When She Said I Do

by Celeste Bradley

  She hung by her hands. Her feet kicked in the air, scrabbling for purchase in the tight seams between the great stones. Her gown got in her way and she cursed it, longing to be a man for one single moment.

  No one. No one for miles.

  * * *

  From the hilltop to the southeast of the house, Ren found a rather stunning view of Amberdell Manor glowing like a castle of gold in the slanting light of late afternoon. He made a throne of a large, sun-warmed boulder and took a moment to contemplate his empire. Not bad, really.

  For a monster. Except that today, he didn’t feel quite as monstrous as usual. For Ren, late of day usually meant stiffness and pain, and often opening a fresh bottle in which to drown it.

  Not this time. He’d walked perhaps five miles, up and down hills, awkwardly clambering over dry-stone walls and stomping through tiny tributaries without bothering to jump them. He was exhausted, sweating, and his boots were unpleasantly damp.

  He was, however, not stiff. The pain was still there, lacing up his spine, spreading down from his shoulder, yet even that felt different. Looser, somehow—less crippling. He found himself looking forward to a hearty meal and possibly even some sleep later that night. Yes, there would be wine, but he found himself more interested in seeing his bride in her chemise—or in nothing but bathwater, or feeding her bits of cake—than in drowning his senses with spirits.

  With an eagerness he found dryly amusing, he straightened from his gargoyle-esque crouch and headed toward the great house.

  Headed toward home.

  * * *

  Callie could not hang on. The stone sill fought her grip, warding off her desperate hands with slippery bird dung and gravity. Her own weight dragged her from safety and she regretted every bite of the morning’s cake. Her wails and curses never stopped, but not because she thought anyone could hear her. She simply couldn’t bear to die without at least sending up a protest.

  She was a Worthington, after all.

  With great regret, she felt her fingers losing their last bit of leverage on the sill. The unforgiving stone, obviously having plotted against her from the first, now paid her the final insult of abrading her skin from armpit to palm as she fought against her slide to death.

  * * *

  “Great George’s Baaaaaaaaaalls!”

  Callie’s impact shook her from toe to crown, addling her brain in her head and smacking the very air from her lungs. She lay still, not breathing, not quite conscious, not really very interested in becoming so—because really, what was the use when she was just going to die slowly. Pity the window hadn’t been on a higher floor. She’d be at peace now if it were, all shining and heavenly, not lying shattered on the cobbles.

  Except she didn’t feel shattered. Not really. Her bum hurt and her head ached and the lack of air was painful and shocking—and she rather thought she’d bitten her tongue, for her mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood—yet it wasn’t truly as bad as—

  Her lungs filled again in a hoarse, gasping whoosh.

  When the girl on top of him sucked in a whooping lungful at last, Ren closed his eyes in gratitude. She lived.

  That was important. He couldn’t recall precisely why at the moment, but somewhere in his mind, he felt relief at that knowledge.

  The other things he felt didn’t really bear thinking about. There was that terrible wrench in his back and shoulder. There was the feeling that his brains were leaking out the back of his head onto the cobbles of the yard.

  On a brighter note, there was the sensation of a warm, full breast spilling out of his palm, swelling upward with every hoarse breath she took. A gentleman would shift his grip.

  Ren figured he deserved it, payment for services rendered.

  What had the silly creature been doing, hanging out of the window like that? Was she entirely mad?

  “What the hell were you doing hanging out of the window like that? Are you entirely mad?”

  He was shouting, he realized. It made his head throb rather powerfully, but he truly couldn’t help it. Just the thought of that moment when he’d rounded the corner of the house to see her slipping over the edge—

  “You bloody little fool!”

  She lay sprawled across him, her back to his front, coughing and wheezing her lungs back into submission while he lay wrapped around her, gripping her parts with all his might and shouting in her ear.

  It was ludicrous. It was laughable.

  He wasn’t bloody laughing!

