BLACKTHORNE TOOK ONE step outside and staggered when a strong gust of wind hit him. His new bride gave a cry of consternation as the powerful draft caught her train and lifted it like a kite. He now understood the dowager’s reluctance to leave the church, and the twins’ giggles. Those two mischief makers could have warned him that, when he opened the church door, he’d be facing gale force winds and torrential rain.
A servant stood nearby on the church porch, struggling with a black umbrella turned inside out by the storm. Clearly there was no way to get from the porch to the carriage without getting drenched.
Blackthorne grimaced. He couldn’t bear the thought of stepping back inside and making polite—and assuredly awkward—conversation with his family in the church vestibule until the maelstrom abated. And it was clear the servant’s umbrella would never recover from the indignity forced upon it. So he did something entirely uncharacteristic and utterly fanciful.
His bride gave a delighted shriek, as he swept her off her feet and into his arms. She clung to him, and he held her close as he ran down the church steps. The servant dropped the umbrella and rushed ahead of him to open the door to his carriage and put down the steps. He practically threw his bride onto the closest seat and followed her inside, dropping onto the seat opposite her, as the servant put up the steps and slammed the carriage door behind them.
They were both drenched.
His new wife sat there in her soggy dress with her sopping hair for only a moment, before he was treated to burbling laughter, a sound as happy and soothing as the brook running over stones at Blackthorne Abbey.
She was pointing at him and laughing so hard she could barely get a word out. “Your…hair. Your…eyelashes. Your…chin.”
He shoved his wet hair back off his brow, then took a hand to his face, swiping off rainwater and wiping it on his trousers.
“You’re in no better shape,” he replied with a laugh. Instead of letting her repair her own misfortunes, he shifted himself to the seat beside her. He tilted her chin up, so he was looking into her laughing face, and realized it was amazing she could see him at all, with her spectacles so doused with rainwater. He slipped them off, so he could dry them with his handkerchief.
Once they were in his hand, he looked across at her laughing face and felt his heart stop. Only for a beat or two, but it must have stopped, because it felt as though he’d been struck by the proverbial bolt of lightning.
His bride wasn’t just pretty. She was stunningly beautiful.
Maybe it was her willingness to laugh at a situation he knew would have sent any other woman of his acquaintance into hysterics. Maybe it was her willingness to laugh at him, as though he were a mere mortal man and not the formidable Duke of Blackthorne. Or maybe it was seeing her amazing blue eyes for the first time out from behind the glass that had slightly distorted them.
He turned immediately back to the task of removing the rainwater from her spectacles, disturbed by what he’d discovered. How could he not fall in love with her? She possessed many of Fanny’s good qualities—kindness, a concern for others, a lack of vanity—and a few Fanny hadn’t possessed—most significantly, forthrightness and a willingness to speak her mind.
And she was far more beautiful.
Blackthorne felt ashamed for making the comparison. It was unfair to Fanny, whose loss he still felt intensely a year after her death. He realized he would have to guard himself against anything so ill-advised as an infatuation with his new wife.
By the time he was done drying his bride’s spectacles, her laughter had died, but he could still see amusement in her eyes. She shoved her wet bangs aside, but raindrops clung to her eyelashes.
“Close your eyes,” he said in a voice that was strangely hoarse.
“What?”
“Just close them.”
He dabbed at her eyelashes with his handkerchief. And then he succumbed to temptation and kissed her. With hunger. With desire.
He felt her hands at his shoulders, as though to push him away, but they slid around his neck instead. And he realized she was kissing him back. With awkward eagerness. With guileless enthusiasm.
While his tongue sought a willing haven in her mouth, his hands traced the tempting contours of his new wife. There was no telling where things would have ended, if he hadn’t dropped her spectacles.
The sound of shattering glass brought them both to their senses. She pulled away, staring down at the debris on the floor of the carriage, and then back at him, with horrified—he could think of no other word to describe the look—eyes. As though she’d betrayed some other lover. As though she’d committed a cardinal sin. As though she’d done something worthy of shame.
She covered her mouth with her hands and said, “Oh. Oh, no.” Then she lowered her gloved hands, folded them primly in her lap, and turned her head to look out the window.
He’d been shaken by their kiss, but he was even more shaken by her reaction to it. What was going on in that head of hers? Was he wrong about her innocence? Did she love some other man? Why had she seemed so upset by her behavior? It was only a simple kiss.
Except there had been nothing simple about it. The soft weight of her breast had filled his free hand, and that kiss, which had involved teeth and tongues, had been a sensual, lascivious thing, a carnal prelude to sex.
He retrieved her broken spectacles from the floor and said, “I’ll have these repaired today.”
