Three Times a Bride

Catherine Anderson
Loretta Chase
Samantha James

Contents

Loretta Chase

The Mad Earl’s Bride

In Pursuit of a Scandalous Lady

About the Authors

Other Romances

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Mad Earl’s Bride

Loretta Chase

Prologue

Devon, England
June, 1820

The Devil was partial to Dartmoor.

In 1638, he rode a storm into Widdecombe, tore off the church roof with a lightning bolt, and carried off a boy who’d been dozing during the service.

This was merely one of several personal appearances. More often, though, Satan appeared in disguise as an enormous black hound or a ghostly stallion galloping across the moors.

His attachment to the area surprised no one, for Dartmoor could not have been better fashioned to suit satanic natures.

Storms lashed the rocky uplands, which loomed stubbornly in the path of Atlantic gales. Heavy damps swirled into the valleys, blanketing villages in impenetrable mists, shutting off communication and travel for days.

Then there were the bogs, filling the hollows and crevices of the highlands, shrinking and swelling with changing weather and season.

Narrow tracks of firm ground coiled through this unwelcoming terrain, yet even the paths could be perilous. At night, or in a mist or storm, it was easy enough for the unwary traveler to lose his way and—if he were especially unlucky—slip into a pulsing morass from which he would never emerge.

Some believed Dartmoor’s mires were the Devil’s own traps, devised to suck their victims straight down to Hell, Aminta Camoys told her son.

It was twenty-year-old Dorian Camoys’s first visit to Dartmoor and the first time he’d seen his mother since Christmas.

“Most considerate of the Archfiend,” he replied as he walked with her to the edge of the narrow track. “After slow suffocation by quicksand, the unfortunate sinner will find Hell’s torments less shocking to his sensibilities.”

She pointed to a suspiciously verdant patch in the bleak wastes below. “Some are bright green like that. There’s a larger one half a mile ahead, but it’s gray—much better camouflage.”

The afternoon had been bright and warm when they’d first ridden out, but a chill wind whirled about them now, and gray clouds swept in, driving out their wispy white predecessors and blanketing the moorland in shadows.

“Thank you for the directions, Mother,” Dorian said. “But I do believe I can find my own route to Hell.”

“I collect you’ve found it.” She glanced at him and laughed. “Like mother, like son.”

He was like her, in more ways than many would suspect.

Although at six feet tall he was by far the larger, the physical resemblance was inescapable. While fully masculine—and puffy and pale at present, thanks to months of dissipation pursued as diligently as his studies—his was the same exotically sculpted countenance.

At the moment, one would never suspect that she, too, was addicted to sins of the flesh. He was the only one, apart from her lovers, who did know. Dorian was her sole confidante.

My mother, the adultress, he thought, as he gazed at her.

Like him, she detested hats, resenting even that small concession to propriety. She’d taken off her bonnet as soon as they’d ridden out of sight of the house. Thick raven hair like his, though much longer, whipped about her face and neck in the sharpening wind. And when she turned to him, the same unblinking yellow stare met his.

Because of those odd-colored eyes and their disconcerting stare—and because he kept to himself and hissed at anyone who came too close—the boys at Eton had nicknamed him Cat. The nickname had followed him to Oxford.

“You’d better take care,” she said. “If your grandfather finds out something besides studying is to blame for your pallor, you’ll see all your carefully laid plans swept into the maelstrom of his righteous wrath.”

“I’ve exercised considerable ingenuity to make certain he  doesn’t find out,” Dorian said. “You may be sure I shall make a deceptively healthy appearance at Christmas for the annual lecture intended to guide me through the new year. After which I shall watch him scrutinize—for doubtless the hundredth time—every penstroke of the academic reports, looking for an excuse to yank me out of university. But he won’t find his excuse, no matter how hard he looks. I’ll have my degree—with honors—at the end of next Easter term, and he’ll be obliged to reward me with a year’s trip abroad, as he’s done for the others.”

“And you won’t return,” she said. She moved away, her gaze turning to the surrounding moors.

“I’ll never be free of him if I do. If I don’t find work abroad, I’ll be tied to his purse strings until the day he dies.”

That prospect was intolerable.

His grandfather, the Earl of Rawnsley, was a despot.

Dorian’s father, Edward, was the youngest of the earl’s four sons, all of whom, with their spouses and offspring, lived at Rawnsley Hall in Gloucestershire, where His Lordship could control their every waking moment. The adults might go away on short visits and spend time in London during the Season, and the boys eventually went away to school; but Rawnsley Hall was their home—or prison—and its master ruled them absolutely. Always, wherever they were, they must behave and think as he told them to.

They did it because they had no choice. Not only did he control all the Camoys money, but he was utterly ruthless. The smallest hint of rebellion was promptly crushed—and the earl had no scruples about how he did it.

When, for instance, whippings, lectures, and threats of eternal damnation proved ineffective with Dorian, Lord Rawnsley turned his vexation upon the incorrigible boy’s parents. That had worked. Dorian could not stand by and watch his parents punished and humiliated for his faults.

Consequently, though he’d been born quick-tempered and rebellious, Dorian had learned very young to keep his feelings and opinions to himself.

His outward behavior strictly regulated, all he had to call his own was his mind—and it was an exceptionally good one. That, too, he’d inherited from his mother, the Camoys not being renowned for intellectual acuity.

Since Dorian had performed brilliantly at Eton, his grandfather had been obliged to send him on to Oxford. In another year, Lord Rawnsley would be obliged, likewise, to finance the year abroad.

Dorian would have one year on the Continent to look for work. He was sure he’d survive, and he wasn’t concerned about living in poverty at first. He would move up in the world eventually. All he had to do was concentrate as he did with his studies…and keep his sensual weaknesses under stricter control.

The thought of his weaknesses drew his mind and his gaze back to his mother. She had taken off her gloves and was playing with her rings.

Gad, but she loved trinkets—and fashionable gowns, and Society…and her romantic intrigues.

He wondered why she’d come to Dartmoor. She’d been born and reared here, yet it hardly suited her nature. She was meant for the gaiety of Society, for parties and gossip and admiring men swarming about her.

He’d expected to find her bored frantic. Instead, she seemed quieter than he could remember her ever being. He supposed her recent illness accounted for the apparent tranquillity. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering why, when the doctor proposed a change of air, she’d asked to come here, of all places. She’d been quite adamant about it, Father said.

He approached her. “I wish you would think about coming to stay with me on the Continent,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I cannot live in a garret. And don’t pretend you’ll miss me,” she added irritably. “I never was the least use to you. I had all I could do to look out for myself. It isn’t easy, as you well know. Lud, I’m so tired of it. You’ve no idea the relief it is to be here, away from temptation and the everlasting thinking and planning and lying. And pretending, always pretending. No wonder my head still aches. It’s so in the habit of laboring, it doesn’t know how to stop. When there’s nothing to think about, it makes something.”

She thrust her hair back from her face—a habit of his, too, and one that had always irritated his grandfather. “That’s the trouble with secrets,” she said. “You can never be rid of them. They haunt you…like ghosts.”

He smiled. “Your sins are not so grave, Mother. Bertie Trent’s grandmother*goes through lovers as she goes through bonnets, they say.”

Her brooding gaze upon the bleak wastes beyond, she did not seem to hear him. “I dreamt my sins took the shape of phantasms,” she said in an odd, low voice. “They pursued me, like the Furies in Greek myths. It was frightful—and so unjust. I can’t help my nature. You understand.”

Dorian understood all too well. He loathed the weakness in himself, but no matter what he did, he could not master it. He could not resist the scent of a woman; he could scarcely resist the mere thought of one. Time and again the need drove him—and Lord, the distances he traveled, the subterfuges he resorted to…for what always, afterward, left him sick with disgust.

It was not nearly so bad with her, he was aware, but then she was constantly under scrutiny, which he wasn’t, and she was a female, smaller in her sensual appetites as she was in size. Still, even her little escapades had taken their toll on her health.

He ought to heed the warning, Dorian knew. She’d only recently recovered. That made it more than six months since Mr. Budge, the Camoys family physician, had diagnosed a “decline.” She’d spent half that time between a chaise longue and her bed.

Dorian could not afford so long a period of debility. He would fall behind in his studies…and the trip abroad would be delayed…and his bondage to his grandfather would stretch on…

He shook off the grim prospect. “It’s Dartmoor,” he said lightly. “Every foot of ground seems to have a spook attached to it. Small wonder you dream of ghosts and demons. I should be amazed if you didn’t.”

She laughed and turned back to him, her melancholy mood lifting as swiftly as it had descended.

From then until the end of Dorian’s two-day visit, his mother seemed to be her lively self again. She related, along with more Dartmoor legends, all the London gossip gleaned from her friends’ letters, and told slightly improper anecdotes that made Father blush, yet laugh all the same. Away from Rawnsley Hall, Edward Camoys was more human and less his father’s puppet, and though he still treated his wife like a wayward child, that had suited them both for years.

All seemed well when Dorian departed.

He had no idea that his father had secrets, too, and as the months passed, Edward Camoys would find them increasingly difficult to conceal.

Aminta Camoys’s letter writing, like Dorian’s, was erratic at best. That was why he suspected nothing, though he didn’t hear from her after early September.

It wasn’t until shortly before Christmas, when Uncle Hugo, the earl’s eldest and heir, turned up at Oxford unexpectedly—and, as it turned out, against the earl’s orders—that Dorian learned the truth.

Then, deaf to his uncle’s warnings, Dorian boarded a mail coach headed north.

He discovered his mother where Hugo had said she was.

It was a private, exclusive, and very expensive lunatic asylum.

Dorian found her in a small, rank room, strapped to a chair. She wore a stained cotton gown and thick, rough stockings on her delicate feet. Her long black hair had been sheared to a dark skullcap. She didn’t know who he was at first. When, finally, she recognized him, she wept.

Dorian did not weep, only cursed inwardly while he unfastened the cruel straps. That sent the attendant running out of the room, but Dorian was too distraught to care. He carried his mother to the narrow bed and laid her down and sat beside her and chafed her icy hands and listened, his gut churning, while she told him what they’d done to her.

She’d fallen ill again, she said, and in her weakness, she’d let her secrets out. The earl knew everything now, and so he’d locked her up to punish her because she was a scarlet woman. Her keepers mortified her flesh to make her repent: they starved her and dressed her in stinking rags and made her sleep on filthy linens. They thrust her into ice baths. They shaved her head. They would not let her sleep: they beat on the door and called her a whore and a Jezebel and told her the Devil was coming for her soul.

Dorian didn’t know what to believe.

Though she sobbed uncontrollably, her speech was coherent. Yet Uncle Hugo had said she’d gone after Father with a knife and tried to burn down the Dartmoor manor house. She heard voices, he said, and saw things that weren’t there, and screamed of ghosts and cruel talons ripping into her skull. Edward Camoys had told nobody about her condition and tried to look after her himself, with the help of the local doctor, Mr. Kneebones. But the earl had visited them in Dartmoor a month ago and, horrified at what he found, summoned physicians from London. Deciding she needed “expert care,” they’d recommended Mr. Borson’s private mad house.

“Don’t look at me so,” she cried now. “I was ill, that was all, and the pain was dreadful, tearing at my skull so that I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t watch my tongue. Too many secrets, Dorian, and I was too weak to keep them in. Oh, please, darling, take me away from this wicked place.”

Dorian didn’t care what the truth was. He knew only that he couldn’t leave her here. He looked about for something to wrap her in, to keep her warm, so that he could carry her away, but there were only the rank bedclothes.

He was tearing them from the bed when the attendant returned, with reinforcements—and Dorian’s grandfather.

The instant the earl entered, Aminta turned into a she-demon. Uttering obscenities and threats in a guttural voice Dorian couldn’t believe came out of her, she lunged at Lord Rawnsley. When Dorian tried to pull her away, she clawed his face. The attendants grabbed her and swiftly shackled her to the bed, where she alternated between bloodchilling curses and heartwrenching sobs.

When Dorian objected to the painful restraints, the attendants—on the earl’s orders—removed him from the room, then from the building altogether. Shut out, Dorian paced by his grandfather’s carriage while his mind replayed the scene over and over.

He could not stop shuddering because he could not shake off the sickening comprehension of what his mother must feel. In the unpredictable moments of clarity—like the one he’d encountered first—she could look about her and recognize what she’d become and where she was. He could imagine her rage and grief at being treated like a mindless animal. He could imagine, all too vividly, her terror as well—when she felt her control slip and the darkness begin swamping her reason. He had no doubt she knew what was happening to her: she’d said as much, that she was weak and couldn’t keep things in.

She knew her once-formidable mind was betraying her, and that was worst of all.

And that was why, when his grandfather came out, Dorian gathered his shattered composure and swallowed his pride—and begged.

“Please let me take her elsewhere,” he said. “I’ll help look after her. I needn’t return to Oxford. I can finish later. I know Father and I can manage with the help of a servant or two. I beg you, Grandfather, let—”

“You know nothing about it,” Lord Rawnsley coldly cut in. “You know nothing of her tricks and subterfuges, her madwoman’s cunning. She played your father for a fool and did the same with you this day. And now Borson says there is no telling what damage you’ve done—taking her part against those who know better, and making promises you cannot keep. She will be agitated for days, weeks, perhaps.” He pulled on his gloves. “But it was ever this way. You were always her creature, in character as well as looks. Now you mean to throw away your future—to care for one who never cared for anybody but herself.”

“She’s my mother,” Dorian said tightly.

“And my daughter-in-law,” was the grim retort. “I know my duty to my family. She will be looked after—properly—and you will return to Oxford and do your duty.”

Two weeks later, in the midst of a violent fit, Aminta Camoys collapsed and died.

She died in the mad house Dorian had been unable to rescue her from, while he was at Oxford, burying his rage and grief in his studies because he had no choice. He had no money and no power to rescue her, and his grandfather would punish anyone who dared to help him.

He told nobody what had happened, not even Bertie Trent, the only friend Dorian had.

And so no one but the Camoys family—and then it was only the immediate family—was aware that Aminta Camoys had died, a raving lunatic, in Mr. Borson’s expensive hellhole of a mad house.

Even then, she wasn’t left in peace. His grandfather let the curst doctors hack into her poor, dead brain to satisfy their grisly curiosity. The brain tissue was weak, and they’d found evidence of blood seepage. A vessel had burst during the last fit—one of many that might have burst at any time, so fragile they were. Her earlier decline, the doctors decided, must have been the first outward sign of an inner deterioration that had begun long before. The headaches were further symptoms, caused by the slow leakage.

There was nothing anyone could have done for her, they claimed. Just as medical science had no way of detecting such defects early on, it had no way of curing them.

And so Borson and his associates absolved themselves of all blame—as though they had not made her last months a living hell.

And the Camoys saw to it that no blame or shame would be attached to the family, either.

She had “sunk into a fatal decline”—that was the story they gave out, because no Camoys, even one by marriage, could possibly be mad. No hint of insanity had ever appeared in the family in all the centuries since Henri de Camois had come over from Normandy with the Conqueror.

Even among themselves, they never openly referred to her insanity, as though giving the truth the cut direct could make it go away, like an unsuitable acquaintance.

That was just as well, as far as Dorian was concerned. If he had to listen to the heartless hypocrites pontificating about his mother’s madness, he was bound to commit some outrage—and be destroyed, as she had been.

After the funeral, he returned to Oxford and buried his feelings, as usual, in study. It was the one thing he could do, the one thing his grandfather could not crush or twist to suit his tyrannical purposes.

Consequently, at the end of the term, Dorian not only earned his degree but did what no Camoys had ever done before: he won a first, In Literis Humanioribus.

The traditional celebration followed at Rawnsley Hall. It was the usual hypocrisy. Dorian had never truly been one of the Camoys and he knew his academic triumph stuck in the collective family craw. Still, they must give the appearance of family unity, and for Dorian, pretending was easier this time, with freedom so near. In a few weeks, he would be upon the Continent—and he would not return to England until his grandfather was sealed in the tomb with his saintly ancestors.

In the meantime, Dorian could play his role, as he’d done for years, and bear their pretense and hypocrisy.

Pretending, always pretending, his mother had said.

Her mind had broken down under the strain, she’d believed.

Too many secrets…too weak to keep them in.

He didn’t know that hers were not the only secrets she’d let out.

He did not find out until twenty-four hours after the so-called celebration. And then Dorian could only stand and listen helplessly for an endless, numbing hour to the chilling speech that shattered and scattered his plans like so much dust and left him with nothing but his pride to sustain him.

Dorian was turned out of Rawnsley Hall with six pounds and some odd pence in his pocket. This was because Lord Rawnsley had expected him to hang his head and make penitent speeches and beg for forgiveness—and Dorian had decided that the earl could wait until Judgment Day.

His grandfather had called him a whoremonger, a slave to the basest of appetites, who shamelessly and recklessly pursued a path that could only lead to madness and a hideous death from the foul diseases contracted from the filth with which he consorted.

Though Dorian knew this was true, he found he must be sunk beyond shame as well because he could not find a shred of remorse in his heart, only rage. He would not, could not submit to his grandfather, ever again. He would starve and die in a filthy gutter, rather than go crawling back.

He left fully aware that he’d have to survive entirely on his own. The earl would make trouble for anyone who aided his errant grandson.

And so Dorian went to London. There he assumed a new identity and made himself one of the insignificant masses. He found lodgings—a dank room among the teeming tenements of the East End—and employment as a dockworker by day and a legal copyist at night. There was no future in either occupation, but then, he had no future, with all respectable doors shut to him. Still, even when the dock work dwindled from time to time, the lawyers kept him busy. There was little danger of their running out of documents. And when the drudgery threatened to crush his spirit, a few coins could buy him the temporary surcease of a relatively clean whore and a bottle.

The months stretched into years while his grandfather waited for the prodigal to crawl back on his hands and knees and the prodigal waited for his grandfather to die.

But the influenza epidemic that bore off Dorian’s father, his Uncle Hugo, two aunts, and several cousins in 1826 left their lord and master untouched.

Then, in the summer of 1827, Dorian suddenly fell ill—and sank into a decline.

One

Dartmoor, Devon
Early May, 1828

Dorian stood in the library of Radmore Manor, look- ing out the window. In the distance, the moors stretched out in all their bleak beauty. They beckoned to him as strongly now as they’d called to his sickly fancy months before in London, when he’d fallen so dangerously ill, too weak even to hold his pen.

In August, Hoskins, a solicitor’s clerk, had found him barely conscious, slumped over an ink-splotched document.

I’ll fetch a doctor.

No. No doctors, for God’s sake. Dartmoor. Take me to Dartmoor. There’s money…saved…under the floorboard.

Hoskins might have absconded with the little hoard, and heaven knew he needed money, living on a clerk’s pittance. Instead, he’d not only done as Dorian asked but stayed on to look after him. He’d remained even after Dorian recovered—or seemed to.

That apparent recovery had not deluded Dorian. He’d suspected, early on, that the illness, like his mother’s years earlier, had simply been the beginning of the end.

In January, when the headaches began, his suspicions were confirmed. As the weeks passed, the attacks grew increasingly vicious, as hers had done.

The night before last, he’d wanted to bash his head against the wall.

…pain…tearing at my skull…couldn’t see straight…couldn’t think.

He understood now, fully, what his mother had meant. Even so, he would have borne the pain, would not have sent for Kneebones yesterday morning, if not for the shimmering wraith he’d seen. Then Dorian had realized something must be done—before the faint visual illusions blossomed into full-blown phantasms, as they had for his mother, and drove him to violence, as they had done her.

“I know what it is,” Dorian had told the doctor when he came yesterday. “I know it’s the same brain disease and incurable. But I had rather finish my time here, if it can be managed. I had rather not…end…precisely as my mother did, if it can possibly be helped.”

Naturally, Kneebones must satisfy himself and arrive at his own conclusions. But there was only one possible conclusion, as Dorian well knew. His mother had died within eight months of the onset of the “visual chimera”—the “ghosts” she’d begun seeing while awake, not simply in dreams, as she’d said.

Six months was the most Kneebones could promise. He said the degeneration was progressing more rapidly in Dorian’s case, thanks to “a punishingly insalubrious mode of living.”

Still, Kneebones had assured him that the violent fits could be moderated with laudanum, in large doses.

“Your father was too sparing of the laudanum, fearing overdose,” the doctor explained. “Then, when your grandfather came, he raged about my turning that unhappy woman into an opium addict. And then the fancy experts came, calling it ‘poison’ and saying it caused the hallucinations—when it was the only means of subduing them and quieting her.”

Dorian smiled now, recalling that conversation. Opiate addiction was the least of his anxieties, and an overdose, in time, might offer a welcome release.

In time, but not yet.

Outwardly, he was healthy and strong, and in Dartmoor, he’d been free of the self-loathing that had haunted him since his last year at Eton, when temptation, in the shape of a woman, had first beckoned, and he’d found he was no match for it. Here, as his mother had said, there was no temptation. When he felt the old itch and grew restless, he rode through the moors, riding long and hard, until he was exhausted.

Here he’d found a refuge. He meant to enjoy it for as long as he could.

Hearing footsteps in the hall, Dorian turned away from the window and thrust his hair back from his face. It was unfashionably long, but fashion had ceased signifying to Dorian years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t matter when he lay in his coffin.

The coffin didn’t trouble him much, either, and hadn’t for some time. He’d had months to get used to the idea of dying. Now, thanks to the promise of laudanum, his remaining anxiety was eased. The drug would stupefy him, sparing him full awareness of the wretched thing he would become, while those who looked after him needn’t fear for their lives.

He would die in something like peace with something like dignity. That was better than the lot of scores of wretches in the cesspits of London, he told himself. It was better than what his mother had endured, certainly.

The library door opened, and Hoskins entered, bearing a letter. He set it face down on the library table so that the seal was plainly evident.

It was the Earl of Rawnsley’s seal.

“Damn,” Dorian said. He tore the letter open, scanned it, then handed it to Hoskins.

“Now you see why I chose to be a nobody,” Dorian said.

Hoskins had learned Dorian’s true identity only yesterday, at the same time he’d been informed of Dorian’s medical condition—and offered the opportunity to depart, if he wished. But Hoskins had fought and been wounded at Waterloo. After the horrors he’d experienced there, looking after a mere lunatic was child’s play.

Moreover, to Dorian’s vast relief, Hoskins’s manner remained matter-of-fact, with occasional ventures into a gallows humor that lifted Dorian’s spirits.

“Is it the irascibility of age?” Hoskins asked mildly as he handed the letter back. “Or was the old gentleman always like this?”

“He’s impossible,” Dorian said. “Born that way, I suppose. And quite convincing. For most of my youth, I actually believed I was always the one at fault. There is no dealing with him, Hoskins. All one can do is try to ignore him. That won’t be easy.” He frowned at the letter.

His remaining aunt, Hugo’s widow, had visited Dartmoor a short while ago and spotted Dorian on one of his gallops through the moors. She’d written the earl a highly exaggerated description of Dorian’s riding garb—or lack thereof—and passed on a lot of local gossip, mostly ignorant speculation about the reclusive eccentric living at Radmore Manor.

The earl’s letter ordered Dorian to appear—his hair properly shorn and his person decently attired—at a family council on the twelfth of May, and explain himself.

If they wanted him, they’d have to come and get him, Dorian silently vowed, and they would never take him away alive.

“Did you wish to dictate a reply, sir?” Hoskins asked. “Or shall we chuck it into the fire?”

