Scandalous Brides

by Annette Blair

  “It was my pleasure,” she said. “I love them.”

  Hawk grew uncomfortable with his inability to say how much his family loved her, without including himself in the declaration. He cleared his throat. “For all my dastardly ancestors’ rule-breaking, I doubt any of them ever found themselves in the incongruous position of trying to wrest, or should I say, rescue, what little was left of their fortunes and estates from the greedy hands of their improvident, globe-trotting heirs. Nor did any of them ever have to stop their wives from marrying another.”

  “You are probing for the details of my alliance with Chesterfield, again, are you not?” Alex asked. She folded her arms and gave him a stubborn look, her expression implying that if he thought she would reveal any of those details, he had another think coming.

  He tried regarding her in such a way as to entice her to take up his verbal gauntlet, but she firmed her spine with her likely resolve and remained adamantly silent.

  “Tell me,” he said, giving up. “How is your Aunt Hildegarde? She was always my biggest fan. Did she mourn me for long?”

  “Aunt Hildy did not mourn you at all.”

  Hawk’s arrested shock at her response made Alex chuckle. “She did not mourn you, because she refused to believe that you had been killed. We tried to tell her, but doing so was like speaking to a stone, so we gave up.

  “On the rare occasions she still asks for you, we tell her that you are on a hunting trip, or taking care of business in London. I thought that, perhaps, my marrying Judson and moving everyone to his house might bring her around, but none of that matters now, does it?”

  Hawk looked away, unable to tell how Alex really felt about the turn of events. But they were nearing the Lodge and the thought of seeing his family, and of them seeing him, knotted his stomach and slicked his palms. The arrogant rogue of Devil’s Dyke, as frightened as a schoolboy who forgot his lessons.

  The carriage climbed Gorhambury Hill—along the River Ver—towards Devil’s Dyke and the house where Alex grew up. With the placement of their family homes, fate had merged their lives at so early an age, Hawk could not remember his life without Alex in it.

  Hawksridge, the home of his birth, temporarily his heir’s, sat at the opposite summit overlooking Devil’s Dyke, which formed the valley between. Hawk gazed westward to catch sight of his estate, but nearly a mile separated the houses, and he had forgotten that, other than in the dead of winter, the very woodland they had romped in grew too lush to allow for even a glimpse from the hill.

  Besides, night had long since fallen, and the looming Lodge claimed his full attention. A few windows shone with light but the rest remained dark. And though a half-moon shone, he could not tell whether the house was still as much a leaking, tumbling pile as he remembered, or worse.

  “Should I go in alone, first, and break the news?” Alex asked, as the carriage came to a stop before a set of weather-beaten granite steps. “I would not want your Uncle Gifford to have a seizure.”

  “You think my scars will come as that bad a shock to him?” Hawk asked. Apoplexy was very near what he expected the first time people who knew him caught sight of him.

  Alexandra regarded him as if he were daft. “Of course not. But I think the ghost of his dearly beloved nephew walking through the door, more than a year after his death, might do the trick.”

  Hawk felt himself flush.

  “I perceive that your scars are a great deal more of a difficulty for you,” Alex said, “than the people who must look upon you.”

  “Therein rests the crux of the problem. They must look upon me, but they would not, if they could help it.”

  Alexandra sighed and shook her head, as if she might argue the point, but the carriage door was thrown open and Claudia and Beatrix scrambled inside, out of the rain.

  Even as the interior grew bright with the light from their lantern, they began tossing rice in the air. “Hurrah for the bride and groom. Hurrah, hurr—”

  Sound stopped as if severed by a blade.

  Hawk braced himself, even as he consumed the blessed sight of them, Bea bigger, but still a halfling, Claudia, nearly a woman, but sadder somehow.

  When Bea focused on his face, she gasped and stepped back, regarding him fixedly, her curly little saffron head tipped in concentration. “Do I know you?” she asked, her small voice wobbling.

  “Do not be afraid,” Hawk said.

  To his horror, she began to cry as she climbed into Alex’s lap.

  Hawk felt the blood drain from him and went stone cold, inside and out.

  Alex wrapped Bea in love and soothing words. The little one had taken one look at him and was frightened to death. His worst nightmare come true, or one of his worst.

