by Julia Ross
Miracle sat down on a delicate gilt chair and folded her hands. The movement was lovely, pure and simple and graceful. Her eyes seemed fathomless, that deep, rich chocolate, but a faint blush of angry pink brushed over her cheekbones.
“Then what the devil did you mean?” she asked.
He swallowed hard. If she tried to defy him, he would beat down her resistance, whatever it took.
“There’s only one circumstance that can possibly demonstrate conclusively to Hanley that I care enough about your fate to remain silent forever.”
“About a secret that you don’t really know.”
“Yes, but Hanley thinks that I do. He already hates me, and he has good reason to believe that the antipathy is mutual. He fears that I’d do anything to damage him and damn the consequences. He’d never believe that I’d keep faith for the sake of a mistress.” He took a deep breath and spun to face her again. “However, he knows with absolute conviction that I’ll keep silent forever for the sake of a wife.”
The color deepened in her cheeks. “Are you mad?”
“I’ve never been more sane in my life.”
“You cannot possibly marry me!”
He strode forward, even though it meant that he towered over her. “I can and I will.”
She leaped up, her eyes blazing. “Have you gone finally, irrevocably lunatic? You cannot force me to wed you.”
Something snapped in his chest, as if a leather belt had been stretched to the limit around his heart and finally given way.
“Devil take it, Miracle! I knew you’d try to defy me in this. But give it one second’s consideration! If you don’t marry me now, I won’t be able to save you. You’ll hang!”
She walked away with an oddly icy calm. It infuriated him. “You can help secure my passage out of the country, instead. Surely that’s not beyond your powers?”
His fists clenched. Ryder forced himself to sit down.
“If we don’t marry right away, Hanley will know I was bluffing. His revenge will be instant. You’d be arrested as soon as you tried to leave this house. Then you’d tell them the truth about Willcott, and be hanged.”
Miracle stopped beside the piano, her back rigid. “Lord Hanley knows that I’m here with you right now?”
Ryder buried his forehead in both palms, his fingers clenched in his hair. “Hanley refused to accept that I could possibly be in earnest, until I gave him the exact time and place, and promised that the marriage would take place before impeccable witnesses.”
As if her knees had simply folded, she collapsed onto the piano stool. “Lord Ayre?”
“We shall marry in Mossholm’s chapel this morning. Ayre and his mother, the dowager countess, will be our witnesses. I cannot ask either of them to lie about this. Hanley is bound to have agents watching the place.”
“I can be smuggled out past them.”
Ryder jerked up his head. “Damn you, Miracle! I won’t take that risk.”
“So this is why you had me brought to Scotland?” She spun about on the stool and flung open the lid. The piano rang softly, like a muffled bell.
“Scottish law allows us to marry without banns. If you want to live much past tomorrow, we’d better make that a reality.”
Her fingers struck the keys. Three chords echoed, one after another, with absolute assurance, to be followed by an angry storm of notes, as if lightning raged from the hammers. He stared at her, struck to the heart by her passion and power.
“I learned to play when I was eleven.” Her voice rang as the chords crashed and boomed. “Sir Benjamin Trotter hired a music master for me, so that I might become a proper lady. I’ve not let that education go to waste. However, I didn’t plan to be a duchess.”
Ryder leaped to his feet and strode to the window. “Even if Hanley learns later that we have no more idea of his secret than of the dark side of the moon, as long as you’re my wife he can’t touch you.”
“And for that faint assurance, you’d transform a temporary ruse into reality? We’ll exchange vows to love and cherish for all eternity? Even if it means that a whore is to become a St. George?”
“Why the devil not?” His blood raged in a host of uncomfortable emotions. He knew that she was right. He also knew that he wanted this very badly and would do almost anything to get it. “It’ll be no harder to play the duchess than it was to play Ophelia.”
She stopped playing in mid-movement. Silence resonated, then she buried her face in both hands and began to laugh with a terrible hilarity.
“Aye, but’appen tha canna ta’e t’ mill oot t’ lass, can ter?”
