“I’m not deaf,” Larkin snapped coming up beside him. “Nor am I stupid,” she said. “He kicked me out then locked the door, by the way. I’m yours.”
“You might have a sense of hearing, even a modicum of intelligence, I’ll grant, but do you have no sense of smell?” Ash asked. “Because I damn well wish I did not. Stand back, will you, and give a man some breathing space.”
“What, no perfumed hanky?” said she, throwing her hips out of line and mincing like a bleedin’ fop. “I thought all the prancing dandies carried them.”
“I do not prance. Nor am I a dandy. And the day I place a perfumed hanky under of my nose is the day I’m daft enough to bed you.”
“Bloody hell,” Myles said. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to?”
Ash stopped and his bride slammed into him. “He turned, stopped her from falling and regarded his friend with a growl. “Not going to what?”
“Bed the wench, damn it,” Myles said. “You can hold your breath and keep your eyes closed, can you not?”
“I said, ‘I CAN HEAR YOU!’” Lark kicked Myles in the shin for his crude suggestion, and Ash jumped back in time to evade a similar fate, though it was her knee she raised his way, and his stomach churned for remembering the consequences.
Hunter stepped behind Ash, for safety’s sake, and chuckled.
“You needed a bride, and now you have one,” Myles said, as he hopped and tried to rub his shin. “Just get it done man.”
“You mean, before she kills one of us?”
“For the love of God,” Hunter said, “Myles, do not be an idiot. Ash has to clean her up first. The wench is a reeking disgrace.”
Another screech, another wounded friend. Some days did not go the way you expected, Ash thought. Like wedding days. If this were, indeed, his wedding day.
“Parson, parson,” Ash shouted to halt the man reeling down the street, a huge book beneath his arm.
The intoxicated cleric who’d performed the seedy ceremony turned and waited for Ash to catch up. Ash took five guineas from his pocket and held them palm up. “They’re yours if you answer a question in God’s own truth. Are you or are you not a man of the cloth?”
The parson shrugged. “An unworthy sot to be sure, but a man of the cloth all the same.” He showed his closed book and there on the cover etched in gilt Ash read the words, “Parish Register, St. Adelbert Church, London.”
“You are married in the eyes of God, my son, though I will regret my part in your downfall until I take my next drink, and forget you exist, and that’s the sordid truth of it. I pray you will someday forgive me.”
“If downfall I face, seek God’s forgiveness, never mine.” Ash opened the cleric’s shaking hand and dropped the coins into it one by one. “For the poor box not the drink.”
“You trust I will do as you say?”
“Inasmuch as I consented to my own marriage,” Ash said, and though the parson flinched, he pocketed the guineas and turned to walk away.
Ash returned to his carriage. “I’ll thank the two of you to wish us happy,” he said to Myles and Hunter. Then he turned his bride toward his open carriage door and pushed her trouser-clad bottom up and inside, to her mortified screech and sailor’s curse. He climbed in behind her and tipped his hat to his friends. “I’ll thank you to stop calling my bride a wench.”
Said bride’s face filled with mottled fury, her posture poised to bolt, so Ash tripped her on her hastening way. By the seat of her trousers, he pulled her back in, and shoved her to the seat opposite. “Sit, wench, and shut up, while I decide what the bloody hell to do with you.”
“You told them not to call me, wench.”
“But I can call you anything I choose. Brinks,” Ash said as his coachman made to shut the carriage door. “Home to Gorhambury, if you please.”
For the first full fifteen minutes of the two-hour journey, Ash regarded his bride, and she him, with a mutually murderous rage. For the next half hour, they both looked away and out their respective windows, though Ash peeked her way at odd intervals.
Truth to tell, he’d needed a bride and now he had one. Problem was—getting up enough courage to bed her. “Hunter is right. You need a bath,” he said, regarding the unexpected fulfillment of his grandfather’s maniacal will—the bloody devil of a bad night’s work—hell a bad life’s work, more like.
