“Good God above!”
They were a group of carefree young rakehells, all splendidly dressed, all riding neck or nothing, all obviously in their cups to one degree or another. One by one they leapt from their mounts and ran forward, eager to lend what assistance they could.
“Bloody hell, it’s Gareth!” cried the nearest, the tail of his fine Ramillies wig bobbing as he fell to his knees before the elegant gentleman. “What the devil happened to you, man? ’Sdeath, I’ve never seen so much blood in my life!”
“Shot. And watch your language, Chilcot there are women and children about.”
“Bugger my language, Gareth, tell us what happened!”
Juliet raised her head and looked this Chilcot in the eye. He, like their injured savior, didn’t look much older than herself, but it was obvious that she had more sense than the lot of these spirited young bucks combined. “Can’t you see your friend is in a bad way?” she admonished. “Pray, don’t make him talk any more than he has to. Now, if you must know what happened.” She quickly told them about the highwaymen, the other passengers adding pieces to the story.
One of the young scapegraces pulled a flask of spirits from his coat, lifted his stricken friend’s head, and held the flask to his mouth. “You mean Gareth took a bullet meant for one of the little ones?”
“He did indeed. He saved all of our lives.”
“Gareth?!”
“Don’t look so surprised, Cokeham,” the tallest of the lot drawled, surveying the scene with a lordly gaze and pulling out a snuff box. He took two pinches, then snapped the lid shut with a casual flick of his fingers. “Hasn’t he always been the one to walk out of cockfights, rescue puppies, shun the use of spurs? Don’t just stand there gawking at him. Go get help. Now!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Perry,” their fallen friend murmured, obviously embarrassed. He tried to move, and through his teeth, sucked in his breath on a gasp of pain. “Now, help me up, would you? Somebody?”
He tried to sit up, but Juliet put a hand on his chest. “You’re staying right there, Mr. Gareth whoever-you-are, until help arrives.”
“Ooooh! Listen to the lady, Gareth! Plagued with petticoats you are, and she isn’t even your wife!”
Juliet, impatient and growing angry, directed a glare toward the one who had spoken. “I assume you boys are his friends?”
He snickered. “We’re the Den of Debauchery.”
Juliet looked at Perry, tall, lounging and elegant—and the only one of the lot who seemed sober. “And you, I assume, are its … leader?”
“No, ma’am.” He sketched her a bow, then indicated his friend beneath her restraining hand. “Gareth is.”
“Well, then. Instead of standing around making him miserable while he bleeds to death in the rain, why don’t you help us get him into the coach? Now that you’re here and must know where a doctor can be found, you can bring us straight to help yourselves.”
Perry’s eyes widened, and his lazy insolence vanished. He straightened up, looking with new respect at the slight young woman with the twangy, unfamiliar accent who knelt beside his friend. And then he gave a slow smile of acknowledgment and touched his hat to her. “The lady is correct,” he said, turning to his companions. “Hugh, you ride for the doctor and have him meet us at the castle. Cokeham, you stay here with these people and keep them safe until we can send someone back for them. I will drive the coach.” His voice was grim. “We’re taking Gareth to the duke.”
“Now see here,” the elderly man said huffily, his face angry as he seized Perry’s silk sleeve, “he doesn’t need a duke, he needs a damned doctor!”
But Perry merely smiled and arched a brow. “What, don’t you know who your noble rescuer is, then?”
Once again, the injured man tried to sit up. “Perry—”
But Perry’s eyes sparkled with private amusement. He stretched out his arm, sweeping it down and forward with a dramatic eloquence that caused his friend’s eyes to flash with impatience and anger. “May I present Lord Gareth de Montforte … leader of the notorious Den of Debauchery, third son of the fourth Duke of Blackheath, and black-sheep brother of Lucien, the present and fifth duke.” He straightened up. “Now, do have a care. I, for one, have no wish to be held accountable to His Grace should anything happen to him.”
Someone let out an exclamation of disbelief.
