Текст книги "I Married the Duke "

Автор книги: Katharine Ashe

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His caress halted.

“Reiner?”

She met his gaze in the mirror. “We do not know who he is, only that he would not recognize the ring unless one of us first wed him.”

His hand fell away from her and moved to his neck cloth. He peered at himself in the mirror and made a minuscule adjustment to the linen. “That sounds like a Gypsy tale if ever I heard one.”

“You think me foolish. And you are correct, for I was foolish to believe in the story. But I keenly wished to know my father. And I wished to know if my mother was the woman that Reverend Caulfield always said she must have been to have abandoned us. If she was a whore.” She swiveled around to look directly up at him. “Do you believe me? About the ring?”

“What reason have I not to?” It was not a statement. It was a question for her.

At this moment she could beg him to believe in her fidelity. She could insist that she would never take another man to her bed like Adina had taken a lover, perhaps like her own mother had long ago, producing three so very different daughters that to believe they shared the same father was naïve. She could tell him that he needn’t hide her in the country with guards to watch her every move because she would never be unfaithful to him.

But she had already told him this and he was still holding secrets from her.

She took up a lacy black shawl and went to the door. “Our guests will arrive shortly. I shouldn’t like to be late.” She turned and for an instant thought she saw a shadow of bleakness on his scarred face. Then it was gone. Possibly she had only imagined it.

She waited for him to come to the door and open it for her, and went down the stairs on his arm, the Comte and Comtesse of Rallis appearing to all the world like they were in perfect accord with each other.

AFTER DINNER, A sumptuous affair with a dozen removes, sparkling conversation, and much laughter, a game of cards was gotten up among the gentlemen. Alone with the ladies, Arabella negotiated the torturous trek between governess and comtesse with every sentence she uttered. Her guests were people of sophistication, though, and all of them affectionate toward Luc, and Captain Masinter and Lord Bedwyr’s easy acceptance of her made it natural.

After midnight she climbed the stairs to her bedchamber thoroughly exhausted. Luc did not come to her bed. Lying awake, she heard him leave his bedchamber and descend the stairs, but he did not return.

After breakfast, leaning back into her cushions, the round lump of her baby protruding from her excessively slender body, Adina waved Arabella away when she offered to assist with the wedding arrangements. Mrs. Baxter busily opened invitation replies and wrote names carefully on the ever-growing list of guests. Arabella left the women to their enjoyment.

Joseph was again at her side, which she took to mean that Luc was not in the house. Accompanied by her burly footman, she made her way to the front of the house and began exploring rooms. When she came upon a modest-sized chamber furnished with a desk, two chairs, and a sideboard sporting an array of crystal carafes and glasses, she backed out of the doorway. Then she paused and went in again, shutting the door in the face of her guard, with a smile for him.

Her nerves were raw, her head aching and stomach queasy. A spot of brandy seemed just the thing to take the edge off of her agitation. Whenever it was that Luc allowed her to see him again, she would be calm and strong and not allow his teasing and secrets to hurt her.

She removed the stopper from a bottle, sniffed, her eyes sprang with tears and she coughed.

Brandy.

She took up a glass and dribbled a thimbleful into it, then made her way a chair and settled down. The pure luxury of doing nothing at ten o’clock in the morning but sitting in a comfortable leather chair and sipping spirits made her smile.

She was still smiling when she glanced at the papers piled in three neat stacks before her. She set down the glass and took up the folio on top of the stack in the center of the blotter.

Pursuant to your intention to petition Parliament for grant of a divorce: a complete and detailed accounting of your wife’s infidelities must be compiled, including dates, places, names, and all possible witnesses. In establishing her True and Undeniable Infidelity in preparation for a hearing of this sort, you must be willing to expose her thoroughly, including those factors in her family and youth that could provide grounds for character assassination. There is no easy way about this, and although I know that a man of your character will be loath to expose his family to public censure, these are the steps that must be taken to ensure your desired result.

It was clearly the draft of a letter, with smudges where the author had dipped his pen anew and words crossed and corrected in the margins. Arabella’s stomach churned nevertheless.

It must be a mistake. Perhaps a prank? Luc would not insist that she wed him in order to immediately divorce her.

But he was hiding secrets from her.

She pulled the stack of papers toward her, and her hands threw each page aside after her desperate eyes scanned them. Her gaze arrested finally on a letter written in the same hand, another draft but signed this time.

