How to Seduce a Scot (22 page)

Alex could not remember a time when he had been more incensed. When he caught their carriage and forced it off the road, he had thought that he was angry with the Englishman. But now he saw that he was furious with her.

Not an auspicious beginning to a wedding day.

He rode into Oxford with his angel on the front of his horse. Her borrowed bag was long gone, headed who knew where by now. All she had were the clothes she stood up in, which was all he had as well, so they were even.

The pearl she had worn at Lady Jersey's ball still gleamed at her throat. It was all she had taken from her burning house in London, save for the nightgown she had worn when she clung to him in her yard, the gown that had been ruined by smoke. He took pleasure in the notion that all she had, all she wore from that day on, would come from him.

Perhaps they might find a dressmaker tomorrow, and have something fitted for her. As it was, he had no intention of closing his eyes again until she was his wife in the eyes of the law as well as in the eyes of God. The license burned a hole in his pocket. Like a madman, he kept checking to make certain that it was there, that he had not lost it along the road.

But he needed to have a chat with his little wife first.

He wound through the narrow streets of Oxford until he came to the wide gates of the university. No one stopped him, so he did not have to show the letter his uncle had given him. The chapel was exactly where his uncle had said it would be. Just because his mother's brother was a bishop of the English church, that did not mean he did not know where his rivals were to be found.

Hidden deep within the beautiful stone confines of Magdalen College, Alex found the jewel he searched for. The tiny chapel shone brilliant in the sunlight of the evening, the stained-glass windows catching the rays of the slanting sun. Alex stopped the duchess's gelding in front of the church, and the horse stood as steady as a post. It was a good steed, one he was tempted to buy from Her Grace, for it had served him well this day, on the most important errand of his life.

The object of his quest leaned silent against his heart. She did not try to bolt or flee again, though he was wary of her now. He needed to know what had possessed her to go back on her word to him, to let him have her as only a husband might, only later to leap from a three-story window to escape him.

His heart had never hurt so much in his life, and all from a blow from one girl. It was humbling. But she was his girl, whether she knew it or not. He supposed that was why she had the power to wound him so deeply, as no one else on earth could.

He climbed down and patted the horse's flank. He loosened the girth that bound the saddle so that his mount might breathe a bit easier, for they would be there for at least an hour or more. Only then did he reach up for Catherine, who sat straight in the saddle, waiting patiently for him to tell her what came next.

He was not deceived. He had thought she had given herself over to him the night before, and he had been wrong. This day, he would be certain of her mind, and bind her to him with the blessing of a true priest before the sun set on them again.

He spotted a tiny wren of a man wearing the black robes of a Dominican friar. He did not approach, but stood waiting for them on the chapel steps, for all the world as if he had been expecting them.

“I received word from the Bishop of London this morning that you might find your way here,” the priest said.

Alex drew Catherine down from the horse's back. He removed the bridle and left his mount free to crop the grass by the church door. He kept his arm around her waist, in case she might find her angel wings and take flight.

“And how did my uncle summon you, Father?”

The priest smiled, his eyes warm with love and faith together, as well as a dose of humor, a combination of traits that all true priests seemed to possess. “By carrier pigeon.”

Alex laughed at that, and held his girl closer still.

“You have come here to be wed, in the eyes of the Church as well as in the eyes of the law?”

“We have, Father. But I must speak with my wife first.”

The priest nodded as if this sort of chat before a wedding was a common occurrence. Perhaps a man and a girl often rode up out of nowhere to this obscure chapel everyone save a handful of Catholics had forgotten even existed.

“You may speak in the vestry,” the priest said. “I will prepare the Host and wine. Come into the chapel when you are ready. Christ and I will be waiting.”

Catherine smiled at that, and Alex had never seen such a beautiful woman in all his life. Her hair was mussed, falling from the braided bun on the top of her head in strands of gold, her borrowed pink gown crumpled beyond repair, and her mossy-green eyes showed the promise of all the springs in his life to come.