Thank God for a closed carriage, he thought, for he would not want even a servant, to espy his consolation “prize” of a bride. Hair the color of … a dirty floor … though somewhat less tidy, and much less appealing—sooty of face, bruised of eye—though not his doing, much as he’d considered it—she stood nearly as tall as him. She stood reed-thin of body, but for a fine flair in her hips, which he’d discovered with his hands while rolling on the filthy taproom floor.
Her tiger’s eyes, he must admit, were amazing and possibly her best feature. Her heart-shaped lips, he thought, might be her best, though he would reserve judgment on that score until after her bath.
No wonder he’d thought her a boy at first glance, though suddenly he could barely mistake the curvaceous hips he’d so recently handled, the feminine arch in her brow, the tilt of her nose.
“Are you certain you’re nearly twenty-two?” Ash asked, opening a window against the sweat and stale-pub stench of her before settling himself more comfortably against the squabs, trying to calm his roiling stomach even as he tried to catch a glimpse of her faceted eyes in moonlight.
“So he says.”
“He, who?”
“Me Da. Who else would know for certain?”
“Your mother?”
“Dropped me an—”
“On your head, I must conclude.”
The way his bride narrowed her eyes made Ash cross his legs to protect himself from further attack.
She caught the move, however, and raised her chin, rather regally for a filthy urchin, while she pretended for all the world that another wash of pomegranate was not working its way up a neck that appeared suddenly swanlike. He must be drunker than he thought.
“I didn’t know Tobe and Da had the pistols,” she said, nearly beneath her breath, a dozen silent minutes later. Then she looked up, regarded him full in the face with so much … longing, Ash nearly blushed. “Guess I wouldn’t be here else.”
“You bloody well would not!” Good God, she must have rattled his brains with that right hook Jackson would applaud. Something around his heart ached, or got nudged, or prodded, perhaps. However he looked at it, she had managed to touch some cord that he bloody well did not want touched, or he had not, to his knowledge, until this very moment.
“You don’t smell so good yourself,” she said out of nowhere. “And don’t think you’re such a bloody blue blood of an agreeable bridegroom, you selfish sot.”
Ash realized then that he must have gone plain old daft; for he could swear that he was half-charmed by the worst mistake he had ever made in his life.
When he opened the other window to let in a cross breeze and dilute the stink, her curse on him and his descendents, in perpetuity, made him chuckle. “Take care, they could as likely be your descendents as well,” he said, and looked toward the heavens to beg almighty deliverance from that ghastly possibility.
He lived in a bleedin’ castle.
Lark wished she had not tried to bolt when they exited his carriage on arrival, or she would now be walking beside her unfathomable new husband, rather than thrown over his shoulder like a grain-sack, an empty one for all the ease he made of it, though he teetered now and again and she feared she would get dropped. “I wish you would put me down. You are drunk as a lord.”
“Am a lord.”
A lord, stuck with her, she thought, amazed anew. After such a terrible deed as cheating him into marrying her, she had decided in the carriage to give him his freedom at first opportunity by disappearing immediately from his life. But not only had she failed when she tried to bolt, she had managed to turn him into a thundercloud.
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Larkin sighed. She did not want Ashford to be angry. Idiot that she was, she wanted him to like her. How would it feel, she wondered, being his friend, viewing his handsome face over the breakfast table every morning, having the freedom to touch his hand, take his arm, brush that unruly lock of hair from his temple?
Lark shivered at the intimate thought, but she was too dirty for any of it, too dirty to lie in any of his pretty beds—not that she had seen them, but they must be special, judging by what she’d seen of his home so far.
From this vantage point, she examined a set of mulberry carpeted, bees-waxed stairs, and the bottommost portion of a gold striped wall, with a fancy mulberry-colored key design along its bottommost edge, and the most amazing railing ever imagined—all of it too good for her.
She stank, said he, as if she had not known this. He regarded her as if she were lowlier than dirt beneath his bright-polished Hessians. As if she were … pig mud, infinitely lower than dirt, and exactly what she smelled of.
