How to Wed a Baron (20 page)

Poor Justin. He'd been under constant duress ever since she'd first stepped onto the dock at Portsmouth, and all because of her. Well, mostly because of her. He shouldn't
have
to marry her just because she was in love with him.

The kindest thing she could do would be to relieve him of any sense of obligation to her. Then, if Nicole and Lydia could be believed, there might still exist a way for him to remain in England, which he could not do if he did something terrible to the
Inhaber
because of her. Clearly she was a complication he didn't need.

Alina looked around the conservatory, where she had been sitting for half the afternoon on the twins' orders, waiting for Justin to come to her. She would soon grow whiskers, waiting for him to come to her. But both Nicole and Lydia had agreed on that one single point: the next move had to come from him.

Perhaps someone would be kind enough to gather
her dry and withered remains after she'd expired here among all the pretty flowers, waiting for him—

“Alina?”

She nearly cried out as Justin walked toward her, looking as wonderfully exquisite as he had that day on the docks. He'd made a handsome, roguish Romany, but when rigged out in his marvelous London finery, there could be no other man on earth who looked so fine. He stopped on his way, plucked an orchid from its curving stem and carried it with him, depositing it in her outstretched palm before sitting down beside her.

“Beautiful, but not perfect. They have no scent, you know,” he said just as if the last words he'd said to her before these hadn't been
I can never forgive myself for what I've done to you….

She lifted the bloom to her face and inhaled deeply. It was a pretty flower, a lovely gesture, but she'd rather he'd kissed her. “I can imagine that this one does. Nothing is ever perfect, except in our imaginations. The rest of the time, we simply have to learn to muddle through, taking the good with the bad.”

“And what are we muddling through today?” he asked, lifting her hand and pressing his lips against her suddenly heated skin.

He wasn't going to be serious, which meant that, inside, he was very serious indeed. She longed to slap him.

Why didn't he kiss her somewhere other than her hand?

“I'm not sure. I would imagine you'd know that better than I. Are the duke and duchess about to take me off to Malvern so that you can go kill somebody else?”

“Would you go with them if I asked it of you?”

Still they hadn't looked at each other. Not really. Physical intimacy beneath the moonlight, it would seem, resulted in nervous avoidance in the mundane, everyday world.
Did we really do that? It had all seemed so natural, so wonderful, at the time. So why are we so loath to be reminded of it now?

“I don't think so, no. I believe I am done being shunted off somewhere else each time you decide what you think is best for me. I've already lost my beautiful new wardrobe to Ashurst and my caravan to Basingstoke. I imagine the only thing I have left to lose to Malvern would be…you.”

He avoided a direct answer, a fact she didn't miss. She was learning him, she really was. He should be careful about that, not that she was going to warn him.

If she looked at him, would he kiss her?

“You enjoyed the caravan?”

“I enjoyed the…adventure. The Romany have a freedom we can never have, even as they are at times persecuted and even shunned for who they are. But at least they have each other, and the streams, and
the moonlight. People who don't understand such things say they have no home, but Loiza told me their hearts and homes travel with them, and that it's only the heart that needs a home.”

“And what of the land? The
Inhaber
seems to want it very much, and I say that with my tongue so firmly in my cheek I'm surprised you can understand what I'm asking.”

Alina sighed. No, he wasn't going to kiss her. He was going to
talk.
Did he have any idea how fatigued she was with
talking?
“You were right. Loiza says it would bring them only sorrow. But, Justin,” she said, turning to look at him for the first time since he sat down beside her, “the land is not mine to give, not really. It's not his to take, either. It's disputed. Correct?”

“You've been thinking, haven't you?” He smiled, stroked the back of one finger down her cheek, so that she was caught between sighing and leaning against him and wanting to shake him for not really listening to her.

Very nice, the way he touched her. Almost as if he could not sit so close to her and not touch her.

But she'd rather he kissed her.

She slapped his hand away (thinking this a good compromise between the two) and got to her feet. If he wanted to talk, then he should be prepared to listen, as well!

“I refuse to discuss this with you anymore, Justin.
All you can think of doing is going around killing everyone. Shooting the
Inhaber
because he tried to have me shot, which he did, and it was horrible of him and he probably deserves to die for any number of good reasons, but that doesn't make it right that you be the one to kill him. Just when your friends think they can find a way to rescue you from all your follies—yes, I heard about the Prince Regent, yet again—you will ruin everything by thinking there is no solution except to hunt down the
Inhaber
and…and execute him. That's what you were doing while you were gone, wasn't it. Finding some way to kill the man? Or is he already dead?”

