Dangerous Diana (Brambridge Novel 3)

by Pearl Darling

  Hades couldn’t even manage to curse. This really had been a bad idea. Forcing himself not to blink, he brought his horse back onto course. He risked a quick glance away from the snake towards Lisle. Within four seconds he estimated that he would reach the man who had stopped to hit out with the stock of his gun at Arturo’s dancing head. Hades was just in time to see Lisle’s smile of satisfaction as he struck the dog with a round blow between the eyes. Arturo fell quietly back to the ground unmoving, as Lisle whipped the pony forwards again.

  “No!” Hades squinted away, back down at the waving snake in his hand, crying out again as it brought its head back to strike. The sudden yells drove his horse onwards, past Arturo’s prone body and alongside Lisle’s straining pony.

  With a yell, he threw the two baskets in front of him towards Lisle. They hurled through the air and landed on top of the man, who batted one of the baskets away easily but screamed as the open basket deposited its contents right in his lap.

  With practiced ease, Lisle plucked the snake from his trousers and flicked it to the floor.

  “You’ll have to do better than…” he yelled at Hades

  But Hades had not stopped. He forced his horse into a tight figure of eight. Before Lisle could finish speaking, Hades whipped the tops off the baskets from his saddle bag and tossed the baskets back at Lisle again.

  The snakes were already upset from being in the jolting saddle bags. As soon as the tops were taken off the baskets they had begun to rise, hissing madly, venom dripping from their mouths. As the baskets tumbled through the air, Lisle’s mouth opened.

  But he had no time to scream. The first snake landed in his lap again and immediately struck into his inner thigh, piercing straight through the soft trousers of his breeches.

  The second snake landed across his shoulders. Initially stunned, it lay dormant. But Lisle didn’t notice. He was too busy screaming and pulling at the snake that was holding on to his legs.

  Hades backed his horse away from the screaming man. He watched as the snake around Lisle’s shoulders awoke from its stupor as Lisle shifted this way and that, pulling at his trousers. Incensed, it reared up and buried its fangs into Lisle’s neck.

  Lisle’s body arched and his mouth opened. The pony beneath him had had enough and bucked hard. Lisle flew through the air and fell to the ground with a sickening crunch. He gasped, clawing at his legs and his neck.

  Without looking back Hades wheeled his horse towards where Arturo lay. Pushing his muscles with one last effort he slid from his horse and picked up Arturo’s unmoving body. Laying the small dog carefully across the horse’s mane, he pulled himself up again into the saddle and turned back to Lisle. . He did not know where all four of the snakes had gone, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow them to get to Arturo, although it seemed that one of the snakes at least was still attached to Lisle’s body. He pushed his horse close to the fallen Lisle.

  “Help me, man!” Lisle gasped, prostrate on the floor. “You need to suck the venom out before it enters too far into my bloodstream.”

  Hades looked down at the Viper impassively. This man had condemned his love to an awful fate. One that Lisle was now experiencing himself. Any compassion he had felt from hearing the man’s tale had left him long before. He touched Arturo’s still, warm body in front of him, and stroked lightly at the blood matted fur.

  “Not until you tell me where the Government documents are,” he said calmly.

  “I can’t!” Lisle said, writhing, “I can feel the venom rising through my body, oh quickly help me, please!”

  “The documents, Lisle,” Hades said again, “where are they?”

  “I, I, can’t breathe…” Lisle said, gasping. His face twisted slightly in a semi-smile, “Bad luck H…H… Harding, Moreno has them. Oh!”

  Lisle’s body twitched once and stopped moving. Hades stared at the still body, the macabre half-grin still spread across its face.

  He answered it with a small grim smile of his own. “Bad luck Viper. I, myself, have Moreno,” he murmured.

  CHAPTER 34

  Melissa looked sideways at Hades in the reflection of the dressing room mirror. It had been a bone-jolting ride away from Melissa’s childhood home to Hades’ house in Mayfair.

