A Wedding by Dawn

by Alison Delaine

  The hollow-cheeked sailor struck William on the side of the head. He stumbled into a fallen stool, and she heard herself scream again. They couldn’t hurt William! Oh, God—this had to stop! Her pistol—it would be useless against this mob even if she could manage to draw it out.

  Nicholas Warre sent the gold-toothed sailor flying. A hand sneaked between her legs and she tried to shove it away but couldn’t.

  William lurched off the fallen stool and threw a right, left, right. Blood spurted from the hollow-cheeked sailor’s nose. The commotion inside the tavern was deafening. Another man took a swing at Nicholas Warre, but he ducked and someone else took the hit. A new fight erupted, and the chaos grew. Hands closed sickeningly around her waist, an inch from the pistol’s grip.

  And then, suddenly, Nicholas Warre had her by the arm and wrenched her free.

  “This way!” he shouted in her ear.

  “Millie—”

  “Jaxbury’s got her. Run, damn you!” His hand clenched hers painfully as he dragged her out of the tavern. She stumbled on the cobblestones, trying to keep up with him as they raced down the street. Moments later, he yanked her into a pitch-dark alley and shoved her against the wall.

  “Don’t you ever,” he seethed at her, nose to nose and out of breath, “do anything that stupid again.”

  “Leave Malta this instant and I guarantee you I shan’t.” She tried to push him away, but he was solid stone.

  “Your recklessness could have gotten both me and Jaxbury killed—never mind the fate that would have befallen you.” He drew in a sharp, ragged breath. “Is that how you planned to bestow your virtue? In a tavern with thirty sailors taking turns between your legs?”

  She told herself she was trembling out of anger, not fear. “You’d best return to the safety of your London drawing room, Mr. Warre,” she taunted. “It’s clear you haven’t the constitution for Mediterranean life.” Except it was clear he had the constitution for any life he might choose. Faint light from the street caught the white flap of his torn shirt and a gleam of blood near his mouth. His wig was gone, and his dark hair stuck out everywhere.

  “Then what a blessing that you and I will be returning to London posthaste,” he drawled.

  No. They would not. But arguing that point would get her nowhere. “You are wasting your time here,” she told him flatly, and reminded herself that if not for him the danger never would have arisen in the first place. “I will not marry you. I’ll kill you first.”

  “Will you.” His eyes were nothing more than shadowed hollows.

  His hands burned through her sleeves. He smelled faintly of cologne—something spicy and aristocratic and much too expensive for someone in his financial condition. Faint light from the street brought his face into chiseled relief, and a renegade nerve flared to life in her belly.

  Betrothed. He fancied he had captured her as his prize. Perhaps he wasn’t so wrong after all.

  The weight of her pistol sat heavy in the band of her breeches. “Yes. And after what you did to Katherine Kinloch—” India began.

  “If bringing a bill of pains and penalties against her was a capital crime, I have little doubt my sister-in-law would have murdered me herself.”

  “I shall happily take on the responsibility.”

  “Bold words from one who actually has committed a capital crime against the lady in question. You do realize you could hang for stealing her ship?”

  Her pistol would put a quick end to this if only she could grab it and fire before he had time to react. There would be seconds, no more. There might be opportunity for nothing more than to gut-shoot him.

  A queasy spell dizzied her head.

  “We merely borrowed the Possession, Mr. Warre. Every moment you waste here with me is a moment you could be searching a way to satisfy your debts. You have greed and selfishness enough for ten men. I have every confidence that you will soon find an alternative method of relief.”

  “Praise, indeed. Fortunately for me, my search ended the moment I found you in that tavern.”

  “Your search, Mr. Warre, will end when your body lies cold at my feet.” She inched her hand toward her pistol. “I demand that you let me go. Now.”

  “Nothing in the world would please me more.”

  “Then—”

  “But I have a vested interest in keeping you.”

  “I’ll not give my consent to a marriage with you.” She raked him with disdain and gave a laugh that sounded more like choking. “Not ever.”

