38
B
raden’s first thought, of course, was for Caroline. She must be got safely from the room, and at once.
But how? For the marquis did not look at all like a man with whom one might reason. Always impeccably dressed—to the point where he’d occasionally been accused of dandyism—the marquis was not looking his best at the moment. His heavily frilled cravat was loose, its snowy folds flecked with dirt—from scaling, Braden didn’t doubt, the back of his garden wall—and his breeches were equally as soiled. His golden hair stood wildly out from his head, and his blue eyes had an unfocused, irrational look about them.
He regarded the two of them with bright interest, however.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Isn’t this fascinating. Lady Caroline breaks off her engagement with me, then heads immediately for Braden Granville’s private home. Whatever, I wonder, can
that
mean?”
Caroline said, in a voice Braden was sure she meant to be reassuring, but which shook rather badly, “It doesn’t mean anything, Hurst. I was only telling Mr. Granville the truth about you and Jacquelyn. I felt he had a right to know.”
“But he already knows,” Slater said, pleasantly. “He broke it off with Jackie several nights ago.”
Caroline, Braden saw, swallowed, and glanced at him. He tried to reassure her with a rueful smile. “See?” he said, lightly. “I told you Jacquelyn and I were through.”
“Right,” Slater said. “Granville and Jackie are through. And so, it appears, are you and I, Caroline. Which brings me back to the original question. What are you doing here, Caroline?”
Braden cut off further attempts at conversation between the two by stepping neatly in front of Caroline. “That isn’t the question at all,” he said, coldly. “The real question is what are
you
doing here, Slater?”
The marquis, to Braden’s surprise, tossed back his head and let out a whoop of laughter. “Slater!” he cried. “Slater! Now, really, Granville. Is that polite? Is that the way a fellow addresses his betters? Certainly not. But then, I wouldn’t expect you to know that, seeing as how you have only just crawled up from the depths of the gutters. Allowances must be made for the underclasses, I suppose.”
Braden, wishing heartily he could get to his desk, where he kept a small-sized derringer in his top drawer, leaned back to say casually to Caroline, “His lordship seems to have a private matter to discuss with me. Why don’t you go and wait for me in the foyer?”
But even if Caroline had been inclined to leave— which, judging by the stubborn look on her face, she was not—Slater would not have allowed her to. He said, “I think not. Caroline, sit down in that chair there.”
But Caroline was not about to go anywhere—not even a chair to which she’d been directed by a madman holding the latest model Granville pistol.
“Hurst,” she said. “I know you’re upset about my canceling the wedding. But this is hardly the way to—”
She broke off, interrupted by Slater’s humorless guffaws.
“Isn’t it, though? Isn’t
this
the reason you’ve broken it off, my dear? Because you’ve fallen for this—” He sneered at Braden. “—scoundrel? No, wait, scoundrel’s too good a name for him.” And now he leveled a look at Braden Granville that might have frozen butter, it was so cold. “What do you call a man who steals another man’s bride?”
Braden decided to keep Slater talking. It would, he thought, give Caroline the best chance at a clean break for the door.
“I don’t know,” he said, politely. “What do you call a man who attempts to murder his fiancée’s brother?”
“That is a lie,” Hurst said. The indignation in his voice was thick. “A foul lie, meant to besmirch my noble name. But what else are we to expect from a man with so low a character as Braden Granville, except lies, lies, and more lies? You can’t trust scum from the Dials, Caroline.”
Caroline said, “Hurst, Tommy himself told me—”
“Told you what?” Hurst was holding his pistol, Braden saw, the way a man unused to firearms held a gun—not carefully enough. Every time he swung it in Braden’s direction, he had to resist an urge to duck. “ Caroline, you know perfectly well I never tried to hurt Tommy. I love Tommy. Wasn’t I the one who sat with him all those months he was ill? Read to him when he was unconscious, and we weren’t sure if he would wake? Wasn’t I the one who pulled him in off the street, where he might have lain bleeding to death, if I hadn’t come along?”
Braden saw those brown eyes he’d come to love flash with fire. “Oh, yes,” Caroline said, bitterly. “But he wouldn’t have been shot in the first place if you hadn’t taken him to that dreadful place—”
“I didn’t know,” Hurst insisted. “I tell you, Caroline, I swear I didn’t—”
“You’re lying.” Caroline’s sweet voice was hard. “You’re lying to me, the same way you lied to Tommy, and my mother, and everyone else I know. You’re nothing but a sneak and a liar, hiding under the guise of a nobleman, and I can’t believe how much time I wasted, thinking I loved you!”
