My Notorious Gentleman (30 page)
She wiped a fleck of dried blood off his face with
the pad of her thumb. “You can rest now, my warrior,” she whispered. “You’ve
done your duty. Now let me take you home.”
His eyes misted at the beauty of those words. He
shut them and held her closer. Did she have any idea, he wondered, how much he
needed her?
For the first time since the war’s end, he began to
think that maybe he wouldn’t have to hide at all. At least not with her. He
cupped her sweet head against his chest, still marveling that she didn’t run
from him after all she’d seen him do. When she sighed with contentment in his
embrace, nestling against him, he held on to her a little more tightly, rather
like a shipwrecked man clinging to a solid rock in a cold, stormy sea.
It was so strange after the savagery of this night
to be flooded with tenderness. From love to hate and back again, from darkness
into light.
“You’re a beacon in the night to me, Grace,” he
whispered. “Never change. You’ve given me more than you will ever know.”
A place to belong.
“I’ll always be here for you, Trevor. I love you.”
She glanced up and met his gaze in artless honesty. “With all my heart, I love
you,” she repeated, as if she knew how much his scarred soul needed to hear
it.
Trevor held his breath, then he said the words he
had never thought he’d be able to say, because he wouldn’t lie. “I love you,
Grace. So very much, my darling.” He bowed his head to claim her lips and kissed
her with a tenderness that blazed in him in equal measure as his fury did when
it came to protecting what he loved.
This woman most of all. His woman. All he wanted as
her lips yielded beneath his kiss was to take her home and lay her down.
She must have sensed the onslaught of the passion
gathering in his blood, for she ended the kiss and pulled back with a knowing
little smile. Flirtation sparkled in her eyes. “Ahem.” She cleared her throat
and glanced around at the soldiers milling about, minding their prisoners.
“So I trust you’ve got this spot of bother sorted
out, then?” she asked in a businesslike tone, smoothing his lapels.
“I have,” he answered in wary amusement, vastly
reassured by the arch humor in her voice.
“Well done, then. In truth, I expected no less,”
she said with a brisk nod. “That’s our Lord Trevor. Do something well and
thoroughly or not at all.”
Trevor was bemused. He furrowed his brow and shook
his head, studying her. No tears? No fainting? So soon she found the ability to
joke with him? He really was impressed. “You handled yourself well back
there.”
“Only because you were beside me.” She shrugged. “I
knew you’d rescue us. It’s what you
do.
”
He stared at her. “Grace, that’s the biggest
compliment you could ever pay me. Thank you. I mean it.”
“Well, it’s true. You’re like a great stone pillar
that holds up the sky, Lord Trevor Montgomery. You and your fellow agents.
Strong. Solid,” she added, giving his biceps a playful squeeze. “I’m proud to
call such a man my own. Shocked about it, really. Wallflower like me.”
“Wallflower?” he exclaimed, finally relaxing enough
to tease her back. “From what
I
hear, you are the
new scarlet woman of the village.”
“Yes, but only for you.”
“Ow,” he said when she pressed up onto tiptoes and
kissed him on the jaw where he had been punched several times earlier this
evening.
“Oh, you poor thing! Come with me,” she ordered.
“Time to clean up all your mean old bumps and bruises.” She took his hand,
tugging him along as if he were one of the Nelcott children with a scraped knee.
“I trust Sergeant Parker can manage things from here.”
“Grace, you don’t have to baby me.”
“Excuse me, you’re mine, and I can do whatever I
please with you,” she shot back, casting him a deliciously wicked half smile
over her shoulder.
It startled him. “Well!” he said, pleasantly
surprised. “If you put it that way.” And he went with her most willingly.
“Parker!” he called. “You’re in charge here! I’ve got to, er, take care of
something at home.”
“If we make it that far,” she whispered under her
breath.
Parker sent him an amiable wave. Lord knew the man
had plenty of experience in sweeping up the aftermath of the Order agents’ many
dangerous quests.
