The Wedding Escape (4 page)

“An' I only took a nip to keep her company,” added Beaton, still standing with his arms wrapped tightly around Jack's waist. Amelia was not certain whether the butler was clinging to Jack out of fondness or his very real need for support.

“Ye're completely wellied, both of ye,” Oliver objected irritably. “Ye should be ashamed of yerselves.”

“Now, Oliver, we cannot fault Lizzie and Mr. Beaton for having a little drink when the house was safely locked up for the evening and they weren't expecting our arrival—especially as Lizzie obviously needs to take gin for medicinal purposes.”

The servants stared at Amelia in slack-jawed surprise. Even Jack regarded her with curiosity. He had not expected his fabulously wealthy heiress to be quite so forgiving of his servants' obvious shortcomings.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kent,” said Lizzie, coming dangerously close to toppling over as she bobbed a clumsy curtsey. “You're most kind.” She hiccuped.

“She's a real spanker.” Beaton winked at Jack.

“Miss Belford is
not
my wife,” Jack said, prying Beaton's arms off his waist. He held the butler's wrist for a moment, making sure the fellow was steady on his feet before actually letting go. “She is my guest, and she will be staying with us for a day or so while I make arrangements to—”

“Miss Belford?” Lizzie's withered brow puckered in confusion. “Miss Amelia Belford, the American heiress?”

Amelia regarded Jack uncertainly.

“Bless my soul, you are her, aren't you?” Lizzie leaned closer to Amelia to take a better look, overwhelming Amelia with the stench of gin. “I've seen your picture in the shops, and of course the society pages have been filled with talk of your upcoming weddin' to that fat old codger, Whitcliffe.”

“Here now, we'll have none o' that talk,” interjected Oliver, concerned that Amelia might take offense at having her betrothed described in such unflattering terms. “Old Whitcliffe is nae fat—he's just a wee bit beefy. All dukes are,” he added with uncharacteristic charity. “That's what comes of bein' well stuffed from cradle to grave.”

“I'm sure it's you,” Lizzie insisted, as if Amelia needed convincing of her own identity. “Your picture has been in all the shops.”

Like most heiresses who traveled to London to find an English lord, Amelia's mother had arranged for her to be photographed by one of the city's leading photographers. Her portrait had been for sale in numerous shops, enabling a fascinated public to purchase her picture. Beyond the popularity of her portrait, Amelia's wedding had received extensive coverage in both the English and American newspapers during the previous weeks, a fact that distressed her but pleased her mother immensely.

“Goda'mighty—she is her—isn't she?” Beaton's eyes bulged from his shiny round head.

“Yes,” said Jack. Lizzie and Beaton had been in his parents' employ for more than ten years, and although they clearly liked to indulge in a drink now and again, Jack knew that in matters of importance they could be absolutely trusted. “She is.”

“Oh, my, you're even prettier in the flesh!” gushed Lizzie, studying Amelia with fresh rapture. “Even if your hair is a mess and your gown looks like you've been crawlin' about the coal bin.”

“But you were to marry Lord Whitcliffe today,” pointed out Beaton. “It's been in the paper for weeks—with sketches of you and His Grace, and the gifts and flowers and lists of food—”

“They said your garters had gold clasps with diamonds on them,” interrupted Lizzie excitedly. “Is that true?”

“No.” Amelia was horrified that the London papers had gone so far as to falsely describe her undergarments. Did people really believe she could be so idiotically frivolous as to wear lingerie studded with diamonds?

“Oh, but look at what's happened to your lovely gown,” Lizzie moaned, “and your hands too, you poor lamb.” She took Amelia's badly scratched hands into her own and clucked her tongue sympathetically. “Did you have an accident?”

“I fell,” Amelia replied. “Into a bush.”

“Miss Belford had a change of heart at the last minute,” explained Jack.

“But your betrothed was a bleedin' duke!” burst out Lizzie. “Whitcliffe lives in one of the grandest castles in all England!”

“Aye, and the lass decided she didna want him,” interjected Oliver, coming to Amelia's defense.

