His Reluctant Lady

by Aydra Richards

  Chapter Nineteen

  When David returned to Jilly’s residence an hour later, with a special license in his pocket and one very confused reverend in tow, the house was as still as the grave. His furious stride echoed down the hall toward the library, where he cast open the door.

  “I’ve—”

  “Shh!” Lady Ravenhurst pressed her finger to her lips, nodding toward the couch, where Poppy was curled up, fast asleep beneath a throw blanket. At some point someone had removed the pins from her hair, and the whole mass of it was left free. Jilly sat beside her, a book open on her lap, absently stroking her fingers through Poppy’s sable locks, just as David had once longed to do.

  David cleared his throat, lowering his voice. “I’ve returned,” he said inanely.

  “So we can see.” Rushton’s voice was pitched low. “And to what end?”

  Three sets of eyes had settled on him, severe in their judgment.

  He cleared his throat again, and Poppy twitched on the couch, her dark brows drawing together, lending her face a fractious expression. David withdrew the folded license from his pocket and offered it to Rushton.

  “A license,” he said by way of explanation, to the ladies who were seated too far to glimpse the paper. “And a reverend.” This, with a gesture at the nervous little man who lingered in the doorway, a bible clutched to his chest. A scowl etched itself onto David’s face. “She’ll be my countess in short order.” He scoffed. “Who would have thought the Countess of Westwood would be called Poppy.”

  “I would,” Jilly said softly. “Although I admit I had hoped for better circumstances.”

  David snorted. “She’ll hope for better circumstances soon enough,” he said roughly. “She might have earned herself a new name, but—”

  “Don’t, David,” Jilly implored. “Don’t let your pride force you to foolishness. I doubt she likes her situation any better than you. What good can come of punishing her for it?” She rose gracefully, crossing the floor to him. “You would have to marry soon enough anyway,” she said. “And you liked her well enough to compromise her.”

  But not enough to forgive her for roping her sisters into springing a trap on him. What man wanted to find himself caught in such a way? He was going to be a laughingstock. He, who had neatly avoided a dozen such ploys, had been done in at last by a sour-faced spinster.

  Who looked as though she’d spent the last hour crying as if her heart had broken.

  He shoved that meddlesome thought out of his head. “I’m doing the honorable thing,” he snapped. “No one could ask more of me than that.” He swept past her, catching Poppy by the shoulder and shaking her.

  She roused with a start, blinking in the low light, bewildered. At last she recognized him, recoiling in shock. “What—what—”

  He stretched his lips into a travesty of a smile. “Time to wake up, darling. You wouldn’t want to be late to our wedding.”

  ∞∞∞

  The reverend was so nervous, he stammered through the entirety of the ceremony. Doubtless he’d never before been roused from his bed to officiate a peer’s wedding, and the acrimony the groom held for the bride likely set him ill at ease.

  Poppy’s cold fingers trembled in his, and David clutched them all the tighter. Perversely, he was irritated that she had set her hand in his only reluctantly, that it had taken several minutes of hushed conversation with both Jilly and Lady Ravenhurst to convince her to accept David’s offer of marriage, though it had been unwillingly tendered. Possibly his antipathy had caused her to regret maneuvering him into marriage, though it mattered little at this juncture. She’d cast the die, and they would both have to live with the consequences of it.

  After the trouble he’d gone to, the grand sacrifice he had made to spare her reputation, she hadn’t even managed to summon a sliver of enthusiasm for the job. She had whispered her vows in a thin, defeated little voice that only served to pitch his ire to further heights.

  There. It was done at last. He’d taken the treacherous little viper to wife. The reverend invited him to kiss his bride, and he felt Poppy’s fingers jerk in his, saw her blanch.

  He bent to kiss her cheek, tasted the salt of her tears on his lips. She cringed away from him as if he had offered her a blow instead of a kiss.

