Noble stretched out his arm and retrieved his letter. “I had hoped for more.”
“I’m afraid three is the best I can do at the moment. They will be round your house in the morning.”
Noble wrote a few lines on the back of a calling card. “Have them present this to my butler, Crouch. Or Tremayne. Either of them; they’re both my butlers.”
Stafford raised his brows. “You have two butlers in one house, my lord?”
“Yes,” he replied, pocketing the letter and standing. “It was my wife’s idea.”
His words echoed in his head a short time later as his carriage rolled toward a certain address near Russell Square. Was it really Gillian’s idea to have the second Tremayne brother follow her up to his town house? She had said something about him helping Crouch learn to be less a pirate, which made no sense at all. Despite his hook, Crouch was not a pirate. Lord knew, the man got seasick just walking on a bridge over a river.
“Gillian,” he said softly, gazing out the window, blind to all but the image of the tall, redheaded Amazon who had moved into his heart. How had she done it? He’d never expected to feel anything beyond mild affection for a woman again, and yet she was consuming his every thought.
Gillian. Just the sound of her name sent tendrils of heat through him; many of them, it was true, pooling in his groin, but he was also conscious of a gentle, soothing glow radiating out from the bright light she cast, warming him and making him believe he was human again.
Gillian. His wife, the woman who bore his name and would bear his children. He thought of her plump and round with his babe, and a spurt of base masculine pleasure added to the warmth already heating him.
Gillian. The woman who was walking down the front steps of his most hated enemy’s house, her arm linked through his, laughing up at that bastard murderer McGregor with a smile that should be reserved solely for him.
Gillian!
“What the bloody hell is this?” he roared, jumping out of the carriage before his coachman could bring the horses to a stop. “By God’s ten toes, woman, what the hell do you think you are doing with that man?”
Gillian stopped on the last step, astonishment writ clearly on her face at the sight of her husband charging down the pavement toward her. “Noble?”
“Yes, Noble,” he snarled and lunged toward the Scot.
“Noble! How wonderful you could join us! Nick, my dear, your papa has come to join us, isn’t that wonderful?”
Noble stopped, his hands a mere fraction of an inch from Carlisle’s throat. “Nick?” His voice was thick as he flexed his fingers. She had brought Nick with her? She had brought Nick with her while she kept an assignation with the man who was responsible for the death of his wife? She had brought his son with her while she tore out his heart and killed any last vestiges of human kindness left within him?
“Good afternoon, Lord Weston.”
Noble blinked at the sight of a lovely blond woman, a familiar blond woman, a woman who, if the maidenly blush and shy eyes were anything to go by, had just been released from a convent.
“You remember my cousin Charlotte, don’t you, Noble?”
“Ah…”
“’Ere ye are then, yer lordship. I was tellin’ the mistress that it weren’t right ’er payin’ this call without yer, but ye know ’ow the ladies is.”
“Er…”
“Charles, Dickon, ’elp Tremayne up there with those ’orses. They don’t like the looks of Piddle and Herp.”
“Uh…” Piddle? Erp? Noble peered between his wife and his enemy. Was there anyone from his home not present? As the heat from the suspicions of a moment before faded, a new fire roared to life when his eyes narrowed at the sight of that murdering bastard McGregor’s hand resting possessively on Gillian’s.
“Mine!” he roared. and scooped Gillian up and deposited her on the pavement behind him.
“I beg your pardon?” Gillian asked, poking him in the back. “Did you just shout mine in a voice loud enough to be heard in Canterbury?”
“Be still, woman, while I deal with this bastard,” Noble bellowed.
“Bastard, eh? That’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” Carlisle roared back.
“Mine? As in I belong to you, husband?”
“What the devil were you doing with my wife and son?” Noble yelled.
“As if I were your possession?”
“That’s none of your business,” Carlisle answered, his voice echoing off the houses across the street.
“I cannot believe you actually stood there and bellowed the word mine as if I were a toy and you a four-year-old child, Noble!”
“Like hell it’s not! I demand to know what they were doing here!” Noble thundered.
“Then why don’t you ask the lady?” Carlisle barked.
“I am not a possession!” Gillian raised her voice to match those of the two men.
“You keep my wife out of this! You’ll answer my question, or by God I’ll have my satisfaction over pistols!” Noble stormed.
“Name your seconds,” Carlisle retorted, his black eyes dancing with enjoyment.
“They’ll call on you this evening,” Noble fired back, his hair standing on end. “Wife! Come with me!”
Gillian recognized that Noble was in a bit of a temper, and with a wisdom that had hitherto been unknown to her, bit back her angry protests at his arrogant display of possessiveness and took the hand he held out. He stalked back to his carriage and would have made a grand exit it if had not been for the others.
“Charles, Dickon, get those ’ounds loaded into the carriage.”
Noble paused in the act of stuffing Gillian into his carriage and looked back. His gaze fell on that of his son, standing next to Charlotte, gray eyes shining brightly in the afternoon sun. “Nicholas, you will come with us.”
Charlotte, who had been hard-pressed to maintain an expression radiating demure, maidenly horror at the thrilling manly display, fanned herself briskly and suddenly realized she would be left to ride home in an ancient carriage with Piddle and Erp as her sole companions.
