by Gayle Wilson
“If I might be allowed to offer assistance,” a deep, accented voice at her elbow suggested.
She glanced down into the bluest eyes she had ever encountered. The clear, rare color of a summer sky, they were set like jewels in the golden skin surrounding them, emphasized by small, white lines radiating around the crystal blue and the black sweep of lashes.
A man who’d lived a long time in a climate where the sun left its mark, she thought briefly. He was very tall, tall enough that she needn’t look down far to be lost in those blue depths. She watched as his hand, lean, long fingered and remarkably graceful, automatically smoothed the sweating neck of her impatient mare. He whispered something, the words too softly spoken for Catherine to make sense of the soothing sibilants, and Storm’s ears flickered with interest.
Amazingly, as he continued to whisper, Catherine could feel the tension caused by the street’s commotion and the delay in the promised run leave her mount. Storm turned to nuzzle those strong fingers, and Catherine found herself watching their caress with something approaching fascination. “Two quid, I believe,” the stranger said.
Still disconcerted, Catherine nodded. She watched him give Storm one last competent stroke and then walk to the waiting peddler. If Jem’s intimidating size had affected the man, he had given no sign of it, but his response to the American seemed one almost of fear. His instinctive recoil when the tall man held out his hand brought a brief reactive movement to those thin lips. Raven waited patiently until the peddler had worked up his courage to take the money and restore his cap to his head.
Slipping between the wooden tongues in the donkey’s place, the vendor awkwardly turned the heavily loaded cart so that it was now headed down the slight incline. The three watched as the wagon gathered momentum on the slope and the usual street sounds again intruded into the stage where the drama had been played out.
Raven turned back to the girl to find her eyes no longer watching the merchant’s retreating figure, but on him. She was questioning the color of his skin, he supposed, or his hair. Making her fascinated distaste apparent. He didn’t know why her frank appraisal bothered him. He had certainly grown accustomed to the stares he’d attracted in London in the last few months.
“Thank you,” she said simply, her eyes meeting his. She held out the small gloved hand that had caught the peddler’s stick. Not to be kissed, Raven realized, but to be shaken.
Her hand was almost lost in his, but her grip was pleasantly firm. He controlled the quick amusement at the sight of those slender fingers captured by his hard, dark ones.
“If you’ll give Jem your address—” she began.
“Consider him a gift,” he interrupted softly, and watched her eyes flick quickly to the animal he’d just bought. Head drooping, the donkey stood patiently waiting for the next blow to fall. In several places where the stick had cut, blood oozed.
The girl’s lips tightened and she took a deep breath. For the first time an emotion besides anger tinged her voice. “Damned bastard,” she whispered. Realizing that she’d spoken the epithet aloud, she glanced quickly at the American. The russet eyes swam with tears, but before they could overflow, she blinked, a fall of impossibly long, dark lashes concealing feelings Raven read quite clearly.
“Thank you,” she said again, looking down into that strong-featured face. Something in the crystalline eyes had changed. And he made no response to her gratitude.
“For my gift,” she explained softly, her lips lifting into the smile that had set masculine pulses hammering since she’d turned fourteen. Catherine Montfort thought of all the presents she had received from suitors in the last three years, not one of whom had, of course, thought to give her an abused donkey.
There was no response in the still, dark face. Not handsome, Catherine thought; it was too strongly constructed to be called handsome. But there was something, some indefinable something in the hawklike nose and high cheekbones that was very appealing. And in his eyes, she thought again. She had never seen eyes that shade of blue.
Raven became aware suddenly that she was talking to him, but he didn’t have any idea what she had said. Something about a gift. Something… He took a deep breath, realizing that air was a necessity he had neglected in the last minute. The perfection of the heart-shaped face floated before him against the background of clouds and sky.
“Angel,” he said softly in his grandmother’s tongue, although the word’s connotation there was not exactly the same. Oliver Reynolds had told him he’d need a guardian angel. The stern line of John Raven’s lips tilted upward at the corners.
Catherine Montfort found that her hand was still resting in his and her throat had gone dry. The small movement of his mouth fascinated her until she recognized the expression for what it was—he was smiling at her.
Sensing her inattention, Storm sidestepped suddenly, and the pull against their joined hands broke the spell. Reluctantly, Catherine disentangled her fingers. She had thanked the man twice, and there was really nothing else she could say. She didn’t even know his name. She might never know it. She’d never seen him before and would, in all probability, never see him again. He was certainly not a member of the select group, the London ton, with whom she associated, the only people with whom she had associated since her birth. What had happened today was simply a chance meeting with a stranger on a crowded London street.
Raven stepped back, clearing the way for her departure. Her boot heel touched Storm in command, and, her back flawlessly straight, Catherine Montfort directed her mount around the donkey and back on the course of her normal activities.
John Raven watched the slight figure until it was lost in the throng of riders and carriages. Realizing that he had been staring far too long for politeness, he turned back to find the groom carefully inspecting the animal’s injuries.
“Shall I find him a home?” Raven asked, wondering what her ladyship would do with a donkey in Mayfair.