Lark wished she could see his face right now. As things stood, all she could see of him was—
She allowed her hand fall into slapping his nether end at every step, almost by accident—and a fine and firm nether end it was. She took great delight as they climbed in this blatant, almost intimate act that he had forced upon her.
“Stop that!” he said, giving her own nether end a stinging slap.
Larkin screeched, and fought to be free, and he slapped her again. “Keep it up, Larkin Rose,” said he, and I will slap you, every time you slap me.”
She kept it up. He did too, slapping her harder than she could ever slap him, until she stopped, and he took to keeping his hand there, flat against her, bold as brass, if you please, his rising movement making it feel as if he were stroking her, there, on her private bottom.
Lark stopped touching him at all then, so he would remove his own hand, for his touch had started a kind of wild rebellion inside her body, an insurgence she did not take to the shivering likes of.
“Put me down,” she said, with less command and more plea in her voice. “I do not like being up here, any more than you like having me here. I promise not to bolt again.”
Ashford snorted. “Tell me another.”
Being draped over the man who had been the center of her dreams for years gave new meaning to the word “intimate” as it had been imagined, once upon a time, as regards to Ashford, himself, and the role he played in her own secret world.
“You have no right—”
“As your husband, I have every right. You are my property now to do with as I please.”
“As you belong to me,” she said, taking a path that surprised even her, “according to the laws of God, and man, and that means all of you, including your hind end.” She slapped his bottom again, hoping to get him to put her down.
“As every part of you is mine to slap, or beat, or stroke,” he stressed, letting the word linger, though Lark was not as afraid as she thought she should be, but exhilarated and … cast as if afloat.
Panic and something more rose in her. Yes, her bottom was his to touch. As all of her was his to do whatever husbands were wont to do with their wives. If she knew what that was, precisely, and if she could be sure that a great deal of blood must not be involved, she might breathe easier again … or perhaps she would not.
CHAPTER FOUR
As she remembered the brutality her sister had suffered at the hands of the man she thought she loved, panic rushed Lark in bold strokes. She prayed that her faith in Ashford would be confirmed, no matter how dangerous he had appeared at several moments during the course of the evening just passed, and that he would not hurt her in the way her sister had been hurt.
Ash must have sensed her fear in some way, because he held her tighter of a sudden, almost as if with the reassurance of a protector.
No, she thought, denying her own foolishness, he held her in that way, only to keep her from sliding off his shoulder and down the bloody stairs.
Before another minute passed, he carried her into a chamber Prinny himself might happily occupy. The marble around the fireplace shone a tawny gold, a rich color that perfectly matched the veins in its cream marble trim. Did God create matching marble for the gratification of the wealthy? Lark wondered.
“Here we are, my gunpoint bride,” he said with obvious resentment. “The master bedchamber.”
Oh, she did not like his tone, Lark thought. “Why did you seek a wife if you do not actually want one?” she asked, to turn her skittering thoughts from bedchambers, especially his.
“My grandfather’s money will not come to me unless I have a wife.” He set her on her feet. “It appears as if destiny meant for you to take on that exalted role.”
“Money,” she said, with as much disdain as he had employed. “I should have known. There must be a great deal of it in the offing, then.” She was thinking of Micah again, realizing he might now have a decent future. What would the boy think of this place? The main stair-rail alone would make for some superb sliding, safe landing and all, carved as if to bow and kiss the floor.
“Money, yes, of which I have little at the moment,” her bridegroom admitted. “Fortunately, however, I do have enough to purchase a nicety or two, like soap, praise be. Grimsley, good man,” Ash said, as his valet appeared. “Have my big copper slipper bath filled at once.”
His valet looked her up and down, and narrowed his nostrils, as if he could smell her from where he stood, though he was too polite to say so. “Your bath, My Lord?”
“Do we have a problem, Grimsley?”
“No, My Lord. That is to say, ah … of course not, but I would dare to offer … Cook or Mim? Either, could set up a bath in the scullery, say, or before the kitchen fire?”
