To Wed a Wild Lord Page 5

  “That’s no excuse for his behavior to me,” she said before they were separated again.

  When they were together in the dance again, he drawled, “You reminded him that I beat him. That’s reason enough for him to dislike you. Why did you do that, when you purport to hate me, too?” His eyes gleamed at her as if he had drawn some spurious conclusion from that.

  She sniffed. “If anyone is to criticize you, Lord Gabriel, it’s going to be me, not some vile fool whose mission in life seems to be making trouble.”

  He laughed, and the dance separated them again.

  After that they spoke no more, but she was very aware that something had shifted between them.

  The lieutenant’s words drifted into her mind: Last time, I had to insult his mother to prod him into threading the needle. Was that really why Lord Gabriel had raced that vile fellow—because of an insult to his mother?

  It didn’t change anything, of course. But it did . . . well . . . mitigate it somewhat, since his parents had died scandalously.

  She’d heard all the rumors ages ago about the late Lord and Lady Stoneville. The official story was that Lady Stoneville had killed her husband by accident, then killed herself out of grief, but all sorts of other tales abounded. That their eldest son, the present Lord Stoneville, had murdered them for his fortune. That Lady Stoneville had killed her husband out of jealousy over one of his many indiscretions.

  No wonder Lord Gabriel had felt compelled to accept the man’s challenge.

  She frowned. How could she make excuses for him? He was a reckless fool with no sense of decency, an arrogant rogue who thought she ought to be grateful that he wanted to marry her . . . And a man who’d lost his parents in a horrific way at seven, and somehow still managed to find some joy in life.

  She glanced at him as they turned with their alternate partners in the dance. The woman he was twirling beamed up at him, and he grinned back.

  All right, so she could see how some women might find him charming. He had a way of making a woman feel she had his entire attention when she was with him.

  Every time the dance brought them back together, he smiled, and every time he did, her pulse gave a little flutter.

  Clearly she didn’t get out into society nearly enough. Her pulse had no taste in men whatsoever.

  They finished the dance, and he led her from the floor. “Since the cat is out of the bag,” he said, “what will you do about your cousin?”

  “Leave Pierce to me. I’ll meet you Friday at one-thirty. Just make sure you’re there.”

  Pierce could squawk all he wanted. She would race Lord Gabriel, and she would win—first at Ealing, then at Turnham Green. Then she would put him and his fine looks and wild reputation out of her mind for good.

  Chapter Three

  Hetty Plumtree had been sitting in the library of Halstead Hall for at least an hour. Her youngest grandson should have been home by now. The rest of the family had returned from the ball at Marsbury House some time ago. And given what they had told her, she did not know what to think of Gabe’s continued absence.

  But then, he never behaved as expected. The rapscallion had a rebellious streak that ran all the way to his toes. She remembered one time when he—

  “You didn’t need to wait up,” said a voice practically at her elbow.

  She jumped, then swatted at him with her cane. “Are you trying to give me heart failure, sneaking up on me like that? Where did you come from anyway, you little devil?”

  Her six-foot-two grandson laughed and pointed to the open window behind her. He bent to kiss her cheek, and she smelled the musky scent of horses on him. He must have lingered in the stables to groom his own mount, which alarmed her. He only did that when something had disturbed him.

  “Where have you been?” she snapped. “Everyone else has been home for hours.”

  “Last I checked,” he drawled as he dropped into the chair opposite her, “I wasn’t required to report on my comings and goings.”

  “Do not be impertinent,” she grumbled.

  He just laughed again. It was Gabe’s way of thumbing his nose at the world. He pretended that his heart hadn’t been sliced open twice already in his young life; first on his parents’ deaths and again on the day Roger Waverly died.

  Gabe plastered over the wounds with a few jokes and a reckless smile, but over the past six weeks, the plaster seemed to be cracking. He couldn’t see it, but she could. And when those wounds began to bleed again, all the jokes in the world were not going to stanch the blood.

