Ever His Bride Read online

  She had to smile. “You won’t catch me, Mr. Claybourne. I assure you.”

  She left him to his scowling and began the weary task of gathering up scattered belongings and piling them at the railhead. She sent a would-be scavenger scurrying with a well-aimed rock to his backside.

  “Thief!” she shouted after him, and doubled her search for lost items and even found her portmanteau and Claybourne’s as well.

  She couldn’t help watching him and the investigators as she collected the baggage. They were terribly uncoordinated in their efforts. She stood at a spot below the grade of the railroad bed and decided to point out a few things, just in case.

  “You missed this!” she shouted.

  Her husband was the first to look up out of the knot of men. A frown of incomprehension made him appear fierce and very unlike the man who had kissed her so nicely in the train.

  “Never mind, Mrs. Claybourne,” he shouted.

  He returned his attention to the stout man beside him. But his bellowing had caused a half-dozen pair of eyes to focus on her, and then back onto him.

  “You ought to see this,” she shouted.

  Claybourne left the group and came toward her, striding down the slight incline like an avalanche. “We’re conducting an official investigation here—”

  “I would hope so.” She pointed to the slightly misaligned railroad blocks. “You can see the problem there, Mr. Claybourne: this part of the curve takes too much of the kinetic force. The blocks beneath have twisted almost imperceptibly out of place over the years. The embankment should have been strengthened when the bigger engines—”

  He hauled her backward, fitting her against his chest, and spoke behind her ear in that very low tone. “Stay out of this, Mrs. Claybourne. These men are from the from Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate, each of them seconded to the Board of Trade from the Corp of Royal Engineers. They know what they are doing.”

  Two of the sappers arrived in a hail of sliding gravel. “Is this your wife, Mr. Claybourne?” the stouter one asked.

  “She is that, Sawyer. And fancies herself a railway inspector, I’m afraid.”

  “I was just showing Mr. Claybourne the maladjusted track.”

  “Yes, of course.” Sawyer nudged the other man and studied her with grave suspicion.

  She walked out of her husband’s arms and prodded her foot along the section of rail that had sprung loose from its moorings, and now stuck out perpendicular to the track. “And this rail is only forty-two pounds to the yard, far too light for the weight of the rolling stock. This should have been caught when the track was laid.”

  Sawyer lifted his spectacles to his forehead and looked at her with an intensity matched only by the glare she was certain her husband had fixed on the back of her head. “How is it you know this, madam?”

  “My father was a railway engineer: Phillip Mayfield. You may have heard his name.”

  Sawyer rocked back on his heels. “A fine fellow, a fine engineer, indeed.” He beamed suddenly. “Then you must be little Felicity! By gravy, you are! I haven’t seen you since you were a kitten, and I was your father’s draftsman. Ah, but since then, you’ve become quite a beauty, and I’ve lost most of my hair.”

  “John Sawyer! I do remember you.” A much leaner man then, with a full head of curly red hair, and a fine tenor voice. As she offered her hand, she caught Claybourne’s scowl.

  Sawyer graciously took her hand in his and turned her toward the others. “All of you must remember Phillip Mayfield. This is his daughter, Felicity Mayfield.”

  Her husband’s eyes hardened. “Felicity Claybourne,” he muttered.

  Good God, now his wife had seconded the investigators! These very distinguished inspectors were nodding and preening as if they’d been gifted by a visit from the queen.

  “And you were with your husband in the first-class car when the accident occurred? You must have seen it all.”

  “I feared it was going to happen—”

  Hunter listened to his wife explain her impossible-to-credit gift for gauging the condition of the tracks by the sensations she felt in her feet, and he wondered how grown men could stand there gaping at her as if they believed every word. It was the pink of her cheeks, not her experience, that drew them as she gamboled along the twisted track like a bit of eiderdown, pointing out her observations and pronouncing her suspicions, which ran the gamut from the effects of mud and humidity on iron rails to the load on the locomotive to George Hudson’s bunions.