He stood up as well and took hold of her by the shoulders, obviously knowing what she knew—that she was ready to run from the conservatory.

Don't touch me. Don't touch me unless you mean it. Don't talk to me. Hold me. Don't you want to hold me?

“I was attempting to
contact
the man, Alina. There's a difference. Contrary to what you think, an impression I imagine you gained from me, I do not
go around killing
everyone.” And then he smiled. “Sometimes I only threaten to kill them.”

Alina rolled her eyes in frustration. “Now you're making a joke, which only tells me that you're thinking again what a bad man you are, and all of that drivel you keep mouthing every time I try to tell you that I—”

She clamped her mouth tightly shut on the words
love you.
She wasn't going to say those words. They'd only make him feel more obligated to her.

“Every time you try to tell me what, Alina?” he asked her, stepping closer, so that her heart began to pound almost hurtfully in her chest.

“Nothing,” she said, looking down at her shoe tops, her borrowed shoe tops, and felt herself slowly begin to shatter into very small pieces. She couldn't help herself. She was only one woman, and only very newly a woman at that, and she had been bartered by her king like so much produce, betrothed to a man she didn't know, dropped into a foreign country only to learn her only living relative really was her odious aunt Mimi and there would be no cousins or uncles and aunts to welcome her. She'd been submerged in a mud puddle, nearly shot, been hidden away with the Romany, had kissed a fool, had been introduced to parts of her body and feelings, both physical and emotional, she hadn't until that moment known existed, and…and… “You keep trying to make things better for me, and you only keep making them worse for both of us!”

He stepped back, shock evident in his expression. “Well, so much for Justin Wilde, the better man. I wondered how long it might take you to realize the gravity of my sin against you. No matter the provocation, the circumstances, I should be shot for touching you.”

“Shot! Do you hear yourself? Everything is life and death to you,” she accused, waving her arms (in what she would later think the way of a demented windmill). “The
Inhaber
wants me dead, so he must die. Your Prince Regent connives with my king, so you puff yourself up and run off to threaten his life. I don't know why the man you killed while we were with the Romany had to die, because you didn't tell me, but I'm certain he did something worthy of dying for.”

“I suppose,” Justin said tightly, “that your conclusion would depend on where you were standing when the man produced a pair of wicked-looking knives and announced that he was going to kill me.”

Some of the wind went out of her sails. “Oh. Well, then I guess that was all right.”
And don't you laugh at me now. Don't you dare laugh at me!

Justin took her hands and pulled her back down on the bench. “Contrary to what you may think, kitten, I do not rise from my bed every morning and think to myself, ah, and who might I kill today? I thought I was done with that when the war ended. I prayed I was done with it long before the war ended. I bought my way back to England, intent only on living out my life in my homeland. I didn't ask for anything I had to do in these past few days. But I won't apologize for it. I did what I was trained to do. I'm talking about something entirely different here, and you know that as well as I. Knowing I couldn't
marry you, knowing I couldn't ask you to give up everything and follow me as I escape to America, knowing that of all the men in the world I am the one man least worthy of you, I took your virginity.”

“That…that doesn't matter,” she said, her head down, watching as he took her hands in his, lightly squeezed her fingers. “I mean, that last part. I made you do it.”

He'd probably forgotten that part.
You can't steal what is freely given.

“Oh, kitten,” he said, chuckling softly, “you mustn't believe everything your companion told you. I knew exactly what I was doing, including what a bastard I was for not putting a stop to it. I simply couldn't find it in myself to give a damn. At the time. Now, however, we have to deal with the consequences, which means we must marry. Then they can hang me.”

“Hang you? But you said you didn't kill the
Inhaber.
”

“No, but it does seem that three of his men, all military attachés and completely innocent of any wrongdoing, I'm told, although they looked very much like hired thugs to me, seem to have been killed, and I have been named as their murderer.”

Her heart sank to the toes of her borrowed slippers. If the man had to be so excessively good at something, couldn't it have been something less
lethal?

“The
Inhaber
is telling everyone this because he wants you arrested so he is free to come after me,” Alina said, marveling at the words as they came out of her mouth. She was beginning to think like a devious person. And Justin had been forced to think this way for all those long years he refused to talk about with her other than to say that those years had killed something important inside him. She was beginning to understand how that could happen. “But he could not chance killing Lady Wilde, could he, especially if she were to make herself very visible in London? That would be too suspicious, and make for strain between our two countries.”