“What the hell are you saying?”
Her fingers strayed over the keys, offering a soft lament. “That I’m a mill girl. That I’m a courtesan. Not even you can make my past disappear. I cannot become your wife. I’m a bird of paradise, a bit of muslin, a whore, a strumpet, a moll, a—”
“It doesn’t matter!”
She glanced across at him, her eyes blazing. “God, it does matter and for a host of reasons! Let’s begin with the most obvious: Your family would never forgive you. Society would never forgive you. You would never forgive yourself.”
“That’s rather up to me, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said with appalling calm. “It’s not only up to you. It’s my life, too.”
Cold sweat trickled down his spine. Everything she had said was true. He knew it. He had faced it. He had made his pact with Hanley anyway. If she would not agree, then he must play the trump card.
“Not unless you prefer the gallows,” he said. “Because that’s the only choice you have left, Miracle: marriage or death. It’s too late now for anything else.”
“Then what a pretty bargain you made with our enemy!” Her fingers picked out a slow dirge in some haunting minor key. “So Sir Galahad will marry his paramour. He’ll defy thunder and headaches for a misalliance that boasts to the world that he’s truly besotted. May I have poppies for my bridal wreath?”
“Wreath?”
A merry dance tune rippled through the room. “A slip of the tongue. Obviously I meant my bridal bouquet. So what flowers would be appropriate? Pansies and rosemary?”
Ryder thought he might shatter. How dare she? How dare she negate his love and the enormity of the sacrifice that he was, in reality, making? Did she think that he hadn’t already thought through all the ramifications of this? Why couldn’t she see that he couldn’t bear to live without her?
He crashed one fist against the folded wooden shutter. It boomed like a drum. She stopped playing.
“I’ve struck enough bargains. This is the last one. You’ll never be poor again. You’ll never have to be afraid again. You’ll live in absolute security for the rest of your life. Are you too proud to accept it? Too fond of all those noble ideals learned in some lecher’s library and used whenever it suits you? You would die rather than marry me?”
The piano lid crashed down. Miracle snarled at him like an avenging fury, beautiful and terrible, the embodiment of dark desire.
“Too proud? Too proud? I’ve fought too damned hard for life, ever since the day I was born, to embrace death over any noble principle. Only an aristocrat like you would ever contemplate anything so foolish. People like me fight the darkness until the moment the noose tightens. We’ll perjure and plead and struggle like demons, before we’ll willingly let anything blot out the sun. But how dare you speak of Sir Benjamin like that?”
“Like what?”
“A lecher, you said. Your voice dripped with so much abhorrence that you couldn’t even bring yourself to say his name. But Sir Benjamin Trotter saved me from the mill. He saved me from ignorance and poverty and misery and hunger. He saved me from going deaf. He saved me from losing a hand in the looms. He opened up the world to me in that library you scorn with such distaste—a world of learning and beauty and reverence. He gave me a real home, and I loved him.”
He felt stunned, as if he had taken a blow to the head. “You loved him?”<
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“It was what I learned from Sir Benjamin that made me who I am. It was thanks to him that I could pick and choose my lovers in the terrible years after he died. The education he gave me saved me from walking the streets, offering myself to sailors for sixpence.” She stalked up to him, lithe and lovely and dangerous. “The only man I’ve ever taken to my bed that I didn’t really choose was you, Lord Ryderbourne.”
“Then why didn’t he marry you?”
Her eyes were pools of black. “Sir Benjamin thought that I wasn’t old enough to take such an irrevocable step. We agreed to wait till I was eighteen. Then he died.”
“Yet he took you to his bed.”
“We mill girls mature young,” she said. “And as I just told you, I loved him.”
Ryder reeled away. She had loved Sir Benjamin Trotter? She had loved Guy Devoran? Maybe she had even loved Jack, his own brother? Yet she could not love him, Laurence Duvall Devoran St. George, the man destined to become Duke of Blackdown. Of all the men she had ever known—other than Hanley—only he could not win her heart?
