may be, Carmen.”

  “Do you, indeed? As I said, you always were able to know me better than anyone else, but . . .”

  He silently held out the letter she had lost beside the stream, now hopelessly crumpled and soiled.

  Carmen bit her lip. Peter was the very last person she would want to know of her troubles! He knew all about that time in her life; he carried the darkness of the same time in his own heart. He had even suspected her of the same things the letter writer spoke of.

  Could still suspect her, perhaps?

  In the midst of her dismay, the thought flitted through her mind that perhaps Peter had written the letters. She dismissed that thought immediately. Not only had his shock on the night of the Dacey ball been very real, but she knew Peter as well as he knew her. If he believed that she had done those things, he would not have written foul, anonymous letters.

  He would have faced her directly and shot her in the heart.

  Carmen forced back the insistent urge to flee, and forced herself to remain where she was, seated on the closed trunk. She folded her hands carefully in her lap.

  “Now you know why I came to England,” she said softly.

  “Do you mean to say that you were receiving these—these things even abroad?”

  “Of course. Four of them in Paris, two here. I traced the ones I received in France to England, and I knew that I would have to come here if I was to find the culprit. I meant to track down every person I had met during the war, and hound them until I found the right one.” Her gaze fell to her clasped hands, to the emerald that glowed on her finger. “Otherwise I would never have come to England.”

  “Why? Do you hate it here so very much?”

  Carmen laughed, more a small hiccup than a true laugh. “Peter, what a true Englishman you are! I do not hate England. It is all these English voices. It was hard enough to hear them in France or Italy. I would hear an Englishman speaking behind me on the street sometimes, and I would turn, so full of hope, thinking it would be you.” She pressed the back of her hand against her eyes, unwilling to look at him as she poured out these embarrassing confessions. “I knew it would be so much worse here, where I would see things and places you had told me about. That we had planned to see together. It would have been—awful.”

  She heard him move then, the soft rustle of his superfine coat as he came across the room to kneel beside her. His hand was cool as he laid it softly on hers, and she peeked up at him cautiously.

  “When I came back from Spain,” he said, “I saw you in every black-haired woman, every red flower, like the ones you carried at our wedding. Every emerald. I felt like my soul had been torn to shreds from losing you, and in such a terrible way. I could never have gone back to Spain.”

  Carmen had never so longed to weep in all her life. “Peter, querido,” she said. Then she could say no more. She simply placed her other hand atop his, and they sat there in silence for several long, sweet moments.

  Then Peter shook his head fiercely, as if clearing it of a dream, and gently drew away from her. He pulled a chair near to her trunk and sat down.

  His eyes, so gray with roiling emotions only a moment before, were now ice blue with resolve. Carmen remembered just such a determined look on his face from military meetings during the war.

  “You say you received four of these letters in Paris,” he said.

  Carmen drew in a deep breath. She had to focus on the business at hand now, not the bittersweet might-have-beens of her marriage. “Yes. And two since I came to England. One at my house in Town . . .”

  “And one under my sister’s very roof,” Peter finished, steel in his voice.

  “I knew that I would have to find whoever is doing this, and put a final stop to it. Or I will never be left in peace. I have not paid anything.”

  “Quite right. Do you have any idea at all of the villain’s identity? Could it possibly be our friend Robert Means?”

  “I had thought of Robert, of course. Especially after you told me of his perfidy. But, despite what he did, I believe he truly thought me dead. And, if he truly was in Cornwall all this time, it would have taken much longer for me to receive the London letter.” She shook her head. “So no, I do not think it is him. But I don’t know who else it could be.” Then she smiled teasingly. “It is only too bad it was not Robert. I could have ferreted him out so very easily, you know. I would simply have worn my most dashing gowns, laughed at all his witticisms, leaned subtly against his arm at supper, pressing my bosom...”

  Peter seized her around the waist then and pulled her onto his lap, both of them laughing helplessly until tears ran down their faces. “I am glad, then, it was not Robert,” he gasped, his breath soft on her hair. “If that is what you were planning, madam!”

  Carmen leaned her forehead against his chest, still giggling. He smelled wonderful, of soap and clean starch and sunlight. She closed her eyes and tried to inhale him inside of her.

  He pulled her even closer to him and pressed his lips against her temple. “We will find whoever is doing this, Carmen, and he will pay. I promise you are quite safe now.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “I cannot say how very many times I have longed to be a we again, not fighting the demons all alone.”

  “You are not alone.”

  “No.” Carmen rested her head on his shoulder and smiled against the fine cloth of his coat. “Not anymore. And neither are you.”

  There was a rustle in the corridor, a hum of voices and laughter as a group passed her door and went down the staircase. Carmen looked at the window and saw to her surprise that it was full dark out. They would be expected at supper very soon.

  She drew away from the warm shelter of Peter’s arms and stood up. “We should be dressing for supper,” she said. “Elizabeth will wonder what has become of us.”

  Peter also rose. “Not my sister! She will assume we are dutifully rehearsing for her dreaded tableaux and all her matchmaking efforts have been successful. But, yes, I should be going. We must put our plan of action in motion this evening, and find out the villain. Perhaps we could speak some more with Lord Crane. I understand that, despite his peacock ways, he was in Spain.”

  Carmen waved her hand airily. “Oh, yes! The plan of action. Low-cut go
wns and bosoms. Do you think they would have an effect on Lord Crane?”

  “Not that plan!” Peter took up her hand and pressed a lingering kiss on her palm. “I am very glad that you have confided in me, Carmen. Now there are no more secrets between us. We may begin afresh.”

  “Yes,” she murmured as she watched him walk out the door. “No more secrets.”

  Only the greatest secret of all. His child.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Carmen sat on Nicholas’s left at supper, half listening to him as he spoke of a planned balloon ascension from Hyde Park that he wanted to escort her and Elizabeth to when they returned to Town. She smiled and murmured at all the appropriate pauses, and even managed to ask pertinent questions every so often. She partook of the excellent dishes Elizabeth’s new French chef had prepared, and tried not to partake too freely of the excellent French wines. Yet even the lobster patties may just as well have been sawdust.

  Too many thoughts swirled in her mind for her to completely throw herself into the merry party the Hollingsworths had worked so hard to create. She was thinking of the cruel blackmailer, that could possibly hide behind a laughing and friendly facade just like the ones about her. She thought of Peter, and the tender scene they had shared. She thought of Elizabeth’s announcement that Lady Deidra and her mother had been called home suddenly, and had left Evanstone Park. She wondered if that meant a final severing of Peter’s old intentions toward Deidra and a new commitment toward herself.

  She thought of her precious daughter, the daughter she had to tell Peter about very soon, and if she dared to hope such a thing.

  Surely the man who had held her in his arms and promised her she was no longer alone was someone she could trust Isabella with? Or was she being too hasty, too hopeful?

  “... don’t you agree, Condesa?”

  Carmen shook off her daze to smile at the woman seated across from her, who had apparently been speaking to her. A Mrs. King, if she was not mistaken, a lady who always seemed to favor grandiose headdresses of fruits and flowers.