He appeared to be having his problems. At least, he’d made little progress toward tethering the nervous horses; in fact, he was still standing a short distance from the foot of the stairs apparently deep in conversation with his wild-eyed stallion.
Emily watched the driving rain plaster his jet-black hair to his head and run rivulets down the finely chiseled contours of his face. She smiled, wondering how many men would stand in such a downpour calmly conversing with a horse. But then, in the short time she had known him, she’d come to the conclusion that this free spirited half brother of the icy duke had little in common with more conventional men.
The wind was intensifying by the minute, whining through the treetops like a thousand frenzied banshees. The very sound sent shivers down Emily’s spine, and as she raised her eyes to the boiling clouds, a shaft of lightning split the sky directly overhead. Her heart leapt into her throat and at the same instant the terrified stallion reared onto his hind legs, striking a glancing blow off the little mare ‘s withers.
She watched breathlessly as Jared lunged for the reins which had slipped from his fingers, and realized he was unaware that a branch high above his head had ripped loose from the great oak and was plunging toward him.
She screamed, but it was too late. To her horror, she watched it crash down upon his head, burying him facedown in the mud beneath a tangle of leaves and splintered wood.
Numb with fear, she rushed forward, slipping and sliding in the ankle-deep muck until she reached the spot where he lay. Heart pounding, she pushed aside the muddy debris and struggled to turn him over. His eyes were closed, his face deathly pale and caked with dirt. Blood oozed from a deep gash above his right temple. Frantically, she ripped a length of ruffle from her petticoat and bound the ugly wound.
“Wake up, Jared,” she pleaded, dropping beside him in the mud to hold his head in her lap. She tore off another section of ruffle and aided by the driving rain, wiped the worst of the mud from his face.
Something crashed behind her and glancing around, she saw the door of the cottage swinging wildly on its hinges in the gusting wind. Never had anything looked so inviting as that open doorway—or so remote. But somehow she had to get Jared through that doorway and into shelter. He had suffered a dreadful shock and he was soaked to the skin; he could be taken with lung fever if he lay much longer in the rain and mud.
Methodically, she ran her hands across his ribs and down his long legs the way she’d seen the village doctor do when she’d helped him tend a carriage accident victim. As far as she could tell, nothing was broken. Only his poor head had suffered in the accident and she doubted moving him would worsen that.
Scrambling to her feet, she bent over and slipped her hands beneath his armpits and dragged him slowly toward the stairs behind her. He was dead weight and heavy as an anvil. His chin lolled forward onto his chest and the boots encasing his long legs dug two tracks in the ever-deepening mud. But she could move him. Just barely. With each step Emily took, the seam of her riding jacket ripped further until she could feel the rain pelting her back and shoulders through the flimsy fabric of her chemisette. Finally she reached the stairs, and with the last of her strength hauled his limp body up stair by stair until she reached the open doorway.
Peering about the dim interior of the single room, she spied a high, narrow bed with two blankets folded across the foot. “Well I’ll never be able to hoist a great hulking fellow like you onto that,” she declared to her silent burden. “The floor will have to do, but I suspect you’ve slept on many a floor during your colorful career.”
With trembling fingers, she stripped Jared of his soggy shirt and wrapped one of the blankets around his shoulders and across his chest. His was not the first male torso she had seen; the field laborers back home often stripped to the waist in the heat of summer. Still, something about this particular bare, muscular chest left her feeling strangely weak of limb and flushed of cheek.
“Act your age, Emily Haliburton,” she chided herself. “You are no green girl and this is an injured man who needs your help, not your maidenly vapors.” Ignoring her pounding heart, she wrapped the other blanket around her own nearly bare shoulders, sat down on the floor and cradled Jared in her arms.
He moaned softly and turned his face into her breast like a babe nestling against his mother, and a surge of tenderness swept through her, so intense it felt almost like pain. Gently, she brushed a lock of blood-matted hair from his forehead.
