Authors: Anna Campbell
“After Rangapindhi, I feel a thousand years old.” He spoke sadly, so sadly her heart clenched.
Pity almost made her step down. Almost.
“Gideon, I don’t discount what happened to you.” Her voice became less strident. “I don’t blind myself to what your ordeal cost you. Still costs you. That doesn’t mean your decisions are always correct. Right now, you’re disastrously wrong.”
“You force me to be frank.” A muscle jerked spasmodically in his cheek. He turned and prowled toward the window, where he curled one hand in the curtains. “Let me lay out some facts. If you can bear to contemplate mundane reality.”
“I’m more aware of facts than you are,” she said through tight lips. His mockery stung. “But pray, dazzle me. I wait in humble anticipation.”
Even in profile, she didn’t miss the way his mouth flattened with annoyance. “Very well,” he bit out, every word as precisely cut as a diamond. And just as sharp. “I’m going back to Penrhyn to an arduous, frugal future. Isolated. Lonely. You are the kingdom’s greatest heiress. I’m physically and emotionally incapable of offering you the life you deserve.”
Disbelief rose to choke her. “You reject me because you’re worried I’ll pine for the occasional party?” Her voice began to shake. “You truly believe I’m irreparably shallow, don’t you?”
He ran his hand through his hair, mussing it to wildness, and whirled to confront her. “Damn it, Charis!”
He sucked in an audible breath as he struggled for control. “I’m a freak, a poltroon, one step off being a lunatic. I can’t bear people around me, touching me. You know my affliction. In spite of my insatiable hunger for you, you know essentially I haven’t changed. Why can’t you see what you want is impossible?”
Stepping closer, she replied with matching heat. “Because of that insatiable hunger. Because you can bear my touch. Because I don’t care about other people. I only care about you.”
“You say that now. How will you feel in twenty years when you’ve wasted your youth on a man who only exists in your imagination?”
She couldn’t doubt his sincerity. No matter how mistaken he was. She made an angry sound in her throat. “And if I’m pregnant?”
He’d been pale. Now he went stark white. His eyes sparked like burning coals. “Don’t you want to bear my child?”
“I want it more than I can say.” Almost as much as she wanted to stake her place in his closed heart. Strange to recognize that need so powerfully and so immediately. She placed a trembling hand on her belly. Could a new life already grow inside her? The idea was overwhelming. Frightening. Exciting.
Gideon’s blazing eyes fastened on her gesture, and a savage expression crossed his face. “Dear God, are you pregnant?”
Was she? With all that had happened, she’d lost count of the days. And she’d been so focused on Gideon, she’d hardly considered consequences. “It’s too early to say. Do you still mean to send me away if I carry your child?”
He looked like he reeled at the prospect of fatherhood. “I don’t know.”
An ounce of her earlier sarcasm crept into her voice. “Why are you so shocked? The natural result of what we’ve done for the last two weeks is a baby. Surely you gave some thought to the matter.”
He slumped against the wall, his face ravaged with despair. “Yes.” He hesitated and shook his head with bleak incomprehension. “No.”
There was a charged silence, then he continued in a dull voice. “Of course I knew I took risks. If I thought beyond how much I wanted you, it was to say we’d deal with any complications when the time came.”
She twined her arms around herself as ice congealed in her blood. Her momentary hope shrank to a cold kernel the size of a pebble. “Risks? Complications? Don’t you want a baby?”
He tensed. “If I’m not fit to be a husband, I’m certainly not fit to be a father. If we have a child, it…” He must have
interpreted her expression correctly because he paused. “…he or she must go with you.”
She raised her chin although she was so deathly tired of battling him. He loved her, she reminded herself. But the words lost their power with every repetition. “Why does anyone have to go anywhere?”
“Aren’t you listening?”
“All I’ve heard is a lot of nonsense.” She turned away and stalked toward the bedroom. She was disheartened, angry, exhausted. Trying to get Gideon to see sense was like flinging herself over and over against a mountain.
For one electric moment, she’d wondered if she’d shaken his certainty. She hadn’t mistaken what she’d seen in his face when he asked if she was with child. He’d been furious with himself. And her.
But she’d seen more in his ferocious black gaze.
She’d seen longing.
He wasn’t nearly as implacably set upon his desolate future as he wanted her to think. If she had his baby, he wouldn’t desert her. She knew that in her bones.
Dear God, let me be pregnant.