He leaned down and kissed her as soon as the priest turned his back. She did not resist him, but leaned close, as if he were a wall and she, a bird taking shelter in a storm. His lips were firm on hers, and hers were soft, yielding, so that he forgot to be angry and simply drank in the sweet taste of her. In spite of her time in the Englishman's carriage, she still smelled like jasmine.

“I am sorry, Alex. I hope you can forgive me. I was wrong to leave you, and more wrong still to leave you as I did. I have made a complete muddle of this day. If I had it to do over, I would change it all.”

“I would change nothing,” he answered. “For now you are here, and with me.”

“I will be with you every day for the rest of my life,” she said.

“I love you, Catherine Middlebrook. I will love you every day for the rest of my life. I will give up the sea, and all the work I once thought I might do on it, so that I can be with you.”

She trembled in his arms, as if shivering in a cold wind. Alex drew her close, and kissed her.

“I love you too, Alex.”

He thought to stand there in silence, holding the woman he would soon make his wife. But there was one more question he had to ask. “Early this morning—why did you leave me in bed alone?”

Catherine sighed heavily, and he kept his eyes on hers so that she would not falter and try to hide anything from him again. “We owe Lord Farleigh money.”

“What?”

“My mother took out a mortgage against my family's property in Devon. The note came due, and we could not pay. Lord Farleigh paid it for us.”

“And he expected you to marry him to answer the debt.”

His estimation of the Englishman had risen slightly that day, but now it plummeted again. He felt his rage rising, and he gritted his teeth against its onslaught.

“No,” Catherine said. “He did not. It was my decision. I thought I knew what my father would have me do, if he were here. But then I realized that my father would wish me to be happy.”

That last statement was a hodgepodge of explosives, so Alex did not touch it. He kissed her forehead at the mention of her father, then asked, “How much does your family owe, Catherine?”

She blinked at him, as if he had asked her to calculate in her head the worth of the moon. “I don't know.”

Alex breathed deep once, and then released it again. He tightened his grip on his girl, and she wriggled closer to him still. She laid her head on his chest, as if she were listening for the beat of his heart. That she had been willing to sell her life and her future for an undisclosed sum did not concern him. That she had not even bothered to ask the amount did. She might have ruined her life and his for a paltry fifty pounds.

“Who may I ask, Catherine, to discover this sum?”

“My father's lawyer, Mr. Philips. He is in the City.”

Alex filed that information away, and then let it go. He had more pressing matters before him. However much it was, Ian would help him pay it, over time if necessary. The Englishman would see reason. He seemed, indeed, like an eminently reasonable man.

“Catherine, hear me, for I will only say this once.”

She looked up at him, her green eyes rimmed with flecks of gold. He did not allow himself to be distracted, but talked on.

“I will find out what this debt is, and I will pay it. Will that suffice to make your time with Lord Loverboy lie behind us?”

“Lord Loverboy?” Her lips quirked in a smile. He wanted very much to lean down and bite her pillow of a bottom lip, but he did not.

“Catherine.”

She must have heard the warning in his voice that he was in deadly earnest. She sobered, and turned to press her body full against him. The feel of her breasts and the cradle of her thighs against his almost shook him free of his reason, but he held on by a fingernail and listened to her speak.

“Lord Farleigh is behind us, and forever, whether the debt is paid or not.”

He kissed her then, plundering her mouth as a pirate might a horde of gold. She opened to him and met him in the dance, her own passion as heated and ungoverned as his. It was he who remembered himself, where they were, and why. He drew back from her only to find his new horse staring at them both, as at a play.

“What is his name?” Catherine asked.

“Jerrod.”

“It does not suit him. I wonder if he might answer to Zeus?”

The horse heard his new name, and seemed to nod in acceptance before he leaned down and cropped the grass at his feet.

“Zeus it is then,” Alex said.

