The Pleasure of Your Kiss (41 page)
The vicar opened his prayer book and cleared his throat. He had just opened his mouth as well when the double doors at the back of the room came flying open and Ashton Burke came striding into the drawing room.
A
s Max’s fingers convulsed around hers in a painful squeeze, Clarinda’s blissful numbness vanished in a flash. Her heart leapt in her chest, then lurched into a thundering rhythm. She pressed the hand gripping the bouquet just below her breasts, wishing she hadn’t ordered her maid to lace her corset quite so tightly just so she could squeeze into the bronze silk taffeta. Spots began to dance in front of her eyes, and for a minute she thought she might actually do something so ridiculous as swoon.
Ash’s coat was unbuttoned and the collar of his shirt laid open to reveal the broad, tanned column of his throat. He was in desperate want of both a shave and a haircut. He couldn’t have looked any more disreputable had he just swaggered down the gangplank of a pirate ship.
Clarinda’s father rose, brandishing his walking stick. “What in the devil is
he
doing here?”
“That’s precisely what I’d like to know,” Max said evenly as Ash came to a halt in the middle of the aisle halfway to the altar.
“I can’t blame you for being upset, sir,” Ash said, lifting a placating hand to Clarinda’s father. “After the grief I’ve caused your daughter, I’m sure you’d like nothing more than to summon your gamekeeper and have me shot. If I were you, I’d feel exactly the same way. Why, I’ll probably shoot any man who dares to lay a finger on my Charlotte before she turns five-and-twenty … no, make it five-and-thirty.”
“Who’s Charlotte?” Luca asked, frowning in confusion.
“My daughter,” Ash replied. “
Our
daughter. The daughter Clarinda and I are going to have after we’re married.”
“She’s not marrying you,” Max said, looking as if he’d be more than happy to shoot Ash himself. “She’s marrying me.”
“That’s right,” Clarinda said, drawing herself up to her full height and giving Ash her haughtiest look. “I’m not marrying you. I’m marrying him.”
“I was a bloody fool for not trying to stop your last wedding. If you think I’m going to just stand idly by while you marry my brother, then you’re a bigger fool than I was.”
It was the duke’s turn to surge to his feet. “Cease this nonsense immediately, Ashton. You’re embarrassing yourself! And your entire family!” He shook his head in disgust. “Not that there’s anything new about that.”
Ash faced his father. “I’m sorry, Your Grace. I know this will come as a shock to you, but for once I’m trying to do the honorable thing. I’m afraid Miss Cardew has no choice in the matter. I’ve already compromised her. Twice. Well, actually four times if you count that night in the desert.” He turned to give Clarinda a lazy smile that made her toes curl in her slippers. “Or should I say four and a half?”
The duchess gasped aloud.
“Oh, hello, Mother,” Ash said fondly. “You’re looking quite lovely in your finery.”
“Why, you … ” Max started forward with a growl.
Clarinda grabbed his arm and held on with all of her strength, forcing him to stop or drag her down the aisle behind him.
She barely recognized this Max. His handsome face was set in savage lines, his upper lip curled in a feral snarl. “It took me nine long years to woo her. To convince her she deserved a home, a husband, children of her own. Do you think you can just come marching in here and destroy all of that? The same way you almost destroyed her?”
“I’m sorry, Max,” Ash said, all traces of mockery disappearing from his face and voice. “It was never my intention to hurt her. Or you. Believe it or not, I loved you both.”
Max raked a hand through his hair, a despairing bark of laughter escaping him. “I suppose I have only myself to blame for this. I was desperate and naïve enough to believe I could bring you back into her life without you smashing it into smithereens. Sometimes I wish like hell your ship had sunk after you came back here the first time!”
As Ash went dangerously still, Clarinda felt her heart go numb all over again. Her hands slid from Max’s arm.
If there’s anything Max excels at, it’s keeping secrets.
You’ve always done exactly what was necessary to get the job done. It’s not what you do, it’s who you are.
