Loretta Chse

by The Mad Earl's Bride

  And Bertie had got it into his head that he would stand as his friend’s groomsman.

  When Bertie got something into his head, it was next to impossible to get it out. This was because Bertie Trent was one of the stupidest men who’d ever lived. This, Dorian had long ago recognized, was the reason Bertie was the only friend he’d ever had—and one whose childlike feelings Dorian couldn’t bear to hurt.

  It was impossible to rage at Abonville properly while trying not to distress Bertie, who was so thrilled about his best friend marrying his favorite female cousin.

  “It’s only Gwen,” Bertie was saying, misconstruing the issues, as usual. “She ain’t half bad, for a girl. Not like Jess—but I shouldn’t wish m’sister on anybody, especially you, even though you’d be m’brother then, because I can’t think of anything worse than a fellow having to listen to her the live-long day. Not but what Dain can manage her—but he’s bigger than you, and even so, I daresay he’s got his hands full. Still, they’re already shackled, so you’re safe from her, and Gwen ain’t like her at all. When Abonville told us you was wanting to get married, and he was thinking Gwen would suit, I said—”

  “Bertie, I wasn’t wanting to get married,” Dorian broke in. “It is a ridiculous mistake.”

  “I have made no mistake,” said Abonville. He stood before the door, his distinguished countenance stern, his arms folded over his chest. “You gave your word, cousin. You said you recognized your duty, and you would marry if I could find a girl willing to have you.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I said—if I did say it,” Dorian said tightly. “I had a headache when you came, and had taken laudanum. I was not in my senses at the time.”

  “You were fully rational.”

  “I could not have been!” Dorian snapped. “I should never have agreed to such a thing if I had. I’m not a damned ox. I shan’t spend my last months breeding!”

  That was a mistake. Bertie’s round blue eyes began to fill. “It’s all right, Cat,” he said. “I’ll stick by you, like you always stuck by me. But you must have promised, or Abonville wouldn’t have said you did, and talked to Gwen. And she’ll be awful disappointed—not but what she’ll get over it, not being the moping sort. But only think how we could be cousins, and if you was to make a brat, I could be godfather, you know.”

  Dorian bent a malignant glare upon the accursed duc. This was his doing. He’d filled Bertie’s head with the kinds of ideas he was sure to set his childish heart on: standing as groomsman for his dying friend, becoming Dorian’s cousin, then godfather to imaginary children.

  And poor Bertie, his heart bursting with good intentions, would never understand why it was impossible. He would never comprehend why Dorian needed to die alone.

  “I’ll stick by you,” he’d said—and Bertie would. If Dorian wouldn’t wed his cousin, Bertie would stay. Either way, Dorian wouldn’t stand a chance. They would never let him die in peace.

  Once Dorian was no longer capable of thinking for himself, Bertie—or Abonville or the wife—would call in experts to deal with the madman.

  And Dorian knew where that would lead: he would die as his mother had, caged like an animal … unless he killed himself first.

  But he would not be hurried to his grave. He still had time, and he meant to enjoy it, to relish his sanity and strength for every precious moment they remained.

  He told himself to calm down. He was not trapped. It only seemed that way, with loyal, dim-witted Bertie on one side, prating of godchildren, and Abonville on the other, blocking the door.

  Dorian was not yet weak and helpless, as his mother had been. He’d find a way out of this so long as he kept a cool head.

  HALF AN HOUR later, Dorian was galloping along the narrow track that led to Hagsmire. He was laughing, because the ruse had worked.

  It had been easy enough to feign a sudden attack of remorse. Given years of practice with his grandfather, Dorian had no trouble appearing penitent, and grateful for Abonville’s efforts. And so, when Dorian requested a few minutes to compose himself before meeting his bride, the two guests had exited the library.

  So had he—out the window, through the garden, then down to the stables at a run.

  He knew they wouldn’t pursue him to Hagsmire. Even his own groom wouldn’t venture onto the tortuous path this day, with storm clouds roiling overhead.