As she reached the doorway, he spoke in a grave voice. When she turned to face him, he looked weary and curiously defeated, although he’d withstood her every attack. “I know you believe I’m cruel and capricious and pigheaded. But I swear I’m acting in your best interests.”
“I wish you’d think of yourself for once. Ask yourself what you want and seize it.” Blinking back acrid, painful tears, she left him alone.
G
ideon turned the hired gig onto the lonely road that snaked across the moor to Penrhyn. At his side, Charis remained bundled away from him in her new blue pelisse and matching bonnet.
She’d been broodingly quiet since before they’d left Jersey yesterday. On the storm-tossed boat that finally reached the mainland south of Penrhyn this morning. During this jolting carriage ride in a shabby, ill-sprung vehicle over potholed roads.
It was well into the afternoon, and still she remained locked away as securely as if a wall of bricks and mortar separated them. She’d rebuffed his stilted attempts at conversation, seemingly content to stare at the rough countryside.
She’d never been a chatterer. Her ability to maintain a restful silence was one of the many things he admired.
This silence wasn’t restful. It seethed. With every mile, the tension twisted tighter.
They hadn’t resolved their acrimonious argument. How
could they? She wanted what he couldn’t in conscience give her. Tying a beautiful, vital girl like Charis to a physical and mental wreck like him was a sin against nature. He’d always recognized that. His pride wouldn’t countenance it. His heart couldn’t endure it. All the passion in the world didn’t change that one bleak reality.
How the devil was he going to live without her?
The memory of the last, radiant days should fill him with regret. His passion had misled Charis into believing they had a chance together. He’d glimpsed a bright heaven that only mocked him now.
But selfish bastard he was, he couldn’t repent what he’d done in Jersey. Not when desolate solitude beckoned ahead.
After their quarrel, they’d slept apart for the first time in over a week. Not that he’d slept. Instead, he’d sat in the parlor, watching night change to grim day. He’d felt like a mongrel cur tossed into the gutter to starve. He still did. Dear God, was this how the rest of his life was going to be?
He beat back the questions, the guilt, the anguish that plagued him. His gloved hands hardened on the reins, and he urged the ungainly pony to a faster pace. The gig bounced along the rocky track. He couldn’t risk slowing down. The clouds closed in, and they’d be soaked if rain caught them on this heath.
Charis’s gloved hand clenched on the edge of the lurching carriage. It had been the only vehicle available in the small fishing village where they’d found safe harbor this morning. They’d tried to land at Penrhyn Cove, but the seas made it too dangerous.
With every second, the weather worsened. A biting wind howled. The sky loured, black and menacing, and thunder rumbled in the distance. He needed to get his wife to warmth and safety. Where she could ignore him in comfort.
He slapped the reins against the pony’s fat rump. They were still several miles from the house. He made a frustrated sound and looked at Charis.
She studied him, her eyes more brown than green, underlined with dark circles. She looked proud, distant, unhappy…
beautiful.
In the strange gray light, her fine brows arched with what he read as disdainful curiosity. “Are you quite well, Gideon?”
“Yes, of course,” he said curtly.
Her lips lengthened with irritation. “You’re very restless, and you’re making bizarre noises.”
“I’m worried about the weather.”
She looked around the open plateau. High in the sky, birds streaked to escape the coming tempest. The wind competed with the gig’s rattle and the clop of the pony’s hooves.
Her hand shifted to touch the necklace he’d given her the morning they left Jersey. England’s greatest heiress must own bank vaults full of spectacular parures. But when he’d seen the amber-and-gold circlet in the jeweler’s window in St. Helier a week ago, he’d immediately thought of Charis. The unusual intensity of the yellow stones reminded him of the light in her eyes when she was happy.
A light noticeably absent today, damn it.
Although her thanks were subdued, she’d seemed to like the trifle. At least she wore it.
Not for the first time, Gideon felt all at sea with his wife. Marriage was a difficult and complicated endeavor. Perhaps it was a good thing that his would be so short-lived, at least in any meaningful sense.
And didn’t that cheer him up no end?
Dourly, he stared past the pony’s ears at the rutted path. It was difficult not to view the surrounding wasteland and threatening sky as omens of his future.
“We’re not far from home, are we?” she asked, without looking at him.
Home.