The lady in whom you have expressed interest is Miss Caroline Gardiner, the eldest daughter of Lord Harold Gardiner and Lady Frances Gardiner. A new title, the estate is fifty miles northwest of Combe and prosperous. The portion to be settled on Miss Gardiner is fifteen thousand pounds, including rights to the operation of the mill at Gardiner Crossing. Potential investment in the mines on Lord Gardiner’s lands is to be considered separately from any marriage settlement. But in my estimation the lady’s portion is more than sufficient to reinvigorate the estate at this time, leaving ample surplus for future projects or to be spent on your properties in the North and in France, as you wish.

If I may, there is an added attraction: the girl is remarkably pretty and recently out of the schoolroom. As her parents are not longtime members of society, they are unaware of the exigencies that could serve as potential deterrents to the marriage. Indeed, I have it on good counsel that they will be more than eager to ally their family with Combe.

I will await your instructions before drawing up an official offer.

Sincerely,

Thomas Robert Jonas Firth, Esq.

An heiress?

Arabella felt astoundingly dizzy. She set the letter atop the pile and tried to draw even breaths. She suspected she would shortly succumb to panicked misery, but at present she felt only cold, metallic nausea and thorough confusion.

Luc had insisted she marry him. Insisted. Then he refused to give her an annulment. Then he asked her to marry him—again—not quietly to fulfill the requirements of the Church, but in a wedding entirely of her choice.

It made no sense. Except that Combe would benefit enormously from fifteen thousand pounds suddenly emptied into its coffers. With that money, the tenants would be round and merry in no time.

The tenants he had wanted her to know.

She pressed a shaking hand against her face. What sort of game was he playing?

Abruptly she could not be still a moment longer. She bolted out of the chair. Her head spun and stomach heaved. She grabbed the edge of the desk and swallowed back her gorge.

With a wash of pure, hot awareness, she understood. Her body was rebelling because she was no longer alone in it.

She sank onto the chair and her hands stole to her belly then to her breast. The nipple was tender, her flesh ever so slightly fuller. It was not her gown the previous night that had displayed her bosom to such great advantage. It was Luc’s child growing inside her.

She smiled. Then she laughed. Then she cried.

Then she wiped the tears from her face and went to the door.

She would not release him. Despite his secretary’s letters and his continued distance, she did not believe he wished to release her. She would deliver him an heir as he needed and it would have brilliant green eyes. And she would help him solve the problem of the tenants’ poverty.

Armed with uncertain courage, her first order of business would be to send a footman to bring the modiste to the house. She was to be married—again—in ten days. She needed a wedding gown.

Chapter 16

The Wedding

“Must be nice to be nearly a duke, Luc old friend.” Captain Anthony Masinter of the HMS Victory stood at the helm of the hundred-twenty-two-gun man-of-war and surveyed his realm. “You can demand that the Royal Navy send its ship not only into port but up a river, for God’s sake, and the Admiralty leaps to it.”

Festooned with garlands of white flowers, paper lanterns, and servants rushing about, the vessel was nothing less than an elegant festival afloat on the Thames. Adina Westfall was a silly woman, but she knew the pomp that must attend such a wedding. All was celebratory.

Except his bride.

As the day drew near, she had been increasingly evasive. Claiming herculean tasks yet to accomplish, she took her dinners with Adina and Mrs. Baxter and spent much of every day in meetings with caterers, florists, and the like. Luc visited his club and met with Firth again, and tried not to crave a glimpse of her in passing. Pathetically, in the hopes of actually sitting in a room with her for several minutes, he visited Adina’s chambers. Arabella was not present, but Adina was loquacious.

“Oh, Luc, you will be the most splendid guardian to my baby, whether it is a boy or a girl,” she gushed. “I am delighted my darling Theodore arranged it thus.”

She was not intelligent enough to be a good actor; he believed her. Fletcher had not yet spoken to her. His threats were either for show or he did not wish to distress her until the baby was safely born.

Word came from Parsons that several of the tenant farmers had requested the opportunity to meet with him when he returned to Combe. The land steward asked him how long he would be absent on his wedding trip. Luc could not give him an answer.

He sent a note to his comtesse . . . who lived in the same house. Nearly six years as captain of one of the navy’s finest vessels, and he felt like an absolute imbecile that he could not even command the voluntary attention of his wife.

