Scandalous Brides

by Annette Blair

  “Oh, Alex, I am so—”

  “Do not say it. I am sick unto death of people being sorry for me. When you came home… No, you never did come home, did you? When you stopped my wedding, and still you did not touch me, I vowed to seduce you, until you said exactly what you just did, that you wanted me, loved me, and then I was going to walk away. And because I learned your true feelings from someone else, I was going to have someone else tell you mine.” She did not say that she planned for them to go on with their marriage afterward, because now they could not.

  “How could you learn my true feelings from someone else, when I did not know them myself?” Hawk shook his head. “I cannot believe that you thought of vengeance as you seduced me? As we loved, Alex?”

  She looked away.

  “So,” he said, “is it finished then? Are you planning to leave me now?”

  Alex looked at the door and knew she must, but before she took two steps, Hawk blocked her path. “I meant what I said; I love you, though you have never said as much to me.”

  “And have it thrown in my face? I think not.”

  “Then you do love me?”

  Alex laughed, mocking them both. “Only forever. Only since I looked up from the bottom of Devil’s Dyke and saw you coming to my rescue.” She raised a hand at his step forward. “No, do not come any closer. My admission does not mean that I will fall at your feet. Besides, I was never good enough for the handsome-as-sin Rogue of Devil’s Dyke. Why am I now?”

  “Alex, you are—”

  “Is it because people say I am… no longer unattractive. Is that why you think you love me? Because Hawk, beauty fades with time. Always.”

  “I have learned a great deal about beauty since my return. I have seen it, first-hand, in a little girl’s adoration. In a little boy and his motley cat. An elderly couple’s love.” He smiled. “I saw beauty every time your back ached.” He touched her lips with reverence. “I see it in the way you kiss my scars.”

  Alex’s eyes filled. Hawk wiped away a tear. When had he stepped close enough?

  “Let me tell you something else. I never saw beauty in the man you termed a handsome-as-sin rogue. What I saw in that man was worthlessness. My father approved of rogues, so I became one, and I enjoyed the role, for a time, but I am not that man. Not quite. I am the man you have encouraged me to become. The man you see before you.

  “As, layer by layer, everything I once thought important was stripped away, I saw, revealed to me, what was truly important. You, the girls, Aunt Hildy and Uncle Giff, Gideon, Sabrina, and their children. Us, working and making a home, together, caring for our family… together.”

  Alex made to speak, but Hawk stopped her with a finger to her lips. “Let me try to explain why I could not bring myself to come home to you. If I never thought the handsome rogue worthy—and I did not—imagine how I felt about the beast, who, by some foolish blunder of fate, cheated death.”

  Alex sobbed and stepped into his arms. “You are not a beast, you are n—”

  Hawk opened his mouth over hers and kissed her with passion, with hunger and wonder, desperate to make her understand how much she meant to him. To take her love and give it back, to connect with the mate to his soul.

  “Beauty,” he said, looking into her eyes, “resides where gentleness and love are the most wondrous of gifts.”

  “And within one who would give his life for a friend.”

  “I fell in love with you,” Hawk said, “while I was healing in Belgium, long before I saw how beautiful you had become… or so I thought. But sometime during my long ride here, I traced my love as far back as that mud-spattered urchin at the bottom of the Dyke.”

  Alex toyed with his cravat. “Perhaps you love the memory of me.”

  Hawk urged her toward the canopied four-poster, the fire in his eyes reminiscent of that night-stalking lion. “I am certain that is not the case, for I am in love with a hoyden,” he said, “who would shoot an arrow through the roof to get her husband into her bed.” He began to undo the buttons at her bodice with single-minded determination. “I am in lust with a siren who would tie said husband to her bed to seduce him… exquisitely.” He kissed her neck and nudged aside her bodice to kiss the crown of a breast.

  “I cherish the woman who gave a mother’s heart to the orphaned daughters of another.” He kissed her brow. “I thank and honor the lass who kept a curmudgeon’s greatest secret to give him the gift of his family’s respect.”

