Annette Blair - Scandalous Brides

Hawk watched a range of telling expressions flit across her amazingly unguarded features, though, not a one of them revealed her revulsion or disgust.

He supposed she must need to verify what might seem like a dream, but in the verification, her eyes awash with unshed tears, she appeared less certain as the silent seconds passed, but more curious.

Not fearful, nor pitying, but not best pleased either.

Then her frown deepened and her eyes turned to blue flames, and she lashed out and struck him square in the jaw. “Dead,” she shouted, her trembling voice a rusty rasp. “We thought you were dead. How dare you let us believe it.”

“Alexandra, Alex. Shh, calm down.”

“A year.” She smacked his shoulders. “A blasted year. No. Longer than that. How could you?” She slapped his arms as he tried to brace her. “Where the blazes have you been?”

When Alex kicked her dead husband’s shin, he winced. But when she smacked his thigh with a fist, all color left his face. Pain etched the harsh angularity of his firm jaw and ashen features, further whitening the new lines carved there. He had suffered—she recognized that now—and her wrath pricked her.

“You lived while we wept because you died.” Broken and elated by the shock of his return, Alex begged to understand. “Why did you not tell us?”

“I was not capable, not for some long time.”

“Because you were wounded?”

He nodded.

“Unable to speak?”

“For the most part, no.”

“You could speak?”

“When I was conscious.”

“You were unconscious for a year?” Her voice rose.

He winced.

“You lost your memory, then?”

Denial, again.

Alex wanted to strike him every time he refused an offered excuse. “ Someone should have written to us.” She shoved his shoulder. “I am so…” Her sob took her by surprise, fast and wild and from the depths of her soul. She grasped his lapels to anchor herself in a careening world. And when that was not enough, she clutched him about the neck, afraid she would shatter, if he did not hold her together.

He held tight.

The storm did not last long. Alex was glad, for rage was exhausting. “I am furious with you,” she said after a calm moment.

“I know you are. It is no more than I expect.”

“And deserve.” She accepted his handkerchief.

Hawk nodded. “I do deserve it. Beat me, if you will, but mind my left leg… and my face.” There, he had said it, Hawk thought with relief. He brought his ugliness into the open.

At once solemn and assessing, Alex reached toward his battered and badly mended face, stopped, and pulled her hand back, as if he might burst into flame … as if touching him repulsed her.

Hawk rejected anguish, and an overwhelming need to crush her in his embrace once more, and donned his old devil-may-care mask. “What, Alexandra? Am I not still a handsome rogue? Does my countenance not please you?”

She frowned and reached again, hesitated again. And after too long a time to be borne, she extended her hand the entire distance between them, to finger a coil of the overlong hair lapping at his shoulders, unadulterated amazement overtaking her.

Hawk braced himself against the grateful quiver that her touch, even on his hair, engendered. “It’s beastly,” he said. “I know. Uncivilized, like me. If you find it in your heart to forgive me, can you tame me, do you think?” Would she even care to?

“I may never forgive you.”

“I guessed as much, but I am the eternal optimist.”

“You are the eternal charmer, but you will not charm your way back into my good graces.”

“I applaud your perception and your determination.”

Alex shrugged and fingered his overlong hair. “You remind me of a cat,” she said. “A night-stalking lion, jungle-bred and ravenous, but I am your huntress.”

“Odd, you remind me less of a cat’s doom than its plaything.”

“A mouse?” she said with more than a trace of indignance, her defense at the ready, if he did not miss his guess.

“Catnip,” he corrected.

“Oh.” Her turquoise eyes widened, making her appear even more beautiful, coy, flirtatious, yet naïve, unmistakably in need of a good loving, God help him.

The notion brought his body to hard attention once more. Rejoicing inwardly over the reaction, Hawk settled his delectable wife more intimately against him to enhance and savor the torture, her breasts no more than a stroke and a kiss away.

She moved a lock of his hair from his eyes, her warm breath bathing the scars on his face like a blessing, and Hawk caught her familiar, violet scent with a new rush of expectation.

As he sat stunned and entranced, she smoothed his beard, which shrouded the worst of his scars, and all but cupped his face.

In that instant, Hawk ached to turn his head and set his lips to her palm, knowing full well that if he did so, a slap might be his for the taking. Her very touch unmanned him, made him want to rush dangerously forward.

Such a mad turnabout—the wicked-as-sin Duke of Hawksworth, moonstruck, over the girl he once treated like a pesky pup.

But the paradox was not new. Alexandra, herself, the memory of her, laughing, teasing, driving him daft, had kept him going, kept him fighting for his life during those endless, pain-wracked months after Waterloo.

And all that time, a world and a war away, a lifetime away, when he still expected to die of his wounds, he was becoming enthralled with his own wife.

“I like it,” she said—of his beard, he presumed, for she was stroking it—but he was too taken with her touch to focus on anything else. “It makes you look a danger,” she said, catching his attention, as she fingered his scar.

“I am a danger; make no mistake—jungle-bred and rapacious, as you say. And well you should remember and keep a safe distance.”

But before he could garner her promise, Hawk was forced to close his eyes, as he entered hell, or heaven, for she had begun to trace the red, uneven welt with a gentle touch, from beside his eye, along its raised and puckered surface, down his cheek and into the depths of his beard, where it disappeared near his chin.

At the wonder of her touch, remorse rose in him, chiding him and ordering him to make amends. He could not keep her—he must not—for she merited better than a battered hulk for a husband, a man who would walk away with no glance back. An undeserving fool who knew not what he had, but sought instead what he could never have—his father’s approval.

Why did he not appreciate the people who cared about him, until he all but lost them? His nieces, Beatrix and Claudia, his Uncle Giff, Alex’s Aunt Hildy, and Alexandra, herself.

They were his family, though all of them, especially Alex, might have done better to remember him as he was, rather than see what he had become. A beast. Ugly. Disfigured.

“For your sake,” Alex said. “I am sorry your scars forced you to join the flawed human race, but you are still handsome in my eyes, and still the Bryceson I hero-worshipped.” With a fingertip, she soothed the hideous knot of discolored flesh nearest his brow. “Does it pain you—other than when you are rightfully beaten for your thoughtlessness?”

Hawk opened his eyes and feasted upon her, struck anew by her beauty, but more by her words. He had not felt like Bryceson for a long, long time… neither had he felt anything near human.

Would she understand if he said his inhumanity was the reason he had not contacted her?

He covered her hand against his face with his own. “At this moment,” he said, “even the memory of pain escapes me.”

“Your leg?”

Hawk shook his head, denying weakness until the end. But she gave him a disbelieving look, and he knew that with Alex, prevarication was useless. He shrugged. “On occasion.”