  Swearing beneath his breath, he turned away from her and strode instead for the table upon which the marriage license lay, awaiting their signatures. He scrawled his carelessly, dripping a blotch of ink upon the paper. It hardly mattered. Poppy followed along after him, rendering her own name in tidy script, and placing the pen down again. Her shoulders hunched, and she scraped at her loosened, untidy hair with fingers that visibly shook. Jilly had come up beside her, sliding an arm around her shoulders and murmuring in her ear.

  David had no patience for any of it. “Come, countess,” he demanded.

  She ignored him.

  “Countess.” The word scraped out of his throat, rough and abrasive.

  Nothing. She turned her face into Jilly’s shoulder, squeezing her eyes closed.

  “Poppy,” he said, exasperated and irate. She jumped, drawing away from Jilly guiltily.

  A sliver of remorse pierced him as he realized abruptly that she had not been ignoring him after all—she simply hadn’t realized that he had been speaking to her. Still, he steeled himself against the wounded misery in her brown eyes. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”

  “David,” Jilly protested. But Poppy had at least the good sense to obey the terse command, and she drew away from Jilly. David didn’t bother to wait for her; he merely swung around and headed for the door. His carriage, which had been sent for some time ago, waited in the drive. In a parody of politeness, he held the door for her. God above, but he could hardly bear to look at the woman who was now his wife—mingled guilt and fury roiled in his stomach. That she should look so forlorn while she’d played him for a fool. That the sight of her face had stirred some semblance of pity in him, even while his anger had goaded him into recriminations that had merely wounded her further.

  She scrambled into the carriage, shoving herself into the far corner as though he might fall upon her like an animal. Her tangled hair draped down her back, and she turned her face to the window and blinked fiercely in the moonlight as if she expected to wake at any moment from the nightmare she had found herself in.

  He scoffed. She looked like a damned tragic heroine from one of her own melodramatic novels.

  “Where…?” Her voice was little more than a shred of sound, and it carried the threat of further tears within it.

  “My home,” he said brusquely. “Kittridge House. Your home now, as well, I suppose.” He heard the damning tone of his voice and regretted it when she flinched. His cutting tone and words were double-edged swords; somehow they struck him just as harshly as they struck her.

  The rest of the ride passed in profound silence. Poppy was silent and still, pressed against the side of the carriage as if she might disappear into it, like a tree nymph returning to the wood. At last the carriage rumbled to a stop, and the coachman jumped down to open the door. David shoved himself out first.

  Poppy stumbled out of the carriage and onto the steps, looking terribly young and uncertain. She fisted her hands in the skirt of her gown and ducked her head as she began to climb the steps after him.

  A lamp had flickered to life within. The housekeeper, Mrs. Sedgwick, no doubt, since Fenton was too old and deaf to hear a carriage approach these days. David thrust open the door and walked inside.

  “You may go for your things in the morning,” he said over his shoulder to Poppy just as Mrs. Sedgwick sailed into the room, wrapped in a burgundy robe. “Mrs. Sedgwick will show you to your room.”

  And really, that was enough for one night. He simply could not bear the sight of her bewildered, injured face one moment longer. So he fled from it, climbing the stairs and abandoning his new bride in the foyer.

  Chapter Twenty

  A week had passed s
ince his wedding, and David had seen neither hide nor hair of Poppy in the intervening days. True, he had spent as much time as possible outside of his house as possible, but he had taken the occasional meal at home, and still she had not bothered to come down for a single one of them. How she had managed to keep her sisters out of his hair was anyone’s guess, but they, too, were quiet as church mice.

  He had thought to find the silence peaceful, but instead he found it aggravating. So what if he had been avoiding her? He had salvaged her reputation, and for that she avoided him? If she only knew the sort of sly jabs he had endured from his peers…from Leighton, who had been pleased as punch to offer his congratulations, such as they were, on having been brought to heel by a woman of Poppy’s dubious charms.

  The smug, self-satisfied look on the man’s face had made David long to bash his fist into in. Instead he had managed an amused laugh, as if he had taken the thinly-veiled sarcasm for honest praise, and given the impression of a man in the throes of new love, convincingly enough that Leighton had been taken aback. It had salvaged his pride, but wrought hell upon his temper.

