Heather and Velvet (49 page)

The murmuring of the crowd rose to a low roar as the door of the courthouse swung open, admitting in a blast of rain the object of their fascination. Women lifted fans to muffle their whispers. The men nudged each other, leering.

The
Times
reporter hid his disappointment as one of the local gentry explained to him that the duchess was not the flamboyant creature in the towering wig and dipping dress, but the bespectacled woman behind her.

There was certainly nothing in the young duchess’s appearance to invite criticism, the reporter mused. She was dressed in simple black, her dark hair caught in a chignon at the nape of her neck. He cursed himself for not bringing his inkpot. God, how he wanted to sketch her! Lines etched with such clarity were always fuzzed by time and memory.

Thunder rumbled through the courthouse as Prudence walked forward and took her seat in the front. Tricia left Old Fish at the door to shake out her umbrella on the grumbling few who had arrived too late to find seats. Tricia’s new beau marched after her with a swirl of his cape—a Corsican count, his pristine frock coat dripping with ribbons and medals.

Prudence folded her hands in her lap. The noise of the crowd seemed to her only the roar of a distant ocean. She could not feel the lash of their whispers, the sting of their leers. She could not feel anything. A terrible numbness washed through her, dulling everything in its path.

One month. Thirty days and no word. Not one note. Not one message. Nothing to indicate Sebastian didn’t want her to go through with the dissolution she had allowed Tricia to schedule. Prudence didn’t need to hear the buzz of gossip around her to know that Sebastian had been released from a London jail almost a week ago. Old Fish had been pleased enough to inform her of that.

Sir Arlo had wisely decided that he would have a difficult, if not impossible, task convicting Sebastian Kerr, since the scene of his arrest had been crawling with Dreadful Scot Bandits, including a Scottish lord, a duchess, and a carrot-topped minister’s son. There was also the
matter of a mysterious disappearing pardon and the fact that Killian MacKay, one of the most powerful dukes in Scotland, had publicly claimed Sebastian as his son, illegitimate or not. To save face and stifle questions, it was announced the Dreadful Bandit had perished in the blast that had destroyed the crofter’s hut. D’Artan’s corpse was buried with suitable aplomb.

Prudence pulled off her gloves, wadding them into a ball. Sebastian was probably on his way back to the Highlands by now, she thought. He was the heir to one of the richest estates in Scotland. He could have his Dunkirk and anything else he was willing to accept from his father. He no longer required a plain duchess of moderate means to buy his respectability.

She stiffened as the judge entered the courtroom. His robes were dusty and his wig looked as if something had been nesting in it. Surveying the crowd, he heaved a tremendous sigh. He wasn’t accustomed to such scenes. His most important judgment last year had involved the theft of a pregnant sow.

He pounded on his bench, dulling the murmurs to whispers. Prudence stared into her lap, letting Tricia answer his questions in her tinkling falsetto. Perhaps now Sebastian could escape the battered legacy of Brendan Kerr, she mused. He would always bear the scars, but in time the wounds might heal. She wished she could believe the same for herself.

“Your Grace!” The words boomed out like thunder.

Prudence started in her chair to discover the judge glowering at her. The nervous titters of the crowd faded to silence. “Yes, sir?”

“Your guardian has been kind enough to answer my questions about your abduction. I would appreciate the same courtesy from you. I will repeat my question again. Was this travesty of a marriage consummated?”

Travesty?
Pelting hand in hand through a sun-drenched meadow. Quibbling over who would name the goat. Sharing a kiss at dawn, clothed only in the morning’s first rays of sunlight. She opened her mouth to lie, fighting to speak past the hard knot in her throat.

A voice rang out from the back of the courtroom. “Aye, sir, that it was.”

Prudence stood, gripping the banister for support. Turning, she saw a man standing in the doorway of the courthouse.

His lips curved in a naughty grin. “And with great pleasure, I might add.”

Prudence went scarlet, then white. The court exploded with cries of shock. The judge hammered on his bench.

Sebastian Kerr stood with his father behind him, both garbed in full Highland splendor. Killian MacKay beamed proudly. Tiny and Jamie flanked them, each wearing crisp new garments. A fat cigar hung from Jamie’s lips.

