by Jackie Ivie
Copyright © 2013 Jackie Ivie
ISBN9781939820181
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Thank you.
Cover design by The Killion Group
Interior format by The Killion Group
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Dedication
To Kim Killion, her creative genius, and a magical span of four weeks I will never forget.
Thank you.
PART ONE
Brandy
CHAPTER ONE
The plan was stupid, it was wicked, and it was absolutely perfect.
Brandy held her tongue as the two women argued, but she kept her eye on the burly man they’d brought with them. Laws, but her neck ached. A little movement to one side would help. But she knew without being told, what would happen if she so much as flinched, so she kept her eyes glazed over and concentrated while Helen and her maidservant gestured.
“It will not work, Madelaine! Look at her! She’s nothing! Worse! God, but I need a stiff drink even to look at her. She looks like...like a banshee!”
Brandy smiled inwardly at Helen’s compliment - she’d worked long and hard to achieve that effect.
“It’s your only hope, Mistress.”
“You French. So stubborn. I should....”
Brandy moved her eye a fraction to see how the maidservant named Madelaine took the words and saw the woman’s lips tighten. French servants were all alike - way above their station. Her cousin shouldn’t employ one if she had no idea how to treat them.
“You payin’ attention?”
Their brute shoved her, and she stumbled clumsily into the wall, swallowing a groan as her shoulder hit.
“So, Helene? What do you say? Isn’t it the best idea you ever heard?” Helen came into Brandy’s line of vision to ask it.
“Ever heard?” Brandy mimicked her exactly, and she received the brute’s hands on her again for her trouble.
“See Madelaine?” Helen tossed a hand into the air. “She’s crazy, and I was even crazier to come here.”
“Calm yourself, Mistress. Of course she’s crazy. Isn’t this the place for it? She’ll do it. You’ll see. Really, you have no other choice, for the ceremony begins in two hours. We’ll have our hands full accommodating your schedule as it is.”
Madelaine’s cool words, spoken with a touch of insolence, were said just the way Brandy remembered. Then, the maid came near her and began speaking. “You see how it is, Miss? Your cousin, Helen? She needs you desperately right now, and, after all, you’ll be away from this dreadful place and married to a handsome man...a very handsome man.”
Brandy shuddered and instantly regretted it as her shoulder stabbed at her neck. She felt the familiar pulling on her face again as it fell. She’d give anything to have her face work again.
“Good God, Madelaine!” Helen exclaimed. “What’s happened to her now?”
Brandy faced them evenly, focusing on nothing in particular. Helen’s face told her everything a mirror couldn’t.
“It’s nothing. She’ll wear a veil, Helen. Besides, she’s about your height. Bring her, Gaston.”
They could’ve asked her. She would’ve joined them at the door. They didn’t have to ask the man to shove her, making her chin throb as her collarbone hit it.
“She’s too thin!” Helen wailed. “What shall I do?”
“Too thin!” Brandy wailed with her in exactly the same tone and inflection. “Much too thin!” She didn’t see Gaston’s fist coming, and, if he really wanted to hurt her, he had to hit the unparalyzed side of her face - the idiot.
And they called her mad!
“Jesus, Gaston! You split open her cheek. I have enough to do to keep from losing my breakfast as it is. Ugh. She drools!”
Brandy ignored Helen’s gagging. She knew without looking what the moisture on her shirt front was. Although it was bloody now, it would mingle just as well with the other stains.
“And she’s filthy. Ouí, Helen, I begin to think we have wasted our time. Gaston?” Madelaine gestured for him to follow.
“Wait for me.”
His words turned Brandy’s blood to ice, and she watched the women turn at the door.
“You can’t possibly want her, Gaston. She’s disgusting! Revolting! Why, she isn’t even human, any longer.”
“Aye.” He grinned, and Brandy’s throat choked with bile. “But she’s available, she’s cheap, and she can’t fight me.”
He lifted the front of her straitjacket, moving her arms forward. The pain that enveloped her made dots dance before her eyes. Quick breath, Brandy, she thought. She couldn’t stop him if she became unconscious. As soon as her vision cleared, she let out her banshee call, ending on a howl punctuated with dog-like barking. It rarely failed her before, and it didn’t then.
He dropped her arms, almost a worse fate, and stepped back as if she were truly insane.
“I’ll do it, Helen.”
They froze in shock at Brandy’s whisper, but she couldn’t have known why for certain, because blood came from her mouth with the words. That could have been it, just as easily. Brandy didn’t care. Whatever Helen wanted, it had to be better than this hell-hole.
Madelaine’s eyes narrowed. Brandy knew instantly that the maidservant was more cagey than her mistress. “Helene? You’ve come back to us?”
“Back to us?” she mimicked instantly.
