Ever His Bride Read online

  “Dear husband,” she whispered too breathlessly, “you ought to be watching the stage!”

  He brushed his warm fingertips deliciously along her forearm, and she sighed.

  “How can I watch the stage, my dear, when I have you here beside me?” Hunter looked far too roguish in the shadowy, gas-dimmed light. He held her hand in his bare palm as if it were porcelain, tugging on one tiny button, then the next, unusually patient in his efforts, his smile brazenly crafty.

  “Aren’t you at all interested in that woeful young man and his sweetheart?”

  “My interest is entirely with you, madam.” His fingers were like fire, his eyes as dark as a moonless ridge of shale, when she dared glance at him.

  “Hunter Claybourne, what are you doing?” Their private box was surely visible from the galleries above them; anyone could look in.

  “Undressing my wife.” His whisper was a phantom caress, slipping itself around her heart, making her smile. “One button at a time.”

  He stroked his warm fingers deliciously between her palm and her glove as if they were his mouth and tongue, tugged and persuaded until he had freed each of her fingers. “Your other hand, my sweet. I need you naked.”

  Felicity giggled even as she tried to frown at him. “I hope you plan to stop with my gloves.”

  His laughter was low and gentle. “For now.”

  She gave up her other hand. Though he never touched more than her hand, he never took his eyes off her, and she felt quite thoroughly kissed when he finished and both hands were bare. She flushed to her hairline as he tucked her gloves into his breast pocket like a shared secret.

  “I love you, Hunter.”

  His face was shadowed, lending an enigmatic glint to his eyes. “And that, my dear, makes you the most remarkable woman I have ever met.”

  “For loving you?”

  She was altogether certain that he loved her, even if he couldn’t tell her so. It just wasn’t his way. But he’d begun to court her as if she were the most important thing in his life. He’d made a desk for her in his library; left her sweet notes, and blush-making ones. She found fresh flowers in her shoes, and a ready partner to walk the grounds in the evening and listen to her plans for the knot garden and the herbarium.

  “I am not loveable, Felicity. Ask anyone in London.” He nodded in the direction of the three thousand other people packed into the theater, as if they knew him and would agree.

  “Let them ask me, Hunter. I’m the expert.”

  Not so long ago, Hunter would have been terrified by the thought; now it pleased him to his soul. She knew him intimately, as no one ever had, and yet she loved him still. He wanted to confess his heart to her, the love for her that teemed there, would do it now, but he didn’t really know how to form such an elemental thing into words. She was the electrifying tumult that banged around in his chest; she had become his pulse and the substance of his days. But he grew hopelessly tongue-tied whenever he set out to explain himself to her. Yet she seemed to know already, seemed to find some amusement in his hesitation, as if it added to her estimation of him. Another secret she held against him.

  He prayed for her patience, and would have swept her into his arms just then, but the first act of the blasted opera seemed to be finished and the gaslights had begun their annoying hissing toward brilliance.

  “Well, I’m disappointed, Hunter! The woman turned down the tenor and sent him on his way. Poor man, he must feel awful.”

  “He’s an incompetent fool.”

  “Hunter! How can you say that about a man in the throes of love?” She was frowning deeply, nearly pouting.

  He had little patience for men, fictional or otherwise, who didn’t know their own minds. He lifted his wife’s fingers to his lips. “If the blighter really loved the woman, he’d have simply offered her the choice between marriage and jail.”

  “What a …” She looked startled for an instant, then her entire face softened in a smile that spoke of miracles.

  He had tipped his heart toward her in the space of a second, and it seemed to fill up and spill over again immediately. “In fact, my love,” he said as she cupped his cheek and whispered his name against his mouth, “I recommend it highly.”

  “Oh, Hunter, I love you.”

  His heart hammered, and his breath caught up in his throat. He kissed her softly, though he yearned to wrap her in his arms and sing his love into her hair. But they weren’t alone; the galleries above and the boxes on either side were thick with people tonight. “We should take a tour of the lobby, love. Before I make a fool of myself here in the box.”