“Very good, kitten. Your mother was English, the daughter of an earl. Your country is England. Your death would cause a strain between two new and still tenuous allies who seem to have less in common now that their common enemy is gone. You'd be safe.”

“Then I refuse to marry you,” she said firmly.

“Alina, for the love of God—”

“No, Justin. Either you find a way to assuage the
Inhaber
and your Prince Regent and make both of us safe here, or I refuse to be safe and you dead. I won't have it.”

“You won't
have it?
”

For a handsome man, he could look very silly, what with his eyes all wide like that and his neck turning a deep red above his pristine white neckcloth.

Suddenly she felt very brave.

“No, Justin, I won't. You're so intent on how terrible you are, and on being some sort of martyr or atoning for past sins, or whatever you think it is you're doing, and I am thoroughly out of patience with you. So, no, I won't do it. If you're going to save my honor or whatever such ridiculousness you've been spouting, then you'll simply have to find another way. Because I will not marry a dead man!”

Then, because brave wasn't the same as fearless, she stood, turned on her heels and ran out of the conservatory, on the hunt for Nicole and Lydia, who would surely hide her until Justin no longer looked as if he'd explode at any moment.

She certainly hoped those two wonderful women would be able to come up with some sort of miraculous ideas as to what they could all do next, because, after having knocked Justin back on his heels, Alina had completely run out of ideas.

And he still hadn't kissed her.

T
HE FOLLOWING EVENING,
after a dinner attended only by the three gentlemen, Justin stood at the opened window of his bedchamber as fading sunlight turned the evening to a misty portrait of muted colors and soft outlines, and looked down into the garden three stories below.

Alina was walking there with the marchioness and the duchess, and the three of them had their heads together like true conspirators. It had been the sound of their conversation wafting up to him that had drawn him, and now he was too fascinated to turn away. They reminded him of three beautiful, perfect flowers, dressed in their gowns of yellow, pale green and softest rose, rivaling any blooms in the gardens.

They'd been constant companions, taking their meals together, shunning male company, and all with the excuse that Alina was not quite well…although, oh no, not ill enough to have the doctor sent for.
She'll be fine,
they said.
We're simply bearing her company.

And Tanner and Lucas seemed to have swallowed this story whole. Either that, or they were better at subterfuge than he'd formerly have given either of them credit for possessing, and were both in whatever plot was going forward up to their starched cravats, and knew more than they were saying.

Had she told the women why she and he were at odds? Had she told them
everything?

Of course she had. Who else did she have to talk to, if not Lydia and Nicole? Surely not her companion, she of the “uncontrolled lust at the drop of a hat.” Look where
that
particular conversation had led them!

No wonder he was in so much trouble. He was only a man, for all his supposed sophistication and talents. What man had ever outcomplicated a woman?

And no wonder she had refused to come down to dinner last night, and turned away the notes he'd sent to her bedchamber. Headache be damned—she simply was refusing to see him while she and the ladies made their plans.

Plans that had to include his downfall, that was certain. He could only guess at how much he was intended to suffer before that downfall.

He'd told Alina he couldn't marry her—for very reasonable reasons—and she'd fought him. He'd told her they had to marry—again, for exceedingly rea
sonable reasons—and she'd thrown his offer back in his face.

Now, most probably on the advice of two women he would have otherwise thought of as perfectly intelligent human beings, she wouldn't speak with him at all.

He had become so frustrated with his inability to find a way to circumvent the ladies and see Alina that he'd actually appealed to Tanner and Lucas for their help.

The next time he considered going to his friends for their advice, he'd have to grab up several bottles of wine, lock himself in a cabinet and drink until he'd overcome the impulse.

“The great Justin Wilde, flummoxed by a slip of a girl?” Tanner had looked at him in feigned astonishment. “The same man who could so coldly and calmly threaten the life of the Prince Regent can't so much as say
boo
to that sweet girl who my wife tells me is so young and innocent it's nearly painful? It's lowering, Justin, I have to tell you. I've lost all faith in you. But I bow to my wife's wisdom on this. Sorry.”

Lucas Paine had been even less help. “Lydia sees young and innocent, but my wife sees independent and determined. As Nicole is more than generously gifted with both attributes herself, I believe I'll take her at her word. My advice? Well, actually, I don't have any. I rather enjoy Nicole the way she is.”