  “So how was the ball?” she asked, wondering how to broach the subject she really wanted to discuss.

  His smile faded. “You know perfectly well how it was. I’m sure the others told you all about it.”

  If he could lay his cards on the table . . . “They said you danced with Miss Waverly. Twice.”

  “I did.”

  “You are not thinking of taking her up on her challenge, are you?”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of marrying her.”

  Hetty gaped at him. “Even though she hates you?” Was he serious?

  He scowled. “Why does everybody keep saying that?”

  “Because it is true.”

  “She can’t possibly hate me—she doesn’t know me. She hates that her brother died racing me, but that doesn’t mean she hates me.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I got her to dance with me, didn’t I?”

  “What did you do—hint that you would agree to race her if she would dance with you?” When he shrugged, she snorted. “What you lads do not know about women could fill up an ocean. Manipulating a woman gets you nowhere with her in the long run.”

  “Yet you continue to try manipulating us,” he said dryly.

  “That’s different. What are grandparents for if not to plague their grandchildren?”

  Staring at his set jaw and haunted eyes, she felt a sudden clutch in her chest. She had always had a soft spot for Gabe, with his easygoing nature, lack of fear, and death-defying grin. But she had always felt helpless to reach him.

  “This is not what I wanted for you,” she said softly. “I wanted love and life and happiness. Not some woman who will make your life hell.”

  The blunt words seemed to upset him, for he went perfectly rigid. “Then you shouldn’t have laid down your ultimatum.”

  “You do not have to choose the one woman who has every reason to hate you.”

  “Thanks to me, she’ll be destitute when her grand father dies. I figured marrying her was the least I could do.”

  She cast him a skeptical glance. “And she agrees?”

  “She will. Eventually.”

  “Gabriel—”

  “Enough,” he said, rising to his feet. “As long as I gain a wife, you have no reason to complain.”

  “You have to live until the wedding for it to count, you know,” she snapped as he walked away.

  He turned to stare at her. “What do you mean?”

  “If you’re planning to race her—”

  “Ah. You think I’ll kill myself threading the needle at Turnham Green.”

  “You have been lucky three times. No one’s luck lasts forever.”

  His brow furrowed. “What if I swore never to thread the needle again, against Miss Waverly or anyone else? What would you give me?”

  She hesitated. Such a vow would eliminate her greatest worry—that he would run that blasted course and kill himself or someone else. Either scenario could put him beyond the reach of his family forever.

  Still, bargaining with her grandchildren was dicey. It had worked to her benefit with Jarret, but Gabe was another matter entirely. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to rescind your ultimatum for—”

  “That will never happen,” she broke in. “Besides, you said you wished to marry Miss Waverly to help her.”

  “I do. But it’s not me I want you to rescind it for. It’s Celia.”

  She gaped at him. “Why?”

&nb
sp; “You’ll already have four of us paired off. I realize the rest of us let it go too long, but she’s only twenty-four. Let her find a husband in her own time. Or not find one at all, if that’s what she prefers. I don’t want to see her marry some fortune hunter, and neither do you. You got lucky with Minerva, but Celia is . . . different.”

  “You mean, because she shoots guns for entertainment.”

  “Because she’ll hold firm in resisting your ultimatum. She’ll force you between a rock and a hard place. You don’t really want to disinherit us all. And you certainly don’t want to do it if everyone complies but her.”

  He was right, though she wasn’t about to say that to him. “I will do what I have to.”

  His lips thinned into a line. “Then I’ll race whomever I want, on whatever course I want.”

  She scowled at him. “Remember what I said. If you die before you marry, then no one gets anything.”

  “Really? You’d punish my grieving siblings just because I had the audacity to die and cheat you out of seeing your plans come to fruition? I hardly think so.” Then that impudent light came into his eyes, the one she knew so well from when he was a boy and would sneak out to the stable, no matter what punishment she invented for making him stay put. “Besides, haven’t you heard? I’m the Angel of Death—I can’t die.”

