Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  “What, Jack?” She looked incensed in her innocence, her hands fisted against her hips.

  Despite the raging fever in his blood, he wasn’t fit for a night like this. That would be a commitment to something far greater and longer lasting than silver.

  “This is a marital pursuit, Mairey. And we’re not, are we? Married, I mean.”

  “No.” The word came out wrapped in a weighty sigh, and the next as horrified as if he’d suggested setting her library on fire. “No!”

  Unclear why her eyes should be so filled with terror at the mere mention of a marriage between them, Jack decided to shelve the subject until a better time, and send her out of harm’s way.

  “I think you’d best leave this to my bath, Mairey.”

  “Oh, no, Jackson Rushford!” She flipped back her hair, the bottom half wet and clinging, then drizzled her opinions across his chest as she wrung out her hem. “I’m not letting you bathe alone. I found you asleep in two feet of water! You’re staggering with exhaustion, and I refuse to leave you. Don’t move.”

  He couldn’t possibly.

  She stepped out of the tub, taking half the bath with her, trailing a stream of water all the way through the open doorway into her room.

  “What are you doing in there, woman?” Jack would have leaped out of the tub and gone for his clothes, but Mairey stuck her head around the panel, her shoulder heedlessly bare.

  “Cover yourself with a towel while you finish if you want, Jack. I won’t look, I promise. But I will be in the same room as you until you’re out of the water.” She disappeared, and he heard the plop of soggy fabric landing on the floor.

  She was undressing. The door was half open, and the woman was undressing!

  “I’ve got three little sisters, Jack. I know a lot about the drowsing effects of bathwater on exhausted children. Poppy gets sleepy the moment she sees the bath.”

  “I’m not a child, Mairey. I don’t need your help.” He needed to sort through his thoughts. He needed Mairey.

  “And I don’t need to find you floating facedown in your bathwater.” She came through the door tugging a dressing robe around a nightgown. Her feet were bare, and her hair hung like a siren’s around her shoulders.

  She swabbed up her watery trail, hung the towel over a chair back, and then sprawled across his bed.

  “Wash, Jack. Else I’ll fall asleep here.”

  The woman clearly hadn’t understood anything from the last few minutes, that neither of them were made of stone. But neither was she peering into his bathwater any longer.

  So Jack scrubbed himself clean, from his scalp to the soles of his feet. The water went milky gray with soap and grime, the clean fragrance rising into his nostrils like memories of home, of scrubbing his skin to bright pink at his nightly baths in the kitchen after a long day in the mine. Privacy had been a foreign notion then, with the rest of his family at the hearth, just out of his circle of modesty. Emma telling stories, his mother plaiting Banon’s black hair, Clady fast asleep on his father’s lap.

  God in heaven, he hadn’t allowed such memories for years; hadn’t dared, for the grief they exposed.

  “Jack?”

  “Yes?” He was standing in the water, his backside bare and dripping with rinse water. He spared a glance at the bed, prepared for the connection of her gaze, for the sharp pang of desire that was becoming as familiar as breathing. But she was tucked up against his pillow, staring at the ceiling, her hands behind her head.

  Trust—she was free with it. To be sure, she kept her secrets from him, rationed her Willowmoon lore as if she were a bank manager suspicious of a loan. But when it came to the truth between them, Mairey Faelyn was as constant as the coming and going of the sun.

  “Jack, I’ve been wondering about your sisters.”

  He welcomed the change of subject and stepped out of the tub to dry off. “What is it you want to know about them?”

  “You told me one time that you hadn’t seen them for years.”

  “I haven’t.” He pulled on his trousers, having nothing else to wear, and certainly not trusting a towel.

  “At first I thought you were estranged from them. That…well, I don’t know…that you had offended them somehow in your magnificence, that you didn’t think them your social equal, or that you’d married them off to your business associates for the profits they brought into the family estate.” She flopped her arms on the mattress, obviously feeling tied to the bed. “May I look?”