  But he and Isis had waited out Dartmoor storms before. There was plenty of time to find the cracked heap of granite where they’d sheltered so many times previously, while Dorian beat back the inner demons urging him toward the old habits, the illusory surcease of wine and women.

  Even if they searched, his unwanted guests would never find him, and they would give up awaiting his return long before he gave in. He had not yielded to his private demons or to his grandfather, and he would not yield to an overbearing French nobleman obsessed with genealogy.

  There would be no more submitting to Duty. The new Earl of Rawnsley would be dead in a few months, and that would be the end of the curst Camoys line. And if Abonville didn’t like it, let him uproot one of the French sprigs and plant him here, and make the poor sod marry Bertie’s cousin.

  Because the only way she would marry Dorian Camoys, he assured himself, would be by coming into Hagsmire with the entire bridal party and the preacher, and even then someone would have to pin the groom down with a boulder. Because he would dive into a bottomless pit of quicksand before he would take any woman into his life now and let her watch him disintegrate into a mindless animal.

  Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance.

  Or so Dorian thought at first, until he noticed that the rumble didn’t pause, as thunder would, but went on steadily, and steadily grew louder. And the louder and nearer it came, the less it sounded like thunder and the more it sounded like … hoofbeats.

  He glanced back, then quickly ahead again.

  He told himself the recent confrontation had agitated him more than he’d suspected, and what he believed he’d just seen was a trick of his degenerating brain.

  The ignorant rustics, who believed pixies dwelt all over Dartmoor, had named Hagsmire for the witches they also believed haunted the area. During mists and storms, they mounted ghostly steeds and chased their victims into the mire.

  The hoofbeats grew louder.

  The thing was gaining on him.

  He glanced back, his heart pounding, his nerves tingling.

  Though he assured himself it couldn’t be there, his eyes told him it was: a demonic-looking female riding an enormous bay. A tangled mane of fiery red hair flew wildly about her face. She rode boldly astride, a pale cloak streaming out behind her, her skirts hiked up to her knees, shamelessly displaying her ghostly white limbs.

  Though it was only a moment’s glance, the brief distraction proved fatal, for in the next instant, Isis swerved too sharply into a turning.

  Dorian reacted a heartbeat too late, and the mare skidded over the crumbling track edge and down the slippery incline—toward the quagmire waiting below.

  THE PALE MARE managed to scramble back from the edge of the murky pit, but she threw off her master in the process.

  Gwendolyn leapt down from her mount, collected the rope she’d brought, and climbed down the incline to the edge of the bog.

  Several feet from where she stood, the Earl of Rawnsley was thrashing in a pit of grey muck. In the few minutes it had taken her to reach the bog, he’d slid toward its heart, and his efforts to struggle for footing where there wasn’t any only sucked him in deeper.

  Still, the muck had climbed only as far as his hips, and an assessing glance told Gwendolyn that this patch of mire was relatively narrow in circumference.

  Even while she was studying her surroundings, she was moving toward the mare, making reassuring sounds. She was aware of Rawnsley cursing furiously, in between shouting at her to go away, but she disregarded that.

  “Try to keep as still as possible,” she told him calmly. “We’ll have you out i
n a minute.”

  “Get away from here!” he shouted. “Leave my horse alone, you bedamned witch! Run, Isis! Home!”

  But Gwendolyn was stroking under the mare’s mane, and the creature was quieting, despite her master’s shouts and curses. She stood docilely while Gwendolyn unbuckled the stirrup strap, removed the stirrup iron, and rebuckled the strap. She looped one end of the rope through the strap and knotted it. Then she led the mare closer to the bog.

  Rawnsley had stopped cursing, and he was not thrashing about so much as before. She did not know whether he’d come to his senses or was simply exhausted. She could see, though, that he’d sunk past his waist. Swiftly she tied a loop at the free end of the rope.

  “Look sharp now,” she called to him. “I’m going to throw it.”

  “You’ll fall in, you stupid—”

  She flung the rope. He grabbed … and missed. And swore profusely.