“Surely she must have known he was beefy before she agreed to marry him,” argued Beaton, still focused on the matter of Whitcliffe's size.

“I've heard of cases amongst the rich where the bride is not permitted to see the groom till she rubs elbows with him at the altar,” Lizzie said, “out of fear she might change her mind and call the whole weddin' off.”

“If t'were me bein' forced to marry old Whitcliffe, I know which direction I'd have run.” Oliver chuckled, forgetting that but a moment earlier he had been defending Amelia's choice for a husband.

“Miss Belford is very tired, Lizzie.” Jack thought Amelia had endured enough questions for one night. “Do you think you and Beaton could prepare a bath for her and find her something suitable to wear? I'm sure there must be something appropriate in my mother's wardrobe. See that she is given whatever she needs in terms of clothes. She will sleep in the blue guest bedroom tonight.”

“Of course you're tired, you poor lost lamb.” Lizzie clucked her tongue sympathetically. “Follow me, dearie, and I'll get you settled in as cozy as a kitten in a basket.”

“You're very kind.” Amelia suddenly felt as if she were about to collapse from exhaustion. “I apologize for interrupting your sleep by arriving here unannounced. I hope you won't have to go to too much trouble on my behalf.”

Beaton and Lizzie blinked in confusion. Neither had ever met an American heiress before, but everything they had heard about these fantastically indulged beauties suggested that they would be just as haughty and condescending toward their class as the English aristocracy generally was.

“ 'Tis no trouble at all, miss,” Lizzie assured her.

“We weren't doing anything before you came,” added Beaton.

“Except for gettin' soaked,” Oliver muttered.

“Up we go then,” said Lizzie, ignoring Oliver's insult as she shepherded Amelia toward the stairs, holding her mangled train behind her. “Beaton will set to heatin' some water for your bath while we see about gettin' you out of this gown.”

Jack watched as the servants set to work to provide for Miss Belford's comfort.

Then he jerked off his necktie and headed toward the drawing room, very much in need of a drink.

 

T
HE WHISKEY WAS WELL AGED AND FULL-BODIED,
with just enough of a smoky finish to remind him of the sweet burning peat of the Highlands. Jack sipped it slowly, taking time to appreciate its carefully cultivated scent, body, and flavor.

There had been a time when he had not been quite so discerning.

He'd started drinking at the tender age of eight, when he used to sneak a fiery swig from a chipped brown jug hidden beneath a filthy crate in the kitchen. That was where the old bastard his mother paid to look after him used to hide it. Jack was never sure whether he was concealing the foul-tasting brew from Jack or from his own wife, a nasty-tempered woman who also enjoyed a good solid drunk now and again. After Jack ran away from them at the age of nine and began living on the streets, he found his taste for alcohol grew. By the time he was fourteen he was arrogantly proud of the fact that he could consume nearly an entire bottle of spirits without vomiting it back up again. He had done just that the night before he was arrested for stealing some cheese, a bottle of cheap whiskey, and a pair of worn shoes. He sobered up quick enough when he found himself sentenced to thirty-six stripes of the lash, forty days imprisonment, and two years at a reformatory school. At the time he had believed he had reached the end of his short, miserable life, for he did not expect to survive the brutality of the judicial system.

Then Genevieve had appeared in his cell, and everything he was destined to become was changed forever.

It was strange, he mused, how some facets of life could be irrevocably altered in an instant, while others remained infuriatingly fixed. He had struggled for years to cast off the filthy mantle of his sordid beginnings. He was the unwanted progeny of a drunken whore and some base customer whose identity he had never known, which was just as well. As a lad he had been a scrawny thief who survived on little more than his sharp wits and his bloodstained fists. His existence had been pitted with desperation and violence, and he had done what he had to in order to survive. And then he was suddenly the ward of the Marquess and Marchioness of Redmond, who made him part of a loving family while helping him to rise above the dark sludge of his origins.

