There was, of course, no reason to believe that he would appear whenever she needed him, and yet... Notwithstanding Burgess’s words, Charlotte still expected Maximilian to come for her. It did not matter that he was engaged elsewhere. He had broken appointments for her before; she was sure of it. It did not matter that she had not seen him for a week, or that they had parted on less than amicable terms. Despite all, Charlotte felt, deep in her heart, that he was coming for her. And Burgess, with all his planning and scheming, could do nothing to prevent it.
Stilling the smile that threatened to emerge, Charlotte looked out of the window, watched the scenery...and waited.
* * *
She did not have long to wait. Perhaps she had sensed his closeness or felt the force of the uncharacteristic hot rage that drove him behind them, ever closer. Or perhaps she just knew that Max, dear, insufferably responsible Max, could not let anything untoward happen to her. Whatever the source of her knowledge, when Charlotte heard the horse draw alongside them and the shout from outside, she was not surprised.
Sir Burgess was. Charlotte saw the flash of fear in his eyes. “Highwaymen?” he croaked. Before he had time to say anything else, the carriage stopped and the door was yanked open.
Charlotte blinked as the sun dipped behind the tall, elegant Earl of Wycliffe, framed in the doorway like a loving portrait. Even though he was scowling ferociously, her heart took to its customary leaping when she saw his handsome face. His black brows were drawn down heavily over his eyes in a familiar pose that was fast becoming so dear to her that the sight made her throat thicken and fill with emotion. She cleared it.
“You certainly took your time!” she said as briskly as she could manage. She rose from her seat and stepped toward him, but Burgess shot out an arm in front of her, effectively halting her progress.
“What is the meaning of this, Burgess?” Max roared. Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed hold of Burgess’s arm with one hand and the man’s collar with the other, and dragged the baron out of the vehicle before Charlotte could even draw a breath. She thrust her head out of the doorway only to see the two brawling in the dirt of the roadway like farm boys.
Lifting her skirts carefully, Charlotte nimbly jumped down just in time to watch Max plant Burgess a bruising facer that should have knocked him out. Unfortunately, she suspected that the baron had an awfully hard jaw, for he did not fall, but tried to strike back at his opponent.
So immersed was Charlotte in the contest that she did not see the coachman until he was upon the earl. To her horror, the driver grabbed Max from behind, holding him fast while Burgess rammed a fist into his stomach. Max doubled over and groaned.
“Stop that this instant, you!” Charlotte shouted as she rushed forward. Without a pause, she gave the coachman a vicious kick behind his legs. He stumbled and obviously loosened his hold, for Max broke away and lunged at Burgess.
The coachman, apparently distressed at her treatment of him, swung round toward her, but Charlotte hiked her skirts and thrust her foot right between his legs as forcefully as she could. He gave a great gasp and bent over, one arm flailing in a vain effort to reach her. After a few hefty breaths, he came hobbling after her again, but he stumbled and fell against Wycliffe’s horse, which managed to kick him in the leg before it took off across the field at the side of the road.
With a few hoarsely mumbled oaths, the coachman obviously decided that Burgess was not paying him enough for this kind of abuse and struggled to his perch. Charlotte let him go without a qualm, but the sound of snapping reins produced a different reaction from Burgess.
“Stop! Wait! Damn it!” the baron shouted. Although he looked not too steady, he managed to pull away from her avenging earl, reach for the flapping, open door of the coach and fall inside as the vehicle began to move away.
“Coward,” Charlotte shouted after him. Then she turned to her gallant rescuer. He did not look well, either. He was filthy dirty, and his hair fell loose about his face in sweaty, matted strings. His coat was torn, his mouth was bleeding, and he swayed as if he could barely stand. In short, she had never seen Max look so utterly dreadful. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Charlotte stared into the depths of those gorgeous brown eyes for one long moment before they closed and the Earl of Wycliffe collapsed in a heap at her feet.
* * *
She managed to drag him to the edge of the road, to avoid possible traffic, and to rest his head upon her lap. Sitting there with the fading rays of sunlight caressing his dazzling, albeit dirty, features, Charlotte was conscious of several things, the most overwhelming being just how much she loved him.
