The Mad Earl's Bride (Scoundrels 3.50)

“Look sharp now,” she called to him. “I’m going to throw it.”

“You’ll fall in, you stupid—”

She flung the rope. He grabbed . . . and missed. And swore profusely.

Gwendolyn quickly drew it back and tried again.

On the fifth try, he caught it.

“Try to hold on with both hands,” she said. “And don’t try to help us. Pretend you’re a log. Keep as still as you can.”

She knew that was very difficult. It was instinctive to struggle when one was sinking. But he would sink faster if he fought the mire, and the deeper he was, the harder it would be to pull him out. Even here, where it was safe, the soggy ground was barely walkable. Her boots sank into mud up to the ankles. Isis, too, must contend with the mud, as well as her master’s weight, and the powerful mire dragging him down.

Still, they would do it, Gwendolyn assured herself. She looped the reins through one hand and grasped the stirrup strap and rope with the other.

Then she turned the mare so that she’d be moving sideways from the bog, and started her on the first cautious steps of rescue. “Slowly, Isis,” she murmured. “I know you want to hurry—so do I—but we cannot risk wrenching his arms from their sockets.”

HE COLLAPSED AS soon as he escaped the mire, but Gwendolyn had to leave him while she returned to the bridle path with Isis. Though the horse had been good and patient through the ordeal, she was restless and edgy now, and Gwendolyn was worried she might stumble into the mire if left unattended. One could not look after horse and master simultaneously.

By the time she’d settled Isis with Bertie’s gelding, retrieved a brandy flask from the saddlebag, and hurried back to Rawnsley, he had returned to full consciousness. To extremely bad-tempered consciousness, by the looks and sounds of it.

His black mane dripped ooze from the mire, and he was cursing under his breath as he shoved it out of his face and dragged himself up to a sitting position.

“Devil take you and roast you in Hell!” he snarled. “You could have killed yourself—and my horse. I told you to go away, curse you!”

A mask of grey-green slime clung to his face. Even under the mucky coating, however, his features appeared stronger and starker than in the miniature. This was a hard, sharply etched face, while the painted one had been sickly looking and puffy.

The rest of him was not sickly looking either. The earl’s bog-soaked garments clung to broad shoulders and back, a taut, narrow waist, and long legs—and every inch of that was solid muscle.

The reality was so unlike the picture that Gwendolyn wondered for a moment whether someone had played a joke on her, and this wasn’t Rawnsley at all.

Then he pulled off his mud-encrusted gloves and wiped the filth from his eyes with his fingers and looked at her . . . and she froze, the breath stuck in her throat as her heart missed the next scheduled beat.

Bertie called him Cat because, he said, that’s what all the fellows at school had called him. Now Gwendolyn understood why.

The Earl of Rawnsley’s eyes were yellow.

Not a human brown or hazel but a feline amber gold. They were the eyes of a jungle predator, burning bright—and dangerous.

Fortunately, Gwendolyn was not easily intimidated. The shock passed as quickly as it had come, and she knelt down beside him and offered the flask with a steady hand.

Her voice was steady, too, as she answered. “No self-respecting witch would go away on a mere mortal’s orders. She’d be drummed out of the coven in disgrace.”

He took the flask from her and drank, his intent yellow gaze never leaving her face.

“You may not know that all the best witches come to Dartmoor for their familiars,” she said. “A black cat is de rigueur. Since you’re the only one available—”

“I’m not available, and I’m not a damned tabby, you demented little hellhound! And I know who you are. You’re the curst cousin, aren’t you? Only one of Bertie’s kin would come galloping into a mire in that lunatic way and blunder about, risking a horse, as well as her own scrawny neck, saving a man from what she got him into. And I didn’t ask to be saved, Devil confound you! It’s all the same to me—I’ve already got one foot in the grave—or didn’t they tell you?”

“Yes, they did tell me,” she answered calmly. “But I did not come all this way only to turn back at the first obstacle. I am aware it is all the same to you. I realize the mire would have saved you the trouble of putting a pistol to your head or hanging yourself or whatever you had in mind. But you may just as easily do that later, after we’re wed. I regret the inconvenience, my lord, but I cannot let you die before the ceremony, or I shall never get my hospital.”

In the past, Gwendolyn often obtained satisfactory results from startling statements.

It worked this time, too.

He drew back slightly, and his furious expression softened into bewilderment.

“It is simple enough,” she said. “I need you, and you need me—although I cannot expect you to believe that at present since you know next to nothing about me.”

She glanced upward. “We are about to be inundated. We will need to find shelter—for the horses’ sake, I mean, since you won’t mind dying of lung fever, either. That is not altogether inconvenient. Waiting out the storm will give us a chance for private conversation.”

Chapter 2

“OH NO, YOU don’t,” Dorian said. The words came out in croaks. His throat was raw from shouting the objections she’d been so stubbornly deaf to.

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he staggered to his feet. Staying upright proved even harder than getting up.

Mires, it turned out, didn’t simply swallow you. His mother had failed to explain that they chewed first. They tried to suck the skin off your bones and crush your organs and muscles into jelly. Every inch of his body, inside and out, was throbbing painfully. He ignored it.

“There will be no private tête-à-têtes,” he said, grasping her arm and marching her to the incline. “We have nothing to say to each other. I am taking you back to the house, and then you will go back where you came from.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. Her voice remained level, and she made no effort to free herself from his grasp.

He let go abruptly, wishing he hadn’t grabbed her slim arm in that oafish way. She had no choice but to follow him, unless she meant to take up residence in Hagsmire.

He started up the slope alone.

After a moment, she followed. “Why did you bolt?” she asked.

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“I took a lunatic fit.” He trudged on.

“That often happens when one converses with Bertie for any length of time,” she said. “Sometimes I have to shake him. Otherwise, he will go on and on and lose track entirely of what he’s saying, and one can grow quite giddy trying to follow.”

“I’m very fond of Bertie,” he said coldly.

“So am I,” she said. “But he is miraculously stupid, isn’t he? Cousin Jessica says he was born with his foot in his mouth and has been unable to get it out since. I suppose he must have made the most harrowing vows of eternal devotion to you. He was blubbering into his handkerchief when he came out to tell me you’d bolted. So there was no getting an intelligible explanation out of him. And Abonville said only that he’d made a terrible mistake, and Genevieve must take me back to the inn.”

“Obviously you heeded Abonville no more than you did me,” Dorian said irritably. “The words ‘go away’ appear to have no meaning for you.”

“If I always did what I was told, I should never accomplish anything,” she said. “Fortunately, Abonville is aware that I do not blindly obey orders. And so, when I said I must go after you, and my grandmother agreed, he took Bertie back into the library, and they made direct for the brandy.”

They had reached the bridle path. Dorian wanted to get on his horse and ride so he wouldn’t have to listen to her, but his leg muscles were giving way.

His hair was thick with mire ooze, and the cold slime dribbled down his neck. Thanks to the slime, he stank to high heaven. He was too tired and shaken to care.

He staggered to a boulder and sat down and stared at his sodden trousers while he waited for his respiration to slow and his brain to quiet.