  Sawyer scribbled earnestly on his notepad, and stroked his chin, nodded his approval to the others, and occasionally to Hunter himself, including him in the conversation without actually having to consult with him.

  He was finally dragged away from his wife’s performance to lead the rescue effort. He hoisted rails and yanked aside sheets of iron, every movement a labor to evict his wife from his thoughts.

  She stayed anyway.

  It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning, the sun washing over the countryside, when he was finally able to load the woman into the twice returned passenger car and travel on toward Blenwick.

  She sat beside him in the seat, her posture upright, but her eyelids drooping.

  “Where are we going, Mr. Claybourne? I ought to see to the injured in the little hospital.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Her suit jacket was missing, along with her petticoats, and her white bodice had long ago been blackened and bloodied. She had the courage and tenacity of a lioness, but she looked like one of those American raccoons he’d seen at the London zoo, her eyes scrubbed clean and the rest of her face streaked with soot and mud.

  “You’ve done enough for one disaster, Mrs. Claybourne. The injured are in good hands at Blenwick Hospital. You need sleep. The station master recommended a place called the Brightwater Arms, one of your damnable country inns. With any kind of luck, we can sleep until sometime tomorrow. I hope that meets with your approval.”

  When she didn’t answer, or offer an argument, he lifted her curtain of hair from the side of her face. Fast asleep and listing away from him in rhythm with the rocking train.

  He caught his arm around her shoulders and settled her head against his chest and wondered how she would rate the Brightwater Arms for her travel gazette.

  Hell, he wondered how she would rate him.

  The woman fell asleep again in a chair in the common room of the Brightwater as he was registering. He carried her up to their small room, then settled her onto the bed—his bed.

  “No choice in the matter, my dear,” he told his sleeping wife as he unlaced her now tattered, near-soleless shoes and dropped them on the floor. “It was the only room left.”

  He shucked off his shirt and would have done the same for his trousers and his drawers, but he thought it best not to shock the woman when she woke. She slept on like a stone, even as he covered her with a counterpane then crawled under it with an involuntary groan. He should have removed her soot-streaked, bloodstained clothes, but he wasn’t sure he’d be the first to awaken, and he didn’t want her to strangle him in his sleep.

  “Good night, Felicity,” he whispered. Or maybe he just thought it.

  And maybe he just imagined he heard a sleepy, “Good night, Hunter,” from the pillow next to his.

  Chapter 13

  Felicity woke slowly out of a dreamless sleep, kept her eyes tightly closed and savored the warm breeze that eddied gently across her cheek. Must be a bright morning, the sun was streaming in from some nearby window. Where exactly was she? In which charming village inn, above which neat little public house. Must have had a late night to be this drowsy. She yawned and stretched and would have slipped back to sleep on a lazy morning like this, but for some reason her body felt pummeled and bruised and she smelled of cinders and steam…dear God, the train!

  She opened her eyes and the nightmare rushed at her like all the horrors of hell; brimstone and broken bodies, a conflagration of smoke and flame. And Hunter standing amidst the infe
rno—doing battle with the devil!

  “Hunter—where?” She sat bolt upright, then breathed out a sigh of relief. He was right there beside her in the tiny bed, sleeping soundly, his head half on her pillow, breathing softly – the source of that eddying breeze—his chest bared and smudged with mud and rust and probably blood, but not his own. A bruise had taken root on his forehead, and his face was so smeared with soot and grime he might well have been coalman, or one of the street urchins he despised so much.

  That he wasn’t among the gravely injured or the dead was a miracle. Every disaster needed a hero; he was that and more to her, to everyone, last night.

  She had wanted so much to dislike him, for the hundred different faults she could count against his large and brooding character. And yet she’d seen such startling moments of virtue in him. He’d been gentle and generous with the injured, taken command of the rescue, and hadn’t let go.