  “I don’t need your consent.”

  “Yes, you do. A marriage requires—”

  “The only thing our marriage will require, Lady India, is an officiant and a consummation. The first will be easy enough to find, and it’s clear you are desperately in need of the second. Once all that is complete, I assure you our marriage will not be put asunder—not by me, and certainly not by your father.” His port-laced breath feathered her lips. “Forgive me, but I cannot think who else might be interested in challenging it.”

  “I will challenge it.” Closer, closer...she nearly had the pistol now. “If you drag me back to England—which you will never succeed in doing—I shall file suit the moment we return.”

  “And may I wish you much success, waddling before the court with my babe rounding your belly.”

  Another strangled laugh escaped her. “You are just like all the rest that my father attempted to fob me off on these past months—going at me with their eyes before Father’s money landed in their greedy, fat hands.” Except he did not have fat hands, and he was as handsome as the devil. Perhaps Father imagined he was doing her a favor.

  “Spoken as if any of those hands would have been pleased with their catch once they realized what they had captured,” he said.

  “Are you disappointed, Mr. Warre? Surely my father did not fail to mention that I am a sailor.”

  “He did. And that you are spoiled, hoydenish and a—”

  Disgrace.

  “—disgrace. All of which can be easily corrected.”

  Oh, yes. Father had thought the same, and only look how he had succeeded.

  If she was going to be a disgrace, she would be one from the deck of her own ship. There would be no returning to England, no being locked away in isolation, no endless tirades about her shortcomings—and no unwanted marriage.

  Her fingers brushed the pistol grip. If Nicholas Warre succeeded in taking her, she may as well use the pistol on herself. The consequences of what she was about to do made her palms sweat. “Whatever my Father has offered you, I will pay you more to leave me be.”

  A shadowed brow rose. “If you have more, then I am a lucky man indeed, for once we are wed I shall have both.”

  “We are not going to be wed,” she said flatly, and closed her hand around the pistol’s grip. Her stomach rolled. Shooting him would make her a fugitive and guarantee she would never see England again.

  So be it. She never wanted to see England again, anyway.

  “Enough of this.” He stepped back, keeping hold of her arm. “We shall return to—” His eyes fixed on her hand.

  Now!

  “We shall return nowhere.” She tried to whip the pistol from her breeches but his hand was already there.

  “Give me that!”

  “No!” She fought with him to cock the hammer.

  “Let go, before you—”

  “No!” The pistol discharged into the alley with a deafening roar, and he wrenched it from her grasp. She tried to run, but he caught her easily and shoved her against the wall once again. Now his hands were on her everywhere—inside her waistcoat, searching, groping, skimming over her hips, her buttocks, even between her—

  “Stop!”

  “And allow you to murder me in cold blood?” he growled, drawing his hand across a place he had no business touching, then shoving it inside her pockets. “God’s blood, I got the sorry end of this bargain.”

  “You did indeed. And if you insist on keeping it, you will spend
the rest of your life sleeping with one eye open.”

  “I shall do nothing of the kind.” His fingers bit painfully into her arm, and he yanked her away from the wall. “Now. We shall proceed to my room at the inn, where we will wait for William and your associate. You will say nothing—not a single word—unless you wish to be bound and gagged. Do I make myself clear?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ONLY THING truly clear to Nick was that it would be a short leap from marrying Lady India to being committed to an asylum.

  “I suppose you’ve brought my things from the ship,” she said. Sixty seconds. Possibly less. That was all it took for her to ignore his warning.

  Not for the first time since embarking on this hellish voyage, Nick wondered if there might not have been an easier way to get his hands on fifty thousand pounds.

  They rounded a corner, and the inn came blessedly into view. He didn’t give a bloody damn about her things. His jaw hurt, his eye throbbed and the by-blow from her pistol had singed one of his fingers—all of which meant little compared to the real problem.

