The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(20)

Ash would be a good man for her. After this one sin, he’d spend the rest of his life in repentant worship of her. She’d be his savior. His goddess. His life.

And if hell awaited him after death for what he was about to do …

So be it. He’d have lived a lifetime in the heaven of her love.

The earth beneath them trembled with approaching hoofbeats, driving them apart.

She held unsteady fingers to her parted lips, staring at him with eyes brightened by revelations and the whisper of something less angelic than usual.

More carnal.

I love you. The words would not leave his mind, nor his mouth.

Suddenly her expression shifted, an inexplicable anxiety concealing the innocent awe. “Don’t go,” she whispered.

“I must,” he panted, struggling to regain control of his breath.

“But you’ll come back, won’t you?”

“I told you I would.” Impassioned, he clutched at her arm. “Lorelai. There are only two indisputable facts in this world: One, that the sun will set in the west. And two, that I’ll come for you. Always.”

“I just have this feeling—”

Mortimer broke through the mists, nearly knocking them both over on his steed before he reined to a stop. Clenched in his fists were the reins of the nag upon which Ash would ride to Heybridge.

Apparently pleased to ruin their moment, Mortimer sneered at his sister. “You’ll be releasing two pets today, Duck.”

“You’ll both be back tomorrow,” she said, as though comforting herself.

“Let’s get a move on,” Mortimer urged. “I’d hate to miss this appointment.”

Ash caught the reins Mortimer hurled at him, enjoying the displeasure his reflexes caused the man who seemed to suck the air out of any space he occupied, even here in the open, replacing it with derision and dread.

Not anymore. Not after today.

Reluctantly, Ash released her arm and mounted, his mind set to his task with grim determination.

“Take care,” Lorelai called. “Be safe.”

When Ash looked back at her, she pressed a kiss to her fingertips and released it into the breeze toward him.

“I’ll come back,” he reassured her.

I love you.

Had he known it might be the last time he’d see her, he would have said the words.





CHAPTER FIVE

Twenty Years Later

If Lorelai had thought to have pockets sewn into her wedding dress, she’d have weighted them with stones and let the Black Water River wash her corpse out to sea.

She gazed out her bedroom window feeling a growing kinship with the river. The disappearing sun turned the glassy, still waters a bittersweet coral. How tranquil it seemed. How serene. And yet, she understood the churning currents beneath. The murky, treacherous depths which swept many an unwilling soul into the Channel.

Take me, she begged. Anything to escape today.

All those people. All those eyes on her, the shy spinster cripple of Southbourne Grove, limping down the aisle to wed an old man with the face of a warthog, and a disposition to match.

An old man who’d come up in the world, desperate to solidify his place in society with a noble marriage to an ancient, titled family. Desperate enough to wed someone on the wrong side of thirty with a serious physical hindrance.

Everyone in the county had quickly sent their RSVP and, it seemed, more people would attend the wedding than could fit in their modest vicarage. Not because they cared, or wished her well, but because they hoped for a spectacle.

They would come because Mortimer’s penchant for ruining parties bordered on the legendary. He’d gambled away both his home and his sister to a wealthy machinist whose parents had been pig farmers. What else could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. She cringed.

Their father had hoped age would calm Mortimer’s cruel spirit. But the years only served to amplify it.

For Sir Robert, death had been a mercy.

Lorelai might have done something desperate long ago, were it not for the woman kneeling behind her, pins in her mouth, taking in the seams of her wedding dress at the last possible moment.

“You’ve lost an alarming amount of weight, dear,” Veronica Weatherstoke, her sister-in-law, said, clucking her tongue sympathetically. “I believe I heard Mr. Gooch mention a certain aversion to slight-framed women.”

“So he did.” Their eyes met in silent commiseration until the delicate bones of Veronica’s lovely features were blurred by offending moisture.

Lord, she hadn’t cried since … Well, for decades. “Do you know what the worst of it is?”

“What’s that, darling?”

“I’m going to be Mrs. Sylvester Gooch. Gooch!” she wailed, right before a hysterical bubble of laughter burst from her chest. How strange that her despair could be so hilarious. That a giggle could make a substitution for a sob. “As if my life couldn’t get more pathetic and pitiful.”

Veronica’s cheeks dimpled with the suggestion of a smile, though a desolate sadness likewise lurked in the emerald of her eyes. “I imagine, were Mr. Gooch a kind man, the surname wouldn’t matter so much.”

“I should say not,” Lorelai agreed.

Tamerlane, Lorelai’s one-eared black cat, brushed against her skirts. Heedless of his tendency to leave tufts of long hair against just about any fabric, she picked him up to stroke his neck.