“I’ll write my own reply. Otherwise you’ll be targeted as an accomplice, and made to feel the weight of his righteous wrath.” Dorian smiled faintly. “Then we’ll chuck it into the fire.”

On the twelfth of May 1828, the Earl of Rawnsley and most of his immediate family were gathered in Rawnsley Hall’s drawing room at the moment that a section of the ancestral roof above them chose to collapse. In a matter of seconds, several tons of timber, stone, and miscellaneous decorative debris buried them and made Dorian Camoys—one of the very few family members not in attendance—the new Earl of Rawnsley.

In a small sitting room in a house in Wiltshire, Gwendolyn Adams read the weeks-old newspaper account several times before she was satisfied she had not overlooked any details.

Then she turned her attention to the other three documents on her writing desk. One was a letter written by the present earl’s recently deceased aunt. According to it, her nephew had turned into a savage. His hair hung down to his knees, and he galloped half-naked through the moors on a murderous white horse named after a bloodthirsty pagan god.

The second document was a draft of a letter from the earl to his “savage” grandson. It gave Gwendolyn a very good idea why the heir had failed to attend the funeral.

The third document was the present Lord Rawnsley’s reply to his grandfather’s obnoxious letter, and it made Gwendolyn smile for the first time since the duc d’Abonville had arrived and made his outrageous proposal.

Abonville’s mother had been a de Camois, the French tree from which the English Camoys branch had sprouted centuries earlier—and thus Rawnsley’s very distant cousin. Abonville was also the fiancé of Gwendolyn’s grandmother, Genevieve, the dowager Viscountess Pembury.

The pair had attended the Camoys’s funeral, after which a harassed solicitor had sought the duc’s assistance as nearest male kin: papers needed signing, and any number of legal matters must be attended to, and the present Lord Rawnsley had refused to assume his responsibilities.

Accordingly, the duc and Genevieve had journeyed to Dartmoor. There, they discovered that the new earl had fallen victim to a terminal brain disease.

Gwendolyn’s smile faded. Bertie Trent, her first cousin, had taken the news very hard. At present, he was hiding in the stables, sobbing over an old letter, creased and faded past legibility, from his boyhood friend Cat Camoys.

She moved the papers aside and took up the miniature Bertie had given her.

The tiny likeness allegedly represented Bertie’s friend. It had been painted years earlier by a singularly inept artist, and it did not tell her much.

Still, twenty-one-year-old Gwendolyn was too levelheaded a girl to base the most momentous decision of her life upon a picture two inches in diameter.

In the first place, she knew she was no great beauty herself, with her pointy nose and chin and impossible red hair. She doubted that her green eyes, to which several suitors had composed lavish—and very silly—odes, compensated for everything.

In the second place, physical attractiveness was irrelevant. Rawnsley had not been asked to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Abonville had simply asked her to marry the earl and bear him a son to save the Camoys line from extinction.

She’d been asked to do this because she came of a phenomenally fertile family, famous for producing males. Both characteristics were critical, for the Earl of Rawnsley hadn’t much time to sire an heir. His physician had given him six months to live.

Unfortunately, there were no documents offering any insights into the brain disease itself. The little Genevieve and Abonville knew they’d learned mainly from the earl’s manservant, Hoskins. His Lordship had volunteered no details, and pressing him for information would have been unkind, Genevieve had said.

Gwendolyn frowned.

Her mother entered the room at that moment and softly closed the door behind her. “Are you truly thinking it over?” she asked as she took the seat next to Gwendolyn’s desk. “Or are you only making a show of hesitation for Papa’s benefit?”

Though she had taken time to reflect, Gwendolyn did not feel hesitant. She knew the task she’d been asked to undertake would not be pleasant. But that did not daunt her in the least.

Unpleasantness was only to be expected. Illness, whether of the mind or the body, was disagreeable; otherwise so much labor wouldn’t be dedicated to making it go away. But illness was also exceedingly interesting, and lunatics, Gwendolyn felt, were the most interesting patients of all.

Lord Rawnsley’s case, combining both a mysterious neurological disease and aberrant behavior, could not have excited her more.

If the Almighty had sent her a letter, signed, witnessed, and notarized, she could not have felt more certain that He, in His infinite wisdom—about which she had entertained doubts on more than one occasion—had made her expressly for this purpose.

“I was making absolutely certain there wasn’t anything to think about,” Gwendolyn told her mother. “There isn’t.”

Mama gazed at her for a long moment. “Yes, I heard the celestial summons—as clearly as you did, I don’t doubt. Papa is another matter, however.”

Gwendolyn was well aware of this. Mama understood her. Papa did not. None of the males of the family did. That included Abonville. Gwendolyn was sure the marriage idea was one her grandmother had planted in his head while convincing him it was his own. Fortunately, Genevieve had an enviable talent for making men believe just about anything she wanted them to.

“We’d better let Genevieve talk him round,” Gwendolyn said. “Otherwise he will create delays by raising a lot of needless obstacles, and we have no time to lose. There’s no telling how long Rawnsley will retain his reason, and he must be of sound mind for the legalities.”

That wasn’t Gwendolyn’s only anxiety. At this very moment, the Earl of Rawnsley might be taking one of his reckless rides and risking a fatal tumble into a mire.

Then she would never have a chance to do something truly worthwhile with her life.

Before she could voice this concern, her mother spoke.

“Genevieve has already begun working on your father,” she said. “She knew what your answer would be, as I did. “I shall go downstairs and signal her to administer the coup de grâce.” She rose.

“Thank you, Mama,” Gwendolyn said.

“Never mind that,” Mama said sharply. “It is not what I would have wished for you, even if you will be Countess of Rawnsley. If that young man had not been Bertie’s friend, and if he had not looked after your idiot cousin all through Eton—and doubtless saved his worthless neck a hundred times—” Her eyes filled and her voice was unsteady as she went on, “Oh, Gwendolyn, I should never let you go. But we cannot leave the poor boy to die alone.” She squeezed Gwendolyn’s shoulder. “He needs you, and that is all that ought to matter, I know.”

Dorian Camoys stood, trapped, in his own library.

Less than a fortnight had passed since the duc d’Abonville had turned up at the door.

Now the Frenchman was back—with a special license and a female he insisted Dorian marry forthwith.

Dorian could have dealt with the Frenchman and his ludicrous command easily enough. Unfortunately, along with Lady Pembury and the girl Dorian had not yet met and knew better than to consider meeting, Abonville had also brought his future grandson, Bertie Trent.

And Bertie had got it into his head that he would stand as his friend’s groomsman.

When Bertie got something into his head, it was next to impossible to get it out. This was because Bertie Trent was one of the stupidest men who’d ever lived. This, Dorian had long ago recognized, was the reason Bertie was the only friend he’d ever had—and one whose childlike feelings Dorian couldn’t bear to hurt.

It was impossible to rage at Abonville properly while trying not to distress Bertie, who was so thrilled about his best friend marrying his favorite female cousin.

“It’s only Gwen,” Bertie was saying, misconstruing the issues, as usual. “She ain’t half bad, for a girl. Not like Jess—but I shouldn’t wish m’sister on anybody, especially you, even though you’d be m’brother then, because I can’t think of anything worse than a fellow having to listen to her the live-long day. Not but what Dain can manage her—but he’s bigger than you, and even so, I daresay he’s got his hands full. Still, they’re already shackled, so you’re safe from her, and Gwen ain’t like her at all. When Abonville told us you was wanting to get married, and he was thinking Gwen would suit, I said—”

“Bertie, I wasn’t wanting to get married,” Dorian broke in. “It is a ridiculous mistake.”

“I have made no mistake,” said Abonville. He stood before the door, his distinguished countenance stern, his arms folded over his chest. “You gave your word, cousin. You said you recognized your duty, and you would marry if I could find a girl willing to have you.”

“It doesn’t matter what I said—if I did say it,” Dorian said tightly. “I had a headache when you came, and had taken laudanum. I was not in my senses at the time.”

“You were fully rational.”

“I could not have been!” Dorian snapped. “I should never have agreed to such a thing if I had. I’m not a damned ox. I shan’t spend my last months breeding!”

That was a mistake. Bertie’s round blue eyes began to fill. “It’s all right, Cat,” he said. “I’ll stick by you, like you always stuck by me. But you must have promised, or Abonville wouldn’t have said you did, and talked to Gwen. And she’ll be awful disappointed—not but what she’ll get over it, not being the moping sort. But only think how we could be cousins, and if you was to make a brat, I could be godfather, you know.”

Dorian bent a malignant glare upon the accursed duc. This was his doing. He’d filled Bertie’s head with the kinds of ideas he was sure to set his childish heart on: standing as groomsman for his dying friend, becoming Dorian’s cousin, then godfather to imaginary children.

And poor Bertie, his heart bursting with good intentions, would never understand why it was impossible. He would never comprehend why Dorian needed to die alone.

“I’ll stick by you,” he’d said—and Bertie would. If Dorian wouldn’t wed his cousin, Bertie would stay. Either way, Dorian wouldn’t stand a chance. They would never let him die in peace.

Once Dorian was no longer capable of thinking for himself, Bertie—or Abonville or the wife—would call in experts to deal with the madman.

And Dorian knew where that would lead: he would die as his mother had, caged like an animal…unless he killed himself first.

But he would not be hurried to his grave. He still had time, and he meant to enjoy it, to relish his sanity and strength for every precious moment they remained.

He told himself to calm down. He was not trapped. It only seemed that way, with loyal, dimwitted Bertie on one side, prating of godchildren, and Abonville on the other, blocking the door.

Dorian was not yet weak and helpless, as his mother had been. He’d find a way out of this so long as he kept a cool head.

Half an hour later, Dorian was galloping along the narrow track that led to Hagsmire. He was laughing, because the ruse had worked.

It had been easy enough to feign a sudden attack of remorse. Given years of practice with his grandfather, Dorian had no touble appearing penitent, and grateful for Abonville’s efforts. And so, when Dorian requested a few minutes to compose himself before meeting his bride, the two guests had exited the library.

So had he—out the window, through the garden, then down to the stables at a run.

He knew they wouldn’t pursue him to Hagsmire. Even his own groom wouldn’t venture onto the tortuous path this day, with storm clouds roiling overhead.

But he and Isis had waited out Dartmoor storms before. There was plenty of time to find the cracked heap of granite where they’d sheltered so many times previously, while Dorian beat back the inner demons urging him toward the old habits, the illusory surcease of wine and women.

Even if they searched, his unwanted guests would never find him, and they would give up awaiting his return long before he gave in. He had not yielded to his private demons or to his grandfather, and he would not yield to an overbearing French nobleman obsessed with genealogy.

There would be no more submitting to Duty. The new Earl of Rawnsley would be dead in a few months, and that would be the end of the curst Camoys line. And if Abonville didn’t like it, let him uproot one of the French sprigs and plant him here, and make the poor sod marry Bertie’s cousin.

Because the only way she would marry Dorian Camoys, he assured himself, would be by coming into Hagsmire with the entire bridal party and the preacher, and even then someone would have to pin the groom down with a boulder. Because he would dive into a bottomless pit of quicksand before he would take any woman into his life now and let her watch him disintegrate into a mindless animal.

Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance.

Or so Dorian thought at first, until he noticed that the rumble didn’t pause, as thunder would, but went on steadily, and steadily grew louder. And the louder and nearer it came, the less it sounded like thunder and the more it sounded like…hoofbeats.

He glanced back, then quickly ahead again.

He told himself the recent confrontation had agitated him more than he’d suspected, and what he believed he’d just seen was a trick of his degenerating brain.

The ignorant rustics, who believed pixies dwelt all over Dartmoor, had named Hagsmire for the witches they also believed haunted the area. During mists and storms, they mounted ghostly steeds and chased their victims into the mire.

The hoofbeats grew louder.

The thing was gaining on him.

He glanced back, his heart pounding, his nerves tingling.

Though he assured himself it couldn’t be there, his eyes told him it was: a demonic-looking female riding an enormous bay. A tangled mane of fiery red hair flew wildly about her face. She rode boldly astride, a pale cloak streaming out behind her, her skirts hiked up to her knees, shamelessly displaying her ghostly white limbs.

Though it was only a moment’s glance, the brief distraction proved fatal, for in the next instant, Isis swerved too sharply into a turning.

Dorian reacted a heartbeat too late, and the mare skidded over the crumbling track edge and down the slippery incline—toward the quagmire waiting below.

The pale mare managed to scramble back from the edge of the murky pit, but she threw off her master in the process.

Gwendolyn leapt down from her mount, collected the rope she’d brought, and climbed down the incline to the edge of the bog.

Several feet from where she stood, the Earl of Rawnsley was thrashing in a pit of grey muck. In the few minutes it had taken her to reach the bog, he’d slid toward its heart, and his efforts to struggle for footing where there wasn’t any only sucked him in deeper.

Still, the muck had climbed only as far as his hips, and an assessing glance told Gwendolyn that this patch of mire was relatively narrow in circumference.

Even while she was studying her surroundings, she was moving toward the mare, making reassuring sounds. She was aware of Rawnsley cursing furiously, in between shouting at her to go away, but she disregarded that.

“Try to keep as still as possible,” she told him calmly. “We’ll have you out in a minute.”

“Get away from here!” he shouted. “Leave my horse alone, you bedamned witch! Run, Isis! Home!”

But Gwendolyn was stroking under the mare’s mane, and the creature was quieting, despite her master’s shouts and curses. She stood docilely while Gwendolyn unbuckled the stirrup strap, removed the stirrup iron, and rebuckled the strap. She looped one end of the rope through the strap and knotted it. Then she led the mare closer to the bog.

Rawnsley had stopped cursing, and he was not thrashing about so much as before. She did not know whether he’d come to his senses or was simply exhausted. She could see, though, that he’d sunk past his waist. Swiftly she tied a loop at the free end of the rope.

“Look sharp now,” she called to him. “I’m going to throw it.”

“You’ll fall in, you stupid—”

She flung the rope. He grabbed…and missed. And swore profusely.

Gwendolyn quickly drew it back and tried again.

On the fifth try, he caught it.

“Try to hold on with both hands,” she said. “And don’t try to help us. Pretend you’re a log. Keep as still as you can.”

She knew that was very difficult. It was instinctive to struggle when one was sinking. But he would sink faster if he fought the mire, and the deeper he was, the harder it would be to pull him out. Even here, where it was safe, the soggy ground was barely walkable. Her boots sank into mud up to the ankles. Isis, too, must contend with the mud, as well as her master’s weight, and the powerful mire dragging him down.

Still, they would do it, Gwendolyn assured herself. She looped the reins through one hand and grasped the stirrup strap and rope with the other.

Then she turned the mare so that she’d be moving sideways from the bog, and started her on the first cautious steps of rescue. “Slowly, Isis,” she murmured. “I know you want to hurry—so do I—but we cannot risk wrenching his arms from their sockets.”

He collapsed as soon as he escaped the mire, but Gwendolyn had to leave him while she returned to the bridle path with Isis. Though the horse had been good and patient through the ordeal, she was restless and edgy now, and Gwendolyn was worried she might stumble into the mire if left unattended. One could not look after horse and master simultaneously.

By the time she’d settled Isis with Bertie’s gelding, retrieved a brandy flask from the saddlebag, and hurried back to Rawnsley, he had returned to full consciousness. To extremely bad-tempered consciousness, by the looks and sounds of it.

His black mane dripped ooze from the mire, and he was cursing under his breath as he shoved it out of his face and dragged himself up to a sitting position.

“Devil take you and roast you in Hell!” he snarled. “You could have killed yourself—and my horse. I told you to go away, curse you!”

A mask of grey-green slime clung to his face. Even under the mucky coating, however, his features appeared stronger and starker than in the miniature. This was a hard, sharply etched face, while the painted one had been sickly looking and puffy.

The rest of him was not sickly looking either. The earl’s bog-soaked garments clung to broad shoulders and back, a taut, narrow waist, and long legs—and every inch of that was solid muscle.

The reality was so unlike the picture that Gwendolyn wondered for a moment whether someone had played a joke on her, and this wasn’t Rawnsley at all.

Then he pulled off his mud-encrusted gloves and wiped the filth from his eyes with his fingers and looked at her…and she froze, the breath stuck in her throat as her heart missed the next scheduled beat.

Bertie called him Cat because, he said, that’s what all the fellows at school had called him. Now Gwendolyn understood why.

The Earl of Rawnsley’s eyes were yellow.

Not a human brown or hazel but a feline amber gold. They were the eyes of a jungle predator, burning bright—and dangerous.

Fortunately, Gwendolyn was not easily intimidated. The shock passed as quickly as it had come, and she knelt down beside him and offered the flask with a steady hand.

Her voice was steady, too, as she answered. “No self-respecting witch would go away on a mere mortal’s orders. She’d be drummed out of the coven in disgrace.”

He took the flask from her and drank, his intent yellow gaze never leaving her face.

“You may not know that all the best witches come to Dartmoor for their familiars,” she said. “A black cat is de rigueur. Since you’re the only one available—”

“I’m not available, and I’m not a damned tabby, you demented little hellhound! And I know who you are. You’re the curst cousin, aren’t you? Only one of Bertie’s kin would come galloping into a mire in that lunatic way and blunder about, risking a horse, as well as her own scrawny neck, saving a man from what she got him into. And I didn’t ask to be saved, Devil confound you! It’s all the same to me—I’ve already got one foot in the grave—or didn’t they tell you?”

“Yes, they did tell me,” she answered calmly. “But I did not come all this way only to turn back at the first obstacle. I am aware it is all the same to you. I realize the mire would have saved you the trouble of putting a pistol to your head or hanging yourself or what ever you had in mind. But you may just as easily do that later, after we’re wed. I regret the inconvenience, my lord, but I cannot let you die before the ceremony, or I shall never get my hospital.”

In the past, Gwendolyn often obtained satisfactory results from startling statements.

It worked this time, too.

He drew back slightly, and his furious expression softened into bewilderment.

“It is simple enough,” she said. “I need you, and you need me—although I cannot expect you to believe that at present since you know next to nothing about me.”

She glanced upward. “We are about to be inundated. We will need to find shelter—for the horses’ sake, I mean, since you won’t mind dying of lung fever, either. That is not altogether inconvenient. Waiting out the storm will give us a chance for private conversation.”

Two

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Dorian said. The words came out in croaks. His throat was raw from shouting the objections she’d been so stubbornly deaf to.

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he staggered to his feet. Staying upright proved even harder than getting up.

Mires, it turned out, didn’t simply swallow you. His mother had failed to explain that they chewed first. They tried to suck the skin off your bones and crush your organs and muscles into jelly. Every inch of his body, inside and out, was throbbing painfully. He ignored it.

“There will be no private tête-à-têtes,” he said, grasping her arm and marching her to the incline. “We have nothing to say to each other. I am taking you back to the house, and then you will go back where you came from.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. Her voice remained level, and she made no effort to free herself from his grasp.

He let go abruptly, wishing he hadn’t grabbed her slim arm in that oafish way. She had no choice but to follow him, unless she meant to take up residence in Hagsmire.

He started up the slope alone.

After a moment, she followed. “Why did you bolt?” she asked.

“I took a lunatic fit.” He trudged on.

“That often happens when one converses with Bertie for any length of time,” she said. “Sometimes I have to shake him. Otherwise, he will go on and on and lose track entirely of what he’s saying, and one can grow quite giddy trying to follow.”

“I’m very fond of Bertie,” he said coldly.

“So am I,” she said. “But he is miraculously stupid, isn’t he? Cousin Jessica says he was born with his foot in his mouth and has been unable to get it out since. I suppose he must have made the most harrowing vows of eternal devotion to you. He was blubbering into his handkerchief when he came out to tell me you’d bolted. So there was no getting an intelligible explanation out of him. And Abonville said only that he’d made a terrible mistake, and Genevieve must take me back to the inn.”

“Obviously you heeded Abonville no more than you did me,” Dorian said irritably. “The words ‘go away’ appear to have no meaning for you.”

“If I always did what I was told, I should never accomplish anything,” she said. “Fortunately, Abonville is aware that I do not blindly obey orders. And so, when I said I must go after you, and my grandmother agreed, he took Bertie back into the library, and they made direct for the brandy.”

They had reached the bridle path. Dorian wanted to get on his horse and ride so he wouldn’t have to listen to her, but his leg muscles were giving way.

His hair was thick with mire ooze, and the cold slime dribbled down his neck. Thanks to the slime, he stank to high heaven. He was too tired and shaken to care.

He staggered to a boulder and sat down and stared at his sodden trousers while he waited for his respiration to slow and his brain to quiet.

“It would appear there has been a misunderstanding,” she said.

He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t keep her distance from him when it must be obvious to her by now that he was deranged. It was certainly obvious to him.

He pushed a hank of soggy hair from his eyes and looked up at her. Though she didn’t appear as demonlike as she had before, galloping after him, she still looked like a witch. A young witch, with her sharp little nose and chin and narrow, uptilted green eyes—and the hair, the wild mass of red hair. It wasn’t even a normal red but a strange maroon, glinting fire even in the gloom of the approaching storm.

All the same, strange as she was, Dorian couldn’t believe he’d actually mistaken this young Englishwoman for one of Satan’s handmaidens.

He should not have let himself become so overwrought, he reproached himself. If he had stayed with the two men and argued patiently and rationally…but he hadn’t. Instead, he had run away—from temptation, yes, but they would think he’d fled a mere girl—and now they would have no doubt he was a lunatic. Abonville would probably have him examined and certified non compos mentis.

“Damn me to hell,” he muttered.

“I don’t mean to plague you,” she said, “but I cannot work out what happened, exactly. What did they say about me that made you bolt? I have been wracking my brains, but all I could think was that Bertie—”

“I didn’t know what to do with him!” he snapped. “The silly sod wants to stay with me—to the tragic bloody end—and I’ll never get rid of him without resorting to violence.” Then they’ll lock me away, he added silently.

“I can make him go away,” she said. “I’m one of the few people who can actually communicate with him. Is that all?”

“All?” he echoed. “No, that isn’t all. I want the lot of you gone. I don’t need Bertie about, sobbing the instant my tragic condition is hinted at. I don’t need Abonville telling me what’s good for me and what I ought to do. I’ve had a lifetime of that. And most of all, I don’t need a wife, damn and blast him!”

The demons in his breast cried that a wife was what he most needed, and conjured erotic images he hastily thrust away.

A pucker appeared in her brow. “That is odd. I should not have thought Abonville would misunderstand. His English is excellent. Or have you changed your mind about getting married? I do wish you would explain, my lord. It is very difficult to respond sensibly to a situation when one is so utterly in the dark.”

“I did not change my mind,” he said, beating back an insane urge to smooth the furrow from her young—too young—brow. “I vaguely remember Abonville’s and your grandmother’s visit—whenever it was—and his explaining how he and I were cousins about a thousand times removed. That’s all I remember, and it’s amazing I recall so much, considering I had swilled about a gallon of laudanum shortly before he arrived.”

Her expression cleared. “Oh, I do see now. Some individuals become extremely docile under the influence of opiates. You must have amiably agreed with every word they said—and all the while you had no idea what they were talking about.”

Thunder grumbled in the distance, and black clouds were massing above their heads. She appeared to heed the threatening weather not at all. She only watched him with quiet concentration. The steady green perusal was stirring a dangerous yearning in his breast. He beat that back, too.

“I tried to explain,” he said stiffly, “but he refused to listen to me.”

