Wedded Bliss

by Celeste Bradley

  “Oliver, shut it,” Morgan snarled as he pushed past his uncle, emerging from the darkness with that murderous glower still in place.

  A chill began somewhere deep in her belly. Bliss knew a secret when she saw one. She stared at the two of them, Oliver practically crowing with nasty pride, Morgan flushed and angry, looking anywhere but at her.

  “My lord, why is it that Morgan is to be congratulated for—for cavorting with his own wife?” She asked the question of Oliver, but it was Morgan she watched.

  Was she sure she wanted to know?

  This is quite probably going to hurt.

  Oliver clapped Morgan on the shoulder. Morgan flinched away from Oliver’s touch.

  He held out one hand to her. “Bliss, we should go now.” Still, he did not meet her gaze.

  Bliss stepped back, clasping her hands behind her. She felt something seeping away, something that had filled her soul with light just moments before. Happiness was leaching away and she could not make it stop.

  Oliver smiled that awful, smug grin again. “I am not congratulating Morgan for toppling you onto a sofa, you obvious little tart. I am congratulating him on becoming the proud captain-owner of the Selkie Maid.”

  He held out his arms magnanimously, as if he actually expected Morgan’s embrace. “Your own ship, my boy, just as you’ve always wanted! And all you had to do to get it was save your brother from marrying a gold-digging harpy! You certainly kept up your end of the bargain. And what a performance!” He laughed. “I actually thought you might strike me earlier!”

  Oliver turned to regard Bliss with smiling hatred. “Wedded and bedded, for all the world to see. You’ll get no annulment now, little thief.”

  Bargain. Performance. Wedded and bedded.

  Oliver’s vicious words fell on Bliss like hammer blows, smashing her brand-new, fragile joy like cheap crystal.

  She was too shocked to cry out, too stunned by her own stupidity to protest. Morgan still glared thunderously at Oliver. Not once since his uncle began had Morgan looked at her. His dark scowl and averted gaze told her it was true, all of it.

  Congratulations, Morgan.

  His betrayal made her gut twist. She felt the bile rise in the back of her throat.

  Yet what had he done but treat her as he always had done? She had known he scorned her for a manipulator. He had kept his word to leave her alone. She had been the one to drag him into the antechamber. She had been the one to kiss first.

  He made me believe.

  Or did I simply make myself believe?

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Either way she was a fool.

  Chapter 29

  HOT rage and shame coursed through Morgan as Oliver spoke.

  He shrank from the truth of what he’d done—what Oliver had manipulated him into doing. Bliss was right to warn him about his uncle!

  You can blame Oliver all you like—but you knew what you were doing. You just convinced yourself you were doing it to someone who deserved it.

  At last, morbid curiosity overcame his shame and he lifted his gaze to face her.

  “I need you. I want you inside me. I love you.”

  Sadly, Morgan saw that the old Bliss had returned. Straight of spine and unflinching of gaze. Not even her tumbled hair and off-center neckline could shake the expression of supreme unconcern from her face. If she hadn’t been so pale, one might have thought he’d not hurt her at all.

  He had, though. He’d felt the blow as if he’d taken it himself. The sweet, reckless adventurer she finally shyly revealed to him was as dead as if he’d stabbed her through the heart.

  “Bliss, I—” Damn it, think! There must be some words he could say, some roguish smile he could flash, some gesture he could make that could bring back the woman he loved!

  He stammered to a halt. There was nothing he could say. Her wide blue gaze remained fixed on him, as it had been for all of Oliver’s revelations.

  “Sir, am I to understand that I could have had my annulment for the mere cost of a ship?” Her tone was cool and distant, almost bored.

  She folded her hands before her and regarded him as if they discussed nothing more momentous than the price of tea.

  “You should have bargained harder, Captain Pryce.” She raised an eyebrow. “If it meant I could have rid myself of you forever,” she said, with no more than a hint of mild contempt, “I would have bought you two.”

