How to Wed a Baron (10 page)

“Why do you think you're still alive, Your Highness? Much as I know you hadn't planned it this way, you've actually unwittingly given me something to hope for, to live for. Or, I should say,
someone.
”

Justin held open the door to allow the Prince Regent to exit ahead of him, but the man stopped just at the threshold, his gaze on the assembled guests in the larger room, his complexion paling this time rather than flushing. “Wait. You didn't answer me. I admit I didn't consider the young lady in all of this, the possible danger to her. But you will protect, you've said as much. Now will you be bringing the gel here to London? That was the arrangement. To bring her here, present her to me, use the special license I managed for you. I didn't mean what I said. And then all will be forgiven, yes?”

Justin wondered how and when the prince would get back to the subject that most concerned him—after the worry over where his not-always-loyal subjects might put his sliced-off tongue before they buried him.

“I thank you, sir, but in point of fact I prefer to handle arranging my own nuptials. There will be ample time to visit London in the spring, during the season. For now, I should think my soon-to-be wife and I will adjourn to my estate and get to know each other. Oh, dear, wait a moment. Now you're frowning again, aren't you? That rascal Wilde, you're thinking, he's making a muddle of everything. I'm supposed to have my fiancée make her curtsy to you tomorrow night at Covent Garden, when that fierce-looking gentleman in the uniform of the Austrian
high command isn't present, as he is tonight. Shame, shame on me.”

“You already saw him? But you came into the room and headed straight to me. Like Doomsday, you know, no matter how you smiled.”

“Men who labored as I did don't survive long if they fail to enlarge their powers of observation. Yes, I saw him.
Inhaber
Jarmil Novak, and your guest. Allow me, please, to hazard a guess—he is Francis's new Minister of Trade, and simply delighted to be on our shores, although probably not because of any fervor to encourage England's importation of fine Austrian cheeses. He has to know without having been told that he's been sent here to eliminate the last of the Valentin's, never thinking that it is he who is to die. I was wondering how you'd bring us all together.”

“So damned smug, figuring it all out. Aren't you clever? You're not amusing, Wilde. Not at all.”

“Unforgivable of me, I'm sure. And yet I will persevere. He arrived with quite a surprisingly large retinue, didn't he? Big, strapping fellows, part of his own private regiment? You have all the makings of a splendid entertainment, and all of it to take place here in London, where you can watch it unfold. You really should thank King Francis. He has no idea how solving his problem for him has become your personal delight. Too bad that the lady and I won't be obliging you.”

“Wilde, wait! Don't you dare to turn your back on me. We have an agreement. I can still destroy you. I can snap you in two the way I snapped George when he dared to ridicule me, so that you'll never be able to show your face in London society again. Worse, I still could order you tried for murdering poor Robbie Farber, and have you hanged.”

The guests closest to them heard most of what had been said, and were doing their best to pretend that they hadn't, even as they, collectively, all leaned in closer, as if they were on a ship that had begun listing to starboard.

As long as he would be the subject of gossip all over Mayfair by tomorrow, as long as he was so determinedly burning his bridges, Justin thought he might as well give them all something more to natter about over their morning chocolate.

“Why, Your Royal Highness,” he said, shock in his every word, “are you saying that your signature is not your bond, your word not your oath? Can it be that your personally signed pardon, bestowed upon me only after I had gratefully and without question poured fifty thousand pounds into your private coffers, means nothing if you say it means nothing?”

“With those words, you have just nullified your pardon and forfeited your life,” the Prince Regent whispered fiercely.

“Possibly, sir. Probably. But not the lady's. You might wish to warn
Inhaber
Novak of that fact, if
not alert him to the target on his own back. Even on yours, if the lady is harmed. You and your new friend Francis played your game poorly, Highness, as I've already seen your cards. You will see mine only as I lay them out. But trust me on this. Mine are better. Oh, one thing more about the way I play the game. You were a lucky man tonight, as I very rarely bluff. I won't do it again.”

Justin turned on his heels and strode out of the large reception room, feeling every eye on his back, with two particular sets of those eyes boring straight into it.