  Alex bit her lip as tears blurred her vision.

  “Do not go out that door, Alexandra Wakefield, for I would only follow. Do not walk away from me, please, I beg you. I could not bear to lose you.” He tried to pull her down on the bed with him, and despite her attempt to resist—to do the right thing and let him go—she toppled, landing atop him, her gown’s skirt settling over her head like a veil.

  Hawk’s eyes darkened as his hands traveled the length of her body. “Will it hurt the babe, if I make love to you?” he asked, melting her to her marrow and making her his for good and all.

  “Ah, Hawk, I can resist you no longer. You think yourself unworthy of love, but you are so worthy, you would raise another man’s child as your own. But there is no need, my love, for no man has touched me, save you. How could you not know?”

  He became endearingly sheepish. “I fear I imbibed rather a lot that night.”

  “Ah… speaking of secrets…”

  His eyes widened. “Damn. You drugged me.”

  “Never, but I did make certain that your brandy glass stayed full.”

  “Sorceress.” He nuzzled her breasts, and rolled her onto her back, to rise above her. “This bed is too bloody big,” he said with a grin. Then he bent to her and threaded his fingers through her hair, on either side of her face and brushed her cheeks with his thumbs. “How would you feel about giving Beatrix a mama and a papa, both, for Christmas? We could adopt her, if you—”

  “Oh, Hawk, yes. And we could give her the baby she wants.”

  “This Christmas, she will have to settle for a mama and papa.” The fire in his eyes leapt and his body surged to life. “Though, if we begin now, and try very hard, perhaps we can fulfill her second wish next Christmas.”

  “Yes, yes, and ye—” He stopped her with his kiss, unable to wait a minute longer to have her mouth again.

  Some while later, Alex cupped his cheek. “I love you.”

  Hawk was humbled and so grateful he could hardly draw breath, and neither the lump in his throat nor the speck in his eye mattered. “You will keep this wreck, who—all the king’s horses and all of his men failed to put together again?”

  “I should beat you for doubting it.”

  Hawk shook his head. “I should have known that you would accept me, broken as I am, but you deserve so much better, that I had the devil of a time asking it of you.”

  “No need to ask.”

  “I do not deserve you, but God help us both, I love and want you. Please, will you forgive this unforgivable rogue for waiting so long to come home?”

  “Not unforgivable, but unforgettable. Even as I walked up the aisle to marry another, I thought only of you.”

  He kissed her. “Now, about that baby…”

  ~ THE END ~

  Continue reading for an excerpt from The Rogues Club Book Three: Unmistakable Rogue.

  BONUS PREVIEW

  Unmistakable Rogue

  ROGUES CLUB — BOOK THREE

  PAINSWICK, THE COTSWOLDS, ENGLAND

  VICAR CLIVE POMFRET remembered the smell of blood in the Sunnyledge tower that night…

  He had gagged as he descended the dank stone stairs to inform Edward St. Yves, Earl of Barrington, of his wife’s passing. At the salon door, Clive stopped at the sight of his sister, Thea, kneeling before the earl. Thea—a vicar’s sister, a devil’s mistress—displacing a wife about to give birth, shaming her brother before his flock.

  “Poor Clive,” Thea drawled, her smile spiteful. “Papa always said you had
a mean scowl.”

  “He said you would be a whore, and he was right.”

  The earl cursed with impatience. “What about my heir?”

  “Your wife is dead.”

  Barrington shrugged. “See to the burial. The child?”

  Clive fisted his hands. “Twin boys.”

  Barrington grinned, and Clive knew that the devil would raise those boys to be just like him. “Both dead,” Clive said, the justice of his pronouncement confirmed by Barrington’s vulgar oath.

  Upon returning to the tower, Clive ordered a maid, big with child, to follow him. He could not save his sister’s soul, but he would save those boys, body and soul, and if Barrington suffered in the saving, so much the better.

  To the maid, Clive presented the languid twin, with eyes as dull as a gray English sky. To the midwife, he gave the boy suckling a fist, his eyes as bright as hellfire—devil’s eyes.

