20 Surprises
S omeone was in the carriage with her, grabbing her, lifting her. Again she screamed, and tore at the bag still covering her face.
"Hush, Izzy," said a familiar voice. "Stop fighting for a minute."
She froze. "Ian? You?"
"Yes, I," he said, whisking the bag from her head. "Who else? Let me help you onto the seat."
"Do not touch me!" she yelled, but he picked her up bodily, tossing her onto the seat beside him. Then to her astonishment, he laughed, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her full on the mouth. When she pushed him away, he laughed again.
"It is no use, Izzy. You cannot escape me now."
And it was true that the carriage was moving along at a rapid rate, tossing them about inside. There was no possibility of jumping out, even if there were a handle to open the door on the inside.
"This is my carriage," she said, frowning.
"Of course. I have been travelling in it for weeks, chasing you hither and thither, but not for much longer, I am happy to say."
"Where are you taking me — not back to Lochmaben, I take it? And presumably not to Strathinver Castle. Where, then?"
"To a small island," he said, pulling at her bonnet and eventually wrenching it off altogether, so that half her hair tumbled down.
"Ian, what on earth are you doing?"
"Kissing you," he mumbled, for his lips were pressed against her exposed neck, and moving down to her throat.
"Stop it!" she said, trying to swat him away, but he was too large a man to be swatted, and besides she was tightly held in his embrace. "Ian, for heaven's sake! Where is this island?"
"Well, I am not quite sure," he said, surfacing for a moment. "It is Kiltarlity's island — he seems to have bits of land scattered like salt grains over the entire kingdom. Apparently, it is somewhere off the west coast. The coachman knows. You see, I am thoroughly sick of you running away from me, so— Oh! Can you swim, Izzy?"
"No."
"Good. No running away, then."
"Are you planning on holding me captive, Ian?" He was kissing her cheeks now, and it was hard to sustain her anger when he was so eager for her… so ardent, and so very unlike himself. "Because I do not consent to this journey at all."
"Oh, I knew you would not consent if I asked you, so I have abducted you. It makes it easier. Have you any idea how wonderful you smell, Izzy? Mmm…" His lips found her throat again.
Laughter bubbled up inside her. "Ian, have you run mad?"
He turned his face up to her, and grinned. "Yes. Indubitably. That is what losing a wife will do to a man… it drives him mad, utterly, absolutely, completely. But now that I have found you at last, I intend to keep a tight hold of you, so there is hope that perhaps in time I shall be sane again." He sighed. "Oh, Izzy, my dear wife, how I have missed you."
"I am not your wife," she said, but he was kissing her again, and she found the very last vestiges of her anger seeping away in the touch of his lips. He was so strange! She had thought she knew him well, this husband of hers, and had long since decided that he was irrevocably dull, but this was so different and oddly exciting… the abduction and his kisses and his unexpected exertion of husbandly will… but especially his kisses.
Eventually, he found her mouth and oh, this was not at all the Ian she knew! Her husband was a mild-mannered, restrained and gentle man, nothing at all like this hot-blooded, passionate stranger, and however much she wanted to dislike being abducted, there was something deliciously thrilling about it. She could not fight him… did not want to fight him, so she melted into his embrace and let him have his way.
For a long, long time they remained entwined, until the carriage dropped into an especially deep rut and flung them apart, laughing, trying to catch their breath.
"Oh, Izzy," he murmured, one hand reaching out to stroke her cheek. "My sweet wife…"
"But I am not your wife," she said in a small voice.
"Yes, you are. We stood in front of your family and mine, and made a solemn vow to each other, remember? A sacred vow, before God. Nicholson may have been a fraud, but God is not, and the words we spoke then bind us just as surely as if we had spoken them in the middle of a field with no other witness. I promised to love you and cherish you, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance, and I meant every single word of it. Whatever the law says, I am irrevocably bound to you for all eternity. You are mine , Izzy, as I am yours. We belong together. So I am going to take you to this small island which has only one tiny cottage on it, because it is the only place I can think of where you cannot run away from me, and I am going to keep you there and ravish you senseless until you agree to marry me again in the eyes of the law. I might even ravish you right here and now, since you are so irresistible."
"In the carriage?" she squeaked.
"Why not? I plan to ravish you a great deal on our island, so we might as well start at once, to get into practice for when we are legally married again."
"And if I never agree to marry you?"