  Just then Iris Worthington floated from the crowd and put her arm around her niece. “There you are, dearest. Do come along, now. I find I’m quite fatigued and there is so much to do at Worthington House. We’ve missed you terribly, you know.” The woman looked frail, but she managed to maneuver Bliss away in a cloud of inanities. Morgan watched the crowd close around them. All eyes remained fixed on him.

  He’d never cared what these people thought of him. That was what he’d told himself for his entire life. Yet the way they looked at him now . . .

  It wasn’t condemnation, as it would be for some ungentlemanly behavior. It wasn’t anger for the fate of a young woman of good family. To the willfully bored ton, who longed for titillation and grand dramatics, it wasn’t even jaded appreciation for a good show.

  Their eyes said something else entirely. Their faces held the one impression he’d fought against all his life.

  What more could we expect? After all, he’s just a bastard.

  • • •

  “YOU BLACKGUARD!”

  Morgan turned to see the Duke of Camberton push his way out of the crowd. Neville staggered to the center of the clearing around Morgan and faced him belligerently.

  Damn. “Neville . . .” Words seemed so weak at the moment. The agony in Neville’s eyes burned a guilt-ridden soul already left scorched by Bliss’s devastated anguish.

  Neville pulled off his gloves and tried to slap Morgan across the face with them. In his inebriation, he missed. Morgan felt the soft gray kidskin whisk painlessly across his chin.

  “I challenge you, in defense of Bliss Worthington’s honor!” Neville threw his gloves to the marble floor. They lay there like open, begging hands.

  As sorry as he felt for what he’d done, Morgan was beginning to weary of providing entertainment for the ton. He raised an eyebrow at Neville’s newly discovered flair for the dramatic. “Bliss Pryce, actually,” he drawled.

  Neville snarled, “Not for long! I will see you dead at sunrise tomorrow!”

  Morgan met his half brother’s fury with anger of his own. “Tomorrow? Why not today? It is nearly sunrise now.”

  Neville blinked drunkenly. “It is?” he asked in more normal tones. He looked vaguely around the ballroom. “I’ve been up all night?”

  A young woman shoved her way through the crowd and moved to Neville’s side. Morgan didn’t know her, but she blazed hot scorn at him from dark eyes.

  “Tomorrow,” she said firmly. “Not today. You would take advantage of his state of inebriation? Your own brother?”

  “Half brother,” Morgan corrected her absently. “And he’s the one who wants to see me dead.”

  Neville roused somewhat. He lifted his head, rage and agony in his eyes. “I will see you in the ground.” Then he swayed slightly. “Tomorrow.”

  He truly loves her. God, I’ve done nothing but muck this up.

  There was just one problem with Neville’s plan of righteous gentlemanly justice.

  Morgan wasn’t a gentleman. Having never been steeped in the social construct that was the peerage, Morgan felt no compulsion to preserve his own honor.

  Yet he could not claim total dissociation from that sphere. He was not a gentleman, but his half brother, his friend, his family, Neville, was.

  Despite the fact that Morgan could quite literally thumb his nose at Neville’s challenge, and stroll back down to the docks where he belonged, he found himself compelled to ans
wer Neville’s furious pain with a short bow and a quiet “As you wish, Your Grace.”

  Two young men stepped forward to take Neville’s arms. “Come on, Nev,” Castor Worthington urged. “Let’s take a stroll out in the air.”

  Neville blinked blearily at the brothers, first Cas, then Dade. Then his gaze narrowed in fresh anger. “It should have been you,” he snarled at Dade. “Cowards, the lot of you! She’s your cousin! You should have challenged Pryce the moment you found out what he’d done!” Then he glared directly at Dade. “Have you no honor, sir?”

  Dade went pale. He took a step backward. Cas shrugged and looked away.

  “But Bliss insisted we weren’t to interfere . . . ,” Cas mumbled.

  Having had more than enough of them all, Morgan turned on his heel and strode from the ballroom. He didn’t know where he was going. Perhaps his ship. There would be no point in going home.

  She would never grace his humble house again.