Justin took a sip of his wine and looked down into the garden again. Now they were laughing.
Laughing!
The
Inhaber
was still out there; Alina knew the man wanted her dead. Justin still couldn't be certain he wouldn't be locked up in chains for having threatened the Prince Regent, or if his pardon had been revoked, three charges of murder were soon to be placed at the feet of this same man who was to become her husband, except that she'd refused him—and she was
laughing?

He hated war. But, damn it all to blazes, war between men was reasonably straightforward, even in his job of spy and assassin; both sides had them. War between a man and a woman had no rules, or at least none the men were informed about by the women, who also seemed to possess all the weapons.

Without consciously searching out the memory, he was suddenly reminded of one of his least-favorite schoolboy lessons, his assigned reading of Aristophanes'
Lysistrata.
But surely the women weren't plotting to withhold their…favors from the men until this small “war” was settled. Were they?

If so, he could probably expect a visit from Tanner and Lucas in his very near and unpleasant future. At least then perhaps they wouldn't be so damned jolly!

Ah, they were moving on, the ladies on the stroll. At least Alina had moved on, rather aimlessly walking ahead of the other two down the path toward the
large hedge maze Lucas had told him was more than two hundred years old.

Wait a moment. Did Nicole just take a quick peek up at his open window? Had she seen him standing there, gawking like a fool?

He leaned closer to the sill.

Now she was whispering in Lydia's ear and pulling rather inelegantly on her sister's arm when her sister began to turn her head, probably to also look up at the window.

He could imagine the whispered conversation:

He's up there, poor lovesick fool, watching us. Shh, don't let Alina hear us.

He's up where, Nicole? Let me—

No! Don't look, don't turn around!

“From this evidence, my lord Wilde,” Justin intoned in mock gravity of purpose, “it may be reasonably deduced that you do not remain unobserved.” A niggling thought knocked on the back of his mind, one that was calling out helpfully:
You've completely lost control of what's left of your wits. You do know that, don't you?

What followed below him was a pantomime wherein Nicole crossed her arms and seemed to shiver in the cool, early evening air, Lydia nodded her head in agreement before taking a few steps toward Alina's departing back and saying a few words, Alina resuming her walk toward the maze, Lydia and Nicole turning to head for the steps to
the terrace—obviously to fetch shawls—and Nicole hanging back as her sister mounted the steps, looking up at Justin's window, putting her fists rather belligerently on her hips, tilting her head, and then finally throwing her arms wide as if to say, “Well, what are you waiting for?” before disappearing out of sight.

Justin scribbled a mental note to himself to be extremely nice to Lucas Paine; the man must really have his hands full. Although he'd said he rather liked Nicole the way she was. And Tanner seemed to be more than content with Lydia, which made perfect sense to Justin, as he'd been half in love with the lady herself before it became clear that she had eyes only for his friend.

Now he knew why he had been drawn to Lydia. It was because he would have been half in love with Nicole as well, if he'd met her before now.

Alina was a delicious mix of the two wives of his friends, and possibly with a touch of the gracious and intelligent Charlotte Daughtry thrown in for good measure, for Alina certainly seemed to like
managing
people, a thought that pleased him even as that small voice knocking on the back of his brain told him that he had only one option open to him now that he fully understood what lay in front of him. Surrender. Complete and total surrender.

His.

“Wigglesworth?” He called out, turning from the window. “Fetch me a blanket.”

The valet hurried into the bedchamber from wherever he'd been lurking, awaiting his master's next request, looking splendidly outlandish in his satins and refreshed wig. “A blanket, my lord? Goodness, who opened that window? Have you taken a chill? I have something in my case for that, a mixture one of the Romany ladies was kind enough to press on me for the paltry sum of threepence when I—”

“Never mind, Wigglesworth.” Justin cut him off impatiently, striding to the large bed and stripping off the heavy tapestry-like coverlet. He wound it around and around as he walked to the open window. Then he tossed the probably priceless bit of silk down onto the flagstones below.

“My lord! That…that was Flemish, sir, and now most probably ruined…. I think I feel faint.”

“Not yet, Wigglesworth,” Justin warned him as he dealt with his evening jacket, removing it with some effort as it had been tailored to fit him within an inch, before tossing it in the valet's general direction. “You will oblige me by withholding your apoplexy until after you have found Brutus and told him to station himself at the entrance to the maze, barring the way to anyone who might dare to enter, including the master of this house. Understood?”