“You think she’ll forget him?” the groom asked, not bothering to look up from his examination. “You think she bought him on impulse and will forget him before she gets home?” The rude sound that followed was indicative of his opinion of what Raven had suggested about the girl.
“Then she won’t?” Raven asked, the slight smile again marking the hard mouth.
“If I don’t have him back in the stables and these injuries tended to by the time she returns, she’ll serve my head to the old man with his supper.”
“The old man?” Fear stirred suddenly in Raven’s gut.
“Montfort,” the groom informed him, as if, that said, there was no other explanation needed. He moved to the other side of the donkey to run skilled hands over the protruding ribs and to pick up a trembling foreleg to examine an untreated cut.
“Montfort,” Raven repeated, feeling like Echo.
“The Duke of Montfort,” the groom said, glancing up at last to assess a man who was so ignorant as not to recognize that particular name. “The Devil Duke, they call him. Not out loud, of course,” he said, remembering his employer’s temper. The sobriquet was well earned and well deserved.
“Who is she?” the American asked, his gaze moving back to the street down which the girl had disappeared.
“The Devil’s Daughter,” Jem said, noticing for the first time the style of the foreign gentleman’s hair. The groom’s eyebrows climbed slightly, but it was not his place to question his betters. “Lady Catherine Montfort. The Duke of Montfort’s only heir.”
“Thank you,” Raven said, and reaching into his waistcoat pocket, he flicked a coin to the groom. The man smiled his thanks and then turned back to his careful survey of the donkey.
John Raven crossed the street and, taking the narrow stairs two at a time, retraced his path to Reynolds’s office. The old man looked up from his notations in a leatherbound ledger.
“Lady Catherine Montfort,” John Raven said, his wide shoulders filling the doorway.
“Montfort?” the banker repeated, wo
ndering again, as he had when he’d first met the American, if he were more than merely eccentric.
“Is Lady Catherine Montfort angelic enough for our purposes?” Raven asked calmly.
The old man stared blankly for a moment, wondering how his client had come up with that name.
“Is she?” Raven prompted, knowing that the banker’s reply really didn’t matter. The die had been cast in the middle of a crowded London street, but at least Reynolds’s approval would provide an acceptable excuse.
“Catherine Montfort is bloody well the entire seraphic choir,” the old man acknowledged truthfully. He watched the smile that touched the American’s mouth again deepen the indentions at the corners. “But I’m afraid that the Montforts—”
“You said one only had to offer enough money.”
“Montfort’s one of the few men in London evenyou couldn’t buy. And I must tell you…” The banker’s voice trailed off. He really hated to offend the man, but he knew that the duke would never accept John Raven as a suitor for his daughter’s hand. His only daughter. His only surviving child and heir. Reynolds’s mind having dealt too long with the prospects of profit, he briefly allowed himself to consider those combined fortunes being handled by his bank. And why not? Was his not the oldest financial establishment in the city? The bank had financed the East India Company’s venture into the Russian market in the sixteenth century. He cleared the tempting visions from his mind and shook his head regretfully.
“He’ll never allow you to even present your suit. Forget Catherine Montfort, John. You’ll never convince her father, and I must warn you that it would be dangerous even to try. Montfort’s as proud, cold-blooded and arrogant as any of the old aristocrats. His was a generation that made its own rules—whatever they wanted, whether legal or moral, they took, consequences be damned. There’s nothing you can do to win Montfort’s daughter. You have nothing to offer the girl that she doesn’t already have.”
The blue eyes rested on the seamed face of the old man a moment, their farseeing gaze untroubled by the obstacles Reynolds had just thrown in his path.
John Raven had believed he had come to London to make money. The call had been so strong that he had left India in the middle of an incredibly successful mining venture. His intuition had directed his journey to this city as surely as it had previously drawn him to Delhi, leaving the profitable exporting business he’d founded in New York to be run by his assistants. Wherever there was money to be made, John Raven could sense it. He could feel it moving in his hands as clearly as he had felt the reality of the rubies and sapphires he’d mined in India. He thought he had been drawn to England by the growth of the mining industry and the possibilities offered by the new developments in the locomotive.
Now he knew that his arrival in London had had nothing whatsoever to do with that.What you need is a wife, Oliver Reynolds had told him, almost exactly the words his grandmother had said to him when he had last seen her more than five years ago. He wondered how many prayers had accompanied the sacred white cedar smoke directed to the AllSpirit in the intervening years. And with amusement Raven found himself wondering if, in one of her dream trances, his grandmother could possibly have envisioned anyone like Lady Catherine Montfort.
Chapter One
“Ididn’t come out to be pawed. I came for a breath of air that wasn’t contaminated by a hundred perspiring bodies wearing too much perfume,” Catherine Montfort said, wondering why the lovemaking of this extremely handsome and highly acceptable suitor left her so cold. She moved out of the attempted embrace of her escort, who released her with a small laugh.
The Viscount Amberton watched as Catherine leaned gracefully against the stone railing of the balcony. He knew she was as unmindful of the nearly priceless material of her gown as if she had been wearing sackcloth. Of course, none of the tedious hours of beading that had gone into its creation had been performed by her hands. She propped her chin on fingers covered in the finest kid and stared out into the darkness that hid the garden.
