Tessa Dare - [Spindle Cove 03.5] (12 page)

“Mr. Evermoore!” Miss Bertram leaped to her feet. “Mr. Evermoore, no! You come back here right now.”

In an instant, the tavern was in upheaval. Some of the ladies jumped on chairs and tables. Others reached for any makeshift truncheon close at hand. Pots, pans, stray copies of
Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom.

“I knew it!” Charlotte cried in vindication. “I knew all along the thief had to be Miss Bertram.”

“I don’t think it was her,” Diana said. “I mean, obviously it was her . . . her pet. She must have left the rat behind last night while everyone went to Ambervale.”

“The little bastard’s over here,” Mr. Fosbury shouted. “In the kitchen.”

There was a crash of glass. Followed by an explosion of flour.

Mama crumpled into the nearest chair, her eyes rolling back in a dead faint. Just as well.

“Oh, please don’t kill him!” Miss Bertram sobbed. “He can’t help taking things. But he’s so intelligent. You don’t understand. Oh, Mr. Evermoore.”

Diana cringed at her sister. “ ‘No one understands our attachment.’ Isn’t that what she always said?”

Charlotte shuddered. “I don’t understand it, either. I don’t want to.”

The two of them laughed uneasily.

Of all the potential scandals that could have lessened Diana’s sordid revelation . . . this one would serve. Yes, she’d given her heart and her virtue to the local blacksmith. At least she wasn’t in love with a rat.

“Found it.” Aaron’s dark head popped up from the other side of the bar. He called to her. “I found the ring.”

Diana pushed through the crowd to meet him at the bar. But she couldn’t bear to remain separated from him, so she scrambled atop the counter on hands and knees.

He did the same.

They sat together, cross-legged atop the lacquered surface, while the wild rat hunt proceeded all around them.

Aaron huffed his breath, blowing a bit of flour off the jeweled setting. He shined the band with his sleeve. “I’d make a speech, but—”

She laughed and flicked a glance at the ongoing melee. “Just put it on, and quick.”

She offered her hand. He slid the ring on her finger.

“Oh, Aaron.” Emotion frayed her voice. “It’s beautiful.”

“Not as beautiful as you.”

He cupped her cheek in one of his strong workman’s hands and tilted her face to his.

And when he kissed her, the world went away.

“Wh- . . . Oh, where am I? Oh, my nerves.”

Diana winced, suddenly conscious of their surroundings. Her mother had revived just in time to see them embracing atop the bar counter, coated in flour and mud and soot, and locked in a deep, passionate kiss.

“Wonderful news, Mama.” Diana held up her left hand and waggled her ring finger. “I’m finally engaged.”

Her mother blinked at the ring. Blinked at Aaron.

And promptly fainted once again.

A few weeks later

“A
re you very sure, my dear? It’s not too late to change your mind.”

Diana shook her head.

From the vestibule, she stood on tiptoe and peered down the long aisle of St. Ursula’s, festooned with bunting and posies of daffodils. All their family, friends, and neighbors sat crowding the pews in anticipation.

“Mama, the wedding will begin any moment. And it can’t start soon enough for me. I’m not going to change my mind.”

“I had to ask.” Her mother twisted a lace handkerchief in her hand. “I know you girls think me a silly, overwrought creature who thinks of nothing but marrying you to rich gentlemen. But it’s only because I love you so.”

Diana softened. “I know, Mama.”

“After we lost your father, I was anxious every moment. How would we live? Where would we go? How could I provide the best for you?” She dabbed at her eyes. “I only wanted to spare you girls the same nervousness.”

Diana’s heart twisted in her chest. “I understand. I do, and I love you for it. Please be happy for me today. I promise, you will never need to worry for me again. With Aaron, I will be loved and safe and protected. Always.”

“I suppose that is all I can ask.” Mama noisily blew her nose into the handkerchief. “Oh, but I had such dreams for you. My intuition insisted that one day a handsome duke would roll into this village in a splendid carriage, ready to choose his bride. But I suppose it’s not likely to happen.”

“I suppose not,” Diana said. “And even if it did, I would still marry Aaron.”

Mama grasped her hand and squeezed it fondly. “Mr. Dawes may not be a gentleman, but your ring
is
nicer than Minerva’s. There is that.”

Diana smiled. Some things never changed.

“Are we ready?” Colin Sandhurst, Lord Payne, appeared in the vestibule, looking as handsomely attired as always and quite ready to have this done.

He offered an arm to Mama and walked her down the aisle. Charlotte followed, fizzing with joy for her role as bridesmaid—or at least, for the new frock it occasioned.