As Sebastian strode down the aisle toward her, Prudence sank back down, her knuckles ashen against the banister. She couldn’t look at him. It hurt too much. It was like looking into the sun.

The crowd held its collective breath as Sebastian knelt beside her. He drew an engraved box from his plaid and handed it to her. “I thought to buy you a ring, but Jamie suggested you might appreciate this more.”

She opened the box with trembling fingers. A tiny gold matchlock pistol nestled in folds of velvet.

Sebastian stood back, a resigned expression on his handsome face. “Do your worst. I deserve it.”

The crowd gasped as she leveled the tiny pistol straight at his heart and pulled the trigger.

A jeweled bird burst from the muzzle, tinkling the first chiming notes of Bach’s “Sleepers, Wake.” Prudence moved to stifle her laugh, but Sebastian caught her hand before she could. Her rich ripples of laughter spilled through the courtroom.

All traces of humor disappeared from Sebastian’s eyes. “I was afraid of implicating you. I couldn’t come back until I knew I was truly free.” He knelt beside her again and folded her hand in his. “I’m still a bastard, you know.”

She primly adjusted her spectacles. “You always have been. But that never stopped me from loving you.”

The crowd roared as Sebastian scooped her up in his
arms. Tricia fell back in a dead swoon, knocking her wig into the count’s lap.

As the crowd parted before them, Sebastian’s lips brushed her cheek, her nose, her brow. His hand raked through her chignon, scattering the pins until her hair fell soft and loose around her face.

Tiny and Jamie flung open the doors. He carried her into the falling rain, tenderly tucking his plaid over her head.

“Where I come from,” she said, her voice husky, “when a man gives a woman his plaid, it means only one thing.”

He paused on the steps of the courthouse, smiling tenderly at her. “Show me.”

She did. Their lips met as she clung to him. The crowd bellowed its approval. Killian MacKay turned and gave them a proper English bow. Tiny threw back his head with a roar of laughter.

Jamie wiped his streaming eyes and blew his nose on the sleeve of his new coat. “Don’t no one dare say Jamie Graham ain’t a sentimental, God-fearin’ lad,” he muttered to himself.

He tucked his smoking cigar between Old Fish’s puckered lips before leaping down the steps, bounding after Prudence and Sebastian in the sweet English rain.

USA Today and Publishers Weekly
bestselling author TERESA MEDEIROS was recently chosen one of the Top Ten Favorite Romance Authors by
Affaire de Coeur
magazine and won the
Romantic Times
Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Historical Love and Laughter. A former Army brat and registered nurse, she wrote her first novel at the age of twenty-one and has since gone on to win the hearts of critics and readers alike. The author of thirteen novels, Teresa makes her home in Kentucky with her husband and two cats. Readers can visit her website at
www.teresamedeiros.com
.

If you loved
HEATHER AND VELVET,
don’t miss

A Kiss to Remember

now available
from Bantam Books

Read on for a preview.…

My darling son, my hands are shaking as I pen this letter.…

The devil had come to Devonbrooke Hall.

He hadn’t come in a coach drawn by four black horses, nor in a blast of brimstone, but in the honey-gold hair and angelic countenance of Sterling Harlow, the seventh duke of Devonbrooke. He strode through the marble corridors of the palatial mansion he had called home for the past twenty-one years, two brindle mastiffs padding at his heels with a leonine grace that matched his own.

He stayed the dogs with a negligent flick of one hand, then pushed open the study door and leaned against the frame, wondering just how long his cousin would pretend not to notice that he was there.

Her pen continued to scratch its way across the ledger for several minutes until a particularly violent
t
-crossing left an ugly splotch of ink on the page. Sighing with defeat, she glared at him over the top of her wire-rimmed spectacles. “I can see that Napoleon failed to teach you any manners at all.”

“On the contrary,” Sterling replied with a lazy smile. “I taught him a thing or two. They’re saying that he abdicated after Waterloo just to get away from me.”

“Now that you’re back in London, I might consider joining him in exile.”

As Sterling crossed the room, his cousin held herself as rigid as a dressmaker’s dummy. Oddly enough, Diana was probably the only woman in London who did not seem out of place behind the leather-and-mahogany-appointed splendor of the desk. As always, she eschewed the pale pastels and virginal whites favored by the current crop of belles for the stately hues of forest green and wine. Her dark hair was drawn back in a simple chignon that accentuated the elegance of her widow’s peak.

