Her expression grew even more disapproving. “A gentleman does not use his sleeve as a napkin,” she proclaimed.
“Are you implying I am not a gentleman?” he asked, leaning forward slightly as though daring her to slap him.
Her mouth tightened, and she shook her head in a small motion.
He chuckled and began to eat, watching her as she unfolded the paper from her food. Her movements were precise and efficient, and her hands moved dexterously, removing the wrapping without touching the food.
Her hands, though as small and delicate as any lady’s, showed signs of hard work. Her knuckles were red, and a few faint marks hinted at some past kitchen accidents. But he remembered the feel of her hands, all smooth and gentle, and he longed for her touch as much as he did the drugs.
The drugs, he remembered. She’d crushed all of them. None left. Nothing to drown out the clamoring pain in his head, the swirling of guilt and sorrow.
Just her.
Was that—a twinge of remorse for placing her in this situation?
He finished eating, wiping his mouth on his sleeve again, catching her eye as he did so. “We should be off soon. I’m guessing Hugh and your brother—half brother,” he corrected when he saw her mouth opening, “are concocting another plan to find us. The sooner we’re on our way and safely married, the better.”
She nodded and began repacking the basket.
“Leave it,” he said. “There’s food in Scotland, and we’ll be there in a few hours.”
“I thought we had very little money? Oh,” she exclaimed, putting her hand to her mouth, “you didn’t pay the innkeeper for your cousin’s room after all, did you?”
He’d been wondering when she would remember that. “No, I didn’t.”
She smiled, a wickedly delicious grin that caused him to exhale. She was delighted. Delighted.
Not an expected reaction, not from the daughter of a vicar. But then again, she wasn’t what he’d expected at all, not from the first time he saw her standing on that table.
He liked the unexpected. He liked it a lot.
She packed up the rest of their things, and he strapped them onto Primrose, then walked toward her with his hands outstretched.
“What are you doing?” she snapped, the tone of her voice at odds with the softness in her eyes. A dark-blue sea he could drown in.
“Assisting you back onto your steed, my lady,” he drawled, placing his hands around her waist. He could feel the swell of her hips just below his fingers and he couldn’t help himself, his little finger sneaked down and caressed her, very briefly. She didn’t seem to notice, thank goodness.
Without waiting for her assent, he lifted her in his arms, placing her on Primrose’s back. “Wouldn’t it be better if I could ride astride?” she asked, scrutinizing the saddle. “Certainly more comfortable, and I am guessing we could go faster. That is the point,” she said, meeting his eyes, “going faster, is it not?”
She swung her leg over the pommel, then pulled her skirts up so she wasn’t bound by the fabric.
Alasdair’s eyes were riveted on her ankles, her shapely calves, and he couldn’t stop thinking about how her thighs were wrapped around the horse’s body. The same way he wished she would wrap them around him.
It was the drugs. It had to be. Even though the effect usually wore off long before now, his insatiable desire for her had to be something outside of himself.
He’d never felt this way before.
He wished he could behave as a normal man, a regular man, would, who found himself alone with an attractive woman: make her pant, and scream, and get that satisfied look on her face he’d seen when she first woke up.
And the benefits to him would be enormous as well—he’d be able to lose himself in her as he did the drugs.
But he wasn’t a normal man. He was a titled lord, a man with responsibilities and honor, for what it was worth now, and he couldn’t treat a woman like that, even if he was going to marry her. Which he was.
He sighed and mounted behind her, careful not to touch her too much, for his sake as much as hers. “Go on, Primrose,” he said, urging the horse into a slow trot.
“Why did you start taking the opium?” she asked after they’d been on the road for about half an hour. He cursed his earlier openness, and wished he could go through with his threat of stuffing her mouth with his cravat.
The last thing he wanted to do was explain himself.
“Why does anyone do anything?” he replied, waving his hand in an artless way just to annoy her.
She huffed in front of him, and he felt her spine stiffen. Then she lifted her right hand and began ticking reasons off on her fingers. “Money. Guilt. Kindness. Love. Responsibility. Pick one.”
It felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Hatred,” he said in a whisper.
“Of whom?” she snorted. “Your cousin? A loathsome man, certainly, but hardly worth developing a—a weakness like that.” She couldn’t say habit, much less addiction.
“Of myself.”
Her hands dropped to where he was holding the reins, and she rested them there, offering a passive comfort that soothed his heart. He wouldn’t have been able to take it if she pitied him.
She didn’t speak for another few minutes, and when she did, her voice was matter-of-fact. “My father used to talk about the damage self-hatred could do. He said that it was our duty to love ourselves, imperfect though we knew ourselves to be, because it meant we loved all mankind.”
“I don’t,” Alasdair said. “In fact,” he said, feeling his chest tighten, “I cannot love humanity when humans are so quick to destroy one another over arguments about land and who rules whom. Nor can I love myself when I know what I am capable of.”
It sounded like she was holding her breath. “And what are you capable of?”