“I am not surprised,” she said. “He was sure to think the Rawnsley he encountered the first time was relatively sane—because that Rawnsley sensibly agreed with everything Abonville said. Today, when you disagreed, he was bound to ascribe it to a temporary fit of insanity.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” he muttered.

“Many people respond to seemingly irrational behavior in the same way,” she said. “Instead of listening to what you said, he probably tried to drum rationality into you by repeating his point over and over, as one drums the multiplication tables into children. Even medical experts, who ought to know better, believe this is an ‘enlightened’ way of dealing with individuals in an agitated state.”

She wrinkled her pointy nose. “It is most annoying. No wonder you lost your patience and dashed off.”

“That was a mistake, all the same,” he said. “I should have stayed and reasoned with him.”

“Waste of breath,” she said briskly. “Your mental balance is in doubt. The explanation must come from one whose sanity is not doubted. I will explain to him, and he will listen to me.”

She paused, looking about her. “The storm is not rushing upon us as quickly as I expected. For once, Providence shows some consideration. I should have hated going back without having the least idea what was wrong. Not that I am altogether happy with the answer. Still, one cannot hold a man to a promise made when he was not properly in his senses.”

Bertie had said she wasn’t the moping sort. Even so, the faint note of resignation in her voice made Dorian feel guilty. She had saved his life. Though he wasn’t at all sure he’d wanted to be saved, he could appreciate the courage and efficiency with which she’d acted. She’d also calmed him. She’d listened. She’d understood.

He looked away, wondering how much of an explanation he owed her and how much he could trust himself to utter.

A jagged branch of fire darted over a distant ridge. The heavens rumbled.

He brought his gaze back to her. “Does it not strike you as…morbid?” he asked. “That I should take a wife, now of all times?”

She shrugged. “I can understand how it might seem so to you. Yet it is not much different than a decrepit old man marrying a young woman, which happens often enough.”

It did happen, Dorian knew. Such a marriage meant a few months, perhaps a few years, of catering to a drooling invalid. The reward of a wealthy widowhood and independence more than compensated, evidently.

He was hardly the one to revile a woman for acting out of greed. It wasn’t as though he’d ever been a saint.

Moreover, he was aware that some women had remarkable powers of endurance. Was there so much difference, he wondered, between lying with a man who was as good as a corpse and lying with a drunken, lusting oaf, insatiable while the need was upon him and soddenly morose afterward?

That was the man he’d been, not so very long ago.

He shuddered—at the past and at what his future held if he yielded to his baser self and took what she offered.

“We had better start back,” she said. “You are tired and wet and chilled.”

She turned and moved toward her horse.

Dorian rose and followed, relieved that she sought no further explanation. Though he’d already said more than he wanted, he still wanted to tell her more, to explain. But that would mean describing the sordid life that lay behind him and the helpless imbecility that lay ahead. Better to leave it as it was, he told himself. She seemed to accept the situation.

They reached the bay gelding, and Dorian was so busy telling himself to hold his tongue before it got him into trouble that he didn’t pause to think but picked her up and set her upon the saddle.

Too late, he remembered it was a man’s saddle.

She swung her leg over and settled comfortably astride, naively exposing to his view several inches of feminine underthings.

Between the dirty draggle of her petticoats and the slime-encrusted boots, her muddy stocking hugged a slender, curvaceous calf.

Dorian backed away, silently cursing himself.

She didn’t need his assistance. He could have mounted his own horse and started for home and let her take care of herself. He had just escaped a mire. No one would expect him to play the gallant at such a time, and she was obviously not a helpless female.

He should not have allowed his mind to wander into the past. He should not have touched her or come close enough to notice what her legs were like. Already he could feel his resistance weakening, was aware of the excuses forming in his treacherous mind—the false promises he knew better than to trust. There would be no relief for him, or release, if he yielded to this temptation. There never had been before: only a temporary oblivion and self-loathing afterward.

He hurried to Isis and hastily mounted.

Gwendolyn Adams was not the granddaughter of a famous femme fatale for nothing. Though she had not inherited Genevieve’s raven hair or heart-stopping countenance or subtly seductive ways, Gwendolyn had inherited certain instincts.

She did not have much trouble interpreting the Earl of Rawnsley’s expression when his exotic yellow gaze wandered to her leg.

She did not have much trouble, either, interpreting her own reaction when his gaze lingered at least two pulse beats longer than delicacy allotted. The hot spark in his eyes had seemed to leap to her limb and set a little fire to it that darted up under her petticoats and past her knee, teasing her thighs with its naughty warmth before it swirled into the pit of her belly. There it set off sensations she had heard of but never before experienced in her life.

She had never dreamed the mad Earl of Rawnsley would arouse such sensations, but then, he was nothing like what she’d expected.

She had read about quicksand and the agonizing pressure it exerted. She was sure he must feel as though he’d been run over by a herd of stampeding bulls. Yet he had picked her up as easily as he might pluck a daisy from the thin Dartmoor soil. Now she watched him swing his long, powerful body up into the saddle in one easy motion, as though he’d done nothing more tiring than pick wildflowers.

Puzzled, she followed the earl in silence down the narrow, winding track.

Rain was falling, but halfheartedly. The worst of the storm seemed to be rampaging in the southeast.

Rawnsley trotted on steadily, never once glancing back at her. If his horse had been fresh, Gwendolyn had no doubt he would have galloped out of Hagsmire in the same desperate manner he’d galloped in.

Abonville had—with the best of intentions, assuredly—thrown him into a dangerously agitated state. It was bound to happen again, and the duc was sure to make the worst possible decisions out of the best possible motives. She had seen it happen too many times: greedy physicians, eager to make heaps of money trying their ludicrous theories out on hopeless cases, and loving families blindly agreeing out of desperation.

But the medical experts were men, and with men, everything was a war of sorts. Doctors were bound to battle disease, at times, as though the victims as well as the illness were mortal foes. Then the physicians wondered why their patients turned hostile.

What Rawnsley needed was a friend. At present, though, thanks to Abonville—and poor, stupid Bertie—he viewed Gwendolyn as the enemy.

“Drat them,” she muttered. “Leave it to men to make a muck of things.”

She was silently reviewing her long litany of grievances against the male of the species when Rawnsley drew his mare to a halt.

Gwendolyn noticed that the track had widened. There seemed to be enough room to ride abreast.

Rawnsley was waiting for her to catch up, she realized with amazement. Her spirits rose, but only a very little bit. Experience had taught her not to leap to conclusions, especially optimistic ones.

When she came up beside him, he spoke.

“You mentioned a hospital,” he said, moving on again. His voice was hoarse and unsteady. Exhaustion and inner distress were easy enough to diagnose. The distress itself was more difficult to analyze. He was not looking at her but watching the path ahead, and his long, wet hair hung in his face, concealing his expression.

“I have been trying to guess why you would come to marry a dying madman,” he continued. “You said you needed me. I assume it’s the money you need.” He gave a short laugh. “Obviously. What other reason could there be?”

That was rather a crass way of putting it. Nevertheless, it was true enough, and Gwendolyn had determined at the outset to be honest with him.

“I do need the money, to build a hospital,” she said. “I have definite ideas about how it should be constructed as well as the principles according to which it must be run. In  order to achieve my goals—without negotiation or com promise—I require not only substantial funds, but influence. As Countess of Rawnsley, I should have both. As your widow, I should be able to act independently. Since you are the last of the males of your family, I should have to answer to no one.”

She glanced at him. “You see, I did take all the details of your present situation into account, my lord.”

He was looking straight ahead. He had pushed his sopping mane back from his face. She still couldn’t read his expression, but she saw no signs of shock or anger.

“My grandfather would turn over in his grave,” he said after a moment. “A woman—the Countess of Rawnsley, no less—building a hospital with the family fortune. All that money thrown away upon peasants.”

“Wealthy people don’t need hospitals,” she said. “They can afford to keep physicians about to attend every trivial discomfort.”

“And you mean to run it according to your principles,” he said. “My grandfather had a very low opinion of feminine intelligence. A woman with ideas of her own, in his view, was a dangerous aberrant of Nature.” He glanced at her, then quickly away. “You present me with an almost irresistible temptation.”

“I hope so,” she said. “There is not another man in England whose circumstances are more neatly suited to my aspirations. I grasped this almost immediately and was quite frantic to get here before you killed yourself. You see, I am much more desperate to marry you than you could possibly be to marry anybody.”

“Desperate,” he said with another short laugh. “I am the answer to your prayers, am I?”

The halfhearted rain was building to a steady drizzle, and lightning skittered at the edges of the moorland. Still, they were not far from the house now, and traveling on lower ground than before.

He seemed to be mulling the matter over.

Gwendolyn waited silently, resisting the urge to pray. She did not wish to tempt Fate into more practical jokes. It had already landed him in a mire.

She contented herself with a few cautious sidelong glances at the man she’d come to marry. The rain was washing some of the muck away, and even though his face was still dirty, there was no mistaking the nobly chiseled profile.

He was terribly handsome.

She had not expected that. But then, she was used to expecting the worst. The possibility of finding him attractive had not entered her calculations. She was adjusting those calculations when he spoke again.

“I came here to finish my time in peace,” he said. “I hoped that if I kept to myself in this isolated place and didn’t bother anybody, no one would bother me.”

“But we have come and turned everything upside down,” she said. “I can understand how frustrating that is.”

He turned to her. “Abonville won’t leave me alone, will he?”

“I shall do my utmost to persuade him to respect your wishes,” she said cautiously. She couldn’t promise Abonville would keep away forever, yet she did not want to use the duc as a threat. She did not want Rawnsley to feel he must hide behind a woman’s skirts. One of the most disagreeable aspects of being ill was feeling helpless and utterly dependent upon others.

“If I do as he asks and marry you, he’ll probably leave me in peace, at least for a time,” Rawnsley said. “The trouble is, I should have you about instead, and yet…” His gaze drifted to her leg, then upward. After studying her face for a brooding moment, he returned his attention to the track ahead.

“I have not had a woman in nearly a twelvemonth,” he said tightly. “I had determined to put such matters behind me. Apparently, that species of saintliness is not in my nature, and a year is not nearly long enough to cultivate it. I should need decades, I suppose,” he said bitterly.

Gwendolyn had not come expecting the kind of “saintliness” he referred to. She had been prepared to go to bed with him and try to make a baby regardless of what he looked like or how he behaved. If it had not seemed like cruel and unusual punishment then, it could hardly alarm or disgust her now. If a long period of celibacy—and for a man, a year must seem like eternity—and a glimpse of her leg was swaying his judgment in her favor, that was fine with her.

“If you are saying you do not find me abhorrent,” she said, “I am glad.”

“You have no idea what might be demanded of you,” he growled. “You have no idea what kind of man I am.”

“Considering what I shall eventually gain by this marriage, it would be absurd, not to mention ungrateful, of me to fret about your personal flaws,” she said. “It is not as though I am perfect, either. I have made it clear that my motives are mercenary. You have seen for yourself that I am disobedient and sharp-tongued. And I know I am no great beauty. I am also obstinate. That runs in the family, especially among the females of my generation. The time may come, in fact, when you will view your loss of reason as a blessed relief.”

“Miss—miss…Hell, I can’t remember,” he said. “I know it isn’t Trent, but—”

“The name is Adams,” she said. “Gwendolyn Adams.”

He scowled. “Miss Adams, I should like to know whether you are trying to convince me to marry you or to kill myself.”

“I merely wished to point out how pointless it is, in the circumstances, to quibble about our respective character flaws,” she said. “And I wished to be honest with you.”

A wicked part of her did not wish to be honest. She realized he was worried about his male urges clouding his judgment. The wicked part of her was not simply hoping the urges would win; it was also tempting her to encourage them with the feminine tactics other girls employed.

But that was not fair.

They had turned into the narrow drive leading to the stables. Though the rain beat harder now, Gwendolyn was aware mainly of the beating of her own heart.

She did not want to go away defeated, yet she did not want to win by unfair means.

She supposed the display of her limbs—however much her immodest mode of riding had been dictated by the need for haste and the unavailability of a sidesaddle—constituted unfair means.

Consequently, as they rode into the stable yard, she headed for the mounting block.

But Rawnsley was off his horse before she reached it, and at the gelding’s side in almost the same moment.

In the next, he was reaching up and grasping her waist.

His hands were warm, his grasp firm and sure. She could feel the warmth spreading outward, suffusing her body, while she watched the muscles of his arms bunch under the wet, clinging shirtsleeves.

He lifted her up as easily as if she’d been a fairy sprite. Though she wasn’t in the least anxious that he’d drop her, she grasped his powerful shoulders. It was reflex. Instinctive.

He brought her down slowly, and he did not let go even after her feet touched the ground.

He looked down at her, and his intent yellow gaze trapped her own, making her heart pound harder yet.

“The time will come when I will have no power over you,” he said, his low tones making her nerve ends tingle. “When my mind crumbles, little witch, I shall be at your mercy. Believe me, I’ve considered that. I’ve asked myself what you will do with me then, what will become of me.”

At that moment, one troubling question was answered.

He was aware of the danger he was in. His fears were the same as those she felt for him. His reason was still in working order.

But he continued before she could reassure him.

“I can guess what will happen, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because I’m the man I always was. A death sentence has changed nothing.” His hands tightened on her waist. “You should have left me in the mire,” he told her, his eyes burning into her. “It was not pleasant—yet Providence does not grant all its creatures a pretty and painless demise. And I’m ready enough for mine. But you came and fished me out, and now…”

He let go abruptly and stepped back. “It’s too late.”

He was in no state to listen to reassurances, Gwendolyn saw. If he was angry with himself and didn’t trust that self, he was not likely to trust anything she said. He would believe she was humoring him, as though he were a child.

And so she gave a brisk, businesslike nod. “That sounds like a yes to me,” she said. “Against your better judgment, evidently, but a yes all the same.”

“Yes, drat you—drat the lot of you—I’ll do it,” he growled.

“I am glad to hear it,” she said.

“Glad, indeed. You’re desperate for your hospital, and I’m the answer to your maidenly prayers.” He turned away. “I’m desperate, too, it seems. After a year’s celibacy, I should probably agree to marry your grandmother, Devil confound me.”

He strode down the pathway to the house.

Three

Dorian made straight for the library, the red-haired witch close on his heels.

He flung the door open.

Abonville was pacing in front of the fireplace.

Genevieve was reading a book.

Bertie was building a house of cards.

Dorian strode in and paused a few feet from the threshold.

Abonville stopped short and stared. Genevieve laid aside her book and looked up. Bertie leapt from his chair, the cards flying about him and fluttering to the carpet.

“By Jupiter’s thunderbolts!” he cried. “What’s happened to you, Cat?”

“Your cousin drove me into a mire,” Dorian said levelly. “Then she fished me out. Then we agreed to wed. Today. You may stand as my groomsman, Bertie.”

The two elders did not so much as raise an eyebrow.

Bertie opened his mouth, then shut it. He retreated a pace, his brow furrowing.

Dorian bent his gaze upon Miss Adams, who had advanced from the doorway to stand beside him. “Any objections, Miss Adams?” he asked. “Or second thoughts?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “The ceremony may take place whenever you wish.”

“I understand that everything has been prepared for speedy nuptials,” he said. “If you’ve the preacher somewhere about, we can do it now.”

He turned his stare upon the trio of relatives, bracing himself for an outburst of hysteria.

They believed he was a madman. He knew he looked like one. The rain had merely diluted his coating of mire ooze, which streamed from his sopping garments onto the carpet.

No one uttered a word.

No one moved.

Except the witch, who paid no more attention to her relatives than if they’d been the statues they were doing a splendid imitation of.

“You’ll be more comfortable after you have a bath,” she said. “And something to eat. And a nap. I know you are exhausted.”

Every muscle in his body ached. He could scarcely stand upright. “I can be comfortable later,” he said, darting another defiant glance over the mute trio. “I want to get married. Now.”

“I should like to wash and change, too,” she said. She stepped nearer and tugged at his soggy shirt cuff. “It will take time to send for my maid and my clothes, as well as the minister. They are all waiting at the inn, along with our solicitors. The lawyers must come, too, so that you can sign the settlements. You don’t want to be waiting about for everybody in wet clothes, I’m sure.”

Lawyers.

Chill panic washed through him.

They would examine him to make sure he knew what he was doing. Very recently, the Earl of Portsmouth’s fourteen-year marriage had been annulled on grounds he’d been of unsound mind when it was contracted. Miss Adams would not want to risk an annulment and lose all claim to his fortune and the title whose influence she needed.

But if they found him unsound…He shuddered.

“Look at you,” she said sharply. “You’re shivering, my lord. Bertie, do stop gaping in that fishlike way and come and make yourself useful. Take your stubborn friend upstairs before he collapses, and tell the servants to ready his bath and find him something to eat. Genevieve, you will send to the inn for what we need, won’t you? Abonville, I wish to speak with you.”

No one uttered a protest, not so much as a syllable.

Bertie hurried toward him, took the bemused Dorian by the arm, and steered him back through the library door.

Moments later, when they reached the stairs, Dorian saw Hoskins dart through the servants’ door and hasten to the library.

He wondered whether the witch had cast a spell over the lot of them.

“Shouldn’t dawdle if I was you,” Bertie warned. “If Gwen catches us hanging about, she’ll take a fit, which I’d rather she didn’t, seeing as how she took one already and my ears are still ringing. Not but what she was right. We wasn’t listening proper, was we?”

He grasped Dorian’s arm and tugged. “Come along, Cat. Hot bath, Gwen said, and she got that right, too, by gad. You look like what the cat dragged in, and meaning no offense, but you smell like I don’t know what.”

“I told you she drove me into a mire,” Dorian said. “What do you expect a man to smell like after a soak in a reeking bog?”

Unwilling to be dragged up the stairs by his overanxious friend, Dorian shook off the helping hand and started up on his own.

Bertie followed. “Well, she wouldn’t’ve had to chase you, would she, if you hadn’t gone and bolted,” he said. “Couldn’t think why you’d do it. I told you she wasn’t like Jess, didn’t I? I told you Gwen was a good sort of girl. Did you think I’d let them shackle you to any beastly female? Ain’t we friends? Don’t we look out for each other? Well, I should think so, or at least I did, but then you was away a long time and never told me where you was. But you never was much for letters, and I never was much good at answering ’em anyhow, and I figured you didn’t hear yet I was back from Paris.”

They had reached the landing. He gave Dorian a worried look. “But it’s all right now, ain’t it? Mean to say, if you was looking at her over the breakfast table, you wouldn’t cast up your accounts, would you?”

If he were looking at her over the breakfast table, he would probably leap on her and devour her, Dorian thought. Even now, he wondered how he’d managed to keep his hands restricted to her waist after seeing the soft, dazed expression in her eyes when he’d helped her dismount. No woman had ever gazed at him in that way. Under that look, reason, conscience, and will had simply melted away, leaving him defenseless and nigh trembling with longing. Even now, merely recalling, he could not summon up a fragment of common sense.

“I like her…eyes,” he told Bertie. “And her voice is not disagreeable. She does not seem silly or missish. She seems a capable, sensible girl,” he added, recollecting the terrifying efficiency with which she’d extricated him from the mire.

Bertie’s worried expression vanished, and he broke into the amiably stupid grin that had softened Dorian’s heart toward him years ago.

“There, I knew you’d see it, Cat,” he said. “Sensible’s the word. Tells you what’s to be done and says it plain so you always know how to go about it. And when she says she’ll do it, Gwen goes and does it. Said she was going after you, and we was to stay put and keep our mouths shut tight and stay out of her way. And she did it and you come back and said you’d have her, and now we’re all in order, ain’t we?”

He’d had his life in order before, Dorian thought: everything in hand, his short future so carefully planned. Kneebones had promised, and he could be trusted to keep his part of the bargain: laudanum, as much as Dorian needed to keep him quiet, to let him die in peace.

Now there was no telling what would happen. He could tell his bride what he wanted, but he could not make her do it. He could exact promises, but he couldn’t make her keep them. Before long, he would have no power over her.

But he could not keep his mind on the future because he could not drive out the recollection of the melting look in her green eyes. All he could think of was the night to come and the little witch in his arms…

Oh, Lord, and if his mind failed and he hurt her—what then?

For Bertie’s sake, he manufactured a smile.

“As you say, Bertie,” he answered lightly. “All in order and everyone happy.”

Some hours later, Gwendolyn was sitting on a stone bench in the Earl of Rawnsley’s garden, watching the blood-red sun’s slow descent over a distant hill. The storm had long since swept off to ravage another part of Dartmoor, leaving the air cool and clean.

She was clean and neatly dressed in the green silk gown Genevieve had brought her from Paris, and her unruly hair had been temporarily tamed into a relatively tidy heap of curls atop her head. She hoped it would still be tidy by the time Rawnsley emerged from his meeting with the lawyers.

Gwendolyn’s hair was the bane of her existence. The Powers that Be, with their usual perverse idea of a joke, had given her Papa’s hair instead of Mama’s.

She did not mind the color so much—at least it was interesting—but there was so much of it, a hodgepodge of twists and bends and corkscrews, each of which had a mind of its own, and all of them demented.

Her hair, which was the complete antithesis of her level, steady, and orderly personality, made it very difficult for people to take her seriously—as though being a female didn’t make that hard enough already. Thanks to the crazed mass of red curls and corkscrews, every new person she met represented yet another uphill battle to prove herself.

She wished wimples would come back into fashion.

She wondered what Rawnsley’s raven mane was like when it was clean and combed. She had not seen him since Bertie had taken charge of him.

She wondered why the earl kept his hair long, whether it  was merely some odd masculine vanity or an act of defiance—against convention in general or, more likely, his straitlaced grandfather in particular. She could certainly understand that.

Rebellion did not explain, however, why the earl so little resembled his tiny portrait. The puffy face in the miniature had seemed to belong to a rather corpulent man. The one Gwendolyn had met hadn’t an ounce of excess flesh upon his six-foot frame. His drenched shirt and trousers had clung like a second skin, not to rippling rolls of fat, but to lean, taut muscle.

What ever was wrong with him was obviously confined to the contents of his skull.

Gwendolyn watched the light of the lowering sun spread a red stain through the deepening shadows of the moors while she searched her mental index of brain diseases. She wondered what malady corresponded to the “crumbling” he’d mentioned.

She was considering aneurisms when she heard footsteps crunch upon the gravel path.

Turning toward the sound, she beheld her betrothed advancing toward her, his face set, his right hand clutching a piece of paper.

At that moment, medical hypotheses, along with all other intellectual matters, sank into the deepest recesses of Gwendolyn’s mind. When he paused before her, all she could do was stare while her heart beat an erratic rhythm that made the blood hum in her veins.

He wore a coat of fine black wool, whose snugly elegant cut hugged his powerful, athletic physique. Her glance skidded down over the equally snug trousers to the gleaming toes of his shoes, then darted up again to his face.

Cleaned of the mire’s vestiges, his countenance was pale, chiseled marble. The long black hair, gleaming like silk, rippled over his broad shoulders. A burning golden gaze trapped hers.

If she had been a normal female, she would have swooned. But she was not normal, never had been.

“Good grief, you are impossibly handsome,” she said breathlessly. “I vow, I have never experienced the like. For an instant, my brain stopped altogether. I must say, my lord, you do clean up well. But next time, I wish you would call out a warning before you come into view, and give me a chance to brace myself for the onslaught.”

Something dark flickered in his eyes. Then a corner of his hard mouth quirked up. “Miss Adams, you have an interesting—a unique—way with a compliment.”

