Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] (20 page)

Graham would be damned if Sophie was going to be that prey.

Another groom passed him, bringing a fine saddled horse. Graham stepped forward. “I’ll take that.”

The groom blinked at him, then looked over his shoulder. Graham followed his gaze to see Somers Boothe-Jamison giving him a strange look.

“Ah.”
Just stealing your horse. Sorry
. “Now see here, Somers—”

“You ought to go after her,” Somers interrupted, frowning down the street where the phaeton was no longer visible. “I don’t trust that Wolfe fellow. There are some very odd tales circling about him.”

Graham briefly closed his eyes in relief. Thank God. Then he grinned fiercely at Somers. “So I’ll just take your horse then?”

He was already mounting. Boothe-Jamison simply
waved him on with a weary hand. “Go on, then. I’ll find another way home. Be good to that horse, would you? Not all of us are dukes, you know.”

Graham settled himself into the saddle. “Try Lady Tessa,” he called out as he dug his heels into the mount. “She always has room in her carriage for a bloke without transport.” Only the young and handsome ones, of course, but Somers was a big lad. He could take care of himself.

The phaeton was well out of sight. Wolfe was really putting on the speed.

What in the hell was the man up to in such a hurry?

SOPHIE TUCKED HER
face down against the chilly night air and contemplated the riotous mess she had created with her impulsiveness.

What was wrong with her? She’d never been so wicked before. She’d stolen money, lied and perpetrated a fraud but she had never lain beneath a man and let him touch her—nay, encouraged him to touch her! It hadn’t been only Graham who had pulled at her bodice to free her breasts to his hands!

Yet in the end, she had allowed him to move away from her, to pull back that wonderful heated gift of passion and need he’d offered her. She could have stopped him—or rather, she could have started him again! She’d known that all she needed to do was to touch him, kiss him, press against him, and she would have been back down on that couch, willing clay in his hot hands once again.

Why? Why had she walked away?

Because in a few more minutes you were going to have to confess. In another second, you would have spouted your love like a fountain and spoken more truth than Graham is ready to hear
.

Sophie truly hated it when that little voice was right.

With a deep breath, she ordered her thoughts to calm. There was no point in getting tightly wrought over the evening’s events. Tomorrow she would figure out a way to either tell Graham or to make sure he never found out the truth. What she needed right now was a good night’s sleep. What she needed right now was her bed—

Except that when she raised her face and looked about her, she wasn’t anywhere near Brook House. Or Primrose Street.

She was in the middle of a wood! The road stretched out before and after them like a moonlit ribbon in the dimness. The lighted lanterns dangling from either side of the phaeton gave only moderate circles of light. The moon, nearly full, gave the rest.

“Where are we?”

At her question, Mr. Wolfe guided the horses to the roadside and pulled them to a halt. “It was nearly time for a stop anyway,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a long way to Gretna Green. We won’t be there before dawn.”

Gretna Green?
Oh, dear. “Mr. Wolfe, please do not inform me that you intend to—” Surely the man wasn’t that stupid?

But he only beamed at her, the darkness making him look oddly . . . sinister? Which was ridiculous, for
Mr. Wolfe was just like Mr. Stickley, a harmless, rather sweet fellow who had perhaps misread her attentions.

Wasn’t he?

He smiled wider. He certainly did have excellent teeth. “Miss Blake, don’t you see? We were meant to be together, in that place, on this night! All day I was trying to ascertain how I ought to do this properly—should I approach Lord Brookhaven for your hand, since you have no father living? But this—this is so very romantic! We shall be lovers tossed upon the road, two travelers seeking rest and respite on their weary journey, a man and a woman, getting married—”

“What?” Sophie drew back from him. “Mr. Wolfe, surely you can’t be serious! How can you be in love with me? You’ve only known me for a matter of days!”

Wolfe grabbed her hand and pressed it to his heart. “It was your kindness, I think. The way you saw my nervousness and drew me out, the way you never failed to include me in the conversation, the way you looked right past those panting louts with all their fancy manners and poses, and didn’t believe their blandishments for one moment!” He brought her hand to his lips and dropped kisses upon her knuckles. “You are a light among the dull and shallow, you are the only one who
saw
me for the man that I am—”

As he carried on, Sophie became more and more horrified. This was what she would look like and sound like if she ever confessed her true feelings to Graham. And this uncomfortable, guilty, but overwhelming desire to flee that she was feeling now? This would be Graham’s reaction to such a confession.