  He’d thought his heart would stop forever when he saw her falling, fluttering through the air, and he couldn’t make it, couldn’t make his battered body move fast enough, reaching desperately, flinging himself between her and the stones that were about to shatter her, break her, ruin her even as he was ruined …

  “You mind-boggling, addlepated, moronic, bloody nightmare of a female!”

  The wheezing gasps turned to choking sobs. Oh, hell. He ought not to have shouted at her. Poor frightened—

  Bloody hell. The mad little terror was laughing!

  Ren nearly pushed her off him right then and there. Then he realized his hood was somewhere else. As in, not on his head, not fallen about his shoulders, not anywhere …

  He couldn’t let her see him.

  His hand left her warm, soft breast—really too bad about that—and covered her eyes. For some reason, that set her off even more. She wasn’t just laughing now. She was howling, arching in his arms and outright screeching with laughter.

  Ren sat up awkwardly, lifting her into his lap while keeping her eyes covered. He felt a foolish smile tug at the scar tissue of his face. She was a complete madwoman. The fact that she was still alive and whole was bloody miraculous. He felt a surge of the same absurd relief, somewhat counteracted by his fury with her.

  Looking around him, it wasn’t hard to re-create the scene. An old ladder lay splintered on the cobbles. Next to it lay a brush and a dented bucket. He looked up. Filthy water still dripped from the sill high above.

  “What were you thinking? That ladder must be decades older than you!”

  She lay in his grasp, giggling limply, not even trying to push aside his covering hand from her eyes. “Perfectly sturdy ladder…”

  “Obviously not, if it collapsed beneath you.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Didn’t collapse—goodness, breathing is wonderful, isn’t it?—it just fell away. I wasn’t anywhere near it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Not if someone pushed it.”

  So now she was not only mad, she was irrationally suspicious? “There is no one within a mile of this house, but for you and I—and it certainly wasn’t I!”

  “No … no, of course it wasn’t you…”

  Bloody hell. “It was not I!”

  “I know that … I do. I don’t suspect you at all. Not even a little bit … really.”

  She didn’t sound terribly sure. Ren fumed and glared up at the offending window ledge. And then down at the guilty ladder.

  And then realized that it was, actually, entirely, completely his fault.

  The lady of Amberdell Manor had nearly died washing her own windows.

  This was his doing, his fault for refusing her request for household staff. His fault for expecting a nice, sane—well, not sane, perhaps, but not mad in the same manner as he—young woman to live like a hermit in a cave.

  He’d nearly killed her and they’d only been married for two days.

  Chapter 8

  All in all, Attie found that murder was not terribly difficult. Take a jar of crystallized ginger from the shelf of the spice market stall, drop it into the bottom of her basket, then purchase the small bag of cinnamon bark with a coin and wide innocent eyes.

  The spice merchant scarcely looked at her and most certainly didn’t notice the way the handle of the basket suddenly cut deeper into the crook of a little girl’s elbow. Attie spared a moment to wonder if perhaps all unsolved murders were committed by children. Reall
y, sometimes it was most convenient to be invisible.

  Once at home, she dashed inside through the kitchen, depositing Philpott’s order of cinnamon upon the vast worktable and disappearing down the hall before the old woman even turned around.

  Clasping her basket, Attie wove her way down the hall with the ease of a lifetime of maneuvering around the piles of clutter—which had always been there and how did people live in those horribly empty houses?—and ducking past doorways to rooms occupied by siblings, all the while sidestepping the worst of the creaks in the floorboards as she leaped and ducked and sidled through the narrow bits.

  It was a vast, jumbled, nonsensical maze. Attie knew precisely where everything was and loved every square inch of it.

  At her own door at last, she locked herself into her small chamber—no one wanted to sleep with her due to her tendency to thrash, kick, and talk loudly in her sleep, a standard she’d established at the wise age of three—placed the very large jar of ginger in the center of the carpet, then crawled beneath her bed to find the box of Philpott’s medicine she’d stolen from the housekeeper’s room the day before.

