“You can’t take my dog! He cost me—”
“You are an extremely tiresome man,” Ripley said. He looked about the inn yard. “Somebody make him go away.” He made a shooing motion in Bullard’s direction.
“That’s my bloody—”
Whatever else Bullard was going to say was cut off as two of the sturdier onlookers took hold of the brute and dragged him to a far corner of the yard.
Ripley turned back to Olympia. “If we take the dog, it’s your dog,” he said. “When I leave you at your aunt’s, I leave him. Is that clear? Once we take him, there is no mind-changing, because I am not going to abandon him on the road or find him another home or adopt him. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said, heart pounding. “Thank you for explaining it in simple terms, in case my girl brain was too small to grasp the implications.”
“Good,” he said.
He moved away to talk to Bullard, who was struggling with the men trying to hold him. A long debate followed, with Bullard’s voice rising in outrage then gradually subsiding to a grumble.
Not long thereafter, a servant emerged from the inn with blankets. He carried them to the boot and arranged them over the parcel containing her neatly wrapped wedding ensemble.
“Will that do, or shall we hire a separate carriage for your new pet?” Ripley said. “And a footman or two to look after him, perchance?”
“That will do,” Olympia said.
Ripley clicked his tongue and the lurcher looked at him, ears pricked. Ripley pointed to the crate. The dog jumped into it. He pushed the blankets with his paws and turned around a few times until all was arranged to his satisfaction. Then he settled down.
The dog had been well trained. Clearly the problem wasn’t the animal’s.
She glanced at Bullard, who stood, mouth open, looking from the dog to her to Ripley and back again.
“Get in the carriage,” Ripley said. “Now.”
Ripley watched her climb into the post chaise and settle into the seat in a flurry of lace and ribbons and bobbing flowers.
He gave one last glance about the courtyard to make sure Bullard wasn’t about to rush out at them and make a pest of himself. More of a pest of himself.
Then Ripley went to the boot and examined the dog. He detected two welts, but saw no blood. The swine hadn’t had time to get to serious whipping.
Ripley stroked the dog and made a few meaningless but comforting sounds, and the dog’s trembling abated.
“You’re one lucky fellow, I hope you realize,” Ripley said. “Your timing was excellent.”
The dog licked his gloved hand. “No drooling.” Ripley drew his hand away. “Even on these unspeakable gloves. And you are on no account to be sick on the way.”
There.
He was better now.
Ashmont’s duchess-to-be was alive and in one piece. Nobody had died. No blood had been shed, although Bullard would have many painful bruises as mementoes of the occasion.
In spite of agreeable thoughts like these, Ripley knew he would need some time to settle down after exerting so much self-control, to keep from beating Bullard to a bloody pulp.
Ripley took one last calming breath, left the dog, climbed into the carriage, and told the postilion to set out.
The vehicle had hardly begun to move and Ripley had hardly settled into the seat when Lady Olympia bounced up and threw her arms about him and said, “Oh, well done, indeed!”
Then she kissed him.
Chapter 6
She kissed him on the cheek because she was overwrought—or so Ripley’s brain, had it been working, would have told him.
Had this organ of intellect been in operation, it would have told him to push her off and say something like, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
His brain wasn’t working. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her on the lips, and not gently. He kissed her with all the anxiety, frustration, rage, and other annoying emotions he’d thought he’d finished with a moment ago. And with the simple lust he’d been fighting for what seemed like a very long time.
He felt her tense, and he was about to withdraw, but then her soft mouth was responding to his, and the taste of her was . . . different. Fresh and sweet and something else. He didn’t know what it was and didn’t care.
She had no idea how to kiss. He didn’t care about that, either. Her mouth was soft and full and tasted good. In any case, he knew how to kiss, and he didn’t doubt she was intelligent enough to catch on.
She melted into his arms and fit exactly as she ought to do, and for a moment he simply lost himself in the rush of excitement and relief and pleasure and other, more alien, feelings.
Then a dog barked, and the sound woke him from the mindless state he’d fallen into. He drew away—cautiously, because, his brain having belatedly begun normal operations, he knew he’d done something amazingly stupid. It made no sense to push her away when he was the one who’d turned an innocent peck on the cheek into something she’d never intended it to be.
“Damnation,” he said. “Did nobody ever tell you not to get too close to men who’ve been fighting only a minute before?”
“You kissed me!” she said, eyes very wide and possibly blue at the moment, though it was hard to be sure in the coach’s dim confines on a dim day.
“You kissed first,” he said.
“On the cheek!”
“On the cheek, on the lips. All the same to me. Female, kiss. Male, excited. Do I have to explain simple facts of life to you?”
“Some, yes, it seems,” she said. “I have six brothers, and I know about fighting. But I was—I don’t know what happened. You saved the dog! And . . . and he—Bullard, I mean—he thought I was a demirep!”
“I believe he won’t make that mistake again,” Ripley said. He couldn’t completely crush a prickling sense of frustration. It wasn’t much of a kiss, when you came down to it. And it seemed to him there ought to have been a good bit more since now there would be a lot of talking to get through and—gad, how could he be so stupidly stupid? Ashmont’s bride, of all women.
“No one’s ever made that mistake,” she said. “Who ever heard of a woman of ill repute in spectacles?”
“Why not?” he said. “They add an air of mystery.”
She stared at him.
He let her stare. He was trying desperately to find a way out of whatever it was he’d got himself into.
“It’s the dress,” she said at last. “I told you. This ensemble was never meant for a spinster.”
“You’re not a spinster,” he said. “You’re a bride-to-be.”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said. “Whose clothes were these meant to be?”
“How in blazes should I know?”
“A courtesan’s.” She smoothed the skirt lovingly. “Or a dashing widow’s. Mrs. Thorpe was certainly accommodating. From the way she spoke, I deduced she owed you a favor. Or a hundred.”
“The favor wasn’t my doing,” he said. “It was my sister’s.”
Had Her Grace of Blackwood attended the wedding, as she ought to have done, Ripley could have enlisted her to help him retrieve Lady Olympia, and the runaway bride would not have got as far as the garden gate.
But no, Alice had to be thirty miles away from London with Aunt Julia, for some as-yet-unexplained reason.
Blackwood hadn’t offered much information, but then, he and Ripley hadn’t had much conversation, had they? Nearly all the talk had been Ashmont talking about getting married.
To the woman Ripley had kissed a moment ago in an excessively enthusiastic manner.
“You’ve met her, no doubt,” he said. “She can be the damnedest—never mind. If you’ve met her, you know what she’s like.”
“Splendid raven tresses and green eyes,” Lady Olympia said. “I was shocked when I heard she was to marry Blackwood. I’d thought she had more intelligence than that.”
He’d thought so, too.
“You accepted Ashmon
t,” he said.