As Miles pulled his coat over his shoulders—a coat he would undoubtedly wear to dine alone—she poked her head into his dressing chamber. She wore a simple black gown that climbed all the way up her neck, and her glorious hair was braided in two thick plaits that fell over her shoulders. A Valkyrie’s hair. Rather, she looked like a girl training to be a governess. Both, combined. She wore no jewels or ribbons, not on her hands or in her ears or about her neck, and the lump of the ruby ring was missing from beneath her bodice. Her cheeks were flushed with pink and her lips parted.

“You wished to see me?”

In every way through every hour of every day.

His mouth was dry.

He gestured for Miles to leave and he walked to her. “I did.”

The tilt of her chin was high. But he could not resist touching her. He took the end of a braid between his fingers and stroked the satiny tress.

“I was reminded today that newly wedded couples often embark upon a wedding journey after the nuptials,” he said, feeling ridiculously clumsy, his tongue stiff. He looked down at the fiery locks in his palm. “Would you like that?”

“We will not be newly wedded, however,” she said. “And as we have already traveled quite a bit recently, I don’t really see why we should now do so simply to suit convention.”

He allowed the braid to slide from his fingers. He clasped his hands behind his back and met her gaze.

His heart jerked beneath his ribs. For a moment her eyes were soft, the light in them almost seeking, it seemed. Then they shuttered again.

It was this swift shuttering each time they spoke that restrained Luc from going to her bed at night. He could demand his rights as a husband and she would acquiesce; she was a woman of passion. But he could not use her like that. She deserved more than the treatment a man might serve his mistress. She deserved to be treated like the princess she had once hoped to be.

He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it, though. A sennight had already seemed like a millennium. If life with her were to be this slow, tortuous death of wanting her and not having her, he would have preferred to die on that beach in Saint-Nazaire after all.

But as he looked down at her lovely face and saw in it both wary reticence and adorable determination, he could not wish that in truth. Even brief moments alone with her were better than a lifetime without her. His madness, it seemed, had become complete.

“Do you?” she said.

“Do I . . . ?” He grasped at the strands of his reason unraveling in her presence, as they always did.

“Do you think we should bow to convention?”

He reached up to rub the back of his neck as though he were considering the matter. He was stalling for time. This issue was about to be settled, the conversation concluded, and she would leave.

“I have never found convention particularly inspiring,” he said. “But forgive me, little governess. I realize that teaching conventional manners must have been the ballast of your livelihood for some time.”

“To the girls who possessed no natural spark of originality, yes. To those with unique spirit, however, I encouraged . . .”

“You encouraged?”

“I encouraged them to follow their dreams in whatever manner they thought would most benefit them.”

His chest actually hurt. She had tried to follow her dream and he had trapped her just short of achieving it.

“I don’t suppose you offered the same counsel to their mothers.” He didn’t know how he accomplished a grin.

“Not precisely.” Her perfect raspberry lips curved into a small smile. “But one becomes proficient at speaking around the truth when one is in an unenviable posi—” Her throat constricted. “—position.” She took a quick breath. “I should go now. I have a hundred and two tasks to accomplish this afternoon.” Her entire demeanor had altered to agitation. “Is that everything you wished to discuss?”

“Yes,” he lied.

She glided away, and he stood still long after she had gone, his heart beating hard and slow.

He had not seen her in the two days since. And now he was to take her as his bride a second time, this time with the sanction of the Church of England.

“After you have captained this ship for nearly six years during war,” he said to Tony, “you will not have to be even a baronet to be given special privileges.”

Tony snorted.

From the quarterdeck Luc watched the wedding guests arriving across the pontoon boats that had been arranged as a sturdy walkway from the riverbank to the ship.

His heart turned. Upon his cousin’s arm, Arabella picked her way carefully across the fabricated bridge to the deck, her head high and shoulders back. She showed no hint of fear as she boarded. Her shimmering hair was swept up in cascading curls, and her gown of the palest pink left her neck and arms bare and offered a tantalizing hint of the feminine beauty beneath it.

With Cam, she passed beneath the white canopy erected above the gangway and came on deck.

Luc went forward.

“Ah, my dear,” his cousin said. “Here is your groom.”

She reached up and touched her hand to Cam’s cheek and kissed him there. “Thank you, my lord.”

Luc’s collar felt hot.

Cam offered her an elegant leg. “It has been my greatest pleasure to facilitate your nuptials. Again.”