  Philpott was well-known for her primary health complaint, which wasn’t so much an illness as a tendency to decline servings of anything that had once grown from the ground. Lifting the lid on the pasteboard box, Attie gazed down upon the rows of folded paper packets with great satisfaction.

  Philpott took one a day with her evening tea. If a single one did service as a mild purgative, surely one hundred of them should kill a man?

  Attie, upon counting out her treasure, was disappointed to realize that the box contained a mere ninety-five packets. Scrunching her face into an expression of stormy disapproval, she proceeded to empty each slender packet into her washbasin. A small pile of crystalline powder accumulated in the center. Attie began to fear that her brilliant plan to restore her family might come to naught.

  Still, she was a Worthington, and Worthingtons were nothing if not persevering. She gamely carried on, stripping open packet after packet until she sat surrounded by a snowstorm of shredded apothecary paper and had a pile of purgative roughly resembling a handful of sand.

  Next she dumped the tall jar of crystallized ginger into the washbasin. Brown, sugar-coated chunks tumbled down to be mixed with eager, vengeful hands.

  Then, back into the jar and the metal clamp done up properly again. Attie cast a critical eye upon her project and decided that her reputation as an evil mastermind was not unfounded in fact. The medication had coated the nuggets and mingled most convincingly with the sugar crystals there.

  Carefully cleaning her hands and the washbasin as well—she was not foolish enough to leave evidence behind!—she tossed every tiny scrap of apothecary packet onto the coals of her bedchamber hearth. Then, after decorating the jar with a bit of ribbon and a note wishing the newlyweds well—most carefully not written in her own cramped penmanship but in a grand looping style that Attie imagined an empty-headed lady of the ton might use—she wrapped it carefully in parcel paper and buried it in the bottom of her basket once again.

  This afternoon would do to post it. It should arrive within a day, and then Mr. Porter would eat it and he would die. Attie smiled. She had no worry that Callie might be injured, for Callie despised candied ginger.

  * * *

  In her bedchamber, Callie set down the tray she’d carried up from the kitchens. It held a pitcher of hot water and a pitcher of cold, more of her herbal salt, and a plate of thick slices of beef and creamy white cheese. She was quite ridiculously attached to the cheese. It must be something the local dairymen made, for she’d never had it before. She would miss it when she left.

  Her fire was lighted tonight. She’d hauled up a full scuttle of coal earlier in the day, when she’d filled the one for Mr. Porter’s study. She would have done the same for his bedchamber, if she could have discerned which of the several disordered rooms he was currently using.

  Well, he was welcome to sleep in his damned study …

  She paused as she spread a freshly shaken canvas dustcover on the carpet before the fire. Would he wish to sleep in here, with her?

  Pensively she removed her gown and her underthings. Before she hung her gown up on its peg, she took a pearl out of the pocket.

  One for the bath today.

  Crossing to the vanity, she deposited the pearl with the other in the little shell bowl there. Two round orbs shimmered in the faint light of her candle across the room.

  This is going to take forever.

  The thought was perhaps not quite as upsetting as it had been yesterday.

  Taking a few things from the vanity, she knelt upon the pad of folded canvas. First she pinned up her hair, planning to brush it after until all the house dust and other detritus of her busy day were gone.

  Her hair was an unassuming shade of light brown, less interesting than Elektra’s shimmering blond or even Atalanta’s rich amber curls. Not curly, not straight—simply badly behaved.

  She didn’t mind being the nondescript Worthington daughter most of the time, for she was far too busy for comparisons or envy—and she was well enough, in her way. Certainly she didn’t consider herself plain, simply a bit lackluster.

  Yet I am the one with a very fine house.

  Complete with a very strange husband inside it.

  No matter. She soaked her washcloth in the salted, herbed warm water she had mingled in her washbowl and began to remove the remains of her mad, outrageous day from her skin. She was no silly child, to feel slighted by the Fates because her life did not resemble some sort of fairy story. She was far too practical to long for grand fantasies of love-everlasting, or some such nonsense. As husbands went, the mysterious Mr. Porter was no fantasy.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t cruel in the slightest. Yes, he’d raged at her about the blasted ladder, yet she’d not been frightened by his noise. He’d been upset, of course. If she’d been married for more than two days, she might even think he’d been concerned for her.