The trace of a smile disoriented her further. “It is a unique experience,” she said. “I never knew my brain to shut off before, not while I was full awake. I wonder if the phenomenon has been scientifically documented and what physiological explanation has been proposed.”

Her eyes would not focus properly but wandered fuzzily downward again…and stopped at the piece of paper. The document snapped her back to reality. “That looks official,” she said. “Legal drivel, I collect. Is it something I must sign?”

He glanced back toward the house.

When his attention returned to her, the half-smile was gone, and his expression had hardened again. “Will you walk with me?” he asked.

The backward glance gave Gwendolyn a good idea of what the trouble was. She kept her thoughts to herself, though, and stood obediently and walked with him in silence down a path bordered by roses. When they reached a planting of shrubs that shielded them from view of the house, he spoke.

“I am told that, in view of my prognosis, a guardian ought to be appointed to oversee my affairs,” he said. His voice was not altogether steady. “Abonville proposes to act as guardian since he’s my nearest male kin. It is a reasonable proposal, my own solicitor agrees. I’ve inherited a good deal of property, which must be protected when I become incapable of acting responsibly.”

A stinging stream of indignation shot through her. She did not see why he must be plagued with such matters this day. All he needed to sign were the marriage settlements. He should not be asked to sign his whole life away in the bargain.

“Protected from whom?” she asked. “Grasping relatives? According to Abonville, there’s no one left of the Camoys but a few dithering old ladies.”

“It isn’t merely the property,” he said. His voice was taut, his face a rigid white mask.

She wanted to reach up and smooth the turmoil and tension away, but that would look like pity. She plucked a leaf from a rhododendron and traced its shape instead.

“The guardianship includes legal custody…of me,” he said. “Because I cannot be responsible for myself, I must be considered a child.”

He was not irresponsible yet or remotely childlike. Gwendolyn had told Abonville so. She knew her lecture had calmed the duc down, yet it was too much to hope that her speeches could fully quell his overprotectiveness. He meant well, she reminded herself. He assumed the marriage would be too great an ordeal for her and wished to share the burden.

She could hardly expect her future grandfather to fully understand her capabilities when none of the other men in her family did. None of them took her medical studies and work seriously. Her dedicated efforts remained, as far as the males were concerned, “Gwendolyn’s little hobby.”

“It is very difficult to think clearly,” Rawnsley went on in the same ferociously controlled tones, “with a pair of lawyers and an overanxious would-be grandpapa hovering over me. And Bertie’s holding his tongue was no help, when he had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to do it, and he still couldn’t stop sniffling. I came out to clear my head, because…damnation.” He dragged his hair back from his face. “The fact is, I do not feel reasonable about this. I wanted to tell them to go to the Devil. But my own solicitor agreed with them. If I object, they’ll all believe I’m irrational.”

And he was worried he’d end up in a mad house, Gwendolyn understood.

That he’d come to her with his problem seemed to be a good sign. But Gwendolyn knew better than to pin her hopes on what seemed to be.

She moved to stand in front of him. He did not look down at her.

“My lord, you are aware, I hope, that the 1774 Act for Regulating Madhouses included provisions to protect sane persons from improper detention,” she said. “At present, only an examining body composed of imbeciles and criminal lunatics could possibly find you non compos mentis. You need not sign every stupid paper those annoying men wave in your face in order to prove you are sane.”

“I must prove it to Abonville,” he said stiffly. “If he decides I’m mad, he’ll take you away.”

She doubted the prospect was intolerable to him. She knew he’d agreed to marry her for what he believed were the wrong reasons. She doubted he’d developed a case of desperate infatuation during the last few hours.

It was far more likely that he’d come to test her. If she failed, he would believe it was wise to let her go.

Gwendolyn had been tested before, by certified lunatics, among others, and this man was no more deranged at present than she. Nevertheless she did not make the mistake of imagining this trial would be easier—or less dangerous. She had marked him as dangerous from the first moment he had turned his smoldering yellow gaze upon her. She was sure he fully understood its compelling effect and knew how to use it.

Her suspicions were confirmed when the brooding yellow gaze lowered to hers. “What’s left of my reason tells me you represent an infernal complication, Miss Adams, and I should be better off rid of you. The voice of reason, however, is not the only one I hear—and rarely the one I heed,” he added darkly.

His gaze drifted down…lingered at her mouth…then slid downward to her bodice.

Beneath layers of silk and undergarments, her flesh prick-led under the slow perusal, and the sensations spread outward until her fingers and toes tingled.

He was trying to make her uneasy.

He was doing a splendid job.

But he faced madness and death, she reminded herself, next to which her own anxieties could not possibly signify.

By the time the potent golden stare returned to her face, Gwendolyn had collected at least a portion of her composure.

“I am not sure you have identified the correct voice as reason’s,” she said. “I am absolutely certain, though, that if Abonville tries to take me away, I shall take a fit. I went to a good deal of trouble to get ready for the wedding. My head is stuck full of pins and my maid laced my stays so tight it is a wonder my lips haven’t turned blue. It took her a full hour to tie and hook me into this gown, and I shall likely be three hours trying to get out of it.”

“I can get you out of that gown in a minute,” he said too quietly. “And I shall be happy to relieve you of your painful stays. It would be better for you not to put such ideas into my head.”

As though they weren’t already there, she thought. As though he hadn’t warned her: he hadn’t had a woman in a year.

Though she knew he was testing her maidenly fortitude, his low voice set her nerves aquiver.

He was taller than she. And heavier. And stronger.

A part of her wanted to bolt.

But he was not on the brink of a violent lunatic fit, she scolded herself. He was feigning, to test her, and allowing him to intimidate her was no way to win his trust.

“I do not see why it would be better,” she said. “I do not want you to be indifferent to me.”

“It would be better for you if I were.”

He had not moved an inch nearer, yet his low voice and glowing eyes exerted a suffocating pressure.

Gwendolyn reminded herself that the Almighty had been throwing obstacles in her path practically since the day she was born and had confronted her repeatedly with men determined to browbeat or frighten her.

That was sufficient practice for dealing with him.

“I know I am an infernal complication,” she said. “I realize you feel put upon, and I do understand your resentment of your—your masculine urges, which incline you to act against your better judgment. But you are not looking on the bright side. A lack of such urges would indicate a failure of health and strength.”

She caught the flicker of surprise in his eyes in the instant before he masked it.

“You ought to look upon your animal urges as a positive sign,” she persisted. “You are not as far gone as you thought you were.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “I find myself in far worse case than I had imagined.”

He directed his yellow stare to a point on her left shoulder where the neckline of her gown left off and her skin began…and instantly she became hotly conscious of every square inch of her skin.

She heard a crackling sound. Looking down, she saw the paper crumpling in his tightly clenched hand.

He looked there, too. “It hardly matters what I sign,” he said. “Nothing matters that should.” He crushed the document into a ball and threw it down.

Her heart was pumping double-time, speeding the blood through her veins in preparation for flight.

“Damn me,” he said. He advanced.

She sucked in her breath.

He grasped her shoulders. “A pretty fellow, am I? Take a fit, will you? I’ll show you a fit.”

Before she could exhale, he clamped one hand on the back of her neck, pulled her head back, and brought his mouth down upon hers.

It was her fault, Dorian told himself. She should not have looked at him in that bone-melting way. She should not have stood so near and caught him in her scent, rich and heady as opium to his starved senses. She should have run, instead of staying so close and snaring him in awareness of the fine, porcelain purity of her skin.

He could not help yearning for that purity and softness, and then he could not keep from reaching for her.

He clamped his needy mouth upon her soft, trembling one, and the clean, sweet taste of her made him shiver—in pleasure or despair, he couldn’t tell. For all he knew the chill was the emptiness inside him, ever-present, impossible to fill.

He should have stopped then, for his sanity’s sake, if nothing else. He knew it was hopeless. This innocent could never sate him. No woman, no matter how experienced and skilled, had ever done it.

But her lips were so soft, warming and yielding to the pressure of his. He had to draw her nearer, seeking the warmth of her young body while he savored the untutored surrender of her innocent mouth.

He pressed her close, greedy for her warmth and softness. He pressed her to his famished body while he deepened the kiss, seeking desperately, as always, for more.

He felt her shudder, but he couldn’t stop—not yet. He couldn’t keep his tongue from searching the mysteries of her mouth…feminine secrets, promising everything.

Lured by scent and taste and touch, he slipped into the darkness. He stroked over her back, heard silk whisper under his fingers, and felt her shift under his touch. Then he was truly lost because she moved into his caress as though she’d done it many times before, as though she belonged in his arms, had always belonged.

Warmth…softness…sinuous curves under whispering silk, melting against him…woman-scent, enveloping him…and her skin…

He trailed his lips over her satiny cheek, and she sighed. The soft sound ignited the too-quick inner fuse of desire. His fingers found a fastening…

“If you’re trying to scare me off,” came her foggy voice, her breath tickling his ear, “you’re going about it all wrong.”

His hands stilled.

He raised his head and looked at her. Her eyes opened, and slowly her hazy green gaze sharpened into focus. His own haze instantly dissipated under that penetrating study.

“I was taking a lunatic fit,” he said, aware that his thick tones told another story. He wrenched his gaze from the mesmerizing trap of hers and drew back.

Curling red tendrils had escaped their pins to tumble wildly about her flushed face and neck. Her gown was twisted askew.

He stepped back and looked at his hands, afraid to think where they’d been and what he might have done to an innocent, lusting oaf that he was.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you make me stop? Do you have any idea what I might have done?”

She tugged her gown back into place. “I have a very good idea,” she said. “I am familiar with the mechanics of human reproduction, as I told Mama. But she felt it was her maternal duty to explain it herself.”

She smoothed her bodice. “I must say, she did point out a few subtleties I was unaware of. And Genevieve, as you would expect, enlightened me further. It turned out to be not quite as simple as I thought.” She pushed a few pins back into her hair. “Which is not to say I haven’t experienced considerable enlightenment under your tutelage, my lord,” she added quickly. “It is one thing to be told about intimate kisses. Experiencing them is another matter altogether. What are you staring at?” She looked down at herself. “Have I missed something? Is anything undone?” She turned, presenting her slim back. “Do I need fastening?”

“No.” Thank God, he added silently.

She turned back and smiled.

Her mouth was overwide. He had noticed that before…and felt and tasted every luscious atom of it.

He could not remember seeing her smile before. If he had, he would not have forgotten, for it was a long, sweet curve that coiled about him like an enchantment.

He did not know how to resist its warm promise. He did not know how to fight her and himself simultaneously. He did not know how to drive her away, as he must, when she made him want so desperately to hold her.

It seemed he did not know how to do anything.

The document he’d been asked to sign, the reasons they’d given him for signing, had made him face what he’d tried to ignore. He’d come, intending to scare her off for her own safety—and his peace of mind. Yet he, once capable of making hardened whores tremble, could not stir the smallest anxiety in her, any more than he could rouse his feeble conscience.

Once capable.

Past tense.

Before the headaches. Before the disease had begun its insidious work.

The answer came then, chilling him: the tenuous link between will and action, mind and body, was breaking down already. He was healthy and strong, she’d claimed, but that was only outwardly. His degenerating mind was already sap-ping his will.

He turned away, lest she read his despair in his countenance. He would master it. He needed but a moment. It had caught him unawares, that was all.

“Rawnsley.”

He felt her hand upon his sleeve.

He wanted to shake it off, but he couldn’t, any more than he could shake off his awareness of her. The taste of her lingered in his mouth, and her drugging scent wafted about him. He recalled the soft look in her beautiful eyes and the smile…warm promises. And he was cold, chilled to his soul.

And too selfish, too weak, he thought with bitter resignation, to let her go.

He brought his hand up and covered hers. “I do not want to go back into that curst library and listen to their solemn speeches and read their bloody documents,” he said levelly. “I signed the settlements. You’ll get your hospital. That is enough. I want to be wed. Now.”

She squeezed his arm. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’ve been ready for hours.”

He looked down at her. She smiled up at him.

Warm promises.

He drew her arm through his and led her back to the house. It wanted all his will not to run. The sun was setting, evening closing in with its blessed darkness. Soon, this night, they’d be wed. Soon, they would go up to his room, to the bed. And then…God help them both.

He took her through the door and hurried her down the hall. He saw the library door standing open, the light streaming into the gloomy corridor.

He turned to speak to her—then he caught it, faint but unmistakable, at the periphery of his vision.

Tiny zigzags of light.

He blinked, but they would not wash away. They hovered, sparkling evilly, at the edges of his vision.

He shut his eyes, but he saw them still, winking their deadly warning.

He opened his eyes and they were there, inescapable, inexorable.

No, not yet. Not so soon. He tried to brush them away, though he knew it was futile.

They only signaled back, glittering, remorseless: soon, very soon.

Four

“This is your doing,” Mr. Kneebones raged at Hoskins. “I told you my patient’s fragile health could not withstand any strain. I told you he must be insulated from all sources of nervous agitation. No newspapers. No visitors. You saw what the news about his family did to him: three attacks in one week. Yet you let strangers descend upon him at a time when he was most vulnerable. And now—”

“A man becomes a peer of the realm, he ought to know about it,” Hoskins said. “And attacks or no attacks, it was a relief to him to learn the old gentleman couldn’t trouble him anymore. And as to letting in strangers, I reckon I can tell the difference between a friend and an enemy. Even if I couldn’t, I’d like to see you shut the door in Lady Pembury’s face—and her the grandmother of the only friend my master ever had. Maybe it wasn’t my place to tell her what was wrong with him, but I judged it best to warn her beforehand that he wasn’t as strong as he looked, and his nerves weren’t what they used to be.”

“Which means they should not have been subjected to any source of agitation,” Kneebones snapped.

“With all due respect, sir, you never clapped eyes on him until a few weeks ago,” Hoskins said. “You may be qualified to judge his medical condition, but you don’t know his character or his wishes. I’ve had more than nine months to learn, and I promise you, the last thing he wishes is to be treated like a vaporish female.” He glanced at Gwendolyn. “Meaning no offense, my lady.”

“None taken,” she said. “I’ve never succumbed to vapors in my life.”

The middle-aged veteran smiled.

Kneebones glared at her.

He’d been glowering at her ever since she’d summoned him into the drawing room, after he’d visited his patient. They had not spoken together ten minutes before hostilities broke out. Hoskins, waiting outside in the hall, had hurried in and leapt to her defense, unware she didn’t need defending.

Still, that had not been unproductive. The manservant’s skirmish with the doctor had clarified several matters, and heaven knew Gwendolyn needed as much enlightenment as she could get.

Rawnsley seemed determined to keep her completely in the dark about his illness.

She had noticed something was wrong within minutes of their returning to the house, after the episode in the garden. During the following hours, while Gwendolyn was marshalling everyone into order, she had watched the earl change. By the time of the ceremony, his voice had settled into a monotone…while his movements became painfully slow and careful, as though he were made of glass and might shatter at any moment.

The fingers slipping the wedding ring onto hers had been deathly cold, the nails chalk white.

Only after it was done, though, and they had signed their names as husband and wife, had Rawnsley told her he had a headache and was going to bed.

She’d sent her relatives away, as he’d asked, saying the earl needed absolute quiet.

He had spent his wedding night in bed with his laudanum bottle. He had locked his bedroom door, refusing to let even Hoskins in.

This morning, Gwendolyn had taken up the earl’s breakfast herself. When she tapped at the door and called softly to him, he told her to stop the infernal row and leave him alone.

Since the servants hadn’t seemed unduly alarmed by his behavior, she’d waited patiently until late afternoon before sending for Kneebones.

After the doctor left the room, the patient’s door had been locked again—and Kneebones refused to discuss his condition with her.

Gwendolyn regarded the physician composedly, ignoring his threatening expression. Medical men had been glowering and glaring and fuming at her for years. “I should like to know what dosage of laudanum you have prescribed,” she said. “I cannot get into my husband’s room to determine for myself, and I am most uneasy. It is all too easy for a patient in extreme pain to lose track of how much he’s taken and when he last took it. Laudanum intoxication rarely improves either calculating abilities or memory.”

“I’ll thank you not to tell me my business, madam,” Kneebones said stiffly. “I have discussed the benefits and risks with my patient—for all the good that does him now, after what he’s been subjected to. One shock after another—capped by a hurry-up wedding to a female he doesn’t know from Adam. It was as good as killing him outright. You might as well have taken a hammer to his skull.”

“I have discerned no symptoms of shock,” Gwendolyn said. “What I have observed—”

“Ah, yes, during your lengthy acquaintance with His Lordship,” Kneebones said with a cold glance at Hoskins. “My lady has known him all of what—thirty-six hours, if that?”

Gwendolyn suppressed a sigh. She would get nowhere with him. He was like virtually every other physician—with the blessed exception of Mr. Eversham—she’d ever encountered. How they resented being questioned! And how they loved to be mysterious and all-knowing. Very well. She could play that game, too.

“I noticed that the hallucinations were of very brief duration,” she said.

Kneebones started. He recovered in an instant, his expression wary.

She could have told him she’d been trained to observe, but she said nothing of her background or of the conclusions she’d drawn after noticing the way Rawnsley had angrily blinked, and brushed at the air near his face, as though trying to clear cobwebs. If Kneebones chose to keep her in the dark, he must expect the same treatment.

She gave him the faintest of smiles. “Did His Lordship not tell you, sir? I am a witch. But I must not waste your valuable time. You have other sickbeds to attend, I know—and I must set my cauldron aboil…and look about for a fresh batch of eye of newt.”

Kneebones’s mouth set in a grim line, and without another word, he stalked out.

Gwendolyn met Hoskins’s quiet gaze.

“I don’t know the dosage,” he said. “All I know is what the bottle looks like—and there’s more than one.”

Dorian awoke from a restless, nightmare-plagued sleep to nightmarish pain.

His head pounded relentlessly. His insides churned, raw with bile.

Slowly, carefully, he inched up to a sitting position and reached for the bottle on the nightstand. He put it to his lips.

Empty.

Already? he wondered dully. Had he finished it off in a single night? Or had several nights passed in the oppressive haze of pain and opiates?

It didn’t matter.

He had seen the silvery wraiths again. Today, they’d slowly closed in from the peripheries and shimmered everywhere he looked. He had watched the wedding preparations through sparkling ripples undulating in the air like waves in a ghostly sea.

Then, finally, the silver shards had vanished from his vision and sliced into his skull like white-hot blades.

Now he understood why his mother had claimed the “ghosts” had vicious talons, and why she’d screamed and torn at her hair. She had been trying to rip the wicked claws away.

Even he had trouble reminding himself there were neither ghosts nor claws, that it was all a sick fancy.

He wondered how much longer he would be able to distinguish between sick fancy and reality, how long before he began confusing those about him with ghosts and demons—and attacked them in mindless rage.

But he would not, he told himself. Kneebones had promised that the laudanum would quiet him, quelling the delusions along with the pain.

Dorian edged closer to the nightstand and opened the door. He reached in and found the porcelain cylinder.

He took it onto his lap and pried off the lid.

The narrow bottle, nestled in a woolen cloth, lay within.

The elixir of peace…perhaps eternal.

He took it out and with trembling hands set the cylinder upon the nightstand.

Then he hesitated, but it was not the prospect of eternity that gave him pause. No, he was too shallow and base for that. It was the witch he thought of, and her soft mouth and slimly curved body. And that image was enough to set his mind to fabricating noble reasons for avoiding laudanum’s risks: if he died before the marriage was consummated, it might be annulled, and she would not get her hospital…and it was his duty, besides, to get an heir.

But her hospital and the end of the Camoys would not matter to him when he was dead, Dorian reminded himself. Nor would she. He would be gone, and good riddance, and God forbid he should leave a child behind. With his luck, his offspring would inherit the same defective brain and live—briefly—and die in the same mortifying way.

He unstopped the bottle.

“I should be careful, if I were you,” came a quiet, familiar voice out of the darkness. “You are married to a witch. What if I’ve turned it into a love potion?”

The room was black as Hades. He couldn’t see her—couldn’t focus past the throbbing anyhow—but he could smell her. The oddly exotic scent stole through the thundering sea of pain like ghostly fingers and lifted him up to consciousness.

“It might even be a potion to turn you into a cat,” she said.

He could not hear her approach past the relentless hammering in his head, but he could smell it, the faint scent growing richer, more potent. Jasmine?

Slim, warm fingers closed over his icy ones.

He tried to speak. He moved his lips, but no sound came out. Pain slammed his skull. His stomach lurched. The bottle slipped from his hands.

“Sick,” he gasped. “Christ, I—”

He broke off as something else, cold and round and smooth, pressed into his hands. A basin.

His body shuddered violently. Then all he could do was hold on to the basin, his head bowed, and give himself up to spasm after spasm after spasm, uncontrollable.

Retching. Endlessly. Helplessly.

All the while, he felt her warm hands upon him, holding him. He heard her soft murmurs above him.

“Yes, that’s right. It can’t be helped. It’s a sick headache, I  know. Beastly thing, isn’t it? Hours and hours. Then it won’t go quietly, will it? Instead, it must rip out of you and take your insides with it. I don’t doubt it seems that way, but you shall feel better in a moment. There. You’re done.”

It was not a moment, but an eternity, and Dorian didn’t know whether he was done or dead. His body had stopped the spasmodic heaving, but he couldn’t lift his head.

She caught him before he could sink into the revolting mess in the basin. She raised his head and put a cup to his lips. He smelled mint—and something else. He didn’t know what it was.

“Rinse your mouth,” she commanded quietly.

Too weak to fight, he obeyed. The tangy draught cleansed the foul taste from his mouth.

When he was done, she gently guided him back onto the pillows.

He lay there, exhausted, aware of movement. The basin disappeared, and its stench with it.

In a little while, a cool, wet cloth touched his face. Gentle, quick, efficient—cleansing and cooling him. He knew he should protest—he wasn’t a babe. He couldn’t summon the strength.

Then she was gone again, an everlasting time, and the pain rolled in during her absence. Though it was not so ferocious as before, it was there still, pounding at him.

This time, when the scent returned, light came with it, a single candle. He watched her shadowy form approach. He winced at the light. She moved away toward the fireplace and set the candle on the mantel.

She returned to the bed. “You are still in discomfort, it seems,” she said very softly. “I don’t know whether that’s the original headache or the aftereffects of laudanum.”

He remembered, then, the bottle she’d stolen from him. “Laudanum,” he choked out. “Give me the bottle, witch.”

“Maybe later,” she said. “At present, I have to work a spell. Do you think you can climb into the cauldron unaided, or shall I summon Hoskins to help?”

The witch’s “cauldron” was alleged to be a steaming bath, and the spell appeared to involve her holding an ice bag on his head while she boiled the rest of him.

That, at least, was the sense Dorian made of her explanation.

He had no trouble deciding that the last thing on earth he wanted to do was climb out of his bed and stagger down to the ground-floor bath chamber.

He changed his mind when he learned his servants were prepared to carry him. He couldn’t bear to be carried by anyone, anywhere.

“Your extremities are icy cold,” she said as she handed him a dressing gown. She looked away while he angrily struggled into it. “Above the neck, you are much too hot. Your system is unbalanced, you see. We must correct it.”

Dorian didn’t care if he was unbalanced. On the other hand, he could not bear her seeing him lying helpless and trembling like an infant.

And so he dragged himself from the bed and stumbled across the room and through the door. Rejecting her helping hand, he made his way out of the room and down the stairs.

He found the small, tiled room filled with lavender-scented steam. Candles flickered in the narrow wall niches.