It was at this point that Caroline might have made her break for the door. Slater seemed completely stunned by what she’d said. But to Braden’s utter chagrin, Caroline stayed where she was.
Still, the distraction she’d provided was all that Braden needed. A split second later, he had hurled himself at the marquis, both hands going for the pistol in his fingers.
The two men fell to the ground with a crash. Braden heard, but only distantly, Caroline scream. His whole being was centered on prying the gun from Slater’s fingers.
But for a man who prided himself on his lineage, Slater was not fighting with anything like what his ancestors would have called nobility. He was biting,
clawing
at Braden’s hands, trying desperately to knee him in the groin, elbow him in the throat . . . anything he could possibly do to throw him off.
Braden wouldn’t let go, however. It wasn’t just his life at stake. Had they been alone, he might have let go of the pistol for a moment, and shoved a fist into one orifice or another of Slater’s. But as it was, Caroline was still somewhere in the room. If he allowed Slater to pull that trigger, there was no telling where the bullet might go: harmlessly into the wall . . . or fatally into Caroline’s heart.
But that was another thing about the violently deranged: they could have the strength of ten men. Slater was obviously desperate, and desperate men were difficult to subdue. Every muscle in Braden’s body was shaking with the effort.
He would not give up, however. He could not. His life depended upon it.
And then, in spite of all his efforts—in spite of the finger he’d thrust behind the trigger, which Slater had kept pulling until it tore a gash in Braden’s skin—a shot went off, deafeningly loud.
Smoke filled the room. Miraculously, Braden felt Slater’s grip slacken, and for one panicked moment, he thought it was because he’d managed to fire a bullet into Caroline . . . especially since he heard no sound from her.
But then he realized that Slater had not released the gun because he’d managed to shoot anyone. No, he’d released it because someone had drilled a neat hole through his right hand, from which blood was gushing at an admirable rate, directly onto Braden’s Oriental rug.
And Slater, after babbling incoherently at the pain of this injury, promptly fainted, quite unnerved by the sight of his own blood.
A second later, Braden felt a soft weight collide with his chest, and suddenly, Caroline’s wildly beating heart lay over his.
“Braden,” she was crying, clinging to him in an embrace that was rather more of a choke hold than anything else. “Braden, are you all right? You’re bleeding!”
He
was
bleeding, he discovered, after taking stock of himself, but not from any serious injury. His finger, where Slater had gouged it by pulling on the trigger so many times, was cut nearly to the bone. And he appeared to have injured his lip, most likely from Slater worrying it with his teeth, something Braden did not in the least wish to discuss.
But other than that, he felt extraordinarily fit. He raised his uninjured hand to Caroline’s hair.
“Shhh,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m all right.”
Her sobbing subsided almost at once, and he was able to ask her, “But wherever did you find the pistol?”
“Over there,” Caroline said, pointing in the direction of his desktop, where she’d dropped the smoking derringer. “In a drawer. I looked everywhere—I knew you had to have one somewhere nearby—”
He smoothed her tumbled hair, unable to think how close he’d come to losing her—not just once, but three times, now.
“That was quite a shot you managed to pull off,” was all he said, however. “Especially for someone who claims to hate guns so much.”
Caroline lifted her tearstained face from his chest.
“I hate them,” she informed him, “but I never said I didn’t know how to use them.”
And while Braden was still digesting this piece of information, she added, “And I don’t care.”
He blinked at her, not having the faintest idea what she was talking about, and startled by her sudden vehemence.
“What you were saying before,” she said. “About how you’re an imposter, and don’t know the difference between a fish knife or a butter knife. I don’t care. I don’t care what knife you use. I love you, and I always will.”
And then—he didn’t know quite how it happened— she was kissing him the way she had that time in his carriage, when she’d wanted to know if she were doing it correctly.
And this time, just like that time, the answer was yes. Oh, yes. She was.
Braden felt something inside of him break as her lips moved with sweet hunger over his. And it wasn’t his heart, he realized, but the knot that had formed in his stomach since the moment he’d thought he lost her. It melted away, and he knew then that, different worlds or no, the two of them belonged together. And he would let no one part them ever again.
They were still kissing when the door to the library burst open, and the Earl of Bartlett, Crutch, and a limping Weasel came tumbling in.
“We thought we heard a—” Tommy came to a halt, stopped in his tracks by two sights that were, each in their own way, equally astonishing: an unconscious and bleeding Marquis of Winchilsea, and his own sister in the arms of Braden Granville.
“Well,” the Earl of Bartlett said, after a moment. “Ma’s sure to have an apoplexy now.”