“Here, said I—” … Ash struggled against the spinning in his head. “And, here, I will say again. At once, whether you please or not. And bring the brandy.” Ash regretted his swollen head, a remnant of his evening’s entertainment, but what could a man do in such a case but raise his chin and scowl?
Grimsley regarded him as if he were daft, then he regarded his bride, with no less horror, and gave up the fight. “Very good, my lord.”
His bride, Ash saw, regarded her new husband as if he had sprouted wings and taken flight. She retreated as far as the wall at her back. “Had me a bath just last week,” said she, with so much humility, he would be a fool to lower his guard.
“Nevertheless, you stink, and if you fight me on this, well, your clothes, I could throw on the fire, but you, I might be forced to drown.”
“You cannot burn my clothes; you’ll leave me without a stitch? What kind of depraved man are you?”
“I am the degenerate who married you at gunpoint. Have you never heard of a husband’s privilege?”
“I do not recall hearing that wife-drowning was a husband’s privilege.” Lark dropped her arms to her sides in an expression of futility. “The stink-maker was Da’s favorite sow. She got loose before you come today. Had to chase her all the way up Market Street. Lost her twice, before I got me a riding hold on her. Slippery, don’t’cha know. I don’t usually smell so terrible bad.”
“Only half so bad, then? Happy to hear it. You rode a pig, you say?” Ash coughed to hide his grin, cringed at the pain in his head, and knew he must still be sotted. “No wonder my eyes watered all the way up the stairs. We will throw your clothes in the fire.”
His bride bit her lip, charming the muzzy bejesus out of him, while a swift swing of emotions—shock, awareness, curiosity—marched across her tri-freckled nose and furrowed her gull-winged brows. “I can hardly appear naked before the world.”
Ash raised a brow, bringing that pomegranate stain to her cheeks in the process, and chuckled, while she took to tracing a fleur-de-lis in his carpet with the toe of a tattered slipper.
“You do know that you’re wearing two different shoes, and that the rest of the world wears matched pairs?”
That brought her Scot�
��s temper to the fore. “They’re shoes, ain’t they? They keep me feet warm, don’t they? Try fighting a rag-picker and see how many matched pairs you come off with!”
“I’ll buy you a dozen matched pairs,” Ash said, surprising himself. He cleared his throat and shook his head free of the surge of sympathy that had overtaken him on her behalf. What cared he for the smelly schemer? “You can wrap up in a bed-sheet for all I care, until I make other arrange—no, wait, I can spare a dressing gown.”
At her look of gratitude … or adoration, Ash felt a burst of warmth that radiated outward, until he could hardly bear the burn. He moved a safe distance away and regarded her curiously. “What do you look like under all that soot?”
“My mother, I’ve been told.”
As Ash made to reply, Grimsley and two maids arrived with buckets of hot water. “Fill my bath and be quick about it,” he ordered, and his bride yelped and made for the hall. “Catch her, damn it!” Ash shouted then he swilled the brandy Grimsley had poured and took chase.
After a lengthy dash around the third floor, and a side trip to the fourth and fifth, Ash carried Lark, screaming, kicking and pummeling, down the hall and into his dressing room, where he unceremoniously dropped her, stinking clothes and all into a bath full of steaming water.
Ash knelt and tried to keep her there. “Quick, Grim, throw in as much soap as you can find. The way she’s thrashing, she’ll whip up a froth and wash herself, clothes and all.”
Ash had never noticed before that Grimsley could not stand without swaying, or was it the? Ash wasn’t certain. The room, he thought, his stomach churning fit to rebel again. Drat the woman; she was already discomposing him. He was exhausted from chasing her and his head throbbed from the sound of her screeching.
Ash dunked her under, just for a moment silence.
“You might be sorry for this night’s work tomorrow, my lord,” Grimsley dared as he dropped three bars of French milled soap into Larkin’s bath. “If you do not mind my saying so, you are somewhat in your cups.”
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 3