  She laughed quietly, and touched his mouth with her fingers, hiding a secret from him, he was sure.

  “Yes, we’ll wait till we get home, Hunter. Some things are best said in private.”

  Inflamed but in control of his passions, Hunter led her from the box into the crowded lobby, exhilarated from his near-confession. Another few moments alone with her and he might have been on his knees, babbling love words like a poet gone lunatic. Even now she was close enough to whisper to, her lovely ear framed in wispy curls and inviting his mouth. And he wanted her to know how much he cared, how much he loved her. “Felicity—”

  “Look, Hunter, there’s Lady Oswin, calling me over. Would you mind if I spoke with her?”

  Hunter took her hand and kissed her wedding band. “The woman makes my ears ache.”

  “It’s probably about the academy. She’s very enthusiastic. And she’s thinking of giving us a new coal heater.”

  “If I promise you two heaters, will you stay here with me?”

  “Hunter, you’re incorrigible.” Yet there she was, with her fingers tucked into his waistcoat again, tugging at him.

  He didn’t give a fig for Lady Oswin; he wanted to corner his wife and fill her with words of love. He could see down the front of her bodice, where the sleek, black satin draped precariously across the rise of her breasts, tempting him to explore. And her eyes, flirting and ever faithful, tempting him to love her all the more. But there would be time enough later, in the private box and in the brougham, all the way home and for the rest of his life.

  “Certainly, my love.” He caressed the small of her back and snuggled a kiss against her ear. “I’ll bring you a champagne.”

  She touched a blissful kiss to his cheek, and he watched her glide through the crowd toward Lady Oswin.

  Temptation. Yes, she was that. A temptation to believe that nothing else mattered but her love for him, and the home she’d made of her heart. Dear God, it was comfortable there, and sheltered. He could look out onto her goodness and feel that some of it was his. Her benevolence had become his conscience, his penance, and it had begun to fit him very well.

  A temptation to believe in redemption.

  “Damn you to hell, Claybourne!”

  Hunter turned from his reverie and found Lord Meath at his elbow. The man looked apoplectic: red-jowled and irrational. He had calmed Meath more than once when one of the man’s unadvised investments had gone awry. What the devil could be wrong now?

  “Lord Meath. What is it?”

  Meath only got redder. “Don’t act the damned fool, Claybourne. It doesn’t become you.”

  Hunter felt suddenly, inexplicably, shoved to the edge of a towering cliff, and he was terrified. Meath’s goodwill meant everything to him: legitimacy and the assurance that his fortunes would thrive.

  “Sir, you have me at a disadvantage—”

  “I’ll bury you, Claybourne!” Sputtering in his whispered rage, Meath yanked a folded magazine from his breast pocket and waggled it in Hunter’s face. “And don’t tell me you know nothing about it.”

  Mercantile Weekly. Hunter calmly took the magazine, trying to keep his hands from shaking as he leafed through it, page by page. “And what am I looking for, my lord?”

  “Your wife’s handiwork, damn you!” Meath slapped the next page.

  “My wife—”

  Hunter saw her name th
en—his own name, the one he’d given to her. Mrs. Hunter Claybourne. His hands went cold. He tried to keep a steady focus, but the letters only blurred in his efforts, and he discovered himself a child again unable to make sense of the scratchings. “I hesitate to say, Lord Meath, that I don’t know what is contained in here.”

  “‘The Tragedy of Workhouse Children?’ Can’t you guess?” Meath hushed his voice and threw a brief glance around them at the crowded lobby. “Half my fortune, Claybourne, and my business, my very legal business—denounced as evil, and slandered by your wife in a trade magazine! There for all the world to see!”

  The words in Felicity’s article focused and then blazed past Hunter’s eyes as he read snatches of the piece. The foulness… the wretched wraiths… the cruel masters. The woman had spared no detail, and his fear reached up into his throat. And there, in the list of the buyers and sellers of these slop-trade goods, was the Harling Street Emporium—owned by Meath’s vast holding company.