Riding clothes and his mount were both waiting for him at his town house, and he was changed and in the saddle within a quarter hour. He probably would not see London again in his lifetime, and for some reason this fact did not bother him. After so many years of longing for this city, this country, he could find no love in his heart for either.

He would not have believed this possible, only two short days ago. But that was before he saw a pair of frightened golden eyes looking to him for answers and reassurance. He'd been handed a gift, a way to do penance for so many crimes, so many mistakes.

Justin Wilde may have failed himself over the years, damned his own soul any number of times…but he would not fail her.

T
HE GIGGLES DREW HIM.
Young, unaffected. The joy of life being enjoyed. He'd laughed like that, he was sure. Long ago. A lifetime ago.

He'd spent another day and a half in the saddle, riding across country, backtracking, until he was convinced he wasn't being followed, that his destination was known to him and only to him. Because the last damned thing he'd ever do would be to bring the hell following him down on his friends.

Justin Wilde had done a lot of stupid things in the course of his two and thirty years. If he were to apply to his friends for a list, the length of it might surprise even him. But threatening the life of the heir to the throne of England had been the topper. That step, once taken, was impossible to correct, even if he'd wanted to, and he didn't.

Because he'd never felt more free, even with the full might of England out to find him, jail him, execute him.

He was tired, filthy dirty thanks to the road dust, and more than slightly damp due to the early-
afternoon rain, when he slid off his horse in the stable yard of his good friend Rafe Daughtry. Too dirty to present himself at the front door of Ashurst Hall, he'd planned to enter through the kitchens and sneak up to his assigned room, where Wigglesworth could render one of his miracles and make him human again.

But that was before he'd heard the giggles.

Alina. The woman he'd thought of night and day since the moment he'd first seen her on the docks in Portsmouth. The woman he'd dreamed of last night as he slept beneath the hedgerows. The woman who could never really be his.

Damn. He'd never before recognized this streak of melodrama he seemed to possess. He'd have to stop thinking like some lovesick swain and remember who he was. And the danger that followed him.

One of Justin's own outriders had been lounging on a bale of hay, using a single stick of that hay to pick at his teeth. He didn't bother to rise until he belatedly realized that the ragtag rider was his always immaculately groomed employer. He hastened to assist him with his mount, noticing that Justin's gaze was on the open door to the stables.

“Lady Alina, my lord,” he offered without being asked. “Sounds like music, don't it? But I'm keepin' one eye on her, yes, I am. We all are, my lord. She just don't like stickin' in one place too long, she says.”

“And what is she doing?”

“Don't know, my lord. I was told to watch, not to look.”

“Very good. I'll see for myself.”

Brushing at the front of his jacket with his gloved hands, Justin left the sunshine of the stable yard for the cool stable, pausing just inside it until his eyes became accustomed to the darker interior. Rafe kept a fine stable, stalls lining it in both directions, the whole of it built into the side of a hill, so that hay and other supplies could be moved by cart, directly into the upper floor of the vast structure.

As Justin stood there, a few bits of hay came drifting down from the wooden plank ceiling above him.

And he heard another giggle.

A man could get very disturbing ideas, hearing a woman's giggle coming from a hayloft.

He turned to the man, who was kicking at the dirt just outside the doorway, as if there was some invisible line he dared not cross. “She's alone?”

“Oh, yes, my lord. Came back from her ride and went on in there, and didn't come back out.”

“Thank you. What's your name?”

“Willis, sir. Did I do somethin' wrong?”

“No, Willis, you did not. Protecting the Lady Alina is paramount, but I will take it from here now. You may return to your post.”

Justin headed for the ladder that wasn't much more than a series of foot-wide slats hammered onto one of the beams, marveling that a woman in a riding skirt would attempt let alone manage the vertical climb. Lady Alina, it would appear, was a young woman who went where she wished to go, when she wished to go there, no matter the difficulty.

He supposed, if he thought about it, he could come to at least two other conclusions. The young woman in question was fairly fearless. And the young woman was probably more than slightly reckless. A prudent man would store all three conclusions away for future reference.