  Clive fixed the serving women with his gaze. “Name and raise the boy you hold as your own. Tell them nothing of their roots or of the other’s existence. If you leave Sunnyledge tonight, and go your separate ways, there will be a fat purse for each of you now, and another yearly until they are grown.”

  The maid’s eyes had widened at the mention of money.

  “It is the will of God,” Clive intoned, calling upon a righteous vicar’s fire,” that the events of this night remain forever sealed. His wrath upon you and yours for eternity should you reveal them!”

  “Thea? Thea?”

  Thea heard her brother call as if from afar, tearing her from his deathbed memory, and her first shocking glimpse of that thirty-year-old scene, back to the present. Edward’s sons had lived! She remembered a babe’s cry that night—an omen, she thought, that the Barrington line must continue through her.

  But Edward had never married her.

  “Right my wrong,” Clive begged, now, with hellfire so near, it singed his brows. “Tell them who they are.”

  “No one will believe their father’s whore, Clive.”

  “I have proof,” he said, fighting for every breath.

  Thea rose so fast, she knocked over a ewer of water, grasped his suddenly sodden shoulders and shook him. “Where? damn you.”

  At the shock of cold water, he began to cough. “Book.” He coughed up blood. “Cask—”

  Thea stepped from his entreaty and watched, unaffected, as he gasped, gurgled, and slumped over… finally.

  “If you do not go straight to hell,” she said, turning to rifle through his desk, “then the place does not exist.”

  She found their names and directions, and there beside her brother’s dead body, Thea Pomfret wrote identical, anonymous notes to Reed Gilbride, Essex, England, and William Somers, Beaupre, France.

  April 4, 1817. You are the missing St. Yves, Earl of Barrington, heir to Sunnyledge. See Everard Sennett, Executor, Gloucester, England. Beware there is one who would steal your heritage.

  ~ ~ ~

  GLOUCESTER, THE COTSWOLDS, MAY 1817

  ‘ARE YOU STEALING those children?”

  Caught beside a second-story workhouse window, Chastity Somers swallowed her scream and gathered the little ones close. The moonless night, perfect for her scheme, became her foe. She could discern nothing, no one, save darkness in the alley below.

  The owner of the deep, disembodied voice seemed to linger, but she dare not. She must get her new and unexpected brood to safety, or fail her husband’s young cousins the way she had failed William, himself.

  With no choice but to brazen it out, Chastity nodded her hood further forward and readied her best English accent. “Do not be ridiculous. You cannot steal what is already yours.”

  The intruder made no reply, so she lifted the last of the four children out the window and shut the sash.

  “Kitty?” Luke’s version of her name echoed loud and alarming as he tugged her sleeve. “You are stealing us.”

  “Hush, Luke.”

  “It’s all right, sir,” Matthew called down. “We wanted stealing.”

  Galvanized by the boy’s defense, Chastity shook herself. “Mark, take Bekah’s hand. Stay by the window, all of you, and hold the sill.”

  They would not be taken away from her, again, Chastity vowed as she lowered herself from the attached shed’s eaves and dropped the remaining distance to land on her bottom in the dirt.

  Amid a discord of giggles, a hand grasped her upper arm, racing Chastity’s heart, trapping her scream inside her throat, but her captor must have sensed her fear, for he gentled her, somehow, with the very touch that alarmed her in the first place.

  His nearness, his very scent—horse, leather, and man—put her in mind of… rescue and… sanctuary, as William had once done, except that her sense of well-being was stronger now than it had ever been with… Chastity shook off her foolishness. “I did not hear your horse approach,” she said, seeking the ordinary in an extraordinary situation.

  “I call him Stealth,” the man said, sounding every bit as safe as she hoped. “He served me well at Waterloo.”

  Relieved by her growing fancy that the military man meant them no harm, Chastity allowed him to help her stand. She should be afraid, she supposed. He had fought her people at Waterloo, but her sheltered convent background, which was hardly conducive to a judicious caution, had taught her they were all God’s children. Equal. Besides, she sensed a hint of the trustworthy even in the tone of his voice.

