The more she considered his wretched prospects, the more she knew that this fool’s game of chance might very well be his single hope for a decent life. If only she could tip the scales….
Her Da rose and went to nudge Toby, none-too-gently, toward the door and Ash lowered his cards to take a left-handed swig of the inferior ale just poured him. The drunker her Da’s customers got, the lower the quality of drink he served, and Ashford Blackburne and his cronies were plenty damned drunk.
Larkin regarded the cards dangling from Ash’s loose grip as something akin to a gift from the gods, and she had never been one to refuse a gift. With Micah’s future in the balance, she reached over and plucked at the fabric of Ash’s right sleeve.
His cards hit the floor and scattered.
While Ash blinked and looked about, as if to identify the sound, Lark replaced his Ace with her father’s two of hearts, the card Da had earlier switched for the Ace up his sleeve.
Lark had originally pocketed the switched card as evidence of her father’s cheat, with a thought to proving her sire’s deception and setting Ash free. That she was now attempting the opposite, Lark considered minor compared to Micah’s needs.
Later— Later, she would fix everything. She would set Ash free, she promised herself, but not until Micah’s future was secure.
When Ash gathered his pickled wits enough to retrieve his cards from the floor, and she knew there was no turning back, panic and remorse rose in Lark, until she reminded herself that her switch was no worse than picking pockets to keep a boy—a babe, really—fed and sheltered. She loved Micah enough to do murder, if she must, so what mattered a little fast and fancy card shuffling in the harsh game of daily survival?
When Ash crowed, Lark cowered and covered her head, certain she was caught and about to be trounced. Prickles raced up her arms and down her legs, but the blow never came. When she raised her head, and looked through the peep hole, all Ash had done, as her father took his seat, was fan his cards on the table with a flourish. “Looks like I win,” said the cocksure Earl, brain addled and smile bright.
At her father’s greedy-eyed behest, Lark watched her toppled hero focus on his “winning” hand with slow-dawning surprise. He scratched his head of dark mahogany, and examined his cards again. “I’ll be damned.”
“Damned or married, same difference,” said her Da slapping his own winning hand onto the table. “Arky!” he bellowed.
When Lark could not move a trembling limb, could not for the life of her believe what she had set in motion, her father’s beefy fist appeared to drag her by the scruff of her neck into the morning light. “Behold yer bride, me lord. Ah and here’s the vicar, as fetched by me good man Toby.”
“Wait just a bloody minute!” Ash rose like a vengeful god, no longer a victim, but the Earl of Blackburne once more. He towered over the group with haughty disdain, and looked ten times more glorious for it, in Larkin’s opinion.
Of a sudden, his alert predator’s eyes, however red-rimmed, were fixed upon her, as if he knew the depth of her deception. Black and furious as thunder, dangerous, Ashford Blackburne looked. Menacing. And more handsome than a racing heart could bear.
Lark told herself she could stop this foolishness now. Ash deserved better than a stinking, street-smart pickpocket for wife, but for the life of her, she could not make her throat work enough to speak the truth and set him free. For Micah’s sake, she dared not.
Ash could not collect his thoughts or gather his scattered wits. He knew he must terminate the twisted jest at once, but could not seem to push an intelligent word past his drink-furred tongue and muzzy brain.
He shook his head again to clear it, and damned near retched, for his stomach had set up a furious roiling since the last tankard he’d drunk, and the taproom dipped almost faster than he could keep his balance to ride it. What had he brought himself to?
McAdams pushed a stinking gutter rat of a stable boy in his general direction, a lad who swore like a sailor, but with a shriek too high to vouch for even the smallest set of ballocks. No….
“Whatever it is, it smells,” Ash said.
It swore as well, he soon learned, and had a spitting aim that could win a trophy.
Ash echoed it’s vulgar profanity and planned to return the favor in the exact same way that he—she?—it had expectorated on his own champagne-bright boots, but he could not bring himself to besmirch the smallest pair of mismatched shoes he had ever beheld.
