She’d learned a great deal about the Wharton girls during the past week. They were as playful and innocent as kittens, closely watched and protected from the darker side of life. Neither twin seemed to have any inkling that their brother had once rescued a girl who’d nearly been whipped to death. And both seemed completely unaware of the dire financial straits into which their family had been sunk. Perhaps the dowager had funds that had kept the girls from realizing the desperate financial problems their brother had solved by marrying her.
Several times, one or the other had seemed intent on speaking to her alone, but the twins seemed inevitably to arrive in a room and leave together, as though some invisible string tied them together.
It had been necessary for Josie to pretend that her trunks were on their way back to America, so she could have an entire wardrobe appropriate to her new station made during the week prior to her wedding. The twins had been on hand, eager to help, when the dowager’s seamstress measured her for both her new wardrobe, which Blackthorne had insisted upon purchasing, and her wedding gown, which was a gift from the dowager.
“Oh, Josie, I’m so envious,” Lark said when Josie had her final fitting for her wedding gown. “I can’t wait till I walk down the aisle.”
Lindsey had arched a dark brow and said, “Do you have someone in mind with whom to make this walk?”
Lark had flushed and answered, “No. I was merely dreaming of the future.”
Josie thought she had her answer for which twin might have an eye for Seaton. She might have inquired further of Lark, but she was never able to speak with the girl when Lindsey wasn’t around.
The elegantly simple gown Josie had worn for her wedding was made of white satin in honor of Queen Victoria, who’d made the trend popular when she’d chosen to wear white at her wedding to Prince Albert. Josie’s gown had lace insets at the throat and sleeves with satin-covered buttons at the wrists. The waist was fitted, with luscious folds of satin falling to the floor in back in a short train.
An infinite number of satin-covered buttons down the back might have created a challenge for the groom on his wedding night, except Josie had no intention of offering Blackthorne the chance to undress her. She planned to be wearing something far less enticing when he arrived in her bedroom to consummate the marriage.
Josie had piled her golden blond hair onto her head to diminish the number of curls she had to contend with if it rained. She’d rarely pulled her hair up to expose her nape over the past two years, because a thin scar showed above even a high collar. She hadn’t realized how naked and exposed she would feel simply leaving her neck bare. By the time she’d conceded her discomfort, it was too late to go back and start over again.
“We need to sign the register,” the duke reminded her, putting a hand to her elbow and urging her toward the bishop’s office at the back of the church.
“We’ll meet you at the house,” Lark said to her brother.
“Don’t be too long,” Lindsey said with a wink.
Josie wasn’t sure what the wink was for. She looked up at Blackthorne and saw he was chuckling and shaking his head at his sister.
Then it dawned on her that Lindsey believed her brother was hoping to have a little time alone with his bride. Perhaps to kiss her again?
Josie kept her head lowered to hide the hot blush that rose on her cheeks as they entered the bishop’s chambers. The churchman must have been delayed, and she could feel the tension growing between herself and the duke, as they stood silently in the austere room. She was painfully aware that they were alone. And that she was Blackthorne’s wife.
Josie wondered if the duke would actually take advantage of this moment of privacy to kiss her again and realized that that was a foolish thought. It was surprising that he’d kissed her at the altar. Now that he had, why would he want to kiss her again, especially after she’d pushed him away?
“You look quite fetching today.”
The words were spoken so softly that Josie almost thought she’d imagined them. She felt the duke’s forefinger tip her chin up until she was looking into his striking blue eyes.
“The gown your grandmother’s seamstress made for me is certainly fetching,” she agreed.
“I wasn’t admiring the gown. I was admiring you.”
Josie self-consciously reached around his hand and poked her spectacles up her nose. “You were?”
His lips curved in the beginning of a smile. Then he looked deep into her eyes and said, “I was.”
Josie felt her insides squeeze into a tight ball. All the oxygen she’d breathed in was suddenly caught in her chest, so it felt like she might explode. A frisson of feeling scurried down her spine, and her toes curled inside her shoes.
Blackthorne’s gaze was suddenly focused on her lips, as he lowered his head. Josie felt almost dizzy with the knowledge that he was going to kiss her again. She wondered if he would do that thing he’d done before, and put his tongue in her mouth. She’d liked the little bit of it she’d experienced before she’d panicked. She’d only drawn away because she hadn’t expected what he’d done. She was willing to try it again and see if it proved to be as pleasant as it had seemed like it might become.
The duke’s lips had nearly reached hers when someone behind her loudly cleared his throat. Flustered, she was startled into stepping backward, while the duke slowly raised his head, not acknowledging in any way that he’d been about to kiss his bride.
The bishop was standing in the doorway. “Are you ready to sign the register now, Your Grace?”
“We are,” he replied. “You first,” he said to Josie.
Her hand trembled as she signed her name. She quickly stepped back and handed the feathered quill to the duke, who dipped it once more into the inkwell and signed his name with a flourish.
“Are we done here?” the duke inquired.
“Yes, Your Grace,” the bishop said. “May I add my congratulations on your wedding?”
The duke was already ushering Josie from the room as he replied, “Yes. Thank you.”