“The…the maze, my lord?”

“I believe that's what I directed, yes,” Justin said
as he stripped off his neckcloth and opened the top button of his shirt.

“If his lordship is perhaps
warm…
”

“I'm not stripping to the buff, Wigglesworth. I'm merely…” He stopped himself before he said
stripping for battle.
“Now go, man, do what I've asked. No! Wait! The servant stairs, Wigglesworth. They lead down to the kitchens and the rear of the house, yes? Show me where they're located in this hulking pile of a place, because I'll be damned if I'm using the main staircase and giving them all a show as they watch from the main salon, which I'm sure they're all already doing.”

“My lord,” Wigglesworth lamented, wringing his hands and clearly on the verge of tears. “I am aware, we are all aware, that you have been placed under a considerable strain these past—”

“You have three seconds to do as I'm asking, man, or that wig gets stuffed in the chamber pot. I haven't yet decided if you'll still be wearing it when that happens.”

Not quite a full minute later, Justin stepped out of the back door he'd been led to by a clearly terrified kitchen maid. It was short work to locate the coverlet—it was damned large and twice as heavy; he might have chosen better—fold it as best he could and then toss it over his shoulder as he took off for the path leading to the maze.

There would be a moon soon, but for now the
night was still caught between dusk and dark, and it was easy for him to navigate the twisting brick path. He hefted the coverlet when it began slipping from his shoulder. It was only moderately cool now, but he was prepared for an evening chill. It wasn't her emerald and ermine-tipped cloak in front of the fireplace at the inn, or the bright skirts and petticoats of her Romany clothes on the bank of the stream, but a priceless Flemish silk coverlet would serve the purpose.

Someday he really ought to try taking Alina to his bed. If, when the mess was finally over, he still possessed one.

He hastened his step.

As he did not encounter Alina along the way, it was obvious to him that he'd been correct in his assumption—the twins had directed her to enter the maze without them, as they went back to the house for shawls, or lanterns, or both.

Brutus wasn't at the entrance to the hedge maze when Justin reached it, but he knew he could rely on the man to do what he was told. The precisely trimmed ten-foot-high hedge would do the rest.

Justin plunged into the maze with more haste than knowledge of the twists and turns of the thing, and a frustrating five minutes later he knew himself to be hopelessly lost. Thanks to the height of the hedges, he couldn't even see the estate house in order to regain his bearings.

“From Paris to Warsaw in the dead of winter, without a map, and while being pursued by a full French company, and you found your way,” he grumbled to himself. “And now, when it's even more important, you let a damn fool hedge defeat you?”

“Justin?”

He turned about in a full circle, but he was still alone on the path. “Alina?”

“Justin. It is you. What are you doing out here?”

He turned to his left, sure the voice had come from the other side of the hedge. “Getting myself lost, apparently. Where are you?”

“Lost,” she said, her voice sounding small. “I studied the map earlier, and thought I knew the key, but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I wanted to surprise Lydia and Nicole by making my way to the gazebo in the center of this dratted thing before they returned. Now, again, what are you doing here? I'm not speaking to you, you know.”

“On orders from
les jumeaux terribles,
I imagine. The terrible twins. Although I am, for the moment, in charity with them both. Unless we never find our way out of here, that is, and have to be rescued, which would force me to reconsider my current sympathetic feelings for the women who have told you to avoid me.”

“They…they sent you after me? Have you come to apologize?”

“Certainly,” he said, trying to peer through the dense hedge, but to no avail. He'd give his best curricle for a sharp sword at the moment. “For trying not to embroil you in my sad and sorry life via matrimony, for pointing out the logic of temporarily aligning you matrimonially with that same complicated—and, as it happens, probably temporary—life, I most humbly apologize. For shunting you from pillar to post these past days, for depriving you of your wardrobe and your caravan, I beg your pardon. Whatever you might wish me to apologize for, consider me figuratively at your feet, begging forgiveness. I will not, however, make the same mistake as I did yesterday. I will not apologize for taking your virginity. I do try not to make the same blunder twice.”

He waited, but she didn't answer him.

“Alina? Alina!”

“I…I remembered where I made the incorrect turn,” she said from behind him, and he turned about sharply to see her standing only a short ten paces behind him. “You were saying something? I followed the sound of your voice, but I'm afraid I couldn't make out your words.”