Always Proper, Suddenly Scandalous (Scandalous Seasons #3)(83)

He squared his jaw. “It is a special license from the archbishop to wed.”

“Ah, I, uh, see that.” She wet her lips. He’d wanted to wed her enough that he’d gone and requested special permission to do so. “You want to marry me?”

He blinked. “Bloody hell, I’m making a muck of this, Abby.” Geoffrey’s olive-hued cheeks went red, and she never loved him more than she did just then.

“Yes,” she blurted.

He slashed the air with his hand. “There is any number of gentlemen more worthy of you than my miserable self. I know I’ve wronged you, but…”

Abigail touched her fingertips to his lips. “I. Said. Yes.”

Geoffrey’s brow furrowed. “You said yes?”

“I did.”

A devilish grin formed on his firm lips. “Well, then.” He made to kiss Abigail, but then pulled away. “I’ve treated you poorly, but in this, I would honor your wishes. If you’d rather us wait to have the banns read, or…”



She kissed him into silence. Geoffrey’s body went taut. The muscles within the elegant lines of his double-breasted black coat stiffened under her touch.

He pulled her onto his lap, and ran his hands over the curve of her hip, the swell of her buttocks, as if reacquainting himself with the feel of her beneath his fingers. She gasped as he cupped her breast. Her lids fluttered and she angled away from him, peering into his hooded eyes. “You do know this isn’t proper?” she whispered against his lips.

Geoffrey curled his hand around the nape of her neck and angled her head. “Being proper is too highly lauded,” he whispered, and then his mouth closed over hers.

A knock sounded on the carriage door and they jerked apart. Their chests rose and fell in fast, matching rhythms.

Abigail looked around frantically, even as Geoffrey shifted her back onto the opposite seat. He tucked two loose strands of hair that had fallen across her shoulder, back behind her ears.

Another knock.

“What is it?” Geoffrey called in the same, cool, composed tones of the gentleman she’d first met at Lord and Lady Hughes’s ball.

Nathaniel opened the door. He looked back and forth, between them, and Abigail felt her skin heat. “Well?” he demanded.

Abigail shifted under his intense scrutiny.

Her brother’s angry stare swung back toward Geoffrey. “When is the wedding to take place?”

***

The wedding between Abigail Stone and Geoffrey Winters, the 5th Viscount Redbrooke would take place at the Earl of Sinclair’s townhouse in the Grosvenor Square section of the London district. Or rather, that was the plan…

If Sinclair’s butler bothered to open the front door.

Geoffrey pounded again.

“Perhaps we might find another, er location to perform the…er ceremony, my lord?” The lips of the same, dour-faced vicar, who’d performed the ceremony between his sister, Sophie, to the Earl of Waxham, tipped downward, in apparent disapproval. He pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose.

Geoffrey ignored him, and continued knocking, mindful of the stares from passing lords and ladies. Still uneasy with undue attention from the ton, Geoffrey pounded the door harder.

“Perhaps,” the vicar began again. He fell silent when Geoffrey leveled a glare upon him.

Where the hell is he?

He glanced over his shoulder at the carriage where Abigail and her brother remained. Sinclair’s front door opened, and Geoffrey spun back around. The butler, a short, stout fellow with wizened cheeks and small brown eyes squinted up at him. The older servant, more than a foot smaller than Geoffrey’s own six-foot frame leaned out the doorway. He trained his glassy-eyed gaze first upon Geoffrey, then, the vicar. “How can I help you?”

Geoffrey flinched as the older man’s booming voice, carried down the street. Christ, so much for privacy. “I’d like to speak to Lord Sinclair.”

The butler cupped his hand around his ear. “You’d like to have a chair?” he shouted.

Geoffrey closed his eyes and prayed for patience. “Sinclair.”

“Yes?”

Saints be praised. Geoffrey looked over the butler’s shoulder at Sinclair. The earl stood in the foyer, studying the meeting on the front steps of his home with no small amount of humor. If he weren’t here begging a favor of the man who’d proclaimed to be his friend, then he would have told him to go to the devil.

“You said you were a friend.”

Sinclair angled his head.

“I need a favor,” Geoffrey continued.

Sinclair’s eyes widened with interest. “Oh?”

So it was, one hour, seven minutes, and a handful of seconds later, with Nathaniel and Sinclair as their only witnesses, Abigail and Geoffrey were wed in the Earl of Sinclair’s office.

Geoffrey glanced around the sparsely furnished office. With the exception of the earl’s desk, a rose-inlaid table, and a handful of chairs, the room appeared largely unused. There were no well-wishers and bountiful flowers. There was no bridal trousseau as Abigail had deserved. And it struck him—he’d failed her again.

Geoffrey lowered his brow to Abigail’s. “Forgive me,” he whispered.

Her brow wrinkled. “For what?”

He traced his finger along the side of her cheek. “You deserved so much more than this, Abby. You deserved a proper courtship and a gown designed specifically for you and…and…everything else young ladies might dream of.”