The scented mist, the warmth, the gentle light enveloped him and drew him in. Entranced, he walked to the edge of the sunken bath. Towels had been laid on the bottom and draped over the sides.

His impotent rage dissipated in the sweet warmth and quiet.

He flung off his dressing gown and climbed in, groaning as he slid into the steaming water and the heat stole into his aching muscles.

A moment later, a small pillow slid behind his neck. His eyes flew open.

Mesmerized by the delicious warmth, the inviting water, he had forgotten about the witch…and he was stark, screaming naked.

“All you need to do is soak,” she said. “Lean back on the cushion. I’ll do the rest.”

He couldn’t remember what the rest was and winced when the soft, icy bag settled onto his head.

“I’ll hold it in place,” she said. “You needn’t worry about it slipping off.”

The ice bag was the least of his concerns.

He looked down into the water. The sunken tub was not the deepest one in the world. He could see his masculine possessions all too distinctly.

Though it was too late for modesty, he drew a bit of towel over the place and set his hand over it to keep it from floating up.

He heard a faint sound, suspiciously like a giggle. He refused to look up.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” the witch said. “Admittedly, the others were live babies or adult corpses, but the equipment is essentially the same in all males.”

Something stirred in his sluggish mind. He laid his head back and closed his eyes, trying to collect the elusive bits and pieces. The hospital…definite ideas and…principles. Her relatives’ puzzling obedience. Her lack of fear. The basin in his hands the instant he needed it…the quiet efficiency.

He began to understand, but not altogether. Many women had nursing experience, and yet…

He returned to the last piece of news. He could understand about the babies. Plenty of women saw infants naked—but adult male…corpses?

“How many deathbeds have you attended, Miss Adams?” He kept his eyes closed. It was easier to think without trying to see at the same time. His eyes still hurt. Though the pain was easing, it was still there.

“I am not Miss Adams any longer,” she said. “We are wed now. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

“Ah, yes. It slipped my mind for a moment. Because of the…dead bodies. I am vastly interested in your corpses, Lady Rawnsley.”

“So was I,” she said. “But you will not believe the difficulties I encountered. Admittedly, fresh corpses are not so easy to come by. Still, that is no excuse for medical men to be so selfish about them. How is one to learn, I ask you, if one is not permitted even to witness a dissection?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“It is ridiculous,” she said. “I finally had to resort to challenging one of Mr. Knightly’s students. The condescending coxcomb claimed I would lose my breakfast and swoon and fall on the stone floor and get a severe concussion. I bet him ten pounds I wouldn’t.” She paused. “As it turned out, he was the one who went to pieces.” Her voice held a quiet note of triumph. “After I’d dragged his unconscious body out of the way—I did not wish to step on him by accident—I continued the dissection myself. It was most enlightening. You cannot learn a fraction as much from a living person. You can’t see anything.”

“How frustrating,” he murmured.

“It is. You’d think that proving myself once would be sufficient, but no. It was the one and only time I had the instruments in my hand and a corpse all to myself. All I won was permission to observe, and that must remain a dark secret, lest my family get wind of it. Even with the patients—the living ones—it was no good proving my competence to anybody. As long as Mr. Knightly was in charge, I might only assist, discreetly. He must rule absolutely, and mere females must obey orders, even when they are based upon the most antiquated theories.”

Behind his closed eyes, Dorian saw the answer now, with stunning clarity.

A day earlier, the insight would have had him leaping from the bath and running hell for leather for the nearest available mire.

At present, a part of his mind suggested that fleeing was not an altogether bad idea.

But he was so comfortable, his muscles relaxing in the steaming water, his tormented head pleasantly cool.

And so he said, very mildly, “Small wonder, then, that you should leap at the chance to have a patient of your very own.”

And before very long, a corpse of her very own, he added inwardly. Not that it mattered. If she wished to dissect his remains, he would hardly be in a position to object.

She did not respond immediately. Dorian kept his eyes closed, savoring the scented mist drifting about him. Her scent was there as well, rich and deep, coiling with the lavender. He did not know whether it was the scent or his ailment that made him feel so lightheaded.

“I was not implying that all members of the medical profession are imbeciles,” she said at last. “But I could not trust Abonville to distinguish among them. Bertie would be worse. He’d be sure to send for experts from London and Edinburgh, and he has such a knack for blundering.”

“I understand,” he said. “You came to…save me.”

“From medical bedlam,” she said hastily. “I am not a miracle worker, and I know precious few brain diseases are curable. Not that I know much about yours,” she added with a trace of irritation. “Mr. Kneebones is as obstinately close-mouthed as Mr. Knightly was. I knew it was a waste of breath to argue with him. Words are rarely of any use. I shall have to prove myself, as usual.”

Dorian recalled her brisk, unruffled mode of freeing him from the mire. He recalled the cool steadiness with which she’d met his attempt to frighten her away. He recalled her calm, efficient ministrations of a little while ago, when he’d been so disgustingly sick.

He considered his present comfortable state. He had not felt so tranquil in months. He couldn’t remember, in fact, when he’d last felt so much at peace. Had he ever?

He couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t been angry with himself for his weaknesses and seething with resentment of his grandfather, who, like the doctors she spoke of, insisted on ruling absolutely.

He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head to look up at her. She kept the ice bag in place while her cool green gaze shifted to meet his.

He wondered whether the cool detachment came naturally, or if she’d had to train herself to suppress emotion, in order to survive in a world that didn’t trust or want her. He knew what that was like, and what the training cost.

“The damp does strange things to your hair,” he said gruffly. “All the little curls and corkscrews sprout up every which way, making a fuzzy red cloud. Even in dry air, it seems alive, trying to do what ever it is bent on doing. ‘What on earth is her hair doing?’ the medical men must ask themselves. One can’t be surprised at their failing to attend closely to what you say.”

“They should not allow themselves to be distracted,” she said. “It is unprofessional.”

“As a group, men are not very intelligent,” he said. “Not in a steady way, at least. We have our moments of lucidity, but we are easily distracted.”

He was—oh, so easily.

The room’s steamy fog had settled upon her. A fine dew glistened on her porcelain skin. Damp curls clustered about her ears. He thought of pushing the curls away and tracing the delicate shape with his tongue. He thought of where his mouth and tongue would go if he let them…along the moist flesh of her neck to the hollow of her throat.

His gaze skimmed down to her neckline, then lower, to where the damp fabric clung to the curve of her breasts.

Mine, he thought. And then he could not think about the future. He could scarcely think at all.

“Some men can be distracting,” she said. “At times. You, especially.”

If he had not been so keenly, yearningly aware of her, he would not have caught the faint, unsteady thread in her voice.

“Ah, well, I’m mad.” What he felt might as well be madness. Beneath the concealing corner of the towel, the part of him that never heeded reason stirred from its slumbers.

“This treatment is supposed to have a soporific effect,” she said, frowning as she studied his face.

She did not appear anxious but puzzled, which would have amused him if he had been capable of detached observation. That was impossible.

She sat near his shoulder, at the edge of the sunken tub, her legs curled up under her gown, and his base mind was fixed upon what lay beneath. He brought his hand up out of the water and rested it on the tub’s curved rim, inches from the hem of her gown.

“Treatment?” he said. “I thought this was supposed to be a spell.”

“Yes, well, I must not have added enough eye of newt. It is supposed to induce a pleasant drowsiness.”

“My brain is becoming somnolent.” His fingers touched the ruffled muslin…and closed upon it.

Her frowning attention shifted to his hand. “You have a headache,” she said.

He toyed with the ruffle. “That does not seem terribly important at the moment.”

Though the pain lingered, it no longer mattered. What mattered was his treacherous recollection of what lay under the muslin. He drew it back.

Soft kid slippers…a few inches of prettily turned ankle…and no stockings. “No stockings,” he said, his voice as foggy as his mind. “Where are your stockings, Lady Rawnsley?”

“I took them off before,” she said. “They were frightfully expensive—from Paris—and I hated to risk catching them on a splinter when I climbed in your window.”

He grasped her ankle. “You climbed in the window.” He did not look up from the imprisoned limb.

“To get into your room. I was worried you would take too much laudanum. Not an idle anxiety, as it turns out. The solution in that bottle of yours had not been properly diluted.”

She had said she couldn’t let him die before the ceremony, he recalled. Apparently, she dared not let him die before the marriage was consummated, either.

And he didn’t want to die before then, either, rot his black soul.

“You had to save me,” he said.

“I had to do something. I know nothing about picking locks, and breaking down the door would have made a ghastly row, so I took the window route. Isn’t your hand growing cold again, my lord?”

“No.” He stroked her ankle. “Does it feel cold to you?”

“I couldn’t tell whether it was me or you.” She swallowed. “I am quite…warm.”

He pushed the gown up higher and slid his hand over the perfectly curved limb he’d exposed. She wanted her hospital, he told himself, and she was prepared to pay the price.

And he wanted to trail his mouth over her wickedly lovely legs…up, all the way up to…His gaze shot to her hair, the wild red curls. His mind conjured a picture of what he’d find at the end of the journey, at the juncture of her thighs.

Then his gaze locked with hers, meltingly soft.

Then he was lost, rising from the water and reaching for her, lashing his arm round her narrow waist, drawing her toward him. He felt the air, cool against his back after the water’s warmth, but it was her warmth he wanted.

“You will take a chill,” she gasped. “Let me get you a dry towel.”

“No, come to me,” he said thickly.

He did not wait for her to come but swept her up in his dripping arms and held her tightly for a long, mad moment. Then he sank down with her into the scented cauldron, and as the water closed over them, his mouth found hers, and he sank deeper then, beyond saving…drowning in a sea of warm promises.

This was most unprofessional, Gwendolyn scolded herself as she flung her arms round her husband’s neck.

It was well known that excitement of the passions exacerbated sick headaches.

Unfortunately, nowhere in the medical literature had she encountered a remedy for cases in which the physician’s passions were excited. She did not know what antidote to apply when the patient’s lightest touch triggered severe palpitations of the heart and a shockingly swift rise in temperature to fever point. She did not know what palliative could alleviate the coaxing pressure of a wickedly sensual mouth upon hers, or what elixir could counteract the devil’s brew she tasted when her patient’s tongue stole in to coil with hers.

She was aware of water lapping at her shoulders and her gown billowing up to the surface in the most brazen manner, but she could not retrieve sufficient clinical objectivity to do anything about it.

She was preoccupied with every slippery, naked inch of him, hard and warm under her hands, and she couldn’t keep her hands from moving over his powerful shoulders and the taut, smooth planes of his broad chest. It wasn’t quite enough. She could not resist the need to taste the smooth, water-slick skin. She eased away from his enslaving mouth and traced his wet jaw and neck with her lips while her hands continued to explore his splendid anatomy.

“Oh, the deltoid muscle…and pectoralis major,” she murmured dizzily. “So…beautifully…developed.”

She was aware of the increased urgency and boldness of his touch, and she knew her brazen behavior incited him. But his caresses were inciting her.

She felt the weight of his hands upon her breasts, a warm pressure that made her ache and push into his hand, seeking more. The sensuous mouth upon her neck simmered kisses whose heat bubbled under her skin and made her quiver with impatience. His wicked tongue teased her ear…maddening.

Above the water’s plashing, she heard the low animal sound he made when she shivered uncontrollably and burrowed into him, as though she could crawl into his skin. She wanted to.

She could not get close enough. The water…her clothes…everything between them…obstacles.

“Do something,” she gasped, fumbling with her gown. She tugged at the bodice, but the soaked fabric wouldn’t tear. “Get it off,” she told him. “I can’t bear it.”

She felt his fingers struggling at her back with the tapes. “They’re too wet,” she said feverishly. “You can’t untie them. Rip it.”

“Wait. Calm down.” His voice was thick.

She dragged her hand down to his belly.

He sucked in his breath. “Gwendolyn, for God’s sake—”

“Hurry.”

“Wait.” He closed his mouth over hers and swept her lunatic rage away in an endless, soul-draining kiss.

She clung to him, her mouth locked with his while he swung her into his arms and up, out of the bath and onto the damp towels.

When he broke the drugging kiss at last, she opened her eyes to a burning gold gaze. He knelt over her, straddling her hips. His skin was slick, shimmering in the candlelight. Water streamed from his long, night-black hair.

While she watched, spellbound, he brought his hand to the neckline of her soaked gown. With one easy yank, he tore it to the waist. “Happy now, witch?” he whispered.

“Yes.” She reached for him and drew him down, frantic to feel his skin against hers.

Hot, hasty kisses…over her brow, her nose, cheeks, chin…and more, down over her throat to sizzle over her breasts. The scorching kisses burned the spell away, and the madness returned.

She caught her fingers in his hair to keep him there. She needed more, though she hardly knew what the more was. She felt his mouth close over the taut bud of her breast, and the first light tug shot threads of tingling electricity under her skin, into…somewhere…a world inside her she hadn’t realized was there.

It was wild and dark, a pulsing jungle of sensation. He took her into the darkness, drawing her deeper with his hands, his mouth, his low, ragged voice.

The remnants of her garments fell away, along with the last vestiges of her reason. She was lost in his scent, so potently masculine, and in the sinful taste of him, and in the stunning power of muscle under taut, smooth flesh.

She wanted him to crawl inside her, under her skin. She wanted him to be part of her. Even when his hand settled between her legs, upon the most private of places, it wasn’t enough, and she arched up to his touch for more.

He caressed her in secret ways that made her moan and squirm under his hand, but it was not enough. The tantalizing strokes slipped deeper, inside her. Spasms racked her, hot, delicious…but not enough.

She trembled on a precipice, caught between wild pleasure and an unreasoning, inescapable craving for more, for something else.

“Dear God,” she gasped, writhing like one demented, which she was. “Do it. Please.”

“Soon.” A rough whisper. “You’re not ready. It’s your first—”

“Hurry.” She could feel his shaft pulsing against her thigh. She dug her nails into his arms. “Hurry.”

Cursing, he pulled her fingers away. She could not keep away. She dragged her hands down over his belly, to the place where instinct led her. She found the thick, hot shaft. Immense. Her hand could not close about it. “Oh, my goodness,” she whispered.

“Stop it. Christ, Gwen, don’t rush me. It’ll hurt and you—”

“Oh, Lord. It feels…so strong…and alive.” She hardly knew what she was saying. She stroked the velvety flesh, lost in heated wonder.

She heard a strange, strangled sound above her.

Then he was caressing her intimately again, dragging her back into the frustrating madness. Her hand fell away from him as the furious pleasure swept her to the precipice.

Then it came, one swift thrust—and a stinging sensation that jerked her back to reality.

She gulped in air and blinked. “Good heavens.”

He was enormous. She was not comfortable.

Yet she was not exactly uncomfortable, either. Not altogether.

“I told you it would hurt.”

She heard the ache in his voice. Her fault, she reproached herself. Everyone knew it hurt the first time. She should not have let herself be taken unawares. Now he probably thought he’d done her a permanent injury.

“Only at first,” she said shakily. “That is normal. You mustn’t stop on my account.”

“It’s not going to get much better.”

She looked into his glowing eyes, saw the shadows lurking there. “Then kiss me,” she whispered. “I’ll concentrate on that and ignore the rest.”

She reached up, slid her fingers into his thick, wet mane, and drew him down.

He kissed her fiercely. The hot need she tasted ignited hers. She simmered in the devil’s brew, and the pain and tightness bubbled away into nothingness.

He began to move inside her, slow strokes at first, but soon quickening. She moved with him, her body answering instinctively, gladly. In the intimate beat of desire, passion returned, hotter than before. She was joined with him, and this was what she’d needed: to be one, to take him with her to the edge of the abyss…and beyond…into the last, searing burst of rapture…and then she sank with him, into the sweet darkness of release.

Five

Some time later, enveloped in her husband’s dress- ing gown, Gwendolyn sat tailor-fashion near the foot of his bed.

She had piled a heap of pillows at his back, and he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him—under the bedclothes because she had insisted he keep his feet warm.

The debauch in the bathing room had left them famished. They had raided the larder and sneaked up to his bedroom with a tray of thick sandwiches, which they’d made short work of.

Though the bath, the lovemaking, and the meal had radically improved his mood, he was not altogether tranquil.

Gwendolyn was aware of the glances he stole at her from under his black lashes when he thought she wasn’t looking. She wished she knew what those troubled glances signified. At present, only one aspect of his character was truly clear to her.

Though facing a horrendous death in quicksand, he’d tried to drive her off—because he was afraid she’d fall in.

He had been willing to risk medical bedlam and eventual incarceration in a mad house, rather than subject her to marrying him.

Though informed of the deadly risks of unsupervised laudanum consumption, he had locked himself alone in his room—to spare her witnessing his miseries.

The Earl of Rawnsley, in short, had a protective streak a mile long and three miles deep.

Gwendolyn didn’t think she was overestimating him. She’d had enough experience with her father, brothers, uncles, and cousins to recognize this particular ailment.

The awareness was doing nothing to restore her clinical detachment, which was in dangerous disrepair already.

Just looking at him paralyzed her intellect. When she recalled what that sensuous mouth, those strong, graceful hands, and that long muscled body had done to her, her entire brain, along with her heart and every other organ and muscle she possessed, turned to jelly.

His low voice broke into her bewildered thoughts.

“I don’t think you ought to stay in here,” he said gently.

She looked up from her folded hands. His carefully polite expression made her heart sink.

She could guess why he wanted her out of his sight. He’d probably spent most of the time since they’d left the bathing room devising a courteous way of telling her he’d rather not repeat the experience.

But she’d been rejected countless times before, Gwendolyn reminded herself, and it hadn’t killed her yet.

“I understand,” she said, her voice cool, her face hot. “I know I behaved shockingly. I scarcely know what to think of myself. I have never, ever, in all my life, reacted that way—to anybody.”

A muscle worked in his jaw.

“Not that I’ve had so many beaux,” she hurriedly added. “I am not a flirt, and even if I was, I hadn’t much time for suitors. I didn’t want to make time,” she babbled on as his expression grew tauter. “But girls are obliged to make an appearance in Society, and then of course the men think one is like the others, and one feels obliged to pretend that’s true. And I must admit that I was curious about what it was like to be courted and kissed. But it wasn’t like anything, and not half so interesting as, say, Mr. Culpeper’s Herbal. If it had been that way with you, I’m sure I should have behaved much more decorously downstairs. I should have fastened my mind on a medical treatise and not made a spectacle of myself. But I could not behave properly. I am truly sorry. The last thing I wanted was to make myself disagreeable to you.”

With a sigh, she started to crawl from the bed.

“Gwendolyn.” His voice was choked.

She paused and met his gaze.

“You are not disagreeable to me,” he said tightly. “Not at all. Word of honor.”

She remained where she was, kneeling near the edge of the mattress, trying to read his expression.

“How could you think I was displeased?” he demanded. “I all but ravished you.”

Good grief, how could she be so stupid? He was upset with himself, not her. Because of the mile-long protective streak.

She tried to remember what Genevieve had told her about men—and the first time—but her mind was a jumble. “Oh, no, it was not like that at all,” she assured him. “You were so very gentle—and I did appreciate that, truly I did. I know I should not have acted like a general: ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that.’ ‘Hurry.’ But I could not help myself. Something”—she gestured helplessly—“came over me.”

“The something was your lusting spouse,” he said grimly. “Which I should not have allowed myself to become.”

“But we are wed,” she argued. “It was your right, and it was a pleasure for me and—” Her face burning, she boldly added, “I am glad you lusted, my lord. I should have been very disappointed if you did not because I have wanted you to make me yours since…” She frowned. “Well, I’m not sure when exactly it began, but I know I wanted it after you kissed me.” She crept toward him. “I wish you would not fret about me.”

“This was supposed to be a business arrangement,” he said. Shadows darkened his eyes. “No one would have known if the marriage had not been consummated. Your position was secure enough. I should not have touched you. You have no experience. You do not know how to protect your feelings. Your heart is too soft.”

She sank back on her heels. “I see. You are alarmed that my feelings will become engaged.”

“They are engaged,” he said. “You have just told me as much. Not that I couldn’t see it for myself. I wish you could see the way you look at me.”

Good heavens. Was she so obvious?

But of course she was. She was not like Genevieve or Cousin Jessica. She had no subtlety, Gwendolyn was aware. But she did possess both a sense of humor and common sense, and these came to her rescue.

“Like a lovesick schoolgirl, you mean?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you expect? You are shockingly handsome.”

He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “I have a brain disease. My mind is crumbling to pieces. And in a few months I shall be a rotting corpse!”

“I know that,” she said. “But you are not mad yet, and when you become so, you will not be my first lunatic—any more than you’ll be my first corpse.”

“You didn’t marry the others! You didn’t bed them! Damnation.” He flung back the bedclothes and stalked, splendidly naked, to the window. “I didn’t even want to be your patient,” he said as he gazed out into the darkness. “And now I am your lover. And you are besotted. It is macabre.”

He would not think it macabre if he could see himself as she saw him, standing so tall and strong and beautiful in the candlelight.

“You said yourself that Providence does not grant all its creatures a pretty demise,” she said. “It does not give each of us exactly what we want. It did not make me a man, so that I could become a doctor.”

She left the bed and went to him. “But now I am not at all sorry I’m a woman,” she told him. “You’ve made me very glad of it, and I am practical and selfish enough to want to enjoy the gladness for as long as I can.”

He swung round, his countenance bleak. “Oh, Gwen.”

She understood then that she would not have long. The stark expression, the despair in his voice, told her matters were worse than they appeared.

But that was the future, she told herself.

She laid her hand on his chest. “We have to night,” she said softly.

He’d made her glad she was a woman.

We have to night, she’d said.

Saint Peter himself, backed by a host of martyrs and angels, could not have withstood her. He would have let the heavenly gates slam shut behind him and taken her into his arms and devoted body and soul—eternally damned though it might be—to making her happy.

And so Dorian scooped up his foolishly besotted wife in his arms and carried her to the bed and made love to her again. And he tasted, again, the rapture of being made love to, of being desired and trusted. And later, as he held his sleeping countess in his arms, he lay awake wondering whether he was dead or alive because he could not remember when his heart had felt so sweetly at peace.

Not until the first feeble light of daybreak stole into the room did something like an explanation occur to him.

Never, in all his life, had he ever done anything that was any good to anybody. He’d done no more than fantasize about rescuing his mother from a world where she didn’t belong and taking her to the Continent, where she would no longer have to lie and pretend. When he’d finally got around to visiting her here, he’d missed all the hints she dropped, and gone on his merry way. If he had paid attention instead, and stayed, and helped his father care for her, they might have forestalled his grandfather and the “experts.” Even at the mad house, when it had seemed too late, it needn’t have been, if Dorian had used the clever brain he’d inherited. He should have played on his grandfather’s overweening pride and sense of duty, and worked him round by degrees. Mother had pulled the wool over the old tyrant’s eyes for years. Dorian could have done it, should have done it.

And he should have done it later, when the ax fell, instead of storming out of Rawnsley Hall in a childish tantrum. Then he might have accomplished something. He might have used the earl’s money and influence to good purpose, in scholarly pursuits, for instance, to further knowledge, or perhaps in a political endeavor.

Everyone died, some early, some late. It was nothing to whimper about. But dying with nothing but regret and if onlys was pathetic.

That, Dorian realized, was what had kept him so unsettled for these last months.

Now, though, his soul was quiet.

Because of her.

He nuzzled his wife’s wayward hair. He had made her happy. He had made her forgive the Almighty for making her a woman. He smiled. He knew that was no small achievement.

