Page 30

Chapter Thirty

Too late to rescue?

T hey reached the house on Greenwood Street with little difficulty. The driver pulled up and they disembarked hurriedly. It all felt very urgent to Marina. She could not quite place the feeling of dread that had assailed her, but it was unrelenting. The fear that something would happen—or worse, that it already had—simply would not be denied.

But as they approached the house, those fears proved at least somewhat well-founded. The door burst open and Lady Crowden came stumbling out, Caleb behind her with a pistol in his hand.

“So much for rescuing him,” Mr. Danvers murmured, sounding thoroughly unsurprised by it.

“Should he have waited for uncertain rescue instead of taking matters into his own hands?” Marina demanded.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s just quite typical of Caleb to be inconveniently self-sufficient.”

It was at that point that Lady Crowden caught sight of them. She let out a blood curdling shriek directed at Mr. Danvers. “And here he is to play the rescuing hero… if you worry about anyone stabbing you in the back, my lord, it should be your closest companion here. Are you aware, Miss Ashton, of Mr. Danvers’s role in all of this?”

Marina looked at her flatly. “I am. But we came here to save Caleb because he saw the error of his ways. Pity the same could not be said for you.”

“You are so smug and superior,” the woman sneered. “You can afford to be with youth and beauty on your side. It will fade. It will fade and you will find yourself desperate for the adulation that was once laid at your feet. Then we will see how firmly you hold to your moral high ground.”

Marina had stopped listening to her. Her attention instead was focused on Caleb. Even in the dim gaslight, it was apparent that he was wounded. “You’re hurt!”

“Only a bit,” he said. “I’ll be fine once I wash the dirt off and get something to eat. It’s helped tremendously just to see you.”

Marina stepped forward, intending to go to him. What happened next was all a blur, a flurry of seething, feminine rage. Lady Crowden lunged at him, her dagger-like nails curled into claws. But she didn’t go for his face. Instead, she wrapped her hands about the gun, trying to wrest it from his hands.

“You’re going to shoot yourself, you fool!” Caleb shouted at her, clearly struggling to keep her from injuring herself or him.

“Better to die here than be exiled to the countryside to live in boredom and obscurity!” she all but shrieked back at him, when the door burst open behind them and a large man stumbled out, his neck covered with blood. Her attack had been naught but subterfuge—a distraction until her ruffian could intervene. “I get what I want, Lord St. Aiden! I always get what I want… and if I do not, then there are always—always—consequences.”

“So what now?” he asked. “You mean to kill me? To kill us all here in the street with witnesses?”

She laughed then. “Oh, heavens no! What would be the enjoyment in that? No. I mean to simply keep you all here… until after the appointed time of your wedding has passed—a time, incidentally, that has already been reported to the local gossip rags. They’ll be hovering before the church like vultures. The reality of it will matter far less than the tales they will spin,” she stated, her expression smug. “Then your bride-to-be will have faced the very same humiliation she visited upon others. Abandoned at the altar. Any shred of respectability she had left will be naught but memory.”

“You will not stop me from marrying her,” Caleb said. “It might be delayed, but it will happen.”

“I find that I care not at all. I need an ally, and Mr. Stanford Williams is one who is devious enough to be useful,” Lady Crowden mused. “Now, move to where your lovely betrothed and your wastrel half-sibling are waiting for you. It’s much easier to guard you with a single pistol when you are all in one place.”

Reluctantly, Caleb crossed the uneven pavement to where Marina stood at Jacob’s side. But as he approached her, he saw the glint of metal in her hand. She was armed. And no one was a better shot than Jacob. Glancing at his longtime friend, he saw the other man nod and then quickly grab the pistol from Marina.

The shot that rang out was deafening, but not nearly as ear splitting as the shriek that followed.

Looking over his shoulder, Caleb saw Lady Crowden on her knees, clutching one bloodied hand with the other. The shot, not fatal, had been true.

“Watson,” she screamed, “get them!”

But Jacob had the other pistol then, raised and pointed directly at the large man. Watson looked down at her, holding her ruined hand to her chest, and made what could only be considered a wise decision. “No, m’lady. I don’t think I will. You don’t pay me enough to risk dying for it.” With that, the brute sauntered off into the darkness leaving the woman who had been so certain of his devotion to stare after him in shock.

“I’ll see her to her husband,” Jacob offered. “And explain the whole sordid mess to him. You should see Miss Ashton home. After all, you do both have a wedding to attend.”

