“Having a taste for porridge doesn’t hurt,” Ian said. He’d spoken seriously, wanting only to stop Hart from going on and on about what it meant to be Scottish, but he liked the reward of Beth’s beautiful smile. Though Hart could speak English with no trace of a Scots accent, had been educated at Cambridge, and sat in the English House of Lords, he had firm ideas about Scotland and what he wanted to accomplish for his country. He could expound on it for hours.
Hart shot Ian a formidable frown and fixed his attention onto his food. Beth gave Ian another smile, which sent Ian’s imagination dancing.
They continued the meal in silence, the only sound the click of silver on porcelain. Beth was beautiful in the candlelight, her diamonds sparkling as much as her eyes. When they finally rose, Hart rumbled something about his damned treaty.
“It’s all right,” Beth said quickly. “I’d love a turn in the garden before bed. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?” Ian walked her to the terrace door. The dogs sprang to their feet, tails wagging. Ian would prefer to have Beth join him in the billiards room, his imagination ripe with things he could teach her about billiards. But if she wanted a walk, he wouldn’t stop her. The garden could be just as entertaining. Beth pressed Ian’s arm before he could form the words, and disappeared out the back door. The five dogs milled back and forth in front of her as she strolled down the walk. Ian took the treaty from Hart and stalked with it into the billiards room, hoping the damn thing was short.
“You’re a very clever young woman.”
Beth turned at Hart’s voice. She’d walked, escorted by the dogs, down a well-tended path to a fountain that sprinkled merrily into a marble bowl. Plenty of light lingered in the sky, though it was already half past nine—Beth had never been this far north before, and she understood the sun barely dipped below the horizon here during the summer months. She’d spent some time figuring out which dog was which. Ruby and Ben were the hounds, Achilles was the black setter with one white foot, McNab was the long-haired spaniel, Fergus the tiny terrier.
Hart stopped by the fountain, the end of his cigar glowing orange as he took in smoke. The dogs swarmed to him, tails moving furiously. When he didn’t respond, they moved off to explore the garden.
“I don’t think myself especially clever.” Beth had thought the night warm, but now she wished she’d brought a wrap. “And I’m afraid I never went to finishing school.”
“Cease with the flippancy. You obviously bamboozled Mac and Isabella, but I’m not so gullible.”
“What about Ian? Are you saying I bamboozled him?”
“Didn’t you?” Hart’s voice was deadly quiet.
“I remember telling Ian quite plainly that I had no interest in marrying again. And then there I was, signing a license and repeating that I’d be with him until death do us part. I believe Ian bamboozled me.”
“Ian is—“ Hart broke off and swung away to stare into the multicolored sky.
“What? A madman?”
“No.” The word was harsh. “He’s… vulnerable.”
“He’s stubborn and smart and does exactly what he pleases.”
Hart pinned her with his stare. “You’ve known him, what, all of a few weeks? You saw that Ian is rich and insane, and you couldn’t resist taking down such an easy mark.”
Beth’s temper flared. “If you had paid more attention, you’d have realized that I have a fortune of my own already. Quite a large one. I don’t need Ian’s.”
“Yes, you inherited one hundred thousand pounds and a house in Belgrave Square from a reclusive widow called Mrs. Barrington. Very admirable. But Ian is worth ten times that, and when you realized that, you wasted no time getting rid of Lyndon Mather and chasing Ian to the altar.” Beth clenched her hands. “No, I went off to Paris, and Ian came after me.”
“Quite a good ploy to smarm up to Isabella. She’s got too soft a heart for her own good, and I’m certain she thought it a fine scheme to push you together. Mac did, too. I can’t think what got into him.”
“Smarm? I don’t smarm. I wouldn’t know how to. I’m not even sure what the word means.”
“I know your background, Mrs. Ackerley. I know your father was a lying blackguard and your mother fell into his trap. Her folly led her straight to the workhouse. I’m sure you learned much there.”
Beth’s face burned. “Goodness, so many people looking into my past. You ought to have asked Curry. Apparently he has quite a dossier on me.”
