She stared at him. “Aren’t you outraged? You look—”
“Something’s wrong with Josie,” he snapped. “So you’re telling me that Darlington wrote Hellgate’s Memoirs. And you’ve been having an affaire with him. The same Darlington who called my wife a Scottish sausage?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
There was a moment of silence. “I was thinking of killing him for that,” he said slowly.
“You mustn’t.”
“I suppose not. Could you have possibly chosen a more likable fellow to bed?”
“I—” Griselda swallowed back her tears. “I like him a great deal. And he will never say anything as cruel again. He’s terribly sorry about the anguish he caused Josie.”
“Given his abominable prose, I hate to think about the intimacies he’s whispered to you in private.”
“Darlington is not an abominable writer! You—You—”
Mayne’s laugh was that of an infuriating older brother. “Piffle, given his inability to put together an articulate sentence. I would have thought better of you.”
Griselda swallowed hard. “Would you stop funning and think for a moment, you ass!” She never swore. In fact, she could hardly believe it when she heard the word fly out of her mouth.
“Think about what?” Mayne said, a little quieter. “Obviously you’re planning on marrying him.”
“What if he’s merely doing it to turn me into a book?” Griselda shrieked at him. “Have you thought of that?”
There was a moment of silence. “Then I would kill him,” Mayne said.
Griselda met her brother’s eyes.
He came over to her and put a hand on her cheek. “Just because he can’t write doesn’t mean that he’s suicidal, Griselda. I assume that he is proposing marriage?”
She nodded jerkily.
“Yet another reason he might live to walk the aisle,” he said, turning around and scooping up his gloves.
“Don’t you—don’t you care that he wrote that book?” she choked.
“In a word: no. I thought the Memoirs was remarkably foolish. I do care that he wants to marry you, but I think by far the more interesting point is that you wish to marry him. You do, don’t you?”
She smiled at him, through a veil of tears. “I think so.”
“I know so.” He dropped a kiss on her nose. “He doesn’t deserve that. I’ll tell him myself, once I get things worked out with Josie.”
“Oh—” Griselda said.
But he was gone.
45
From Hellgate’s Memoirs,
Chapter the Twenty-eighth
I knew she loved me when her eyes filled with tears. She loved me…She loves me. Dear Reader, know this: there is nothing like that sweet emotion to change a man’s life, nay his entire character. She is Mine, she is Mine.
Dear Reader, rejoice. I am remade.
It was all much easier than Josie would have thought. Mayne came to fetch her at Tess’s house and she handed him a cup of tea, mentioning that Tess would return in a moment.
He started to tell her something about Darlington and Hellgate—could it be that Darlington wrote the Memoirs? But Josie couldn’t keep her attention on the subject because he was drinking the tea.
And then…before she even drew a breath, he was asleep, leaning into the corner of his chair, his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks. She couldn’t help it: she knelt in front of him and brushed his face with her fingers. “Because I love you,” she whispered to him. “It’s only because I love you so much.”
He sighed and smiled. After she had a molar pulled, she woke up with just that delicious sense of having had a happy dream.
Then she pulled herself upright, went out and carefully closed the door behind her. Tess was waiting for her. “Do you have the letter?”
“I need to write it,” Josie said, fighting back her tears.
“Are you certain?”
“Of course I am! It’s just that he looked so defenseless, lying there. He didn’t even know that I’d drugged him.”
Tess shook her head. “I think it’s a foolish scheme. But write your letter.” She pushed her toward the writing desk.
Josie sat down with a piece of fresh foolscap. It would be no good to make the letter flowery. That wasn’t like her. Of course, she couldn’t tell him the truth either.
Dear Garret,
I know you will be surprised to find yourself on board ship. What I didn’t understand when I married you is that love is the most important thing—not marriage, but love. You love Sylvie, so you ought to be with Sylvie. Even if she won’t accept your hand in marriage, it is a terrible thing to be separated from the person you love, and I can’t bear the idea that I am responsible for it.
Josie
She was crying so hard that she left the letter where it was and collapsed onto the bed.
“Don’t worry, darling,” Tess said, helping her to stand up and then wrapping a cloak around her. “I’m going to take you back to your house while Lucius takes care of everything else.”
“You told Lucius?”
“Of course I told Lucius,” Tess said, looking surprised. “How could I get Mayne out to the wharf? Lucius is just the right person. You know he’s very good at getting things done correctly, Josie.”
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said, wiping away her tears with the sheet. “I didn’t want anyone to know!”
“Lucius is necessary for your scheme,” Tess said soothingly. “Up with you.”
When they walked down the stairs, the door to the sitting room was still closed. “He will only stay asleep for four hours at the most,” Josie said, suddenly anxious. “He has to be at the docks by five o’clock when the tide turns. What if the Excelsior leaves without him?”
“It won’t,” Tess said. “You know that Lucius never makes mistakes.”
Josie thought about that as they trundled along the London streets. It was true that Lucius Felton was just the sort of man who was never late. Probably the tide would wait for him, if for no one else.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Lucius! What did he think of my scheme?”