It was true. No matter how hard she had fought against it, no matter how much she had tried to like other men, no matter how foolish and painful it was, she, the vicar’s pretty daughter, had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the Earl of Wycliffe.
Charlotte put a hand to his face and pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. Beneath the dust sprinkling it, it shone with life, a long, nearly black strand. Charlotte moved it between her fingers. So silky...
She dropped the lock guiltily. Instead of caressing him, she ought to be trying to revive him, but how? She had no smelling salts for him to breathe or water to dash upon his face, and he looked so battered from the fight that she did not want to slap him awake. Burgess was but a speck in the distance, and Maximilian’s horse was nowhere to be seen. She was left with nothing but her reticule...and Max.
Pulling out her handkerchief, Charlotte leaned over him to gently wipe the blood from his mouth. She let her eyes move tenderly over his face, taking her time, enjoying the chance to peruse him closely. She had not realized that his lashes were so long or his nose so well-formed. Running a trembling finger down his cheek, Charlotte felt the rough hint of stubble. Warmth, sweet and heady, spread through her, engendered by the simple act of touching him.
Emboldened by the heat that drove away the evening’s chill, she traced his full bottom lip and shivered with the thrill of its form and texture. So smooth... Reverently, she began again, lightly outlining the edges of his mouth, but when he stirred, she jerked her hand away. The flutter of his lashes made Charlotte straighten, for he might not welcome her kiss. She knew he would not welcome her love.
His eyes, those wonderful, chocolate eyes, opened at last, and he looked at her dazedly, as if he were confused. For one long moment, he stared up at her dreamily, and Charlotte stared back, enthralled by those deep, dark depths. Finally, she opened her mouth to explain, wetting her dry lips with her tongue, but when she did, Maximilian sat up so abruptly that she nearly fell back into the grass.
“Good God!” he grunted. Then he groaned, grimaced and put a hand to his forehead.
“Are you all right?” Charlotte asked.
She was rewarded with the blackest look she had ever seen slanted from under his long lashes. “No, I am not all right,” he answered through gritted teeth.
Charlotte searched his face and noticed that under the dirt, he was beginning to bruise. One eye had started to swell, as had his lip, but she certainly was not going to tell him that. Happily, she had no mirror with her.
“My head is splitting, and I ache all over. Do I look all right?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. He stood up, glanced down at himself and groaned anew. “Look at me. Just look at me!” he demanded.
Charlotte’s gaze swept up and down his tall frame, taking in his muscular thighs, his trim waist, his broad shoulders, his handsome if rather bedraggled features, and her heart hammered irregularly. There was something rakish about his torn clothing and his less than perfect appearance that made him seem more desirable, more accessible... “I think you are even more attractive than usual,” Charlotte said softly.
Max ignored her. “I cannot believe this! I have never in my life been involved in a brawl in the dirt like some...some country chaw-bacon!” He was raging now. “Where is my horse?” he asked suddenly, dropping the hand from his temple. �
�Do not tell me my horse is gone,” he warned her in a low, decidedly menacing voice.
Charlotte stood up and shook out her skirts, but wisely said nothing.
“My horse is gone! Damn it, Charlotte! My horse is gone, and I am a bloody mess!” Maximilian put a finger gingerly to his red lip, made a face and glared at her. “No more, Charlotte. No more. Ever since I met you I have been dragged from one tangle to another, each more wretched than the last, but this is it. I have had enough. I refuse to—”
He broke off to lift a hand to his head, and Charlotte realized that it must be hurting him dreadfully. Still, his sharp disgust with her, coming as it did on the heels of her discovery that she loved him, was rather painful. She met his dark eyes, and they bored into her with the furthest thing from affection. “Something will have to be done to remedy the situation,” he warned softly.
Charlotte felt her heart lurch. What would he do? Send her home? She blinked at him, feeling the pressure of tears behind her eyes, and told herself it did not matter. Whether she was in London or Sussex or on the moon, nothing would change the way she felt about him, and nothing, obviously, was going to change the way he felt about her. She dropped her gaze, unable to look any further into the dark depths for what was not there.
