“I’m delighted to announce the betrothal of my dear sister-in-law Morwenna to one of the finest men I know. Hugh Rutherford, Baron Garson. Morwenna and Garson, I couldn’t be happier for both of you. I wish you many years of joy ahead.” Silas faced the crowd with a beaming smile. “Now it is my great pleasure to ask you all to raise your glasses in a toast to the happy couple.”
“No...” But nobody heard Robert’s low growl of denial.
Through a red haze, he watched Garson lift Morwenna’s hand and place a kiss on the knuckles.
“No,” he said more loudly.
This time, a few heads turned toward him. But he had no thought for other people.
Clumsily, on legs that felt as unwieldy as blocks of wood, he shoved his way forward. Every cell in his body burned to rip Garson’s handsome head from those wide, straight shoulders. He hardly cared that he knocked aside the nation’
s most powerful men and their wives in his battle to reach the front. All he cared about was ending this abomination.
“No.”
This time his strangled cry rose to reach his family. Silas, tall like him, frowned across at the disturbance, then turned as white as parchment and staggered back. His wife Caro was slower to notice, as was Amy. Morwenna, damn her, still stared entranced at the man who held her hand.
Robert stumbled to the front as a couple of brawny footmen rushed in his direction, clearly intent on ejecting this disreputable interloper.
Silas waved his hand to them and spoke in a choked voice. “Stop.”
The footmen halted in their tracks, as the crowd receded to leave Robert standing in isolation. His chest was heaving, and that agonizing feeling of unreality compounded as he watched Morwenna step closer to Garson.
“Let her go,” he said unsteadily to the big bastard. “She’s not yours. She’s mine.”
At the sound of his voice, Morwenna stiffened, then turned in his direction in a swirl of rich blue. She ripped her hand away from Garson, but Robert was too far gone in rage and disbelief to find any satisfaction in that.
For one blazing moment, he read transcendent happiness in her face. Then the blue eyes, clear and changeable as the Cornish seas that lapped around her birthplace, dulled, and he saw unmistakable shame.
And dear Lord above, fear.
“Robert?” she whispered, although he heard his name as clearly as if she’d shouted.
“Of course,” he said coldly.
To do his wife justice, she’d always been brave. While the blood drained from her face, leaving her like a ghost, she stood her ground before him and didn’t fall into a faint.
No, it was his sister Amy who stared at him with glassy eyes, then collapsed into the arms of the golden-haired Adonis beside her.
Chapter Two
* * *
The room receded from Morwenna in an alarming rush, and the loud buzz of curiosity and concern that rose from the crowd reached her from a long way away. The only real thing in the room was her husband’s face.
His beloved face.
But so changed. When she looked into that face that had filled her dreams, she didn’t see the light-hearted, laughing man she’d married, but a stranger.
Her first, dazed glance told her that he’d been through hell on earth to reach her. He looked pale and ill, with the skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. A long scar divided his cheek from temple to jaw. She flinched as she imagined a sword slicing down to inflict that cruel cut. An inch higher, and he’d have lost an eye.
Yet he remained the most compelling man she’d ever seen. Even worn and hurt and bristling with hostility.
Those striking features had been carved on her heart from the moment six years ago, when she’d first seen him in the Truro assembly rooms. He was dark, dark enough to be a Cornishman, with the same snapping black eyes as his sister Helena.
Robert had been tall and elegant when they met, dashing in his naval uniform. Just promoted to captain, the youngest in the navy, a mark of his brilliance as a navigator, and his heroic deeds along the Barbary Coast.
All the Truro girls were mad for him, but he’d had eyes only for the local belle, Morwenna St. Leger. Their courtship had been quick and passionate. It had been a near thing that she’d arrived in her marriage bed a virgin.