  “Hmmmm…I had no idea your opinion of me was so colorful.” He was safely rolling up his shirtsleeve when she sat up and dangled her bare calves over the edge of the bed.

  “My opinion of you remains colorful, sir, more so than ever. But the part about your sisters isn’t true, is it? You’re not estranged; you haven’t seen them since the night your father was killed.”

  She was very good at finding things, uncomfortably so. He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue.

  “It was earlier that day. At breakfast.”

  She was quiet for a moment as he rolled up his other sleeve, because it gave him something to do.

  “What are their names?”

  Are. Not were. Leave it to Mairey to understand the tiny morsels of hope that he tucked away for safekeeping. The bargains he’d made with God. He sat down beside her, gripping the edge of the mattress, staring down at the wooden floor, at the long cracks and the fine grain and the swirl of the knots.

  “My mother’s name is Claire.”

  “That’s very pretty.”

  “Yes. I hadn’t realized—she was my age when I last saw her. Emma was eleven at the time. Banon was seven. And Clady had just turned six.” He struggled to get his voice past the lump in his throat. “She’d gotten into the honey that morning. I went up to the strike line with a gob of it in my hair.”

  “Oh, Jack.” There it was in her eyes, in the way she turned to him and enfolded his hand in hers. He didn’t have to tell her about the hearth shadows and the ghosts at the lodge. Or why he’d fought so hard to banish her sisters from Drakestone.

  “What happened to them, Jack?” Her voice was a little frantic, echoing the panic whenever he wondered the same. “Where did they go? With your mother, surely?”

  Take care of them, Jack, my son. He’d done a hell of a job.

  “I lost them.” He paced away to the open door between their rooms, where he could better gain a full head of steam. “I was forced into exile by my own mother. God, how I fought her. I was the man now, entrusted by my dying father to take care of them. But she put me on a ship bound for Canada, afraid that I’d be sent to prison.”

  “She loved you, Jack. I would do the very same to protect my son if he were in danger.”

  There was the motherly sort for you. Missing the point entirely.

  “I was thousands of miles from home with no idea where my family had gone. I sold my first nugget of gold and hired a law firm in London to find them, the best team I could afford.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything at all?”

  “It’s been eighteen years. Nothing.”

  “That’s very odd, Jack. And horribly sad.” Her soft brow furrowed. “Has this firm checked parish registers in Yorkshire?”

  “Repeatedly.” A cool shiver of guilt rode Jack’s neck—a recent memory of Mairey and her expert quest through the Tower, through the ancient records at Donowell, turning over every particle of evidence until she had found what she wanted.

  He should have fired Dodson.

  “There are so many other places to look, Jack. Have they inspected the emigration manifests? Ships leave every day for America, Australia.”

  Emigration? He’d never thought of that and doubted that Dodson ever had or would.

  “This is a law firm, Jack?” She was chewing on her lower lip, her gaze fixed on someplace different and glittering with her interminable tears.

  “Dodson, Dodson and Greel.” The bastards. One more year and then he’d get rid of them. The d
ecision freed him some.

  “Did these same lawyers clear your name, Jack?” She stood suddenly, and her robe loosened like a curtain, completely irresistible. “Or is the constable still looking for you?”

  “I am reprieved, madam.” And falling madly for you. Everlastingly. How could he ever let her go? Quitting breathing would be simpler, or stopping the tides.

  “You bought off the legal system?”

  “Absolutely.” He laughed at himself, at the grubby coal miner turned peer, and it felt very, very good. “I was still in Labrador when I made the New Year’s honors list of 1853—an appreciation of my financial contributions to the Empire, so the letter said.” He felt better still when he lifted her into his arms, all seven, delectable stone of her, and started toward her room, and was damned pleased with himself when she began to nuzzle his neck.

  “So I wrote to the lord chancellor informing him of my regrettable past legal difficulties, and he informed me by return packet, six months later, that my youthful offense had been permanently erased, that I was now Viscount Rushford, and would I be interested in the purchase of old Drakestone House, and three manors in Lincolnshire?”