  “The children are not afraid of you,” he said, reflecting her wonder over her own lack of fear.

  “Of course they are not. How do you know?”

  “Frightened children rarely laugh.”

  Neither lonely ones, Chastity remembered from her own childhood, hoping she was employing the same, faultless instincts as the children, where this man was concerned.

  Reassured, but unnerved all the same, by his hand on her arm, Chastity nevertheless regretted the loss of human contact when he released her. But she had no time to regard it, for Bekah’s cough urged their removal from this unhealthy place, and fast, lest the children be incarcerated, again.

  Even if the man was a threat, Chastity thought, she would bargain with the devil to keep her little ones safe. “I have to get the children down,” she said. “Thank you for your help, but we can manage on our own.”

  The devil had the impertinence to laugh.

  “Be quiet,” Chastity hissed.

  “You are a few tuppence short a quid,” said he, “and will get exactly what you deserve for this night’s work. Children are nothing but trouble.”

  “Children are gifts from above.”

  “Hah! Vengeance, more like.”

  Chastity perceived some vexation in the man, but no real threat. For all his curious notions, he seemed of a mind to let her and the children go. “We shall be fine. Truly. Thank you for stopping, but you may be on your way without further concern for our welfare.”

  “’Tis not concern detains me, but astonishment. Why would anyone seek the encumbrance of children?”

  Shaking her head, Chastity turned toward the four waiting atop the workhouse shed. “All the world and his wife would step over a dead body in the middle of St. James’s,” she snapped. “But I do something the least… uncommon, and am observed by someone who investigates. Matthew, lower Bekah to me.”

  Chastity hugged the littlest close as she received her. “Good. Now Mark, then Luke.”

  “Kitty, I’m hungry,” Luke said as she set him on his feet.

  “I know, darling. Hush, now.”

  Deep within the bleak bowels of the parish workhouse, a bell began to toll. “Jump, Matt,” Chastity ordered, thrusting Luke into the stranger’s arms. “You’ll have to help,” she said, scooping Bekah into her own. “Hurry.”

  Reed Gilbride heard, rather than saw, the woman hasten away, her stolen brood hard at her heels. Then he realized that if he failed to follow, he would be stuck with the urchin dangling before him. “Damn.” Reed slung the lad under his arm like a sac
k of grain and gave chase, Stealth trotting behind.

  Despite being carted off by a stranger, the lad’s giggles over his tumbling ride testified to the rare joy in his short life.

  Reed had to give the woman credit, pluck to the backbone, she was. Either that or daft, he thought, as he followed her through noisome village byways, dodging running steps and reeling vagrants, all the while wondering why he got involved.

  He had reached Sennett’s office hours early, and gazed about, thinking to find a light at an inn, when in the alley across the way, a cloaked form in the window, silhouetted against the dim interior of the workhouse, caught his attention. A matron of the asylum, he thought, until he noticed the children’s profiles atop the attached shed roof. A curious sight, yes, but he should never have intruded. What cared he for a flock of raggle-taggle street brats or their provoking protector?

  The bell from the workhouse faded in the distance, and when the woman slowed, Reed set the lad in her path. “Here, you snatched him, you take him. I’ll not be left to foster somebody’s brat. I’ve had enough of children to last forever.”

  “You need to have that ice chipped away.”

  Birds called their first good mornings. Too bad it was still an hour or more till full light, Reed thought, for he conceived an urge to see her face, discern her age and examine her features. Her words and manner contradicted his impression of her as a matron of any kind. “What did you say?”

  “The ice around your heart: you should have it removed.”

  If he owned a heart, her honey-warm voice might complete the task on its own, Reed mused, before stifling the maggoty notion. “What the devil are you about?”

  “Watch your language around the children. We were running because… because of a—”

  “Fire?”

  To his surprise, she laughed, the sound a balm to his senses. “I was rescuing them.”