  Yet how could she ever forgive him for his callous, uncalled-for intolerance in his everyday life, his hatred of the helpless and the innocent. He’d treated Giles like a beast, as though the boy were nothing more than leavings to sweep into the gutter. Had become a wild-eyed madman when he’d found her near the slums; had nearly drowned her until he’d scrubbed the muck off her clothes.

  Where did a man come by such blind prejudice? In a home filled with hate? A brutal father could as easily teach a son to loathe as he could to fish; could beat a boy and abuse his heart until that son learned to raise himself up and fight back the only way he knew how, with a cold heart turned against the world, against the light. Living in a house as gray as a tomb, and as silent—a refuge against the encroaching wildness of the heath.

  Though he wasn’t particularly miserly, nor was his pride propped up by the imperious trappings of his wealth and position. When she had dressed her chamber like that of a princess, he’d only asked after her comfort. When she opened all the windows to the sunlight, he’d shied from the brightness at first, but hadn’t complained.

  He’d grumbled about the cost of her wardrobe, but rightly so. Seven hundred pounds was more than most workingman’s lifetime wage. But he’d paid the bill, never begrudged her a stitch, never mentioned the cost again, even when the lot was delivered.

  And last evening, before the accident, when he forced her to ride with him in the rail carriage—he’d surprised her with his banter. What should have been a ghastly journey made in a cloud of ill-humor and unvoiced accusations had been a nearly enjoyable adventure. No, entirely enjoyable. He’d been charming, conversational, willing to share some of his life with her. And a pot of strawberry preserves.

  And then he’d slipped a wedding band on her finger, of all the unexpected things!

  Something deep inside her had changed in that moment and in all the dark moments afterward—a commitment she hadn’t meant to make, entangling her heart.

  And she’d so blithely sealed it with a kiss. If only she hadn’t been so eager, but the moment had been heady and hot, so lovely she’d wanted it to go on and on. And wasn’t entirely his fault! How was the poor man to be expected to restrain his urges if she encouraged him?

  Urges. She had felt them in herself long before he kissed her, and during, felt them rising even now as she lay here beside him, making a study of his coal black lashes, his finely sculpted mouth.

  He stirred, frowned and flinched in his sleep, then turned his head from her.

  Better to let him sleep while she took a steaming hot bath, if she could find one.

  She gathered a change of clothes from her bag, limped down the hall to the bath closet, and lounged for half an hour before drying off and dressing in her clean brown traveling suit and returning to the room.

  Her husband was still sleeping. So Felicity took her portmanteau with her folios and went downstairs to have tea in the common room.

  A full two hours later, she heard a thump and a thunderous voice above stairs, and looked up from her writing. The three women who sat nearby had heard it, too, and stared at her as though she could explain the sounds.

  She had her suspicions.

  Footsteps raged down the narrow stairwell, and an instant later Hunter Claybourne stumbled into view in the doorway, his chest bare and heaving, his hair rumpled, his face still smudged, and his eyes blazing.

  “Where do you think you’re going, wife?” he bellowed, coming to a staggering halt on the last step, holding fast to either side of the opening. He looked very large.

  She hadn’t known he could move so quickly.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Claybourne, and neither should you. Especially without your shirt.” She hid her smile from him. But the other women now stared openly at the scandalously deranged man who had just swooped down on the diners.

  He was a proud man and she hoped he wouldn’t feel as exposed as he appeared. He glanced toward the sheltered titters from the other side of the room, then turned and disappeared up the stairs.

  When her scowling husband was out of earshot, Felicity winked at the three women. “As handsome as he is mad, isn’t he?”

  They must have agreed, because the giggling continued amid talk of the train wreck and the mysterious man who had exhibited superhuman powers in his single-handed rescue.

  When he finally descended the stairs a half-hour later, he looked as he always did on his way out the door to his office: scrubbed and tailored and confident, except for the wary gaze he swept across the room.