  On the eighth day he decided that he would tolerate Poppy’s avoidance no more.

  He found Mrs. Sedgwick in the pantry, taking stock of the kitchen’s dry goods.

  “Mrs. Sedgwick,” he inquired. “Where is my wife?”

  She dropped the jar of preserves she had been holding, and it crashed to the floor and shattered at her feet, splattering his boots and her skirts with sticky fruit. “I beg your pardon, sir?” she asked. “Your wife?”

  He scowled. “Yes, my wife. The countess. Poppy.” At her continuing blank stare, he held up his hand, approximating her height. “About up to here,” he said. “Brown hair, brown eyes. Terrible taste in gowns.”

  She started with a little gasp, her brown eyes widening. “You don’t mean…the woman who arrived with you a week ago?” The horror in her voice stirred a sense of alarm.

  “Of course. Who else would I have meant?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.” She clutched a fistful of her dress as if steeling herself to deliver bad news. “She left, sir.”

  “Left?” he echoed. “What the devil do you mean, she left?”

  “Just that, sir.” She fidgeted uncomfortably, sidling away from the mess of the broken jar and oozing jam spreading across the floor. “The very night she arrived with you. Within minutes.”

  “She can’t have left.” The words swirled around his brain, knocking together but failing to drop into place, making no sense. “She’s my wife. You were to show her to her room.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I didn’t know she was your wife. She looked like a governess.” This time her gaze was faintly accusatory.

  “Of course she is my wife. For what other purpose would I have brought a woman—no, don’t answer that, if you please.” David stepped backward, the anger that he’d managed to get a rough handle on over the past week reigniting. “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No, sir.” Mrs. Sedgwick stepped over the mess herself. “She just said she was sorry to have disturbed me and that I should go back to bed. Then she left.”

  David pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the tight knot of fury to abate. She hadn’t been avoiding him this past week as he’d thought—she hadn’t been present at all. She’d simply walked out of his house in the middle of the night, with her hair unpinned and the remnants of her tears still clinging to her cheeks, and taken herself off somewhere. She hadn’t been hiding away in his house, sulking or nursing her own wounds. She had just gone.

  Some part of him acknowledged the wisdom of it. He doubted he would have wished to remain in a house where he knew well enough he wasn’t wanted. Another part raged that she’d been missing more than a week without his knowledge. Still another chided that if he had bothered to seek her out, he would have learned of it much sooner.

  Poppy, it seemed, could not be content to have caught herself a title and a wealthy husband. No—she had to go and twist his conscience into guilty knots along with it.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Damn.” It did little to appease the flare of temper growing inside him.

  She’d caught him already, but it seemed she would force him to catch her.

  ∞∞∞

  He arrived at Poppy’s rented house thirty minutes later, after having changed out his boots for unsullied ones. The butler answered the door immediately, his dark eyes disapproving.

  “I’ve come for Poppy,” David said brusquely, striding forward.

  “Who may I say is calling?” the butler inquired, though by the dislike burning in the man’s dark eyes, David suspected he had an inkling.

  “Her damned husband,” he snarled, shoving past the man into the foyer.

  “Miss Fairchild isn’t receiving,” the butler said with a scowl. “She won’t see you, my lord.”

  “It’s Lady Westwood,” David corrected. “And she had damned well better see me.” He stepped into the drawing room, taking up an indolent pose upon the couch. He slung one arm over the back of the couch and returned the critical glare the butler pinned on him, all but daring the man to eject him.

  With a rough sound of irritation, the butler turned. “I will inquire with her whether or not she is at home.”

  The commotion from the foyer hadn’t drawn Poppy out of hiding, but she was hardly the house’s only resident. Moments after the butler had departed for the upper floor of the house, David heard a flutter of footsteps tripping down the stairs. He turned, half-expecting to see the dour face of the butler once again, but instead found the two little imps who had assisted in his capture standing in the foyer.