  “Well, I can’t imagine how you expect me to prepare for my wedding without my things, Mr. Warre,” she scolded. “Or to travel, which raises another question. How, precisely, do you plan to convey me back to England? By ship, I hope. The roads on the Continent are devilish rutted. Auntie Phil and I took weeks upon weeks to travel to Venice, but of course that was years ago. Oh, I would love to see Venice again. And Vienna. All cities beginning with V, in fact. Perhaps we can—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Am I bothering you, Mr. Warre?” she inquired with false concern. “Do accept my apologies. Truly. One does so hate a yammerer. Such a nuisance. Of all the qualities one might find in a person, I daresay chattering has got to be the least—”

  “Silence.” He pushed her inside the inn, ignored the frowning concierge, hauled her upstairs by the arm and managed to drag her into his room.

  “Well, since you hadn’t the foresight to collect my things—” Good God, he would have to gag her “—we shall simply have to return to the Possession.”

  He went to the pockmarked bureau. “By all means, let us proceed there directly.” The looking glass in this third-rate inn was so shoddy it was good for little more than guessing where the blood was as he inspected the damage from the bar brawl.

  “Sarcasm is an ugly thing, Mr. Warre. Everyone says so. You really ought to be more sincere, if not for me then for the sake of your soul, because—”

  “Lady India,” he said sharply, and turned on his heel to face her. She observed him craftily with eyes better suited to a courtesan. “For the sake of your soul—” he pointed at the fraying sitting suite behind her “—sit.”

  There was a beat. A little twitch at the corner of her too-full lips. And then she turned away and sprawled herself in a shabby velvet armchair like a man, except there wasn’t one bloody thing masculine about her—a fact his hands were having difficulty forgetting.

  “I wish he’d broken your nose,” she said, staring him directly in the eye.

  “A charming sentiment.” He turned back to the glass. He’d lost his peruke in the tavern, and his hair—too long for the damned thing anyhow after nearly five weeks aboard that godawful ship—lay in a mess of near-black waves. He’d have a black eye by morning. That, a bloody lip and sore ribs were the perfect cap to an endless bout of seasickness.

  No. No, the perfect cap was sitting in an armchair behind him, observing him disdainfully.

  He checked his pocket watch. Where the hell was Jaxbury?

  “You did not succeed in ruining Katherine’s life to pay your debts,” she told him haughtily, swinging a small foot back and forth, “so you’ve decided to ruin mine. You will not succeed.”

  Ruining Katherine’s— Of course. Lady India was loyal to her former captain, and apparently the fact that Katherine was now Nick’s sister-in-law carried little weight. But Lady India would not want to hear that ruining Katherine Kinloch’s life had never been his objective, and that sometimes one pursued options in one’s desperation that one would never consider otherwise.

  Such as agreeing to pursue a young hellion and force her into marriage.

  “Your life is already ruined,” he told her.

  “It isn’t.”

  Yes, it is. No, it isn’t. There was no doubt Lady India would be able to keep up that conversation for the better part of an hour.

  In the glass he watched her rise from the chair and approach him. She had the kind of shapely mouth that could earn a fortune doing unspeakable things at Covent Garden.

  He refused to think of what Lady India might do with that mouth. Leave a man singing two octaves higher, most likely.

  “My life isn’t ruined, of course,” she said conversationally, “but my body—well, that is another matter entirely. I regret to inform you, Mr. Warre, that I am not a virgin.” She put a hand to her belly. “At this moment, I could well be carrying a child. An Egyptian child, if you must know, although strictly speaking I suppose Ottoman is the better—no. No, in truth he was from Tunisia, I think, so if one wants to be strictly factual—”

  “And I do, Lady India. I do wish to be strictly factual. Which is why I must remind you that less than an hour ago you spoke of giving your virtue to a sailor.”

  Her mouth curved in a bemused smile. “I really don’t consider anything properly done until it’s been accomplished a minimum of three times, so—being strictly factual now, mind you—tonight would have marked the final demise of my virtue. I was referring to the coup de grâce. The triple cut, one might say.”