  It was good that she had gone home with her aunt. He hadn’t liked letting her go. He just hadn’t felt he had any right to her. Not anymore. How she must hate him now.

  He didn’t blame her one little bit. He was in total agreement with her, in fact.

  He really was a bastard, after all.

  Chapter 30

  “HOW can she still be at it?”

  Miranda peered around the door to the kitchen, where Bliss was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the cooking hearth with a wire brush. “Hasn’t she scoured that already?”

  “She’s scoured everything already.” Cas shook his head. “I’m afraid to sit down, for fear she’ll scour me if I hold still too long!”

  “She shelved all my books. By height and topic. I’ll never find anything now!” Attie eyed the spotless house around her with an expression of mistrust. “How do we get her to stop?”

  Bliss lifted her face from her task, unaware that her cousins were near. As she brushed aside a few strands of hair with her forearm, Dade saw it—a single tear rolling off the dainty tip of her chin.

  Attie stared. “She’s crying!”

  “Oh, Bliss.” Dade felt his stomach twist in grief for his cousin. “What a disaster.”

  Just then Iris joined her children, placing a hand on Dade’s shoulder. She clucked her tongue in worry. “The poor dear! The house wasn’t in need of much tidying to begin with, yet she’s been at it all night and all morning!”

  Dade and Cas shared a sideways glance. Iris had always been blissfully unaware of the chaos of their home, but in truth, Worthington House had been in its customary, terminal state of dire disarray when Bliss returned home from the ball with her cousins the previous night.

  She immediately asked Iris for an old dress, changed out of her ball gown, and began heating water.

  “I shall make this house shipshape!” Bliss had assembled the Worthingtons to make her announcement. “By breakfast time, all shall be sparkling clean. Worthington House will once again be just so!”

  That was when everyone scattered to the four corners of the house in an effort to save their treasures from the rubbish bin.

  While the others slept, Dade had taken it upon himself to keep a watchful eye on his distressed cousin through the night. She began with the kitchen at the back of the house, then swept and scrubbed and organized her way through the entire main floor, only to return to the kitchen once breakfast was done. She had already informed the family that she planned to conquer the upstairs bedchambers next.

  Every time Dade tried to help Bliss carry a pail or lift a table leg, she had refused. Each of his attempts to talk with her was declined.

  “Don’t be silly,” she’d said. “I am not some kind of delicate flower—I am as robust as a person can be! It’s only that I enjoy a bit of tidying-up now and then!”

  Iris leaned in and whispered in Dade’s ear, “Did we manage to rescue Archie’s newssheets? And Attie’s rodent skull collection?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you hide the playbills?”

  “Yes, Iris.”

  “Wonderful! They are our only connection to a lifetime in the theater!”

  Dade nodded again, then turned to his mother. “I am deeply worried for Bliss. If she doesn’t stop soon, she will collapse from exhaustion.”

  Iris kissed his cheek. “Do not fret, my dear boy. I have a secret weapon.”

  • • •

  MORGAN WAITED PATIENTLY on the steps to Camberton House, in the precise spot Regis insisted he remain. He was happy to do so, as he had expected the butler to slam the door in his face.

  Instead, Regis had eyed him suspiciously but agreed to carry a message to Neville.

  “Let us resolve this matter peacefully, Neville,” Morgan had written. “There is much I need to tell you. I wish you no harm.”

  After a few long moments on the stoop, the butler returned. He cracked the door just enough to slip a note to Morgan and disappeared inside the house without another word.

  Morgan glanced down at the single sheet of fine linen paper, folded unsealed. Perhaps Neville did not wish to waste a perfectly good drop of wax on such a terse response. The note consisted of a mere three words, composed in a shaky hand: “Choose your second.”

  He shoved the paper in his coat pocket, turned, and departed. As he walked toward the street, Morgan began to comprehend the absurdity of his current situation. In a gentlemen’s duel, a second was a faithful friend, a man trusted to ensure that the dueling weapons were similarly matched and the “field of honor” provided a fair and equitable stage for the confrontation. Simply put, Morgan’s life could depend on the fidelity of his second.