He drew back from her and pulled a ring out of his pocket. It was a peridot in a bed of gold, and it shone in the sunlight like the moss green of her eyes. “It is not the biggest ring they had, nor the finest, but it suits you well.”

“It is beautiful,” his angel breathed, reaching out to take it from him.

He closed his hand over it, hiding it once more in his fist. “No indeed, Miss Middlebrook. I have seen what you do with gentlemen's betrothal gifts. We will take it to the priest inside and make it your wedding ring.”

“But we must post the banns,” she said. “How can we marry today?”

“As I told you last night, when perhaps you were not attending…” She blushed and he kissed her before he went on. “I have a special license, which will please His Majesty's government. I have procured a priest, which pleases God. Now all I need is your consent. Catherine, will you step inside and marry me?”

Her green eyes shone with tears that she did not shed. She faced him alone, with none of her kin beside her. In her eyes burned the message that she would love him for the rest of her life, and beyond, if the priests were right.

“Yes.”

Catherine had often thought of her wedding day as a child. She had dressed her hair in summer flowers and had mocked walking down an aisle, imagining her father at her side. In the last few years, she had thought of what kind of dress she would make for the day, what color it would be, what kind of cloth, wondering always if it would be silk or damask or muslin. She had thought to have Margaret attend her, and her mother looking on from the front pew of the village chapel.

On her true wedding day, she wore a borrowed gown of light wool that was rumpled from being stowed in a satchel, donned in the half dark of early morning, and creased beyond repair from having been slept in while she had ridden in a jouncing coach. Her mother and sister were both a half day's travel away, and instead of tucked away in the village church of her childhood, with the people she had known all of her life looking on, she stood at an altar in Oxford with a priest she had met just that hour standing before her.

But none of that mattered. For this day, Alex Waters stood beside her.

Every thought she had ever had, every fantasy she had ever cherished of her wedding, faded as the phantoms of dreams at morning. All that mattered was that the only man she had ever loved, the only man she would ever love, stood beside her. His hand cradled hers as if he would cherish it, and all the rest of her, for the rest of his time on earth.

The fading light of day slanted through the chapel's stained-glass windows. An older lady had come to replace the altar flowers, and she watched as Alex and Catherine faced each other before the priest.

Catherine was glad the stranger was there, so that there was a second witness to her happiness. She felt for an otherworldly moment as if she had entered a dream, but then Alex smiled at her, and she knew that smile was real.

The words of the priest were short, his blessing sweet. He wrapped their hands in a stole, and admonished them to remember their vows, and that they would last into the hereafter. Alex put the ring he had shown her on her finger, and it fit. It did not slip or slide across her knuckle; it did not feel like a shackle on her hand. If anything, her hand felt lighter with the symbol of his love upon it.

The green of the stone shone like grass and growing things. It seemed to her that their love would not stay as it was in that moment, but would keep growing, like the great oak with its unfurled leaves that stood on the village green back home.

When their vows were made, and the stole removed from their hands, the old lady and the priest left them alone at the altar. Catherine knew that they must leave. They must go back into the world and return to London, where her mother and sister, where his brother and sister were waiting. But as she stood looking into the dark eyes of the man she loved, she could not think of anyone or of anything else.

“We should go home,” she said, knowing her duty, and all the music that had to be faced.

“To the Highlands?” Alex asked, a teasing smile playing at the corners of his mouth, lighting his eyes with the fire of mischief.

“Later this summer,” she answered. “I meant, home to my mother.”

“Your mother knows where you are,” Alex answered her. “She knows you are in my care. She probably even knows that we have married.”

“Is she clairvoyant, then?”

Catherine wished her words back, for she did not want to start the first five minutes of her marriage with annoyance. But Alex did not take offense. He slipped his arm around her waist, for all the world as if he truly thought she might escape him again.

“She sent me to fetch you back,” Alex said. “But I think she will understand if we do not go today.”