Luc took her hand and drew her toward him. Her lashes lifted and the cornflowers were bright.

“Bugger off, Cam.”

“Charming, Lucien. Have you the rings?”

“With the sacristan at the church.” He did not shift his attention from her. “Now go away.”

“Ah, the Eager Groom. It seems that elusive creature does exist after all. Fascinating. My compliments to you, dear.” He grinned at Arabella and wandered off.

“He was kind to assist me aboard,” she said with a small smile.

“He will seize any opportunity to touch a beautiful woman.”

“And you, my lord?” she said with that directness that had dazed him from the first.

“I wish to touch only one woman.”

Disquiet flickered in the cornflowers. “I hope the woman to whom you refer is me.”

“For some time now, in fact.” He tried to speak lightly but he feared he sounded as much of a buffoon as he felt. “Are you well?”

She nodded, quick little jerks of her head that revealed she had not done away with her fear but with great effort hid it now.

“Why did you do this, Arabella? Why the ship when you are terrified of the water?”

“I have no wealth—”

“You have mine.”

“Wealth of my own.” Her chin remained high. “I wished to give you a wedding gift. I wished to please you in a manner– In a manner in which I had not pleased you before.”

“Duchess, if you had not already done so, do you think I would be here now?”

She curtsied as gracefully as a swan dipping its neck. “I am honored, my lord.”

“Arabella, I have—” Beyond her shoulder, a figure in black strolled onto deck. Fletcher looked left and right, and held the railing as though casually but with tight fingers.

Luc’s breaths stalled. “Did you invite that man?”

She turned. “Which one?”

“The one with the gold cross about his neck.”

She looked into his face. “Who is he, Luc?”

“The Bishop of Barris. Absalom Fletcher.”

“I did not see the final guest list. Adina supervised it. It is not peculiar that she should invite her brother.” She placed her hand on his. “I am sorry, Luc. Do you wish me to ask him to leave? Adina will not attend, of course, and I see no reason to have him here if it displeases you.”

He looked into her wide, compassionate eyes and wanted her to know everything. She had taken another woman’s children into her care until they were safe. She had begged for mercy for a thief because he was starving. She had sought to protect the Lycombe name from her family’s uncertain past. Yet he could not utter a syllable to her now. He could not tell her the shameful secrets of his past or his fears of the present. He must protect her.

She clasped his hand in her slender fingers. “He will not disturb our celebration,” she said firmly. “We will simply ignore him. I have been studying the art of the cut direct. According to Mrs. Baxter, it is a necessary weapon of a duchess. I don’t see why I cannot wield it as a comtesse.”

He wrapped his hand around hers.

“A siren with hair like white flame and eyes like summer cornflowers.” The young man at Luc’s shoulder spoke swiftly and with a soft flavor of the Continent. “My brother did you justice, belle enfant.”

Arabella feared she stared.

He seemed to hover upon the toes of his shining boots, leaning into Luc, his green eyes vibrant and mobile. “Your beauty does his admiration justice in return.” He smiled a gorgeous smile that lit up his face.

Luc’s hand slid from hers and went to the young man’s arm.

“You have come.”

“I could not miss my brother’s wedding.” He stepped around Luc and lifted her hand to his lips. “Christos Westfall. Enchanté.”

“Arabella, this is my brother.” Luc’s stance had broadened and his voice sounded fuller.

She curtsied but Christos urged her up. He angled close and his bright eyes swept her face, assessing.

“Luc, elle est exquise,” he said, drawing out the words. Then quickly: “Where did you find her?”

The corner of Luc’s mouth turned up. “In a tavern.”

“And yet her bones shout of royal blood.” Christos’s long fingers grasped her chin, tilting her head left then right. She allowed it, trying to smile, her belly a tangle of nerves. “You must dress her in purple and ermine and I will do a portrait of her. You will wear a crown, Belle. J’insist! No scepter, though. Scepters are for old whiskered kings, not princesses.”

“As you wish,” Luc said easily, but he watched his brother with the same intensity with which Christos studied her.

She drew gently from the cage of his fingertips. “I am so pleased you have come.” She held her voice level with effort. “The two of you must have much to speak of, and I have guests to greet. Please excuse me.”

She went blindly forward.

A small, strong hand grabbed hers.

“He looks just like the duke!” Ravenna whispered.

“In a manner, though slenderer and less substantial.” Eleanor came to Arabella’s other side. “Is that his brother, Bella?”