Whatever “it” was—and Ash was almost certain it was not male—it skewered him with eyes of gold and green bearing as many facets as a gem-cut emerald surrounded by shards of topaz, tiger’s eyes that could see far deeper into a soul than a man cared to allow.
Ash regarded McAdams and attempted to focus him into one unwavering entity. “Who did you say this was?”
“Me daughter. Larkin McAdams. Arky. Yer bride.”
Hunter snorted and grinned like the sot he was. “The Lady Arky.”
Ash squinted in the girl-boy’s direction, wishing his faculties were not quite so pickled, and holding the whiskey responsible for the horrendous sight before him. “A girl? Are you certain?”
Before Ash knew what hit him—and it hit hard—the smelly scrap of humanity the innkeeper called his daughter jumped the table and toppled him, chair and all, to the floor, and proceeded to try and beat him to a bloody pulp.
Hurling guttersnipe invectives at his head, she left him no choice but to give her the lead, while he evaded her every blow, for she was a girl, after all—she’d proved it, flat atop him as she lay—boasting a surprising number of curves in most of the right places.
Before Myles and Hunter managed to rouse themselves from their respective stupors to come to his aid, Ash felt as if she had blackened both his eyes and broken his nose in the bargain. In rising panic, he knew bloody well that she was trying to knee him where it mattered most, all the while cursing like a sailor.
When her knee did hit target, Ash took up her briny chant, himself, stars dancing about his eyelids, stomach churning fit to cast up its accounts, and the knife-pain in his ballocks like to bend him over double.
When Myles and Hunter finally rose to the occasion to focus on his dilemma, the sots found it amusing that he refused to fight, but as a gentleman, what else could he do but try to survive the she-cat’s onslaught? He had been taught never to strike a woman, though this might be the time to begin.
“Get off me, Hellcat, or I’ll turn you over my knee,” Ash said at her ear, and when they held each other at bay, so that neither was able to move, her cat’s eyes boring into the fury in his own gaze, he upped his threat. “Stop now, or I’ll bear your arse before the lot, I swear I will, and spank it crimson just for sport. Do not make the mistake of doubting me, for I am the man who can.”
That made her falter enough for him to get the upper hand, which landed on a firm little bee-sting of a breast, which went a long way toward healing Ash’s manly pride, though it did nothing for his bruised ballocks.
Under something of a struggle to decide which of them won the battle, they tried untangling arms, legs, and sundry parts, while the reeking guttersnipe got in a bit more knee pressure, until Ash tried to match her might with a gentle, but unsatisfying nipple-flick.
Deafened by her screech, nonetheless, and with the help of his two former friends, Ash and the boy-girl rose, the two of them scrapping like gutter rats over sustenance, her face as bright as a bleeding pomegranate.
Separated, finally, Myles and Hunter holding them at bay, Ash tried to compose himself, to straighten his screaming body, his torn and bloody clothes, and get himself the devil out of there, while on the command of the wily innkeeper, and to the sudden cocking of four—count them: four—pistols, a scrawny, gin-sot cleric opened his book and cleared his throat. “Dearly beloved….”
“You need a special license for this kind of thing,” Ash announced with all the haughty disdain he could muster, despite his fight to remain upright with th
e taproom turning about him.
McAdams laughed. “Hell, I’ve had me one of those for two-year now. Didn’t do me much good, mind. Haven’t shed the baggage yet, but I guess this is me lucky day. A thousand guineas, and her trussed like a goose for the stuffing.”
The innkeeper’s grin revealed his rotting teeth. “I guess me fine Lord, you’ll be the one doing the stuffing,” said the fetid fellow. “But not, mind, ‘til the vows are spoke.”
Ash gave up his scant veneer of refinement. “Bloody hell, I am not going to marry this stinking scrap of rags!” He called himself craven for picking on the weakest of the lot, but hoped the filthy scrapper might have some influence with her sire, if the scoundrel were indeed her father.
Ash supposed the girl had been in on his fleecing from the start, but she might change her tune, if she got a sample of what she could be in for with him.