  Warily they surveyed him, their green eyes assessing, but their faces faintly condemning. He didn’t see why they would so censure him; they had gotten what they wanted of him, after all.

  “You might as well come in,” he said. “I don’t care for being gawked at, and I don’t bite.”

  “One need not bite to inflict injury, sir,” the one on the right said, her voice rife with reproach.

  Cheeky little brat. “You’d think you’d be a bit more grateful,” he said. “I saved the lot of you, after all. But for me, you’d have been sent packing in disgrace. I didn’t have to marry her. No one would have blamed me if I hadn’t.” Except for his nearest and dearest—who beyond all reason seemed to like the insufferable woman—as well as the inconvenient conscience he had somehow developed.

  “Yes, well, it seems as if that might have been a preferable outcome.” The rightmost one again. “We misjudged you, my lord.”

  That they had, if they had expected him to meekly fall in line with their petty schemes, which had cost him his freedom.

  “Poppy didn’t conspire to trap you.” The one on the left this time.

  “Isobel.” Her sister speared her with a glare.

  “I’m sorry!” Isobel said. “But it’s true. Poppy didn’t know.” She took a gasping breath and sidled forward. “It was just us. We thought—she’s never looked at anyone as she looked at you. And you did send her such lovely flowers.” A hiccough marred her relative composure. “Poppy never got to have a Season or a suitor of her own. We thought you liked her. We only wanted to hurry things along a bit.”

  Poppy hadn’t known? His heart lurched in his chest, a knot of betrayed hurt releasing as if it had been snipped away with shears. He wrenched his mind back to the evening in Jilly’s library, the words she’d whispered when she’d caught sight of her sisters.

  No. Victoria. Isobel. No.

  He had thought it a fancy bit of playacting. But Poppy was a terrible actress—she couldn’t keep her emotions off her face, hadn’t perfected that smooth, artificial mask of indifference that every other lady of his acquaintance wore.

  The one called Victoria gave a huge sigh, her shoulders slumping. “Poppy told us to leave well enough alone,” she admitted. “We ought to have listened.”

  Yes, they ought to have. Only now the
damage was done—and he’d punished Poppy rather harshly for her role in it, and it had been undeserved. He’d been cold enough, cruel enough, that she had fled his home in the middle of the night rather than spend another second beneath his roof, beneath the weight of his disdain.

  Moments later there was the subdued sound of steps on the staircase. Poppy appeared at last, garbed in yet another wretched gown of dark, gloomy green. Her hair had been tortured back into that severe knot at the top of her head. She looked no less than the governess that Mrs. Sedgwick had thought her, and her voice was dull and tired as she said, “Girls. Up to your rooms.”

  Her face was still pale. She looked as if she hadn’t dared to leave the house in the week she’d been missing—and probably she hadn’t. The scandal had been obscene. She was the butt of every joke, the name whispered on every pair of lips in the city. The drab little mouse who had trapped an earl.

  Except she hadn’t, if her sisters were to be believed.

  Lady Winifred appeared behind her, her nose tilted in the air. She gave a disdainful sniff, and Poppy’s shoulders stiffened at the sound. Somehow he suspected she’d been treated to quite a few of those disapproving sounds just lately, and each one had scraped across her nerves until they were as raw as his had been just recently.

  “Miss Fairchild,” Lady Winifred ground out, nudging Poppy between her shoulder blades as if to force her into the room. To David, she sent an apologetic, ingratiating glance. “My apologies, my lord. I have been attempting—”

  “Lady Westwood,” he corrected, turning away so he didn’t have to see the strain scrawled across Poppy’s face. “She’s Lady Westwood now.”

  “Of course, my lord, but—”

  “I would like an annulment.” Poppy’s soft voice crashed over him with the force of a hurricane, stripping away the ragged bits of self-control he had managed to cobble together.

  Lady Winifred gave a horrified gasp, her hand fluttering to her chest in distress.