With his eyes closed and his sensuous mouth twisted pain, he looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable than the wicked tease who had ridden into her life a fortnight before. So young, so vulnerable…so infinitely dear. Tears misted her eyes. Had she foolishly lost her heart to this impossible man? Was this terrible ache deep inside her the same emotion poets described with such fervor? If so, she found love a far more painful thing than their glowing words portrayed.
For long, terror-filled hours, she held Jared—watching with anxious eyes every expression that flitted across his face as he slipped in and out of consciousness. Sometimes his inky brows drew together in a scowl; sometimes a faint smile lingered at the corners of his mouth as if he were only asleep and dreaming pleasant dreams.
Once when he opened his eyes and stared at her, he grimaced in pain and mumbled, “I must tell you the truth, little sparrow.” But almost instantly, his eyelids closed and his breathing deepened, and Emily was left to ponder what mysterious truth he felt compelled to tell her.
With anxious heart, she waited for the raging storm to abate so she could find her way back to the manor for help. Much as she dreaded the thought of exposing Jared to the tender mercies of his arrogant half brother, she had no alternative—and she clung desperately to the belief that not even the icy duke could refuse to aid an injured man.
Eventually the hours took their toll. Emily’s arms began to ache and her legs felt as stiff as two broomsticks. She stirred cautiously, hoping to bring the circulation back into her tortured limbs without disturbing Jared, but the slight movement set him to moaning restlessly.
“Hush, my love,” she crooned, tightening her hold until his cheek once again rested against her breast. Jared nuzzled against her but this time, when he opened his eyes, the expression in their silver depths looked vacant and disoriented, and she felt a new wave of fear engulf her.
A powerful gust of wind rattled the cottage and splattered rain against the windows. Emily groaned. Rather than abating, the storm appeared to be gathering momentum by the minute.
Tenderly, she pressed her lips to Jared’s feverish brow and murmured a desperate prayer. “Please tell me what to do, dear God, for I am at my wit’ s end.” Tears welled in her eyes and splashed onto his pale cheek—and as if in answer to her supplication, the door burst open, revealing Mr. Rankin and one of the duke’ s grooms. They stopped dead just inside the doorway, their faces blank with shock.
“Thank heavens you’ve come,” Emily cried, so relieved to see them she failed to register their stupefied expressions. “But however did you find us?”
Mr. Rankin ignored her question. Dropping to his knees beside her, he lifted Jared from her arms. “Your grace,” he muttered in a choked voice. “What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
Jared’s fingers closed on Mr. Rankin’s neatly tied cravat, sending it askew. “Is that you, Edgar?” he asked in a voice barely audible.
“It’s I, Jared…your grace. We’ve come to take you home. I swear to God I lost ten years of my life when that devil stallion returned to the stables without you. Every man at Brynhaven, including old Ben, is out looking for you. It was just luck I remembered this cottage. “
Your grace! Emily stared dumbfounded first at Jared, then at the man who bent over him so anxiously. Shock and disbelief warred in her muddled brain, turning the terror that had gripped her just moments before into bitter, chilling anger.
“Are you saying this man is the Duke of Montford?” she managed between gritted te
eth.
“Of course ‘e’s the duke. Who’d you think ‘e was, Miss?” The groom knelt beside Mr. Rankin. “Lucky we come in a carriage, sir. ‘Is grace don’t look up to makin’ it back to the manor anyways but flat on ‘is back.”
“Right you are, John Groom, and the sooner we get him there the better.” Mr. Rankin lifted the bloody bandage to check his employer’s injury. “Fetch the coachman. Tell him we need his help to lift the duke,” he ordered, and the young groom immediately pulled himself to his feet and disappeared through the doorway.
Mr. Rankin raised his head and fixed Emily with an assessing stare that made her humiliatingly aware she was not only muddy and disheveled, but missing part of her clothing as well. From the look on his face, she suspected he thought she’d been thoroughly ravished.
His gaze dropped to where the blanket had slipped aside to further show her dishabillé.
“Please be good enough to explain what happened here, Miss Haliburton,” he demanded with a chilling politeness. “In particular, how his grace sustained such a lethal blow to the head?”