Frankly, they couldn’t do it without him. But
Trevor put all the bloody business of this night out of his mind, focusing his
attention on the alluring prospect of spending the hours until dawn with his
fiancée. He yelled to Parker that he was taking one of the horses, then he
helped Grace mount up and swung into the saddle behind her.
As he took the reins, steadying her against his
body, he had visions of tumbling the luscious creature straight into his bed.
One place where he would quite enjoy receiving a hero’s welcome.
Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get home.
“Ready?” he murmured, sliding one arm around her
waist.
“For anything,” she vowed. “As long as we’re
together.”
“That, my love, is a given,” he whispered at her
ear. She laid her head back happily on his shoulder. Then Trevor urged the horse
into motion, and they went cantering off together down the moonlight-silvered
road.
Six Weeks Later
“G
race, hurry up, we need to go! Darling, I know you’re feeling queasy, but you’re going to miss the biggest wedding Thistleton’s ever seen. Come on, sweeting. Callie will be a wreck without you.”
“You did this to me,” she replied as she stepped out from behind the corner screen after being sick again, as she did most mornings these days.
Not that she minded one bit, in truth.
If marrying Trevor had been a dream come true, then having his baby, a child of her own to love at last, was worlds beyond any joy she ever could have envisioned.
Let the morning sickness come.
But today, she really wanted to feel at least somewhat human, so she accepted the tepid ginger tea he’d brought her and took a sip. He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and felt her forehead to see if she was feverish though, of course, she wasn’t.
“All right. I’m ready to go.”
“That’s my girl. I love you,” he added, bending to give her a boyish kiss on her cheek.
“In sickness and in health, eh?”
“Always.” He kissed her hand, then tugged her along. “Hurry. You look beautiful,” he added when she lingered before the mirror.
Gazing at herself in the glass, Grace saw a woman transformed by the changes in her body, and indeed, in her life. She was glowing. Then from the corner of her eye, she noticed Trevor watching her, arrested.
“Radiant,” he whispered. “Absolutely luscious, and all mine.”
She cast him a tremulous smile.
“Now stop dawdling,” he ordered, grabbing her hand. He tugged her toward the door and outside, past all the reconstruction work under way inside the house.
This morning, Papa would be marrying George and Callie, and the festivities were sure to last for days to come. But it was just as well that Grace’s morning sickness delayed their exit from the Grange, for if they had left on time, they would have missed the messenger who came galloping up the drive.
“Lord Trevor Montgomery?” the courier called.
“Yes?” he answered, as they walked outside.
“Delivery for you, sir!”
“Good timing.” Trevor took the letter and quickly paid for it.
“Who’s it from?” Grace asked, as he helped her up into his finest carriage, newly brought down from London.
“The Beauchamps.” Joining her in the coach, he absently ordered Nelson to stay but told his coachman to hurry. At last, they were on their way to the wedding. Trevor cracked the waxen seal and unfolded the letter.
She waited while he skimmed a few lines in curiosity.
“Are they back in London?”
“No, this came all the way from France. They’re still on holiday.”
“It must be rather urgent. What’s the big news?”
Trevor lowered the letter with a stunned look. “Why, that sneaky old Scot! I can’t believe it. He always said he had no family . . .”
“What is it?” Grace touched his arm and looked at him in concern. “Not bad news, I hope?”
“No, no. Nothing like that . . .” He shook his head to clear it. “Seems Beau caught a whiff of information in Paris and decided to follow the trail.”
“But he’s on holiday!”
“Once a spy, my love,” he said absently. “And I’m sure Carissa insisted on ‘helping.’ ”
“Aha,” she murmured. “So what did he find out? Or can’t you tell me?”
“Well, confidentially—it’s about our old Scottish handler, Virgil Banks.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve mentioned him before. How he was like a father to you all, and how difficult it was for you when he was murdered.” The grim subject took some of the glow out of the day before them.
“Well, as it turns out, the old Scot was even more of a mystery than we suspected.” He shook his head in wonder. “I can’t believe he never told us!”
“Told you what?” she exclaimed impatiently.
He shook his head in wonder. “Virgil had a daughter.”
Grace frowned, seeing that his full attention had gone off on this astonishing news. She plucked the letter out of his hand. “No spy business today!”
