Bride for a Night(41)

Christ. He’d been through hell imagining the various horrors that his bride might have endured. And now, being able to catch a glimpse of her in the distance, and yet knowing she was still out of reach, was torture.

“I warned you when you insisted on joining me that I would not endure insults to my wife,” he seethed.

Predictably Hugo refused to give ground. The damnable man was one of the few whom Gabriel could not intimidate.

Which was no doubt the reason he was one of Gabriel’s rare friends.

“And I will not willingly allow my friend to walk into danger,” Hugo said between clenched teeth. “I have too few of them as it is.”

With an effort, Gabriel regained command of his frayed temper, releasing Hugo and taking a jerky step backward.

“There will be little danger.”

“Little danger?” Hugo scowled, waving a hand toward the distant gardens. “Perhaps you failed to notice the battalion of French soldiers milling about the palace?”

Gabriel shrugged, catching sight of two soldiers leaning against a broken fountain and flirting with a buxom maid.

“It is obvious that they are more interested in their entertainment than in keeping watch.”

Hugo remained unimpressed. “That does not mean they will not eagerly shoot an intruder.”

“Only if they realize there is an intruder,” Gabriel countered, shrugging aside his friend’s concern. He did not care if Napoleon and his entire army made a sudden appearance. Nothing was going to prevent him from retrieving his wife. “If you will recall, I managed to slip beneath the nose of our headmaster for years without being caught.”

Sensing Gabriel’s determination, Hugo muttered a vile curse. “I do not like this.”

“Neither do I, but there is no choice.”

“There is always a choice,” Hugo argued. “As you have pointed out with revolting frequency, Talia is now the Countess of Ashcombe. All we need do is to locate the closest British troops and they will…”

“I have no intention of leaving my wife in the hands of the enemy another night and certainly not the days, or even weeks, it would take to gather an army,” Gabriel ground out. “Besides, I will not risk Talia in the midst of a battle. We both know it is often the innocents who are injured in the heat of war.”

“If she is innocent…”

“Enough,” Gabriel snapped.

Hugo made a sound of impatience. “Would you listen to me, Ashcombe?” he rasped. “You have only the word of two traitors that she was taken against her will. What if you manage to approach her without being caught and she refuses to leave with you?” He paused. “Or worse, what if she reveals your presence to the French?”

Gabriel gritted his teeth, refusing to admit that Hugo’s accusations struck a nerve.

In the back of his mind, however, a treacherous voice reminded him that he had sent a young, beautiful woman into the isolated countryside without so much as a companion to keep her occupied. Would it be so astonishing that she would turn to a handsome and charming vicar to ease her loneliness? Or even to fulfill the needs of her body that he had stirred to life on their wedding night?

Of course, it was the same voice that had convinced him that Talia had been as guilty as her father in trapping him in an unwanted marriage and was responsible for this mess to begin with.

For a gentleman who prided himself on his ability to confront any situation with a logic untainted by emotions, he behaved as if he were as witless as those dandies littering the London ballrooms.

The knowledge was as annoying as it was inexplicable.