  She scoffed at herself as she ran the cloth over her arms and torso, luxuriating in the warmth of the glowing coals radiating on her bare skin. Mr. Porter had been no more concerned for her than he would have been for anyone who had nearly been injured. She paused, halting in the act of washing her neck. Didn’t that very fact make him a good man?

  * * *

  Ren had also taken some time to prepare himself. There was nothing he could do about his ruined face and broken form, but there was no reason to subject his bride to an unwashed monster.

  If anything, he ought to try to polish up a bit.

  Yes, be a pretty monster. That will help.

  He wished he could stop thinking about her. All day, his thoughts had never been more than a moment away from her. From the way she’d felt in his arms when he’d snatched her from Death’s very jaws. His heart had pounded from the danger … and much more.

  It was as though he’d awoken in that moment, truly awoken to the feel of her skin, the weight of her breasts, the sweet warmth of her breath as she sighed at his touch.

  He felt quite wild with it, as if something he’d tried to pen up, to forget, had been unleashed. It was untamed and it was hungry.

  All the more reason for care, for control. He dared not let her see him, not his face and not his dark, inner core where the man he’d once been had left a man-shaped hole not properly filled by the bitter angry urges of the beast. Any hint of that pain-born being would only ensure her departure at the earliest. She would leave anyway, as soon as she could. Even half the pearls would bring in a tidy bit of coin, so there was no guarantee that he would have an entire year with her.

  You’re lucky to have had one night. Every moment she allows you to touch her is one more than you have any right to expect.

  In his most recent room, wrestling himself into another loose-fitting shirt that was decades out of fashion, Ren caught sight of himself in a small mirror hung over the washstand. He thought he’d removed
them all.

  Stepping closer, he gazed at himself in the glass. Yes, look hard. See what she saw when she screamed in terror. See what she will see if she ever dares to open her eyes.

  He put one hand up to block the most damaged side of his face from his view. When he did this, he could get a glimpse of the visage that had greeted him the first twenty-five years of his life. It was like catching sight of a stranger he’d once known well. An older, worn, sallow version of that stranger. A crescent-shaped scar the size of a guinea marred his brow, and narrow white lines cut into his overgrown beard, but it was still a familiar sight.

  He’d been called handsome, before. He’d certainly never had difficulty catching a girl’s eye, being always ready with a smile and a flirtatious word. He’d walked with confidence in a dangerous world, as sure of his superiority as he’d been of his immortality. He’d belonged in that world, as surely as Miss Calliope Worthington … Porter … belonged in her ridiculous family.

  Brotherhood, camaraderie, a sense of being part of something larger and more important—more than enough reward, he’d thought then.

  Until one of his brethren betrayed him into enemy hands, sold like an unbroken horse to a disreputable trader, without a care of the consequences to him. He’d believed in that mad band of misfit patriots—believed with a faith built of the same stone as his loyalty to them.

  He moved his hand, to show the other half of his face.

  Consequences.

  The worst scar ran from his forehead down over the corner of his eye and down his cheek to his jaw. It pulled his eyelid down as if his flesh were melting and twisted his mouth into an ugly grimace. There were more scars, stretching back from his cheekbone and tracing through his hair, to the place where his skull had been cracked with a rock, a final act of mercy leaving him for dead.

  Incompetent bastards. When one set out to kill a man, one ought to have the decency to see it through. Beaten, brained, and stabbed, and they still hadn’t managed to finish the job.

  They’d driven a pike right through him, into his chest and out through his back. The rest of his injuries from that dark night that he could not recall were minor in comparison, but left his face and body a map of scars—a map that had led him here, to hide his monstrous self away while he waited for the end that a London physician had assured him would come mercifully soon.