She wanted to be a doctor. Equally important, she would use the Earl of Rawnsley’s money and influence to good purpose.

Very well, he told her silently. I cannot give you a medical degree, but I will give you what I can.

And that must have been the right conclusion, because his busy mind quieted, and in a little while, he fell asleep.

After breakfast, Dorian took her out to the moors, to the place where his mother had brought him eight years earlier.

He helped Gwendolyn from her horse—treating himself to but one brief kiss in the process—then led her to a boulder at the track’s edge. He took off his coat and laid it on the cold stone and asked her to sit, which she did with a bemused smile.

“Last night you said I was not your first lunatic,” he began.

“Oh, not at all,” she eagerly assured him. “Mr. Eversham, who took over Mr. Knightly’s practice, was particularly interested in neurological maladies, and he let me assist him in several cases. Not all the patients were irrational, certainly. But Miss Ware had six different personalities at last count, and Mr. Bowes was prone to violent dementia, and Mrs. Peebles—may her troubled soul rest in peace—”

“You can tell me the details later,” Dorian interrupted. “I only wanted to make sure I had heard correctly last night. I was not fully attending, I’m sorry to say. I have not listened properly since you came.”

“How can you say such a thing?” she exclaimed. “You are the only man except Mr. Eversham who’s ever taken me seriously. You did not laugh at my hospital idea, and you were not horrified about the dissections.” She hesitated briefly. “You are rather overprotective, true, but that is your nature, and I know it is a very gentlemanly and noble inclination.”

“Overprotective,” he repeated. “Is that how you see it, Gwen?”

She nodded. “You want to shield me from unpleasantness. On the one hand, it is rather lovely to be coddled. Still, on the other, it is just the tiniest bit frustrating.”

He understood how he’d frustrated her. She didn’t like being kept in the dark about his illness. He had treated her like a silly female, as other men had done.

“I have surmised as much.” He clasped his hands behind his back to keep from gathering her up and “overprotecting” her in his arms, as he very much wished to do. “Yours is a medical mind. You do not see matters as we laymen do. Illness is a subject of study to you, and sick people represent a source of knowledge. Their ailments make you no more queasy than a volume of Cicero’s works does me.” He paused, his face heating. “I fancied myself a scholar once, you see. Classics.”

“I know.” Her green gaze was soft with admiration. “You took a first, Bertie says.”

“Yes, I am not merely a pretty fellow,” he said with a short laugh. “I have—had—a brain.” Embarrassed, he looked away, toward the moors. “I also had plans once, as you do. But they were not…well thought out, and it all ended in…rather a mess.”

His throat tightened.

He told himself it was ridiculous to feel uneasy. He had prepared himself to tell her everything. He knew it was right. She needed to learn the facts—all of them—in order to make intelligent decisions about her future. At present, her attachment to him was probably little more than a new bride’s infatuation, a response to the physical passion they’d shared. If, after he enlightened her about his past and what the future held in store, she chose to leave, she’d swiftly recover her equilibrium. If she chose to remain, she would do it with her eyes open at least, prepared for the worst. To show respect for her mind and character, as well as belief in her goals, he must give her the choice, and accept her decision, and live—and die—with the consequences.

“Dorian?”

He closed his eyes. How sweetly his name fell from her lips. He would remember that, too, no matter what happened—or he would remember, at least, for as long as his brain functioned.

He turned back to her, smiling as he shoved his wind-blown hair from his face.

“I know you want to hear all the fascinating details of my illness,” he said. “I was only trying to decide where to begin.”

She sat up straighter and her soft, adoring expression transformed into the steady green regard that had so intrigued him when they first met. “Thank you, my dear,” she said, her tone thoroughly professional now. “If you don’t mind, I should like you to begin with your mother.”

After dinner that evening, Gwendolyn sat at a table in the library, making a list of medical texts to be sent from home. Dorian sat by the fire, perusing a volume of poetry.

She knew it had not been easy for him to talk about his past, but she was sure it had done him good. He kept too much bottled up inside him, Gwendolyn thought as her gaze strayed back to him. When people did that, matters tended to get exaggerated out of proportion, and his ignorance of medical science only made it worse.

The visual chimera he’d described, for instance, were physiological phenomena common to a number of neurological ailments, not ghastly aberrations, as he thought. Furthermore, Dorian had not quite comprehended his mother’s case or the difficulties of managing lunatics. Nor had he realized that the doctors often had no way of knowing for certain until after death that the brain was physically damaged. Still, she was not sure Mr. Borson had handled the case altogether wisely.

Dorian looked up and caught her staring at him.

“You’re wearing your medical frown,” he said. “Am I foaming at the mouth, by any chance, without realizing?”

“I was thinking about your mother,” she said. “Her hair, for instance. I’m not sure cutting it was the only option.”

His face stiffened, but only for a moment. “I’m not sure what else they could have done,” he said slowly. “She was tearing it out in bloody clumps, according to my father and uncle. She did not realize it was her own hair, I think. She must have believed it was the talons. The imaginary claws of the imaginary Furies.”

Gwendolyn left her chair and went to him and stroked his hair back from his face.

He smiled up at her. “I give you leave to cut my hair, Gwen. I should have done it weeks ago—or at least for my wedding.”

“But that is the point,” she said. “I don’t want to cut your hair.”

“I don’t wear it this way because of some mad whim you must indulge,” he said. “I had practical reasons, which are no longer relevant.”

“I thought you did it to spite your grandfather,” she said. “If he had been my grandfather, I am sure I would have done something to vex him.” She considered briefly. “Trousers. I should have worn trousers.”

He laughed. “Ah, no, I was not so bold as that. When I went to London, I was concerned that someone might recognize me and tell him where I was. Then he would punish my landlady and my employers for giving aid and comfort—such as it was—to the enemy.”

He’d told her about his time in London, slaving night and day. Working on the docks explained his muscles, which had puzzled her very much. One rarely saw that sort of upper body development among the nobility, though it was common enough among laborers and pugilists.

“Looking like an eccentric—and possibly dangerous—recluse keeps the curious at bay,” he went on. “It discourages them from prying into one’s personal affairs. Such concerns obviously applied here in Dartmoor, at least while my grandfather was alive.”

“Well, I’m glad you were impractical and didn’t cut your hair for the wedding,” she said. “It suits your exotic features. You don’t look very English. Not in the ordinary way, at any rate.” She paused, struck by an idea.

She stood back to consider him…and grinned.

He grasped her hand and drew her toward him, and tumbled her onto his lap.

“You had better not be laughing at me, Doctor Gwendolyn,” he said sternly. “We madmen don’t take kindly to that.”

“I was thinking of Cousin Jessica and her husband,” Gwendolyn said. “Dain is not ordinary-looking either. She and I seem to have similar taste in men.”

“Indeed. She likes monsters and you like lunatics.”

“I like you,” she said, snuggling against him.

“How can you help liking me?” he said. “I spent hours yesterday talking of little but medical symptoms and insane asylums. And you listened as though it were poetry and all but swooned at my feet. It is too bad I haven’t any medical treatises about. I’m sure I need read but a paragraph or two, and you will become ravenous with lust and begin tearing off my clothes.”

All he had to do was stand there—sit there—to make her ravenous with lust, she thought. She drew back. “Would you like that?”

“Your tearing off my clothes? Of course I’d like it.” He bent his head and whispered in her ear, “I am mentally unbalanced, recollect.”

She glanced toward the door. “What if Hoskins comes in?”

Dorian slid her hand into the opening of his shirt. “We’ll tell him it’s a medical treatment,” he said.

She turned back to him. Behind the laughter glinting in his eyes, desire smoldered, fierce and hot.

One day, too soon, the fierceness and heat would turn dangerous—deadly, perhaps.

But she would deal with that day when it came, Gwendolyn told herself. In the meantime, she was happy to burn in his strong arms.

She lifted his hand to her breast. “Touch me,” she whispered. “Make me mad, too, Dorian.”

He had an attack the next day.

They had just finished breakfast when she saw him blink impatiently and brush at the air near his face.

He caught himself doing it and laughed. “I know it does no good,” he said. “A reflex, I suppose.”

Gwendolyn left her chair and went to him. “If you go to bed now and I give you a dose of laudanum, you’ll scarcely notice when the headache starts.”

He rose, and went upstairs with her, his expression preoccupied. She helped him undress, and noticed that his vision was not so impaired that he couldn’t find her breasts. He fondled them while she wrestled with his neckcloth.

“You are remarkably good-humored,” she said when she’d finally got him under the bedclothes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect my lord only wished to lure me into his bedchamber.”

“I wish it were a trick,” he said, blinking up at her. “But there the damned things are, winking and blinking at me. And you were right, Gwen. They are not like ghosts, after all. You described it better. ‘Like colliding with a lamppost,’ you said. ‘First you see stars, then the pain hits.’ I should like to know what it was that persuaded my brain I’d suffered a blow to the head.”

She knew, all too well.

I told you he must be insulated from all sources of nervous agitation, Kneebones had said.

He was a real doctor, with decades of experience. He understood the malady, had studied Dorian’s mother for months.

You saw what the news about his family did to him: three attacks in one week.

She recalled yesterday’s conversation, and her conscience stabbed.

“I can see what it was,” she said tightly. “Yesterday, I obliged you to relive the most painful experiences of your life. And I was not content with the general picture, was I? I pressed you for details, even about the post-mortem report on your mother. I should have realized this was too much strain for you to bear all at once. I cannot believe I did not think of that. I do wonder where I misplaced my wits.”

She started to move away, to fetch the laudanum bottle, but he grabbed her hand. “I wonder where you’ve put them now,” he said. “You’ve got it all backwards, Gwen. Our talk yesterday did me nothing but good. You eased my mind on a hundred different counts.”

He tugged her hand. “Sit.”

“I need to get your laudanum,” she said.

“I don’t want it,” he said. “Not unless I become unmanageable. That’s the only reason I took it before. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself. But I can trust you. I’m not your first lunatic. You’ll know when I need to be stupefied.”

“I also know the pain is dreadful,” she said. “I cannot let you lie there and endure it. I must do something, Dorian.”

He shut his eyes then, and his face set.

“It’s started, hasn’t it?” It was a struggle to keep her voice low and even.

“I don’t want to be stupefied,” he said levelly. “I want my mind clear. If I must be incapacitated physically, I should like to use the opportunity to think, while I still can.”

Gwendolyn firmly stifled her screaming conscience. Her guilt would not help him.

She had come with low expectations, she reminded herself. She had hoped to learn while ameliorating, insofar as possible, his suffering. She had never had any illusions about curing what medical science scarcely understood, let alone knew how to treat.

She had not expected to fall in love with him, almost instantly. Still, that changed only her emotions, and she would simply have to live with them. She would not, however, let them rule, and be tempted to pray for a miracle, when what she ought to be doing was listening to him and ascertaining what he needed and how best to provide it.

“You want to think,” she said, frowning.

“Yes. About my mother and what you said about her. About my grandfather. The experts. The asylum.” He pressed a thumb to his temple. “I do not believe I’ve burst a blood vessel, but I distinctly see my life passing before me.” Smiling crookedly, he added, “And it is beginning to make sense.”

She felt a surge of alarm, which she ruthlessly suppressed. “Very well,” she said calmly. “No soporifics. We shall try a stimulant instead.”

Gwendolyn gave him coffee. Very strong coffee and a good deal of it.

Two hours and countless cups later, Dorian was fully recovered and his wife was staring at him as though he’d just risen from the dead. She stood by the fire, her hands folded in front of her, her expression a comical mixture of worry and bewilderment while she watched him yank on his clothes.

“I begin to suspect you believed I had burst a blood vessel,” he said as he fastened his trouser buttons. “Or was about to.”

The comical expression vanished, succeeded by the familiar steady green regard. “I do not know what to think,” she said. “Frankly, I am confounded. Two hours, from start to finish. This makes no medical sense at all.”

“I told you I distinctly felt the pressure ease after the fourth cup,” he said. “As though my head were being released from a vise. Perhaps the coffee washed the pressure through my system and”—he grinned—“into the chamber-pot.”

“It does have diuretic qualities,” she said.

“Obviously.”

“But you should not respond in this way.” Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps I misinterpreted your account of the autopsy report, though I do not see how. Your mother’s was hardly an unusual case.”

“I should like to know what’s troubling you,” he said. “Have I been babbling incoherently without realizing it? Am I manifesting signs of mania? Is the extraordinary sense of well-being a danger signal? Because if I am at death’s door, Gwendolyn, I should appreciate being informed.”

She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. I had thought the dilating blood vessels and increased blood supply—possibly augmented by leakage—triggered the aura and pain. But for the pain to stop, the vessels must contract again and diminish blood flow—and your cells and tissue are supposed to be too weak and damaged to do it so quickly and thoroughly.”

He recalled what she’d told him yesterday about brain function. “I see,” he said. “You fear that something has cut off blood supply too abruptly, perhaps in a dangerous and abnormal fashion—and this is a temporary and illusory surcease.”

“I cannot say.” Her voice was the slightest bit unsteady.

Perhaps he’d fall down dead in the next minute, Dorian thought. That did not seem possible. He had never felt more alive. Nonetheless, he wasn’t going to take any chances.

He went to her and gathered her in his arms and kissed her, long and thoroughly, until she melted against him. He went on kissing her, then caressing her, and soon, carrying her to the bed.

That wasn’t what he’d intended. He’d only wanted to make sure she understood how he felt about her.

But there was no stopping, once they’d begun. In a little while, the garments he’d so recently donned lay strewn about the floor, along with hers, and he was lost, drowning inside her, in the hot sea of desire.

And later, when they lay together, limbs tangled, he found his heart was still beating and his brain was still working, and so he told her what she’d done for him.

Yesterday, he’d told her of his debauched past, expecting shock and disgust. Instead, she’d impatiently dismissed his whoring and drinking as normal male behavior.

He’d told her about his mother, the pitiable and monstrous creature she’d become, and Gwendolyn had not turned a hair. “It’s like consumption,” she’d said, after reducing the horrors to a logical series of physiological events. “There is no saying that her infidelities and secrets made it worse or triggered the breakdown. Her marriage was unsatisfactory. For all we know, the romantic intrigues may have reduced the emotional strain and delayed the inevitable, instead of hastening it.”

If Dorian had stayed with his mother, he might have added to her agitation, Gwendolyn had theorized, because Aminta had a stronger emotional bond with him than with his father.

Moreover, the conditions at the mad house must be put into perspective, Gwendolyn had told him. The moral faculties were often destroyed in such cases. Patients might appear calm and rational without having any more awareness or control over their thoughts and behavior than if they had been marionettes, with the damaged brain cells pulling the strings. And aware or not, patients often forgot what they were angry or sad about, just as they forgot basic hygiene, and even who they were or who they’d imagined they were minutes before.

Then he’d realized that his mother might not have endured continuous humiliation and pain, because she’d been living for the most part in a world of her own, where little could reach her.

“You have truly eased my mind,” Dorian told his wife now. “Even my grandfather does not seem so monstrous. Pitiable, actually, in his ignorance, his fear of what he didn’t understand, and his dependence on ‘experts.’ But you are not like him or his precious experts. You have a knack for making the incomprehensible make sense. You’ve reduced it to manageable proportions. Even this last attack seemed like little more than a damned nuisance.”

She lifted herself onto one elbow and studied his face. “Perhaps, because you became less agitated, your brain did not have to work so hard,” she said. “You said you needed to think, and it appears your reflections were positive. It’s possible that stimulating such thought, rather than stupefying it, was the more beneficial approach.”

“Lovemaking instills in me any number of positive feelings,” he said. “Perhaps we must regard that as a beneficial treatment as well.”

She arched one eyebrow. “I recall nothing in the medical literature recommending coitus as a course of treatment.”

He slid his fingers into her wayward hair and drew her down to him. “Maybe you haven’t read enough books.”

Six

Three weeks later, Dorian stood in the doorway of his wife’s sitting room, watching her frown over a pamphlet.

Her books had arrived a fortnight ago, and he and Hoskins had helped her convert the sitting room into a study. The medical tomes stood in neat rows in a bookcase.

Her desk was not so neat. Pamphlets, notebooks, and sheets of foolscap lay in haphazard heaps.

Dorian leaned against the door frame and folded his arms and studied his preoccupied wife.

He knew what she was looking for. Not a cure, because there wasn’t any, but clues to his “positive response to treatment.” Though she would never admit it, Dorian knew she had hopes of prolonging his sanity, if not his life.

He had every reason to cooperate. He would be glad of an extra month, even an extra day. Yet her dogged search made his heart ache for her. She was not “practical and selfish,” as she’d claimed. She cared, deeply, about her patients. She had even cared about Mr. Bowes, whose dementia made Dorian’s mother’s fits seem like mere sulks.

But at present it was not simply a matter of caring. Dorian feared Gwendolyn’s dedication was crossing the line, from a quest for intellectual enlightenment to obsession. Last night she’d muttered in her sleep about “idiopathic inconstancy” and “lesions” and “prodromal symptoms.”

He was strongly tempted to send the books back and order her to cease and desist before she developed a brain fever. Yet he couldn’t deprive her of what he knew was the learning opportunity of a lifetime, or show a lack of respect for her maturity, intellect, and competence.

Fortunately, he’d been able to devise something like a solution because his mind was still functioning adequately, despite two more attacks. The last, a week ago, had continued for twenty-four hours, until he’d made her dose him with ipecac, to make him vomit. After that, he’d slept like the dead for another half a day.

Yet he’d recovered with the same sense of well-being and clarity of mind he’d experienced the two previous times. He was sure it was because she’d exorcised the demons of fear, shame, and ignorance, thus reducing emotional pressure on his damaged brain. He knew the reprieve was temporary, and he wasn’t going to waste it. He had no future, but she did, and he’d spent the last week looking into hers.

“Is this a bad time to interrupt?” he asked.

Her head went up and her preoccupied gloom vanished, and the sun came out in the endless smile that could still make his heart turn over in his breast.

“There is never a bad time for you,” she said. “You are the most welcome interruption in the world.”

Dorian came away from the door frame, crossed to her desk, and perched on the edge. His gaze settled upon the pamphlet she’d put down when he approached: “An Account of Acute Idiopathic Mania as Manifested…”

“It is one of Mr. Eversham’s studies,” she said. “But your behavior does not fit his model.”

He took it up and scanned the pages. “I wonder how you make anything of this gibberish.” He set down the pamphlet and took up a narrow volume. “This is still worse. I should go howling mad trying to read the first sentence—and it’s only three-quarters of a page long.”

“They are doctors, not writers,” said Gwendolyn. “You ought to see their penmanship. It is a wonder the printers are not all in Bedlam by now.”

“Yours is nothing to boast of,” he said with a meaningful glance at the untidy pile of foolscap covered with her even more untidy scrawl.

She wrinkled her nose. “Yes, my handwriting is horrid. Not at all like yours. I’m sure you were the finest copyist those London solicitors ever had.”

“I should be happy to copy your notes legibly,” he said. “In fact, I…” He trailed off, his mind snagging on a recollection. Something she’d said weeks ago. Something “misinterpreted.”

Catching her worried look, he shrugged. “I’m all right. My mind wandered, that’s all. I had interrupted for a specific reason, and the medical jargon and your ghastly handwriting distracted me.” He ruffled her hair. “I came to ask if you’d like to visit Athcourt with me.”

“Athcourt?” she said blankly.

“I wrote to Dain a few days ago,” he explained. “I need advice on some business matters. He’s now a member of the family, his place is but a few miles southeast of here, and he’s an excellent manager, from all one has heard.”

“Athcourt is reputed to be one of the most prosperous, well-run properties in the kingdom,” Gwendolyn said, nodding. “I’m sure his business judgment is sound.”

“At any rate, he’s made me feel welcome.” Dorian withdrew a letter from his pocket and gave it to her.

As she perused it, her mouth began to twitch. “The man is incorrigibly wicked. And what is this?” She read aloud, “‘If that nitwit Trent is still loitering about, you might as well bring him, too, since mayhem can only result if he’s left to his own devices. Still, you know what will be expected of you in that case.’” She looked up. “It would appear you are better acquainted than I had guessed.”

Dorian laughed. “Dain was still at Eton when Bertie first came,” he explained. “About once a fortnight, Bertie would fall down the stairs or trip over something or otherwise contrive to stumble into His Lordship’s path. Fortunately, I was on the spot the first time and hustled Bertie away before Dain could dispose of him by more violent means. After that, whenever your cousin strayed into the Satanic presence, His Lordship would summon me. ‘Camoys,’ he would say, as cool as you please. ‘It’s back. Make it go away.’ And so I would make Bertie disappear.”

“I can see Dain doing it. And you, too.” She patted his arm. “It is your protective streak.”

“It was my instinct for self-preservation,” Dorian indignantly informed her. “I was scarcely twelve, and Dain, even at sixteen, was as big as a house. He had but to set one huge hand on my head to squash me like a bug.” He grinned. “Still, I admired him tremendously. I should have given anything to get away with what he did.”

She laughed, a delicious sound. “So should I,” she said. “It was not hard to understand why Jessica was captivated with him. Or why she was so vexed about it.”

“I thought you’d enjoy visiting with her while Dain and I talk business,” he said.

“I should, very much.” She gave the letter back. “I am glad you thought of Dain as a business advisor. A better choice than Abonville. The duc is a foreigner and of another generation.”

“I knew you had reservations about him.”

“He’s a wonderful man, but he can be too paternal.”

Dorian hesitated. He did not want to upset her; on the other hand, they could not spend the remaining time avoiding all mention of what lay ahead. “I trust you won’t mind, then, if I end by making Dain my guardian instead,” he said quietly.

There was only the briefest pause before she spoke. “If I encountered difficulties, and you were unable to assist me, there’s no one I’d rather have on my side,” she said. She met his gaze, her own clear and steady.

He could guess what the composure and steadiness cost her, and it distressed him. Nevertheless, they couldn’t pretend they would have forever when they didn’t.

He bent and lightly kissed her. “That’s how I feel,” he said. He drew back and grinned. “If we must choose an ally, it makes sense to pick the biggest one we can find.”

A few days later, they went to Athcourt, intending to stay for two days. They wound up staying for a week.

Dain turned out to be knowledgeable—and obstinately opinionated—about a vast array of topics, and the two men were soon quarreling happily, like old friends or brothers. They raced each other over Athcourt’s vast park and into the surrounding moorland. They fenced and practiced pistol shooting. One day, Dain undertook to teach Dorian some of the finer points of pugilism, and they knocked each other about in a corner of the stable yard, while their wives cheered them on.

Dain’s bastard son lived at Athcourt as well. He was a wicked piece of mischief, eight years old, whom Dain proudly referred to as the Demon Seed.

Little Dominick was wary of Dorian at first, but within two days, he was inviting the Earl of Rawnsley to visit his tree house. This, Dorian learned, was a signal honor. Until now, only the boy’s adored papa had been privy to the refuge’s location and initiated into its mysteries.

And so, Dorian came away from Athcourt with scraped knees and elbows, Dain’s assurances that Gwendolyn’s affairs would be properly looked after…and a mad yearning for a child.

Dorian told himself it was ridiculous to long for a child he would never see born and ruthlessly focused his energies on realizing Gwendolyn’s hospital dream.

Dain had agreed with him that her influential title and wealth would not fully compensate for her being a female, and a young one at that. She would be contending with scores of men, few of whom held an enlightened view of feminine capabilities.