  Damn it, Felicity! What is this?

  “Seven irreplaceable orders canceled today alone, Claybourne. Seven! Thousands and thousands of pounds gone elsewhere!”

  “My humblest apologies, sir.” He knew before he’d said them that such words meant nothing to a man like Meath. How could they? Where was the profit in apologies? He’d have felt the same if his own name had been dragged through this particular muck.

  “Damn your worthless apologies, Claybourne! My name has been irrevocably linked to workhouses, to labor scandals! And all because of you! That’s the end of it! If you can’t control your wife, I doubt you’re capable of maintaining control as a Commissioner of Railways.”

  “Sir.” Everything inside him hardened. A roaring rushed into his ears, built up against his temples and began to pound.

  Damn you, Felicity! She’d been nothing but trouble to him from that moment in the sponging house. And he’d walked right into it, blinded by her sunlight and by her reckless promises. He gathered his focus and his resolve and fixed them both on Meath.

  “Sir—”

  “Do you hear me, Claybourne?” The man was still squawking, an insignificant parasite, preying on anything that got in his way. Wives and children and reputations. And now he was holding the name Hunter Claybourne in his fat, unscarred hand.

  “I do hear you, sir.” He could hear little else. “I understand completely.”

  “Good. Because I will block your election, Claybourne! Your nomination will be pulled immediately. And you can damn well expect a great migration from the Claybourne Exchange. As you can see from your wife’s libelous misrepresentations, there are others involved here, others affected—”

  “Lord Meath, I—” But Hunter stopped himself. He wouldn’t beg, though his guts had twisted up on themselves and sweat ran down his back. He hadn’t begged since he was a boy, and he wasn’t about to start again now. He would fix this with Meath somehow, and with the others. But it wouldn’t come from his begging. The fix would start elsewhere.

  She had become a liability and he knew better than any of them what to do with a liability.

  “There’s your wife now, Claybourne. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep her locked up. You’ll be hearing from my solicitors.” Meath disappeared into the crowd.

  Locked up, locked away? Yes, that would have been the right choice from the beginning. It was what he had always done with thieves and liars.

  Trust me, she had said. Whisper your secrets to me, Hunter and I will keep them. I love you.

  And so he had trusted her, unconditionally, with everything that had ever been dear to him.

  How easily she had betrayed him.

  “Hunter?”

  He turned sharply away from the hotly familiar hand on his arm. He didn’t want to look at her, not yet. He needed strength to stand against her and her all-deceiving righteousness.

  “Hunter, you look pale. What’s wrong?”

  Felicity had missed him even in the short minutes they’d been apart. She sought her husband’s eyes when he finally turned; but they had never seemed so shadowed and inaccessible, nor so stingingly fixed on hers. A chill poured off him, coating her in icy fear and making her hug her wrap around her shoulders.

  “What’s happened, Hunter? Have you and Meath quarreled?”

  He seemed to lose focus for a moment, lifted his hand and stumbled a step toward her, as if he had wrestled a terrifying violence and had caught himself. She watched words form on his lips and then disappear in disgust, as though they tasted vile on his tongue.

  “Hunter—”

  “Come!” His deep voice shook with bottled rage. He stalked away, toward the Bow Street entrance.

  “Hunter!” A sinking dread crept over her, a torn seam left unmended and now splitting wide. She hurried after him, across the emptying lobby. He was already through the iron gate and down the four steps of the deserted portico when she reached the exit door. He was barking for his carriage when she reached his side.

  “Tell me what’s happened, Hunter. You’re frightening me. Is there trouble at home? At the Exchange?”

  “Trouble?” His face was granite and his eyes as brittle as spun glass when he looked down at her. “It’s a bit late for you to worry about that, Miss Mayfield.”

  “What are you talking about?” She touched his elbow and he shook it off with a wild gesture.

  “Don’t!” He climbed back up the stairs to stand beside one of the thick stone pillars, watching the street, his arms gone rigid at his side.