” His grace was hit by a falling tree limb and I dragged him in out of the storm—an act of mercy I now heartily regret, I should have left the villain lying in the mud where he belonged.”
“Oh, Emily,” the injured man protested without opening his eyes.
Emily clutched her blanket tighter around her and rose to her feet. “You black hearted rogue,” she said bitterly, embracing her rage as if it were a shield with which she could momentarily fend off reality. Later, when she was alone, she would face the paralyzing hurt and humiliation of this bewildering betrayal.
She leveled an accusing look on the duke’s bespectacled man-of-affairs. “And don’t you say a word either. It is plain to see you were part and parcel of this game your depraved employer was playing.” To her everlasting shame, her voice broke in a sob. “My God, I cannot credit to what lengths you shallow creatures will go to find amusement.”
Turning her back on the two men, Emily marched out the door and into the raging storm.
“Damn your eyes, Jared, you promised me you’d tell Miss Haliburton the truth,” Edgar muttered before the groom and coachman drew close enough to hear.
Edgar’s voice sounded far away, as if he were deep inside a cave, but Jared had no trouble understanding his words. Nor, even in his befuddled state, could he mistake the disgust with which those words were uttered.
He struggled to gather his wits sufficiently to defend himself against the accusation. “I tried, “he murmured thickly, but his head ached so abominably he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was he had tried or what had prevented him from succeeding.
Through half-closed eyes, he watched the groom and coachman cross the room to stand over him and moments later, felt himself lifted and carried through the rain to a covered carriage. The last thing he heard before someone closed the carriage door was Emily declaring she would rather ride up beside the coachman.
The decision to ride outside the carriage on the coachman’s seat had been a grievous mistake—one of those dangerous impulses her dear mama had often proclaimed would one day prove her undoing. If Mama was looking down from heaven now, she must surely be shaking her head and saying, “I said it would be so.”
Emily had been so shocked, so angry, so devastated by the perfidy of the man she had thought a common highwayman, she had made her stubborn stand without considering how strongly she would be buffeted by the wind and rain or how difficult it would be to keep the blanket clutched about her while she clung to the seat for support. Nor had she stopped to think how she would appear to onlookers when she arrived at the manor house with her hair whipped from its pins and her clothes looking as if they’d been forcibly ripped from her body.
She thought about it now, alone in her bedchamber. She thought about the crowd of anxious houseguests and servants waiting outside the manor house to greet the duke’s carriage. She thought about the horror and disbelief in Lady Hargrave’s and Lucinda’s eyes and the earl’s beefy face mottled with rage. She thought about the giggling housemaids and the stoic butler and the disapproving looks on the faces of the duke’s two aunts and Lady Sudsley’s look of smug satisfaction. She had not only brought disgrace upon herself but on everyone related to her.
No one had spoken a word. The entire assemblage had appeared stunned into absolute silence. Everyone, that is, except Mr. Rankin who very curtly ordered her to stay seated while he arranged to have the duke carried to his suite— then personally handed her down from her elevated perch. With his hand firmly gripping her elbow, he led her through the group of gaping spectators, up the stairs, across the great entry hall and finally to the door of her bedchamber.
“Miss Haliburton,” he said as he raised her hand to his lips. “I cannot speak for the duke, but I know I feel quite properly chastised.” Gravely, he searched her face, “But, all things considered, would it not have been wiser to make your point a bit more discreetly?”
Emily raked him with a scathing look, stalked into her bedchamber, and slammed the door in his face—but in her heart she knew he was right. She had had good reason to hate the man who had played her for a fool, but in letting that emotion drive her to such extremes, she had made an even greater fool of herself. In one reckless moment, she had branded herself a hoyden—probably worse—in the eyes of all who had witnessed her ignominious return to the manor.
She slumped onto the bed, a bundle of abject misery. Had it been only an hour ago that she had gazed at a man’s face and felt warmth and tenderness? Now the very thought of that cruelly handsome face turned her blood to ice and her heart to stone.
Behind her, the door opened and then closed. “Emily?” Lucinda’s voice sounded even more tentative than usual.
