Page 26 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo

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.

CHAPTERFIVE

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 mattersomuch.”

“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.

“When Mortimer came to court me… I thought the Countess Southbourne the handsomest-sounding title one could desire,” Veronica recalled. “And now…”

NowVeronica Weatherstoke, her brother’s young bride, once thought the loveliest woman in the county, had the solemn, wary eyes of a war refugee.

Lorelai took her dear sister’s hand, and they clung to each other for a while. “Perhaps if Mr. Gooch is pleased with me, he’ll allow you and Mortimer back to Southbourne Grove after a time.”