“Where will we go?” Catherine asked, worried.

Alex kissed her deeply, and her mood suddenly improved. “Come with me a little ways, and I will show you.”

* * *

They went first to an office tucked away among the curved streets of Oxford, where they were married under the law by a curate of the Church of England. This ceremony was short, and had only two witnesses. Catherine understood the necessity of it, and she took pleasure in making her vows twice, though she was married already.

After that strange interlude, Catherine rode on the front of his saddle as they wended their way along the outskirts of town, along the river. She thought for a moment that Alex was lost, but then Zeus stopped in front of a small whitewashed cottage with a trellis of roses climbing up the side. The roses were pink and white, and some of their blooms were just beginning to open.

“How lovely,” Catherine said. “Whose house is this?”

“For this night, it's ours,” Alex answered.

“You can procure a house and a priest and a vicar, all at a moment's notice?”

“Give me a day, and I'll furnish you with a new gown and a coach and four as well.”

Catherine laughed, as she knew he had meant her to, and then lost her breath as he swung her down from Zeus's back. He drew her close, so that she slid down the length of his hard body. He kept her against him, so that her toes barely touched the ground. He did not kiss her, but leaned close, taking in her scent from her hair, along her temple, down to her throat.

“You still smell of jasmine,” he said. “I would never know that you were with that Englishman.”

“I wasn't
with
him,” she corrected. “I was riding in a carriage with him.”

“On your way to marry him, if I recall.”

Catherine frowned at him and watched as he relented in front of her.

“I am sorry, angel. I promise you, I will not bring him up again.”

“It is a new day,” she said. “We are married now.”

His smile shifted, and his eyes took on a light of reverence, the same light they had held in the stone chapel as they spoke their vows. “It is a new world,” he answered.

He kissed her, and his lips tasted of sunlight and coffee. She drank him in, grateful to God that she was in his arms, that she would be in his arms for the rest of her life. She shifted against him, her body growing hungry as it had the night before. She wondered how soon they might go to bed and whether decent married people ever made love in the sunshine of a borrowed garden.

She knew the answer to that, but a girl could dream.

Her dreams were shattered by the rumble of her stomach.

Alex pulled back from kissing her and looked down at her, one eyebrow raised. “When was the last time you ate, angel?”

“I drank that cider you gave me last night,” she said. “I didn't each much dinner before the fire. I was too worried about you, and what I was going to do.”

“Well,” he said. “Let's see if Father Patrick has stocked the larder.”

She did not let him go when he made a move to leave her. She clung to him like a limpet, pressing herself hard against the burgeoning manhood she could feel rising against her stomach.

“Alex,” she said, remembering the night before with sudden vivid clarity, the way his lips had felt on her, the way his body had felt inside her. The memories came back to her like a flash tide, leaving her gasping. “I don't want food. I want you.”

He kissed her hard, wrapping his arms around her and enfolding her in an embrace that felt unbreakable. She shivered with joy and need together, wriggling against him in a futile effort to get closer. He groaned and kissed her again before he came up for air.

“Mrs. Waters, I will feed you before I have you again.”

“Why?” she asked plaintively, her stomach rumbling a second time.

“My first duty is to see you cared for, and that's what I'll do.”

She smiled up at him through her lashes, the way she'd seen her mother smile at her father, long ago. He seemed to falter for an instant, but then he laughed. “You won't get around me on this with your feminine wiles, you little minx.”

But his hand lingered on her derriere in a manner that said he longed for her body as much as she longed for his. She took that as her due, and strolled off ahead of him to investigate the house where they would spend their wedding night.

The house was small, but clean. The parlor stood open to the garden in the back of the house, and the kitchen was well stocked. She did not go upstairs, but began to rummage in the pantry, finding a nice wheel of Cambray cheese and a bottle of red wine from France. A fresh loaf of bread was swathed in towels, and no mice had eaten at it yet, so she declared it sound.