“Sir Benjamin may have saved you from the mill,” he said, precisely enunciating each word. “Only I can save your life. So I assume that—in spite of your misgivings—you will still marry me?”
She marched up to the door. Her fingers gripped the latch, but she pressed the other fist to the panels and leaned her forehead against it. “There’s not a whore in London won’t cheer when she gets the news that one of her own has snared Lord Ryderbourne. I’ll be the toast of the taverns and the anathema of the drawing rooms.” She spun about, her chin high and her cheeks burning. “So of course I will marry you, though we will both live to regret it.”
“Good,” he said, though his triumph yawned like an empty pit in his gut. “Ayre and the dowager countess will have arrived by now. They’ll be waiting with Mr. Melman in the chapel.”
He walked up to offer her his arm, but she wrenched open the door and whirled away.
“Don’t touch me!” she said with a sudden wry laugh. “If you touch me just now, I’ll shatter into tiny pieces to be swept up and tossed away like broken glass.”
He was lost in an ice storm. “But we’re about to be married!”
“Yes, and you break my heart, you mad St. George. Why didn’t I insist that you leave me to drown? I’d have saved you from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“Whatever price is exacted, Miracle, I’m prepared to pay it.”
“Are you? I can at least promise that you’ll always have a way out.”
A shaft of sunlight beamed down from a high window, firing her dark hair with mysteries, lighting her cheekbones with the glimmer of transcendence. She was lovely enough to weep over.
“You would deliberately give me grounds to divorce you?” He felt incredulous.
“If I thought it was really forever, do you think I’d agree to this wedding? Whenever you wish to untie this injudicious knot, let me know. Parliament won’t hesitate to free you, if your wife is caught in adultery.”
Ryder seized her by both arms. “If you ever cheat on me—”
“Oh, stop!” she said. “Those are my terms. You’ve no choice but to accept them. Now, if we’re going to swallow our despair and get married, we mustn’t keep Mr. Melman waiting.”
IT was not how Ryder had imagined his wedding. As he and Miracle exchanged vows, Lady Ayre sat alone in front of a gathering of servants. Miracle was wearing her plain traveling dress, the only concession to the occasion a bouquet of white roses from Mossholm’s garden, bound in blue ribbon and offered at the last minute by the dowager countess.
Lady Ayre was a tall, gaunt woman with silver-red hair. Though she watched the ceremony with shrewd blue eyes, she did not know who Miracle was, of course. She knew only that her son’s friend wished her presence for his sudden marriage and that she was their only claim to respectability. Her Ladyship would obviously do anything for her son, who would apparently move heaven and earth for Ryder.
Ayre himself stood to one side, his face grave as he gazed steadily at Miracle. Ryder consciously noticed for the first time how bright his friend’s hair was, how stern his features.
Tall and lean, Lady Ayre’s only son was a red-gold Scot, but the skin over his cheekbones was a smooth gilt tan, as if he were cast in metal. Like any ship’s captain who had sailed exotic oceans, his eyes encompassed the heavens. He caught Ryder’s glance and his cheeks creased in a friendly smile, but ardor lurked in those sky-blue depths: an ardor composed of both admiration for a lovely woman and unabashed desire for her.
Ryder knew a sudden urge to wipe his friend from the face of the earth.
But the service was over. Ayre stepped forward to shake his hand and kiss Miracle discreetly on the cheek. Mr. Melman offered his congratulations. Lady Ayre tendered a few wryly correct comments, then walked from the chapel with her son, leaving the preacher with Ryder and Miracle to oversee the signing of papers.
Mr. Melman’s carriage was waiting. As Ryder saw him to the door he pressed a purse of gold into the man’s hand.
“For your flock,” he said. “With the thanks of myself and Lady Ryderbourne.”
After a last exchange of good wishes, the preacher was gone.
Miracle lifted the white roses to her face and inhaled. “What now?” she asked, glancing up at him beneath her heavy lashes. “You’ll send news of our wedding to Hanley, I assume?”
“I’ll take it to him myself.”
“Ah! Then what happens to me?”