  A chill coursed down her spine. Damned fool. Saying such a thing was tempting Fate.

  He stepped nearer, his voice low. “And I’m going to live just to watch Celia make you squirm, Gran. I suspect that after she takes her turn at finding a spouse, you’ll regret you ever came up with this plan of yours. Never say I didn’t warn you.”

  When he turned again to leave, she said, “I’ll think about it.”

  He paused to look at her.

  “I am not saying I will take you up on your offer. But I shall consider it.”

  “You’d better consider it soon,” he drawled. “I’m racing Miss Waverly in three days.” He strode off.

  Damn that boy! It seemed he had inherited every bit of her skill at manipulation. If she was not careful, he might gain the upper hand in this battle.

  She used her cane to push herself to a stand.

  But she had come this far without caving in to her grandchildren’s complaints. She was not about to give in because of Gabe’s threats.

  Still, as she hobbled to her bedchamber, his words rang in her head: I’m the Angel of Death—I can’t die. She knew better than anyone that Death could seize you when you least expected it. And she could not bear to think of losing someone else she loved to its greedy hands.

  GENERAL ISAAC Waverly was hunched over his breakfast of shirred eggs and bacon when his great-nephew entered the room. Still smarting over the loss of the Marsbury Cup yesterday, Isaac didn’t even look up.

  Ghost Rider should have won—the colt had lost by a mere nose. How was Waverly Farm supposed to get out of debt if its horses couldn’t win purses?

  Stud farms lived and died on the careers of their racehorses, and he hadn’t had a spectacular winner in some time. He was pulling in less and less money from stud fees, and his few tenants were struggling because of the recent drought. It had been a hard year for many a squire, but he needed to set funds aside for Virginia.

  He vastly feared that she wouldn’t find a husband with her small dowry. Between her lack of a season and her inability to hold her tongue when she should, she needed all the help she could get. And he owed it to her. The girl had given up her future to take care of him after his injury—she deserved something more than a life of looking after a cranky grump like him.

  He glanced over at Pierce. “How was the ball? Did our girl dance with anyone?”

  Pierce poured himself a cup of tea. “You could say that.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  His nephew hesitated, then glanced toward the door leading into the kitchen, from which came the sounds of Virginia’s happy chatter with the servants.

  It was no surprise to Isaac that she was as comfortable in the kitchen as she was in a drawing room. In those long months after he was thrown from a horse and unable to leave his bed, Virginia’s only company, aside from the occasional visit from Pierce, had been the servants.

  They adored her. His cook snuck her ginger cake when she was low, his housekeeper consulted her on the accounts and the menus, and his grooms let her have whatever mount she chose, even the ones that he’d instructed were strictly forbidden to her.

  The girl had her mother’s energy and her father’s temper. They argued about everything as she bustled about creating order in his widower’s household. Sometimes he found it easier just to let her have her head.

  “So whom did she dance with?” he prodded Pierce.

  “Gabriel Sharpe.”

  A sense of foreboding caught him by the ballocks. “Why the devil would she dance with that cocky bastard?”

  His nephew grimaced. “There’s something I should have told you a month ago, when it happened. But I figured you had enough on your mind, and I really didn’t think she’d go through with it. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Go through with what?” he asked, his blood running cold.

  In a few terse words, Pierce laid out exactly what his spitfire of a granddaughter had been up to.

  Isaac leapt up from the breakfast table like a charger hit in the rump with birdshot. “Virginia Anne Waverly!” he shouted. “You come in here right this minute!”

  The little sauce-box entered the room with a plate of toast in one hand and a salver of butter in the other, wearing an expression of pure innocence that didn’t fool him for one minute. “Yes, Poppy?”

  He scowled. “Pierce tells me that you mean to run some fool race against Lord Gabriel Sharpe.”