When he was a callow lad of fifteen, he had told himself that he was a born survivor and that he would have managed well enough, regardless of whether Genevieve had come into his life or not. As he matured, the harsh reality of the world took on a different cast. He had only to look at the rough, half-starved young men hanging about the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow to see what he would have become but for Genevieve: illiterate, angry, and contemptuous of the world around him. Most of these aimless fellows scrabbled out a miserable living slaving in the factories or stealing, both professions that were better performed sober, which they rarely were. Trapped by poverty and ignorance, they hoped for little more than to still be alive the following week, and not jailed or killed by alcohol or a brawl or some ungodly piece of factory machinery.

It was scarcely a life worth surviving for.

How different were the travails of Miss Amelia Belford. For her, hunger was an entirely abstract concept, based upon the vaguely empty sensation one felt between the hours of luncheon and teatime. Jack could not imagine that she had ever been permitted to want for anything—save perhaps a gown so extravagant even her father had been forced to question its necessity, or perhaps those ludicrous diamond-studded garters Lizzie had gone on about. For Amelia, life was a glorious pageant of everything she could ever have possibly imagined, and more.

Yet she had risked all of it to scale down a church wall and run away.

She was naive in the extreme if she thought for a moment that her Viscount Philmore could provide her with anything resembling the affluent life she might have enjoyed with Whitcliffe, Jack decided, albeit at her father's expense. Jack didn't know Philmore, but if he was at all typical of his class, Jack knew his type. Spoiled, arrogant, and lazy. Jack supposed he should not judge him for being tediously representative of his class. After all, even Haydon had once borne these very same traits. But if this Philmore cared for Miss Belford as much as she evidently believed he did, why hadn't he married her? Had it been Jack, he would never have let Amelia's subsequent betrothal to Whitcliffe and her parents' refusal to let him see her stand in his way. If he had suspected for an instant that she was being forced into a marriage she did not want, he would have bloody well charged through her home and knocked aside anyone who got in his way as he took her out.

He extricated himself from his chair, too weary to think about the matter anymore. He blew out the lamp in the library and slowly mounted the stairs, unfastening the buttons of his shirt.

Upon reaching the upstairs floor he noticed a spill of lamplight seeping onto the richly woven Persian carpet from the ajar door of the guest bedroom. Frowning, he walked toward it, wondering if something was amiss with Miss Belford.

Asleep, she lay tucked in a tiny ball upon the bed, her honey-gold hair trickling in soft swells across the expansive white ocean of her pillow and sheets. Her hapless wedding gown and veil rested in a discarded froth upon a chair, and there was a tray of tea, toast, and cold beef sitting untouched upon a table. She had kicked off her woolen blankets, but the air gusting through the open window was cool, and it was clear to Jack as he moved toward her that she was chilled and needed to be covered.

She was wearing a nightgown of ivory cotton, delicately embroidered with a scattering of tiny pink rosebuds at the neckline and trimmed with a cascade of filmy lace. It was void of all the shimmering ornamentation that had rendered her wedding gown so ostentatious, and Jack felt it suited her much better. The scalloped neckline draped loosely over her shoulder and across her breasts, exposing an expanse of silky skin, and the lacy hem had shifted up her calves as she kicked away her blankets, revealing her small, perfectly formed feet. He leaned upon the bedpost and studied her a long moment.

And then he frowned at the sparkle of tears upon her lashes.

He should have asked Lizzie to stay with her, he realized. Despite the confident, determined composure she had maintained during their ride to London, it was clear Miss Belford's wedding day had been filled with extreme emotions, which obviously had taken their toll when she finally rested her head against her pillow. But for his agreeing to spirit her away, the young woman before him would have been a prisoner in Whitcliffe's bed tonight, a terrified, unwilling bride with no choice but to endure whatever her new husband wanted of her. And Whitcliffe would have wanted as much of her as he could consume. Despite the duke's advanced age and substantial weight, Jack did not believe any man could have resisted such exquisite beauty.

Outrage unfurled within him. No man had the right to force himself on an unwilling woman, regardless of whether the law, the church, and her parents conspired to give him that right. Jack did not know whether Amelia had wept out of fear of her future or sheer relief at having escaped her bondage to Whitcliffe. Whatever the reason, the trail of tears staining her cheek cut him to the core. He lifted the disheveled blankets at the foot of the bed and clumsily draped them over her.