  “Muffin?” Alex coaxed. “What is it, Love? Why are you crying?”

  “That man made me sad. I miss my Uncle Bryce.”

  Claudia’s gaze shot to his face then, as if the scales had slipped from her eyes, and she saw him true, and understood the reason for Bea’s confusion.

  Hawk gave her a half nod, and as quick as he did, Claude covered her mouth with a hand and her eyes filled to brimming, not for the first time that day, if he did not miss his guess. Her tears overflowed and spilled onto her cheeks.

  Hawk wished he knew whether she wept with happiness, or horror, or both. At least he understood the little one’s tears. “Come,” he said, lifting Beatrix away from Alex. “Come, Pup, I am Uncle Bryce.” He hugged her close and smoothed her hair. “No more tears for missing me. I am here, Sweet. I am here.”

  Bea looked up at him, taking her lip between her teeth, her eyes wide, sobs escaping at odd moments, her expression moving from doubt to wonder. “Uncle Bryce?”

  “Bumble Bea?”

  “Uncle Bryce,” she screamed, throwing her arms around his neck. Then Claudia was laughing and hugging him, too, and all his girls, Alex included, wept openly, laughing through their tears.

  And as Alex reached for his hand, and the little one kissed him all over his face, scars and all, Hawk felt, amazingly, as if he had come home… for the first time in his life.

  Beatrix had so much to tell him that they did not move from the carriage for fully three-quarters of an hour, and even then, Alex kept telling her that she would have the rest of her life to catch him up.

  “Hello the carriage,” came a gruff, old, curmudgeonly shout from the darkness. “Where has everyone got to?”

  “In here, Uncle Giff,” Alexandra said. “Come in, out of the rain.”

  Hawk shrugged at Alex, as his stodgy old uncle squeezed into the seat opposite, so busy ordering Claudia aside he had not yet regarded the seat across from him. And when, at length, he did, he simply furrowed his grizzled brow in bewilderment.

  Hawk kissed Bea’s little head, firm against his chest. “I am Hawk, Uncle. I survived, after all.”

  “No.”

  “Truly, though I am a little the worse for wear, as you see.”

  “No.”

  Alexandra laughed. “Quiz him, Giff. You will discover that he knows all our atrocious middle names, including the most ridiculous of our secrets. No doubt about it. He is Hawksworth.”

  “No.”

  The girls burst into laughter and began talking at once, and Beatrix practically fell from the carriage, she was so excited, then she dashed for the house.

  In the foyer’s dim light, Hawk noted his uncle’s hair had turned the color of pewter in the intervening time, and his manly physique may have thickened and shifted somewhat. But all in all the old boy looked fit and spry and he seemed much less a curmudgeon than Hawk remembered.

  “Well what do you know,” his uncle said, quite belatedly slapping him on the back, at long last accepting the truth before him. “The dotty old magpie isn’t five feathers short a tail, after all, but wise as an owl.” Giff grinned. “Hildy,” he called, striding to the bottom of the stairs. “Hildy, you will never guess.”

  “Alex?” Claudia asked, stepping near. “Did you find Unc
le Bryce today? Or yesterday?”

  Alex smiled. “He found me… before I married Ch—”

  “Hurrah,” Claudia exclaimed twirling away from Alex and into her uncle’s arms. “I love you, Uncle Bryce.”

  Hawk knew he had missed some pertinent component in that exchange, then he heard Alexandra’s Aunt Hildegard reproaching his uncle from somewhere on the upper floor.

  Nothing had changed.

  When Aunt Hildy started down the stairs, Hawk saw her focus on him right away. And she did not miss a beat, not even when she took his uncle’s arm halfway down. “Bryceson, you stayed away too long this time,” she chided, beaming, as if he had not changed a jot, as if she had been expecting him all along.

  “But we forgive you, do we not, Alexandra? I am so glad you are back.” She stood on the bottom step, and still she barely reached his chin. “Though why your letters stopped more than a year ago, I cannot imagine. And it was too bad of the war office to ship you out a mere week after your wedding. Poor Alex wept for months about not even having your child with which to remember you. Now you have another chance, you can get on with having that family of yours while you are still young. I shall put in my order, now, shall I, for a big, noisy brood?”

