Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (4 page)

McAdams raised a brow at the sound, but he tipped his tankard back for a good long, greedy swallow. At length, when he finished swilling the stuff, and slammed his empty vessel on the table, he swiped his mouth with a grimy sleeve, belched, and nodded at the pistol-wielding pair. “No powder, no balls,” said he with pride. “Empty as me till, those pistols. Worthless as the bloody pair of
you
.”

Aiming at the ceiling, Hunter tested the revelation only to prove it correct. Myles and Hunter cursed as one, and Ash began to laugh. “This farce is over,” Ash said, thinking the parson and the marriage might be as empty as the pistols, set to test the theory and see if he could escape after all.

“Thank you McAdams, for an interesting … exchange.” Before donning his curly beaver, Ash tipped it to the “lady,” picked up his cane and headed for the door.

McAdams’s roar behind him did not hasten his retreat, for he willed himself to remain calm. Not so, his inebriated friends, who quit the premises, faster than stones shot from a boy’s sling. “Mewling idiots,” Ash said beneath his breath as he walked sedately on.

Then he heard a screech, a somewhat familiar sound now, and kept walking, not certain what to expect. When he cleared the door, Ash breathed a deep draft of fresh night air, felt almost sicker for it, but heaved a sigh heavy with relief at any rate. Perhaps he would be forced to suffer neither an annulment nor his guttersnipe bride’s overripe scent a minute more,
if
she were indeed his bride.

His elation was short lived. No sooner had he stepped from the curb than McAdams’s henchmen carried the screaming hellcat out the door, and deposited her in his path. And there she sat, on her arse, beside a pile of horse dung, his reeking, blushing bride, Countess Arky.

Ash shook his head, extended a hand to help her up, and she bit it. “Damnation! That will be enough,” he shouted.

Catching his breath and scooping her into his arms, Ash carried her, surly as ever, hissing and fighting, mad as a wet cat, back to the pub, where he opened the door and threw her back inside.

Again, he departed, and again, he breathed a tentative, though more cautious, sigh.

“What the devil are you going to do with her?” Hunter asked as they made for Ash’s carriage at a quickened pace.

“I just got shed of her, didn’t I?”

“Don’t look now, but she’s catching up.”

“Stuff it, Hunter,” Ash said. “How the bloody devil should I know what to do with her, but I can tell you one thing, strangling her ranks right up there with giving her a bath.”

“I’m not deaf,” Larkin snapped coming up beside him. “Nor am I stupid,” she said. “He kicked me out then locked the door, by the way. I’m yours.”

“You might have a sense of hearing, even a modicum of intelligence, I’ll grant, but do you have no sense of smell?” Ash asked. “Because I damn well wish I did not. Stand back, will you, and give a man some breathing space.”

“What, no perfumed hanky?” said she, throwing her hips out of line and mincing like a bleedin’ fop. “I thought all the prancing dandies carried them.”

“I do not prance. Nor am I a dandy. And the day I place a perfumed hanky under of my nose is the day I’m daft enough to bed you.”

“Bloody hell,” Myles said. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to?”

Ash stopped and his bride slammed into him. “He turned, stopped her from falling and regarded his friend with a growl. “Not going to what?”

“Bed the wench, damn it,” Myles said. “You can hold your breath and keep your eyes closed, can you not?”

“I
said
, ‘I CAN HEAR YOU!’” Lark kicked Myles in the shin for his crude suggestion, and Ash jumped back in time to evade a similar fate, though it was her knee she raised his way, and his stomach churned for remembering the consequences.

Hunter stepped behind Ash, for safety’s sake, and chuckled.

“You needed a bride, and now you have one,” Myles said, as he hopped and tried to rub his shin. “Just get it done man.”

“You mean, before she kills one of us?”

“For the love of God,” Hunter said, “Myles, do not be an idiot. Ash has to clean her up first. The wench is a reeking disgrace.”

Another screech, another wounded friend. Some days did not go the way you expected, Ash thought. Like wedding days. If this were, indeed, his wedding day.

“Parson, parson,” Ash shouted to halt the man reeling down the street, a huge book beneath his arm.

The intoxicated cleric who’d performed the seedy ceremony turned and waited for Ash to catch up. Ash took five guineas from his pocket and held them palm up. “They’re yours if you answer a question in God’s own truth. Are you or are you not a man of the cloth?”

The parson shrugged. “An unworthy sot to be sure, but a man of the cloth all the same.” He showed his closed book and there on the cover etched in gilt Ash read the words, “Parish Register, St. Adelbert Church, London.”

“You are married in the eyes of God, my son, though I will regret my part in your downfall until I take my next drink, and forget you exist, and that’s the sordid truth of it. I pray you will someday forgive me.”

“If downfall I face, seek God’s forgiveness, never mine.” Ash opened the cleric’s shaking hand and dropped the coins into it one by one. “For the poor box not the drink.”

“You trust I will do as you say?”

“Inasmuch as I consented to my own marriage,” Ash said, and though the parson flinched, he pocketed the guineas and turned to walk away.

Ash returned to his carriage. “I’ll thank the two of you to wish us happy,” he said to Myles and Hunter. Then he turned his bride toward his open carriage door and pushed her trouser-clad bottom up and inside, to her mortified screech and sailor’s curse. He climbed in behind her and tipped his hat to his friends. “I’ll thank you to stop calling my bride a wench.”

