Alison DeLaine - A Wedding By Dawn

Her fingers brushed the pistol grip. If Nicholas Warre succeeded in taking her, she may as well use the pistol on herself. The consequences of what she was about to do made her palms sweat. “Whatever my Father has offered you, I will pay you more to leave me be.”

A shadowed brow rose. “If you have more, then I am a lucky man indeed, for once we are wed I shall have both.”

“We are not going to be wed,” she said flatly, and closed her hand around the pistol’s grip. Her stomach rolled. Shooting him would make her a fugitive and guarantee she would never see England again.

So be it. She never wanted to see England again, anyway.

“Enough of this.” He stepped back, keeping hold of her arm. “We shall return to—” His eyes fixed on her hand.

Now!

“We shall return nowhere.” She tried to whip the pistol from her breeches but his hand was already there.

“Give me that!”

“No!” She fought with him to cock the hammer.

“Let go, before you—”

“No!” The pistol discharged into the alley with a deafening roar, and he wrenched it from her grasp. She tried to run, but he caught her easily and shoved her against the wall once again. Now his hands were on her everywhere—inside her waistcoat, searching, groping, skimming over her hips, her buttocks, even between her—

“Stop!”

“And allow you to murder me in cold blood?” he growled, drawing his hand across a place he had no business touching, then shoving it inside her pockets. “God’s blood, I got the sorry end of this bargain.”

“You did indeed. And if you insist on keeping it, you will spend the rest of your life sleeping with one eye open.”

“I shall do nothing of the kind.” His fingers bit painfully into her arm, and he yanked her away from the wall. “Now. We shall proceed to my room at the inn, where we will wait for William and your associate. You will say nothing—not a single word—unless you wish to be bound and gagged. Do I make myself clear?”

CHAPTER THREE

THE ONLY THING truly clear to Nick was that it would be a short leap from marrying Lady India to being committed to an asylum.

“I suppose you’ve brought my things from the ship,” she said. Sixty seconds. Possibly less. That was all it took for her to ignore his warning.

Not for the first time since embarking on this hellish voyage, Nick wondered if there might not have been an easier way to get his hands on fifty thousand pounds.

They rounded a corner, and the inn came blessedly into view. He didn’t give a bloody damn about her things. His jaw hurt, his eye throbbed and the by-blow from her pistol had singed one of his fingers—all of which meant little compared to the real problem.

“Well, I can’t imagine how you expect me to prepare for my wedding without my things, Mr. Warre,” she scolded. “Or to travel, which raises another question. How, precisely, do you plan to convey me back to England? By ship, I hope. The roads on the Continent are devilish rutted. Auntie Phil and I took weeks upon weeks to travel to Venice, but of course that was years ago. Oh, I would love to see Venice again. And Vienna. All cities beginning with V, in fact. Perhaps we can—”

“That’s enough.”

“Am I bothering you, Mr. Warre?” she inquired with false concern. “Do accept my apologies. Truly. One does so hate a yammerer. Such a nuisance. Of all the qualities one might find in a person, I daresay chattering has got to be the least—”

“Silence.” He pushed her inside the inn, ignored the frowning concierge, hauled her upstairs by the arm and managed to drag her into his room.

“Well, since you hadn’t the foresight to collect my things—” Good God, he would have to gag her “—we shall simply have to return to the Possession.”

He went to the pockmarked bureau. “By all means, let us proceed there directly.” The looking glass in this third-rate inn was so shoddy it was good for little more than guessing where the blood was as he inspected the damage from the bar brawl.

“Sarcasm is an ugly thing, Mr. Warre. Everyone says so. You really ought to be more sincere, if not for me then for the sake of your soul, because—”

“Lady India,” he said sharply, and turned on his heel to face her. She observed him craftily with eyes better suited to a courtesan. “For the sake of your soul—” he pointed at the fraying sitting suite behind her “—sit.”

There was a beat. A little twitch at the corner of her too-full lips. And then she turned away and sprawled herself in a shabby velvet armchair like a man, except there wasn’t one bloody thing masculine about her—a fact his hands were having difficulty forgetting.

“I wish he’d broken your nose,” she said, staring him directly in the eye.

“A charming sentiment.” He turned back to the glass. He’d lost his peruke in the tavern, and his hair—too long for the damned thing anyhow after nearly five weeks aboard that godawful ship—lay in a mess of near-black waves. He’d have a black eye by morning. That, a bloody lip and sore ribs were the perfect cap to an endless bout of seasickness.

No. No, the perfect cap was sitting in an armchair behind him, observing him disdainfully.

He checked his pocket watch. Where the hell was Jaxbury?

“You did not succeed in ruining Katherine’s life to pay your debts,” she told him haughtily, swinging a small foot back and forth, “so you’ve decided to ruin mine. You will not succeed.”

Ruining Katherine’s— Of course. Lady India was loyal to her former captain, and apparently the fact that Katherine was now Nick’s sister-in-law carried little weight. But Lady India would not want to hear that ruining Katherine Kinloch’s life had never been his objective, and that sometimes one pursued options in one’s desperation that one would never consider otherwise.

Such as agreeing to pursue a young hellion and force her into marriage.

“Your life is already ruined,” he told her.

“It isn’t.”

Yes, it is. No, it isn’t. There was no doubt Lady India would be able to keep up that conversation for the better part of an hour.

In the glass he watched her rise from the chair and approach him. She had the kind of shapely mouth that could earn a fortune doing unspeakable things at Covent Garden.

He refused to think of what Lady India might do with that mouth. Leave a man singing two octaves higher, most likely.

“My life isn’t ruined, of course,” she said conversationally, “but my body—well, that is another matter entirely. I regret to inform you, Mr. Warre, that I am not a virgin.” She put a hand to her belly. “At this moment, I could well be carrying a child. An Egyptian child, if you must know, although strictly speaking I suppose Ottoman is the better—no. No, in truth he was from Tunisia, I think, so if one wants to be strictly factual—”

“And I do, Lady India. I do wish to be strictly factual. Which is why I must remind you that less than an hour ago you spoke of giving your virtue to a sailor.”

Her mouth curved in a bemused smile. “I really don’t consider anything properly done until it’s been accomplished a minimum of three times, so—being strictly factual now, mind you—tonight would have marked the final demise of my virtue. I was referring to the coup de grâce. The triple cut, one might say.”

My daughter is a wild harridan, Cantwell had said. The man had a talent for understatement.

“Well, then.” He dropped the cloth in the basin and turned toward her. “You won’t mind if I have a taste of what I may look forward to once we’ve celebrated our nuptials.”

The quick apprehension in her eyes told him everything he needed to know about whether she might be carrying a Tunisian sailor’s illegitimate child.