  “They’re are gone, Mr. Claybourne,” she said, pleased to finally be alone with him.

  “And the inspectors?” He tugged stiffly on each cuff, gave his neckcloth a tug, and came toward her with a slight hitch in his step.

  “Gone to a tavern, it seems. Mr. Sawyer asked me to tell you there’d be a photographer here tomorrow morning.”

  “Good.” He exhaled a short, stiff grunt as he sat down opposite her at the table.

  She wanted to inspect the bruise that hid among the loosened curls at his hairline, but decided against drawing his temper. “You seem not much the worse for last night’s wear.”

  “I’m older by a decade, at least.”

  “That would make you how old, Mr. Claybourne? About forty?”

  “Well into my eighties.”

  She smiled. “Then you’ve aged nicely, sir.” He looked quite miserable in his stiff collar. “But truthfully, husband, I really ought to know how old you are. In case anyone asks. You know, in the same way I needed to know how to answer if they asked if you’ve kissed me.”

  He leaned toward her with such imposing determination, she thought he would kiss her again right there in the common room. But he stopped short of such a display and said in a very low, very pointed tone, “Tell them to mind their own business.”

  “I’ll tell them you’re eighty.”

  “Have you eaten?” he asked, eyeing the cook as the woman came toward them with a plate.

  “Twice,” she said. “I said you’d be hungry as soon as you came down. I also thought you’d like this.” She handed him a copy of the Times.

  He looked surprised and cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

  She forgave him his brusqueness, and moved her writing out of the way as the woman sat a heaping plate of sliced beef and roasted potatoes in front of Claybourne. “And I ordered your favorite wine.”

  “And how would you know what kind of wine I prefer?”

  “You have crates of it in your cellar.”

  Hunter felt suddenly catered to, and altogether suspicious of her motives. “Ah, yes, my cellar. I might have known you’d have found your way down there.”

  He decided that his wife was entirely too observant, and entirely too lovely this evening. Her hair hung down her back, tied away from her face by a ribbon of the same lush green as her eyes. She was dressed again in her travel-brown, poised, it seemed, to leave him at a moment’s notice. And yet she was gazing at him over the top of her tea cup, and he wondered what devilment she was designing and what part she ha
d planned for him.

  “By the way, Mr. Claybourne, I took the liberty of hiring a vintner to sort your stock of wines for you, and to store it correctly.”

  Hunter set the glass down. “You did what?”

  “Wine goes bad if it isn’t cared for properly. And that would be a sad waste of good money, wouldn’t it?”

  “That doesn’t give you leave to hire people without my permission.”

  “It’s for your own good. Mr. Claybourne, your house is not a home. It’s a huge, cold-storage building.”

  “I’m a very busy man. I can’t worry about which lamp goes where—”

  “That’s a wife’s job.”

  “So is warming a husband’s bed.” Damnation, why the devil did he say something like that? The very last thing he should have said—given their cozy isolation, and the fact that she had been tangled in his bedclothes so very recently, and that she now wore that bloody gold band on her finger! The only thing he could see anymore, besides a tiny cut on her cheek. Those green, green eyes. And her mouth. A vexing warmth slid up his neck from his chest.

  She fiddled with her pencil and looked out at him through feathery lashes. “You confuse me, Mr. Claybourne.”

  “Please ignore my outburst.” He was beginning to sweat.

  “With pleasure. Your living conditions are deplorable. I have been attempting to make your house more homelike, with your express permission, I remind you. But if you’re going to fight me, or forbid me, say so now and I’ll stop trying. I’ll keep to my chamber and tend a small corner of the garden, and I’ll try to spend more time on my travels.”

  More time away? He hadn’t liked the silence she’d left behind. And he’d come to expect the scent of the wildflowers she brought into the house, and the perfumed breezes skipping through the open windows, and all that blasted sunlight. “Fine. Hire anyone you like to do whatever you think needs doing around the house.”

  She smiled broadly. “Outside and in?”