"Then we shall grow very tired of our little island, I dare say, although with such a quantity of ravishment, we might not care. I certainly shall not, so long as you are with me. Izzy, my sweet Izzy, if you had chosen one of your other suitors five years ago…" He paused, and took a deep breath, and she could see the raw pain etched on his face. "I could have coped with it, I dare say. Perhaps. I should have put a brave face on it and pretended not to mind too badly. But to be married to you for five years… and then to have the shining light of my existence snatched away from me, and be plunged into the darkness of utter despair… I cannot bear it, Izzy. I cannot face the rest of my life without you."
She had no words for him. All her bravado was stripped away in the face of his desperate need of her. No one had ever needed her before. Wanted her, yes, but this… this was different. ‘The shining light of my existence…' Oh, Ian, foolish man, to keep such feelings hidden all this time!
"Why did you never tell me this before?"
"I knew you never loved me, so… Oh, Izzy!"
He curled himself up to lay his head on her shoulder, one arm still round her waist, squeezing her tight. With a sigh, she rested her head on his, her fingers running through his soft hair. He had lovely hair, with just enough of a curl to be fashionable without waywardness, and so silky soft. Had she ever touched it before? She could not even remember. What a strange, distant marriage theirs had been.
Another jolt shook them apart again.
"A carriage is no place for ravishment," she said firmly, "and your island does not sound very comfortable. Shall we find an inn, and stop for a while so that we can talk properly?"
"Only if you promise not to run away," he said.
"I promise," she said, one finger touching her own lips and then his. "On my word of honour, I will not run away."
It was not much of an inn, just a low-built cottage with stables and a few rooms built on at the back, but it had a parlour and the innkeeper's wife promised them a meal within the hour. It was too early for dinner, but neither of them had the energy to argue about it. A bottle of indifferent wine was found, and with a goblet in her hand, Izzy felt a great deal more normal, almost as if this strange interlude had never happened.
Yet it had. Her husband had been so desperate to keep her that he had abducted her and planned to keep her a prisoner until she agreed to be his wife again. It was astonishing, but gratifying, too. He loved her, that was the amazing part of it all. For a while she walked back and forth, sipping her wine and treasuring the warm glow inside — he loved her. ‘The shining light of his existence', no less. How wonderful he was!
He made no effort to talk, simply watching her, a little smile on his face.
"Do you know why I married you?" she said, after a while.
"For the title and six thousand a year," he said at once.
"Yes," she said, laughing. "Dreadful, mercenary creature that I was."
"No, it was a rational decision, completely dispassionate. I understood that. The title was always my best hope, for I could never compete with the rest of them in any other way. You made the sensible choice, not for love but because I was steady and dependable. You could look at me and know exactly what you were getting."
"Oh yes, and look how the others turned out. Marsden is a skinflint, Davenport became drearily practical and even Robert—" She stopped, eyeing him sideways.
"It is all right, Izzy. You can talk about it. I know very well you were in love with him, for you have told me often enough. Perhaps you still are."
"No," she said slowly, settling on a worn sofa. "No, I do not believe so. When he sent me that note — that was your doing, of course. You engaged him to draw me out so that you could abduct me." She giggled. "How delicious! How romantic , and I never knew you had that in you. I thought I knew you so well! It is an odd thing, but everywhere I went on my travels reminded me of you. I went away with the intention of putting you aside for a while, but instead I kept remembering all your good qualities, and the happy times we have had. Then Robert's note arrived, and I realised that I was not in love with him any longer. Perhaps I never was, for if I had been, surely I would have married him when he offered? But you are right — you were the only one of the four of you who was completely honest. You never put on airs or pretended to be what you were not. You never stooped to subterfuge to win me. You simply laid all your cards on the table and waited for me to decide. Whereas the others—"
She looked at him as he sat across the room, twirling the pewter goblet that was all the inn offered, not drinking his wine, just watching her, smiling. How she had missed him watching her! And now she knew why he did that.
Leaning forward, she went on, "That year was magical, Ian. I had spent my whole life, it seemed, preparing to be launched into society, learning how to be a lady that a man would want to marry, how to dance, how to perform in public. When Josie went off for her first season, I was wild with jealousy. London! The Metropolis! That was life, to me, not my miserable existence in Yorkshire. Corland is so remote , and I was desperate to escape it. Josie came back still unwed, and quite unmoved by all the excitements of the season. I determined that I would marry before her, and oh, Ian, you cannot imagine how wonderful it was, that season. For three months, I was a queen, fêted and fawned over, surrounded by suitors, far more than Josie, but then she never cared about that. She was bored, I think, whereas I… I felt alive for the very first time. And then…"
"Then you married me and discovered how dull married life is," he said.
She smiled. "No! Not at first, no. There was the excitement of the wedding and all my new clothes, the congratulatory calls and gifts, the dinners and balls held in my honour, and oh, the joy of being a viscountess! So shallow of me, but I loved every moment of it."
