Trapped at the Altar (2 page)

“There are times, Ari, when I'd happily wring your neck,” he declared, kicking a stone out of the path before sitting down on a large rock.

“You and half the valley,” she returned, looking back down the track to the peaceful scene below. “The elders are ready to burn me at the stake.”

He gave a short crack of laughter. “Not that, exactly, but I wouldn't put it past them to lock you up and starve you into submission.”

She shrugged slim shoulders beneath a thin white shirt through which the tones of her skin showed delicately pink. “They wouldn't succeed.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed, lifting his face to the sun, letting it graze his closed eyelids. “But they're mad as fire, Ariadne, and they don't understand why, now, you're refusing to honor the betrothal.”

“I give that for their anger.” She snapped her fingers contemptuously. “I'll not marry you, Ivor. There's no point in discussing it.”

Ivor sighed. Ariadne was as stubborn as a mule and always had been. But in this situation, all the obstinacy of a team of mules would not win the day for her. “You may now own half the valley, dear girl, but you are still subject to your grandfather's will. Our marriage was willed by Lord Daunt before his death . . . for God's sake, you agreed to the betrothal just a few days ago. Your grandfather's will is sacrosanct; you know that as well as I do. You have lived by Daunt rules all your life. The elders will make the wedding happen one way or another.”

“Forcible marriage is illegal in the laws of the land.”

“In name, maybe, but not in practice. You have a duty to obey your grandfather's will, and here in the valley that is the law. Since when,” he added, “did Daunt and Chalfont obey any laws but their own?”

“I'll run away.”

“How? You have no money, no means of travel. You
would never get past the guards on horseback, and you could not bring Sphinx up this goat track. He would break a leg for sure.”

“You could help me.” She didn't look at him as she said this.

“No,” he stated. “I could not. I would not if I could.”

“You could refuse to marry me.”

“No,” he repeated. “I could not. I would not if I could.”

Ariadne made no response, but a small sigh escaped her, and a little shiver ran across her shoulders. It wasn't as if she had expected anything else. Ivor had much to gain from the marriage. If only her grandfather had not died so suddenly, just the day after the betrothal. With more time, she knew she could have persuaded him to release her from the engagement. She had always been able to win him over in the end, but it always took time and patience, and she'd agreed to the betrothal to buy herself that time. And then death had just crept in that night and taken him. His servant had found him dead in his bed, when the previous evening he had been hale and hearty, presiding over the Council meeting in his usual sharp and incisive fashion, celebrating his granddaughter's betrothal with some of the finest wines in his cellar. Wines destined for the cellars of West Country gentry, liberated in the dark of the moon by Daunt raiders from the smugglers' trains of pack mules going about their deliveries in the narrow Cornish lanes.

Ivor leaned across and took her hands from her lap, holding them in a tight grip. “Face it, Ari. Accept it. We
will be married this day week. As soon as Lord Daunt is in his grave, we will be wed.”

Her gray eyes held his deep blue ones in a fierce stare as she tried to free her hands. “You know that I love someone else, Ivor. I
cannot
marry you. It would be dishonest.”

He dropped her hands with a laugh as mirthless as before. “That's rich, Ari, coming from one whose entire existence is based on deceit, on thievery, on piracy. Truth and morality mean nothing here in this valley. You were born into this life of dishonesty and trickery. We mock the laws of men and discount the imperatives of ownership. We take what we want, whether it's ours or not. I will take you to wife, Ariadne Daunt. Your grandfather has willed it; my family has agreed to it. It is for us to unite the two families. You belong to me, not to that
poet
of yours, scribbling his nonsensical verse in the houses of the gentry.”

Ari's gray eyes burned with an anger all the more fierce for being impotent. She knew she could not win this argument or, indeed, run from the bitter truth behind it. “The Daunts are of lineage as ancient and proud as any in the counties of Somerset, Devon, or Cornwall,” she retorted. “And my dower will be sufficient to overcome any minor moral scruples. Gabriel's family will welcome me as a daughter; he has assured me of that.”

Ivor shook his head. “I wouldn't be so certain. For one, do you really think your family elders would pay your dowry to the Fawcetts? Just hand it over, meek and mild, with their blessings on their precious niece? I had never thought you naïve, Ari.”

Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them away. “Just leave me alone, Ivor. Go back down. I'm climbing to the top.”

He hesitated, then decided that she was best left alone for the moment. Maybe she was going to meet her precious poet and maybe she wasn't. But she would not run away. Ari would never run when fighting was an option. She was a Daunt, born and bred.

He got up from his rock, dusting off his hands. “Very well. But you are expected at Council this evening before the feast for your grandfather's wake. Make sure you're there. We will both regret it if I have to come and find you.”

There was something about his tone, an authority he had never used with her before, that shook her. Realization slowly dawned. “They have made you my guardian?” It was barely a question; she knew the answer.

“Yes,” Ivor answered curtly. “Your grandfather is dead. Who better to watch over you than your future husband? I will see you at Council.” He turned from her and began the long scramble back to the valley.

Ariadne exhaled slowly. She shouldn't have expected anything else. She knew the ways of the Daunt world—knew them but didn't have to accept them. She watched Ivor's retreating back. He was her friend, but she could never accept him as her governor. Her grandfather's death had released her from the family's control; she would not relinquish that independence now.

Rising, she turned her face to the cliff top, climbing steadily until she reached the tufted grass above, sprinkled
with daisies and the occasional pink. Grazing sheep ignored her unorthodox arrival in their midst, and a few cows regarded her with lazy bovine stares as she shook down her homespun skirt and kicked dirt from her shoes before starting across the field to a small spinney at the far side.