“Something must be done, and I intend to do it.” Max was muttering to himself now, in between wincing and groaning and touching his face. He really was acting childishly, Charlotte decided. She would have laughed, if her heart had not been breaking.
Maximilian stopped mumbling and cursing long enough to stand and glare down the roadway. Where was his mother? Although he had known he could catch up with Charlotte and that perfidious Burgess on horseback, he had ordered Sibylle to follow in the coach. So where the hell was she? He glanced up at the lowering sun, the empty roadway...and Charlotte.
This was just the situation he had hoped to avoid. If Charlotte’s reputation was to be salvaged, she needed a chaperone quickly. She should not be here, at sunset, alone with anyone, including him. Especially him...
Although his head throbbed, his lip and his eye stung, and his whole body ached, Maximilian could still summon up desire for the woman standing beside him. He imagined that if he were totally incapacitated, she would still tempt him. From the moment he had opened his eyes to find her luscious, full breasts above him and her lips only inches from his own, he had known he was in trouble.
With an oath, Maximilian kicked at a stone and stared into the distance, willing his mother’s vehicle to appear. He admitted to himself that his attraction to Charlotte, powerful from the first, was becoming an obsession that he struggled with all too frequently.
Something had to be done. And this annoying interest in her was not all that troubled him about the vicar’s daughter. Because of her, his life had become a mess of canceled appointments, disrupted schedules, duels and the like, culminating in his headlong rush to rescue her tonight, and topped by fisticuffs in the roadway. “Attacked by a common coachman!” he said aloud, his breast filled with disgust. “The mind positively rebels.”
Something had to be done. Maximilian refused to look at her, but gazed resolutely down the highway while he examined his alternatives. Several possibilities presented themselves as permanent solutions. He could send her home; he could go away himself; or he could see her wed. He scowled into the sunset.
With grim finality, Maximilian vowed that before this night was over, he would write her papa.
* * *
Viscount Raleigh sat kicking his heels in Wycliffe’s drawing room and wondering where on earth his friend was. When the predictably punctual earl had failed to attend the quarterly meeting of his driving club, Raleigh had been compelled by curiosity to find out why. Sniffing about, he had been able to discover nothing except that the earl had ridden like a wild man from his mother’s town house this afternoon.
It was now well past dark, and Raleigh was no closer to solving the mystery, although he had treated himself to his absent host’s best Bordeaux. He glanced up at the clock, trying to decide whether to go on to White’s or crack open another bottle, when the door burst open and a large, foul-looking fellow rushed in.
“Here, now!” Raleigh mumbled, straightening up in his chair. Momentarily in fear of his life, or, at the very least, his friend’s valuables, he had no idea how he was going to fend off the knave.
“What are you doing here?” the creature demanded.
“I would ask the same of you!” Raleigh protested before something in the man’s face made him practically swallow his tongue. He gaped, he stared and he stammered, dumbfounded at the sight of the always perfectly groomed Earl of Wycliffe standing before him in filthy, torn and stained clothing, his eye nearly swollen shut and his lip bruised and bloody. “Good God, Wycliffe! What happened to you?” Raleigh half rose from his seat in astonishment.
With a heedlessness wholly unlike himself, the fastidious earl sprawled in a nearby chair and frowned grimly. “The vicar’s daughter. That is what happened to me.”
Raleigh nearly dropped his teeth. “You mean...Miss Trowbridge did this to you?” He was still gawking at Wycliffe’s wounds when a pale-faced Hoskins appeared.
“Your brandy, my lord, and your...ice,” said the unflappable butler before withdrawing silently.
Wycliffe took a huge gulp of liquor, wrapped the ice in a cloth and put it to his eye, emitting a low, and heretofore unprecedented, groan.
“I rue the day that I met her, Raleigh,” the earl replied, a glazed look in his good eye. “If I had known what awaited me, I would never have entered the vicarage. I would have turned tail and run in the opposite direction with all speed!”