  “Ah, the royal white elephants.”

  “A whole herd of them.” He was quaking again with desire for her, tempted to stay, to join her in her bed, to finish what they’d begun in the bath.

  But beginnings were precious, delicate; they needed strategies and time to plan them.

  She puckered a frown at him as he lowered her into her rumpled covers. “Are you leaving the inn, Jack?”

  “No. It’s two in the morning. I’m going to bed.”

  She pointed at him and gave an ungainly yawn. “But you’ve got your clothes on.”

  “Yes, madam, but I won’t as soon as I’m back in my room.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead.

  “Ah.” She was finally blushing, though he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a heated flush. “I’m sorry about the bath. I won’t do it again.”

  “Then I’ll be sorry, Mairey Faelyn. To the end of my days.” He closed the door, and listened for the click of the lock that never came.

  Chapter 14

  Dodson, Dodson and Greel.

  Mairey felt another wring of guilt as she stood in front of the tarnished brass plaque that marked the law firm’s chambers just off High Holborn.

  She should have at least mentioned this visit to Jack. But he’d been absolutely closed about the subject of his missing family in the week since their return to Drakestone House, so she’d let the matter sink below the surface.

  The girls had been so delighted to see Jack when he and Mairey had returned, they had run right past her and flung themselves into his arms, Poppy climbing to his shoulders as if she’d shinnied up his towering trunk every day of her life.

  “We took good care of your fairies for you, Lord Jack!” She had the poor man by the ears, bending over to look him in the eye. “The green one’s name is Wendell!”

  “Wendell? Really?”

  “Truly, sir.”

  If Mairey hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the tears that glistened in the dark of Jack’s eyes, by his bellowing laughter that rang through the lodge and the smacking kiss he’d put on Poppy’s cheek, she might have felt spurned by their desertion. Instead, she was enchanted.

  “Sumner helped us plant sweet peas, sir!” Anna waved a seed packet in front of Jack’s face, and he’d done his best to follow its bobbing. “And snapdragons!”

  “Lookee what I can do!” Caro had come zooming down the banister, on a squealing collision course with the floor. But Jack had plucked her out of the air and stood looking at Mairey helplessly, the giggling girl hanging from his hip like a sack of flour.

  “Welcome home, Jack.” He was just so very fine.

  Her sister’s hearts were big, and seemed to know by instinct that he needed their fierce hugs and sticky hand-holdings. Just as Mairey knew that he would lay down his life for them.

  As he had done for his own sisters, for his dear mother. How sad that they didn’t know how much he loved them, how long he’d stood by their memories. His father would have been so proud of him; his mother must have died inside when she’d sent her son away. Jack still didn’t understand why he’d been denied the right to make good on his father’s pledge, and probably wouldn’t until he had children of his own.

  Our children—or they might have been, if this sorrowful tale had been destined to end happily.

  No, she couldn’t think that. It was selfish and dangerous.

  Love was sacrifice, and knowing when to let go.

  Yet Mairey held more tightly every day to the man. She sought him out every morning, afraid of the stirring in her heart when she caught sight of his dark eyes. His grief and guilt about his lost family were so close to the surface that she wondered how she’d missed them before.

  They’d had no more wild embraces, no tumultuous bathtub romps that left her breathless and wanting. And he’d made no more allusions to marriage. That had been a part of the fairy tale: another time, another land, another princess and her dragon.

  But Jack was persistent, and he stole a kiss from her at least once a day, in the most bewitching way. He would catch her in the green woods, or against her desk in the library, in a carriage where she couldn’t escape, or late at night in the lodge when it all felt so right.

  But the kisses were hardly stolen from her: they were offered, given freely, begged for in her heart and tucked away for the bleak days when he was gone from her life.