Madelaine slapped her, opening a cut in her cheek. Brandy barely it, because her neck had rocked at the woman’s action, and that pain was excruciating.
“Gore! She’s mad, Miss Helen.” Gaston crossed himself uneasily. If she could’ve gotten away with it, Brandy would’ve smiled. As it was, she could only focus hazily on the wall beside them.
“Wouldn’t you be after a year in this place? Ugh. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill her, but look at her hair, Madelaine! What a disaster. The veil has been in the Tremayne family for generations, and it can’t hide such a sight. Honestly, Helene, what have you been doing to your hair?”
“I wash and oil it daily, M’Lady, but my comb’s a-missing today. Could be I mistook it for bread and ate it.” She answered in Helen’s strident voice, the one reserved for servants, not her
many beaux.
Curse her stupidity in answering flippantly! Gaston made her moan as he yanked on her tied arms again. He’d better guard his back for that - no one was allowed to make her show weakness.
“I’ll make her pay, Mistress?”
Brandy heard the hope in his voice and started carefully blanking her mind. She’d done it so often in the past, it came easily.
“No, Gaston. You’ll mark her so she’ll bleed through the entire ceremony, and we’ve already lost half an hour. She’ll never be clean enough.”
“Only her hands have to show, Helen. Calm yourself and slip out of your finery,” the maid replied.
Brandy ignored Helen’s movement as she shed the expensive-looking wedding gown in which she’d arrived, but she knew Gaston watched, because his hands started trembling, and Brandy knew Helen enjoyed that. It showed in her eyes and in her face as she gave him the harlot’s smile.
“She’s a bit thinner than you are, but I brought extra nightgowns to make up the difference.”
“Whose nightgowns?” Helen stood in her chemise and stockings, and Gaston’s hands on Brandy’s arms made the pain worse as he shuddered.
“My own, of course. I’d never use yours, Mistress. It’d be a waste of such finery. Now turn, Miss Helene, and we’ll see how your own beautiful...uh...gown unfastens.”
Brandy waited passively enough as Madelaine’s fingers slipped through the lacing behind her, hoping she could handle the pain the restored circulation in her arms would cause. She had never been more thankful to Helen in her life—because of her cousin’s near-naked state, the brute, Gaston, never again looked at Brandy.
CHAPTER TWO
She’d done it! Brandy had survived as she’d known she would, and the absolutely gorgeous man sitting opposite her didn’t even know how grateful she was. Of course, she couldn’t speak with the side of her face falling as it was and through not one, but three layers of chiffon veiling her face. Still, she thanked him all the same.
It didn’t surprise her to watch him drinking straight from the bottle without asking his new bride why she hadn’t spoken since the wedding vows nor attended her own reception. She knew he drank, because he thought he’d just married Helen.
She almost snickered at the thought.
“Merci, ma Mere.” She whispered the prayer softly and knew that, wherever Mama was, she was still watching out for Brandy, as she always had.
She watched as Gillian Tremayne shifted one long leg over the other, looking as uncomfortable on his side of the coach as Brandy was. It was easy to tell why - a worse-sprung vehicle would’ve been hard to find. Why if she weren’t a-wash in thankfulness, she would have let reality intrude enough to scream her agony at how the bench’s movement rocked her shoulder. It was better to be thankful. At least rats weren’t nibbling at the toes of her socks.
“You think you won easily, don’t you, my fine wife?”
He slurred the words, but even besotted, he was absolutely gorgeous. He was well over six feet of strength and masculine beauty, and Helen had run from him? Brandy thought her cousin had better sense.
“Christ, but my head hurts. And did I give you permission to sit there?”
She glazed over her eyes as he lifted his tawny head to ask it. She couldn’t think of a suitable reply. She didn’t have permission to lean against the corner? Lord, that was the only way she could survive the jouncing.
She struggled to sit upright in the center again, and he smiled.
“That’s better. I want to make certain you give it your best shot, My Lady.”
When he said the title, it wasn’t with affection. It wasn’t a surprise. Brandy had noticed how cold he was earlier when she’d put her cleaned hand in his to be pronounced his lawfully wedded wife.
“My best shot...at what?” Brandy mimicked Helen perfectly, but she almost forgot to finish the sentence, and then he might have looked closer at her than he’d done all day.
“Losing that bastard you supposedly carry. What else?”
If she could have perished from the venom in his eyes, she would have. She’d never seen such ugliness as he had in his blood-shot, light-blue eyes, but she could understand his hatred. And since it was directed at Helen, and not at her, she actually longed to salute it.
So...Helen was expecting a child, and she’d gone and trapped this man with it, only to run at the last moment? Cor, but her cousin was the most stupid women Brandy had ever met. If she didn’t have that Madelaine to guide her, she’d have sunk long ago. She was nothing like Gerard, her brother. Despite her own injury, Brandy trembled before she could help it, and suffered the ache it caused. No, Helen was nothing like Gerard. Well...maybe a little.