“He thought it was utter poppycock,” Tess said. She saw Josie’s mouth open and held up her hand. “Until I reminded him that I myself was originally engaged to Mayne. And what if I were holding out a hopeless passion for Mayne?” She smiled to herself. “He didn’t seem to like that idea.”
“You were both very lucky,” Josie said, knowing that her voice was surly.
“True.”
They didn’t speak again until they were inside the house, Mayne’s house. “You need a bath,” Tess said, ringing the bell. “You need a bath, and supper in your room, and then bed. You are exhausted. Why, Josie, your face looks all thin and drawn.”
Josie thought about it. Sure enough, she hadn’t been eating much in the last few days, and nothing at all today. Tess pushed her before the glass. “Look at yourself!”
Josie touched her cheeks. There were hollows there. Almost like cheekbones.
“You look awful,” her sister told her.
And suddenly, as if the mirror had cracked before her, Josie saw what she meant. Those weren’t tempting hollows in her cheeks, but the signs of weariness. She didn’t look beautiful, she just looked oddly gaunt. She sighed. Apparently her face was not the sort that would look good slim.
By now Mayne must be on the boat, discovering that she’d given him up. Turned him over to Sylvie. Set him free.
The thought made her nauseous, so she listlessly climbed into the bathtub.
“I’m going home now,” Tess said, popping her head in sometime later. “I’ve ordered you a light supper in your room.”
“Thank you,” Josie said.
“I’ll be over first thing in the morning,” Tess said, blew her a kiss and was gone.
But Josie didn’t want to eat in her room. When she climbed out of the bath, she put on Mayne?
??s robe, the sleek silk one he lent her after she threw away her corset, that very first night when he rescued her at the ball. Then she spoke briefly to Ribble and climbed the stairs to Cecily’s turret.
There it was, as shadowy and sweet and magical as it had been the first night Mayne brought her there. The unicorn danced along his vine, and the little boy who looked like Mayne swung by one hand.
Josie crumpled into the big chair from which she’d watched Mayne prance around in her dress, but she didn’t cry. She knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that she was right. He didn’t love Sylvie, for all he thought he did. Up here, in the turret room, she even dared to whisper the truth of it.
“He loves me,” she whispered. Who was she telling? His Aunt Cecily’s spirit, perhaps. “He does. He loves me.”
Ribble came up with a glass of wine and some supper. Josie had brought only one thing to the room with her: the Earl of Hellgate’s Memoirs. She sat there in the guttering light from the lamps, rereading the long passionate adventures of a man she loved more than life itself. The wine was deep red, and felt as magical as the walls. Reading the book made it almost as if she had been all those women Mayne loved…
And yet, did he love them?
He said that he never laughed in bed with them. The stories seemed thin and anxious now, full of desire but also tedium. She paused at the story of Hippolyta and how she bound Hellgate to the wall of the garden house. Mayne said he threw down the book when he reached that chapter, said that he had never engaged in such an activity.
But Josie could quite see tying Mayne to the bed. In fact—she smiled and drank another sip of wine—once he returned from his little voyage that was just what she would do.
He might be a little angry at first.
But once he got over it…
There was a noise at the door, and Josie didn’t even look up, just turned the page. Now Hellgate would discard his Amazon mistress as if she were no more important than a cast-off slipper, and turn to—
She looked up.
There in the shadows of the door was—Mayne. Drops of water were streaming from his shoulders, from his hair. His eyes were rimmed by dark circles.
“Joooosie,” he said hoarsely. “They dropped me from the rowboat…I was bound and couldn’t swim…I had to come say farewell to you…”
Josie didn’t say anything. The air went dark and thick around her, as if there was no air in a world without her husband. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe.
She fainted.
Mayne walked into the room and looked down at his wife, shaking himself like a dog after a good rain. She was out like a snuffed candle. He picked up her glass of wine and took an appreciative draught. She was drinking the Château Margaux 1775 that his father laid down. Very nice.
Then he sat down on the footstool before her chair and looked at her.
Too many novels, that was the truth.
“Josie!” he said. And then: “Josie!” She didn’t stir, so he ran a hand along her cheek. She was so beautiful that his heart turned over, and yet he schooled himself to be firm.
“Josephine, you wake up now,” he told her.
So she did. Her eyes opened and she stared at him. “Garret?” she asked.
“Ghost of,” he said promptly.
She grabbed his hand. Looked at him for one moment, at his damp hair (thanks to a quickly administered glass of water), and then lunged out of her chair and shook him. “How could you? How could you do such a thing to me? I thought you were dead!”
He would have defended himself more, but he was laughing too hard.
“You—You—I’ll make a ghost of you,” his little wife shrieked.
Finally he managed to stop her from beating him around the shoulders and caught her hands in his. “You deserved it, Josie,” he said, fighting back another great swell of laughter.
But there were tears in her eyes, and the laughter died in his throat. For a moment he saw everything in her eyes: a love that would last their entire lives, a vulnerability that would never go away, and, where he was concerned, a deep selflessness that made her the most wonderful, funny, intelligent woman he knew.