Despite the fact that one of McAdams’s thick-necked poltroons raised his pistol and cocked it Ash’s way, he dared to clasp the girl’s arm and turn her so as to force her to look directly into his eyes. “I’ll beat you,” he said. “Every day before breakfast.”
Bloody hell. She didn’t believe him. That was when he saw a spark that made him think for all the world of … hope and … redemption, for he glimpsed a shimmer of something amazing in her eyes, yearning perhaps, but for what? To be taken away from all this? And who could blame her for that?
Ash shook himself, and her, physically as well as mentally, and tried again to make eye contact, hoping not to see anything more worthy than he wanted. “Call them off,” he said, more gently than he planned, and sensed the desired effect, not as a result of his threat, but of his tenderness. “Please,” he added.
“Da,” she said, now more than willing to comply, for Ash had unfortunately caught a fast flash of raw, naked fear in her eyes, not when he had acted the beast, oddly enough, but when he had gentled his touch, softened his voice, and pled for mercy.
What ilk of womanhood did brutality strengthen and gentleness disarm? he wondered, but he had no time to consider answers or causes, nor did he wish to, for McAdams’s henchmen were closing in, pistols at the ready.
“Repeat the Vicar’s words, me girl,” the innkeeper ordered, “or me fine Lord won’t need him a bride, but a pine box with a tight lid, and a deep hole in the churchyard dirt.”
Ash watched untold emotions transform that begrimed genderless countenance, made up of a surprisingly aristocratic mix of gull-winged brows, high cheekbones, heart-shaped lips, and a nose upon which he counted three freckles and enough soot to keep a chimney sweep busy for a week.
Regret, he saw ton that promising visage, dreams flaring to life one minute, taking flight the next. Hope and the death of hope. They all came and went in a blink and left behind them nothing save the ashes of regret, sorrow, and a loss the likes of which Ash could not begin to fathom.
While mired in confusion, Ash faltered in his resolve, until one of the innkeeper’s flat-faced toadies stepped nearer still. The barrel of his pistol kissed Ash’s temple and brought a rush of cool sobriety, but the depth of it was nothing to that brought by the cocking of its trigger.
“I, Larkin Rose McAdams,” the guttersnipe said in a rush, then waited for toady to release the trigger, “take Ashford Edward Blackburne, Earl of Blackburne, as my lawfully wedded husband….”
Something in her voice—sweet, melodic, almost reverent—as she said his name, her concern for his safety, and her own name, Larkin Rose, of all the feminine appellations, all seemed to soften Ash’s pickled brain.
How had she known his middle name? Why did he perceive some vague mirrored kinship in the lost-soul depths of her gilded verdant eyes?
“Fine,” Ash said more or less accepting his fate, “but only because I am desperate for a wife.”
His words brought a renewed surge of fury to his grimy bride’s face, and he was forced to fight her to take one of her hands in his, then he found himself looking for something in the way of reassurance in her eyes. But when all he’d previously glimpsed now seemed closed to him, Ash called himself a fool and ran his thumb along her jagged fingernails to root himself to earth.
Her father relaxed, as did his toadies, and Ash knew if they could get away from here alive, married or not, they had choices, a future.
He could scrape the incrustation off her and see what he found beneath. He could get to know her and see what he found inside. And if she turned out to be as dreadful as she appeared, there was always banishment, or at the worst, annulment.
At the improbable best, he had himself a bride he could get with child before Christmas, which would fulfill his grandfather’s requirements and save the estate for his mother. Revenge and repentance at the turn of a card, imagine that. Had he been offered as much when he quitted his botched nuptials earlier, he might have accepted with gratitude.
Prodded and further sobered by a second kiss of the pistol barrel, Ash repeated his own vows with a slur he could not seem to shake and in a discordant voice that echoed as if it belonged to another.
Once the stipulations to grandfather’s will were fulfilled, if he and his bedraggled bride did not suit, he could set her up with a small house and an allowance. Either way, she would live better in the future than she had in the past.