She nodded and gripped her sisters’ hands. “Stay with me. Please. I know so few of the people here and at this moment I think I may not be entirely prepared to be a comtesse.”

Eleanor returned the pressure. “Of course. But you are much stronger than even you realize, Bella. If you weren’t, you would not be a comtesse now.”

But that was not true. She was a comtesse because she had been indescribably weak, not strong. Now the man whose supposed unfitness had propelled her into marriage stood yards away, as perfectly fit a person as any other on the ship.

She greeted people she did not know with practiced poise, gracefully accepted their congratulations, and ignored their curious stares. There were elegantly garbed earls and impressive ministers and old dukes and fashionable countesses and barons and admirals and their lady wives in number, and she spoke to them all without trouble. The only man she could not speak easily with now was somewhere in the crowd with his black-sheep brother, his stance confident and a smile across his dashingly scarred face.

Eleanor and Ravenna had fallen into conversations with others. Her breaths increasingly quick and shallow, not from the gray water of the river all around but because of the panic rising in her, Arabella fled belowdeck.

Christos and Ravenna found her there.

“Belle! At last we have discovered you!” He moved with lightness and great grace. He was a beautiful man with all the character and intensity in his face of Luc’s yet none of the confident command. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “Your guests, they seek you out. Why do you hide?”

“Are you hiding, Bella?” Ravenna stood before her, hands on her hips, brow worried.

“No. Yes.” She faced Christos directly. “You and he have not seen each other in a great long time.”

“A half dozen months only. But”—he waved his hand dismissively—“months and years matter nothing when there is affinity of spirit and great affection, non?”

Ravenna nodded.

Arabella’s hand twisted in Christos’s and broke free. Desperate words that had been caged inside her rushed to her tongue. “Would your brother make plans to divorce his wife without telling her of that plan?”

“Not the brother that has been writing me letters in praise of her for the past many weeks,” he said without hesitation.

“I found letters to him, written by his man of business. They spoke of preparing a petition for divorce, and of an heiress whose portion could restore the fortunes of Combe.”

“Oh, Bella.” Ravenna’s dark eyes went wide. “Did you ask him about them?”

“She did not,” Christos said, nodding thoughtfully. “There is great fear where there is uncertain love, I think.”

Ravenna’s brows rose. Arabella could not meet her sister’s gaze.

“This heiress,” Christos said, tilting his head. “Was she named?”

“Miss Gardiner.”

His face relaxed into a smile. “Ah, then the mystery is solved, ma belle. It was my uncle who wished to make her my wife.”

Air flooded Arabella’s lungs. “Your uncle?” She tried to picture the letters. They had lacked dates and Luc’s name. “When did your uncle tell you this?”

“A twelvemonth ago.”

“But what about the divorce?”

“To excise Combe from the grip of his wife’s brother,” Christos said immediately.

Arabella sat forward. “What do you know of this?”

“What my aunt told me a year ago when I paid a call upon her, that her brother required her to remain in London while my uncle died alone in Shropshire. She is a weak soul, though benevolent. Her innocence is to my brother’s disservice, I fear.”

“But what does either have to do with the other?” Ravenna demanded.

“Ah, mon chou,” he said with a shake of his head. “You know little of the greed of men, I think.”

“Happily.” She squinted. “What’s a chou?”

“A cabbage.”

Arabella’s thoughts sped. “Why didn’t he divorce Adina if he intended to? Her child is not his.”

Christos offered an elegant shrug. “Perhaps he did not know she was with child.”

“He must have. Why didn’t you wed Miss Gardiner?”

“Ah.” He lowered his chin. “Though I would like it very much, I think—the affection and companionship of a woman with whom to share dreams—it is not for me. I am not fit for such a gift, ma belle.”

Not fit.

“Christos?” She took up his long, beautiful artist’s hand. “How exactly are you unfit?”

With a crease of his lips that shaped them into a wave, he turned their hands over together. “I have peaks, and I have valleys.” He drew back the lacy cuff of his shirt. His wrist was crisscrossed with thick, straight-edged scars, overlapping one upon the next. “The valleys, they are oftentimes quite low. No gentle lady deserves to be bound to that.”

There was a silence between them in which the shuffling of feet on the deck above, the muffled conversations of four hundred people, and the muted delights of violin and flute could be heard.

