Unmistakable Rogue

by Annette Blair

  Reed sat on the ground beside Mark and dredged up some of his most painful childhood memories to illustrate the way he had kept from being hurt.

  After a while, Mark raised his head.

  “If you do not accept love,” Reed said. “There’s no pain when it’s taken away, which you know will happen.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Your father left. That was a pretty awful thing to do, leave his family like that.”

  “My father was a good man.”

  “Yes, I think he was, which you need to remember, so you can stop being angry at him for dying. His life is gone, not his love.”

  Mark shrugged but with less of an edge to the movement. “Da went to bring God to the heathens. We should be proud. He wasn’t s’posed to go forever.”

  “He left you with your mother, but then she left you.”

  “She said Da would die if she didn’t. She didn’t want to leave; I could tell. She cried.” Mark turned away and wiped his face with an angry fist. “She cried like when baby John died.”

  “Then Aunt Anna left you.”

  “Matt took good care of us, we don’t need anybody else.”

  “Matt did a wonderful job of caring for you all, but Chastity did a better job.”

  Mark thought about it. “I didn’t think she would come for us at the workhouse.”

  “But she did.”

  “It was her fault we were there! She could’a taken us right off, but she marched us to that hairy old Beadle.”

  Reed coughed. “Chastity loves you.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “I love you.”

  “Shut up! Shut up, you bastard.” Mark jumped up, sending Zeke scurrying. “You hate us. You hate all children. You wrote that letter to get rid of us. You wanted to send us away, so you would have Chastity to yourself. You hurt her and I’ll kill you. I will.”

  Reed should have expected the blow, but he did not, and he got his jaw cracked. He protected his face after that, and certain parts to which Mark’s boots came perilously close. But for the most part he allowed the boy to beat the devil out of him.

  “I hate you!” Mark shouted.

  For every avowal of hate, Reed offered one of love. “I love you. Chastity loves you.” He named Matt and Luke, and Rebekah. Reed even told him that Mr. Sennett loved him, but Mark was persistent in lashing out.

  “I want to be your father.”

  The boy stopped, fists poised, breath coming hard.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” Reed said. “‘I don’t need anyone’ were the words I lived by, until Chastity fell off a shed roof and landed on her bottom at my feet.”

  Mark nearly smiled.

  “I love you all,” Reed said. “You’re right about love hurting, but it can be better than great, if you let it. And, if you’re lucky and work at it, the hurt part is small compared to the joy. I’d venture to guess that with Chastity caring for us, we’ll be very lucky. I haven’t always known it, mind. I learned it recently. Chastity taught me, in the way she taught you. Admit it.”

  Mark said nothing.

  “Everybody needs love, Mark. I need it so much, I want Chastity to marry me. I want to adopt your brothers and sister. And you, especially you, because you’re so much like me, I have this need inside to teach you there’s good in the world while you’re young enough to have a childhood. I want you as my son, Mark. Chastity does too.”

  Mark remained quiet, his tears hovering.

  “You can hate me until you’re a man grown,” Reed said, “but I’ll never stop loving you.”

  Mark threw himself against Reed’s legs, almost knocking him over, his sobs soul-deep and wrenching. Reed knelt to embrace the boy, and they stayed that way for a time, silent and holding on.

  “You’re going to think I’m out of my mind,” Reed said after a while. “But not only do I want a woman who can’t cook a bean, and a flock of raggle-taggle street brats who’d steal a man’s pants right out from under his, ah, nose, I want more children.”

  Mark pulled away in surprise.

  “I know,” Reed said, shaking his head. “I must be sick or something. But I want children with Chastity, and any others she brings home that need keeping till they’re grown. I even want to keep Zeke—we have got to find that rabbit another name—and her babies. Where are her babies?”

  “In the wagon.”

  “Ah. Will you have me as your father?”

  “You had better find him a mother first.” Chastity stood at the corner of the shed by the wood pile, Luke and Matt beside her, Bekah in Mr. Sennett’s arms.

  “I do not suppose you’re applying for the position?”

  “I do not suppose you’re proposing?”