Caleb watched him walk away, taking the protesting and caterwauling Lady Crowden with him. “I have many questions.”

“I have a few of the answers,” Marina replied. “Though not all. I think some will have to come directly from the horse’s mouth so to speak. First, let’s get you home so that we can tend that rather nasty wound on your head. What in heaven’s name did they do to you?”

“Not all that they wished,” he admitted. “That is of a certain.”

*

The cab pulled up outside his Belgravia mansion at just past twelve, a fact underscored by the sounding of the clock as it rang out through the city. Alone in the darkened carriage, Marina had felt tears stinging her eyes. Now that it was all said and done, the idea of what might have happened—of all that could have gone wrong—left her feeling shaken and terribly frightened. Because it all mattered so much more to her than she might have imagined. Because he meant more to her than she might have imagined.

“I cannot simply send you home as upset as you are,” he said.

“I hadn’t planned to go home just yet anyway. You’ve refused to have a physician summoned and someone will need to deal with that cut on your forehead,” she pointed out, wiping away her tears. “I simply cannot fathom why our marriage should be of so much interest and such an inconvenience for others that they would take such drastic measures to halt it.”

Caleb sighed as he ushered her into the house and up the stairs. “It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us, regardless of how it came to pass. But there are those in this world whose vanity is so boundless that they cannot conceive that every action of every single person around them is not somehow about them. That’s the real issue—with Lady Crowden, with Stanford Williams, and even with Jacob, though he did redeem himself somewhat tonight.”

“He cares for you,” Marina insisted, as they stepped through the door Caleb had opened. “Very much. But jealousy is a truly terrible feeling. It can, if left unchecked, drive one to do awful things.”

“I hope that is something neither of us will ever have cause to feel,” he said.

“Why would we ever have cause for such a feeling?” Even as she asked the question, she was looking around, suddenly conscious of where they were. He’d shown her to his bedchamber. The awareness of that new level of intimacy was inescapable.

“We’ve not discussed it, but it needs to be said. Ours will not be a society marriage, Marina. Regardless of the circumstances under which we became betrothed, I intend for us to live fully as man and wife. I won’t be keeping a mistress or consorting with other women. And even if you grow to despise the very sight of me, I’ll not turn a blind eye. I’ll fight for us every step of the way.”

“I will fight for us too,” she said.

He smiled at her. “Clearly. You proved that tonight. You were incredibly brave… Reckless, but brave.”

“I couldn’t let anything happen to you… I—you have become very important to me,” she confessed, feeling terribly awkward and uncomfortable as she did so. Those words did not come close to describing what she felt for him, but the words that did describe it utterly terrified her.

“As you have become to me,” he said softly. “I know that Stanford hurt you deeply—”

“He didn’t actually. My pride? Certainly. My vanity? Beyond question… but I realized that, more than anything else, the ugliness with Stanford only made me feel foolish. I’m not certain my heart was ever truly engaged. I think I only accepted his suit because he had been the first man to court me before it became public knowledge that any man who married me would become ridiculously wealthy… And, as it turns out, he simply learned the truth of it before anyone else did.”

Caleb was quiet for a moment, leaning back against the door, his arms crossed, but his expression revealing how clearly surprised he was by her admission. When he spoke, his voice was pitched soft and low. “And now, because you had the temerity to leave him rather than face whatever it was he had in store for you, he means to assassinate your character instead—to make himself appear less the villain and more the victim.”

“I can only presume that is his aim. I don’t think he has a heart to be hurt by my rejection… and if he does have a heart, I certainly never warmed it. Is it revenge? Possibly. But I tend to lean toward more mercenary motivations. There is, in retrospect, something innately cold and calculating about Stanford. I can see it clearly now though I was blind to it before,” she admitted. Marina cast her gaze once more about the room, trying to look at everything but the bed which loomed so large in that chamber. “Casting me in a negative light will engender sympathy for him and thus improve his marital prospects.”

“You mean being free of scandal, or as much as he can be, will allow him to ensnare some other young woman with an open heart and a large fortune.”

A bitter smile twisted her lips. “Precisely.”

“Regardless of recognizing that he was not the person you believed him to be, it still hurts you. He still hurts you, ” Caleb stated.

Marina shook her head. “Not in the way that you might imagine. It isn’t really about him at all… I do not pine for him. Not in any way. But I do miss the person I was before I learned of his perfidy. I miss being open and trusting and… hopeful, I suppose. I fear the entire experience left me very jaded and cynical.”