“Admit it, Cat. You’re bored. Too many ballrooms. Too many dinner parties attended by the same people. Too many suitors declaiming their undying love. Why don’t you name the lucky man and put them all out of their misery?” the viscount suggested.
Since Amberton was well aware that he held the inside track, with the duke, certainly, if not with the daughter, he was becoming increasingly impatient with Catherine’s refusal to accept the necessity of matrimony. Especially when he considered all the diligent toadying to the old man it had taken to acquire that inside track. The viscount was not nearly so impatient as his creditors were, however. The only reason they had held both their tongues and his bills was that they, too, were well aware of how this game was played. The faintest hint that Lord Amberton needed Montfort’s money, and he’d never see a guinea of it.
“All ofthem?” she questioned mockingly, slanting a quick smile at him over her shoulder.
“All of us, then,” he conceded. “You know my heart’s yours. It always has been. You are very well aware of that fact.”
“But the problem is inmy heart,” Catherine said softly.
“Not being in love is not generally considered to be a hindrance to marriage,” he assured her. Indeed, they both knew how rare a love match was in their circle.
“I keep thinking there must be a man who won’t bore me to tears after the first month.”
“You’re such a wonderfully spoiled chit, my dear. There are worse things than boredom,” Gerald suggested lightly, knowing she wouldn’t understand just now the truth of his statement. But she would. One day soon she most certainly would. Then she might long for boredom, Gerald thought with a touch of malicious humor.
“I doubt it,” she said, but she smiled again.
“You’re eighteen, at the end of your second season. The Duke of Montfort’s only child, and he wants a grandson. He’s not going to wait much longer.”
“I know.” She’d heard the same arguments all too often, from both Amberton and her father. She had begun to be afraid the duke would brush aside the promise he’d made two years ago to consider her wishes in the selection of her husband.
There was no need to base that decision solely on the amount of the marriage settlements. And no one unsuitable by birth would be so absurd as to offer for Montfort’s only daughter, so her father had seen no reason not to give her the assurance for which she had so charmingly begged. But now he was growing impatient. Her refusal to choose was becoming a source of discord in what had always been, despite the duke’s notoriously volatile temperament, a loving relationship.
“Give in gracefully before you’re left with no choice at all,” Gerald suggested smoothly.And before I’m clapped into Newgate, he thought bitterly.
“Give in,” she repeated, with her own touch of bitterness. “Always to be at someone else’s command. Forever hemmed in by his wishes and desires. Governed by his—”
Amberton’s laugh interrupted her litany of complaints. “And you, of course, believe that you should be the exception to those restrictions, allowed to make your own decisions.”
“To a certain degree. Why not? I’ve not made so many errors in judgment that I must always be constrained to accept a husband’s guidance in every decision,” she argued.
“And if youhave made errors, your father has been remarkably willing, and certainly more than able, to extricate you from situations that were, perhaps, not in your own best interests. Such as a certain clandestine journey to the Border.”
Catherine had been only sixteen, and the fortune hunter who had arranged that elopement had been handsome and charming enough to turn older and wiser heads. However, his carefully selected target had been, almost from his arrival in London, the Duke of Montfort’s daughter.
“Don’t,” she ordered softly, her humiliation over the incident still acutely painful. “I shouldn’t have told you about that. And you promised never to repeat it.”
“Your secrets are safe
with me, my dear. Especially if you agree to favor my suit,” he suggested truthfully, smiling at her. “Then I’d have a vested interest in protecting your reputation.”
“Such as it is,” she finished for him. “Blackmail, Gerald?”
“Not in the least. Simply another heartfelt avowal from quite your oldest suitor.”
“Oldest?” she repeated, laughing, relieved to be back on the familiar ground of flirtation. “You’ve forgotten Ridgecourt.”
“Then earliest, my love. I think you know that we’d rub along together very well. And I promise to permit a certain amount of freedom. Not, I’m afraid, that I’m willing to give you as long a tether as your father has allowed.”
“Tether!” she echoed despairingly. “Oh, God, Gerald, that’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about.”
“Simply a figure of speech, my dear. There’s really no need to pounce on every idiom as if I’m trying to imprison you.”
“That’s exactly how Ido imagine marriage. I’m already surrounded by enough restrictions to enclose an army. Don’t ride too fast. Don’t dance with the same gentleman more than once. It’s not seemly for unmarried females to wear that color or this style. God, I’m so sick of it all. Even my father has lately taken to issuing dark warnings about my being left languishing on the shelf, despite the fact that he’s received at least three offers in the last week.”
Eventually, the viscount knew, she would have to succumb. Everyone did. And Amberton intended to be prominently at hand, conveniently under her father’s nose and eminently suitable, when she did. But she had damn well better hurry. He had heard the wolf howling at his door too often to have any peace of mind.
“There is a solution,” Gerald reminded her.
“Marriage. To exchange one prison for another. To give another person the right to correct, criticize and chastise. Do you know, Gerald, that there are men who beat their wives if they don’t obey them in every instance? How would I know—”