  Gwendolyn quickly drew it back and tried again.

  On the fifth try, he caught it.

  “Try to hold on with both hands,” she said. “And don’t try to help us. Pretend you’re a log. Keep as still as you can.”

  She knew that was very difficult. It was instinctive to struggle when one was sinking. But he would sink faster if he fought the mire, and the deeper he was, the harder it would be to pull him out. Even here, where it was safe, the soggy ground was barely walkable. Her boots sank into mud up to the ankles. Isis, too, must contend with the mud, as well as her master’s weight, and the powerful mire dragging him down.

  Still, they would do it, Gwendolyn assured herself. She looped the reins through one hand and grasped the stirrup strap and rope with the other.

  Then she turned the mare so that she’d be moving sideways from the bog, and started her on the first cautious steps of rescue. “Slowly, Isis,” she murmured. “I know you want to hurry—so do I—but we cannot risk wrenching his arms from their sockets.”

  HE COLLAPSED AS soon as he escaped the mire, but Gwendolyn had to leave him while she returned to the bridle path with Isis. Though the horse had been good and patient through the ordeal, she was restless and edgy now, and Gwendolyn was worried she might stumble into the mire if left unattended. One could not look after horse and master simultaneously.

  By the time she’d settled Isis with Bertie’s gelding, retrieved a brandy flask from the saddlebag, and hurried back to Rawnsley, he had returned to full consciousness. To extremely bad-tempered consciousness, by the looks and sounds of it.

  His black mane dripped ooze from the mire, and he was cursing under his breath as he shoved it out of his face and dragged himself up to a sitting position.

  “Devil take you and roast you in Hell!” he snarled. “You could have killed yourself—and my horse. I told you to go away, curse you!”

  A mask of grey-green slime clung to his face. Even under the mucky coating, however, his features appeared stronger and starker than in the miniature. This was a hard, sharply etched face, while the painted one had been sickly looking and puffy.

  The rest of him was not sickly looking either. The earl’s bog-soaked garments clung to broad shoulders and back, a taut, narrow waist, and long legs—and every inch of that was solid muscle.

  The reality was so unlike the picture that Gwendolyn wondered for a moment whether someone had played a joke on her, and this wasn’t Rawnsley at all.

  Then he pulled off his mud-encrusted gloves and wiped the filth from his eyes with his fingers and looked at her … and she froze, the breath stuck in her throat as her heart missed the next scheduled beat.

  Bertie called him Cat because, he said, that’s what all the fellows at school had called him. Now Gwendolyn understood why.

  The Earl of Rawnsley’s eyes were yellow.

  Not a human brown or hazel but a feline amber gold. They were the eyes of a jungle predator, burning bright—and dangerous.

  Fortunately, Gwendolyn was not easily intimidated. The shock passed as quickly as it had come, and she knelt down beside him and offered the flask with a steady hand.

  Her voice was steady, too, as she answered. “No self-respecting witch would go away on a mere mortal’s orders. She’d be drummed out of the coven in disgrace.”

  He took the flask from her and drank, his intent yellow gaze never leaving her face.

  “You may not know that all the best witches come to Dartmoor for their familiars,” she said. “A black cat is de rigueur. Since you’re the only one available—”

  “I’m not available, and I’m not a damned tabby, you demented little hellhound! And I know who you are. You’re the curst cousin, aren’t you? Only one of Bertie’s kin would come galloping into a mire in that lunatic way and blunder about, risking a horse, as well as her own scrawny neck, saving a man from what she got him into. And I didn’t ask to be saved, Devil confound you! It’s all the same to me—I’ve already got one foot in the grave—or didn’t they tell you?”

  “Yes, they did tell me,” she answered calmly. “But I did not come all this way only to turn back at the first obstacle. I am aware it is all the same to you. I realize the mire would have saved you the trouble of putting a pistol to your head or hanging yourself or whatever you had in mind. But you may just as easily do that later, after we’re wed. I regret the inconvenience, my lord, but I cannot let you die before the ceremony, or I shall never get my hospital.”