She didn’t say “Thank you.” She didn’t say anything, or look anywhere but out the window, leaving him to think about his bride in silence.
Blackthorne reclined on the plush seat of the ducal carriage wondering what the rest of his life would be like, now that he was married to this strange American girl. Unusual. Unconventional. Unpredictable, for certain, if the past week turned out to be in any way typical of the next fifty years.
He couldn’t help thinking of Seaton’s reaction to his decision to marry Miss Wentworth, which his friend had expressed at the table after their pre-wedding dinner last night. The two of them had been enjoying a glass of brandy, the women having adjourned to the sitting room.
His friend had startled him by saying, “I thought in the end you’d give up everything before you married anyone.”
“Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because you’ve had this hope—this dream—for the past year that the woman you saved in the Dakota Territory would miraculously reappear. I’m sorry, for your sake, that you never saw her again. Maybe then you could have closed that chapter—no, that single sentence—in your life, once and for all.”
Because Blackthorne had denied his infatuation with the girl so many times in the past, he didn’t bother protesting. But his gut had churned at the thought of giving up forever the forlorn hope his friend had put into words.
“Based on the poor quality of her clothing,” Seaton continued, “your rescued maiden obviously didn’t have the wealth to solve your financial woes. It’s probably a good thing her whereabouts remain a mystery. Imagine the disaster if you’d decided to do something so foolish as to marry her. You’d have lost everything. As it turns out, this American girl—this Josephine Wentworth—is something out of the ordinary.”
“She is that,” Blackthorne had agreed, as an image of his future bride—leaping up like a jack-in-the-box from the dowager’s dining table—rose in his mind’s eye. “I should have anticipated something like what happened at dinner, I suppose. After all, she was raised in an egalitarian society. Still, it was a surprise.”
Seaton chuckled. “You mean hopping up to serve the turtle soup? I thought your grandmother was going to choke on her wine.”
“I was impressed with the reason the future Duchess of Blackthorne gave for helping Grandmama’s elderly footman.”
“That the tureen looked heavy? That she could easily serve, if he would hold the bowl?”
Blackthorne realized he was grinning. “To be fair, I was half out of my own chair when Soames tripped on the carpet as he entered the room and nearly dumped the soup in her lap.”
Seaton chuckled again. “I thought her excuse for leaving her own bowl empty was priceless.”
“That she’d once had a pet turtle, and couldn’t possibly eat anything that reminded her of Murtle? Definitely priceless.”
They’d both laughed. Guffawed, in fact.
But there was nothing funny about what he’d felt at the altar, as he’d stood beside his bride. He glanced at the woman who was now his wife, but her face remained determinedly aimed out the window of the coach.
When she’d looked up at him at the altar with those summer-sky-blue eyes, shaking like a lost soul, he’d wanted to protect her, to shield her from hurt and from harm. He’d taken her hand and felt the enormity of the obligation he was accepting for the second time in his life.
It had been unsettling to admit that he didn’t love the woman who would be his wife. He’d taken solace from the fact that he found her endlessly entertaining, since she was constantly doing the unexpected. It was disconcerting to realize that, ever since he’d met her, he’d been continually surprising himself with his own behavior, which was anything but normal—at least for him.
Whatever had moved him to kiss his bride at the altar, in front of his grandmother and Seaton and the twins? He would never hear the end of it from any of them.
That kiss…
It must have been sympathy or empathy or God knew what that had made him do something so uncharacteristic for the reserved Duke of Blackthorne, with a bride he barely knew. He’d wanted to laugh—or was it cry?—when she’d answered the bishop’s question with that whispery, “I will?” When his turn came, he’d felt shaken by the hopeless knot in his throat. He’d been relieved when he’d managed to speak without his voice cracking.
He suddenly realized what it was he’d seen on her face at the altar that had caused him to lift her chin and lower his head: desolation.
Which made no sense. He glanced again at the back of his wife’s head, as she stared out the window. She was getting what she wanted, wasn’t she? As his duchess, she would live the rest of her life at the height of Society in London—and for that matter, the world. She could lord it over all of her American friends. What did she have to be sad about?
Which made him question why she’d married him, if it hadn’t been to purchase a royal title. But what other possible motive could she have had for giving up her fortune and marrying a perfect stranger, someone she’d known for a single week? Which made him wonder, not for the first time, why she’d been in such a hurry to get married. She would have married him a day after meeting him, if his grandmother hadn’t intervened.
Blackthorne’s mouth turned down. He had the awful feeling that Josephine Wentworth had put something over on him. But it was hard to conceive of a nefarious plan being hatched by someone as artless as his American bride.