Josie was surprised to find Blackthorne’s grandmother and sisters waiting for them at the front of the church, since the girls had suggested they would meet us later at Blackthorne’s mansion.
“Is there some problem?” the duke asked, his voice filled with concern. “I thought you would be on your way by now.”
“It’s pouring rain,” the dowager replied.
“You won’t melt if you get a little wet,” the duke said with an indulgent smile.
“You go ahead,” the dowager said. “We’ll wait until the deluge slows down.”
“Suit yourselves.”
Josie should have known from the way the twins were huddled together laughing, that they weren’t going to encounter a typical English rain.
And they didn’t.
BLACKTHORNE TOOK ONE step outside and staggered when a strong gust of wind hit him. His new bride gave a cry of consternation as the powerful draft caught her train and lifted it like a kite. He now understood the dowager’s reluctance to leave the church, and the twins’ giggles. Those two mischief makers could have warned him that, when he opened the church door, he’d be facing gale force winds and torrential rain.
A servant stood nearby on the church porch, struggling with a black umbrella turned inside out by the storm. Clearly there was no way to get from the porch to the carriage without getting drenched.
Blackthorne grimaced. He couldn’t bear the thought of stepping back inside and making polite—and assuredly awkward—conversation with his family in the church vestibule until the maelstrom abated. And it was clear the servant’s umbrella would never recover from the indignity forced upon it. So he did something entirely uncharacteristic and utterly fanciful.
His bride gave a delighted shriek, as he swept her off her feet and into his arms. She clung to him, and he held her close as he ran down the church steps. The servant dropped the umbrella and rushed ahead of him to open the door to his carriage
and put down the steps. He practically threw his bride onto the closest seat and followed her inside, dropping onto the seat opposite her, as the servant put up the steps and slammed the carriage door behind them.
They were both drenched.
His new wife sat there in her soggy dress with her sopping hair for only a moment, before he was treated to burbling laughter, a sound as happy and soothing as the brook running over stones at Blackthorne Abbey.
She was pointing at him and laughing so hard she could barely get a word out. “Your…hair. Your…eyelashes. Your…chin.”
He shoved his wet hair back off his brow, then took a hand to his face, swiping off rainwater and wiping it on his trousers.
“You’re in no better shape,” he replied with a laugh. Instead of letting her repair her own misfortunes, he shifted himself to the seat beside her. He tilted her chin up, so he was looking into her laughing face, and realized it was amazing she could see him at all, with her spectacles so doused with rainwater. He slipped them off, so he could dry them with his handkerchief.
Once they were in his hand, he looked across at her laughing face and felt his heart stop. Only for a beat or two, but it must have stopped, because it felt as though he’d been struck by the proverbial bolt of lightning.
His bride wasn’t just pretty. She was stunningly beautiful.
Maybe it was her willingness to laugh at a situation he knew would have sent any other woman of his acquaintance into hysterics. Maybe it was her willingness to laugh at him, as though he were a mere mortal man and not the formidable Duke of Blackthorne. Or maybe it was seeing her amazing blue eyes for the first time out from behind the glass that had slightly distorted them.
He turned immediately back to the task of removing the rainwater from her spectacles, disturbed by what he’d discovered. How could he not fall in love with her? She possessed many of Fanny’s good qualities—kindness, a concern for others, a lack of vanity—and a few Fanny hadn’t possessed—most significantly, forthrightness and a willingness to speak her mind.
And she was far more beautiful.
Blackthorne felt ashamed for making the comparison. It was unfair to Fanny, whose loss he still felt intensely a year after her death. He realized he would have to guard himself against anything so ill-advised as an infatuation with his new wife.
By the time he was done drying his bride’s spectacles, her laughter had died, but he could still see amusement in her eyes. She shoved her wet bangs aside, but raindrops clung to her eyelashes.
“Close your eyes,” he said in a voice that was strangely hoarse.
“What?”
“Just close them.”
He dabbed at her eyelashes with his handkerchief. And then he succumbed to temptation and kissed her. With hunger. With desire.
He felt her hands at his shoulders, as though to push him away, but they slid around his neck instead. And he realized she was kissing him back. With awkward eagerness. With guileless enthusiasm.
While his tongue sought a willing haven in her mouth, his hands traced the tempting contours of his new wife. There was no telling where things would have ended, if he hadn’t dropped her spectacles.
The sound of shattering glass brought them both to their senses. She pulled away, staring down at the debris on the floor of the carriage, and then back at him, with horrified—he could think of no other word to describe the look—eyes. As though she’d betrayed some other lover. As though she’d committed a cardinal sin. As though she’d done something worthy of shame.
She covered her mouth with her hands and said, “Oh. Oh, no.” Then she lowered her gloved hands, folded them primly in her lap, and turned her head to look out the window.
He’d been shaken by their kiss, but he was even more shaken by her reaction to it. What was going on in that head of hers? Was he wrong about her innocence? Did she love some other man? Why had she seemed so upset by her behavior? It was only a simple kiss.