Epilogue
T
hey were playing badminton in Braden Granville’s back garden.
Not badminton the way it was supposed to be played, either, but a new version, devised by Caroline. Still played with rackets, birdies, and a net, the only difference, really, between regular badminton and Caroline’s version was that instead of losing a point when a serve was missed, the offender had to remove an article of clothing.
The only problem, Caroline was discovering, was that certain players enjoyed losing a bit too much.
“Now that was an easy one,” she said, of a serve she was convinced Braden had missed on purpose. He had not, in fact, so much as raised his racket in the birdie’s direction.
Braden, who’d already lost his shoes and shirt, now began to lower his trousers. “Shame on me,” he said.
“Don’t think,” Caroline informed him severely, “that just because you’re naked, I shan’t continue to play.”
He eyed her through the net, tied between two slender poles not far from the enormous padded swing upon which they’d spent many leisurely hours. She had lost her shoes and gown, and now stood in the dappled sunlight in only her corset and pantaloons, a most delightful sight.
But perhaps most delightful of all was the fact that she was, at long last, his wife.
“I thought,” he said, having shed his breeches, “that when one or the other of the players lost all of his or her clothing, the game was over.”
“Not,” Caroline said, loftily, “if he or she has purposefully missed serves. Now, really, Braden, you’ve got to
try.
Otherwise, it isn’t the least entertaining.”
She stepped back to serve, and Braden, quite enchanted by the manner in which her rosy nipples rose up out of the cups of her corset whenever she raised her arms, shot an arm out beneath the net, seized hold of her, and half carried, half dragged her over to his side of the impromptu court, where he unceremoniously deposited her in the grass, then dropped down between her legs, and began to examine the bow which held her pantaloons together.
“On the contrary,” he said, pleasantly, as he gave the silk ribbon a tug. “I am prodigiously entertained.”
Caroline, not quite as put out by his unsportsmanlike behavior as she pretended, studied the pattern the leaves and branches overhead made against the cloudless blue sky. “If I had known,” she informed him, “what a poor loser you were, I would never have insisted on playing.”
“What?” Braden asked, as he examined the soft flesh he had uncovered. “And let Emmy’s wedding present go to waste?”
“The badminton set
is
the most useful thing we’ve been given,” Caroline observed. “Did you see the silver soup tureen from the Prince of Wales? Whatever are we to do with it? It’s big enough to swim in.”
Braden’s only response was a grunt. This was because he had buried his head between Caroline’s thighs, where he was conducting a thorough exploration with his lips and tongue.
“I suppose,” Caroline said, a bit breathlessly, after a very short time, “that I oughtn’t to complain, however. It’s astonishing that anyone gave us anything at all, when you consider how we eloped, and . . . well, everything that came before that.”
Braden lifted his head, and regarded her with a wry expression from between her knees. “I realize that after a month of marriage, most wives are well acquainted with, and perhaps even bored by, their husband’s lovemaking techniques, so perhaps you’d like me to stop what I’m doing so that you can continue to chatter about wedding gifts?”
Caroline, whose heart had begun to beat a bit unsteadily, sighed. “Oh,” she said, closing her eyes. “No. Please carry on.”
Braden did so, with a good deal of relish.
Later, luxuriating in their mutually satiated state, it was Caroline who first lifted her head from the grass and asked, “Did you hear something?”
“I did not.” Braden, tracing lazy circles with his fingertip-along his wife’s bare hip, contemplated all the places where she had become tanned during their two weeks honeymooning in Lugeria. It was quite something, he was discovering, having a wife. Even better, a wife who never complained about the sun—or he was discovering, much of anything, for that matter. Except, perhaps, his business. But that was something he’d been working in secret to rectify.
“I’m telling you—” Caroline began to crawl about, gathering up her clothes. “—someone’s here.”
“Impossible,” Braden said. He folded his fingers behind his head and stared up into the cloudless summer sky. “I sent everyone to the races with explicit instructions that they were not to return until after dark. It’s probably only the neighbors, and they can’t see us. The walls are much too high.”
And then, bursting through the French doors at the back of the house, waving a newspaper and an envelope festooned with a good deal of ribbon, came his father.
“Braden?” Sylvester Granville called. “Braden, my boy, where are you?”
Caroline, struggling into her gown, hissed, “Oh, Braden, do get up! What if he sees you?”
Braden watched her frantic wriggling, finding it quite charming, despite the circumstances. “What if he does? I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s my property, and you’re my wife. I assure you that for once in my life, my behavior is well within the parameters of the law.”
But to appease her, he rose, stepped casually into his trousers, and pulled them up.