Then her eyebrows snapped together. “Bastard!” she snapped.
“You deserved it.”
“I never should have trusted Tess. Never.”
“Woke up to find Felton chortling at me,” Mayne admitted. “Mind you, he did hand over that letter you left for me.”
“Oh.”
“Damned if I’m not surrounded by terrible writers,” he said. “First Darlington—and that bounder looks to be becoming my brother-in-law—and now my own wife. ‘Love is more important than marriage.’ Purple prose! Fluff and feathers! It could have been written by Hellgate himself.”
“I’m sorry that my writing wasn’t up to your standards,” Josie said with dignity.
“Not only did you write me a fluffy letter, but you drugged me and tried to get rid of me,” he said remorselessly.
“I didn’t!” She struggled against his hands. “I never wanted to get rid of you.”
“You wanted me thrown onto a boat with a Frenchwoman whom I hardly know.”
“It was Sylvie! If you remember, you were going to marry Sylvie!”
“God yes, it was Sylvie! How could you think that I would want to spend several days trapped aboard ship with Sylvie?”
“Because—Because—”
But it was time to stop the foolishness, so he sat down and pulled her straight into his lap, looked her in the eye and said, “You’ll never get rid of me, Josephine.”
“Never?” she whispered.
“Not by drugging me, nor sending me to sea either.”
“I didn’t want to.”
But he wanted to hear it, so he waited.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you too much to keep you away from Sylvie.”
His smile came straight from his heart. “We can leave Sylvie out of this, though how you came to think I loved her—”
“Because you told me so repeatedly? Because you were going to marry her? Because you kissed her letter?”
“I never kissed any letter of hers!”
“You did, you—”
“If you loved me,” he said, cutting through the piffle, “how could you let me go?”
“That’s why. I had to give you to her, if that’s what you wanted.”
He cupped his hands in her face. “I will never let you go, Josephine, my wife. Not if you fall in love with Hellgate himself.”
She was laughing and crying at the same time. “But, Garret, I am in love with Hellgate, didn’t you know?” She pushed her fingers into his damp curls.
Then he was kissing her, fiercely, as if he could drink her in and make her his. Except she was already his.
“I never knew what love was,” he said, feeling the words piling up inside him. “I thought I was in love with Sylvie…how could you not have known what an ass I was to even imagine such a thing?”
“Well…” she said. And kissed him.
“I gather you wanted me on that boat precisely because you knew better?”
“I thought,” Josie explained, “that you might be in love with me, and you just hadn’t realized it yet.”
“Oh, I realized it.” He kissed her, hard.
“You didn’t say—”
“I would have. You are my countess, and the only woman I have ever loved. In the whole of my misbegotten, Hellraking life.”
Her laughing eyes were a little teary, so he worked his hands into that dressing gown of hers. It was a damned useful garment, the way the tie gave at the waist, and then it fell open to show him a feast of creamy flesh and beautiful breasts.
He couldn’t stop kissing her, though. He’d stray onto her breast, and have her crying with the pleasure of it, but then he had to kiss her mouth again. And again.
“I’m not the same around you,” he told her at some point. “I’m never bored, Josie. I’m not—I’m not myself.” r />
“Yes, you are,” she said, as bossy as ever. “Could I possibly suggest that you go back to what you were doing?” Because his hand had stilled with the need to tell her, to make her understand.
“You’re not listening,” he whispered, even as he caressed her again, watching her eyes close and an enchanting little pant come from her lips. She was all sweet plump welcome, but he still wanted to say it.
“With you, I’m not Hellgate,” he told her, knowing she wasn’t really listening. “I’m not some dissolute rake, sleeping with anything with two legs. I’m going to turn the Mayne stables into something people remember for decades. And I’m going to—”
“For God’s sake!” she said, her eyes snapping open. “Garret Langham, are you actually talking about your stables—now?”
He looked down at her. Her lips were pouting a dark cherry color from all his kisses. He had one hand curved around her breast and the other between her legs, and her eyes were wild and loving and desperate with need, all at once.
“Well,” he told her, easily picking up her hips and positioning her just so. And then letting her slip down on him, inch by inch. “I thought we could—” he had to take a breath “—talk about our breeding program.”
“You’re lucky to have me,” Josie told him against his lips. Then she nipped his lower lips and wound her arms around his shoulders.
“I know it,” he said.
She was setting the pace, making his blood race, making him feel as untamed as a tiger. Her hair tumbled down her back, unruly and soft. She cupped her hands around his face. “I should kill you for that water trick.”
“Don’t,” he gasped. “I don’t think that…ghosts have—” But he was done talking. So he just kissed her into silence, his own sweet Josie, his beloved, his wife.
46
From The Earl of Hellgate’s Memoirs,
Chapter the Twenty-eighth
As I say adieu to you, my Dear Readers, I can only wish with all my heart that you might sail on the same clouds of happiness as do I…reach the same summit of bliss as I have.
Adieu, Adieu!