Hart dropped his cigar and ground it out with his heel. He leaned close to Beth and spoke in a low voice, his breath tinged with sweet-smelling smoke. “I will not let a fortune hunter ruin my brother, if it’s the last thing I do.”
“I assure you. Your Grace, I’ve never hunted a fortune in my life.”
“Don’t mock me. I’ll annul the marriage. I can do that, and you will leave. It never will have happened.” Beth summoned the courage to look straight into Hart’s golden eyes.
“Can you not consider that perhaps I fell in love with him?”
Deeply, dramatically, foolishly in love.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Hart drew a breath but didn’t speak. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“I see,” Beth said softly. “You believe he’s mad, and you don’t think any woman could love that.”
“Ian is mad. The commission of lunacy proved it. I was there. I saw.”
“Then why not leave him in the asylum if you think he’s insane?”
“Because I know what they did to him.” In the gentle twilight the powerful Duke of Kilmorgan looked suddenly haunted. “I saw what the damn quacks did. If he hadn’t been mad when he went in, the place would have driven him so.”
“The ice baths,” Beth said.
‘The electric shocks.”
“Even worse than that. Dear God, when he was twelve years old they had him bend bare-assed over his bed every night so they could strap him. To keep his dreams quiet, they said. My father did nothing. I couldn’t do anything; I didn’t have the power. The day my father fell off his horse and broke his damned neck, I went to the asylum and took Ian out.”
Beth flinched at his vehemence, but at the same time, her heart warmed. “And Ian is grateful you did. Very grateful.”
“Ian couldn’t even speak. He wouldn’t look up when we talked to him or answer questions put to him. It was as though his body was with us but his mind was far away.”
“I’ve seen him do that.”
“He did it for three months. Then one day when we were eating breakfast, Ian looked up and asked Curry whether there was any toast.” Hart nicked his gaze away, but not before Beth saw the moisture in his eyes. “As though nothing had been wrong, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to ask Curry for toast.”
The breeze of the dying afternoon stirred his hair, tugged at the curls on Beth’s forehead. She watched as one of the highest dukes in the land blinked away tears. “I’ll send for my solicitor in the morning,” he said abruptly. “We’ll find a way to negate the marriage. You’ll not be ruined.”
“I know you don’t believe me, but I would never hurt Ian.”
“You are right. I don’t believe you.”
The wind freshened, scattering cool droplets from the fountain over Beth’s face. Hart turned on his heel to stride back to the house, but Ian stood there like a solid wall.
“I told you to leave her be,” he said quietly.
Hart’s back went stiff. “Ian, she can’t be trusted.” Ian took one step closer to Hart. Though he kept his eyes averted, there was no mistaking the anger in his stance and his voice. “She is my wife, under my protection. The only way I will let you do anything against this marriage is if you declare me a lunatic again.”
Hart flushed dull red. “Ian, listen to me—“
“I want her as my wife, and she stays my wife.” Ian softened his voice a notch. “She is a Mackenzie now. Treat her as one.”
Hart stared at Ian, then at Be
th. Beth tried to keep her chin up, but her heart raced, and the urge to run away from that predatory stare was strong.
Strange, when Ian had informed Beth they were marrying, she’d argued with him. Now that Hart looked grimly determined to part them, she knew she’d do anything to stay wedded.
“I am Ian’s wife because I choose to be,” she said. “Whether we live in a grand mansion or a tiny boardinghouse, it makes no difference.”
“Or a vicarage?” Hart countered, scowling.
“A vicarage in the slums served me very well, Your Grace.”
“It had rats in it,” Ian said.
Beth looked at him in surprise. Curry’s notes must have been thorough.
“Indeed, there was a family of them,” she said. “Nebuchadnezzar and his wife, and their three children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”
Both men merely stared at her, the double golden gaze unnerving even if Ian’s didn’t touch her fully. “It was our little joke, you see,” she stammered. “Made having rats a bit more bearable if they had names.”
“There are no rats here,” Ian said. “You never have to worry about rats again.”
