by Gayle Wilson
“You intend to approach my father?” she repeated unbelievingly, incredulous that he didn’t seem to understand the width of the gap that lay between them.
“Yes.”
“With that proposition?”
“Not couched in precisely those terms,” he said, the amusement back in his voice. “Simply as an offer for your hand.”
“He’ll have you thrown out,” she warned.
“Will he?” he asked, sounding interested. “I wonder how.”
“By the servants,” she responded with deliberate bluntness, finally angered at his continual mockery of the reality of the world she lived in. Coal merchants, however wealthy, did not ask for the hand of the Duke of Montfort’s daughter.
“I should like to see them try,” Raven suggested softly, and found that he really would. He’d damn well like to see them try.
He inclined his head to her and turned the black away from the path, touching the animal’s gleaming sides with his heels. Catherine wondered if that had been anger she’d read in his voice, but the statement had been too quietly and calmly made. It had sounded like a simple declaration of fact.
She watched horse and rider until they disappeared into the line of trees across the park, and then, disgusted with her attention to the American nabob, she once more touched Storm’s flank, breaking into what passed for a brisk gallop within the careful restraints of London. And she didn’t even wonder why her morning’s ride was so bitterly dissatisfying.
Two days later, returning from a particularly dull afternoon musicale, she was approached by the duke’s butler as she entered the door, his agitation obvious.
“His grace requests that you join him, if you would, my lady. He’s awaiting you in the salon.”
“Thank you, Hartford. I’ll only be a moment. Please convey that message to my father, and tell him—”
“I think…” the servant interrupted, and then paused, unaccustomed to denying her ladyship’s requests. “If you would be so kind, my lady, I believe you should join him immediately.”
Catherine considered the man before her. Hartford had never before shown her the slightest sign of disrespect, so she decided that whatever had distressed him enough to cause this small breech of his usually careful manner might really need her immediate attention.
“Thank you, Hartford,” she said softly and walked to the wide doorway of the town house’s formal salon.
Her father greeted her appearance with something that sounded like relief. He was dressed with his usual elegance, every white hair in place, but because she knew him so well she could sense his annoyance.
“This…gentleman,” he said sardonically, the pause clearly deliberate, “insists he’s an acquaintance of yours.”
The duke’s disbelief was patent. His thin hand moved to indicate the man standing at his ease before the strawcolored sofa. He had not, of course, been asked to sit down on it.
Catherine felt an absurd urge to smile at the picture John Raven presented. He, too, was perfectly dressed: his cravat, faintly edged with fine lace, flawlessly tied; his expertly tailored coat of Spanish blue stretched over wide shoulders; his silk waistcoat and pantaloons revealing the strong lines of his muscled body. And yet he looked as out of place in the genteel confines of this room full of priceless family heirlooms and fragile furniture as her father would look in a coalfield.
“Mr. Raven,” she greeted him, her amusement at the image of the duke in the middle of a coalfield still showing in her eyes. There was a gleam of reaction to that amusement in John Raven’s eyes, and then he inclined his head as regally as royalty was wont to do at an audience. If he felt any unease at being in the Duke of Montfort’s elegant salon, he hid it very well indeed.
“You do know him?” her father asked, apparently finding it hard to believe his daughter was confirming Raven’s claim.
“Of course,” Catherine said easily, advancing across the floor to present her hand to Raven. He glanced down at her fingers, as if contemplating their cleanliness, and then, at the last second possible to avoid outright rudeness, he took them in his own and conveyed them to the line of those straight lips. She was briefly aware of the warmth of his breath above her skin for a second before he released them. His fingers had been hard against the softness of hers, their callused strength very unlike the well-cared-for hands of the men she knew.
“Lady Montfort,” he said, controlling his anger at her amusement as impassively as he had at Montfort’s rudeness.
“Mr. Raven,” she answered, smiling. “How delightful you could visit today. No coalfields up for bid?”
An almost indiscernible reaction moved behind the crystal eyes, which were taking on the glint of ice. “No, I’m confining my bidding to other properties today,” Raven mocked, his meaning apparent only to her.
Good God, she thought,he hascome to offer for my hand.
“Coalfields?” Her father repeated the word as if he’d never before had occasion to use it. Or as if he couldn’t quite believe he had just heard his daughter employ it.
“Mr. Raven is a coal merchant,” Catherine said, reducing all he had taught her to an object of derision. How dare he embarrass her before her father? He had probably told the duke that they’d discussed marriage settlements. She had told Raven how impossible this was, but here he was, determined to humiliate them both and to anger her father in the bargain.
“A coal merchant?” Montfort repeated.
“I’m an investor,” Raven said simply. He’d be damned if he’d let the two of them belittle honest labor. He certainly wasn’t ashamed of what he did.
“In coal,” Catherine interjected helpfully. “And railroads.”
“In locomotions?” Montfort’s voice rose.
“Locomotives,” John Raven corrected quietly. He wondered if he could have been so wrong about what he had seen before in Catherine Montfort’s eyes. She was deliberately trying to embarrass him before the duke, but there had been no derision in her voice when she’d asked him to explain his businesses to her.