Said bride’s face filled with mottled fury, her posture poised to bolt, so Ash tripped her on her hastening way. By the seat of her trousers, he pulled her back in, and shoved her to the seat opposite. “Sit, wench, and shut up, while I decide what the bloody hell to do with you.”

“You told them not to call me, wench.”

“But I can call you anything I choose. Brinks,” Ash said as his coachman made to shut the carriage door. “Home to Gorhambury, if you please.”

For the first full fifteen minutes of the two-hour journey, Ash regarded his bride, and she him, with a mutually murderous rage. For the next half hour, they both looked away and out their respective windows, though Ash peeked her way at odd intervals.

Truth to tell, he’d needed a bride and now he had one. Problem was—getting up enough courage to bed her. “Hunter is right. You need a bath,” he said, regarding the unexpected fulfillment of his grandfather’s maniacal will—the bloody devil of a bad night’s work—hell a bad life’s work, more like.

Thank God for a closed carriage, he thought, for he would not want even a servant, to espy his consolation “prize” of a bride. Hair the color of … a dirty floor … though somewhat less tidy, and much less appealing—sooty of face, bruised of eye—though not his doing, much as he’d considered it—she stood nearly as tall as him. She stood reed-thin of body, but for a fine flair in her hips, which he’d discovered with his hands while rolling on the filthy taproom floor.

Her tiger’s eyes, he must admit, were amazing and possibly her best feature. Her heart-shaped lips, he thought, might be her best, though he would reserve judgment on that score until after her bath.

No wonder he’d thought her a boy at first glance, though suddenly he could barely mistake the curvaceous hips he’d so recently handled, the feminine arch in her brow, the tilt of her nose.

“Are you certain you’re nearly twenty-two?” Ash asked, opening a window against the sweat and stale-pub stench of her before settling himself more comfortably against the squabs, trying to calm his roiling stomach even as he tried to catch a glimpse of her faceted eyes in moonlight.

“So
he
says.”

“He, who?”

“Me Da. Who else would know for certain?”

“Your mother?”

“Dropped me an—”

“On your head, I must conclude.”

The way his bride narrowed her eyes made Ash cross his legs to protect himself from further attack.

She caught the move, however, and raised her chin, rather regally for a filthy urchin, while she pretended for all the world that another wash of pomegranate was not working its way up a neck that appeared suddenly swanlike. He must be drunker than he thought.

“I didn’t know Tobe and Da had the pistols,” she said, nearly beneath her breath, a dozen silent minutes later. Then she looked up, regarded him full in the face with so much … longing, Ash nearly blushed. “Guess I wouldn’t be here else.”

“You bloody well would not!” Good God, she must have rattled his brains with that right hook Jackson would applaud. Something around his heart ached, or got nudged, or prodded, perhaps. However he looked at it, she had managed to touch some cord that he bloody well did not want touched, or he had not, to his knowledge, until this very moment.

“You don’t smell so good yourself,” she said out of nowhere. “And don’t think
you’re
such a bloody blue blood of an agreeable bridegroom, you selfish sot.”

Ash realized then that he must have gone plain old daft; for he could swear that he was half-charmed by the worst mistake he had ever made in his life.

When he opened the other window to let in a cross breeze and dilute the stink, her curse on him and his descendents, in perpetuity, made him chuckle. “Take care, they could as likely be your descendents as well,” he said, and looked toward the heavens to beg almighty deliverance from that ghastly possibility.

He lived in a bleedin’ castle.

Lark wished she had not tried to bolt when they exited his carriage on arrival, or she would now be walking beside her unfathomable new husband, rather than thrown over his shoulder like a grain-sack, an empty one for all the ease he made of it, though he teetered now and again and she feared she would get dropped. “I wish you would put me down. You are drunk as a lord.”

“Am a lord.”

A lord, stuck with her, she thought, amazed anew. After such a terrible deed as cheating him into marrying her, she had decided in the carriage to give him his freedom at first opportunity by disappearing immediately from his life. But not only had she failed when she tried to bolt, she had managed to turn him into a thundercloud.

Larkin sighed. She did not want Ashford to be angry. Idiot that she was, she wanted him to like her. How would it feel, she wondered, being his friend, viewing his handsome face over the breakfast table every morning, having the freedom to touch his hand, take his arm, brush that unruly lock of hair from his temple?

Lark shivered at the intimate thought, but she was too dirty for any of it, too dirty to lie in any of his pretty beds—not that she had seen them, but they must be special, judging by what she’d seen of his home so far.

From this vantage point, she examined a set of mulberry carpeted, bees-waxed stairs, and the bottommost portion of a gold striped wall, with a fancy mulberry-colored key design along its bottommost edge, and the most amazing railing ever imagined—all of it too good for her.

She stank, said he, as if she had not known this. He regarded her as if she were lowlier than dirt beneath his bright-polished Hessians. As if she were … pig mud, infinitely lower than dirt, and exactly what she smelled of.

Lark wished she could see his face right now. As things stood, all she could see of him was—

She allowed her hand fall into slapping his nether end at every step, almost by accident—and a fine and firm nether end it was. She took great delight as they climbed in this blatant, almost intimate act that he had forced upon her.