  Reed reached her and snatched her against him, bending her over his arm in a mockery of a romantic embrace. “I do not suppose you’re accepting?”

  “What was the question?”

  He let her up, took her hands, and kissed them. “Will sweet Chastity Somers marry Reed Gilbride St. Yves, and become parents to Matt, Mark, Luke, and Rebekah ... and any others who come along ... one way or another?”

  WARRONNNK!

  “Perfect timing, Luke.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said sweet Chastity Somers.

  EPILOGUE

  May 1818

  “You can blow your horn now,” Reed told Luke as he entered the nursery playroom where the children waited, with anything but patience.

  WARRONNNK!

  Gathered round a horde of worn tin soldiers stood Matt, Mark, Luke and Bekah with their brothers Harry and Sidney. Sidney’s mother died at his birth a year before. Four-year-old Harry was brought to them when his only living relative perished in a mill accident.

  Two-year-old Brenna clung to Luke’s hand. They’d fetched her in response to a note from her nurse who’d kept her since her parents died. The old woman lived just long enough to hand the mite over and tell them her name.

  Clarice, clinging to Brenna, had been born at the workhouse the week Chastity worked there planning her fateful rescue.

  They’d gone for Clarice the day they married. Ash took them in his carriage that very morning, procured a special license, and witnessed their wedding, complaining all the while that he should be the groom.

  Then nothing should be done but Chastity must return to the Quay Street Workhouse on their way home, to rescue the babe she had wanted to take in the first place, and give the administrators a piece of her mind.

  Reed gazed from one sweet, tiny face to the next.

  What cared he about a band of raggle-taggle street brats? Oh God. He loved them. He sat in the nursery rocker, while his eight—God help him—older children gathered round, faces wide with awe to view the newest additions to their household. Giggles erupted when one of his bundles gave an abbreviated wail. What a delightful sound.

  “Two of ‘em?” asked Luke.

  Reed nodded thinking he just might pop his buttons with the pride swelling his chest. “Twins, like me and my brother,” though these would never be separated.

  Mark indicated them with his chin. “Boys, right.”

  Reed cleared his throat. “Girls.”

  Bekah whooped. “Good thing you like to do braids, Papa. How’s mama?”

  “Tired, but happy.”

  “Both girls?” Matt asked, back to the original subject, as if a horrible error had been made. “Two girls?”

  “Jillian and Meggie, your new sisters.”

  “Don’t worry, Matt, we still got more boys than girls,” said Luke. WARRONNNK! “Better get more so we stay ahead.”

  Reed groaned.

  One of the babies began to wail, then the other.

  Reed laughed. Matt joined him, as did the rest of his brood, a contagious, deafening sound amid the babes’ wails.

  “Let’s go see Mama.” Reed and the babies led the parade, a cacophony heralding their arrival.

  Chastity sat up in bed, supremely content—a love beyond imagin
ing, and ten children. How could she be so lucky? Tears spilled down her cheeks. She could not seem to contain them, so she laughed as she cried.

  Sidney and Clarice—her cuddlers—climbed on the bed and burrowed against her.

  Matt, Mark, Luke, and Bekah, hugged and kissed her, in turn. Then her unmistakable rogue, her beloved husband, handed a twin each to Bekah and Matt and sat beside her on their bed. He took her hand, raised it to his lips, kissed it, and winked. “Can’t abide the little beggars.”

  Chastity touched her rogue’s face as he pulled her close. “I love you,” she whispered, her heart overflowing.

  “None of that now,” said Gideon St. Goddard, Duke of Stanthorpe, as he entered with his wife Sabrina on his arm. “Mr. Sennett said we should come up,” Gideon added, as Sabrina claimed the babe Matt had been holding. “He’s watching our five.”

  Bryceson Wakefield, Duke of Hawksworth, nodded his hello right behind them. “It’s this kissing business that keeps getting us into trouble,” he said, patting the evidence of his wife’s imminent motherhood.

  Alex claimed the second babe.

  “Meddling rogues,” Reed said with a grin, as he looked into Chastity’s eyes, his dimples winking with his smile, melting her as ever.

