They galloped off, but were forced to slow their mounts to a walk when they turned off the high road onto a rough track. The bare trees ahead were embroidered with multiple nests, ragged bundles of sticks gathered by the rooks, gregarious cousins of the crow.
It began to drizzle.
“So where did you get the money, Mr. Piggot?” Catherine asked.
“Was my month’s wages,” Archibald replied with a cheeky grin. “Mr. de Dagonet will pay me back.”
If he lives! If he lives!
The freezing rain intensified as they entered the woods. A narrow track led down through the trees and emerged into a mown meadow, well sheltered from the road.
In the clearing stood six gentlemen: Lord Brooke and Lord Kendal at one end; two strangers at the other; and in the center of the sward, Dagonet faced a nervous young man over the naked blades of their rapiers.
Both swordsmen were stripped of their coats. They saluted. The increasing rain molded their shirts to their bodies. The grass was already slick with ice.
A handkerchief dropped and the blades clashed together.
Catherine slipped from her mount and threw the reins to Archibald.
Dagonet was giving way before a furious, if uncoordinated, attack from the younger man. He looked wild, as if he no longer cared, yet he was laughing.
“Come, Viscount! I am ready to die on your blade, sir, but my pride forbids that I fall onto it without at least an attempt at skill on your part.”
Goaded, Hammond flailed wildly.
Still Dagonet backed away. “Come, sir! I cannot find a moment when you are steady enough for me to impale myself. Must I just drop to the grass, so that you can run me through?”
“He shall not!” Catherine cried. Picking up her mud-stained skirts, she ran across the clearing toward them. “Pray, stop, sirs!”
Lord Kendal and David Morris turned as if to intercept her, but Dagonet had already reacted.
The rapiers clashed together. With a rapid turn of the wrist, he overwhelmed the viscount’s unsteady arm, and that gentleman’s sword flew from his hand into the grass.
Catherine raced up to them. How it happened, she did not know, but as she arrived at the astonished feet of the viscount, she tripped over some unevenness in the ground and sprawled headlong. She slid across the wet turf to land without ceremony at Dagonet’s polished boots.
Tossing aside his blade, he reached both hands to hers and helped her to her feet.
“Sweet Kate!” he said. “Must you always land in the mud when you attempt to save me from some precipitate action?” He reached up to brush wayward strands of hair from her cheek. “There was no danger from Rye Combe Bog and there is none, I assure you, from Viscount Hammond’s inexperienced blade.”
Her face burned from the cold ride. Her eyes smarted with unshed tears. “But the marquis thought that you would let him kill you.”
“Yes, I am aware that Grandfather had some such intention when he arranged this sorry duel. The marquis is a man of violent emotion. But I am not so selfless, dear Kate. My intention was simply to let the viscount go home a tired and humbled survivor. I have no desire to die just yet. Did you come all the way out here just to prevent my gallant demise?”
“I though you meant to free me from the marriage. I could not bear it if you were to die.”
“Dear Kate, can this mean that you put some value on my worthless life? Please tell me that it does, because I have loved you ever since Exmoor, and though I don’t expect you to return it, I would treasure whatever modicum of good feeling you might find it in your heart to offer me.”
Her heart leapt to her throat. She tried to steady her voice as the drizzle turned in earnest into sleet, threatening to freeze them both where they stood.
“Please don’t tease me, Mr. de Dagonet! I can’t bear it. What do you mean?”
“That I love you, fair Kate. Always have, always will! But I assure you I shall not burden you with unwelcome advances. Let us get this damned marriage dissolved as soon as possible.”
The sleet settled on his dark hair and ran over the chiseled planes of his face. His shirt was plastered to his arms and chest. Catherine looked straight into the sea-green eyes, as ice coated her hair and mud-bedraggled cloak.
“If you really love me, sir, I would much rather consummate it,” she said boldly. “If you would have me, after all, for your warlike mate.”
He caught her again by the hands. “Kate! But I have nothing to offer you but my worthless self. Sweet Miss Hunter, it won’t do, will it? The marquis is right: you deserve better.”
“I don’t see anything in our way, sir. I would gladly live in a ditch with you, if you will only say again that you love me.”
“I love you, dear Kate. I loved you at Lion Court when you tried to call the butler. I loved you in the grotto. I loved you bravely fighting with Westcott’s sheep. I loved you in our country dance with the vase and the fire screen. I believe I have always loved you, even in my dreams. ‘But love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.’ I’ll not keep you to such a rash promise, when being Mrs. Charles de Dagonet means being the wife of an adventurer.”
“There is nothing wrong with being Mrs. de Dagonet when it means being mistress of Lion Court, though, is there?”
His face changed and he raised one eyebrow. Rapidly she told him of the arrival of Peter Higgins and the truth that they had learned about Millicent Trumble.
“The marquis was rewriting his will as I left,” she explained. “And Lion Court is to be yours as of today.”
Raw emotion raced across his face: disgust, anger, a relief so profound it seemed deeper than joy.
“Poor foolish Milly! So it was Mr. Clay? Alas, poor Charlotte! She will never recover. Why did I not guess? To have been felled in the woods by pale Mr. Clay! It doesn’t do much for my pride, does it?”
“It didn’t do much for George’s either, I gather,” Catherine said wickedly, “when Mr. Clay replaced him in Milly’s affections.”
“Poor George! He never cared for Lion Court, but it meant a lot to him to be Lord of the Manor and a potential Member of Parliament. So the marquis forgives me my rattlepated ways? I trust Miss Ponsonby will still have George, when she learns about this.”
“If she loves him, she will have him, whatever. She has plenty for them both to live on,” Catherine said. “As I will gladly have you, if you will let me.”