Living, when everyone I care for dies. “You should know that for yourself by now. Buying women at auction, breaking my promises, leaving my blood relatives without money, bound to a bed.” He laughed a laugh without humor. “And that’s only been in the past twenty-four hours.”
Her hand did tighten on his, finally. “You’re troubled, but you’re not evil,” she said in an earnest voice.
“Spoken like a true vicar’s daughter.” He hoped his derisive tone would shut her up, stop her from stirring up his thoughts, so he wouldn’t have to question just what he believed about himself.
Or what she might believe about him.
Chapter 11
Mary’s heart hurt. She’d always been too soft, everyone said so, and she’d always thought other people were just too hard. They were right, she was too soft. She ached for him, ached to comfort him, to make him believe he belonged in the world as surely as anyone. But the finality of his tone, his utter hopelessness, made it hard to think she could help him.
Hard, but not impossible. She knew what she had to do for herself, but now she knew she had to do something for him: make him, if not whole again, at least not as broken.
Her right hand still held his left, and she looked down at their fingers, interlaced on Primrose’s reins. His hands were long, well shaped, elegant; hers were small and covered with telltale signs of her long hours of housework. As she looked, his fingers began to move, to caress her papery-dry skin, moving up and down in an unconscious movement.
“Your father. He died recently?” His voice came out in a low rumble behind her, and she started at the sound. She removed her hand and pushed a curl behind her ear.
“Yes. Just last month.” Her voice caught on a sob. “It was very sudden. He’d gone out to rescue a sheep from the stream; the farmer was away to market and his wife was pregnant. When he came back, he was sneezing. Four days later, he was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and she could hear the sincerity in his voice.
Mary shrugged, as though it hadn’t destroyed her life. “Yes, well, it wasn’t as if he was a young man. He was sixty. He was already thirty-five when I was born
.” And even then he hadn’t been married, but she didn’t tell him that.
It still hurt too much to know her father had lived a lie, had let her think her mother had died in childbirth, when she was actually alive, was still alive, living in London all this time. Although if Mary told him she was illegitimate, he’d surely—no, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t care.
She didn’t know him that well, but she knew he didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what people thought. Oddly enough, that lifted her spirits.
“You’re older than you look.”
She half-turned in the saddle to look at him, and was surprised by how close his face was to hers. “What am I to say to that, my lord? ‘Thank you for complimenting me, despite my advanced years?’ No wonder you’re not already married, if that is your idea of flattery.”
His beautiful lips flattened into a thin line. “I was married.” His green eyes darkened, and he closed them for a moment, pressing his lids tight as though to suppress the image of something—or someone.
“Oh.” Mary turned back around, her face aflame.
“She died.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a whisper. “Was she—was it Judith?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Mary swallowed the lump in her throat. No wonder he was so unhappy—he must have loved his wife deeply. She knew that because of the way his voice sounded when he called her name.
After another half an hour, he spoke again. “We will be over the border in another hour or so. It’s my guess our pursuers are at least thirty miles from us now, more than a day’s hard ride.”
“So that means we’re safe?” Mary asked.
“Safe? Not hardly. It just means we know where our enemy is.”
“You sound as if you’ve had experience tracking your enemies. Of course, you must have a lot of them.” She tried to imbue her tone with a humorous note, to get his mind—and hers—off his dead wife.
“I was in the army.”
So much for getting his mind off dead people. “Oh. Where were you?”
His hands tightened on the reins. “Anywhere the French were.”
What wouldn’t remind him of all he’d lost? “Would you like me to read another poem?” she asked.
She felt him hitch himself forward, further into her back, and saw his fingers flex on the reins.
“Yes, that would be … pleasant,” he said in a noncommittal tone of voice.
She dug into her skirts, noticing her hand was just inches away from his thigh. His strong, muscular thigh that gripped the barrel of the horse.
As she looked, Primrose skitted a little to the left, and she saw his thigh muscles bunch as he held on tighter. She swallowed and tried to find the book as quickly as she could, before she reached out and touched him as she longed to.
“Here it is,” she announced in her best schoolmistress voice. She wedged the book under her left leg and used her right hand to leaf through the pages. She cleared her throat. “ ‘The Sun Rising’—do you know it?”
“I don’t know any Donne, except as a weapon.”
“You can just stop talking about that, thank you very much,” she replied primly. “If you’re ready to listen?”
“Be my guest,” he replied in an exaggeratedly polite voice.
She licked her lips and took a deep breath.
“She’s all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
By the time she reached the end, she could hear the emotion in her own voice. They were both quiet. Mary’s throat was tight; that was what love was, what it should be. Had her parents—her real parents—ever loved each other like that?
“Your Donne,” Alasdair said in a ragged voice, “has quite a way with words. Pedantic wretch, indeed.”
Mary felt him draw a deep breath behind her.
“She’s all states, and all princes, I,” he quoted softly. “Too bad that is never true.” He had regained his composure, and spoke in his normal, acerbic tone. She hadn’t. She might never again.