  “Sabrina kissed the babe she was holding, and squeezed Reed’s shoulder. You went looking for your heritage, and look what you found, besides.”

  “Salvation,” Reed said.

  “Thank God I did something the least bit ... uncommon,” Chastity said, “And got caught by a rogue who investigates.”

  THE END

  Excerpt

  UNTAMABLE ROGUE

  by

  Annette Blair

  CHAPTER ONE

  London, March, 1818

  Ashford Blackburne, Fifth Earl of Blackburne, did not care where he married and planted his seed, so long as he did both before Christmas, when his tyrannical grandfather’s archaic ultimatum ran out.

  Awash in the stale scent of incense, aware of a mortifying rigidity in his spine, Ash fixed his gaze upon the claret marble altar before him, and acknowledged, if only to himself, the unlikelihood of his bride’s arrival.

  Given his first jilt six years before—due to his lack of funds—Ash thought surely today’s bride would show, for he had paid her well to be here. But her absence proved her as greedy and dishonest as the rest. An actress of some talent—simply regard the way she’d taken his money and run—she might have played the role of loving wife well enough to satisfy even his grandfather’s skeptical eye.

  Now he so obviously faced a second jilt that none but a strangled cough dared pierce the weighty silence behind him, only to be trapped in the gothic eaves, like a fluttering ribbon of echoes in an unending wave of mockery.

  Ash glanced about, as if for escape, and though his groomsman, Myles Quartermaine, seemed loath to speak, the portly, plum-cheeked cleric stepped timidly forward. “My Lord, I ... do believe that your bride—” The parson plucked at his strangling collar. “She must have—” He blotted his brow with a palsied hand and opened his mouth like a fretful fish.

  Ash cursed and sent the vested craven scurrying from harm’s way like a crab before the tide while the resonance of his expletive filled the rafters, and the craven turned crimson.

  “Devil it, Ash,” Myles whispered. “She has taken your money and run.”

  Ash firmed his jaw. At this moment, he’d rather fight another horde of bayonet-wielding Frenchies than face any of his gossip-greedy guests. Nevertheless, he turned to regard the vultures. “There will be no wedding today,” he said, and before the surge of speculation broke, he’d stepped through the vestry arch, twice-jilted and thrice as furious.

  The warble-voiced vicar barely offered a blessing before Ash cleared the north nave exit, leaving Myles to the mercy of its ravening jaws.

  As the two reached the front of the huge steepled edifice, Hunter Elijah Wylder, Marquess of Wyldborne, another battle-scarred rogue of the club, quitted the church and fell into step beside them.

  In a gesture of impotent fury, Ash waved off his coachman and together the three strode down Piccadilly and straight through the rotting portals of McAdams’s Pickled Barrel Inn. There they always ended when dissipation came to mind, and there they sat now to drink and forget the scandalbroth to come.

  “McAdams,” Ash shouted. “Your best whisky, and bring the bottle.”

  “Bring three,” Myles said.

  “Hell, roll the barrel over,” Hunter added.

  Larkin McAdams had seen him coming. Him—the man who’d filled her dreams since childhood, foolish, wistful, impossible dreams, he who dominated them since he lifted her from the floor, wiped her tears, kissed her scraped knuckles and called her a brave little lady—the most handsome and forthright being ever created: Ashford bloody-beautiful Blackburne.

  If only he were not of the lowest and most feeble-brained of God’s creatures ... a man. Practical to a fault, Lark sighed and admitted that for dreaming purposes, Ashford Blackburne’s manliness did not seem so much a failing, as an advantage. His male shortcomings paled in comparison to his masculine strengths, as exhibited by her nightly fancies, in which he played a leading role.

  Ashford—as she dared call him in her mind—sat now in his favorite chair at his favorite corner table from which he liked to survey the room at large. And she, on the far side of the enclosed stair-wall behind him, sat on the bottom step, her temple against the rough wall board, as near to him as she dared get without being seen.

  If she closed her eyes, she could ignore the stench of ale and tobacco about her and remember the special scent of him that day eleven years before, like the most exotic of spices. And when she did recall it, a yearning for more than she could ever have overtook her.