  In the past, Gwendolyn often obtained satisfactory results from startling statements.

  It worked this time, too.

  He drew back slightly, and his furious expression softened into bewilderment.

  “It is simple enough,” she said. “I need you, and you need me—although I cannot expect you to believe that at present since you know next to nothing about me.”

  She glanced upward. “We are about to be inundated. We will need to find shelter—for the horses’ sake, I mean, since you won’t mind dying of lung fever, either. That is not altogether inconvenient. Waiting out the storm will give us a chance for private conversation.”

  Chapter 2

  “OH NO, YOU don’t,” Dorian said. The words came out in croaks. His throat was raw from shouting the objections she’d been so stubbornly deaf to.

  Ignoring her outstretched hand, he staggered to his feet. Staying upright proved even harder than getting up.

  Mires, it turned out, didn’t simply swallow you. His mother had failed to explain that they chewed first. They tried to suck the skin off your bones and crush your organs and muscles into jelly. Every inch of his body, inside and out, was throbbing painfully. He ignored it.

  “There will be no private tête-à-têtes,” he said, grasping her arm and marching her to the incline. “We have nothing to say to each other. I am taking you back to the house, and then you will go back where you came from.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. Her voice remained level, and she made no effort to free herself from his grasp.

  He let go abruptly, wishing he hadn’t grabbed her slim arm in that oafish way. She had no choice but to follow him, unless she meant to take up residence in Hagsmire.

  He started up the slope alone.

  After a moment, she followed. “Why did you bolt?” she asked.

  “I took a lunatic fit.” He trudged on.

  “That often happens when one converses with Bertie for any length of time,” she said. “Sometimes I have to shake him. Otherwise, he will go on and on and lose track entirely of what he’s saying, and one can grow quite giddy trying to follow.”

  “I’m very fond of Bertie,” he said coldly.

  “So am I,” she said. “But he is miraculously stupid, isn’t he? Cousin Jessica says he was born with his foot in his mouth and has been unable to get it out since. I suppose he must have made the most harrowing vows of eternal devotion to you. He was blubbering into his handkerchief when he came out to tell me you’d bolted. So there was no getting an intelligible explanation out of him. And Abonville said only that he’d ma
de a terrible mistake, and Genevieve must take me back to the inn.”

  “Obviously you heeded Abonville no more than you did me,” Dorian said irritably. “The words ‘go away’ appear to have no meaning for you.”

  “If I always did what I was told, I should never accomplish anything,” she said. “Fortunately, Abonville is aware that I do not blindly obey orders. And so, when I said I must go after you, and my grandmother agreed, he took Bertie back into the library, and they made direct for the brandy.”

  They had reached the bridle path. Dorian wanted to get on his horse and ride so he wouldn’t have to listen to her, but his leg muscles were giving way.

  His hair was thick with mire ooze, and the cold slime dribbled down his neck. Thanks to the slime, he stank to high heaven. He was too tired and shaken to care.

  He staggered to a boulder and sat down and stared at his sodden trousers while he waited for his respiration to slow and his brain to quiet.

  “It would appear there has been a misunderstanding,” she said.

  He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t keep her distance from him when it must be obvious to her by now that he was deranged. It was certainly obvious to him.

  He pushed a hank of soggy hair from his eyes and looked up at her. Though she didn’t appear as demonlike as she had before, galloping after him, she still looked like a witch. A young witch, with her sharp little nose and chin and narrow, uptilted green eyes—and the hair, the wild mass of red hair. It wasn’t even a normal red but a strange maroon, glinting fire even in the gloom of the approaching storm.

  All the same, strange as she was, Dorian couldn’t believe he’d actually mistaken this young Englishwoman for one of Satan’s handmaidens.

  He should not have let himself become so overwrought, he reproached himself. If he had stayed with the two men and argued patiently and rationally … but he hadn’t. Instead, he had run away—from temptation, yes, but they would think he’d fled a mere girl—and now they would have no doubt he was a lunatic. Abonville would probably have him examined and certified non compos mentis.