“I can deal with the men,” Dain had said, “but I should want precise instructions. I know nothing about hospitals, even the everyday variety, and it seems that your lady has something novel in mind.”

“I’m not sure she’ll be as precise as one would wish, when the time comes,” Dorian had answered. “Already I detect signs of emotional strain. I had thought that if I started the project now, it would make a healthy distraction. Moreover, if I am directly involved in its founding, others will take it more seriously. If the Earl of Rawnsley says the building must be a perfect hexagon, for instance, another fellow won’t pipe up that it must be a perfect cube and start a row with someone who says it must be an octagon, according to the best authorities. Instead, they will all murmur, ‘Yes, my lord. A hexagon. Certainly,’ and write down my every word with the greatest care, as though it came direct from the throne of Heaven.”

Dain had chuckled, but something in his dark gaze made Dorian edgy. “Am I overly optimistic?” he’d asked. “If you have doubts of my capabilities, Dain, I wish you—”

“I was only wondering why the devil you don’t cut your hair,” Dain had said. “While I doubt your coiffure would affect your credibility—you’re a Camoys, after all—I should think it was a damned nuisance to look after—as though there won’t be enough in organizing this project.”

Dorian had smiled sheepishly. “My wife likes it.”

“And you are besotted, poor fool.” Dain had given him a commiserating look, then laughed. “Well, then, I collect this is as rational as you’re ever going to be. Make the most of it, I say.”

Dorian was determined to make the most of it.

Accordingly, on the second night of their return home, he explained to Gwendolyn his idea about getting an early start on her hospital.

She told him it was an excellent idea and she seemed very enthusiastic, but Dorian could not shake off the feeling that her mind was elsewhere: on his accursed ailment and its provoking mysteries. He was strongly tempted to lecture her. He suppressed the urge and made love to her instead.

The following afternoon, they settled down in the library to discuss the matter in detail, and she was the same. She talked enthusiastically of her ideas, and obligingly sketched out a rough plan for the building itself, and described the functions of different areas. All the same, Dorian sensed that her mind was not fully engaged.

In the following days, she went on working cheerfully with him, transforming her dreams into orderly facts and specifications, but the note of abstraction remained.

Dorian bore it patiently. He had learned from her that it was often possible to combine several treatments to combat an ailment’s array of symptoms. One remedy for sick headaches, for instance, combined laudanum with ipecac—the former to dull the pain and the latter to relieve the nausea by inducing vomiting.

He had, likewise, devised a combination treatment for her. One of the “medications” arrived a week after their return from Athcourt.

Dorian slipped into her study and left the packet on her desk while she was consulting with the cook about the following day’s menu. Then he left the house, to work on the next part of the remedy.

An hour later, Gwendolyn stood in the study doorway, gazing blankly at Hoskins.

“He’s gone to Okehampton,” the manservant said for the second time. “He had an appointment. Something to do with the hospital, he said.”

“Oh. Oh, yes. With Mr. Dobbin.” Gwendolyn turned away. “He reminded me at breakfast. So silly of me to forget. My wits must be wandering. Thank you, Hoskins.”

She stood in the doorway, staring at the thick letter on her desk while Hoskins’s footsteps faded away.

Then she shut the door and returned to her desk and took up the letter again with trembling hands.

It was from Mr. Borson, the physician in whose care Aminta Camoys had been placed. It was in response to an inquiry from Dorian. He had written to Borson a fortnight ago, it turned out, without telling her.

Dorian had attached a note to Borson’s letter: “Here it is, Doctor Gwendolyn—with all the deliciously grisly details. I shall expect to find you writhing with uncontrollable lust by the time I return.”

Gwendolyn read the note again, for the tenth time, and this time she could not control herself. She covered her face with her hands and wept, not because of Borson’s reply, but because of what it had cost her husband to obtain it, to write and seek a favor from the man he viewed as his mother’s torturer, if not her murderer.

Dorian had done it for Gwendolyn’s sake, and that was what made her heart ache, unbearably, so that she wept, like the wife she was instead of the doctor she wanted to be.

Or had thought she wanted to be.

Or imagined she was capable of being.

She was not behaving very capably now, she scolded herself.

She wiped away her tears and told herself there would be plenty of time to cry later. A lifetime, if she chose to devote it to grief, and throw away the gifts God had given her, and all that her husband was trying to give her. He knew she was trying to learn, and he was trying to help her in every way he could.

She had no business weeping about it. She knew it made Dorian happy to help her. Furthermore, Borson’s letter contained exceedingly valuable information. She had seen that in the first quick perusal. He had even enclosed a copy of the post-mortem report, which would solve several nagging riddles…once she could get her mind to focus properly. And stay focused, which was not easy lately.

She kept forgetting things and missing things. She had spent a full week with Jessica before realizing her cousin was breeding. Gwendolyn had not been able to put the simplest symptoms together: physical evidence any medical student would have discerned, not to mention the uncharacteristic moodiness. Twice, while Gwendolyn had been there, Jessica—who never wept—had burst into tears for no apparent reason, and several times she had lost her temper over the most trivial matters.

Jessica had said nothing about it, and Gwendolyn had tactfully refrained from questioning her. After all, it was early days yet, and the first trimester was a notoriously uncertain…period.

Trimester…twelve weeks…symptoms…

Gwendolyn stared blindly at the autopsy report.

She had been wed for more than six weeks.

Her last menses had been two weeks before the wedding.

The report dropped from her nerveless fingers, and her gaze dropped to her belly.

“Oh, my goodness,” she whispered.

Dorian sat in a private parlor of Okehampton’s Golden Hart Inn, not with the fictional Mr. Dobbin, but with Bertie Trent, whose square face was twisted into a painful grimace.

This was because Bertie was trying to think.

“Well, Eversham do need money,” Bertie said finally. “But he ain’t the sort that gets on with other fellows so well, which if he was, he wouldn’t be stuck in Chippenham, which even Gwen said, but he got on fine with her, and Aunt Claire liked him well enough, seeing as how he was the only one knew what to make of her spells.”

“He doesn’t need to get on with the other fellows,” Dorian said. “He only needs to tell us what to do. Dain and I agree that we need an experienced physician on the hospital planning committee.”

He also needed someone who could talk to Gwendolyn in her own language and make her listen and face facts. And take better care of herself.

But all that was explained in Dorian’s letter. The thick packet lay on the table between him and Bertie, who was eyeing it dubiously, still reluctant for some reason to take it up.

“It’s hospital information,” Dorian said. This was partly true, although the bulk of the contents consisted of his copies of Borson’s materials—so that Eversham would arrive armed with facts for his intellectual joust with Gwendolyn. “I hope he finds the proposal irresistible. If he doesn’t, I am counting on you to use your unique powers of persuasion. As you did with Borson.”

As soon as Dorian had realized he must write to Borson, he’d realized he’d need more than a letter. Physicians could be balky, and they did like to keep secrets, Gwendolyn had said. Also, they were often too busy with patients to attend to correspondence. Unwilling to risk a wait that could extend to months, Dorian had decided to send for Bertie.

What Trent lacked in intelligence he made up for in loyalty and stubbornness. He was loyal to Dorian, and Bertie would stubbornly persist until Borson gave him what he came for. Which Borson had done, when he realized there was no other way to get rid of him.

Dorian trusted that Bertie’s loyalty and obstinacy would serve equally well with Eversham. Gwendolyn’s hero had not sounded like the sort of man who would come running at the snap of a nobleman’s fingers.

“Still, if it doesn’t work, we can try something else,” Dorian added, because Bertie was still frowning. “I realize this will be more difficult than dealing with Borson. We’re asking Eversham to give up his practice and pick up and leave, which is no small matter. Even if he agrees, I realize it will take some time to settle his affairs. But you will make sure he understands I’ll cover all expenses and use my influence as needed. Make sure he realizes I’m a man of my word, Bertie—that this is no madman’s whim. If he has doubts, he can write to Dain.”

Bertie blinked very hard. “You ain’t mad, Cat. No more ’n I am—and looking well, too, better than before. She’s done you good, hasn’t she?”

“Of course I’m not mad,” Dorian said. “And it’s all thanks to Gwendolyn. She is wonderful and I am…exceedingly happy,” he added with a smile. I want her to be happy, too, he added silently.

The clouds vanished from Bertie’s expression and a light shone in his pale blue eyes. “I knew you’d like her, Cat. I knew she’d do you good.”

Dorian understood what the light signified and had no trouble guessing what Bertie wanted to believe.

But Bertie had not read Borson’s account or the postmortem report, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have grasped even the fraction Dorian had comprehended. And that was far more than he’d done the first time, seven years ago, long before Gwendolyn had explained about the brain’s unique self-sufficiency, which made it so susceptible to self-destruction.

Bertie wouldn’t understand that the destruction couldn’t be repaired or halted, even by Gwendolyn. He didn’t know that, once begun, the decay continued relentlessly…the way it had at Rawnsley Hall, quietly moldering under the surface until the roof caved in.

Bertie believed that “good” equaled “cured,” and Dorian hadn’t the heart to explain the difference.

“I like her immensely, Bertie,” he said. “And she has done me a world of good.”

Gwendolyn wanted to build the hospital in Dartmoor.

Which meant she intended to stay here, permanently.

She stood at the library window, looking out, and Dorian gazed at her in despair.

He stood at the table, where he’d laid out several rough architectural sketches of the hospital, moments before pressing her for an answer to the question he’d asked every day for the past five days.

He had not wanted to press her.

Two weeks had passed since his clandestine meeting with Bertie, and Dorian had received no word from him. Meanwhile Gwendolyn was becoming ill. Her countenance alternated between weary pallor and a hectic flush, and she was becoming short-tempered, doubtless because she was sleeping poorly. Last night she’d bolted up from the pillows babbling about “extravavasation” of something or other.

“Gwendolyn, you can’t live here,” he said, his voice calm, his mind churning with troubling images of her future.

“I like it here,” she said. “From the moment I came, it felt like homecoming.”

“This is not a healthy climate,” he said. “Even in the valleys, the damp settles in and—”

“Poor people cannot afford to transport sick relatives to coastal resorts or travel back and forth to visit them.” She turned around. “The moor folk need a modern hospital. And damp is scarcely an issue. Bath is damp and cold, and people in all stages of illness and decrepitude live there while taking the waters.”

“This is not a healthy place for you,” he said tightly. “You’ve been here only two months and—” He thrust his hand through his hair. Say it, he commanded himself. It was time to stop pretending. She was ill, and he was making her so, and it was time to confront that, with or without Eversham.

The fellow should have been here by now, curse him, Dorian thought. Eversham would know what to do, what to say. He was an experienced, allegedly brilliant physician. He would solve the exasperating riddle for her, and make her face facts.

“You are not well,” Dorian said. “You don’t eat properly or sleep properly and you are tired and—and unreasonable. You sulked for two hours last night because dinner was ‘boring,’ you said.”

“She was supposed to use the spices,” Gwendolyn said stiffly. Her hands fisted at her sides. “I sent to London for them, and explained to Cook—about phlegm and congestion and reducing the pressure from excess fluid—and she went ahead and made…pap.”

Dorian sighed. He had talked to Hoskins, who’d talked to Cook, who’d said the pungent spices would give Her Ladyship indigestion, which was what kept her awake nights. Everyone knew they “raised the blood,” Cook had said.

“Cook is worried about you,” he said. “We are all worried about you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, this is lovely. I am on my way to a medical breakthrough, and no one will cooperate—because they have taken it into their heads to worry.” She marched to the table. “If I were a man—accepted as a scientist—I would merely be ‘preoccupied’ with my work. But because I am a woman, I am taking a fit of the vapors, and my blood must be lowered. Lowered.” She struck the table with her fist. “Of all the antiquated, medieval notions. It’s a wonder I can think at all, with so much nonsense and anxiety clouding the atmosphere about me. As though it were not enough trouble concentrating, in this cond—” She broke off, scowled at the drawings, and moved away from the table toward the door.

“I need some fresh air,” she said.

But Dorian got there before she did, and blocked the way. “Gwen, it’s raining,” he said. “And you…” The rest of the sentence faded as he took in her appearance. Her face was flushed and her bosom was rising and falling rapidly, as though she’d been running for miles, and…He frowned. “Your frock has shrunk.”

She looked down at herself.

“It’s a wonder you can breathe,” he said. “It’s a wonder the seams of your bodice haven’t split.”

She retreated a pace. “It is not a wonder,” she said, her gaze averted. “This happens to all the women in my family. We are so obvious.” She drew a long, shaky breath. “I’m…breeding.”

“Oh.” He sagged back against the door. “I see. Yes. Of course.”

The room was dark, reeling about him, while within, another darkness settled like a vast weight. His eyes ached, and his throat, too, and his heart was a wedge of solid pain in his chest.

“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t you dare give way, Dorian. Don’t even think about sickening now.” She flung herself against him and his arms closed, reflexively, round her.

Her head pressed against his aching chest. “I am happy,” she said shakily. “I want our baby. And I want you to be there.”

“Oh, Gwen.”

“It isn’t impossible,” she said. “Another seven months or so, that’s all we need.” She drew back and gave him a smile as wobbly as her voice. “If I were an elephant, it would be different. The gestation period is twenty and a half months.”

He managed a shaky laugh. “Yes, let’s look on the bright side. At least you are not an elephant.”

“I shall look like one at the end,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?”

He wove his fingers through her wild hair. “No, I wouldn’t, sweet. You present me with an irresistible temptation.”

“I hope so.” She patted his chest. “The patient’s motivation can have a pronounced effect on treatment, Mr. Eversham says.” Her voice was nearly returned to its normal cool efficiency. “I should have told you about the baby sooner, but this is an uncertain period, and I did not want to get your hopes up for nothing. Still, perhaps I was overcautious. It is rare for the women of my family to miscarry.”

Seven more months, Dorian thought. He’d been given less than that before she came, and she’d been here for two months now.

Yet he was doing better than his mother had at this stage. The visual chimera had not worsened, blossomed into demons. His temper remained relatively even. No sudden black melancholy or inexplicable fits of gaiety or rage.

Instead, there was the fierce rapture of their lovemaking, and the moments of quiet contentment, and the joy of working with her, planning something worthwhile.

According to Borson’s account, Mother had continued articulate to the last. Mad, and living in a perverse world of her own, but articulate…and cunning, even devious at times. Perhaps she would not have sunk into a demon-plagued world of her own if the real world had offered understanding and joy and a sense of being useful and valued and worthy of affection. Perhaps she might have lived a little longer and died more peacefully.

It was not impossible.

A few extra months, he told himself. Long enough to see their baby. That would be wonderful. And if it did turn out to be impossible, at least he would have given Gwendolyn a child, which would surely gladden her heart and banish any sentimental inclination to mourn for him.

Nevertheless, her wishing to remain here was not a good sign. She needed to start a new life, in a new place, away from sad memories. But Eversham would arrive eventually, Dorian assured himself. Her mentor would set her right.

Dorian drew his wife tightly against him. “I shall try to maintain a positive attitude,” he promised softly.

“And you must speak to Cook,” Gwendolyn muttered into his shirt front. “Remind her who is the doctor in this house. I ordered a curry for dinner—and it must be hot.”

He chuckled. “Yes, crosspatch.” He kissed the top of her head. “But first, let us see what Doctor Dorian can do to sweeten your temper.”

Seven

Ten days later, Gwendolyn was recalling that conversation and the methods Dorian had employed to sweeten her temper. He had used the same techniques every day since, kissing and caressing the irritation away, drawing her out of her annoying moods and into his strong arms, to take her to heaven and back, and leave her dazed with bliss.

Now, sitting in Mr. Kneebones’s surgery, she focused on those blissful sensations in order to keep her temper from taking over and leading her to do the physician a severe, possibly fatal, bodily injury.

It was hardly the first time she’d humbled herself with doctors, she told herself, and Dorian was far more important than her pride.

She treated Kneebones to an apologetic smile. “I only want to know whether those materials prove absolutely what made Mrs. Camoys’s brain start breaking down.”

Kneebones scowled at her, then at the autopsy report in his hand. “One cannot prove anything absolutely in such cases. One makes logical inferences based on observable facts and the patient’s history. Mrs. Camoys did not drink to excess or indulge in opium eating, which rules out toxic insanity. She had not sustained a high fever prior to or during the decline. And if she had suffered a blow to the head, as you surmise, do you not think Mr. Budge, the family physician, would have mentioned that little detail in his account of her medical history?”

“What if he didn’t know?” Gwendolyn persisted.

“Budge is a competent man. I reckon he knows a concussion when he sees one.”

“But one can’t, precisely, see them,” Gwendolyn said. “She had lovers. What if one of her lovers did it? If he did as great an injury as we’re talking about, she might not have even remembered.” She tipped her head to one side. “Did you question her maid, by any chance? Servants often know more family secrets than the family does.”

Kneebones took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “I do wonder how it is that Lord Rawnsley is not in a strait-waistcoat by now,” he muttered.

“That is what I am wondering, too,” she said. “Otherwise I should not have come to pester you. I know there must be a logical explanation, but I cannot find it.”

Kneebones set his spectacles back on his nose. “That may be due to an overactive—and highly melodramatic—imagination and underactive attention to observable facts.”

“Tell me where I’m wrong,” she said.

He pushed the autopsy report toward her. “Let us suppose your little theory is correct, Lady Rawnsley. Let us suppose Mrs. Camoys’s condition arose from a blow to the head, sustained many months before the early symptoms of traumatic insanity appeared, as often happens. What difference does it make? Her son’s history easily allows for physical violence, fever, alcoholism, not to mention a host of morbid conditions of the system, all of which produce similar consequences. Perhaps this has not occurred to you. Nor do you seem aware that a man may inherit character, and with it a predisposition toward an irrational, self-destructive mode of life. You fail to take into account the patient’s degenerate morals, irrational behavior, and savage appearance. No matter how the initial damage began, these symptoms clearly indicate progressive deterioration.”

At this, Gwendolyn’s fraying patience snapped. She stood up. “My husband is not and never has been degenerate, irrational, or self-destructive,” she said stiffly. “He has a powerful instinct for self-preservation—else he would never have survived a month in the London slums, let alone years.” She took up the autopsy report and stuffed it into her purse. “I cannot believe you overlooked that,” she said, “and I cannot believe that you, a man of science, would diagnose him as insane, simply on account of his hair.”

She stalked out.

Lord Rawnsley did not know that his wife had been quarreling with Mr. Kneebones in Okehampton. She was supposed to be making a tour of possible hospital sites with Hoskins and quarreling with him, because his orders were to (a) find fault with all sites and (b) keep her busy until teatime.

Unaware that she was racing home at this very minute, obstinately immune to all Hoskins’s delaying tactics, Dorian stood by the library fireplace. His hands were clasped tightly at his back and his gaze was fixed on a disconcertingly young and gentlemanly physician.

Eversham stood at the library table. Having finished perusing Gwendolyn’s latest notes, he was now thoughtfully perusing Dorian.

“She’s very near the mark with your mother’s case,” Eversham said. “The same theory occurred to me when I read your letter and your copies of Borson’s materials.” He smiled faintly. “Very handsomely written they were, my lord.”

“Never mind my penmanship,” Dorian said. “You were about to tell me what you learned in Gloucestershire.”

Eversham’s arrival had been delayed, it turned out, on account of a detour to the Rawnsley Hall estate in pursuit of information about Aminta Camoys. He had made the detour partly because Dorian’s letter had aroused his medical curiosity and partly because of Bertie Trent’s tear-filled litany of Dorian’s noble and heroic qualities. It had taken them several days to locate Mother’s former maid.

“Shall I be delicate or brutally direct?” Eversham asked.

Dorian’s heart pounded. “Brutal, if you please.”

“Your mother had been having an affair with your Uncle Hugo,” Eversham said dispassionately. “They were meeting secretly, in the estate’s laundry house, when her maid came to warn them that your grandfather had returned unexpectedly. Your mother panicked, tripped, and hit her head on a stone sink. Since she seemed to recover almost instantly, there seemed no reason to summon the doctor—and risk discovery of the accident’s circumstances.”

Eversham went on to explain concussions, which could be insidiously deceptive: internal injury with no external evidence, sometimes no discernible symptoms for weeks, months, even years—by which time it would be difficult to connect the symptoms with an apparently minor accident of long before. Thus she had been misdiagnosed initially as suffering a “decline,” or constitutional breakdown.

“As you may not be aware,” Eversham said, “the brain functions—”

“I know how it works,” Dorian cut in. “Gwendolyn explained that—and how it breaks down as well.”

Eversham nodded. “It seems to break down in more or less the same way following a trauma—a blow, for instance—as it does in a number of other, quite different maladies. The point is, my lord, your mother evidently suffered a severe concussion, which it is impossible to inherit.”

He took up one of the sheets containing Gwendolyn’s notes. “Furthermore, Her Ladyship has detected in you none of the usual symptoms of brain degeneration. That is not surprising, since there are none to detect.”

Eversham eyed Dorian assessingly. “You are remarkably fit,” he added, “especially for a member of the upper classes. Your brain is in excellent working order. Both your penmanship—evidencing superior motor control—and the logical and orderly presentation of highly personal and emotionally laden information leave that in no doubt.” He returned his attention to the sheet in his hand. “She reports no lethargy or fatigue. No restlessness or sleeplessness. No difficulties with attention to detail and concentration—as your proposal for the hospital clearly demonstrates.” He cleared his throat. “And it would appear that the reproductive functions are—er—functioning.” He looked up, smiling. “I congratulate you, my lord. That is a pleasant event to look forward to, is it not?”

His Lordship had only just managed to digest the matter of a concussion he could not possibly have inherited. It took him a moment to catch up with the rest, during which he stared stupidly at Eversham.

It took another moment to force the words out. “What are you saying?” he asked, dazed. “Look forward to—? I have—You have—” He thrust his hair back. “Haven’t you overlooked something? The things. The—the ‘visual chimera’—‘first you see stars, then the pain hits.’ Physiological phenomena, common to a host of neurological ailments, my wife said.”

Eversham nodded. “Indeed, quite common. Among others, these are classic symptoms of migraine headache. That, I collect, is what’s ailing you.”

“Migraine?” Dorian repeated. “As in…‘megrims’?”

“Not merely headache—which is what most people mean by ‘megrims’—but severe, debilitating headaches. Still, they’re not fatal, for all that.”

“You are telling me,” Dorian ground out, “that all this time…” His face heated. “All these months, I have been playing bloody tragic hero—and all I’ve got is a bleeding, damned headache?”

Eversham frowned and returned the paper to the pile with the rest and straightened them, while Dorian listened to the silence stretch on and wondered what would come to fill it. Eversham had just said they were headaches. Not fatal. Why then, was he hesitating?

Gwendolyn had thought she heard Dorian’s voice, but when she reached the library door, all was quiet within. She opened it for a quick peep to be sure.

At that moment, another, equally familiar masculine voice broke the silence.

“I wish I could say otherwise, my lord, but the ailment is incurable. Though it has been studied for centuries, it remains a medical enigma. I have never yet encountered two cases precisely alike. I am not sure I can even promise you relief, which I deeply regret, for I know it is murderously painful. And I cannot promise that it will not be passed on to your offspring, for there is strong evidence that it is an inherited predisposition.”

A choked sob escaped her.

Two masculine heads swiveled sharply, and two gazes—one blue, one golden—shot to her before she could retreat.

“Oh,” she said. “I do beg your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt.” She hastily shut the door…and fled.

Gwendolyn ran blindly down the hall, yanked the front door open, hurtled through it and down the steps—and ran straight into Bertie.