He removed his hat and flung it on the hard-packed dirt floor, as nothing much could be done to the hat than hadn't already been accomplished by the rain and the fact that he'd used it for a pillow as he slept beneath the hedgerows last night, before pulling himself up to the floor of the loft.

Following the giggles, he soon located Lady Alina in a small walled-off area of the large loft. She was lying on her back in the soft, fragrant straw.

And she was covered in kittens.

At the moment, she was holding up one of the furry black-and-white balls of fur and then bringing it down to her face, nuzzling the lucky thing nose to nose, as its littermates—Justin counted at least six of them—variously snuggled against her side
or climbing over her as if she were some mighty Gulliver and they were the inquisitive Lilliputians.

The mother cat, that had obviously accepted the intruder, wasn't quite as certain of Justin's appearance, and strutted over to him, her tail high, her back slightly arched. “Put a scratch in these boots, Mother, and there will be no saving you from Wigglesworth's wrath,” he warned, and Lady Alina immediately sat up, looking at him with those wide, golden eyes.

He'd surprised her, surely. But she didn't look shocked. On the contrary, she appeared to be pleased.

Or he was weary enough to allow wishful thinking to cloud his heretofore clear judgment.

Her pins had fallen out of her hair. Ebony curls tumbled all around her head and shoulders. Sunlight streaming in through a barred window shone on her emerald-green riding habit and touched on her slightly reddened cheeks as she quickly put down the kitten and began buttoning up her jacket, for several of the buttons had slipped their moorings as she played with the frisky litter.

Justin caught a glimpse of snow-white skin and the soft curve of a breast above a silk chemise.

He swallowed like a schoolboy.

“You're here,” she said unnecessarily as she began pulling bits of hay from her curls.

“Your powers of observation are astounding, Alina, if a trifle belated. Still, I couldn't be more
delighted with my welcome,” he told her, striving to get himself back under control, appear nonchalant while all he wished to do was take her in his arms and hold on tight to the best thing to have happened to him. Instead, he bent to pick up the kitten Alina had been playing with and brought it to his face. “Lucky little man, aren't you?” he said before carefully putting it back down in front of its worried mother.

“Do you always sneak up on people unannounced?” Alina asked as he held out a hand to assist her. She ignored it, and got to her feet unaided. She began working at her hair, tugging loose more bits of hay.

“Your pardon, I'm sure. Clearly I should have had Willis announce me. He could beat on a drum, or perhaps crash some cymbals? Here, don't do that, you're only making more tangles. Let me play at lady's maid.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then lowered her arms and nodded. “At least you look worse than I do,” she said as if that made everything all right. “Wigglesworth told me you are always impeccable. Clearly I should not believe all that Wigglesworth tells me.”

“I wouldn't believe the half of it,” Justin told her as he fought the impulse to thread his fingers through her hair. Her soft, silky, wonderfully warm hair. “I vastly overpay the fellow.”

If he just slipped his hands into the soft curls at either side of that sweet little face, and then gently drew her toward him, then he might kiss that full pink mouth, taste her sweetness once more, lose his wickedness in her innocence…

“What are you looking at? Do I have dirt on my nose?”

Justin pulled his mind from foolish fantasies and stepped away from her. “No,” he said shortly. “Are you ready to return to the house? I've a great need for a bath and a change of clothes before I find our hosts and thank them for their kindness in taking care of you while I was gone.”

She gave a rather imperious toss of her head, marred only by the sort of snorting
hrummph
that accompanied the gesture. “You make it sound as if I'm some infant and need taking care of. Which I don't, thank you. I'm quite out of charity with you at the moment. And if Brutus hadn't gotten in the way, I would have shot that man.”

As she attempted to rush past him, Justin grabbed at her elbow and spun her around to face him. “Would you mind repeating that last little bit, kitten?”

Alina pulled her arm free of his grasp. “Don't call me that, even though I'm certain you think it's charming. You think
you're
charming. Wigglesworth insists that you're charming. Is it charming, my lord, to go riding off, leaving me in a strange land, sur
rounded by strangers, and having Luka shot into the bargain?”

Justin's blood froze in his veins. “Luka has been shot?”