Lord Gareth de Montforte cursed beneath his breath.
And Juliet Paige went as white as the chalk mud in which she stood.
Their gallant savior wasn’t just the duke’s brother.
He was Charles’s brother, as well—and the uncle of her baby daughter.
Chapter Three
As the passengers argued with Lord Gareth’s friends about where to bring him, Juliet got to her feet and walked a short distance away, trying to regain her composure and hide the shock that must’ve been written all over her face.
She ran her palms down her cheeks. Dear God. This man is Charles’s brother. He looks so much like him … how could I not have known?
Her back to the commotion behind her, she drew several deep breaths, stared blankly into the darkness for a moment, then shut her eyes in a silent prayer for strength. Finally she rejoined the others, where she reclaimed Charlotte and retrieved her miniature from the highwayman’s leather bag. Perry took her arm; at his insistence, she climbed into the coach to ride along with Lord Gareth.
Wrapping Charlotte in a blanket, she wedged herself into one corner of the small back seat, set the baby beneath her elbow, and reached for the injured man as his friends brought him in after her. Nobody noticed how her hands shook. Nobody noticed how her entire body shook. They settled him on her seat, positioning him so that his head and shoulders lay cradled in her lap, his eyes, glazed with pain, gazing up at her. And then the door was shut, Perry climbed up on the box, and the coach shot past the worried faces beyond the window as Perry sent the team off with a shout and a crack of the whip.
Charles’s brother.
His weight was warm and heavy and solid. She averted her gaze from his and found she could not speak.
Not yet.
And as the vehicle raced through the lonely English night, Juliet leaned her cheek against the cold window and let her thoughts drift back in time back to that cold winter day in Boston when she’d first seen Captain Lord Charles de Montforte.
He had been the stuff of a young woman’s dreams.
The memory was as near as if it had all happened yesterday….
She was minding the counter in her stepfather’s store, stuffing logs in the little stove; outside, the cold morning air was as brittle as glass. The day was like any other of late, with rinds of frost on the windowpanes and one or two customers who still had any money left to spend walking up and down the wide-planked aisles as they browsed the shelves. And then she heard it: the steady rattle of musketry, brisk commands, the ringing clatter of a horse’s hooves over frozen, crusty cobbles.
A flash of scarlet passed just outside. Tossing the last log into the stove, Juliet rushed to the window and, with the heel of her hand, cleared a spot in the frosty pane. And there he was, sitting high atop his horse, his coattails splayed over the animal’s powerful brown haunches, his fair hair queued with a black bow beneath his tricorn—a King’s officer, capable and dashing, reviewing his troops on Boston Common.
Her hand went to her suddenly fluttering heart. She’d thought a handsome man in uniform was just that—a handsome man in a uniform—but this one was different. His red tunic stood out against the fresh snow like the plumage of a cardinal, and even from a distance of some fifty feet she could see that he was well-bred, untarnished, something special. Back as straight as a steeple. White-gloved hands firm but gentle on the reins. A man above squalor, above indecency, above common, everyday things. From the elegance of his leather smallclothes to the sword at his thigh, from the whiteness of his breeches to the glossy mirror of his boots, he’d been a gentleman. A god. She couldn’t
have cared less whether he was a soldier or a colonial. She couldn’t have cared less about anything. She had fallen in love. Right then, and right there.
“Fancy that, the troops parading in our common as though they own the place. Pompous asses! Despicable louts!”
Old Widow Murdock, one of the customers in the store that morning, saw immediately what had caught Juliet’s interest.
“Yes.”
“Juliet? I’d like a half-dozen eggs. Mind you give me the brown ones, not the white this time. And no cracked shells, ye hear? Juliet! Are you listening to me? Juliet!.”
The coach hit a bump, jarring her rudely back to the present. Juliet closed her eyes, desperately trying to hold on to the memory, that sweet, sweet memory, but it faded back into the murky arms of time and she was once again in England—three thousand miles from home, from the memories, from a Boston that was torn apart by war.