  Frightened to death by his cold anger, she followed him up the steps. “Why are you so angry? What happened in there?”

  “It happened in here, Miss Mayfield.” He brandished a tightly rolled magazine, then threw it backhanded to the ground. It skidded across the portico and stuck beneath the bars of the iron gate.

  Suddenly fuming at his unwarranted hostility, Felicity retrieved the magazine.

  “You have no right to treat me this way, Hunter, no matter what had happened between you and Lord Meath.” She unrolled the cover as he stood his watch over the street. “The Mercantile Weekly? What is this? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Liar.”

  Furious and frightened, she took a step toward him. “Hunter, I’ve never seen this magazine before.”

  “Then who the hell is the Mrs. Hunter Claybourne on page nine?”

  Her hands began to shake as she found the page, a blur of black ink and pulp white; “The Tragedy of—” This is Dolan’s doing! He must have started another weekly.

  “I don’t understand. It’s my workhouse article, Hunter.”

  His eyes were unyielding obsidian when he turned to her. “And one of Meath’s most profitable businesses you reviled, in your little broadside. And I’m the one who must pay for your folly.” He stuck his fists into his pockets and paced to the edge of the portico, dismissing her as he looked out onto the noisy traffic.

  The Commission! The endorsement of all his achievements. Dear God, what she had done to him! “Hunter, I’m so sorry to put you in this position! I didn’t know about Meath. He wasn’t on the list. I wouldn’t have … I’m so sorry—”

  He barked a laugh, but didn’t spare a look at her. “Feeble words, those. ‘I’m sorry.’ I tried them myself—Meath wouldn’t have them. He doesn’t trust me any longer. And I don’t blame him. Finds my name and my reputation objectionable. He’s taking his business elsewhere and slapping me with a liable suit. Well, I can’t afford that, Miss Mayfield.”

  “Hunter, I—”

  He turned to her then, his face wintery and the light gone from his eyes. “And I can no longer afford you.”

  “No longer …” Her heart paused in its racing. “What do you mean?”

  “Branson will be here momentarily to pick you up. You will pack your things and be gone from Claybourne Manor in the morning.”

  “Gone, Hunter?” Her throat thickened and failed in a sob. “And that’s it? Our irrevocable marriage? Gone?”


  “I gave you every warning—”

  “You’re a coward, Hunter!” He had just discharged her, simply and cleanly. Now he was looking through her, all his connections efficiently severed. Shaking with anger and nearly hobbled by the pain in her chest, Felicity held out the magazine.

  “You, above anyone, can do something to stop this barbarous practice, Hunter. You should condemn it! Meath’s part in this foul business is indefensible.”

  He glanced away from her and went back to his traffic-watching. They might have been strangers waiting for separate hackneys.

  “You’ll be amply provided for, Miss Mayfield. Separation papers will be delivered to you as soon as you forward your new address to my solicitor.”

  “Separation.” Felicity put her hand to her stomach, a shield for the child that might be growing there. “And love counts for nothing, Hunter?”

  He only nodded toward his carriage as it came around the corner on Bow Street. “Branson’s here. You’ve become a liability to me, Miss Mayfield,” he said flatly. “A risk I can no longer sustain.”

  He turned without a glance, and walked back into the theater.

  Her desolation pushed her backward against the pillar and pinned her there, trembling. The pain in her chest was so hot it burned away the tears before they got to her eyes.

  “You’re wrong, Hunter.” She had struck him a terrible blow, but he was wrong. Her disappointment in him blazed as fiercely as her loss.

  If Hunter couldn’t stand up to Lord Meath, a man who built his trade on the backs of helpless children like Andy and Giles and Betts, then she could have nothing more to do with him anyway, no matter how much she loved him. She would continue her fight for the children as long as she could draw breath.

  Branson hadn’t seen her yet, and he was climbing the steps on the far side of the portico to take her back home to Claybourne Manor.

  Home?

  She slipped into the shadows of Bow Street and left the Royal Opera House. She had a new home now—with Gran McGilly and the children at the Beggar’s Academy.