Gideon supposed she must consider Penrhyn her home. Lord knows she’d been exiled from anywhere else she rightfully belonged. Now he prepared to exile her again. He knew he did the right thing in setting her free. But at this moment, it didn’t feel like it.
“Not far. Pray God we beat the rain.”
The road dipped into a tree-filled dell. Interlacing branches turned the gloomy afternoon into night. Away from the wind, the gig’s creak seemed unnaturally loud.
Then the ambush came.
When the tree crashed in front of them, at first, stupidly, Charis thought the wind caused the accident.
Then she realized there was no wind in this hidden hollow.
“Damn it.” His powerful shoulders bunching, Gideon struggled to control the rearing, squealing pony. The tree had missed the animal by inches. “Whoa there! Settle down!”
Charis clung trembling to the rocking gig as the maddened horse bucked and fought. Gideon fought to enforce obedience. Finally, recognizing the hand of authority, the pony stood quivering between the shafts with its head lowered.
Gideon cast her an urgent glance. “Jump, Charis, and run!”
But it was too late. Charis hardly drew breath before a roughly dressed man appeared from the underbrush. He snatched the halter with cruel force, wrenching the skittish pony’s head up.
“Sir Gideon, what a pleasure.” The oily self-satisfied voice oozed down Charis’s spine and held her paralyzed on the seat. A terrifyingly familiar voice.
Across the pony’s heaving back, she met Felix’s gelid gray regard. Her every muscle tensed. Choking fear set like stone in her belly. Dear Lord, they were trapped.
Felix looked so pleased with himself, rage boiled up to drown her fear. With just such an expression, he’d watched Hubert beat her black-and-blue. She invested every ounce of the contempt she felt into her glare. “Felix. Still a sneaking little worm, I see.”
Her stepbrother’s hands clenched on the halter, so the frightened pony whinnied and tossed its head in protest. “Shut up, you little bitch!”
“And eloquent as ever. I’m impressed.” Her voice lowered into irony. “I find myself less impressed with your appearance. Have you given up bathing for Lent?”
“Stay quiet, for God’s sake,” Gideon hissed, dragging her to his side with one strong arm. With his other hand he reached into the pocket of his greatcoat, she guessed for his pistol. “What in Hades are you about, Farrell?”
He didn’t shift his attention from Felix, and his voice was sharp and lordly, as it had been when he spoke to the brothers at Penrhyn. Charis pressed closer, her brief defiance fading beneath growing awareness of their terrible danger.
“I wouldn’t do anything too impulsive, if I were you, Trevithick.” Felix drew himself up and made a dismissive gesture. “You’re expendable, and I’m sure you won’t wish to leave my sister undefended.”
He nodded to someone behind the gig, and Charis heard the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking. She didn’t need to see who it was. The two brothers rarely acted apart.
Her pulses raced, and sweat prickled her palms, but Gideon’s heartbeat remained steady and sure under her cheek. The unhurried, regular sound bolstered her courage. Even as he lifted his hand away from his pocket.
“Lady Charis is now my wife,” Gideon said calmly, his arm tightening around her in a silent promise of protection. But how could he keep her safe when the brothers had them at such disadvantage?
“The devil she is,” Hubert snarled, stamping into view and brandishing two large horse pistols.
The brothers’ fortunes had clearly worsened in recent weeks. They were unshaven, their clothing was creased and stained, and their linen was gray. The Farrells’ unkempt state hinted they’d been sleeping rough. With sudden spite, Charis hoped it had rained every night. She hoped it had
snowed.
“We’ve ridden to Gretna and back. We know you haven’t married the slut,” Felix snapped, snatching one of the guns from Hubert and aiming it squarely at the pair in the gig.
Gideon didn’t flinch although she felt him subtly shift so his body shielded her from the pistol. Foolish, heroic man. The rusty taste of regret flooded her mouth as she remembered how angry she’d been with him all day.
“I have indeed wed this
lady.”
Gideon bit out the last word. His sangfroid stirred Charis’s admiration even as acid dread rushed through her veins. “In Jersey a fortnight ago. For confirmation, apply to the Reverend Thomas Briggs of St. Helier. Lady Charis’s person and fortune are now at my disposal.”
Stupid Hubert lowered his pistol. Felix cast him an irritated glance. “What the hell are you doing, man?”
“They’re married,” Hubert spluttered. “The game’s up.”