Diana brought up the end of the procession.

As she walked down the grand, carpeted aisle, moving ever closer to the handsome, broad-shouldered figure at the front of the church, she saw their whole future painted for them in rich, stained-glass hues. They would marry here. They would make Christmas and Easter memories here. They would christen their children here.

If her arithmetic was correct, they could be doing that christening part in a little less than nine months. She hadn’t given Aaron any idea—it was too early yet to be sure. But she thought he might have formed his own suspicions.

As the organist played the last verse of the hymn, he drifted close. His strong arm brushed hers, and a shiver of delight passed through her. Strangely enough, she couldn’t gather the courage to look up at his face. Her whole heart would be in her eyes, she knew. And though her heart would be forever his by the end of this ceremony, she wanted to guard it just a few moments more.

“You are radiant,” he murmured. “And you look like a woman with a secret.”

“Just a little wedding present for you,” she whispered. “You’ll find out later.”

“Good. Because I have a present for us both.”

“Oh?”

He leaned and spoke in her ear. “I hired a cook.”

She had to clap her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing aloud. Oh, she loved him so.

“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” The vicar looked to Lord Payne, who was standing in the first row.

Luckily, her brother-in-law remained enough of a scoundrel to be easily corrupted. As she’d asked of him, he remained silent.

“I do.” Diana looked up at Aaron and smiled. “I give myself.”

Not ready to leave Spindle Cove yet?

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A
NY
D
UCHESS
W
ILL
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O

Coming soon from Avon Books

C
HAPTER
O
NE

G
riff cracked open a single eyelid. A bright stab of pain told him he’d made a grave mistake. He quickly shut his eye again and put a hand over it, groaning.

Something had gone horribly wrong.

He needed a shave. He needed a bath. He might need to be sick. Attempts to summon any recollection of the previous evening resulted in another sharp slice of agony.

He tried to ignore the throb in his temples and focused on the tufted, plush surface under his back. It wasn’t his bed. Perhaps not even a bed at all. Was it just a trick of his nausea, or was the damned thing moving?

“Griff.” The voice came to him through a thick, murky haze. It was muffled, but unmistakably female.

God’s knees, Halford. The next time you decide to bed a woman after a months-long drought, at least stay sober enough to remember it afterward.

He cursed his stupidity. The epic duration of his celibacy was no doubt the reason he’d been tempted by . . . whoever she was. He had no idea of her name or her face. Just a vague impression of a feminine presence nearby. He inhaled and smelled perfume of an indeterminate, expensive sort.

Damn. He’d need jewels to get out of this, no doubt.

Something dull and pointed jabbed his side. “Wake up.”

Did he know that voice? Keeping one hand clapped over his eyes, he fumbled about with the other hand. He caught a handful of heavy silk skirt and skimmed his touch downward until his fingers closed around a stocking-clad ankle. Sighing a little in apology, he rubbed his thumb up and down.

A squawk of feminine outrage assailed his ears. An unyielding object cracked him over the head, but hard. Now to the pounding and throbbing in his skull, he could add ringing.

“Griffin Eliot York. Really.”

Bloody hell.

Forget the headache and piercing sunlight, he bolted upright—bashing his head again, this time on the low ceiling. Blinking, he confirmed the unthinkable truth. He wasn’t in his bedchamber—or any bedchamber—but in the coach. And the woman seated across from him was all too familiar, with the double strand of rubies at her throat and her elegant sweep of silver hair.

They stared at one another in mutual horror.

“Mother?”

She smacked him again with her collapsed parasol. “Wake
up
.”

“I’m awake, I’m awake.” When she readied another blow, he held up his hands in surrender. “Good God. I may never sleep again.”

Though the air in the coach was oven-warm, he shuddered. Now he most definitely needed a bath.

He peered out the window and saw nothing but vast expanses of rolling green, dappled with cloud-shaped shadows. The coach’s truncated shadow indicated midday.

“Where the devil are we? And why?”

He tried to piece together memories of the previous evening. This was hardly the first time he’d woken in unfamiliar surroundings, head ringing and stomach achurn . . . but it was the first time in a good long while. He thought he’d put this sort of debauchery behind him. So what had happened?

He hadn’t imbibed more than his usual amount of wine at dinner. By the fish course, however, he seemed to recall the china’s acanthus pattern undulating. Swimming before his eyes.

After that, he recalled . . . nothing.

Damn. He’d been drugged.

Kidnapped.

He snapped to alert, bracing his boots on the carriage floorboards.

Whoever his captors were, he must assume they were armed. He was without a blade, without a gun—but he had eager fists, honed reflexes, and a rapidly clearing head. On his own, he would have given himself even chances. But the bastards had taken his mother, too.