  My daughter is a wild harridan, Cantwell had said. The man had a talent for understatement.

  “Well, then.” He dropped the cloth in the basin and turned toward her. “You won’t mind if I have a taste of what I may look forward to once we’ve celebrated our nuptials.”

  The quick apprehension in her eyes told him everything he needed to know about whether she might be carrying a Tunisian sailor’s illegitimate child.

  Those eyes were blue—real blue, not gray-blue like Clarissa’s. Nor was her hair the pale, flaxen shade of Clarissa’s. It was pure honey, alive with ten shades of gold.

  Desire ripped through him. Devil take him, he was an idiot.

  But those eyes had taken on a decidedly less bold light, so he let his lip curve. “Not so adventurous as you claim, I see.”

  She laughed, and it transformed her face in a way that wasn’t helpful at all. “My, Mr. Warre, you do think highly of yourself. You’ve already seen my taste in men. You’re hardly exotic, and much too old. I could never bring myself to bed someone so ancient.”

  Fifty thousand pounds. Cantwell suffered from a severely overinflated view of his daughter’s worth. Or, depending where one stood, a severely underinflated one. “Indeed. God knows how I manage to stay upright with thirty-four years behind me.”

  “Thirty-four!”

  “Fortunately, our relations will be more of the lying-down variety.”

  “Thirty-four?”

  “Shocking, isn’t it?”

  “Ought you to remain standing? You mustn’t tax yourself on my account.” She gestured toward the sitting suite. “Please, do be seated.”

  “I find that I am particularly fit for my age,” he said drily. If only someone were transcribing this priceless conversation. “As for exotic, if you like, I shall wear a turban when I ‘bed’ you.” He regretted the words the moment they left his tongue.

  “What a generous offer, Mr. Warre. But I worry about engaging in anything so vigorous as bedding with a man of your age. My Auntie Phil once spoke of a Lord Garth who dropped stone dead in the middle of—”

  “Lord Garth was two and eighty.” Something like a laugh escaped him, and he went to his portmanteau because it was too easy to imagine her splayed across that bed, and his dropping dead would not be part of the entertainment. Good God. Lady India’s Auntie Phil, the young and widowed Lady Pennington, s
hould have a care what she discussed with impressionable minds.

  “Regardless, one can’t be too careful when one gets up in one’s years,” she said. “I would hate for anything to befall you.”

  His hands itched to open the door and toss her out. Let her go back to her stolen ship and her lusty sailors. Let Jaxbury deal with her, while Nick finally, blessedly got some sleep after the hellish weeks of sea travel.

  But he was in too deep to turn back. Holliswell had granted him time to pursue Lady India and collect the money from her father, yes. But if Nick did not succeed by their agreed-upon date, Holliswell would take ownership of Taggart. It was either marry Lady India or lose Taggart.

  And he’d be damned before he’d lose Taggart.

  “I assure you I shall take the utmost care,” he told her. “At least we may content ourselves that the marriage will be short, as I have one foot in the grave already.”

  “There will be no—”

  “Marriage. Yes, I understand your position thoroughly. Unfortunately, you’ve got no say in the matter.”

  “You cannot force me to say the vows,” she informed him.

  With the right priest and enough money, she could recite bawdy tavern songs for all he cared. “I have a signed contract and assurances from your father that I may do whatever is necessary to carry it out.” He pulled Cantwell’s contract from inside his waistcoat and unfolded it. “You may read the contract if you like, but you will understand if I hold it for you while you do. I would hate for anything to happen to it.”

  She wrinkled that shapely little nose that would have been perfect were it not dusted with a handful of freckles. “That contract means nothing to me.”

  “Perhaps that will change when you read it.”

  “I don’t need to read it, because I shan’t be agreeing to its terms.”

  “Then it’s a good thing its terms don’t require your agreement,” he said, and tucked the contract away. Once again he checked his watch. For God’s sake, Jaxbury— Perhaps the man had gone to the church instead of coming back here.