“Yes, and my best traveling ensemble has been destroyed. Not that anything so trivial is so important as Luka being shot. But if you'd not had us riding all over this silly island while you did some flit as if you couldn't stand being with me—with us all a moment longer, instead of taking us to London, as you were supposed to do, then we wouldn't have been accosted by highwaymen intent on stealing my cloak. I shouldn't have flaunted it on the dock, granted, because that was horribly stupid of me now that I've had time to reflect on the thing. But still, it's mostly all your fault.”

Justin's head was spinning, a circumstance that he felt no need to apologize for, as the woman could have been speaking a language he didn't understand for all the sense he could make of her words. He decided the cloak and the silly island could be disregarded as superfluous to the point for the moment, and instead concentrated on the words
Luka shot
and
highwaymen.

“You were accosted by highwaymen on the way here, and Luka was shot?”

She looked at him in wide-eyed exasperation. “Didn't I already
say
that? Yes, we were accosted by highwaymen, and Luka was shot. And then I
ended up in the mud and Brutus scooped me up and all but threw me back into the coach. For a man who doesn't speak, he can certainly make his point extremely clear.”

Justin relaxed, but only slightly. She was clearly safe, and the major's wound couldn't have proved fatal, or else she wouldn't have been out here, giggling with kittens. “I find myself powerless to resist asking, kitten. How did you end up in the mud?”

“That isn't important to the point,” she told him, shifting her gaze away from him. “Luka wants to see you as soon as you've returned. He is very put out with you.”

“It would appear he's not the only one. Alina, I had to leave. But I could only leave if I believed that you would be safe until my return, which you most obviously were. But you think I was running away from you and our…arrangement. Don't you?”

“No, of course not. Don't flatter yourself. I don't even know you. I could not care a drop why you left.”

She lied badly, and Justin's heart lifted with delight.

He put a bent finger beneath her chin to hold her in place, so that she had no choice but to meet his gaze. “Ah, but I care what you think of me. We have an adventure ahead of us, Alina. I need you to feel able to trust me. Without question, without hesitation.”

“I don't understand. Are you speaking of our marriage?”

“There will be no marriage, kitten. I wouldn't so abuse you as to saddle you with a fugitive for a husband.”

She blinked, but then looked at him rather intensely. “A fugitive from what? No, now you're lying to me. You're an English nobleman. You are your king's choice for my husband. Of course we're going to marry, it's all arranged. You're making no sense.”

Why couldn't he have left this for later? Why couldn't he simply continue to enjoy this moment, this unexpected interlude?

He knew the answer. The more he was with her, the more he would miss her when he had to go.

There was no good place to start, no easy way to say so much that had to be said. And no time to say it all, damn it. He may have avoided the king's men on his way to Ashurst Hall, but the
Inhaber
's men, those Alina had believed to be highwaymen, had to have followed them from Portsmouth. Someone was watching, and that someone had seen him ride into the stable yard, and word was undoubtedly already on its way to London and
Inhaber
Novak.

“We have to leave,” Justin said, taking her hand and leading her toward the ladder. “Tomorrow morning at dawn, no later. There will be time for explanations once I have you somewhere safe.”

He descended the ladder first, and then helped guide her down until she was standing in front of him once more. “I feel safe where I am, thank you. Charlotte has been everything that is kind, and Rafe apologized most profusely about the highwaymen, who he says have been a problem these past few months. I feel eminently safe here, thank you, except perhaps not quite so much now that you're here, too. You really are a very strange man, you know. Are you really a fugitive?”

Justin picked up his hat and offered Alina his arm. “So, from your question, I take it that trusting me implicitly is not under consideration?”

“Without question or hesitation I believe I can say yes, that's correct,” Alina told him as they walked toward the house. “And I will add that this supposed marriage of convenience we both agreed to has been very much less than convenient since the moment I first saw you preening on the dock.”

“I wasn't preening,” Justin objected, laughing. “I was standing there awestruck, as I was supposed to do, my considerable consequence totally eclipsed by my affianced wife, whom I'd supposed to be fat and with a hairy chin, when I thought of her at all.”