However, if the depth of her hidden need, the sound of her voice, and her willingness to marry him to save him, was any indication of what lay beneath the crust, then perhaps, with some effort on both their parts, they might make a decent night’s work of this, after all.
Likely not, Ash cautioned himself, but devil it, alive they could find a way to make it work. Dead, neither of them had hope at all.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The room swayed again, not so much from drink as shock, Ash feared. “Tell me this is better than being dead,” he begged Myles … and Hunter belched.
CHAPTER THREE
At the finality of the vicar’s pronouncement, Ash and his bride seemed to pale as one, Ash uncertain as to which of them seemed more like to retch.
The cleric placed the parish register before them for their signatures, but McAdams shoved it aside to get Ash’s signature first on his thousand-guinea voucher.
Ash wished his head was not so muzzy or his stomach so unsettled. If he had his wits about him, he might refuse this final step for a chance to think, but the pistols rose again, aimed again, and the thought of getting himself killed, in this intoxicated stomach-sick condition did not sit well with him. He signed the voucher, then the register, vowing to God on High that he would never drink again.
After that was done, and his bride had made her mark—God help him—beside his name, the big-bellied innkeeper slapped his filthy apron, laughed and offered a toast. When his henchmen lowered their weapons to get their share of life’s nectar, Ash’s former friends belatedly relieved the thugs of their weapons. Not that the pistol-wielding poltroons seemed to care any longer, for they seemed more interested in drinking now, than killing, and well, the harm had already been done.
After the parson filled his tankard, McAdams raised his own. “To my daughter,” said he, “the Lady Blackburne.”
Ash groaned and rolled his eyes as Myles and Hunter cocked the pistols they had confiscated—now that the bloody horse had escaped the bloody barn!
McAdams raised a brow at the sound, but he tipped his tankard back for a good long, greedy swallow. At length, when he finished swilling the stuff, and slammed his empty vessel on the table, he swiped his mouth with a grimy sleeve, belched, and nodded at the pistol-wielding pair. “No powder, no balls,” said he with pride. “Empty as me till, those pistols. Worthless as the bloody pair of you.”
Aiming at the ceiling, Hunter tested the revelation only to prove it correct. Myles and Hunter cursed as one, and Ash began to laugh. “This farce is over,” Ash said, thinking the parson and the marriage might be as empty as the pistols, set to test the theory and see if he could escape after all.
<
br /> “Thank you McAdams, for an interesting … exchange.” Before donning his curly beaver, Ash tipped it to the “lady,” picked up his cane and headed for the door.
McAdams’s roar behind him did not hasten his retreat, for he willed himself to remain calm. Not so, his inebriated friends, who quit the premises, faster than stones shot from a boy’s sling. “Mewling idiots,” Ash said beneath his breath as he walked sedately on.
Then he heard a screech, a somewhat familiar sound now, and kept walking, not certain what to expect. When he cleared the door, Ash breathed a deep draft of fresh night air, felt almost sicker for it, but heaved a sigh heavy with relief at any rate. Perhaps he would be forced to suffer neither an annulment nor his guttersnipe bride’s overripe scent a minute more, if she were indeed his bride.
His elation was short lived. No sooner had he stepped from the curb than McAdams’s henchmen carried the screaming hellcat out the door, and deposited her in his path. And there she sat, on her arse, beside a pile of horse dung, his reeking, blushing bride, Countess Arky.
Ash shook his head, extended a hand to help her up, and she bit it. “Damnation! That will be enough,” he shouted.
Catching his breath and scooping her into his arms, Ash carried her, surly as ever, hissing and fighting, mad as a wet cat, back to the pub, where he opened the door and threw her back inside.
Again, he departed, and again, he breathed a tentative, though more cautious, sigh.
“What the devil are you going to do with her?” Hunter asked as they made for Ash’s carriage at a quickened pace.
“I just got shed of her, didn’t I?”
“Don’t look now, but she’s catching up.”
“Stuff it, Hunter,” Ash said. “How the bloody devil should I know what to do with her, but I can tell you one thing, strangling her ranks right up there with giving her a bath.”
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 2