Mary tucked the book back into her pocket and bowed her head, regarding Primrose’s mane through misted eyes. She couldn’t rebuke him—what could she point to, her father’s love for her mother? Ha. His love for her stepmother? A perfectly fine woman, but someone he’d clearly chosen because his little daughter needed a mother.
And she was getting married because he’d bought her, she had no choice, and it seemed he didn’t either.
It wasn’t the best reason, but it wasn’t the worst.
***
“Are we here?” Mary asked, blinking her heavy eyelids. She had nodded off, surprisingly comfortable astride Primrose. Or perhaps it was because she was cradled in his arms.
He’d stopped Primrose, and the horse was angling her head down to crop the grass. Mary looked around; they were at the outskirts of what appeared to be a small village. She saw a few curls of smoke emanating from chimneys dotting the horizon, and heard a faint thrum, as if from a village square.
“Yes, we’re here, wherever ‘here’ is.” Alasdair slid his arms from around her and dismounted, then held his arms up for her. “Come.”
She hesitated for a moment, caught by the look in his green eyes. They were filled with—well, in anybody else, she’d have said yearning, but since it was him, perhaps it was apprehension.
She took his outstretched hand, trusting the strength in his fingers, and hopped down from Primrose’s back.
“You wait here, girl, while your mistress and I go get married,” Alasdair said to the horse, looping her reins around a tree. He turned to Mary and held his hand out. “Well, shall we?”
She met his gaze and smiled. “Why, yes, my lord.” She allowed him to lead her toward the center of town. “And do we just wait in the middle of the town square and announce to everyone we wish to be married?”
“I am not sure. The last time I was married was in a church, with flowers, and guests.” He paused, and Mary swallowed.
How inadequate must this seem, compared with that?
“It was miserable,” he continued. “My father-in-law got drunk at the wedding breakfast, and my parents and I were still recovering from Anthony’s death.”
“Did—was your wife happy?”
“She was marrying me.” His tone was completely devoid of emotion. His face was so set and expressionless she didn’t dare to ask him anything further. “There, we can find a blacksmith where those horses are coming from.”
Mary peered down the road to where a few dray horses were emerging from a low shed. They trudged in silence over the dirt road. At least she had sturdy boots for walking the road to hell.
***
“So ye wanna be wed, hm?” The blacksmith barely paused before slinging another ringing blow to a piece of metal lying in the fire.
Mary wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Yes.” Alasdair, to Mary’s disgust, was not sweating at all.
“It’ll cost you.”
Alasdair fished in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled bill. “Will this do?”
The blacksmith paused in his work to glance at the money. “It will. Give me a sec. Ye ken step over there to wait.”
Alasdair took Mary’s arm and walked her over to where the smithy had pointed. “It’s not too late to back out,” she said, her throat closing up in panic.
“Isn’t it?” he asked, his voice strained. His face was white and drawn.
It had been a long time since he’d taken those pills. The pills she had destroyed.
>
“Ye ready then?” the blacksmith asked as he walked toward them, brushing his hands off on his apron.
“We are.”
Mary drew a deep breath and pulled Alasdair’s arm closer to her body.
***
“We’ll stop here,” he—her husband!—said as they led Primrose back through the town. They were in front of a modest inn, not quite as bad as the last. And it was her wedding night. She gulped and looked up at the second-story windows. She’d spend her wedding night in one of those rooms. With him.
It was no more bizarre than the wedding ceremony they’d just had. Not even a ceremony, just a few words spoken by a huge, sweating man. She’d barely paid attention to what he was saying; her focus had been on not getting sick from the stench of burning coal that flooded her nostrils. And noticing Alasdair’s eyes were wet after the man had pronounced them wed.
Probably just the soot getting in his eyes.
In all of her romantic imaginings—which honestly hadn’t been too many—she’d never dreamed she’d be marrying a marquess who had promised not to touch her, and who had an unhealthy dependence on opium.
He bent his head down to hers. “Please don’t ‘my lord’ me,” he said in a whisper, even though no one was within earshot. “Hugh is probably sending people to look for us. I don’t want people to know we’re anything more than—what is your last name again?”
“Smith.”
He grimaced. “Smith. It sounds ridiculously obvious that we’re lying, but I don’t think you, with those trusting eyes, would be able to carry off an unfamiliar surname, even if it is now your legal one.”
She bristled, and opened her mouth to protest, until she saw his face.
He was trying to get her to react, trying to get her angry. Why? So she wouldn’t ask any more questions about him? So she couldn’t try to help him? She swallowed her irritation, and nodded.
“You are doubtless right, my—Alasdair.”
His eyes narrowed, his lips thinning into a grim line. “Just keep quiet, all right?” He grabbed her arm and marched her toward the door of the inn without waiting for an answer.
At least the inn was a lot cleaner than the last two she’d been in, Mary reflected as the innkeeper led them to their room.
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