Secrets and lies.
Clarinda had told Ash there had been too many of them. She just hadn’t realized how many.
“You saw me that day? The day before Clarinda was supposed to wed Darby? You knew I had returned for her yet you did nothing? Said nothing?” Ash shook his head in stunned disbelief. “Why, you coldhearted son of a—” He started toward Max, his hands balled into fists.
Before he could reach his brother, Clarinda drew back her arm and slapped Max full across the face. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the stunned silence.
Max slowly lifted his hand, touching his fingers to the vivid print she had left on his cheek.
“How could you?” she whispered, trembling with outrage and anguish as she relived all of the wasted years in that one moment. “You knew what he meant to me. You were the only one who
truly
knew.”
Max lifted a hand as if to touch her hair, then slowly lowered it. His gray eyes were shadowed with a pain that had nothing to do with her blow. “I did it because I loved you. Because I had loved you long before he had. If he was worthy of you, he would have made you his wife before taking you to his bed. That’s what I would have done. Even if you wouldn’t marry me because I would always be nothing more to you than a reminder of him, I was convinced you’d be better off with Dewey than with him.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make!” she shouted. “It was mine!”
“I realize that now. I realized it even then. But by the time I came to my senses, it was too late. Ash was gone and Dewey and the baby were dead. I knew I could never tell you what I’d done or you’d despise me forever. I’d spent my entire life trying to do the right thing, yet in one blinding fit of jealousy, I did something so terribly wrong that it’s haunted me ever since then.”
“Is that why you turned against me after I came back from Eton?” Ash asked, still breathing hard. “Because you were
jealous
?”
Max’s smile held little humor. “Ironic, isn’t it? I had the title and our father’s favor, but once I saw the two of you together, I knew you would always have the only thing I ever truly wanted—Clarinda’s love.” Max gazed down at her for a long moment, then slowly turned away, his every movement heavy with regret. Despite his obvious defeat, he still couldn’t resist giving his brother a mutinous look. “You’ll never be good enough to deserve her, you know.”
“God doesn’t always give you what you deserve,” Ash said quietly. “Sometimes he gives you what you can’t live without.”
As Ash’s words sang through her heart like birdsong in the spring, Clarinda reached up to dash a tear from her cheek.
A gentleman to the bitter end, Max gave them all a stiff bow before turning and striding down the aisle. Although he probably would have liked nothing more than to slam the drawing room door, he gently pulled it shut behind him instead. After waiting a polite moment, Yasmin went slinking out of the room after him, no doubt hoping he would need a shoulder, or perhaps a pair of ample bosoms, to cry upon.
Ash swept his gaze over the room. “Well, we have a vicar, guests, and a bride. It seems all we’re lacking is a groom.”
“Are you volunteering yourself for the position, Captain?” Clarinda asked primly. “I heard a rumor that you’d recently become unemployed.”
Moving closer to her, Ash lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “This may be my only chance to catch you between fiancés. And besides, where am I going to find a corpulent sodomite as pretty as you?”
Clarinda lifted her chin. They were standing in front of several witnesses. She was wearing her finest bronze silk taffeta, the one that made her eyes glow like emeralds. This was the perfect chance to give him the cut direct. To tell him to go to the devil and mean it.
Instead she said, “If I marry you, I’ll never be a lady, you know.”
“Fortunately for you, I happen to prefer bourgeois little hoydens.”
With that tender declaration of his undying love, Ash snatched her into his arms and kissed her as if it were both their first and their last kiss. As the kiss went on and on, the vicar nervously cleared his throat, plainly fearing Ash was going to compromise her for the fifth time right there in front of them all.
According to the scandal sheets, after notorious adventurer Captain Sir Ashton Burke rescued wealthy shipping heiress Clarinda Cardew from the lurid depravity of a Moroccan harem, he refused the extravagant fortune her father tried to bestow upon him, insisting the only reward he would accept was her hand in marriage. They were not wed in the drawing room of her father’s mansion but in a snow-draped meadow beneath the spreading boughs of an old oak tree. The future Mrs. Burke wore bronze silk taffeta and an ermine-trimmed cloak while the captain wore the biggest grin of his life.