“Please don’t sulk, cousin dear,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “I can bear the world’s censure, but yours cuts me to the heart.”

“It might if you had one.” She tilted her face to receive his kiss, her stern mouth softening. “I heard you came back over a week ago. I suppose you’ve been staying with that rascal Thane again.”

Ignoring the leather wing chair in front of the desk, Sterling came around and propped one hip on the corner nearest his cousin. “He’s never quite forgiven you for swearing off your engagement, you know. He claims you broke his heart and cast cruel aspersions upon his character.”

Although Diana took care to keep her voice carefully neutral, a hint of color rose in her cheeks. “My problem wasn’t with your friend’s character. It was his lack of it.”

“Yet in all these years, neither one of you has ever married. I’ve always found that rather … curious.”

Diana drew off her spectacles, leveling a frosty gaze at him. “I’d rather live without a man than marry a boy.” As if realizing she’d revealed too much, she slipped her spectacles back on and busied herself with wiping the excess ink from the nib of her pen. “I’m certain that even Thane’s escapades must pale in comparison with your own. I hear you’ve been back in London long enough to have fought four duels, added the family fortunes of three unfortunate young bucks to your winnings, and broken an assortment of hearts.”

Sterling gave her a reproachful look. “When will you learn not to listen to unkind gossip? I only winged two fellows, won the ancestral home of another, and bruised a single heart, which turned out to be far less innocent than I’d been led to believe.”

Diana shook her head. “Any woman foolish enough to entrust her heart into your hands gets no more than she deserves.”

“You may mock me if you like, but now that the war is over, I’ve every intention of beginning my search for a bride in earnest.”

“That bit of news will warm the heart of every ambitious belle and matchmaking mama in the city. So tell me, what brought on this sudden yearning for home and hearth?”

“I’ll soon be requiring an heir, and unlike dear old Uncle Granville, God rest his black soul, I’ve no intention of purchasing one.”

A bone-chilling growl swelled through the room, almost as if Sterling’s mention of his uncle had invoked some unearthly presence. He peered
over the top of the desk to find the mastiffs peering beneath it, their tails quivering at attention.

Diana slowly leaned back in her chair to reveal the dainty white cat curled in her lap.

Sterling scowled. “Shouldn’t that be in the barns? You know I can’t abide the creatures.”

Giving Sterling a feline smile of her own, Diana stroked the cat beneath its fluffy chin. “Yes, I know.”

Sterling sighed. “Down, Caliban. Down, Cerberus.” As the dogs slunk over to the hearth rug to pout, he gave his cousin an exasperated look. “I don’t know why I bothered going off to war to fight the French when I could have stayed here and fought with you.”

In truth, they both knew why he’d gone.

It hadn’t taken Sterling long to discover why his uncle wasn’t averse to a show of spirit in a lad. It was because the old wretch took such brutal pleasure in caning it out of him. Sterling had stoically endured his uncle’s attempts to mold him into the next duke until he’d reached the age of seventeen and, like his father before him, shot up eight inches in as many months.

Sterling would never forget the cold winter night he had turned and ripped the cane from his uncle’s gnarled hands. The old man had quailed before him, waiting for the blows to begin falling.

He still couldn’t say whether it was contempt for his uncle or for himself that had driven him to snap the cane in two, hurl it at his uncle’s feet, and walk away. The old man had never laid a hand on
him again. A few short months later, Sterling had left Devonbrooke Hall, rejecting the grand tour his uncle had planned in favor of a ten-year tour of Napoleon’s battlefields. His stellar military career was punctuated by frequent visits to London, during which he played as hard as he had fought.

“You might consider coming home to stay,” Diana said. “My father’s been dead for over six years now.”

Sterling shook his head, his smile laced with regret. “Some ghosts can never be laid to rest.”

“As well I know,” she replied, her eyes distant.

His uncle had never once caned her. As a female, she wasn’t worthy of even that much of his attention.

Sterling reached for her hand, but she was already drawing a folded, cream-colored piece of stationery from beneath the blotter. “This came in the post over four months ago. I would have had it forwarded to your regiment, but …” Her graceful shrug spoke volumes.