Annette Blair - Scandalous Brides

Hildegarde swatted his arm but preened anyway. “Are you hungry?” she asked, stepping off that last step, and composing herself. “Thirsty? Have you dined?”

“I am fine,” Alex said. “How about you, Hawksworth?”

“Nothing for me.” Hawk felt all the nervousness of an imposter. Alex was treating him like Hawksworth, the stranger, rather than Bryce, the friend. His family believed good of him, when no good existed.

He had chosen to ship out immediately after their wedding, rather than risk leaving Alex with the child of a man she did not love. And he had not written, not to anyone, to sever their ties early, in hopes that when he was killed, which he daily expected, their shock and grief would be diminished.

Had Alex stayed somewhere else in London, alone for a time, to shore up a pretense of wedded bliss? Had she passed them news that supposedly came from him? Considering what her aunt had said, had Alex even pretended for a time that she might be carrying his child?

“Why has little Miss Beatrix not been sent up to bed, I would like to know?” Alex asked, cutting the tense silence, looking as uncomfortable as him, as she ruffled Bea’s curls. “It is gone past ten.”

“Because of your wed— Because these are special days,” his Uncle said. “Though we expected you yesterday.”

“Very special days, more than you can imagine,” Hawk said. To his mind, stopping Alex’s nuptials to Judson Broderick, Viscount blasted Chesterfield, offered a great deal more to celebrate than her marrying him might have done.

“Exhausting days, all the same,” Alex said. “And it is very late, past time for little girls to be tucked into their beds.”

“Time for all of us to go up,” Aunt Hildegarde said.

“But there is no bedchamber for Uncle Bryce,” Beatrix wailed in distress.

“Of course there is,” Alex said. “He shall have the master bedchamber.”

“But that is your b—”

Claudia had clapped a hand over her sister’s mouth. “You heard Alex, Little Miss Mischief, time for little people to be in their beds.”

“Big people, too,” Giff said, taking Aunt Hildy’s arm. “Let us all go up and allow Hawk and Alex the opportunity to, er, settle everything.”

That fast, she and Bryce were left standing at the base of the main staircase to regard each other. Alex wished the foyer did not seem so drab for his homecoming, while he appeared, for all the world, like a raw boy with his first girl, the way she was certain he had never appeared in the whole of his life.

“I do not want to put you out,” he said, wrapping dignity about him like a shield, much as he had done the evening before. “As you know, I do not sleep well these days. Any bedchamber will do.”

Plague take it , Alex thought. Was not a husband expected to sleep with his wife? They were home now. She was no longer in shock. And if she did not begin the way she intended to go on, then she would deserve the consequences. “There is no other bedchamber,” she snapped.

“There must be a dozen at least.”

“If they have beds, they have no mattresses.”

“Why ever not?”

Alex gave a long-suffering sigh. “When we were forced,” she stressed, “to return here, the mattresses had been turned into mouse houses, so we turned them out of our house, leaky and dilapidated as it is.”

Bryceson clearly bit back an oath, and that old impatient tic worked in his cheek. “The tower room in the attic,” he said, seeming to grasp at straws. “Isn’t there a chaise lounge, or a daybed, that would serve? When we used to practice our archery up there on rainy days, I am certain we proved the thing indestructible.”

“You are able to climb so many stairs, then?” Alex asked, hoping to discourage him.

“I climb better than I descend, it is true, but I can manage. Besides, I am convinced that the more I use my legs, the better they will work.”

Myerson cleared his throat from the door of the servants’ hall, self-consciously turning his dripping hat in his hands. “Excuse me, your grace, but the horses?”

While Bryce oversaw the stabling and feeding of the matched pair he had borrowed with the carriage, Alex carried a candle and bedding up three flights of stairs to the attic tower.

Sure enough, the huge, sparse circular chamber appeared dry as toast and looked exactly as it had the last time they played there, except for the additional dust. Everything as they left it, including their old archery equipment and the dratted daybed.

Thoroughly annoyed by the sight, Alex placed her candle on a table, and the bedding on the lounge. She went for a bow and arrow and set them up, crossed the room, and in a fit of pique, she let the arrow fly, hitting the target dead center.

“Rotten roof leaks everywhere,” she muttered, choosing another arrow. “Wouldn’t you just know it would hold above this one blasted room.”

She set the second arrow in the bow, but changed her mind about its destination and turned her sights, and her weapon, upward. “Bloody, stupid roof.” She sent the missile skyward.

The arrow disappeared into the darkened attic rafters, and almost as it did, a drip hit the floor, then another, and another, until rain dripped down in a vapid, steady rhythm. “Oops,” Alex said. “Must have been ready to give at any moment.”

Her mind worked and her smile grew as she chose yet another arrow and aimed it, unerringly, toward the rafters directly above the chaise lounge. But when she let it fly, nothing happened, and she could not tell exactly where it disappeared within the shadowed labyrinth of beams closer to the tower’s peak. “Drat.”

Hearing footsteps on the stairs, she stashed the bow, saw the daybed was dry, and sighed with regret. Doomed to spending another night alone. Double drat.

As Hawksworth entered, she beamed a bright smile. “Only one, small leak,” she said with feigned pleasure. “Your bed is fine. See.”

Even as they regarded the makeshift berth, an arrow dropped, flat on its side, dead center of the bed, and rain poured, literally, down, soaking the bedding and the lounge, rendering it completely useless.

Rainwater must have eased the arrow from the rupture where it struck and stuck, Alex mused as she bit her lip and regarded her husband.

He raised a brow. “Are we under siege?”

“I was… practicing,” she said, by way of feeble explanation. “And I heard… something. And I jumped… in fright. And, accidentally, my shot went wide… accidentally.”

“Very wide. Accidentally.”

Alex swallowed a knot of hysterical laughter, but she could not quite stop it from rushing forward, so she clamped a hand over her mouth.

Hawksworth regarded the source and sorceress of all his dreams, her turquoise eyes wide with trepidation, yet brimming with merriment all the same.

He shook his head. Behold the thorn in his side, his hoyden… his wife.

EIGHT

‘SLEEPING WITH ME will not be as dreadful as you seem to think,” Alex promised as they made their plodding way, arm in arm, down the stairs toward the family bedchambers. “My bed is big. You will not even know I am there.”

Hawk scoffed, feeling all the restrictions of a cage. “Well you will bloody well know I am there. If it were not so late, and you did not look so tired, I would fight you on this. You will be sorry when I push and kick and trample you in my sleep. You may end up more severely wounded than I.”

Alex bit her lip, appearing not the least worried or repentant. “Oh, Myerson,” she said when they saw his man in the upper hall. “Welcome to Huntington Lodge. Do you think you can bring up a tub and some hot water to my—our, dressing room? His grace will want a bath before I cut his hair.”