  His uncle Gifford’s sudden paroxysm of coughing turned into a strangled laugh.

  “Ah, good to see you, too, Aunt Hildegarde,” Hawk said, feeling the tightening of his cravat.

  The dear old lady bussed his cheek, but when she did, and he placed an arm about her shoulders, he realized, from the degree of her trembling, that she was a great deal more shaken than she was letting on. And when he bent nearer, he saw tears hovering on her lashes.

  “Praise be,” she whispered.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Hawk said, for her ears alone, kissing her cheek in turn. “Especially now that I have seen my best girl.”

  Hildegarde swatted his arm but preened anyway. “Are you hungry?” she asked, stepping off that last step, and composing herself. “Thirsty? Have you dined?”

  “I am fine,” Alex said. “How about you, Hawksworth?”

  “Nothing for me.” Hawk felt all the nervousness of an imposter. Alex was treating him like Hawksworth, the stranger, rather than Bryce, the friend. His family believed good of him, when no good existed.

  He had chosen to ship out immediately after their wedding, rather than risk leaving Alex with the child of a man she did not love. And he had not written, not to anyone, to sever their ties early, in hopes that when he was killed, which he daily expected, their shock and grief would be diminished.

  Had Alex stayed somewhere else in London, alone for a time, to shore up a pretense of wedded bliss? Had she passed them news that supposedly came from him? Considering what her aunt had said, had Alex even pretended for a time that she might be carrying his child?

  “Why has little Miss Beatrix not been sent up to bed, I would like to know?” Alex asked, cutting the tense silence, looking as uncomfortable as him, as she ruffled Bea’s curls. “It is gone past ten.”

  “Because of your wed— Because these are special days,” his Uncle said. “Though we expected you yesterday.”

  “Very special days, more than you can imagine,” Hawk said. To his mind, stopping Alex’s nuptials to Judson Broderick, Viscount blasted Chesterfield, offered a great deal more to celebrate than her marrying him might have done.

  “Exhausting days, all the same,” Alex said. “And it is very late, past time for little girls to be tucked into their beds.”

  “Time for all of us to go up,” Aunt Hildegarde said.

  “But there is no bedchamber for Uncle Bryce,” Beatrix wailed in distress.

  “Of course there is,” Alex said. “He shall have the master bedchamber.”

  “But that is your b—”

  Claudia had clapped a hand over her sister’s mouth. “You heard Alex, Little Miss Mischief, time for little people to be in their beds.”

  “Big people, too,” Giff said, taking Aunt Hildy’s arm. “Let us all go up and allow Hawk and Alex the opportunity to, er, settle everything.”

  That fast, she and Bryce were left standing at the base of the main staircase to regard each other. Alex wished the foyer did not seem so drab for his homecoming, while he appeared, for all the world, like a raw boy with his first girl, the way she was certain he had never appeared in the whole of his life.

  “I do not want to put you out,” he said, wrapping dignity about him like a shield, much as he had done the evening before. “As you know, I do not sleep well these days. Any bedchamber will do.”

  Plague take it, Alex thought. Was not a husband expected to sleep with his wife? They were home now. She was no longer in shock. And if she did not begin the way she intended to go on, then she would deserve the consequences. “There is no other bedchamber,” she snapped.

  “There must be a dozen at least.”

  “If they have beds, they have no mattresses.”

  “Why ever not?”

  Alex gave a long-suffering sigh. “When we were forced,” she stressed, “to return here, the mattresses had been turned into mouse houses, so we turned them out of our house, leaky and dilapidated as it is.”

  Bryceson clearly bit back an oath, and that old impatient tic worked in his cheek. “The tower room in the attic,” he said, seeming to grasp at straws. “Isn’t there a chaise lounge, or a daybed, that would serve? When we used to practice our archery up there on rainy days, I am certain we proved the thing indestructible.”

  “You are able to climb so many stairs, then?” Alex asked, hoping to discourage him.

  “I climb better than I descend, it is true, but I can manage. Besides, I am convinced that the more I use my legs, the better they will work.”