  What man would do this for him?

  Morgan laughed at the irony. There was no one in his life he would trust to serve him so, save for his half brother, Neville, who happened to be his opponent. Where did that leave Morgan?

  It would not be fair to drag any of his crew into this mess. He had no other family, save for his wife’s relations—the Worthingtons. And though asking for their help would be an act of desperation, it was his only recourse.

  Morgan hailed a hack and gave the driver the address.

  • • •

  “HELLO, SWEETIE. AREN’T you going to let me in?”

  Miranda stood in the open doorway of Worthington House staring at their unexpected visitor. And though she knew was being terribly rude, Miranda was left speechless. She bounced the baby on her hip and noted the jewels around the woman’s throat and fingers, the heavy silk of her gown, and the pleated capote styling of her bonnet. It took Miranda a moment, but the woman’s identity eventually occurred to her.

  “You’re—”

  “I’m—”

  “I know!” Miranda gasped. “We have previously met.”

  “We have?” The woman looked back at her with mild curiosity.

  “I believe so.” Miranda switched the baby to the opposite hip. “Didn’t I burn down your brothel?”

  Mrs. Blythe, infamous madam and proprietress of Mrs. Blythe’s House of Pleasure, turned a sharp eye on Miranda, then smiled. “You had help from your husband—or was it your brother-in-law? It was so very difficult to tell them apart that night, with all the billowing smoke and flopping Johnsons.”

  Miranda’s mouth fell open in shock.

  “Motherhood becomes you, Mrs. Worthington.” Mrs. Blythe stepped past her in a swish of silk and strolled into the foyer. She glanced over her shoulder at Miranda. “Don’t worry, pet. I never hold a grudge.”

  Just then Cas appeared. He froze in obvious alarm. “Ah! Well . . . hello! Ah . . .”

  He shot a panicked glance toward Miranda, then the baby. Miranda glared back. What is she doing here?

  Cas grimaced and shrugged, a tiny movement. I have absolutely no idea. He turned to their guest, struggling to remain polite. “Well, then. Mrs. B—I mean,
my goodness—”

  The notorious madam graciously patted his arm as she swished past him. “Just popping by, Cas dear. No need to fuss.”

  She swept into the hall, striding through Worthington House as if she knew it very well indeed.

  Cas turned to look at Miranda. Popping by? he mouthed.

  Miranda shrugged helplessly, then handed Cas the baby. “You go put Aurora down for her nap. I’m not missing this for all the world,” she whispered to him. She scurried after their visitor.

  • • •

  FROM HER CROUCH at the base of the kitchen stove, Bliss pressed with all her might into the cleaning cloth, rubbing black into the cast iron until it shone. She had nearly finished the endeavor when she heard the sound of a woman clearing her throat. A quick glance to her right revealed a pair of silvery gray shoes adorned with a heavily jeweled buckle and a bit of ostrich feather.

  Bliss let her gaze travel up the yards of gray silk, to the fashionable beaded reticule clutched in fine kid gloves, on to the delicately embroidered spencer that contained a rather bountiful bosom.

  The visitor gazed down upon her with a gentle smile.

  As always, the woman’s timing was perfect. Perfectly preposterous.

  “Of course you would come now,” Bliss muttered. She got to her feet with a sigh, dropping the rag and wiping her hands on Mrs. Philpott’s borrowed work apron. “Hello, Mama.”

  • • •

  MORGAN’S HIRED HACK arrived at Worthington House, stopping alongside one of the grandest carriages he had ever seen. It was shiny and black, unmarked by crest or decoration. Four perfectly matched black horses were hitched to its front, while a stoic driver in costly silver-trimmed livery sat perched on his bench, the man’s posture as straight as iron.

  Morgan gave only the barest thought to the identity of the caller, as his mind was on the task at hand. Though he knew he would not be greeted with friendly hospitality, he did pray for basic civility. He only desired to state his case.

  Castor answered the door to Worthington House with a pretty, pink-cheeked, carrot-topped baby on his hip.