Royally Ever After

All in hopes of this.

A title.

And of all the men, all the well-behaved, eager-to-please men, she had to fall in love with him.

“Very well,” he said, nodding. “No hard feelings. But it’s damned inconvenient, Barbara. You might have told me sooner.”

“So that you could have courted someone else.”

“Of course. I had a list.” He drank, then refilled the glass. “My aunts made it. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“Gad, I thought I told you everything. So easy to talk to.”

That’s what she’d thought, too: He was so easy to talk to—though of course nobody in Little Etford would believe that.

“After we’d learned precisely how my sire had left matters, my aunts compiled a list of suitable females,” he said. He set down the glass, pushed some of the bottles out of his way—leaving one teetering near the table’s edge—and with one long index finger he made as though to write on the stained table. “Here is Miss So and So, the daughter of a Brighton jeweler. Fifty thousand pounds. Here is Miss This and That, the daughter of a physician. Seventy-five thousand. Ah, here is Miss Findley. Two hundred thousand. Let me at her, I said. Let me at Miss Findley. I don’t care if she’s snaggle-toothed, squinty, and flatulent.”

“I know it wasn’t easy for you,” she said.

He shrugged. “Men go to war and chance having their heads blown off. All I had to do was find a rich girl to wed. Not a problem. I’ve never been squeamish.”

“Yet it must have hurt your pride to be obliged to come to a provincial nothing of a place, to a public assembly, no less,” she said. She’d ached for him, for what it must have cost such a man to be forced by circumstances to stoop so low.

“It hurt my brain,” he said. “I felt as though I’d traveled to Madagascar or Outer Mongolia, to observe the quaint customs of the natives. I was all amazed to hear you speak English . . . of a sort.”

Was that what she’d seen in his face when he’d been introduced to her? Amazement? Was that what had made his dark eyes warm and had softened the taut set of his mouth into a hint of a smile?

“But there you were,” he said. “Three and twenty, with such a fortune, and still unwed. Impossible, thought I. The chit must have a wooden leg. Or perhaps she runs mad at odd times, and howls at the full moon. But there you were.”

He turned away to stare into the fire. “There you were.” He shook his head. “And here you are. Why?”

It was easier to talk to the back of his head than to look into those midnight eyes. “I owed you an explanation, as you said.”

“You explained sufficiently,” he said. “I’m destitute, not stupid. I’ve worked it out. I mowed you down, like the Juggernaut. Sorry about that. I was in a panic, you see. Couldn’t let you get away. But you did. You got away.” Still without turning he waved the wine glass, and wine sloshed over the rim. He didn’t seem to notice. His big shoulders slumped. “Go away now, Miss Findley,” he muttered. “I’m growing maudlin, and that’s a mood best enjoyed in solitude.”

“Yes, I’m going,” she said. Her eyes filled, and she blinked hard. She had to swallow hard, too, to go on. “It’s stupid, I know, but I wanted us to be in love, you see. Like the queen and her prince. Royal marriages are always arranged. It’s politics and money and power and alliances. They never marry for love, do they? But I thought, if she didn’t have to settle for less, why should an ordinary woman, who hadn’t a single drop of blue blood in her veins? That’s what I thought.”

She waited.

She heard a sound. It was faint but unmistakable.

He was snoring.

She started toward him, and put her hand out, to touch his head, wishing she could make go away all the trouble he carried in there. But she couldn’t. She drew her hand back and went out, closing the door quietly behind her.

9 February 1840

Nine o’clock in the morning

The road was slick and muddy after the rain, but he’d ridden like a madman through yesterday’s storm. Why not ride madly now?

He rode on, toward the house.

I wanted us to be in love.

He didn’t remember stumbling to bed but he must have done, because he’d woken this morning in the bedchamber he’d hired. The first thing he noticed was the silence, the end of the rain’s drumming. And the second thing was his aching head and her voice in it—saying something about the queen and her prince and wanting to be in love.

He’d told himself he dreamed it, and he was a maudlin imbecile for dreaming it, and he’d dressed and set out for London. He’d traveled a few paces along the stretch of the Old North Road past the entrance to the Swan’s stable yard. Then he’d turned his horse in the other direction, like a moonstruck boy, to chase a dream.