  “I don’t understand why I had to ride with your mother in the carriage.” Melissa wrinkled her nose. “She wanted to ask me all sorts of questions!”

  “It was for propriety,” Hades said in even tones. “And it was the least I could do for Arturo.”

  Melissa narrowed her eyes at his reflection through her spectacles. “Propriety? You didn’t care about that when you brought me here at first!”

  “I thought you were the Viper at first.”

  “Mmm.” Melissa fell silent. She had been exploring the house in Chalfont St. Peter when movement outside had attracted her to a window. She had screamed as Lisle had felled Arturo, and then watched unmoving the twisted death of the man who had ruined her family.

  She had also nearly fainted when Lisle had shot at Hades.

  “Who is Pergamum?” she asked faintly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Pergamum. You shouted ‘Death to the Pergamums’ and then chased after that man.”

  “Oh. Yes. I had been thinking for the past few months about strategies related to snakes. I couldn’t get the Viper out of my mind. Then I remembered a piece I had read in Polybius about how Hannibal threw jars of snakes at the Pergamum’s ships in order to defeat them. He knew that he would not be able to take them on directly. When I saw that trunk of baskets…”

  “Yes, quite.” Melissa shuddered. After having been imprisoned in a room full of snakes she had no love for smooth creatures. She had almost screamed when Carter had curiously opened up one of the baskets to see what he had passed to Hades. Carter hadn’t been too impressed either. He had fallen off the cart in a dead faint.

  “So have you thought any more about—” Hades stopped again midsentence as the counterpane on Melissa’s bed moved slowly. “What the hell?”

  “Ah, yes. About that.”

  A small comical nose poked out from underneath the blankets followed by smiling bright eyes.

  “Arturo?”

  The dog wriggled forward as Hades sat slowly on the bed. The counterpane fell back to reveal Arturo’s tufted fur, lines of stitches crawling across his back, and a white bandage stiffly tying his tail which thumped audibly against Hades’ side.

  “He knows he’s not allowed but…”

  “He saved me. He saved us.”

  Melissa nodded. In the carriage journey pulling away from Chalfont St Peter, both she and Dowager Lady Harding had wept over the small dog. But as Melissa’s tears had dried, she had realized that Arturo’s body was not growing cold as was customary, and the dog’s wounds had continued to bleed. They had used their skirts to bind his wounds. As they had arrived back in London, his eyes began to open.

  It seemed that the only thing the knock on the head had done for Arturo was to increase his love of biscuits.

  Picking the small dog up gently, Hades pressed a cheek to the dog’s ear and set him down carefully in the hall. Stepping back in the bedroom, he shut the door with a slow click.

  Melissa looked at him over her shoulder, through her eyelashes. She turned back to the dressing table mirror.

  “Come here, Hades,” she said softly. She watched as he took a step towards her, and then another. She carefully put her hands to her face and pulled her spectacles off and laid them on the table next to the still closed bottle of henbane.

  She waited until she could feel his breath upon her shoulder. She kept her back to him. “We missed our appointment two nights ago,” she said, shivering slightly as his warm breath moved across her neck when he nodded. “I wanted to explain something then, but perhaps it is better if I show you now.”

  Hades’ form in the mirror remained deadly still.

  “Without my glasses, I cannot see well,” Melissa said softly. “Without my gl
asses I am at your mercy, just like I have been at many men’s mercy throughout my life.”

  Hades moved suddenly, but Melissa put a hand up to stop him pulling away.

  “I vowed never to be at anyone’s mercy again. I think you would think of it as being defeated. I thought of it as being controlled.” A small tear collected in the corner of Melissa’s eye but still she kept her hand up to stop Hades moving forward.

  “But then I read your mother’s note in the book that she gave you. ‘Behind every defeat there is a triumph, and behind every sorrow, a joy.”

  Hades repeated the words with her. His head dropped forward, but she continued talking desperately.