There was even a crock of butter tucked between cool stones by the pantry door, so she thanked her stars and got to work slicing and buttering. Alex came in with a jar of butter pickles, which he had found who knew where. He saw her preparing their meal, crossed the small room, and took her bread knife from her.

“My love, I said I would feed you.”

“And so you have. Look at all this bounty.” Catherine beamed up at him, and relinquished the knife to his grasp.

“Since our meeting in the coach, you must understand why I want the knife in my own hand.”

She laughed out loud at that. She had never thought to have such a joy-filled wedding night. She said another prayer of thanksgiving even as she baited him. “I did not know it was you, Alex. Mary Elizabeth warned me of highway robbers, and I was prepared.”

“You threw at the wrong door, Catherine.”

“That was only my first try.”

It was his turn to laugh as he sliced delicate hunks of cheese and arrayed them with pickles on a plate. He set the thick slices of fresh bread in a basket on the table and started buttering the ones she'd missed.

“I will prepare your meal this night, wife. You've had enough excitement for one day. Take your ease there, and let your husband work for you.”

Catherine laughed, for she did not have to be told twice. “I think I can stand a bit more excitement, Alex.”

He quirked a brow at her, and the heat in his eyes made her want to push the food out of the way and crawl across the table to him. As it was, he came around to her side and sat with her on the simple wooden bench. He sat close and offered her a bite of white bread with sweet butter on it, which he fed to her from his own hand.

“This is crude fare, wife, but I will make it up to you. I'll do better tomorrow.”

“It's a feast fit for a queen,” Catherine answered him. “And I would not wish myself anywhere but here.”

Catherine had hoped to explore the upstairs with him, but after they had wrapped up the remains of their meal, Alex led her outside to take in the last of the sunset, and a stroll down to the river. It was not yet late, and she was not even slightly tired. Her body hummed with energy at his nearness until the very waiting seemed to soothe her senses as well as enflame them. Alex was in a talking mood, telling her of his home in Glenderrin. She liked to hear him talk, so they walked down by the river and looked at the irises that bloomed in beds of green close by the willow trees.

“The Thames is beautiful here,” Catherine said, her hand clasped firm in his great one.

He quirked a brow at her, and she caught the light of humor in his eyes. “I like it a sight better than at Richmond.”

“Did I thank you for saving Margaret?” she asked. “Let me thank you now.”

She rose on the tips of her toes, and he leaned down to meet her. She kissed his lips, exploring the contours and the taste of him, the taste of bread and butter and spiced pickles with cheese. And the scent of him—his favorite soap and his musky smell of man and horse. She lost the thread of her intent, which was only to tease him, and lost herself along with it. She found herself in his arms on the damp ground, his hands beneath her skirt and her hair falling from its pins behind her.

“I love you, Catherine. I will not have you for the first time as my wife in the damp grass of a borrowed lawn.”

“Will we do this on our own lawn then one day?” she asked him coyly.

He laughed, as she had meant him to. “It's too cold to take our ease by the burn near Castle Glenderrin. But if we are in Devon in summer, I will consider it. Have they a river there?”

“Yes, the river Culm. I will show it to you, if you promise to teach me how to fish in your burn.”

He pressed his lips to her temple. “You need not learn to fish for me, angel. I love you as you are.”

“I'll try it once. Mary Elizabeth sets her heart by it,” Catherine answered, snuggling close against him, taking deep draughts of his scent as if she might never have him by her again. But she would have him by her every day of her life. She had the ring and the paperwork to prove it.

They did not spend much more time talking about fishing or family. He helped her up from the grass, and she noticed in the failing light that her borrowed pink gown now had grass stains on it. She laughed a little. “I'll have to buy Mary Elizabeth a new dress.”

“We can buy her a dozen.”

Alex did not linger, but took her hand and led her back to the house as dusk was rising from the riverbank, making all the world turn as indigo as the sky where the first stars of the night had already come out.