Emily turned to face her wide-eyed young cousin and forced her rigid lips into a semblance of a smile.
“Dear Emily, whatever have you done?” Lucinda wailed, crossing the room to sit beside her on the bed. “I have never seen mama so distraught nor papa so furious. They have forbidden me to ever speak to you again or even to mention your name in their presence. I could not be here now if Hawkes were not standing watch by your door.”
She took Emily’s cold hand in her small, warm one. “Papa says you have brought such disgrace upon our family the duke will never offer for me now. I cannot say I am sorry for that, but it breaks my heart to know you are a fallen woman and Papa will never allow you to darken our door again.” Her eyes grew wide as saucers. “Oh, Emily, where will you go? What will you do?”
What indeed? Emily felt gripped by absolute terror at the thought of being left alone and penniless, and she had not the slightest doubt that Lord Hargrave would cast her out without a farthing now that she had ruined his grand scheme to refill his empty pockets.
“Hurry, Miss Lucinda.” Hawkes poked her head in the door. “Her nibs wants to leave for London afore Lady Sudsley has another go at her. She said to tell Miss Emily she’s to ride in the luggage carrier and stay out of sight of the earl ‘cause he’s hoppin’ mad.”
Lucinda’s eyes puddled with tears. “Oh, Emily, will I ever see you again?”
“Of course you will, and you must not worry your head about me for I shall be quite all right. I am very good at taking care of myself, you know.” Emily gave Lucinda a hug and even managed a genuine smile, but everything inside her felt as if it were cracked and crumbling as she watched her tearful cousin leave the room. For all her addlepated ways, Lucinda was a love, and she would miss her dreadfully.
“You’d best hurry and change into a traveling dress, Miss, whilst I pack the rest of your things,” Hawkes said in her best no-nonsense voice. “As browned-off as the Earl is, he’d likely leave you here at Brynhaven if you was to keep him waitin’ And you wouldn’t want that now, would you, Miss?”
Emily instantly leapt to her feet and tossed aside her blanket. Facing the great, inhospitable city of London alone and without funds might b
e terrifying; remaining at Brynhaven was unthinkable.
“Oh my poor lass, what has that black hearted rake done to you?” Hawkes commiserated, her eyes wide with horror at the sight of Emily’s torn and sleeveless garment.
She gave Emily a sympathetic pat on her bare shoulder. “If it’s any comfort, you’re not the first woman what’s had her good name ruined by such as the duke. Nor will you be the last. It’s how the gentry takes their pleasure. Many’s the tweeney and chambermaid I’ve hidden behind the linen stacks when the earl come home drunk as a wheel barrow and lookin’ to drop his britches.”
Maggie Hawkes’ favorite subject of conversation was the depravity of the English aristocracy. Emily had often thought that if Madame Guillotine were ever to hold sway in London, Hawkes would be the first to embrace the sans coulottes and shout, “Off with their heads.” She had to admit she was sorely tempted to do a little shouting of her own at the moment, but for the sake of her self-respect, she felt honor bound to set the record straight.
“The duke never touched me,” she said quietly, trusting she’d be forgiven for stretching the truth to exclude some highly improper kisses. She explained in careful detail how she came to rip the seams of Lucinda ‘s riding habit, ending with, “You know how tight it was across my chest.”
Hawkes surveyed her with dubious eyes. “So you says, Miss, but there’s no use bamming me. I knows there’s more to the story than that, because I knows the duke’s kind and knows ‘em well. “
Emily ignored Hawkes’ obvious attempt to draw her out. The woman had a heart of gold but gossip was her one failing. Emily had no intention of giving her any more choice bits to chew on. With shaking fingers, she buttoned herself into one of the ill-fitting cotton frocks Lucinda had abandoned once she left the schoolroom.
Hawkes folded the last item of Emily’s scant wardrobe and placed it in her portmanteau. “I hopes, for your sake, Miss, you’re not so foolish as to think the muckworm gives a fig what’s to become of you now he’s had his fun,” she said sourly.
The Duke's Dilemma Page 13