“For God’s sake, keep them in your sights!” Felix whipped around to face Gideon and Charis. The feral light in his eyes indicated this was his last desperate throw of the dice, and he intended to win. “It’s not as simple as that, Trevithick.”
“No?” Gideon still sounded nonchalant. “Any harm gets you no closer to the money—and garners you a hanging when the law catches up with you. Make no mistake. You and your brute of a brother are identified as likely culprits should mischief befall us.”
“You have it all wrong.” Felix’s smile took on a smug curve that sent a shiver down Charis’s backbone. “I mean everyone to walk away safe and sound, Hubert and I considerably richer and you, sadly, considerably poorer.”
Gideon’s soft laugh lifted the hairs on the back of Charis’s neck. He sounded utterly powerful. As if he hadn’t a care in the world, for all that they were held at gunpoint without hope of outside aid in this wild woodland. “I wouldn’t toss you a farthing after what you did to her, you bastard.”
Felix’s lip curled in scorn. “Brave words.” Without shifting his attention from the gig, Felix tilted his head toward Hubert. “Get the jade.”
Hubert stepped toward them, then hesitated as Gideon spoke with a cold savagery that made Charis’s heart skip a beat. “Touch her, and you’re dead.”
Felix’s face hardened. Most people considered him a handsome man, but for a moment, he looked uglier than a hobgoblin. Charis suppressed another shiver. “We’ll hold the chit until you transfer every penny of her fortune to me.”
Charis bit back a gasp, and her hands clenched in Gideon’s coat as if that would save her from being dragged away. She should have expected this. She knew from bitter experience that Felix hated to be bested. He’d never allow her money to slip through his fingers.
“Don’t worry.” Gideon looked down at her and his arm firmed around her shoulders. “I won’t let them take you.”
“Can’t we fight?” Charis’s voice shook with distress.
Regretfully, Gideon shook his head. “They’re armed. The risk of your getting hurt is too great.” He turned his unblinking gaze to Felix. “Take me instead.”
Gideon’s easy tone momentarily deceived Charis. Then, with disbelieving shock, she realized what he offered. On a strangled cry, she straightened and stared at him in horror.
You will not do this, my love. I won’t let you.
Felix gave an unimpressed grunt. “What purpose will that serve?”
“It keeps her out of your filthy paws.” Gideon’s tone dripped derision.
Felix sent him a hate-filled glare. “Sadly, because of your machinations, it’s your signature we require, not hers.”
“My man of business is at Penrhyn to advise her how to get the money. Charis can contact the trustees and the bank, organize the papers. Until then, I place myself at your disposal.”
Her belly twisted in denial, and her hands clawed at his coat as if she’d restrain him by main force if she must. “No, Gideon, this is unthinkable. You can’t.”
The broken protest faltered into silence. She couldn’t risk Felix and Hubert discovering his vulnerability. If they knew what Gideon risked by becoming their hostage, they’d torture him to insanity.
“You can’t,” she repeated in a shaking voice, wishing they
were alone, wishing she’d never met him and put him in this danger. Better she’d married Desaye weeks ago. What she’d always feared had finally come to pass. Her dilemma threatened to destroy the man she loved.
Through glazed eyes, she saw Gideon register her terror and rise above it. His black gaze as it probed hers was certain, unafraid. “I’m not letting them within a yard of you, my darling.”
It was the same voice he’d used when he’d stubbornly insisted they had no future together. Her instincts told her he was determined on this course, and nothing she said would shift him.
She had to do something. She had to stop him. He confronted his vilest nightmares for her, and she wasn’t worth it.
She swallowed the lump of furious emotion in her throat, only to have words fail her again as Gideon raised her gloved hand and brushed a fleeting kiss across her knuckles. Scalding tears prickled her eyes.
Felix and Hubert were ruthless, violent bullies. They’d work out their frustrations on their captive. Even without his affliction, Gideon faced pain and humiliation at their hands. With his affliction, the consequences could be catastrophic.
“No…”
Gideon’s jaw took on the familiar implacable line. “I swore these dogs would never touch you again.”
“Dear me, your gallantry touches my heart,” Felix said sarcastically as he moved closer in unmistakable threat. “But I do believe we’re better keeping the jade.”
“Completely unacceptable.” Gideon didn’t look at Felix, and he spoke as if he held the upper hand in this ugly scene.
Felix emitted a harsh laugh. “By God, you’re a cool one. What’s to stop us taking her?”
“I’ll stop you.”