Three thousand miles from the grave in Concord, where the single red rose she had left would long since have been blown away by the wind.
Her throat suddenly ached and she stared off into the night, her eyes stinging with unshed tears.
And here he was, Charles’s brother, faintly familiar and thus already beloved, his very likeness to his dead sibling resurrecting all those memories Juliet had locked up inside herself, relegated to their proper place, since that horrible day last April. He lay heavily across her lap, his head cradled in the crook of her arm and his pale face just visible in the gloomy shadows of the coach. She should have known, of course. They both had the same romantic eyes, the same lazy smile, the same curve of the cheek and cut of the mouth, the same height, same build, same bearing. Only the hair color was different. Where Charles had been a gilded blond, his younger brother’s hair was a few shades darker. It was probably tawny-brown, Juliet thought. Somewhat fair in daylight. But not now.
The coach hit a rut and she heard him catch his breath in pain. Gingerly, she rested her arm across his chest to better steady him against the swaying rock of the coach. His blood, warm and sticky against her skin, had soaked through her bodice, her skirts, her stomacher. His eyes were closed, but she suspected he was conscious and merely drifting in his own private hell of pain and fear. She ached to speak to him, yearned to ask him all about Charles, tell him just who she—and Charlotte—really were. But she did not. It didn’t seem quite right to intrude upon his thoughts when he might very well be dying, and so she remained quiet, cradling his head and now, seeking his hand in the darkness to assure him that he was not alone.
His fingers tightened immediately over hers, dwarfing them, and sudden tears stung her eyes as she gazed down at him.
Dear God, he reminds me of my beloved Charles.
The ache at the back of her throat became unbearable. Her nose burned and she blinked back the gathering mist in her eyes. Damn these tears. These weak, foolish, useless tears. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to think of Charles and his cavalier smile, the hardness of his body and the way his mouth had felt against her own. Instead, she tried to see the dim shapes of trees passing just outside in the darkness, to concentrate on the squeak and rattle of the coach, to lull her mind into numbness and keep at bay the huge waves of emotion that threatened the dam of her self-control.
And then her gaze fell on the baby, still swathed in the blanket and nestled in the tiny space between Gareth’s head and the padded side of the coach.
Charles’s daughter.
She didn’t realize she was weeping until the brother’s pained whisper broke the choking silence.
“Are they for me?”
Her nose was running now. She sniffed, sniffed again, flashed a smile that was too quick, too false. “Are what for you?”
“Why, your tears, of course.”
Oh, Lord. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak for fear she’d give in to the great, wracking pain that threatened to burst from her. This man, suffering so quietly, so bravely, did not deserve to see tears; he needed hope, comfort, encouragement from her, not an appalling display of weakness. She suddenly felt selfish and ashamed—and guilty, too. After all, the tears were not even for him, poor man. They were for Charles.
“I’m not crying,” she managed, dabbing at her eyes with the back of her sleeve and staring out the window to hide the evidence.
“No?” He gave a weak smile. “Perhaps I should see for myself.”
And then she felt them; his fingers, brushing her damp cheek with infinite softness and concern, tracing the slippery track of her sorrow. It was a caress—achingly kind, gentle, sweet.
She stiffened and caught his hand, holding it away from her face and shutting her eyes on a deep, bracing breath lest that dam of her self-control break for good. She managed to get herself under control, and when she finally dared meet his gaze, she saw that he was looking quietly up at her, at her distressed face and the tears she was trying so valiantly to hold back.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked, gently.
She shook her head.
“Are you quite certain?”
“Lord Gareth, you’re the one who’s hurt, not me.”
“No. That is not true.” His eyes searching her face, he touched her other cheek, the one the highwayman had cuffed, his whole manner one of such gentle, selfless concern that she wanted to lash out at someone, something, for this injustice that had been done to him. “I saw that … that scoundrel strike you. If I could kill him all over again for that, I would. Why, your poor cheek still bears the mark of his hand.”