“Ayre and his mother will escort you to Blackdown Square. It shouldn’t be too uncomfortable a journey. You’ll stop every night in the very best posting houses. Lady Ayre will take care of you.”
Loose petals drifted to the stone floor of the chapel, releasing more scent. Miracle turned to face him, her eyes searching his. “So now that you’ve saved my worthless life, I’m to be packed off to London with your fascinating friend? You trust me in his company?”
He grinned, though his heart felt close to devastation. “I trust Ayre. Besides, his mother will be more than adequate chaperon on the journey, and he knows perfectly well that if he breaks faith, I’ll kill him.”
She bit her lip and began to shred another rose. “Will I ever see you again?”
“God, of course! I’ll send for you as soon as I can.” He stared at the trail of white petals as she turned away. “It’s up to you, of course, whether you come.”
Her shoulders tensed, but she laughed. “If you send for me, wild horses wouldn’t keep me away. How else can I wreak my revenge on you?”
The door creaked as Lord Ayre stepped into the chapel. His good looks had turned many female heads in the past. It had never bothered Ryder before, but it did now.
“Our carriage is almost ready,” the Scot said. His smile seemed only coolly assessing. “Lady Ayre wishes to start out as soon as possible. If that’s convenient, Lady Ryderbourne?”
Miracle plucked one rosebud from the remains of the bouquet and tucked it into her hair. The folded petals caressed her cheekbone. Ryder stared at her, fighting visions of Ophelia, and poppies, and the intimation of tragedy. He was not even going to be able to kiss her good-bye?
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Lord Ayre. If you would allow me one quick visit to my room, so that I may pack a few last minute things?”
Trailing petals and heartbreak, she walked away toward the door.
Ayre shook Ryder once again by the hand. “Delighted to escort your new wife to London, Ryder, but what the devil’s so important that you aren’t taking her there yourself?”
Before Ryder could reply, Miracle turned from the doorway. She gave Ayre her most dazzling smile, betraying both courage and irony. Possessive jealousy pierced like an arrow.
“My new husband must go alone and immediately to Wyldshay,” she said. “He has to break the news of what he has done to his mother.”
THE high towers of Wyldshay could be seen from miles away. The dragon ban
ner hung limply beneath blue summer skies. It had been a long and exhausting journey. As soon as he had left Hanley, Ryder had traveled day and night without stopping, more than three hundred and sixty miles in thirty hours.
Shadows flitted as his carriage rolled over the arched bridge and pulled up in the courtyard. In spite of the mad distress of the previous three days, he was home. The tall towers and echoing halls offered balm to his bruised spirit.
Ryder strode first to his own rooms to bathe and change. His valet shaved him and trimmed his hair without comment, as if it were perfectly normal for Lord Ryderbourne to stalk in without notice after an unexplained absence, looking like a Gypsy. A footman brought sandwiches and hot coffee. Ryder ignored the food, but swallowed one bitter cup before he went in search of his mother.
Miracle had seen straight into his heart, as always. He could not dismiss the reality of his identity. Without the unlikely support of the Duke and Duchess of Blackdown, their marriage would be destroyed.
He found his mother, small and precise, walking in her rose garden. The air was heavy with scent. Hot sun beat down on stone walls and a pretty ranking of statuary.
As Ryder strode toward her along the gravel path, she glanced up from her contemplation of an overblown red rose. Beneath the shade of an ivory silk parasol, her eyes seemed both wary and fascinated, as if she watched a very interesting stranger who might offer her either solace or calamity.
He halted and bowed. “Your Grace? I trust I find you well?”
“My roses are infested with greenfly,” she replied dryly. “Patter-son should spray them with soapy water.”
“I’ll see to it. I must apologize if the gardeners neglected their duty while I was away.”
She arched an elegant brow and moved her hand. The rose exploded in a rain of red petals, leaving only the spiked, naked heart.
“I see you are burning to unburden yourself, sir. Can you offer an account of your adventures fit for a mother’s delicate ears?”
“Probably not,” Ryder said. “Though I have important news, all the same.”