“Not the four-legged kind, anyway,” Beth went on. “Inspector Fellows reminds me a bit of Meshach—his eyes would glow and his nose would twitch when he set his sights on a particularly tasty bit of cheese.”
Ian frowned, and Hart clearly didn’t know what to make of her.
“I imagine you have snakes, though,” she said, her tongue tripping. “This is the countryside, after all. And field mice and other creatures. I must confess I’m not used to the country. My mother was country born, but I lived in London from an early age and strayed outside the metropolis only when Mrs. Barrington saw fit to go to Brighton and pretend she liked the sea.”
Ian half closed his eyes, taking on the expression he did when he’d stopped hearing her. She knew he wasn’t listening, but a week from now he’d be able to come back to a particular phrase and drill her on it.
She closed her mouth with effort. Hart looked at her as though he’d fetch a lunacy commission up here on the morrow to grill her.
Ian came out of his trance and reached for her. “Tomorrow I will show you everything about Kilmorgan. Tonight we sleep in our chamber.”
“Have we got a chamber?”
“Curry fixed it up while we were at supper.”
“The ten-times-resourceful Curry. Whatever would we do without him?”
Hart looked at Beth sharply, as though she’d said something significant. Ian slid his arm around her waist and turned her around to lead her to the house. His warmth cut the coolness of the evening and blocked her from the wind.
A safe harbor. In the turmoil of her life, she’d known so few of them. Now Ian drew her close, protecting her, but Beth felt the edge of Hart’s gaze on her back all the way to the house.
The house swallowed Beth. Ian led her up the vast, ornate staircase, deeper and deeper into its maw.
There were so many pictures on the walls of the staircase hall that they obscured the wallpaper beneath them. Beth glimpsed the signatures on them as Ian rushed her up the stairs—Stubbs, Ramsay, Reynolds. A few paintings of horses and dogs were by Mac Mackenzie. Dominating the first landing was a portrait of the current duke, Hart, his eyes as golden and formidable in the picture as in person.
On the second landing hung the portrait of an older man who glared as haughtily as Hart did. He fiercely clutched a fold of Mackenzie plaid and sported a full beard, mustache, and side-whiskers.
Beth had noted him on their rush downstairs to dinner, but now she stopped. “Who is that?”
Ian didn’t even glance at the painting. “Our father.”
“Oh. He is quite… hairy.”
“Which is why we all like to be clean shaven.” Beth frowned at the man who’d caused Ian so much pain. “If he was so awful, why does he have pride of place? Hide him in the attic and be done with him.”
“It’s tradition. The current duke at the first landing, the previous duke at the second. Grandfather is up there.” He pointed to the top of the next flight. “Great-grandfather after that, and so on. Hart won’t break the rules.”
“So every time you go upstairs, Dukes of Kilmorgan glower at you at every turn.”
Ian led her on up toward Grandfather Mackenzie. “It is one reason we all have our own houses. At Kilmorgan, I have a suite of ten rooms, but we’ll want more privacy.”
“A suite of ten?” Beth asked faintly. “Is that all?”
“Each of us has a wing of the house. If we invite guests we put them in our wing and take care of them.”
“Do you often have guests?”
“No.” Ian led Beth back to the dressing room in which she’d changed for dinner. She’d thought the little room grand, but Ian now showed her that on its other side lay a bedroom the size of Mrs. Barrington’s entire downstairs. “You are my first.”
Beth gazed at the high ceiling, the enormous bed, the three windows with deep window seats. “If a person must marry you to get an invitation, I’m not surprised you haven’t had more guests.”
Ian’s golden gaze swept over her and back to the bed.
“Are you joking again?”
“Yes. Don’t mind me.”
“I never mind you.”
Beth’s heart thumped. “Is this your bedchamber?”
“It’s our bedchamber.”
She wandered nervously to the heavily carved walnut bedstead. “I’d heard that all aristocratic couples had separate bedrooms. Mrs. Barrington quite disapproved. A frivolous waste of space and money, she said.”
Ian opened another door. “The boudoir in here is yours. But you will sleep with me.”