Raleigh wondered just what kind of head injuries his friend had suffered. He knew that no female, let alone the lovely Miss Trowbridge, could have so damaged the earl. “But who assaulted you?” he asked.
“Burgess. I am going to kill him,” Wycliffe replied, setting down his glass.
Raleigh was too astounded by the name to remark on his friend’s unnatural vehemence. “Sir Burgess? The old baron?”
“He is not that old,” Wycliffe said.
“Well, obviously, he is not too old to throw a punch!” Raleigh agreed.
Wycliffe lifted the ice to glare at him with both eyes. “I was doing fine, thank you, until the damned driver took me from behind. Blasted coward!”
“Good God, Wycliffe, you do not mean to tell me that you actually brawled with a coachman!” This was too much. Raleigh reached for the second bottle and poured himself a liberal portion. “Dueling is one thing, but fisticuffs... Not your style at all, Wycliffe! Too messy, for one thing...” He glanced at the earl’s torn clothing and shuddered.
Wycliffe gave him a pained expression. “What could I do? The man tried to steal Charlotte off to Gretna Green.”
Raleigh tossed off his drink in one swallow, although his head already felt none too clear. “Burgess? The quiet, polite gentleman farmer?”
Wycliffe nodded grimly. “He is not what he seems. The fellow is as queer as Dick’s hatband, and I have it on good authority that he is obsessed with Charlotte. Something to do with a family connection.”
Raleigh tried not to seem too skeptical. “What ties would a barony have to a country vicar?”
“I do not know,” Wycliffe said, flinching and shifting the ice to his lip and back again. “I am still trying to gather information, which is woefully slim, about the man. From the accounts I have received, he was much attached to his mother, who died suddenly when he was a young man, leaving him in the hands of a strict and demanding father. The father arranged Burgess’s marriage to a homely but rich tradesman’s daughter, and Burgess came into the title when his father died a few years ago. His wife was killed in some sort of suspicious accident shortly afterward, and somewhere along the line, our wealthy widower took up opium smoking.”
“And became enamored of Miss Trowbridge,” Raleigh supplied.
Wycliffe nodded, grimacing. “And now
he has run to ground, his tail between his legs, but I shall find him.”
“But surely you cannot mean to kill the man in cold blood?” Raleigh protested.
“I do! The bastard abducted Charlotte against her will and attacked me. He blackened my eye, bruised my body and ruined my clothes, not to mention my dignity!”
“Be reasonable, man,” Raleigh said, nearly choking on the irony of his plea. Wycliffe always was the reasonable one. “You simply cannot do it. Think of Miss Trowbridge! You have already fought one duel over her. She cannot afford any more scandal. Your mother may face it out, but no matter how you hush it up, something is bound to get out about this day’s escapade. If you go chasing after Burgess, it will simply confirm all manner of rumors. And if, as you say, the man fancies himself in love with her, then losing his bid for her will be punishment enough. He will certainly never get close to her again.”
Wycliffe still looked alarmingly prone to violence, so Raleigh desperately tried another tack. “And, speaking of Miss Trowbridge, dare you leave her here alone? She appears to attract an inordinate amount of trouble. While you are away, who knows what else will happen to your vicar’s daughter?” He was taken aback by the sharp glint in Wycliffe’s eye.
“Yes,” the earl said softly, staring off into space. “Perhaps you are right, Raleigh. I will stay here, at least until I have matters well in hand.” He straightened, dropping his icy cloth in a shallow dish left by Hoskins, and picked up his unfinished brandy.
“But, make no mistake about it, this day’s piece of work is the last I intend to suffer for the vicar’s daughter,” Wycliffe said before emptying his glass in one swallow. “I am going to put an end to Charlotte’s adventuring, once and for all.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Charlotte blinked down at the printed words, trying to make some sense of them, but it was futile. No matter how hard she tried to concentrate on The Suppliants, her thoughts always returned to the owner of the book before her. With a loving finger, she traced the binding, imagining his dark eyes intent upon the pages, his well-groomed hands cradling the text...
The Vicar's Daughter Page 19