  “I was upset that you attempted to manipulate me into doing what you wanted, just so that you could catch the Viper. I was sorrowful because I enjoyed being with the man who was obsessed with strategy, mindlessly ate the biscuits his misfit cooks made for him, and sentimentally fed them to his dog too.”

  “I didn’t think of it as manipulation,” Hades said, in a low voice. “Perhaps it was at first, but then I just wanted to draw the Viper away from you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Those books that you found… I had no idea. And then you ran away from me in Brambridge.”

  “The henbane,” Melissa said. “I was collecting henbane—I couldn’t allow you to touch me.” She fingered the glass vial on the table and inhaled slowly. She paused, then said, “I realized that I had never had a man control me because he wanted to protect me, which was a triumph of sorts. And then you dealt with the Viper for me. You killed him for me, doing what I could not do.”

  The small tear that had formed at the edge of her eye fell gently down her cheek. “And so, as your mother wrote, behind every sorrow is a joy. Hades, Hades darling,” she repeated, “I would very much like to be your wife, to love you, to be protected by you. I have wanted it since I took your chair in your study, since you kissed me senseless and awoke a joy and passion in me that I did not recognize.”

  Melissa turned to stare blankly at Hades’ cravat, not wanting to look upwards, afraid that the expression on his face that her eyes wouldn’t be able to see would be one of regret, that he had changed his mind from the words that he had spoken in the heat of the moment.

  Hades said nothing for a few moments. Melissa wished she could step backwards, to take herself out of the moment, but the dressing table was behind her. She had bared all, her soul now naked and defenseless.

  “I had thought I knew what love was,” Hades began hoarsely. Melissa reached out blindly and touched the table behind her. “I had thought I knew what love was because I became obsessed with a woman who I thought felt the same way about me.” Melissa increased her grip on the table. The room was beginning to spin. The use of past tense was not helping her feeling of powerlessness.

  “But then she dropped me, and without a backward glance took up with another man who was richer, and older. Since then every woman I have met has tried to trap me into marriage, to defeat me, to gain their own victory.” Hades reached out and brushed the tear on Melissa’s cheek away with the soft pad of his large thumb. “And yet you, you have gone your own way. Without realizing you broke into the very citadel of my own house, my study, and inserted yourself straight into my heart, much as a grand strategist would have done.”

  Hades cupped Melissa’s face with his two hands and traced the underneath of her eyes with his forefingers. “And now you stand, offering yourself before me, defenseless, shivering, having shown all of yourself to me.”

  Hades bent his head towards Melissa and before she could protest, he pressed a gentle kiss to her lips, swift and sweet. “This is not a defeat for either of us, Melissa.” He kissed her again at the corner of her mouth. “This is our triumph, our victory.”

  Hades turned her round again to face the mirror. He plucked the spectacles from the table and pulled them behind her ears. Her eyesight cleared and she saw straight into his face through the mirror.

  Hades’ eyes were aflame with the passion that she had seen before. But this time as she looked at him the passion did not dim, nor did the fire bank in his face. “I want to you to see me,” Hades said hoarsely, dropping small kisses on the back of her neck. “You have seen through me already. I take you with everything, spectacles, Hobbs and all. Melissa, I am delighted that you will take me as your husband.”

  Melissa let out the breath that she didn’t realize that she had been holding. “I want one last thing, Hades,” she said querulously.

  “Anything, Melissa, and you shall have it.”

  “I want you to help me take off my dress, so that I can really show you how I feel.”

  Melissa watched Hades like a hawk as his face blanched, and the fire in his eyes roared higher. “Gladly,” he murmured hoarsely, pulling at the buttons on the back of her dress.

  Melissa shivered as Hades undid each button with exquisite slowness. As before his fingers traced the soft skin on the back of her neck, all the way to the middle of her spine as her tender flesh was revealed.

  She could not tell who was in control now, nor who was at whose mercy. But certainly they had both triumphed. And her will was still her own. Melissa smiled in joy as Hades’ large hands spanned her bare waist, and her dress pooled around her on the floor.