“For carrying the coal,” Catherine continued. “Or was it the ore? I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which. And I’m sure it was very useful information. I was thinking only today how I might work that into a conversation at some dinner party. I’m sure—”
“Are you serious?” the duke interrupted.
“Perfectly,” she said. “I assure you I have it on the best authority, even if I’m a trifle unclear on the details. I’m certain Mr. Raven would be willing to explain it again. He seems to feel everyone else finds coal as interesting as he does.”
“I find human progress interesting,” Raven said simply. There was no trace of answering amusement in his voice.
“Indeed,” Catherine said primly. “How… interesting.”
“Is there a reason,” the duke began, looking at his guest, “for your call today?”
Catherine could almost see her father mentally repeating the phrase she’d used, as if fixing it in his mind.Coal merchant. She could imagine the laughter at his club tomorrow when he told his cronies about it. And she, of course, was only making it worse. Humiliation was inherent in the situation; that was why she had tried to warn the American. But he had been so sure that what he’d suggested was as reasonable as he’d made it sound.
She glanced at Raven’s face and found he was watching her instead of her father. A muscle tightened briefly beside his mouth, and then even that was controlled. His eyes moved back to the duke, and he said finally, despite her warning, what she had known he would say from the moment she had walked into the room.
“I’ve come to offer for your daughter’s hand. I would like your permission to marry Catherine.”
Her father’s face quickly drained of color, and then, his eyes never leaving those of the man who had made that ludicrous suggestion, it suffused with blood, purpling with rage.
“You—you wouldwhat?” he sputtered.
Raven drew papers from the inside pocket of his coa
t and unfolded them as if he had all the time in the world. “One of these is a listing of my assets. The other is a marriage agreement that the man of business I employ here in London believed might be appropriate in such a merger. As you will see, the death settlements are extremely generous, and I require nothing from you except your permission for the match to take place. Not the usual contract in matters such as these, I’m aware, but my financial success has given me the liberty of not having to be a stickler for the conventional terms. Your daughter’s hand is dowry enough, I assure you.”
Raven had just uttered more words than Catherine had heard him put together in their previous conversations, except when he was talking about coal. The speech had had a rather endearing charm, if one thought about it—not that her father would.
“How dare you!” the duke said.
Although the old man certainly presented no physical threat to the American, his fury was rather awe inspiring— to Catherine at least. She couldn’t remember seeing her father this enraged since she’d run off with the fortune hunter. Resolutely, she turned her mind away from that memory.
“Listed here also are the properties I am willing to settle on your daughter after our marriage,” Raven added.
Catherine wondered if she were to be given a coalfield as an inducement to marriage. The wordswith my worldly goods, I thee bestow ran fleetingly through her mind.
“Get out,” her father said ominously.
“Or a cash settlement if you prefer,” Raven offered reasonably. Reynolds’s warnings began to stir darkly in the back of his mind. Because the settlements were indeed extremely generous, he had believed that a man of the duke’s intelligence would immediately see the advantages for his daughter.Not of his class, the banker had counseled.Notorious for his temper, the groom had suggested. And Catherine’s own advice, given almost with regret, he’d believed:My father would never allow such a match. All the warnings Raven’s pride had ignored were repeated in the old man’s features.
The Duke of Montfort stalked across the room to ring the bell, which Hartford answered too quickly. The butler must have been standing in the hall in case of just such an occurrence.
“Get out of my house,” the duke repeated.
“Your daughter has voiced no objection to the match,” Raven averred calmly.
Not exactly the truth, Catherine thought, but he was certainly not easily discouraged.
Her father, however, had apparently had enough. “Throw him out,” he said, gesturing to Hartford.
The butler walked up to John Raven, who turned those remarkable eyes from the contemplation of her father’s face to the servant’s. As the duke’s had, Hartford’s features lost color, but for a different reason altogether. The American’s controlled smile appeared briefly at the man’s hesitation, and then he turned and walked around him.
There would be no advantage to Raven in a meaningless confrontation with Montfort’s butler. Fighting with the servants would only make him appear more ridiculous than he already had.
However, he didn’t resist the impulse to issue his own warning. He turned back in the doorway to speak to the duke.
“I intend to marry your daughter, your grace. Nothing that has been said today has changed that. I have never done business this way in the past, and I believe it was a mistake on this occasion, but because I’m a stranger here, I allowed others to influence my actions. You may name your price, but I mean to have Catherine. You can be certain of that.”
The duke’s shock held him motionless a moment. Raven’s eyes moved back to meet Catherine’s. He nodded to her and finally, mercifully, he turned to leave.
Something in that last challenge to his authority, his pride or his honor had broken Montfort’s control, never particularly reliable under the best of circumstances. He rushed after the departing American, almost shouting in his fury. “You’ll marry Catherine over my dead body. You’ll not bring your sweat-stained lucre into my family. You’re another damned fortune hunter, and you’re not fit tospeak my daughter’s name. I’ll see you in hell before you insult her with your proposal again. You stink of sweat, and your stench offends my nose!”
Raven turned back to face the duke, and for once the warrior Scot in his heritage overcame the hard-learned Indian stoicism.