“Lord Weston!”
Noble handed Gillian into the carriage and turned to look at Charlotte.
She stood looking between Lord Carlisle and Noble.
“I…the dogs…you cannot possibly expect me…my lord, I…”
Gillian leaned out of the carriage. “I do believe this is a first, my lord. I’ve never seen my cousin at a loss for words.”
Noble grunted and would have left Charlotte to the dog’s carriage but for Gillian. There was a motive to her madness—she no more wanted to be alone with Noble, where he would feel free to vent his anger on her regarding her visit to Lord Carlisle, than she wanted to dance with a crocodile.
“I believe, my dear lady wife, your chances with the crocodile are substantially better,” Noble said through gritted teeth and proceeded to ignore her and everyone else in the carriage by staring out at the passing scenery.
“We were just off to the zoological gardens,” Gillian started to say, but one look from Noble’s icy gray eyes made it quite clear that the visit was canceled. Gillian sent her son an apologetic glance and was heartened to see the boy give her a warm smile and a little shrug.
She mouthed to him that they would go another time, and settled back next to Noble. Charlotte exchanged sympathetic glances with her cousin and was not in the least bit sorry when the carriage pulled up before her house. Gillian wished to have a word or two with her, but Noble grimly assisted Charlotte down, then leaped back into the carriage and gave the signal to be on the way.
In an attempt to forestall the inevitable tongue-lashing she was sure was due her, Gillian clasped Noble’s hand in hers. His hand was unresponsive and stiff. Gillian mentally created, and discarded, any number of excuses and explanations for her visit to the earl. T
he carriage rocked as it bounced over bumps in the street, the familiar clop of the horses’ hooves setting up a rhythm in her brain. Although within there was naught but injured silence, outside the carriage horses neighed, dogs barked, people shouted, coachmen and grooms talked to their charges, vendors shouted their wares, and a thousand other noises wove together into the intricate tapestry that was life in London. Gillian closed her eyes and leaned slightly toward Noble, her thumb tracing circles on the top of his hand, feeling suddenly safe and secure even if her husband was shortly to lecture her as she’d never been lectured before. She slid her thumb down to the underside of his hand and made little massaging circles on the pads of his fingers, sliding up and down the length, feeling the strength that lay in those long, elegant hands. Noble did not respond to her caress, but neither did he withdraw his hand.
She continued to stroke and pet his hand while she considered the results of her daring act in visiting the Scottish earl—she was now in possession of a list of four names, women who had been Noble’s mistresses during the last fifteen years, as long as Carlisle had known him.
She hoped they could help her to figure out just what Noble’s relationship with Elizabeth had been like before his dear wife died—or not his dear wife, if what Lord Carlisle had said was true.
Gillian chewed on her lower lip. The earl must be mistaken. She knew Noble, and no matter how strong the provocation, he could never have murdered his wife, not even if he had found her with another man, as Lord Carlisle implied. And the hints he made about Noble’s treatment of Elizabeth—well, those simply couldn’t be true.
Gillian rubbed Noble’s wrist and let her delicate, blue-tinted fingers massage the top of his hand. No, the earl had to be wrong about Noble. Clearly he had gotten hold of the same misinformation that had flooded the rest of the ton, and just as clearly it was up to her to uncover the truth and clear Noble’s name.
A little sigh escaped her lips as she considered all she had to do, a sigh that went straight to Noble’s heart. He stopped fighting the desire to respond to Gillian’s gentle strokes and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. She didn’t look at him, but sighed again as she snuggled up against him, content in the knowledge that everything would be all right. Noble wasn’t angry after all.
Noble was furious. He controlled himself in the carriage with an iron will that amazed even him, but once he arrived home, he demanded Gillian’s presence in his library. By the time she left the room, her face pale and tear-streaked, he had made himself absolutely and undeniably clear as to his feelings about his wife visiting the man who was responsible for so much misery and unhappiness.
“But Noble, why can’t I call on him if I’m suitably escorted?” Gillian cried after the bulk of his rage had been exorcised, tears trembling on the edge of her lashes.
Noble hardened his heart against the sight. “Because the man’s a murdering bastard, madam, that’s why you cannot call on him! From this moment forward you will have nothing further to do with him.”
Gillian had blanched at the word murderer. Noble’s accusations were so similar to Lord Carlisle’s, it confused her. “He’s a murderer? Whom did he murder?”
Noble’s jaw set in a manner that Gillian was becoming all too familiar with. He placed his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned down until he was a breath away from her.
“It is of no matter to you. Hear me well, wife. On this you will obey me—you will have no further contact with McGregor. If you see him at a public place, you will ignore him. If he approaches you and attempts to converse with you, you will walk away. If he sends you any correspondence, you will immediately surrender it to me. Do I make myself clear?”
Gillian stared deep into his icy gray eyes and saw Noble’s demons battling for control. There was anger and masculine dominance there, but there was also concern and something she didn’t recognize—something that made her feel warm and feminine and at peace with him despite the fact that she was, at that moment, the target of his wrath.