“I am fine.”
“But—”
“Dear heavens, Lord Gareth, must you keep at it so?”
The words had come out angrier than she intended. She saw the sudden shadow of confusion that moved across his eyes, and a sharp pang of remorse lanced her heart for having put it there. Her anger was not for him, but at the fates that had taken first one of these dashing brothers and would now, most likely, take another. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. And here he was worried about her cheek, her silly, stupid cheek, when his life’s blood was oozing all over her skirts and onto the seat, and his flesh was feeling colder and clammier by the moment. She wanted to cry. Wanted to put her head in her hands and bawl until all the grief and pain and rage and loneliness still locked inside her was purged. But she did not. Instead, she took a deep breath and met his questioning gaze.
Same romantic eyes. Same kindness in their depths, same concern for other people. Oh, God help me.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, shaking her head. “That was unfair. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m so sorry.”
“Please, don’t be.” He smiled, weakly. “Besides, if those tears are for me, I can assure you there is no need to waste them so. I shall not die.”
“How confident you sound! I—I wish I shared your convictions.”
“Well, I simply cannot die, you see?” Again that slow, lazy grin that sought to reassure her even when the hot, tinny smell of his blood could not. “My brother Lucien would not allow it.”
“And is Lucien a god whom even death obeys?”
“But of course. He is the Duke of Blackheath. A deity into himself, I am afraid.”
His eyes had closed. He was growing weaker, his voice little more than a thready whisper now, yet even so, he tried to inflect a certain jaunty humor to his tone that tore fiercely at Juliet’s heartstrings. How brave he was. How totally selfless. She gazed down at him, and shook her head in growing despair. “Save your strength, my lord. I know you’re just trying to bolster my confidence that you will indeed survive.”
“Perhaps.” He opened his eyes and looked guilelessly up at her. “But as I’m trying to bolster my own as well, what harm is there in it?”
She sought his hand. Laced her fingers through his and squeezed. A long moment passed between them, with neither saying a word as they held hands in the darkness and the coach bounced over the night-lonely road.
“Why did you do it?” sh
e finally asked, her voice breaking. “Why, when you could have just turned your back on all of us and gone safely back in the direction from which you’d come?”
His eyes widened in blank surprise, as though he was confused that such a question even needed, let alone deserved, an answer. “Why, ’tis my duty, of course, as a gentleman. There were women and children amongst your lot I could not have turned tail like a coward and left you all to perish, now, could I?”
“No,” she murmured, sadly. “I suppose not.”
She pulled her hand from his to make sure the strip of cloth with which she had bound his wound was still in place. Her fingers came away wet with blood. Fresh dread coursed through her and she surreptitiously wiped her fingers on her cloak, stilling her expression so as not to alarm him.
He was not fooled, though. She could see it in his eyes. But he knew she was already upset, and was too kind to distress her further. Like the gentleman he was, he changed the subject.
“Speaking of those children.” He tried to turn his head within the curve of Juliet’s arm so that he could look at Charlotte. “It appears that one of them is yours.”
“Yes, my daughter. She’s just over six months.”
“Will you lift her up so I may see her? I adore children.”
Juliet hesitated, thinking that sleeping babes were best left alone. But it was not in her to deny the wishes of a man who might very well be dying. Carefully, she picked up the infant and held her so that Gareth could see her. Charlotte whimpered and opened her eyes. Immediately, the lines of pain about Gareth’s mouth relaxed. Smiling weakly, he reached up and ran his fingers over one of the tiny fists, unaware that he was touching his own niece. A lump rose in Juliet’s throat. It was not hard at all to imagine that he was Charles, reaching up to touch his daughter.
Not hard at all.
“You’re just as pretty as your mama,” he murmured. “A few more years and all the young bucks shall be after you like hounds to the fox.” To Juliet he said, “What is her name?”
With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection Page 145