“Ah, there you are,” Sylvester said, hurrying up to them a few seconds later. “Enjoying the lovely weather, I see.”
“Quite,” Braden said mildly. “And what are you doing home so early? I thought you and Lady Bartlett were attending that concert in the park. . . .”
“Oh, we were, we were.” Sylvester looked worried. “But unfortunately we ran into Lady Jacquelyn and that new beau of hers, Lord Whitcomb, and would you believe that Lady Jacquelyn
cut
your mother, Caroline? Cut her dead!”
Caroline, who’d come to stand beside her husband, sighed. “Oh, dear. Poor Ma.”
“Shocking behavior,” Sylvester continued, sadly, “ especially coming from a duke’s daughter. One might expect better behavior from a lady of her distinguished background. Still, it was good of her not to sue you for breach of promise, Braden. She might have, you know, and been well within her rights.” Sylvester grinned at them, and wagged a chastising finger. “Lucky for you she found solace so quickly with Lord Whitcomb. I understand the two of them will be exchanging vows next month. Quite a nice match, I must say, even if his lordship
is
a bit old for her. . . . But the marquis! Oh, my, have you heard about the marquis? Why, he was so devastated, I understand he decamped for America. America, of all places!”
“Lady Bartlett, Pa,” Braden said, trying to steer his father from the topic of Hurst. “Is she unwell, then?”
Sylvester looked surprised. “Oh, didn’t I say so? No, no, she asked me if I’d mind terribly leaving the concert early. Lady Jacquelyn’s behavior quite shocked her, and she went home to rest. Your mother is terribly delicate, you know, Caroline. Why, I don’t believe she’s yet recovered from the shock of your elopement. . . .”
Caroline, Braden noticed, was beginning to look distressed. While her brother wholeheartedly supported their marriage, Lady Bartlett had not welcomed the news with as much enthusiasm. Even when Hurst’s duplicity—and Braden Granville’s role in putting a stop to it—had been revealed to her, she could not find it in her heart to forgive Caroline—not for choosing Braden over the marquis, but for eloping: Lady Bartlett was crushed that the Worth wedding dress would now never have occasion to be worn.
Seeing his wife’s troubled look, Braden held out his arm. She moved quickly into his embrace, slipping an arm around his bare waist. He smiled down at her, and laid a kiss upon the top of her sun-warmed head.
While Lady Bartlett had been let in on the reason behind the Marquis of Winchilsea’s mysterious decampment to America—that faced with The Duke’s incarceration, and Braden’s threat of certain death if he ever showed his face in London again, he had chosen a clime less hostile—Sylvester Granville had not, primarily because Braden preferred to shield his father from things that would, he knew, only worry him unduly.
“But look,” Sylvester cried, “look what I have here, Braden. This might make Lady Bartlett feel a bit better, I would think!” He held up the copy of the
Times
he’d been clutching beneath his arm.
Caroline noticed it first, and gasped as she stepped forward to seize the paper from her father-in-law’s hands.
“Braden,” she cried. “What is this?” Then she read aloud from the sporting section: “ ‘From Granville Enterprises, a surprise: not a new style of pistol, but a handsome and yet fully functional bridle. A significant improvement over the bearing rein, this harness, with its relaxed bit, allows the animal free movement of his head, without sacrificing driver control.’” Caroline, flabbergasted, turned wide eyes upon him. “Braden!” she cried. “When did you do this?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “Some time ago, actually,” he said. “That night after we all saw
Faust . . .
I couldn’t sleep, and I kept remembering your face when you saw the duchess’s bearing reins—”
Caroline, shaking her head with wonder, read on. “It says here that the Prince of Wales has ordered a gross of them for his stables!”
“Prince of Wales,” Braden muttered, rolling his eyes.
“I’m so proud of you,” Caroline said, her eyes shining in the sun as she returned to his side to hug him again. “I knew you could invent something that was actually useful.”
“Thank you,” Braden said, wryly, “for the crumbs from your table, Mrs. Granville.”
“But that isn’t all,” Sylvester Granville broke in, excitedly. “What do you think was being delivered as I came up the steps to the house, my boy? What do you think?”
Caroline looked at the brightly sealed envelope. “What is it?”
“His letter,” Sylvester said, proudly. “Braden’s letter of patent from the queen. She’s offering him a baronetcy because of his contributions to the science of firearms. My boy—your husband, my dear—” Sylvester Granville puffed out his chest. “—is going to be a lord!”
Caroline looked up at Braden with shining eyes.
“But he already is,” she said, with a smile.
“My
lord, anyway.”