“Bold Kate! I don’t think you could stop me. It is time to make you Mrs. de Dagonet in truth.”
With a wicked laugh, he pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her very thoroughly on the lips.
Viscount Hammond and his seconds had already crept away.
Lord Kendal turned to Lord Brooke. “It would seem that our friend no longer needs our assistance, sir,” he drawled. “This rain is uncommonly cold and damp, don’t you know? I believe it will be snow by lunch time. What do you say to breakfast, before we commence our journey back to town?”
With a delighted laugh, David Morris nodded his head.
Thus when Dagonet finally released Catherine, they were alone in the clearing except for Archibald Piggot, who tactfully gazed up into the treetops as he held the horses.
“Come, wife!” Dagonet glanced at his new servant. “We are wet to the skin, Mr. Piggot. Take those sorry jades back to London! Mrs. de Dagonet rides with me.”
Archibald saluted. Mounting one of the horses, he took the other by the bridle and rode confidently away.
Dagonet led Catherine over to the gray Thoroughbred, which stood nervously under a tree, and tossed her into the saddle. Springing up behind her, he turned his horse’s head in the direction of Jermyn Street. Held securely against his chest, she relaxed into his arms, and the powerful horse bounded away.
* * * *
They were soaked and half frozen by the time they entered the simple bedchamber at Dagonet’s lodgings. He brought her a towel.
Pulling
out the pins, she began to rub at her hair. “Were there really tons of lovers?”
He laughed and pulled her to him. Through his wet shirt, she could feel the fine fire of his skin.
“Whoever said that?”
“Annie. A quote from our maid Polly.”
“Enough, I should hope, that I shall know what I’m doing.”
Catherine felt herself blush, but she could not stop her hands from running up his strong back.
His green eyes smiled down into hers. “Do you mind? There has been no one since I met you, which strikes me now as extremely odd.”
She laughed back up at him. She had no doubt that he was telling the truth, but surely he owed her something for letting her believe him indifferent for so long?
“Then what about the hairpins?” she said.
“What hairpins?” he replied at last, when he lifted his mouth from hers.
It took a great deal of concentration to reply at all, since his beautiful fingers were caressing the side of her face and neck.
“When we came back from Whitechapel. There were some here, on the dresser.”
His laugh was filled with genuine delight. “I can hardly believe, sweet Kate, that you couldn’t recognize your own hairpins. I managed to slip some in my pocket, you see, after relieving your hair of their offending presence in the alley. I set them in here while you warmed yourself at the fire. The comb, alas, was my own.”
“You deliberately deceived me?”
“How else,” he said softly, “could I possibly keep us apart?”
She knew now that she had long ago forgiven him. “Then you make no plea at all? Can’t you even give me a suitable quote from the poets?”
He ran his hands through the free strands of her hair. Though the emerald gaze was alight still with laughter, there was something else there that made her heart sing in her breast.
“Dear Kate, I am defenseless before you. I should plead guilty to anything you say. As for the poets, there is no verse in the language that could express what I feel.”
* * * *
Catherine had no idea that what happened between a man and a woman could express love with such an exquisite music of pleasure and delight. She felt herself peeled of her defenses, layer upon layer, until her innermost self was revealed to his care, but he gave back of himself in equal measure: passion tempered with grace; power with subtle restraint; intensity with wit and with poetry. But what else could she expect from Devil Dagonet?
Some hours later, Catherine lazily sat up. The sheets slipped away from her back, and her tumbled hair fell around her breasts and shoulders, but she felt no false modesty.
He reached up to pull her back into his embrace.
“Sweet Kate,” he said gently. “Never leave me.”
She nestled against his firm chest. “I wish we hadn’t waited so long, Charles,” she said with a sigh.
He traced her lip with his finger, and kissed her.
“La patience est amère,” he breathed softly, “mais son fruit est doux.”
It was an old French saying: “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
“If I’d had any idea how sweet,” she said shyly. “I could never have been so patient.”
Author’s Note
Dear Readers,
I grew up in the English countryside in a Georgian house last remodeled in 1820. There were still servants’ bells in the hall and stone sinks in the kitchen when I moved in with my family. In that house, curled up beside an elegant Regency fireplace, I devoured my first ever Georgette Heyer romance, The Grand Sophy.
Already a fan of Jane Austen, I was hooked.
The only way to enter that fascinating world more deeply was to write my own Regency romance, even though I didn’t find the time until many years later.
Scandal’s Reward was the result, the first in my award-winning series of six Regency romances published by Zebra Books. Virtue’s Reward is the second book in the series, which culminated in Love’s Reward, winner of the RITA Award for Best Regency of the year.
Later I wrote eight bestselling long historical romances for Berkley/Jove—every single one a Romantic Times “Top Pick”—which garnered more awards and rave reviews along the way.
“It was a green, and flowery, and sunshiny world,” wrote Mary Russell Mitford, remembering the rural England of the Regency. Yet it was also a time of adventure and intrigue, style and wit, rakes and gamblers, the waltz and the marriage mart—and the duel at dawn.
I hope you’ll enjoy my Regency world.
Please visit www.jeanrossewing.com or www.juliaross.net.
Thank you, Readers!
Scandal’s Reward:
WINNER Award of Excellence, Best Regency
Finalist Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, Best First Regency
Finalist HOLT Medallion, Best Regency
“True Regency wit and charm … will capture every reader’s heart.” — JO BEVERLEY
Copyright © 1994/2015 by Jean R. Ewing
Originally published by Zebra (ISBN 978-0821746660)
Electronically published in 2015 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part,
by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any
other means without permission of the publisher. For more
information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San
Francisco, CA 94117-4228
http://www.RegencyReads.com
Electronic sales: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is
coincidental.
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