  She shot her cousin a foul glance as she set the plate and salver on the table. “See if I ever embroider a pair of slippers for you again.”

  Pierce eyed her coolly over his cup of tea. “If you embroider me any more slippers, I shall have to grow extra feet.”

  “You know perfectly well that you need an inordinate number of slippers,” Virginia said. “You wear them out faster than—”

  “I don’t care about Pierce’s damned slippers!” Isaac shouted. “I want to know what possessed you to challenge Sharpe to a race! It’s not like you to do something so foolish.”

  Anger flared in her face. “It’s nothing to worry about, just a quick carriage race along that course in Ealing. You remember the one—it’s not the least dangerous.”

  “Any kind of racing is dangerous, young lady!”

  “Poppy, sit down,” she said firmly as she came to his side and took his arm. “You know the doctor says you must avoid upset.”

  “Then stop upsetting me!” He batted her hand away. “Pierce tells me you actually challenged the man to thread the needle—what were you thinking?”

  A hot flush rose in her cheeks. “I thought that I would beat him and he would finally stop strutting around town, showing off his prowess at getting people killed.”

  That reined in Isaac’s temper right quick. Roger’s death had hit them both hard, but it had been harder on her. She’d idolized her brother, and his death had put a fine patina on the giant monument she’d been building in his honor ever since she was a girl. She couldn’t see straight when it came to Roger.

  “Oh, lambkin,” he said. “You have to stop fretting over Sharpe. I hate the fellow as much as you do, but—”

  “If you had only seen him last month at the race, bragging about how he’d beaten Lieutenant Chetwin.” She balled her hands into fists. “He didn’t give a fig for the fact that Roger died running that course! Someone needs to put Lord Gabriel in his place, to teach him some humility, some . . . some sense of decency!”

  “And you think it should be you?”

  “Why not?” Her voice turned pleading. “You know I can do it. You said yourself that I can tool a curricle better than any man you’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m not goi
ng to watch you risk your life—and your future, I might add—trying to race that man, of all men. Get your bonnet. We’re paying a visit to Lord Gabriel Sharpe. You, my dear, are going to tell him that you’ve seen the error of your ways and you refuse to race him.”

  “I’m not doing any such thing!” she sputtered. “I refuse to let him think I’m a coward.”

  “And I refuse to lose another grandchild to that arse!”

  She paled. “You won’t lose me, I swear.” “You’re damned right, I won’t,” he said, feeling a clutch of fear in his heart. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  After his wife had died of pleurisy while accompanying him and the cavalry on the Peninsula, he’d had a rough time. Then his son and daughter-in-law had died, and he’d come home to run the stud farm, bitter over his losses, wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole and grieve alone.

  He’d planned on finding a relative to take in Virginia and Roger, until he’d seen the girl—three years old and inconsolable. She’d gazed up at him with trembling lips and said, “Papa gone?”

  A lump had stuck in his throat as he’d answered, “Papa is gone, lambkin. But Poppy is here.”

  Staring at him with huge, tear-filled eyes, she’d thrown her chubby little arms around his leg and said, “Poppy stay.”

  In that moment, she’d clutched his heart in her tiny fists. He’d become her “Poppy,” and she’d become his “lambkin.”

  And he was never going to lose her. “We’re getting you out of this race with Sharpe, or I swear to God, I’ll lock you up in your room and never let you out again.”

  The girl argued with him every step of the way. She protested while they waited for the carriage to be brought. She pleaded as they set off for Ealing. But as her efforts yielded nothing during the hour’s drive to Halstead Hall, she lapsed into a brooding silence. He didn’t know which was worse.

  By the time they neared Halstead Hall he’d worked himself into a fine temper, further fueled by the sight of the large, impressive manor house. He’d always known that Sharpe was brother to a marquess, from a family as old as England itself. Indeed, that was one reason he hated the fellow.