Worse perhaps now because she ought to know better. She had seen the other side of this. She hated to think that she was just as thoughtless and careless as Graham!

Yet, how could she blame Graham, when he was only being kind, as she had only been kind to Mr. Wolfe? She had let herself get caught up in her imagination and damned fairy stories! And fooled herself into thinking there was more.

It was then that she saw the entire affair with crystal clarity.

Simply wanting to love someone because they were appropriate or deserving was as futile as wishing one could fly. Here before her was a man who seemed as perfect a choice for her as any she had ever met—and she could no more love him than she could soar through the air.

Just as Graham could never love her, simply because she loved him or because she deserved more than friendship.

What precisely did she deserve? She had lied and stolen. She had perpetrated an enormous hoax upon Society at large, pretending to be someone she would never truly be.

For someone who had always felt that her exterior did not do justice to her interior, it was a sobering realization that, perhaps, it did. Perhaps she was as plain and worthless within as she was without.

Perhaps she deserved precisely what she’d received.

Nothing.

Wolfe’s praises ran down a bit and now he was gazing
at her with fire in his eyes. It actually made him look a bit demented, poor man. How she would hate to be reduced before someone this way!

Taking a breath, she tried to ease her hand from Wolfe’s grasp before her fingers became completely numb. “Sir, I fear you’ve labored under a misunderstanding.”

Oh, the words were awful, weak and spiritless, yet what else could she say? The answer itself would devastate him, that she knew with all her heart. How she phrased herself probably mattered very little.

Yet she could not help but try to ease the sting. “You are a very fine man, Mr. Wolfe. I’ve greatly enjoyed our conversations—” That was a vast overstatement, but it would do. “And I have nothing but the utmost respect for you—”

“Oh, my darling!” He pulled her to him, his arms overcoming her startled resistance so easily that she doubted he had even noticed it.

“Mr. Wolfe!” She squirmed, but he held her without difficulty. She’d never tried her strength against a man’s. It shocked her how simple it was for him to subdue her struggles.

“Mr. Wolfe, let me—”—
go!

His mouth came down on hers as he pressed her back in the seat, his weight trapping her helpless beneath him.

Graham drew back on the reins of Somers BootheJamison’s splendid, lovely horse. The animal had maintained top speed through all of Graham’s false starts and dead ends. Now, at last, he saw the phaeton ahead, its side lanterns bright even on this moonlit night.

Dismounting, he tied the horse several yards behind the vehicle and started forward. He didn’t see anyone inside—had he misjudged that Wolfe fellow? Sophie could very well be safe at Brook House at this moment—

A rustle, a gasp. Sophie’s strained voice, full of dismay tinted with fear. “Stop this!” The unmistakable sound of a fist hitting flesh and bone.

“
Sophie!
” Graham didn’t recall running. All he knew was that he was on top of the man in the carriage in an instant, pulling his fist back to bloody the bastard’s . . . the bastard’s bloody nose?

Startled, he turned to look at Sophie, who was gazing at him with perplexity while shaking her right hand in pain.

“Where did you come from?” She flexed her fingers and winced.

Suddenly a bit weak in the knees, Graham dropped his chokehold on Wolfe’s collar and sank to the padded seat beside Sophie. He looked back and forth, from the unharmed—if one didn’t count bruised knuckles—Sophie to the vividly bleeding Wolfe, who now had his handkerchief pressed tightly to his nose. The man’s eyes gleamed, but it was too dark to see with what.

Graham was fairly sure that his own were gleaming with amazed respect. “You defended your own honor.”

Sophie shrugged. “Mr. Wolfe’s . . . affections overwhelmed him.” She frowned at the man. “I’m very sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to harm you, but you simply wouldn’t listen to me.”

Wolfe warily slid himself up to a sitting position. His gaze flicked to Graham. “I meant no harm,” he said, his voice muffled.