“I say, Gwen, where are you—”

She pushed past him and hurried to his gelding, which one of the stablemen was leading away.

She snatched the reins from the groom.

Bertie hurried up to her. “I say, Gwen, what’s happened?”

“Give me a lift up,” she said tightly.

He bent and clasped his hands together. “Don’t tell me Cat’s gone and bolted again,” he said as he hoisted her up. “I thought he’d get on well enough with Eversham, and I was just setting out to let Dain know, when I seen you turn into the drive and never was so astonished in all my life. You were supposed to be in—

“Gwendolyn!”

Bertie swung round. “There he is, Gwen. Ain’t gone after all. What was you—”

“Let go of my foot, Bertie.”

He let go, but Dorian reached them in the same moment and caught hold of the bridle. “My dear, I don’t know what you—”

“I am a trifle…out of sorts,” she choked out. “I need…a ride. To clear my head.”

“What you need is a cup of tea,” he said soothingly. “I know it was a shock to see Eversham, but I—”

“Oh, I wish he’d never come!” she cried. Her voice shook, and her eyes filled. “But that is silly, I know. It is always better to know…the facts. And you have made me…so happy—and I love you—and I shall love you always, no—no matter what h-happens.” Her voice broke then, and with it the last shred of her control. She wept, helplessly, and when he reached up and grasped her waist and lifted her down, all she could do was cling to him, sobbing.

“I love you, too, sweet, with all my heart,” he said gently. “But I do believe you’ve got this backwards.”

“No, I heard,” she sobbed. “I heard what Eversham said—and he knows. He’s a p-proper doctor. Incurable, he said. Kneebones was right and I was wrong, and I should have known b-better.”

“Backwards, indeed,” Dorian said as he threaded his fingers through her hair. “The London experts, Borson, and Kneebones all got it wrong. So did I. You knew better than any of us. I feel like an utter dolt. But your Mr. Eversham says my brain is functioning and one cannot inherit concussion, and so I collect you are stuck with me—and my confounded megrims—indefinitely.”

She lifted her head, and through her tears, she saw the truth glimmering in his golden eyes. “M-m-megrims?”

“Migraine, he calls it,” Dorian said. “Providence has played you another joke, I’m afraid. You came all this way to nurse and comfort a dying madman in his last wretched months, and advance the cause of medical science by studying his fascinating case…” He smiled. “And you wound up with a perfectly healthy fellow with a boring old headache.”

She reached up and stroked her husband’s hair back, blinking at him through the tears that continued to fall though she no longer had anything to cry about. “Well, I love you anyway,” she said.

She heard the gelding snort, and looked round to see the groom leading the horse to the stables and a worried-looking Bertie hurrying back to her and Dorian.

“By Jupiter’s thunderbolts—I say—Good gad, Cat, what’s happened? What’s she bawling about? I never seen Gwen do that before.”

“It is perfectly normal, Bertie,” Dorian answered while he gently stroked her back. “Your cousin is going to have a baby. It makes her emotional.”

“Oh. Well. Oh, that is—I mean to say—Oh, yes. Jolly good. Indeed.” Gingerly, Bertie patted her head. “Well done, cuz.”

“And you may be godfather.” Dorian drew back to peer into her face. “That’s right, isn’t it, sweet?”

Gwendolyn gave a watery laugh. “Oh, yes. Of course Bertie will be godfather.” She let go of Dorian’s lapels and wiped her eyes.

“And you shall have a lovely hospital, with a lovely new physician with modern ideas,” her husband told her as he gave her his handkerchief. “And we shall make tiresome old Kneebones go away, so that he can’t interfere or make obstacles or quarrel with sensible people. We shall send him as private physician to the dithering old Camoys ladies at Rawnsley Hall. If their own quacks and patent medicines haven’t killed them by now, it’s unlikely Kneebones can do them any harm.”

She laughed again and wiped her nose—which was probably as red as her hair at present, she thought. And her hair must be a sight as well, judging by Bertie’s expression.

“There, you see?” Dorian told him. “She is practically herself again.”

Bertie was still eyeing her dubiously. “She’s all red and splotchy.”

“She simply needs time to…adjust,” Dorian said. “It turns out, you see, that Gwen will be stuck with me for—oh, heaven only knows how long. Poor girl. She came all this way to comfort a dying madman during his last tragic days—and now—”

“And now it turns out that all Cat’s got is a headache,” Gwendolyn said. Her voice was still wobbly. She steadied it. “It’s only megrims, Bertie.”

Her cousin blinked. “Megrims?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Like Aunt Claire’s spells?”

“Yes, quite like my mama.”

“And Uncle Frederick? And Great Uncle Mortimer?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Well, then.” Bertie’s eyes grew very bright. He rubbed them. “But I knew it would be all right, all along, like I told you. Mean to say, Cat, it ain’t all right, exactly. Very sick-making. Great Uncle Mortimer bangs his head against the wall. But megrims ain’t killed any of our lot yet.” He clapped Dorian on the shoulder. Then he took Dorian’s hand and pumped it vigorously. Then he hugged Gwendolyn. Then, red-faced, he broke away. “By Jupiter. A baby, by gad. Godfather. Megrims. Well. I’m thirsty.”

Then, frantically rubbing his eyes, Bertie hurried on to the house.

An hour later, while Bertie was recovering his emotional equilibrium in the bathing chamber, Dorian stood with his wife, watching Mr. Eversham’s battered carriage lumber down the drive.

“We must get him a better carriage,” Dorian said. “People judge by appearances, and young doctors have a difficult time inspiring confidence. But a handsome equipage will indicate a profitable practice. If people believe he’s greatly sought after, they’ll be less likely to doubt his competence.”

“You think of everything,” Gwendolyn said. “But it is your protective streak—which I am beginning to suspect is a throwback to the Camoys’s feudal origins and the lord of the manor looking after all his people.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I’m only being practical. The man will have enough to do between doctoring and supervising the hospital construction, without having to prove himself as well and get involved with local rivalries and politics.”

“Yes, dear,” she said dutifully. “Practical.”

“And you will have enough to do, without having to leap to his defense a dozen times a day—or bothering me about it. Pregnancy makes you cross enough as it is. Can’t have you antagonizing all of Dartmoor.”

They watched the carriage round a turning behind a hill and descend out of view. “The sun is setting,” he said. “The pixies and phantoms and witches will be at their toilette, preparing for the night’s revelries.”

His gaze returned to her. “Will you walk with me?”

She tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and walked with him into the garden. He took her to the stone bench where he’d found her quietly waiting weeks earlier. He sat, taking her onto his lap.

The sun hovered over a distant hill. Its glow set fire to the clouds scattered about like goose down pillows on a celestial bed of blue and green and violet.

“Do you still want to build in Dartmoor?” he asked.

She nodded. “I like it here, and so do you. And Dain and Jessica are near.”

“We’ll need a larger house if we’re going to raise a family,” he said. He glanced behind him at the modest manor house. “I suppose we could add a wing. It would not be very grand. But Rawnsley Hall was grand and it felt like an immense tomb. Couldn’t wait to get out of there. At present, in fact, I am strongly tempted to forget about repairs and raze the whole confounded pile.”

“You don’t like it, but your heir might,” she said. “If you rebuild, you might give it to him as a wedding gift.”

He lightly caressed her belly. “Are you sure you’ve a boy in there?”

“No, but we are bound to have one eventually.”

“Even before I realized there would be an ‘eventually,’ I knew I should be just as happy if it were a girl,” he said.

“Ah, well, you have a soft spot in your heart for females,” she said. “But you also seem to have a way with little boys, and so I am not anxious either way. You will make a doting, devoted papa. Which is a good thing,” she added with a little frown, “because the women of my family are rather negligent mothers. But then, they are always breeding, you see, which is distracting.”

“Then I shall look after the children,” he said. “Because I should like a great many, and you will have the additional distraction of hospital matters.”

She stroked his hair back. “You have a gift for thinking ahead.”

“I’ve been blessed with a great deal to look forward to,” he said. “Watching the hospital rise from the ground, for instance. Discovering what modern medical ideas and principles can and cannot achieve. The possibilities. The limitations.” He shook his head. “It amazes me how much I’ve learned about medicine in these last weeks, and how interesting it turns out to be. It even has a sort of poetry to it, and its own logic and riddles, like any intellectual pursuit. And there is the same wonderful feeling of discovery as mysteries are solved. I felt that today, when Eversham explained where your notes had led you.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m so proud of you.”

“You should be proud of yourself,” she said. “You did not put obstacles in my way, though you wanted to—to protect me from myself. Instead, you tried every possible way to help me solve my riddle—by writing to Borson and sending for Eversham.”

“Eversham is not like any other doctor I’ve encountered,” he said. “He certainly does have his own ideas. While you were washing your face, I asked him why he had accepted you as a colleague. He told me that in olden times, women were the healers in many communities. But their arts, to ignorant folk, seemed like magic, which was associated with the Devil. And so they were reviled and persecuted as witches.” He chuckled. “And so I realized I had been right from the first. I had wed a witch. And he was right, too, for you are a healer. You’ve healed my heart. That was the part that was ailing.”

She curled her fingers round his neck. “You’ve healed me, too, Cat. You made the doctor part and the woman part fit together.”

“Because I love both parts,” he said softly. “All your parts. All of you.”

She smiled, the sweet everlasting smile, and weaving her fingers into his hair, drew him down and kissed him, slowly, deeply, lingeringly.

While he lingered with her in the warm forever of that moment, the narrow red arc of the sun sank behind the glowing hill. A faint thread of light glimmered on the horizon. The night mists stole into the hollows and crevices of the moors, and the shadows swelled and lengthened, shrouding the winding byways in darkness.

The sharpening breeze made him lift his head. “A beautiful Dartmoor night,” he murmured. “At moments like this, it is easy to believe in magic.” He met her soft gaze. “You’re magic to me, Gwen.”

“Because I’m your witch, and you are my devoted familiar.”

“So I am.” He smiled down at her. “Let’s make a spell, sorceress.”

She frowned her endearing medical frown. “Very well. But first you must help me find some eye of newt.”

He laughed. Then, cradling his bride in his arms, the Earl of Rawnsley rose, and carried her into the house.

LORETTA CHASE holds a B.A. from Clark University, where she majored in English and minored unofficially in visual art. Her past lives include clerical, administrative, and part-time teaching at Clark and a Dickensian six-month experience as a meter maid. In the course of moonlighting as a corporate video scriptwriter, she fell under the spell of a producer who lured her into writing novels…and marrying him. The union has resulted in more than a dozen books and a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s Rita® Award. You can talk to Loretta via her email address Author@LorettaChase.com, visit her website at www.LorettaChase.com, and blog with her and six other authors at WordWenches.com.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at

IN PURSUIT OF A SCANDALOUS LADY

The first in a new series from USA Today bestselling author Gayle Callen

The biggest secret in London is about to be…revealed.

Every gentleman is wondering: Who is the beauty in the scandalous nude portrait hanging in one of London’s most fashionable clubs? Is it true that she’s a member of the ton? Who would be so daring? So reckless?

Julian Delane, Earl of Parkhurst, has a good idea. So good, in fact, that he’s willing to make a wager on it. If only the bet were all that’s at stake…

Determined to clear the family name from a scandal that claimed his father’s life, Julian believes the ravishing model will lead him to answers. Rebecca Leland—spirited, adventurous, with a bit of a wild streak—is just as determined to evade his questions. But when Julian finally corners his quarry, he may find Rebecca well worth the pursuit.

Rebecca felt a secret little thrill. She saw the way both women and men stepped out of Lord Parkhurst’s way. He ignored them all, his every focus on her. Awareness was a prickling flush that started at the nape of her neck and spread along her body. She barely felt Susanna’s fingers clasping hard on her arm, as she had to look up and up as the earl came closer and closer. Good lord, he made her feel positively dainty.

She’d been longing for something different to happen to her—and now here he was, large and bold and threatening beneath a veil of civility.

Lady Rosa beamed at her daughters. She had the same shade of dark brown hair as Rebecca, with only a little gray to betray her age. Susanna had inherited her warm brown eyes. She was a striking woman, displaying the easy elegance of her birth, yet at the same time showing her compassion and strength. She’d endured the fear of losing Rebecca to countless childhood illnesses and suffered through a year believing her son dead. Her marriage had almost floundered under the weight of a lifetime of scandal, but Lady Rosa had emerged victorious. Now the only triumph she seemed to truly want was to see her daughters well—and happily—married. And Rebecca almost regretted that she could not appease her mother in such a way.

“My dear girls, how pleased I am to find you together,” Lady Rosa said, beaming. “Lord Parkhurst, allow me to introduce my daughters, Miss Leland and Miss Rebecca Leland. Oh dear, I’ve already gone on so long about them, you probably feel as if you know everything there is to know!”

Rebecca’s smile stiffened. Everything there was to know, indeed. Lord Parkhurst probably did think such a thing, especially after the way he’d studied the painting for what seemed like forever.

And then it was as if she were in the dark, candlelit saloon again, standing too close to this giant of a man, meeting his intelligent, assessing gaze. He should seem out of place in this false garden, where people talked with little substance. Instead, she could imagine him one with the forest, hunting a beast of prey.

And she realized that she was the prey.

A flush of heat had her wondering if he could see her blush.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, ladies,” the earl said, bowing his head politely. His voice was mild rather than challenging, though still deep and rumbling.

She and her sister curtsied. Rebecca could feel some of Susanna’s tension subside. Up close and by the light of day, he seemed a bit…different. There were lines of strain across his forehead, as if he regularly frowned. His eyes were hooded, almost tired.

Had he spent much of the night thinking about her, as she’d thought about him?

No, she wasn’t worth that to him. He was a bored aristocrat who’d found something to amuse himself for a few days—a month at most, she reminded herself. Though he might look different, he was surely the same as every other man of her acquaintance.

“Is this truly the first time we’ve spoken, Lord Parkhurst?” Rebecca asked politely. “I feel like I’ve seen you at several events.”

“And I have seen you, Miss Leland.”

He spoke with all politeness, but she heard another meaning in his words, and barely withheld a shiver.

“I wish to congratulate you all on the miraculous return of Captain Leland,” he continued.

“Thank you, my lord,” Lady Rosa said with a happy sigh. “I was…quite devastated by the loss of my son. With his return, my husband and I are restored in spirit and in our hearts. The captain is spending time with his cousins this month.”

“Ah, so I heard,” he said, glancing at the Leland sisters. “The captain himself told me. We have had several shared investments recently.”

Why hadn’t he said that he knew her brother last night? Rebecca wondered with annoyance. She was feeling more and more deflated. The earl was not so removed from Society. She only wanted him to be.

“Did you meet my son at university?” Lady Rosa asked.

Lord Parkhurst linked his hands behind his back, his appearance casual—far too casual. Rebecca sensed…something beneath the surface.

“No, I did not, my lady.”

“Ah, then you must have gone to Oxford. My husband lectures at Cambridge.”

“I came into my title at eighteen,” Lord Parkhurst said. “I did not have time for much else.”

Lady Rosa’s expression turned momentarily pained. “Do forgive me, my lord. I had forgotten that your father died so many years ago.”

Rebecca looked between them, curious at what wasn’t being said. But if she asked her mother for details later, Lady Rosa would think her interested, and never let her hear the end of it.

To cover the vague unease she sensed in her mother, Rebecca said, “Our cousin, Madingley, did not attend university either, for exactly the same reason.”

He nodded. “I remember that.”

“Even though you are without an advanced education, my lord,” Lady Rosa said, “I hear men talking with much admiration of your knowledge and skill.”

“Admiration is it now?” His wide mouth quirked in a faint smile. “That is putting it kindly. But yes, there is education to be had, even if it is self-motivated. Yet formal education is something that should be taken advantage of—as I keep telling my brothers.”

“How many brothers do you have, my lord?” Rebecca asked.

He glanced at her, those gray eyes impassive. “Two, Miss Rebecca, eighteen-year-old twins.”

“Young then,” Susanna said, nodding. “I feel like my eighteenth birthday was so long ago.”

Lady Rosa flashed her a mortified frown, as if Susanna should never allude to her advanced, unmarried age of twenty-seven.

“Youth does not excuse common sense,” Lord Parkhurst said.

“Perhaps they see that you do not have a university education, my lord,” Rebecca said, “and yet you seem to have survived.”

They looked at each for a moment—a moment too long, for Lady Rosa’s brows rose.

“Susanna, do escort me to the dessert table,” Lady Rosa said. “I am suddenly quite famished. Enjoy your afternoon, my lord.”

Wearing an apologetic look, Susanna was led away.

Julian watched the gaze exchanged between the two sisters and withheld his amusement. Susanna thought she was leaving Rebecca with the devil himself—and who could blame her, after their evening together?

But Rebecca…he did not quite understand her mood. Last night, she’d been bold, in command, even fearless, though three men held her and her relatives practically captive. Today she was a subdued lady of the ton, patiently allowing her mother the lead, as any daughter who expected to be led to the altar would.

“Lady Rosa did that quite neatly,” Julian remarked.

“She has had much practice,” Rebecca said dryly.

“Then I suggest we reward her.” He held out his arm. “Would you care to walk?”

She eyed him, her eyes faintly devilish, her lips curved in a lovely smile. Then she placed her hand lightly on his arm. “I imagine I cannot come to harm in a conservatory.”

“You could always scream,” he countered.

“And find myself married before the week is out? I think not.”

“Ah, you are crushing my self-esteem. Would not many young ladies wish to be married to an earl?”

“Perhaps not many, for you are not married.”

“By choice. And neither are you.”

“Stating the obvious, my lord.”

They walked quietly for several minutes, weaving their way out of sight of the other guests, although the murmur of voices never quite went away. At the rear of the conservatory, the glass separated them from the walled garden outside. They paused as if to admire it, but Julian knew she must not be thinking of the view.

He was thinking of his view…of her. Her lovely rose-colored gown hugged her torso, revealing herself to be shaped much as she’d been painted. She was slender but not fragile, small, yet rounded. Her hair was styled artfully, curled, with carefully placed ribbons. Her bodice was high enough that he found himself wondering if she hid the Scandalous Lady beneath her garments.

Patience, he reminded himself. He’d spent the morning speaking with people about her family. Though he’d heard of several of the family scandals, the Lelands and the Cabots certainly did not seem like thieves. And Rebecca was far too young to have stolen the diamond herself almost ten years before. So how had she come by it?

He’d realized during the long night that the best way to discover answers to his questions was to earn her trust. He had diligently tried to be unassuming at the luncheon, wanting her to believe that his intensity of the previous evening was more about his overindulgence. And to some degree, that was true. He shouldn’t have intimidated her, standing too close, looking so menacing, which was always rather easy for him to do.

She didn’t seem intimidated. She inhaled the scents of the flowers all around them, then exhaled almost on a sigh—but not a sigh of resignation. There was something very…unusual about her nonplussed reaction to the wager.

But then again, only an unusual woman would pose for a nude portrait. He wondered how unfettered her morals truly were.

And that aroused him far too much, he realized. He could not let himself dwell on her nudity, her lack of inhibitions. He had to focus on the Scandalous Lady, and bringing it back to its rightful owner—him.

He began the hunt for information. “You and Miss Leland seem close to your cousin Lady Elizabeth.”

She eyed him, a smile touching her full lips. “We are of an age, and we were raised together at Madingley Court.”

“Your families all lived together?”

“Have you seen Madingley Court?” she asked, amused.

He nodded. “Ah, I see. The palace of a duke, of course. So you were not too crowded living together.”

“Not at all,” she answered, searching his face with the faintest confusion.

He knew she wondered at his motives, why he didn’t bring up the wager. And his talk of crowded living conditions revealed too much of his own childhood issues.

“So the three of you were like sisters,” he said.

“We still are,” she answered, her voice firm. “We support each other through anything.”

“Obviously,” he said. “They risked much for you with their declaration last night.”

“We would risk anything for each other.”

“You’d risk exposure and humiliation?”

He thought she’d drop her hand from his arm, but she didn’t, only looked up at him coolly.

“Are you threatening such a thing?” she asked. “I would have thought you a gentleman.”

“I am a gentleman, Miss Leland. But that painting does not make a gentleman remember the civilized part of his brain.”

He felt her stiffen.

“But then you knew that would happen when you posed,” he continued mildly. “Or did you not think beyond a momentary thrill? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Are you lecturing me, my lord? A true gentleman would protect a lady’s sensibilities, would forget the things he’d seen.”

“You have not displayed a lady’s sensibilities, have you?”

She dropped her hand and faced him now, speaking in a low voice, her hazel eyes flashing. “Now you’re offending me. You know nothing about me.”

“I would like to.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You want to win a wager with your silly friends.”

“Which you and your silly female relatives made possible by your behavior last night.”

“How disapproving you sound, my lord.”

“No, I am simply stating a fact. Your guilt makes you believe that everyone is censorious.”

“Guilt?” she cried, then looked down the path and lowered her voice. “I feel no guilt whatsoever.”

“Then why else would you attempt to steal the painting?”

“For the simple reason that it was supposed to be in France, not here where people who know me will see it.”

“Then why pose, Miss Leland? Why risk it?”

She paused, and in her mercurial eyes, he could see her weighing what to reveal. He waited almost impatiently—and he was never an impatient man. Then to his surprise, she stepped closer. He could feel the heat from her body, imagined how it would feel with just another step, as she pressed against him. His logical brain threatened to shut down, and that had never happened to him.

“Did you ever just want to be adventurous, my lord?” she asked softly.

IN PURSUIT OF A SCANDALOUS LADY
by Gayle Callen

On sale now from Avon Books

About the Authors

CATHERINE ANDERSON, the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical fiction, lives with her husband and three canine friends—a mixed spaniel named Kibbles and two Rottweilers named Sam and Sassy, who seem to think they are teacup poodles and that obedience training is for people.

LORETTA CHASE holds a B.A. from Clark University, where she majored in English and minored unofficially in visual art. Her past lives include clerical, administrative, and part-time teaching at Clark and a Dickensian six-month experience as a meter maid. In the course of moonlighting as a corporate video scriptwriter, she fell under the spell of a producer who lured her into writing novels…and marrying him. The union has resulted in more than a dozen books and a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s Rita® Award. You can talk to Loretta via her email address Author@LorettaChase.com, visit her website at www.LorettaChase.com, and blog with her and six other authors at WordWenches.com.

It was SAMANTHA JAMES’s love of reading as a child that steered her toward a writing career. Among her favorites in those days were the Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames series of books. She still loves a blend of mystery and romance, and, of course, a happily-ever-after ending. The award-wining, bestselling author of eighteen romances and one novella, her books have ranged from medieval to Regency to  the American West. Please visit her on the web at www.samanthajames.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

More Dazzling Romance from

Catherine Anderson

CHERISH

Lorretta Chase

DON’T TEMPT ME

Samantha James

SINS OF THE VISCOUNT SUTHERLAND

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THREE TIMES A BRIDE. Copyright © 2010 by Avon Books. “Fancy Free” copyright © 1995 by Adeline Catherine Anderson. “The Mad Earl’s Bride” copyright © 1995 by Loretta Chekani. “Scandal’s Bride” copyright © 1996 by Sandra Kleinschmidt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Avon Books paperback printing: May 2010

EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201175-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

* See Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase, published by Avon Books.

Table of Contents

The Mad Earl’s Bride

In Pursuit of a Scandalous Lady

About the Authors

Other Romances

Copyright

About the Publisher

*

More Dazzling Romance from