Beth peered around him into an elegant room with comfortable-looking chairs and a deep window seat. “My. I suppose it will do.”
“Curry will help you fit it out as you like. Just tell him what you want and he will arrange it.”
“I’m beginning to think Curry is a magician.” Beth waited for him to respond, but Ian said nothing, his gaze remote again.
“I think you take an awful risk,” she said. “I read somewhere that sharing a bedroom with a woman is dangerous, because she exhales noxious fumes when she sleeps. Absolute balderdash, Mrs. Barrington said when I told her. Mr. Barrington slept beside her for thirty years and never once took sick.”
Ian slid his arms around her, the warmth of his body distracting her from all other thought. “Quacks will say anything to attract money for their research.”
“Is that what they did at the asylum?”
“They tried all kinds of experiments to cure my madness. I never saw where any of them worked.”
“That was cruel.”
“They thought they were helping.”
Beth put her fists on his arms. “Don’t be so bloody forgiving. Your father locked you away, and those people tortured you in the name of science. I hate them for it. I’d like to go to that asylum and give your doctor, whoever he is, a piece of my mind.”
Ian put his fingers to her lips. “I don’t want you part of that.”
“Like you don’t want me part of the High Holborn murder.”
Coldness crept into his usually warm gaze. “It has nothing to do with you. I want you… apart. I want to remember only this, not you with the things of my past.”
“You wish to create different memories,” she said, thinking she understood.
“My memory is too damned good. I can’t blot out things. I want to remember you alone here with me, or in that pension in Paris. You and me, not Fellows or Mather or my brother, or High Holborn…”
His words died and he began to rub his temple, frustration glinting in his eyes. Beth put her hand over his. “Don’t think of it.”
“It plays over and over and over again, like a melody that won’t stop.”
Beth softly rubbed his temple, his hard fingers beneath hers. He pulled her close. “Your being with me makes it stop. It’s
like the Ming bowls—when I touch them and feel them, everything stops. Nothing matters. You are the same. That is why I brought you here, to keep you with me, where you can please make… everything… stop.”
Chapter Fifteen
Beth stared up at him, her blue eyes wet. “Tell me how.” He held her face between his hands, her beautiful face that had jolted through the clamor in his head at the Covent Garden Opera House. She’d been the only thing real to him in Lyndon Mather’s box; everything else had been shadowy and wrong.
“Stay with me.”
“We’re married,” she whispered. “Of course I’ll stay.”
“You could decide to leave me.”
He leaned his forehead to hers, remembering the horrible day that he’d gone to Mac’s house with the farewell letter Isabella had written. Ian had never forgotten Mac’s devastation when he’d realized that Isabella was gone.
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I have promised. I do promise.”
Her voice rang with sincerity, her eyes wide and lovely. He kissed her lips so she wouldn’t keep giving him reassuring lies. Isabella had loved Mac desperately, and yet she’d left him.
“Stay with me,” he repeated.
She nodded into his kiss. He drew her body against his, fingers finding the buttons of her bodice. Her chest came into view, and he leaned down and kissed it. She made a soft noise, and he suckled her skin, branding her yet again.
He felt her hands parting his clothes, burrowing past the layers of fabric to find him. She put her mouth to his chest just below the hollow of his throat, and he inhaled sharply. The scent of her hair filled his nostrils, driving him a little bit mad. Ian pulled her up to him and kissed her, parting her lips, pressing his thumbs to the corners of her mouth. She was his wife, and he wanted her. For now, for always. He swiftly unbuttoned the rest of her bodice, then untied her stays in little jerks. He pushed them from her body, then unfastened her chemise, catching her bare breasts as they tumbled out. She arched back as he kissed her again, pressing her nipples tight against his palms.
Unlacing and pushing away her skirts and bustle and petticoats took some time, and he became impatient, tearing fabric while she squeaked a protest. He lifted her and carried her to the bed, then pulled off his own clothes with the same impatience. He climbed up with her, not bothering to pull back the bedclothes. When she started to speak, he silenced her with a deep kiss.
The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie Page 17