“What am I to you?” she whispered, unable to keep the words back.
His eyes narrowed. “You are my wife.”
The warm, peaceful feeling evaporated, leaving behind it the tears that had threatened earlier. “Is that all, Noble? It’s true, then—I’m just a possession? Something you purchased with a specific goal in mind? I’m nothing more to you than an object to be kept in its place and brought out when it pleases you?”
Noble didn’t know how to answer her, didn’t know how to erase the pain he saw in her lovely green eyes. The words were written deep in his heart, but they were too new, too fresh to be spoken out loud. The light that glowed inside him, her light, was still too weak to banish all the darkness. He gazed into her eyes and said nothing, damning himself for his inability to speak, for his desire to have that which he’d sworn he would never again seek, and for allowing her into the secret recesses of his soul, where no one had been allowed before.
He watched with tormented eyes as she first pushed ineffectually at his hands until he released her, then raced, sobbing, out the door. God’s eyebrows, what a mess he’d made of everything. Feeling his legs about to buckle under him, Noble sat in the chair Gillian had just abandoned and let his head slump into his hands. How the devil had things turned out this way? When had life slipped out of his control, turning it from a well-ordered and structured, pleasant existence into this chaotic farce? How could a man be expected to function when all he planned, all he hoped for was dashed away and replaced…the thoughts suddenly stopped cold.
What was the use, why was he pretending to himself? His life had been well-ordered and structured before Gillian came to it, that was true, but it had also been a bleak and hollow life, a life without joy or warmth or…love. Chaos might dodge her footsteps, but it was a small price to pay to be loved by her. And what had he done in the face of that love? He’d blown up at her, yelled at her until she sobbed at his cruelty, tears streaming down her face when she realized that he would not, could not, give her the words she needed to hear.
Another woman’s tears came to mind, another woman’s tears as a result of his cruelty. Noble clutched the arms of the chair until his nails gouged crescents in the wood, but he paid no heed to the pain in his fingers. He was too busy fighting the crippling pain that gripped his soul.
Dear God, please don’t let me drive her away as I did Elizabeth, he prayed, his thoughts jumbled and confused, chasing each other in circles. Images of that night, that terrible night came unbidden to his mind, the image of finding his son curled up in a little ball in a pool of blood, almost out of his mind with terror. The night his wife died, the night he knew for a fact that hell existed, because he was in it. The feelings of guilt, once thought long gone, swept over him and merged with this new flood of guilt over his treatment of Gillian.
Noble Britton, the twelfth Earl of Weston, sat alone in his library and at last faced the emotions he had refused to acknowledge for five years: sorrow for the horrors he had forced upon his son, remorse for failing his first wife, self-pity for the hell he had lived in for so long. And finally, and most recently, shame for hurting the one person who meant more to him than life itself.
***
Gillian stood in the doorway of the library and hesitated. She had knocked, but Noble had not answered. Was he ill? So angry still that he refused to acknowledge her? She took a step forward, afraid to draw his attention to her and yet unwilling to face his wrath if he thought she was concealing the letter she had just received.
“Noble?” The word was so soft, even she could hardly hear it. She stepped silently toward the head that rested against the back of the armchair. Was he reading? Asleep? She came around the side and stopped, stunned by the sight.
He was asleep, his head resting at an angle that looked most uncomfortable, his hands curled into fists. His face in repose looked so unguarded, so young, so peaceful, but it wasn’t that
unusual sight that made her heart constrict with pain. She bent forward and touched a finger to his cheek. Faint silvery tracks led down the angled planes of his face, down into the darkening shadows of his jaw.
He had been weeping. Her Lord of Rage had been weeping.
Eight
“Good evening, Lady Weston.”
“Oh, Lord Rosse, good evening.” Gillian peered around the marquis, looking for Noble. “How nice to see you again. That’s a lovely waistcoat. Are those dragons?”
“Yes. It is a gift from my betrothed.”
Gillian looked at him, startled. “You are betrothed? I didn’t know. Noble never mentioned it.”
Rosse smiled. “I’ve been betrothed since I was sixteen. Our fathers arranged it.”
Gillian’s brow furrowed. “Is that legal?”
Rosse shrugged. “It matters not, I’ve pledged myself to the girl, and I’ll marry her. Some day,” he added with an irresistible grin. Gillian couldn’t help but grin in response. She liked Rosse the best of all Noble’s friends. He reminded her of a friendly puppy, all eagerness and enthusiasm.
“Noble had an important appointment, I’m afraid, but I managed to convince him to allow me to have the honor of escorting you to the Countess of Gayfield’s rout, where your estimable husband will join us later.”
Gillian was disappointed that Noble had not remained home to escort her. She not only wanted to discuss the note she had received from Lord Carlisle, she wanted to find out why he had been weeping. Nick was in good health—that had been her first concern. Try as she might, she just could not understand why her Lord of Tempers ran hot one moment, then cold another. Perhaps it would be better if she stopped trying to understand him and just accepted his volatile emotions.
“Er…quite so, my lady,” Lord Rosse said and held the door open for her.
Gillian blushed, thought about explaining about her Unfortunate Habit, then decided it wasn’t important.