“But you don’t understand. We never knew he had any family!”
“Husband, we are on our way to a wedding! This is a day for love, not intrigue. Please?”
He paused, then smiled ruefully. “You’re right.” As stunned as he was by the news, he did his best to put it aside and drew her into his arms. “I want everyone in the world to be as happy as we are.”
“Even Callie and George,” she agreed.
“Now that they’re both ready.” When he looked at her, she saw the love and husbandly concern in his gray-blue eyes and felt her heart lift again. “You all right?” he murmured.
“Never better,” she whispered, giving way to a warm smile, which he reflected back to her.
Then he bent his head and kissed her, and once more, the day, indeed, their entire future glowed.
As long as they were one.
L
overs of nineteenth-century literature may recognize Grace Kenwood, the heroine of this story, as an homage to those most famous of preacher’s daughters: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. The Reverend George Austen was the vicar of Steventon and Deane in Hampshire for more than thirty years, while the Reverend Patrick Brontë, born in County Down, Ireland, became the Anglican incumbent at Haworth in Yorkshire in 1820 and served there till his death in 1861.
Another research topic that I thought readers might like to know more about is the massive eruption of Mount Tambora, which turned 1816 into the infamous “year without a summer.” Located in Indonesia along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” mighty Mount Tambora was a fourteen-thousand-foot-high mountain before it woke up from its five-thousand-year nap to spew columns of ash and steam some twenty-six miles into the stratosphere.
It was this great height to which the ash cloud flew that enabled it to spread so effectively, encircling the globe. Veiling the sun, it dropped global temperatures an average of five degrees Fahrenheit over the next year or so, until it finally dispersed.
The volume of material that Tambora blasted into the atmosphere is hard to imagine. It is estimated to have been 10 times greater than Italy’s Mt. Vesuvius (which buried Pompeii) and 150 times greater than the Mt. Saint Helens’ eruption of 1980. Even Indonesia’s gigantic Krakatoa, which erupted in the 1880s, is estimated to have been the equivalent of twenty Hiroshima bombs going off simultaneously. Yet Mount Tambora was one order of magnitude on the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) greater than that!
Considering that it hit in April 1815, while the Congress of Vienna was under way on the other side of the world, it was spectacularly bad timing for war-weary Europe. The exhausted armies of both the Allies and the Napoleonic forces alike were finally marching home after twenty years of war. Economies and infrastructure were already in shambles when the ash clouds rolled in and killed the crops. For a still mostly agrarian world, where new, scientific agricultural “improvements” were only just being implemented by the more foresighted landlords, this spelled disaster not just for the human population but for the horses they relied on for transportation and for the farm animals that provided food. With dire Malthusian warnings of overpopulation and starvation ringing in their ears, the people of the nineteenth century wondered if the end of the world was at hand as they watched the snow fall in July and August.
In France, the wine grapes died on the vine, while in Germany, the skyrocketing cost of fuel (i.e. oats for horses) became such a problem than an enterprising nobleman and gentleman-inventor, Baron Karl von Drais, invented the first bicycle. “The Running Machine” (later dubbed the velocipede) didn’t have pedals or brakes: You sat on the equestrian-inspired saddle and pushed along the ground with your feet. Throughout the world, weird-colored sunsets were the norm. Across the Pond in President Madison’s America, pioneers whose crops had been ruined by the snows pushed farther west into the wilderness, hoping to find areas unaffected by the malfunctioning weather. Up in Canada, Quebec City got a foot of snow in the middle of June. Because of the food shortages, there were frequent riots and looting in many places, and when populations are weakened by famine, they soon become vulnerable to disease. Eastern and Southern Europe were especially hard hit by typhus. It sounds like I’m describing the setting for a dystopian novel rather than the “glittering” Regency period, doesn’t it? But such is history. Personally, I find it encouraging in our uncertain times to hear about how our forebears dealt with times of severe adversity like the “year without a summer.”
Thanks again for reading, and I hope you’ll look for Nick’s story, the next (and final!) installment of the Inferno Club series, coming sometime next year.
Best wishes,