“Do not be alarmed,” he told her.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. Bad for the complexion.” She touched the double strand of rubies at her throat.

Those rubies. They gave him pause.

What shoddy excuse for a kidnapper used the family coach and left the captive wearing several thousand pounds’ worth of jewels?

Devil take it.

“You.”

“Hm?” His mother raised her eyebrows, all innocence.

“You did this. You put something in my wine at dinner and stuffed me in the carriage.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “My God. I can’t believe you.”

She looked out the window and shrugged. Or rather, she gave the duchess version of a shrug—a motion that didn’t involve anything so common or gauche as the flexing of shoulder muscles, but merely a subtle tilt of the head. “You’d never have come if I
asked
.”

Incredible.

Griff closed his eyes. Times like these, he supposed he ought to remind himself that a man only had one mother, and his mother only had one son, and she’d carried him in her womb and toiled in labor and so on and so forth. But he did not wish to think about her womb right now—not when he was still trying, desperately, to forget that she possessed ankles.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Sussex.”

Sussex.
One of the few counties in England where he didn’t claim any property. “And what is the purpose of this urgent errand?”

A faint smile curved her lips. “We’re going to meet your future bride.”

He stared at his mother. Many moments passed before he could manage coherent speech.

“You are a scheming, fiendish woman with entirely too much time at leisure.”

“And you are the eighth Duke of Halford,” she returned. “I know that doesn’t mean much to you. The disgraces at Oxford, the gambling, the years of aimless debauchery . . . You seem determined to be nothing more than an unfortunate blot on the distinguished Halford legacy. At the very least, start on the next generation while I still have time to mold it. You have a responsibility to—”

“To continue the line.” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So I’ve been told. Again and again.”

“You’ll be five-and-thirty this year, Griffy.”

“Yes. Which makes me much too old to be called ‘Griffy.’ ”

“More to the point, I am fifty-eight. I need grandchildren before my decline. It’s not right for two generations of the family to be drooling at the same time.”

“Your decline?” He laughed. “Tell me, Mother, how can I hasten that happy process? Other than offering a firm push.”

Her eyebrow arched in amusement. “Just try it.”

Griff sighed. His mother was . . . his mother. There was no other woman in England like her, and the rest of the world had better pray God had broken the mold. Like the jewels she delighted in wearing, Judith York was a formidable blend of exterior polish and inner fire.

For most of the year, they led entirely separate lives. They only resided in the same house for these few months of the London season. Apparently, even that was too much.

“I’ve been patient,” she said. “Now I’m desperate. You must marry, and it must be soon. I’ve tried to find the most accomplished young beauties in England to tempt you. And I did, but you ignored them. I finally realized the answer is not quality. It’s quantity.”

“
Quantity?
Are you taking me to some free-love utopian commune where men are permitted as many wives as they please?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I was being hopeful.”

Her lip curled in a delicate scowl. “You’re terrible.”

“Thank you. I work hard at it.”

“So I’ve often lamented. If only you applied the same effort toward . . . anything else.”

Griff closed his eyes. If there was any conversation more tired and repetitive than the “When will you ever marry?” debate, it was the “You’re a grave disappointment” harangue. Only in
this
family would it be considered “disappointing” to successfully oversee a vast fortune, six estates, several hundred employees, and thousands of tenants. Impressive, by most standards. But in the Halford line? Not quite enough. Unless a man was reforming Parliament or discovering a new trade route to Patagonia, he just didn’t measure up.

He glanced out the window again. They seemed to be entering a sort of village. He slid open the glass pane and discovered he could smell the sea. A salted-blue freshness mingled with the greener scents of countryside.

“It is a prettyish sort of place,” his mother said. “Very tidy and quiet. I can understand why it’s so popular with the young ladies.”

The coach rolled to a halt in the center of the village, near a wide, pleasant green that ringed a grand medieval church. He peered out the window, gazing in all directions. The place was far too small to be Brighton or . . .

“Wait a minute.” A vile suspicion formed in his mind.

Surely she hadn’t . . .

She
wouldn’t.

The liveried footman opened the coach door. “Good day, your graces. We’ve reached Spindle Cove.”

“O
h,
bollocks
.”

When the fancy coach came trundling down the lane, Pauline scarcely gave it a glance. Many a fine carriage had come down that same road, bringing one visitor or another to the village. A holiday in Spindle Cove was said to cure any gently bred lady’s crisis of confidence.

But Pauline wasn’t a gently bred lady, and her trials were more practical in nature. Such as the fact that she’d just stumbled into a murky puddle, splashing her hem with mud.