Halfway to the house, reason gained the upper hand.

Wasn’t that drunken display enough?

How much more pathetic do you want to look?

He drew his horse to a halt, and was preparing to turn when he heard approaching hoof beats.

At first he saw nobody, but the hoof beats grew louder, and a moment later, the horse and rider came round the turning.

He recognized the cloak streaming out behind her, the handsome green cloak that enhanced her delicate skin tone and deepened the green of her eyes.

He recognized the ease and grace with which she rode, and her headlong pace—the way she did everything, it seemed: bursting into a room, telling him he was drunk, refusing to tiptoe about his poverty, mocking his high-handed ways.

But I do love you, he should have said. How could I help it? How could you not see?

He saw the bird swoop down, aiming, probably, for some tiny creature scurrying in the ditch. Her mare shied and reared, and everything inside him froze. A heartbeat later, he was in motion, racing toward her, but not fast enough. He saw her struggle to control her mount, but something else—a slippery patch of ground, or some other distraction nearby—panicked the creature. He watched helplessly as it reared again, throwing Barbara down. Then he couldn’t breathe.

An eternity later he was dismounting, then sinking into the muddy road beside her crumpled form. He caught her up in his arms. Her head sagged against his forearm. Her face was white.

“No,” he said. “No.” He pulled her close, burying her face against his heart, a great lump of fear in his chest.

She must wake up. The longer she remained unconscious, the greater the danger. Or was it too late? Was she breathing? He put his fingers to her neck, to her wrist, but his hands were shaking. He couldn’t tell if what he felt was a pulse or his own trembling.

“You must wake up,” he said in the dictatorial tones she would have labeled fee, fie, foe, fum. “I won’t have any of this . . . swooning. I won’t—drat you, Barbara, you must wake up.”

She lay so still in his arms. “Listen to me,” he said. “I was so drunk last night I could hardly see straight. I wasn’t sure, this morning, whether I’d dreamed you. Were you talking about love, or did I dream it? I must have dreamed it, because you couldn’t be so thick not to have known.”

He shook her a little, but he daren’t do more, not knowing whether she’d broken anything. “You must wake up. I came to tell you—and if you don’t wake up, you’ll never know, because you’re shockingly obtuse. How could you not see? If I didn’t love you, would I care whether you’d be happy, married to me? Of course not. I’m the Juggernaut. I would have browbeaten you and overwhelmed you and seduced you into changing your mind again, and I’d keep you seduced until I got the ring on your finger. But no. I had to be a hero. I had to want you to be happy, infatuated sapskull that I am, even if it meant losing you.”

He pulled her closer. “Dammit, Barbara. Say something. Do something.”

He heard a sound. He eased his grip a little and looked down at her, not sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.

Snoring.

She turned in his arms and smiled u

p at him.

“You wretched female,” he said.

“You were going on so well, I hated to interrupt,” she said.

He made a harrumphing sound. “Then you’re unhurt?”

“I had the wind knocked out of me for a moment,” she said.

“You’d better let me check for injuries,” he said.

“I promise you, I’m no more than a little bruised,” she said.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He proceeded to examine her so thoroughly, his big hands moving over every inch of her body, that she went hot all over.

Then he hauled her to her feet, dragged her up against him, bent his head and kissed her, slowly and with the same single-minded determination he’d applied to courting her. He worked his way from a chaste meeting of lips to something not at all chaste, that had the blood pounding through her veins and stirred up, low in her belly, a hot impatience for something she had no name for.

When at last he drew away, she was limp and nearly sick with wanting.

“Oh, my goodness,” she managed to say, in a strange, hoarse voice she barely recognized as hers. “If you’d done that before, I never should have jilted you.”

“I know,” he said. “But it would have been unsporting.”

“I thought my feelings were not returned,” she said. “I couldn’t bear the idea of a lifetime of being the only one in the marriage who was in love. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and all I could think of was you riding away, and I’d never see you again, and how wretched I should be. And so I came to tell you that I didn’t care if I was the one who did all the loving—and—and that I rescinded everything I said in that stupid letter.”

“And I rescind all my heroic self-sacrifice,” he said.