  EPILOGUE

  The clapping started before Melissa and Hades could reach the end of the aisle. St George’s church in Hanover square burst at the seams with the great and good, and some of the not-so great and the good.

  The news that the Viper had been defeated in a daring feat of courage was the talk of London. The fact that the man that had done so was also a war hero had also been leaked, but by who, no one knew. Everyone wanted to see the great man get married to his secret love who had unwittingly defeated all the debutantes to become his coveted wife.

  There were a few notable absences. There were many red faces in Whites. Not just of those that had bet against Hades, but those who also found out that their private discussions had been picked up and passed on by the Viper. They were calmly given a dressing down, and in some cases discharged from what little duties they still held.

  Many of Melissa’s patients sat in the audience, occasionally coughing and groaning to the disgust of their near neighbors. Hades’ staff sat at the front in the same aisle as Dowager Lady Harding and Lady Colchester. They let out wild cries of delight. Dowager Lady Harding merely smiled broadly, pleased that her son had finally found peace.

  Bill sat next to Freddie in the last row. Freddie clapped laconically. “And another one bites the dust,” he said disgustedly.

  Bill glanced quickly at a spot near the front, catching sight of sleek blond hair atop a cream complexion jeweled with blue eyes. “Yes,” he said distractedly.

  “You and I at least are free to do what we want. Weren’t you telling me last night about that lovely little opera singer…?”

  Bill grimaced. Being in London and associated with Hades had brought unwanted attention. That and the fact that he now owned a large estate in Devon, and that he used to be a blacksmith. It seemed an irresistible attraction to some women, riches and a low down past. Just not irresistible enough to the woman that he wanted.

  “I have other troubles at the moment,” he said in a low voice.

  “Ah yes. Moreno. You weren’t to know that he would be able to undo all those knots with his teeth, back flip across the room, jump out of a window fifteen feet in the air and still run away on two feet. Stanton said he was a slippery character in that boathouse.”

  “It was your home we were in, Freddie!”

  “Yes, but you were the one on guard. A man has to use the facilities sometimes you know.”

  Bill clenched his massive fists. Hades had not been very understanding. In fact he had taken Bill to see Lord Granwich. Bill could still hear the conversation in his mind, where the earl had done most of the talking;

  “So you see Grannie, I will not be doing this for you. I am retiring to Chalfont St. Peter f
or the summer with my new wife to set to rights her family home, and to enjoy discovering some of the art of botany. I did everything that you asked. I suggest that you employ Standish here to recover these secrets of yours, since he was the one who lost them again.”

  Bill glanced once more at the golden hair bobbing gently in the audience at the front of the church.

  “Clap, dear boy, clap.” Freddie tapped him on the arm. “You don’t want to get on the new Lady Harding’s bad side, I hear she has a dab hand with potions. You never know what she might do to you.”

  Bill put his hands together and gave himself unwillingly over to the moment.

  At the exit to the church, Earl Hades Harding turned to his wife, Lady Melissa Harding and stopped briefly. A carriage waited to take them to a wedding feast to be held in Chalfont St. Peter with a small number of select guests.

  “A triumph?” he asked her with a raised eyebrow, caressing the small of her back.

  She nodded back at him, the sunlight glinting off the edge of her golden glasses. “A triumph, darling Hades,” she replied, “and no snakes in sight!”

  Their tale is over, but for others, the story has only just begun…

  Before turning the page to read the Prologue to Reckless Rules the fourth book in the Brambridge Novels series:

  Firstly thank you for reading Dangerous Diana. I hope you enjoyed it! Please do let me know what you thought by leaving a review at Amazon and/or Goodreads.

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  Dangerous Diana is the third book in the Brambridge Novels series. The other books currently available in the series are Somewhat Scandalous, Burning Bright, (Dangerous Diana), Reckless Rules and Maddening Minx. Click on the titles to discover more about them, or visit www.pearldarling.com for my blog, books, and more.