And that her sister was near tears for the second time that morning.

“The list,” Daniela said. “It’s not here.”

Drat.
Pauline knew they didn’t have time to go back to the farm. She was due at the tavern in minutes. This was Saturday—the day of the Spindle Cove ladies’ weekly salon, and the Bull and Blossom’s busiest day of the week. Mr. Fosbury was a fair-minded employer, but he docked wages for tardiness. And Father noticed.

Frantic, Daniela fished in her pocket. Her eyes welled with tears. “It’s not here. It’s not here.”

“Never mind. I remember it.” Shaking the muddy droplets from her skirts, Pauline ticked the items off in her memory. “Dried currants, worsted thread, a bit of sponge. Oh, and powdered alum. Mother needs it for pickling.”

When they entered the Brights’ All Things shop, they found it packed to bursting. While the visiting ladies met for their weekly salon, the villagers purchased their dry goods. Villagers like Mrs. Whittlecombe, a cobwebby old widow who only left her decrepit farmhouse once a week to stock up on comfits and “medicinal” wine. The woman gave them a disdainful sniff as Pauline and Daniela wedged their way into the shop.

Pauline could just make out two flashes of white-blond hair on the other side of the counter. Sally Bright was busy with customers three deep, and her younger brother Rufus ran back and forth from the storeroom.

Fortunately, the Simms sisters had been friends with the Bright family since as far back as any of them could remember. They needn’t wait to be helped.

“Put the eggs away,” Pauline told her sister. “I’ll fetch the sponge and thread from the storeroom. You get the currants and alum. Two measures of currants, one of alum.”

Daniela carefully set the basket of brown speckled eggs on the counter and went to a row of bins. Her lips moved as she scanned for the one labeled
CURRANTS.
Then she frowned with concentration as she sifted the contents into a rolled cone of brown paper.

Once she’d seen her sister settle to the task, Pauline gathered the needed items from the back. When she returned, Daniela was waiting with goods in hand.

“Too much alum,” Pauline said, inspecting. “It was meant to be just one measure.”

“Oh. Oh, no.”

“It’s all right,” she said in a calm voice. “Easily mended. Just put the extra back.”

She hoped her sister didn’t notice the sneering expression on old Mrs. Whittlecombe’s face.

“I don’t know that I can continue to give this shop my custom,” the old woman said. “Allowing half-wits behind the counter.”

Sally Bright gave the woman a flippant smile. “Just tell me when we can stop stocking your laudanum, Mrs. Whittlecombe.”

“That’s a health tonic.”

“Of course it is,” Sally said dryly.

Pauline went to the ledger to record their purchases. She secretly loved this part. She flipped through the pages slowly, taking her time to peruse Sally’s notes and tabulations.

Someday she’d have her own shop, keep her own ledgers. It was a dream she hadn’t shared with anyone—not even her closest friend. Just a promise she recited to herself, when the hours of farm and serving work lay heavy on her shoulders.

Someday.

She found the correct page. After the credit they earned from bringing in eggs, they only owed sixpence for the rest of their shopping. Good.

Bang.

She whipped her head up, startled.

“Good gracious, child! What on earth are you doing?” Mrs. Whittlecombe slapped the counter again.

“I . . . I’m p-puttin’ back the alum,” Daniela stammered.

“That’s not ‘da aw-wum,’ ” the old woman repeated, mocking Daniela’s thick speech. “That’s the sugar.”

Oh, bollocks.
Pauline winced. She knew she should have done it herself. But she’d wanted so fiercely for Daniela to show that wretched old bat she could do it.

Now the wretched old bat cackled in triumph.

Confused, Daniela smiled and tried to laugh along.

Pauline’s heart broke for her sister. They were only a year apart in age, but so many more in understanding. Of all the things that came a bit more difficult for Daniela than other people—pronouncing words that ended in consonants, subtracting from numbers greater than ten—cruelty seemed the hardest concept for her to grasp. A mercy, in Amos Simms’s family.

“Not the clayed sugar,” Rufus Bright moaned.

Sally boxed him across the ear.

“I just scraped it from the cone,” he apologized, rubbing the side of his head. “Bin was almost full.”

“Well, it’s entirely useless now,” said Mrs. Whittlecombe smugly.

“I’ll pay for the sugar,” Pauline said. She felt instantly nauseous, as if she’d swallowed five pounds of the stuff raw. Fine white sugar came dear.

“You don’t have to do that,” Sally said in a low voice. “We’re practically sisters. We should be
real
sisters, if my brother Errol had any sense in his head.”