Ravenna lowered herself to a chair and placed her palms on her knees. “What can we do, Bella, so that with a mind free of burdens you can marry your duke again?”

“Oui, ma belle. Your sister—though she speaks of the mind where I would speak of the heart—we shall help. For I believe as surely as I am a man that my brother has no ill intent toward you. Rather, the contrary.”

“The tenant farmers of Combe are being extorted, I believe,” Arabella said, “but they offer me only fearful hints. No proof. I believe that the Bishop of Barris, Adina’s brother, is behind this. But I have little upon which to base this.”

“Except his hatred of my brother and his manipulation of my sweet aunt. And, unless my brother becomes the duke, he is the principal trustee of Combe.”

“That isn’t enough to prove a crime,” Ravenna said.

“Then she must find the proof,” Christos replied.

“Where?”

“In his private chambers.”

“Do you truly believe that a man who commits crimes involving thousands of pounds would hide proof of those crimes in a drawer in his study?”

“I do.” He blinked his intense green eyes. “For I have seen it done. The fools. Pft!”

“Where is Barris?” Ravenna said, abruptly eager. “We will go there and—”

“Barris is a speck of an island in a far off northern sea, mon chou.”

“Does he usually live in London, then?”

“When I was a child, he had a house near Richmond. We lived there, my brother and I, for some years.”

“He still has this house,” Arabella said. “Adina mentioned it.”

“You could pay a call on him,” Ravenna said, “and when he is in the other room you can search his desk. I read a lending library novel in which the hero did that.”

“Ah, oui. And the art, it always reflects the reality, non, mon chou?” he said with a lift of a brow.

“I think you should stop calling me your cabbage, or our siblinghood will swiftly become uncomfortable for you.”

“But it is too far to go to Richmond,” Arabella said, “and then to sit and wait to enter his house after he has gone out.”

Ravenna’s lips screwed up. “With all his servants, presumably.”

“Then she must go while he disports himself in London.”

“How would she know when he’d be doing that?”

“Is he not doing that at this very moment, above our heads, mon—”

Ravenna glared. He laughed.

“Perhaps . . .” Arabella’s heart raced. She wanted to help Luc. She needed to help him. This was the trouble that he was hiding from her. She did not have all the pieces: why he would not share it all with her, nor why Christos’s arrival today had transformed his distress into ease.

Her fists bunched. “He refuses to allow me to help him protect the people of Combe.”

“Ah, ma belle,” Christos said. “My brother seeks always to protect. To share that burden is a foreign thing to him.”

She stood up. “I could go to the bishop’s house now, while he is here. I might not have this opportunity again. My footman Joseph could go with me. You two would remain here and make excuses for my absence.”

“From your own wedding?” Ravenna hopped out of her seat.

“Immediately after it. I must go, Venna. When I arrive, the servants will ask me to await his return, then they will forget about me, and I can look around at my leisure.” She bit the inside of her lip. “I hope.”

“This seems far-fetched.”

“Non. It is not. The house, it is plain and empty. The places to search are few. The servants are aged, their interest in guests poor.”

“In a bishop’s household?”

“In his household.” Christos rose to his feet like a cat, slender and graceful. “I know this, you see. For it takes a madman to recognize a madman.”

CHAMPAGNE HAD FLOWED freely during Arabella’s sojourn below, and conversation was lively atop. Just like her imagination. It was pure foolishness to consider running off to Richmond to search a bishop’s house for documents that probably didn’t even exist. The same sort of foolishness that had taken her to a dark alley in a port town she did not know and began the series of events that led her here.

There remained but half an hour until a small party of guests and family were to leave the ship with her and Luc to go to the church nearby for the ceremony. They would return to the Victory afterward for supper, dancing, and fireworks. Adina had spared nothing in her plans.

Arabella could not wait half an hour. She needed to see Luc. She searched between clusters of guests. Her nerves were twisted to rawness, and as much as she feared his distance, she wanted only to be alone with him now.

At first she thought those strained nerves were the cause of the peculiar glances some of the guests were throwing her way—ladies, especially, ducking behind parasols to avoid her gaze while the gentlemen turned their heads away when she passed. She was imagining it, of course. No one would cut a bride at her wedding.

Wending her way between people under the main canopy spread across the front of the ship, she found Eleanor.

“Bella?” Her sister’s brow creased. “I have something to say to you that I think will be difficult for you to hear. But you should know it.”