“Well? No surprised gasp of shock? No fancy words of rebuttal? You’re a bigger whore than Reginald said, and now I’m a laughingstock.”
Gil took another long draught of spirits and Brandy cursed the weakness that made his image dance before her eyes. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. She’d faced worse than a bumpy carriage ride, but that was before—
She wouldn’t think of it.
“You’d best lose that child. And soon.” He was snarling as he said it. “For we arrive at my Grandmama’s little hunting cottage in no time, and I mean it when I say I’ll see your throat slit before I’ll let a bastard inherit from me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Little dots filtered through her vision of him, and it was a shame how his image blurred. Brandy decided Helen was stupid. That was it. She could have used any number of potions and items to prevent a pregnancy. She didn’t have to get herself into such a predicament. Then again, Helen had definitely managed to trap a very impressive, wealthy-looking, stunning fellow into marriage...and then she’d gone in search of her long-lost, supposedly insane, cousin to replace her in the ceremony.
And they called Brandy mad.
“I told you already, you’re not to lean there!”
Hard hands gripped her wrist, hauling her back to the center of the seat. Brandy barely kept from crying out. His hold threatened the blood supply to her hand, but, since her unhealed collarbone made her shoulder feel like fire was eating at it, it was doubtful her hand got any blood, anyway.
“Your hands are like ice, Helen, my love. Do I frighten you so much, then? You should have thought of that before you threatened me. You should have thought of a lot before—”
He reached to rip off her veil, surprising her with his swiftness, and the look on his face was comical once he got it off.
“Bloody hell!”
He fell back to his side of the carriage, his hand trembling on the liquor bottle. Brandy smiled with the working side of her face as he crossed himself. Her action made him pale.
“Who...? What the hell are you? And where...is my wife?”
“Ah, Gil, darling,” she said in Helen’s false, soft-throated voice. “I am your wife.”
“But...but....”
“Allow me to introduce myself, properly. I’m Helene Marguerite, the new lady of Tremayne.” She winked as his healthy complexion whitened. “You’ve got yourself a prize, Your Lordship. You have. You’ve up and wed with the insane Bingham, the one from...Bedlam.” She whispered the last word conspiratorially and watched him gulp, wide-eyed. It was a shame, truly it was. He was such a big, strong, powerful man, but he was frightened of a mere slip of a girl like herself? Shameful.
“Are...are...?”
At the rate he was stammering, he’d never ask the question. Brandy decided to help him.
“Am I insane, you ask?” She lifted both eyebrows several times. “But, of course.” Then, she gave her banshee scream.
The coach stopped swiftly, as if the coachman had orders to drive as roughly as possible. The move slammed her new husband’s head into the wall with a resounding thump. She watched him crumple forward, before sliding unceremoniously to land in a heap at her feet. Odd. She’d never seen a grown man in a swoon before, but it wasn’t near as amusing as she’d
thought it should be.
Brandy wished she had the same unconscious freedom. The abrupt halt hadn’t done her shoulder any favors. She bounced off the padded backrest while tears of agony flooded her eyes. She sucked in breath to send them back, ignoring pain. Agony. Hellish fire. She wouldn’t cry! Not over such a small thing as a shoulder injury. Hell had fury a-plenty for anyone so weak.
“What have you done to His Lordship?”
The door opened, and Brandy barely had time to hide behind the torn veil before the servant glared at her. She watched him lean over His Lordship.
“He’s out cold,” he said. “And I heard a demon cry.”
He looked at her hard, trying to pierce the secret of her veil, but she’d had enough reaction for the moment. She would let Gil decide who to favor with her beauty, or lack thereof, next.
He stirred, and the coachman released her from his glare to attend him.
“I saw...! I saw...! Thompson? Tell me I’m dreaming,”
“You’re dreaming, My Lord,” the man dutifully replied.
Brandy almost rolled her eyes, but that would have caused even more pain in her body than she could handle.
His lordship looked shaky as he reseated himself, then found his decanter to gulp some more liquid. Thompson eyed her again. Gil could spare his health - spirits weren’t going to make her disappear.
“Start up again, my good man. And Thompson?”
“Yes, My Lord?”
Ever the obsequious English servant, this Thompson awaited orders like a lap dog.
“You can slow the pace. It was a mistake.”
Brandy could have kissed him for that, if it wouldn’t cause another faint. After one more, long, considering look at her, Thompson shut the door, and she waited. At least, her new husband would probably let her lean against the wall now. She did so, easing slowly into the corner and waiting for the infernal throbbing in her neck to calm into a manageable ache.