Gabriel Fawcett stood among the trees in the spinney, watching as Ariadne came across the field towards him. He held a small nosegay of late-summer roses from his mother's garden and felt the customary surge of blood, the swift pounding of his heart, as she drew closer. Sometimes he wondered how it was physically possible for one body to contain so much passion, so much lust and love, as he felt for this girl. Ariadne Daunt was out of his experience, almost magical in her difference from anyone he had ever met before. She was not of his world, and sometimes he thought she was not of
this
world at all. But he knew that she was very much of
this
world. The very name of Daunt brought dread to all who heard it.

It had not always been so. They were one of the oldest families in Somerset and one of the wealthiest in both estates and fortune, until Charles I had lost his head and Oliver Cromwell's Protestant Commonwealth had ruled the land with a dour fist. The Catholic Daunt family had raised their standard for King Charles and lost everything back on that cold January day in 1649 when the King had been beheaded. They had barely escaped with their lives, and they had been revenged ever since
upon all who they thought had betrayed them, on erstwhile friends and neighbors, indeed, on anyone who had bowed their heads beneath Cromwell's yoke.

Outlaws, they had created their own land and their own laws in a valley of the River Wye, a place easily fortified and defended. And when it pleased them to create mayhem across the usually peaceful countryside, they did so. They terrorized the seaports of Devon and Cornwall, piracy and even the vile business of wrecking were not beneath them, and they amassed a fortune rumored to rival that of any of the great landed families of the realm.

And Gabriel Fawcett had fallen in love and lust with Lady Ariadne Daunt, the scion of one of the oldest and now the most loathed family in the West Country. And to his eternal astonishment, the lady loved him in return. It was an impossible match, an impossible relationship, and yet it
was.
An immutable, all-consuming fact, and as he watched her now, her light step springing across the mossy ground, her skirt hitched up to reveal slender ankles, her lovely long feet clad only in a pair of light slippers, he knew he would die for her if he had to.

He took a step out of the trees, and Ari saw him at once. She raised a hand in greeting and ran towards him, burying herself in his embrace. She felt the swift beat of his heart against her ear as she placed her head on his chest and inhaled the fresh rosemary scent of his linen.

“Oh, how I have missed you,” she murmured. “It has been such a dreadful time, Gabriel. I don't know where to turn.”

He tilted her face and kissed her, his mouth hungry
for the taste of her. The nosegay was crushed between them, but he didn't even notice the thorn pricking his finger as he held her tightly against him. At last, his hold slackened, and she drew herself upright. Her body was tiny, seemingly fragile, but he could feel the strength and suppleness of her form as she stood so close to him. And he could see the deep shadows lurking in the usually clear gray eyes, the lines of strain around her wide, generous mouth.

“What has happened, my love?”

Ariadne took a step away from him. It was easier to keep her thoughts straight when she wasn't within the circle of his arms. “My grandfather, Lord Daunt, died three days ago.”

He frowned, unsure how to respond. Ari had rarely spoken of her grandfather, her guardian since her father's death ten years ago. Indeed, she almost never spoke of her life in the valley.

“What does that mean for you?” he asked hesitantly.

She gave him a twisted smile. “It means, my dear, that I am to marry my second cousin, Ivor Chalfont, as a way of uniting the fortunes of the two families and finally ending the enmity between Chalfonts and Daunts . . . as if such a thing was ever a realistic possibility,” she added bitterly. “The two branches of the family have loathed each other since before the Crusades.”

An exaggeration, perhaps, she reflected, but it might just as well have been true given the depths of their hatred and rivalry.

“I . . . I don't understand.” Gabriel's eyes had an almost
hunted look as he gazed at her in shocked bemusement. The crushed roses slipped from his hand, and without thinking, he sucked at the bead of blood on his forefinger where the thorn had pricked him.

Ari bent to pick up one of the roses, a small white bud that had somehow escaped the massacre. She said dully, “Ivor grew up in the valley. We played together as children. We were betrothed first as infants and then formally a few days ago, as part of this plan to unite our two families.” She hesitated. Talking about her family never came easily to her, and she had tried instinctively to keep Gabriel untouched by her own history, as if in some way it would keep their love free of the taint of the valley.

But what did it matter now? After a moment, she continued, “Daunts are Catholic, Chalfonts are Protestant. My grandfather decided that if the two factions were joined as one tribe, then they would present a strong force to handle whichever political and religious faction finally ruled. The greater good of the united tribe would overcome individual family differences.” Her laugh was short and bitter. “So someone has to be sacrificed to this greater good, and that seems to be me.”

Gabriel shook his head as if to untangle his confusion. “But what of this . . . this cousin . . . Ivor? Is he not also to be sacrificed?”

She pushed the rosebud into a buttonhole on her shirt and said, “No, apparently, Ivor does not consider himself to be a sacrifice. He appears to find the idea a good one. It will benefit him, of course.” By marrying the heiress to the ill-gotten Daunt fortune, Ivor would become rich.
But was that what motivated him? Somehow Ariadne didn't think it was as simple as that. Ivor had never been particularly predictable, and he rarely followed a simple path. It was one of the things she liked most about him. It had always made him a fun and exciting playmate in their childhood. She had never thought about what kind of husband he would make; the fact of that childhood betrothal hadn't impinged upon her thoughts until the last two weeks, when it had become a concrete reality. But by then, she had met Gabriel Fawcett, and she had looked at the world beyond the valley, and that concrete reality had become an impossible one.