  As always, she fought the pull. Being so near the object of her fancies never failed to rush her blood and pummel her heart with the kind of wild sentiment she hated, yet at this moment, there existed no place on this earth she would rather be.

  Her dissatisfaction with life would pale with his departure, she knew, and reality would return, however rude and unpleasant, though her yearnings never seemed to end.

  Lark slid to the floor just behind him and stretched her arm as far as she could reach, far enough to touch the hem of his frockcoat, bold unworthy creature that she was, and stroke its fine and fancy cloth between her callused fingers. Too greedy by half and ignoring the risk such abandon wrought, she slid her hand into his pocket, and out as fast, for nobody picked pockets better than she, not even her Da.

  She palmed a silver snuffbox with curls that might be letters cut into it, a glove the color of wheat, and a perfumed lady’s calling card. Lark’s jaw set at the sweet, cloying scent of the card, but she brought Ash’s butter-soft kid glove to her face, let the wash of his nearness shiver through her, and forgave him. ‘Twas the spicy scent she remembered from that long-ago day mixed with a strong touch of ... lavender, as if he’d crushed a sprig in his gloved hand.

  Lark slipped the calling card between the stair treads and watched it disappear from sight with utter satisfaction. Ash was only a man, after all—human, weak, selfish and self-serving, like the rest—but kinder than most, infinitely more honorable, and much, much better on a poor maiden’s eyes.

  Lark pushed the remainder of her bounty into her trousers’ pockets and sat in the stairwell so long, her legs cramped. The drinkers, Ash and his two cronies, at first rowdy, then silent, then morose, in turn, called for three more bottles, then three more.

  For a while dust motes danced in the slant of daylight piercing the grimy bay window near Lark’s perch, then the light changed direction, lost its brilliance, and disappeared altogether.

  Ash stopped swilling whisky long enough to belch and grin, and Lark was glad he was coming out of his sulks. Something must have gone terribly wrong, for Ashford Blackburne could be a rogue of a charmer when the world went his way.

  The friend he called Myles caught his mood, wi
nked, and slapped him on the back. “You’re running out of time to get you a bride, old boy.”

  Ash clutched his friend’s neck cloth and pulled him strangling close. “No bloody fooling,” Ash said with another belch and another charming grin.

  “God’s teeth,” Myles said, pulling from Ash’s hold and loosening his neck cloth. “If you cannot persuade someone to marry you—”

  Ash growled at that and Myles reared from harm’s way. “I meant ... what the bloody chance do I have, I’d like to know?”

  “Not a chance in Hades,” said the third rogue—Hunter, Ash called him—his whiskey-induced grin rather endearing, if also a danger to the female population. “Though I do think your grandfather’s ultimatum is rather absurd, not to mention, damned-near impossible to achieve. At this rate, you’ll never inherit.”

  “Stubble it, Hunter,” Myles said to both the personal slight to himself, and the discouraging commentary on Ash’s dubious future.

  Hunter shrugged and returned his attention to Ash. “Devilish bit of bad luck, there, getting yourself jilted, again.”

  Again? Larkin sat straighter, ignoring their banter as it escalated toward disagreement. Jilted? Ashford Blackburne had been left at the altar? More than once?

  Were society women daft?

  “Does the first count as a real jilt?” Hunter, with his whiskey-grin, put in. “You ran off to fight Boney without a word, after all, and Ellenora was desperate to marry; we all knew that. She could hardly be expected to wait and see if you would survive. Ames was a Duke with a fortune as big as hers, so she would take him.”

  Ash leaned over the table, fisted a quick hand, and knocked the sot of a speaker on his arse. “Thank you for the patronizing reminder, but she took the man too bloody fast, if you ask me. She did not even wait two months and that I cannot forgive. Fact is, I’d rather run this pub than be stuck with the fickle likes of either flighty jilt.”

  Whoever the women were, they must be lacking in wits, as well as eyesight, to deny their hands in marriage to a handsome rogue like Ashford Blackburne, Lark thought, ignoring the talk of trade and pub profits that ensued.