As he’d lowered his head to kiss her at the altar, she’d closed her eyes and pursed her lips in a way that convinced him she had very little experience at such things, which was as it should be. He’d been very much aware of her vulnerability, her trust in him to keep her safe, and her belief, however naïve, that he would never hurt her.
Knowing that the vows had been said, knowing that it was too late to undo what he’d done, he’d felt an uneasiness he hadn’t expected. Guilt? For what? She’d consulted with his solicitor. She was well acquainted with the terms of their agreement. She already had her very generous first quarter’s allowance in hand. She was going into this with her eyes wide open, even though they’d been shut at that moment.
Then she’d peeked at him, checking the progress of their kiss. He’d realized he had to go through with it or embarrass both her and himself. So he’d brushed his lips lightly against hers. And felt his whole body quiver in response.
He’d tried to end the kiss, but she’d leaned into him, and he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to continue the experiment, to see if he could determine what it was about kissing this uncommon girl that made all his senses suddenly come alive.
He’d wanted to taste her, so he’d slid his tongue along the seam of her lips seeking entrance. She’d opened her mouth, more from shock, he now believed, than anything else, but before he’d gotten the chance to satisfy his curiosity, she’d jerked away. He’d had the distinct impression that, if he hadn’t been holding on to her, she might have fled.
It was the wonder in her eyes when she’d looked up at him afterward that had brought home to him how much power he had to wound her.
Something he’d apparently done when he’d kissed her just now in the carriage.
He noticed her gloved hands were knotted tightly in her lap. He worried that, as unworldly as she was, Josephine Wentworth Wharton harbored some starry-eyed expectation of romantic love that he could never fulfill. He had no intention of falling in love with his mail-order bride. In his opinion, their marriage-for-the-sake-of-money precluded it. Besides, after the unbearable pain of losing Fanny, he wasn’t sure he could ever give his heart so freely and fully to another woman.
However, their recent kiss—in all its carnality—gave him hope that they might at least share the pleasures to be found in the marriage bed. Assuming he could make of his wife a willing partner. That seemed doubtful at the moment, although the thought of seducing his bride made their wedding night something he eagerly anticipated.
He darted a look at Josie and realized she hadn’t stopped looking out the window since he’d released her from that kiss. He would have given a great deal to know what was going on in that pretty little head of hers. He pursed his lips ruefully, in no doubt that when the time came, she would tell him exactly what was on her mind.
After he’d welcomed her to his home and introduced her to his servants, they had to entertain their guests at their wedding breakfast. Except, he thought wryly, his home was now their home, and his servants were now their servants.
As the carriage drew up to the front steps, Blackthorne wondered how well his American bride would cope with greeting a multitude of servants and meeting so many of his titled friends. His lips quirked. Whatever happened, it was bound to be out of the ordinary.
After being hurtled from church to carriage through gusting winds and lashing rain, his new duchess could very well have ended up looking like a drowned rat. But her wedding dress was only a little the worse for wear, and her blond hair had dried in soft curls around her face. Blackthorne realized she must have ironed her hair to get it to straighten. That led him to wonder what all those blond curls would look like spread out on a pillow around her face.
He cut off the direction his thoughts had taken. Time enough to think about such things once night had fallen. Right now, he needed to break the ice, to avoid any awkwardness between them when they left the carriage and encountered the line of servants that would be waiting inside to greet them.
The carriage suddenly stopped.
“We’re here,” he said.
“Oh, dear.” She turned toward him, her eyes wide and frightened, and he found himself reaching out to clasp her hand.
“Don’t worry. You’ll do fine.”
“After last night…The dowager said…”
His grandmother had left his bride in no doubt that she disapproved of her behavior at the supper table the previous evening. She’d admonished Josie to behave better—more like the duchess she would be—at the wedding breakfast.
He squeezed Josie’s hand reassuringly, but she continued staring at him, gasping air like a rabbit run to ground. He brushed his thumb across her lower lip, forcing her to release it from between her teeth. “I promise no one in my household will distress or discomfit you.”
If they did, he vowed to himself, they would have him, at his most forbidding, to answer to.
“I like your curls,” he said with a smile intended to ease her anxiety.
“Oh!” She reached up to touch her hair and appeared dismayed when she felt the tendrils about her face. “I must look a fright.”
“You look…fine.” He stopped himself from saying “beautiful,” or even “lovely.” Both words had come to mind. It wasn’t safe to think of Josephine Wharton, Duchess of Blackthorne, in those terms. She was merely the mail-order bride he’d married to save his estate. She didn’t love him. He didn’t love her. And if they were both smart, things would stay that way.
But he had no idea how he was supposed to get through his wedding night—with a wife he found incredibly beautiful and entirely lovely and completely desirable—without losing his heart.