“If my money’s stained, it’s with my own sweat, your grace. Not that of the peasants your family robbed for hundreds of years. Mine’s a far cleaner stench than yours, sir,” he said bitterly. “And as for being a fortune hunter, I assure you I’m not interested in your money. It’s Catherine I want, and I intend to have her. I assure you I meant no insult to your daughter. I have made her the most honorable offer she’s likely to receive. Even if you’re both too insular to understand that.”
“Insular?” Montfort shouted. “You colonial jackanapes, don’t you dare call me insular.”
His gaze found the crop Catherine had left on the hall table that morning after her ride. It was not her custom, but she had apparently forgotten it when she had stopped to examine the calling cards in the salver that rested there. The crop’s position proved far too convenient for her father’s fury.
In his fit of blood lust, he grasped the whip, flying across the narrow space that separated him from his unwanted guest, to slash a blow across the mouth that had spoken those insults.
Raven wrenched the crop from the duke’s fist, but a slim, feminine hand caught his wrist, just as it had caught the rattan stick. Although he could have easily freed himself from the grip of Catherine’s fingers, Raven hesitated, another emotion interfering with his anger. She had touched him, slender fingers resting on the bare skin of his wrist, and he could feel the results of that realization beginning to move through his body, replacing the involuntary flood of adrenaline with a different, but just as uncontrollable, response.
“He’s an old man,” she begged. “Please don’t hurt him.”
Raven’s eyes, filled with a fury that matched her father’s, moved down to meet hers. Somehow, at the sight of russet eyes full of regret and apprehension, he found control.
She took a deep breath as she felt the rigidity gradually leave the upraised arm. “Just go away,” she whispered. “I tried to tell you this would happen. Please, just go away.”
Catherine’s fingers slipped across the back of Raven’s hand, and he allowed her to take the crop he could never have used against the old man. The welt her father had raised across his face was beginning to change from livid white to angry red. He raised his own fingers, which to his disgust trembled slightly, to explore it. The upper end was the most heavily damaged, a crimson thread there beginning to overflow and spill across his high cheekbone. He brushed his hand over the welling blood, feeling the fighting fury of his ancestors build again.
Catherine could hear the harshness of Raven’s breathing. She was close enough even to. smell him. There was no cloying perfume, but rather a pleasant aroma composed of the starch that had been used in his cravat, the fine leather of his boots and the warmly inviting, totally masculine scent of his body.
She lowered the hand that now controlled the whip and found, surprisingly, that she was fighting an urge to touch the brutal stripe her father had laid across his face. She knew that the duke’s rage was not really directed against John Raven. This blow had been struck in revenge for another insult to his daughter, for another man whohad been exactly what Montfort had accused the American of being. What had happened here this morning was not what she had wanted, but she knew very well her mockery had played a role in what had occurred. Raven would never know how deeply she regretted that.
“I’m sorry,” she offered softly.
It seemed almost as if he didn’t hear her. Finally the blue flame of his gaze focused again on what was in her face. His lips were white with the pressure he was exerting. The small, throbbing muscle jumped again in his jaw.
“Tell him,” Raven ordered, reading the look in her eyes— the look he had seen there before. He hadnot been mis
taken.
“Tell him what?” she asked, truly not understanding what message she was supposed to give.
“That you’re mine. And that he might as well get accustomed to that reality.”
John Raven had disappeared into the street, slamming the door behind him, before she could think of an answer.
Chapter Three
In the ensuing days, her father said little about the confrontation with John Raven. He had grudgingly admitted, knowledge assuredly gained from his friends at White’s, that the “coal merchant” was exactly what he had claimed to be.
“Rich as Croesus,” the duke acknowledged. “They’re calling him the American nabob, but I am led to understand that most of his wealth was accumulated in the East.”
“China and India,” Catherine agreed, remembering their ride.
The old man’s eyebrow lifted. “God’s teeth, Catherine, exactly how well do you know this damned miner? Surely you must realize what you’re doing by this ridiculous delay—making it appear youdesire the attentions of men like this American. Choose a man of your own class, suitable for your birth and position, and do it damned quickly. I’ll not be accosted by any more importunate jackanapes with coal dust under their fingernails.” The duke’s slender, elegantly erect frame shuddered dramatically, illustrating his distaste.
“Importunate?” Catherine repeated. “I should think that would be one adjective that wouldn’t apply in this case. He’s hardly the fortune hunter you called him.” Recalling her father’s fury over the disastrous incident of two years ago, she added, “I should think you’d be glad you don’t have to worry about that with Mr. Raven’s proposal. Actually…” she began, savoring the rather exciting bluntness of that proposal.
“Don’t press me, Catherine. You think to wind me around your finger as you’ve always done, but I warn you, girl, this is no trifling matter. Pick a husband, or I shall do it for you. And be damned sure that I will, Cat. Damned sure.”
The problem was that she knew very well his temper might cause him to do exactly that, regardless of his promise to her. Despite her father’s warning, she had found herself reliving that last encounter with John Raven more times than she wished, mentally watching her crop descend across the high cheekbone. The memory that was most clear and, to her disgust, most often repeated in her mind, was what he had said just before he’d departed.