They named their first daughter Charlotte.
M
aximillian Burke was a very bad man.
He watched a tendril of smoke rise from the mouth of the pistol in his hand, trying to figure out exactly when he had embraced the role of villain in the farce his life had become. He had always been the honorable one, the dependable one, the one who chose each step he took with the utmost care to avoid even the possibility of a stumble. He had spent his entire life striving to be the son every father would be proud to claim and the man any mother would want her daughter to marry.
At least that’s what everyone believed.
It was his younger brother, Ashton, who had gone around getting into brawls, challenging drunken loudmouths to duels, and facing the occasional firing squad. But now Ash was comfortably settled in their ancestral home of Dryden Hall with his adoring wife and their chattering moppet of a daughter. A daughter who had her mother’s flaxen hair and laughing green eyes.
Maximillian briefly closed his eyes, as if by doing so he could blot out the image.
While Ash enjoyed the domestic bliss that should have been Max’s with the woman Max had loved for most of his life, Max stood in a chilly Hyde Park meadow at dawn, his boots coated with wet grass and the man he had just shot groaning on the ground twenty paces away.
He had little doubt Ash would have laughed at his predicament, even if it had been a drunken slur cast on Max’s sister-in-law’s good name that had prompted it.
Max could not seem to remember that Clarinda’s honor was no longer his to defend.
When he opened his gray eyes, they were as steely as flints. “Get up and stop whining, you fool!” he told the man still writhing about on the grass. “The wound isn’t mortal. I only winged your shoulder.”
Clutching his upper arm in bloodstained fingers, the young swell eyed Max reproachfully, his ragged sniff making Max fear he was about to burst into tears. “You needn’t be so unkind, my lord. It still hurts like the devil.”
Blowing out an impatient sigh, Max handed the pistol to the East India Company lieutenant he had bullied into being his second and stalked across the grass to help the wounded man to his feet, gentling his grip with tremendous effort. “It’s going to hurt more if you lie there whimpering until a constable comes to toss us both into Newgate for the crime of dueling. It will probably fester in that filth and you’ll lose the arm altogether.”
Max was only too relieved to hand the wounded fellow off to the man’s white-faced second and the hovering surgeon. Resting his hands on his hips, Max watched them load the lad into a carriage.
He had to confess, there was something almost liberating about relinquishing his heroic mantle. When you were a villain, no one looked at you askance if you drank too much or neglected to tie your cravat in a flawless bow. No one whispered behind a hand if it had been three days since your last shave. Max ruefully stroked the stubble on his jaw, remembering a time when he would have fired his valet for letting him appear in public in such a disreputable state.
Since resigning from the board of the East India Company, he was no longer forced to make painfully polite conversation with those who sought his favor. Nor did he have to suffer fools graciously, if not gladly. Instead, everyone scurried out of his way to avoid the caustic lash of his tongue and the contempt smoldering in his smoky gray eyes. They had no way of knowing his contempt wasn’t for them, but for the man he had become, the man he had always secretly been.
If he hadn’t been so deep in his cups when he had overheard his unfortunate dueling opponent loudly tell his friends that legendary adventurer Ashton Burke had married a sultan’s whore, he would have never challenged the silly git to a duel. What the boy really needed was a sound thrashing before being sent to bed without supper.
Shaking his head in disgust, Max turned on his heel and went striding toward his own carriage. He needed to get out of London before he killed someone. Most likely himself.
The lieutenant hurried back across the grass to retrieve the pistol and return it to its mahogany case before trotting after him. “M-m-my lord?” he asked, a stammer betraying his nervousness. “W-where are you going?”
“Probably hell,” Max snapped without breaking his stride. “All that remains to be seen is how long it will take me to get there.”