Graham didn’t believe him for a moment, but Sophie simply waved a hand. “I know that. But seriously, sir—even if I had returned your sentiments, I would not have appreciated being accosted in an open carriage on a dark road.”

This turn of phrase gave Graham decidedly improper ideas about accosting her in a
closed
carriage on a dark road. . . .

Then again, he’d likely wind up with a swollen nose of his own. He smiled at his brave, self-reliant Sophie. “Is there anyone else you need to assault this evening, my delicate flower, or are you ready to call it a night?”

For an instant, she smiled back, then her expression
chilled. “Graham, are you under the impression that I’m speaking to you again?”

He sighed. “You’re angry, I know. At the moment, I think it’s a bit more important that I take you back to Brook House safely.”

She gazed at the man on the floor of the phaeton, crammed as he was in the narrow space. Then she looked up at Graham, her brow furrowed.

“What is it?” He was tired and sticky from his ride. It was time to go.

She rubbed at her sore hand. “I’m trying to decide who is the lesser of two evils.”

Graham gaped. “You can’t be serious!”

She glared at him. “Mr. Wolfe didn’t do anything that you didn’t do—and with rather more honorable intentions, in the end!”

Wolfe nodded. “I asked her to marry me!”

Graham couldn’t believe it. “But I—!” He halted. What was he going to say?
I want to marry you . . . more?

Not possible. There was nothing he could say.

She saw it in his eyes. Her elegant face became closed and cool again. “I will go home with Mr. Wolfe.”

Wolfe was nodding. “Of course, Miss Blake!”

Graham considered giving the fellow another blow to the nose.
Smarmy bastard
. No, he wouldn’t trust this lout with a one-sided pound note, much less with a treasure like Sophie. He swung down from the phaeton without a word.

Sophie leaned forward, calling after him. “Graham, don’t take it so hard—”

Graham solved the entire matter by walking around the back of the phaeton, pulling Sophie out, tossing her over his shoulder, indignant cries and all, and striding back to his borrowed mount.

She kicked and pounded and even bit, but he had her wrists safely pinioned and his coat was thick enough to protect him from her teeth. Wolfe was another matter entirely.

The man roused himself to run after them. “Edencourt, you brute! Put the lady down at once or I’ll turn the law on you!”

Graham swung about, causing Sophie to give an uncharacteristically girlish squeal of surprise, and glared at the man who’d tried to assault his woman.

“Wolfe, go ahead and call the law—if you really think they’re going to look any more kindly on your actions tonight than mine.” Then he smiled. “A solicitor’s word against a duke’s—how do you think that will play out?”

His bluff called, Wolfe snarled, his face ugly and hard. Graham wished Sophie could see the fellow now, but he didn’t dare let her down long enough. She’d belt him one and escape into some other, even more dangerous situation, no doubt.

No, there was nothing to be done but protect her from herself. He warily turned his back on Wolfe and continued to the horse. Tossing Sophie up into the saddle, he swung up behind before she had quite sorted herself out.

Luckily, she wasn’t a horsewoman. Instead, she clung rather gratifyingly to his arms as he held her close and kicked the horse into a canter.

“Wait!” Sophie cried. “You’re going the wrong way! London is back there!”

Graham grinned into the wind and the flyaway banner of her red-gold hair. “We’re not going back to London.”

He aimed the horse at a hard gallop—

Straight to Edencourt.

“You don’t really expect me to continue to tolerate this treatment, do you, Graham?”

From where he walked ahead, leading the borrowed horse, Graham didn’t answer. After the first flush of triumph when he’d stolen her away, he’d begun to wonder when exactly he’d lost his mind. Was it when he’d learned of his father’s death? Or had it been the next day, when he’d placed Sophie’s long, elegant fingers on his cheek and tingled with the electricity of her touch?

Or had it been a process more slow and sinister, brought on by long evenings of brandy and firelight and losing too many hands of cards?

Whenever the original lapse had occurred, he’d surely worsened matters now with his ill-thought-out kidnapping. Yet, despite the fact that he knew better, despite the fact that he was making the mistake of his life, despite the overwhelming logic of turning around and hot-footing it back to London with Sophie’s reputation unbesmirched, he’d been unable to aim his feet in any direction than that of Edencourt.