  She could at least do this one kindness for Jack before she found the Willowmoon Knot: investigate her suspicions of the Messrs. Dodson and Greel. If they had been fleecing Jack all these years, he might not be prepared to hear it. But neither could she let the unforgivable fraud continue. Whether he could see it or not, the man had set his heart aside for all those years, waiting to be loved again.

  “So good of you to come, Miss Faelyn. Please sit down.” Dodson senior and junior might have been twins if there hadn’t been three decades between them.

  “Thank you.” Mairey sat down on the edge of the chair and smoothed her hands over the fine linen skirt of the suit Jack had ordered for her. She’d come home to a wardrobe full of new clothes and had argued against them, but she’d lost out to his logic.

  For visits to Windsor, madam. The scoundrel. She’d lost out to the rareness of the silk that felt like his skin had underwater. But mostly she’d succumbed to his roguish smile.

  I’m starved for you, Mairey, he’d said, and then kissed her deeply, sending her off in a great spiral of yearning.

  “Now, then, miss, you’ve come on the recommendation of a Sir Harold Hayward, dean of Galcliffe College?”

  “Yes.” Hay ward’s name had been the first to come to her mind when the lawyer’s secretary had asked who had referred her. “Dean Hayward said that you’d done some investigative work for a relative of his. Though I’m afraid I can’t recall the man’s name. A professor at Oxford.”

  “Oxford…Oxford? Hmmmm…” The senior Dodson fiddled with the ends of his moustache for a moment and then brightened. “Ah, yes. Blaine, it was. I remember now. A baronet.”

  Liars! She’d never heard of an Oxford baronet named Blaine.

  The younger scooted his chair closer: a well-turned fellow, classically handsome, but with too-regular edges—nowhere as compelling as the man who let Anna put a flower in his lapel every morning, and took extraordinary care to see that it wasn’t crumpled by his day’s work.

  “How can we help you, Miss Faelyn?”

  “What I want to know, gentlemen, is how you would go about finding someone that I have lost”

  “Lost?” They were a pair of swivel-necked ravens, nodding at each other.

  “It’s very sad. You see, for reasons too painful for me to discuss in public, my father emigrated with me to Australia shortly after I was born, leaving my mother behind with my three little brothers.” A family like Jack’s mother and his thre
e sisters, lost about the same time as his.

  “A sad turn indeed,” the elder Dodson said, leaning back in his chair, weaving his fingers together over his sunken chest.

  Warming to her performance, Mairey continued. “Now that my father has passed on, I would like to find my mother and my siblings. They’re the only family I have.”

  “Not even betrothed, Miss Faelyn?” Young Dodson was affecting a rakish brow; God knew what was going on behind those overly blue eyes. Biology, no doubt.

  “Not even a betrothed,” Mairey said, patting her belt purse. “But I have money enough to retain your firm for as long as you require.” She leaned forward. “How long would that be?”

  “Well, Miss Faelyn,” the younger said, rising like a judge and striding toward the bookcase, his hands clasped behind him, “the duration of our search depends entirely upon how detailed the information is that you give us.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “Dates of birth, place of birth, wedding, uhm…”

  “Emmigration records?”

  Obviously a new thought. “Yes, very good.”

  “What other records do you investigate?”

  “Well, uh…many.”

  “And do you examine these records yourselves?”

  “Well…no. That is, not usually. You see, our firm deals primarily in wills and estates. We have an operative who investigates claims against inheritance.”

  “And looks for lost relatives when he has the time?”

  “Er, yes, but of course he will make time for this,” the older Dodson assured her hastily.

  “And what is your success rate, gentlemen?”

  “Good.”

  “Excellent, Miss Faelyn.”

  Blue ballocks! The Messrs. Dodson, Dodson, and Greel couldn’t find their collective hat if it were nailed to their collective wooden heads. Damn them all to the very hottest part of hell.

  “You’ve been most informative.” Mairey steadied her outrage and stood. She offered her hand, grateful for her deer-skin gloves, which kept Junior Dodson’s fingers from touching hers.