  Myerson cleared his throat from the door of the servants’ hall, self-consciously turning his dripping hat in his hands. “Excuse me, your grace, but the horses?”

  While Bryce oversaw the stabling and feeding of the matched pair he had borrowed with the carriage, Alex carried a candle and bedding up three flights of stairs to the attic tower.

  Sure enough, the huge, sparse circular chamber appeared dry as toast and looked exactly as it had the last time they played there, except for the additional dust. Everything as they left it, including their old archery equipment and the dratted daybed.

  Thoroughly annoyed by the sight, Alex placed her candle on a table, and the bedding on the lounge. She went for a bow and arrow and set them up, crossed the room, and in a fit of pique, she let the arrow fly, hitting the target dead center.

  “Rotten roof leaks everywhere,” she muttered, choosing another arrow. “Wouldn’t you just know it would hold above this one blasted room.”

  She set the second arrow in the bow, but changed her mind about its destination and turned her sights, and her weapon, upward. “Bloody, stupid roof.” She sent the missile skyward.

  The arrow disappeared into the darkened attic rafters, and almost as it did, a drip hit the floor, then another, and another, until rain dripped down in a vapid, steady rhythm. “Oops,” Alex said. “Must have been ready to give at any moment.”

  Her mind worked and her smile grew as she chose yet another arrow and aimed it, unerringly, toward the rafters directly above the chaise lounge. But when she let it fly, nothing happened, and she could not tell exactly where it disappeared within the shadowed labyrinth of beams closer to the tower’s peak. “Drat.”

  Hearing footsteps on the stairs, she stashed the bow, saw the daybed was dry, and sighed with regret. Doomed to spending another night alone. Double drat.

  As Hawksworth entered, she beamed a bright smile. “Only one, small leak,” she said with feigned pleasure. “Your bed is fine. See.”

  Even as they regarded the makeshift berth, an arrow dropped, flat on its side, dead center of the bed, and rain poured, literally, down, soaking the bedding and the lounge, rendering it completely useless.

  Rainwater must have eased the arrow from the rupture where
it struck and stuck, Alex mused as she bit her lip and regarded her husband.

  He raised a brow. “Are we under siege?”

  “I was… practicing,” she said, by way of feeble explanation. “And I heard… something. And I jumped… in fright. And, accidentally, my shot went wide… accidentally.”

  “Very wide. Accidentally.”

  Alex swallowed a knot of hysterical laughter, but she could not quite stop it from rushing forward, so she clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Hawksworth regarded the source and sorceress of all his dreams, her turquoise eyes wide with trepidation, yet brimming with merriment all the same.

  He shook his head. Behold the thorn in his side, his hoyden… his wife.

  EIGHT

  ‘SLEEPING WITH ME will not be as dreadful as you seem to think,” Alex promised as they made their plodding way, arm in arm, down the stairs toward the family bedchambers. “My bed is big. You will not even know I am there.”

  Hawk scoffed, feeling all the restrictions of a cage. “Well you will bloody well know I am there. If it were not so late, and you did not look so tired, I would fight you on this. You will be sorry when I push and kick and trample you in my sleep. You may end up more severely wounded than I.”

  Alex bit her lip, appearing not the least worried or repentant. “Oh, Myerson,” she said when they saw his man in the upper hall. “Welcome to Huntington Lodge. Do you think you can bring up a tub and some hot water to my—our, dressing room? His grace will want a bath before I cut his hair.”

  “His grace will not want his hair cut,” Hawksworth said. “And you would not be doing the cutting, if he did.”

  “The bath, please, Myerson,” Alex said. “And thank you.”

  Hawk followed Alex into a well-appointed bedchamber. The curtains and counterpane, like the upholstery on the two wingback chairs by the hearth, were covered in the deep turquoise velvet of Alex’s eyes. Pillows of gold brought the color, the very room, to life.

  Upon her dresser sat a Roman pottery vase, one of the childhood treasures they had unearthed near Devil’s Dyke, though this one had always been Alex’s favorite. Colored pale tan to deep blue-gray, and looking as if someone had combed a staff of shallow half-circles in the clay before firing, the vase lent an air of reality to Hawk’s illusory sense of homecoming.