"And Josie still had not married," he put in.
"Very true. I felt so sorry for her. Then you allowed me a free hand with redecoration, which was the most amazing fun, even if I made a few mistakes." He raised an eyebrow. "Very well, a lot of mistakes. And Helena came along, then Aurelia, and you were sweet about them being girls."
"I care nothing about an heir. I married you for your extraordinary self, not for your breeding potential. You can have twenty girls for all I care. I have a vast supply of male cousins to inherit, and I have a plan to provide for a widow and numerous daughters if I should die without an heir and Henry throws you all out of Stonywell."
"Of course you have," she said, with a quick laugh. "It had never occurred to me, but naturally it occurred to you and you have made provision for such an event. For me, it was the horrible feeling that I had failed in my primary duty. One daughter… that was permissible. But two! I was very low after Aurelia, and then Robert—"
Again she stopped, but he went on evenly, "Robert unexpectedly inherited, and you must have wondered whether you had made the right choice."
"Yes. Oh, not because of you . I had no complaint whatsoever about you."
"Except that I am too dull for words."
That made her laugh. "Not dull, no. You were, and are still, reliable and steady. No, it was Aurelia. If she had been a boy, I would have been more sure of myself, but two girls! It was as if God were mocking me for choosing with my head instead of throwing caution to the winds."
"God does not mock."
"No, no! I know that, but… somehow I began to wonder what my life might have been if… if I had chosen a different path. So when I found myself free… do you understand, Ian?"
He nodded, but his face, his expression that she had once thought so inscrutable was all too readable now. The pain she saw there twisted her heart agonisingly.
"Will you not come and sit beside me?" she said gently.
He shook his head. "I dare not. To be so close to you… so enticing… I want only to touch you… to hold you…"
"To ravish me?"
He gave a quick bark of laughter. "That too. But you wanted to talk, and I am not really so overbearing as I might have appeared today. I would never impose anything upon you against your will, you know. Not if you truly disliked the idea, but I was so desperate…"
His words ended in something like a sob, one hand covering his eyes as if the world were just too overwhelming at that moment. She rose and crossed the room to stand before him, and with a groan, he threw his arms around her, and clutched her tight.
"They have bed chambers here," she said softly.
His face lifted at once, puzzled. "You want to stay the night?"
"I want you to ravish me, husband, right now, and a parlour feels a shade public."
"Oh… Oh! Truly?"
"Truly. Even if we are not legally married."
His face lit with sudden amusement. "But we are, in fact, since we are still in Scotland. The laws are different here."
That was bewildering. "So Nicholson does not matter here?"
"Nicholson matters here, yes. When we entered Scotland, we were not legally married, it is true. But Scotland does not require an ordained minister to make a marriage valid, or even a ceremony. All that is required is to say one is married, for that to be witnessed and for neither party to contradict it. We told the innkeeper we are Lord and Lady Farramont, so therefore… we are married and any ravishment that might happen is perfectly acceptable, but only in Scotland. As soon as we cross the border into England, we shall stop at the first church we find, haul the parson from his bed and make use of this special licence I have been carrying round for weeks, and the sooner the better, for I shall not begin to feel normal until you are truly my wife again."
"Have we time for some ravishment first?"
He laughed. "Oh yes, my love. We certainly have time for that."
"Good. That sounds like an excellent plan. I like Scottish laws very much."
His expression turned suddenly sad. "They have one other wonderful idea which will not help us at all. Illegitimate children are legitimised by the later marriage of their parents."
"Then… since we are now legally married—"
"In Scotland."
"—they are not illegitimate?"
"Only in Scotland."
"Oh. Perhaps we should live in Scotland," she said. "It is a more civilised country than England. My poor, poor daughters — they will be cast out of all good society."
"I doubt that," he said softly. "They will have good dowries and the best education we can give them, and their wonderful mother will ensure that they hold their heads high and are not ashamed of their heritage."
"Oh, yes! I can teach them to look the world in the eye and live their lives exuberantly."
"As you do," he said complacently.
"I hope that they will be, in some ways, less exuberant than their mother," she said, suddenly serious. "I sincerely trust that I will be less exuberant in future. No more shattered porcelain, on that I am determined. I must be a responsible mama to my lovely girls, and a good wife to my surprising husband, so it is time I grew up, is it not?"
"But not too much," he said. "I should be very unhappy with a docile wife."
"We cannot have you unhappy, so that is agreed — a little less exuberance, but not too much. And still I am unravished, husband."
He laughed, smiling up at her. "Then let us do something about that, wife."