Except there had been nothing simple about it. The soft weight of her breast had filled his free hand, and that kiss, which had involved teeth and tongues, had been a sensual, lascivious thing, a carnal prelude to sex.
He retrieved her broken spectacles from the floor and said, “I’ll have these repaired today.”
She didn’t say “Thank you.” She didn’t say anything, or look anywhere but out the window, leaving him to think about his bride in silence.
Blackthorne reclined on the plush seat of the ducal carriage wondering what the rest of his life would be like, now that he was married to this strange American girl. Unusual. Unconventional. Unpredictable, for certain, if the past week turned out to be in any way typical of the next fifty years.
He couldn’t help thinking of Seaton’s reaction to his decision to marry Miss Wentworth, which his friend had expressed at the table after their pre-wedding dinner last night. The two of them had been enjoying a glass of brandy, the women having adjourned to the sitting room.
His friend had startled him by saying, “I thought in the end you’d give up everything before you married anyone.”
“Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because you’ve had this hope—this dream—for the past year that the woman you saved in the Dakota Territory would miraculously reappear. I’m sorry, for your sake, that you never saw her again. Maybe then you could have closed that chapter—no, that single sentence—in your life, once and for all.”
Because Blackthorne had denied his infatuation with the girl so many times in the past, he didn’t bother protesting. But his gut had churned at the thought of giving up forever the forlorn hope his friend had put into words.
“Based on the poor quality of her clothing,” Seaton continued, “your rescued maiden obviously didn’t have the wealth to solve your financial woes. It’s probably a good thing her whereabouts remain a mystery. Imagine the disaster if you’d decided to do something so foolish as to marry her. You’d have lost everything. As it turns out, this American girl—this Josephine Wentworth—is something out of the ordinary.”
“She is that,” Blackthorne had agreed, as an image of his future bride—leaping up like a jack-in-the-box from the dowager’s dining table—rose in his mind’s eye. “I should have anticipated something like what happened at dinner, I suppose. After all, she was raised in an egalitarian society. Still, it was a surprise.”
Seaton chuckled. “You mean hopping up to serve the turtle soup? I thought your grandmother was going to choke on her wine.”
“I was impressed with the reason the future Duchess of Blackthorne gave for helping Grandmama’s elderly footman.”
“That the tureen looked heavy? That she could easily serve, if he would hold the bowl?”
Blackthorne realized he was grinning. “To be fair, I was half out of my own chair when Soames tripped on the carpet as he entered the room and nearly dumped the soup in her lap.”
Seaton chuckled again. “I thought her excuse for leaving her own bowl empty was priceless.”
“That she’d once had a pet turtle, and couldn’t possibly eat anything that reminded her of Murtle? Definitely priceless.”
They’d both laughed. Guffawed, in fact.
But there was nothing funny about what he’d felt at the altar, as he’d stood beside his bride. He glanced at the woman who was now his wife, but her face remained determinedly aimed out the window of the coach.
When she’d looked up at him at the altar with those summer-sky-blue eyes, shaking like a lost soul, he’d wanted to protect her, to shield her from hurt and from harm. He’d taken her hand and felt the enormity of the obligation he was accepting for the second time in his life.
It had been unsettling to admit that he didn’t love the woman who would be his wife. He’d taken solace from the fact that he found her endlessly entertaining, since she was constantly doing the unexpected. It was disconcerting to realize that, ever since he’d met her, he’d been continually surprising himself with his own behavior, which was anythin
g but normal—at least for him.
Whatever had moved him to kiss his bride at the altar, in front of his grandmother and Seaton and the twins? He would never hear the end of it from any of them.
That kiss…
It must have been sympathy or empathy or God knew what that had made him do something so uncharacteristic for the reserved Duke of Blackthorne, with a bride he barely knew. He’d wanted to laugh—or was it cry?—when she’d answered the bishop’s question with that whispery, “I will?” When his turn came, he’d felt shaken by the hopeless knot in his throat. He’d been relieved when he’d managed to speak without his voice cracking.
He suddenly realized what it was he’d seen on her face at the altar that had caused him to lift her chin and lower his head: desolation.
Which made no sense. He glanced again at the back of his wife’s head, as she stared out the window. She was getting what she wanted, wasn’t she? As his duchess, she would live the rest of her life at the height of Society in London—and for that matter, the world. She could lord it over all of her American friends. What did she have to be sad about?
Which made him question why she’d married him, if it hadn’t been to purchase a royal title. But what other possible motive could she have had for giving up her fortune and marrying a perfect stranger, someone she’d known for a single week? Which made him wonder, not for the first time, why she’d been in such a hurry to get married. She would have married him a day after meeting him, if his grandmother hadn’t intervened.
Blackthorne’s mouth turned down. He had the awful feeling that Josephine Wentworth had put something over on him. But it was hard to conceive of a nefarious plan being hatched by someone as artless as his American bride.
As he’d lowered his head to kiss her at the altar, she’d closed her eyes and pursed her lips in a way that convinced him she had very little experience at such things, which was as it should be. He’d been very much aware of her vulnerability, her trust in him to keep her safe, and her belief, however naïve, that he would never hurt her.
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