“I cannot imagine a more terrible experience for a woman.” He took her hand, and even though Josie knew she should be writhing in guilt, her heart started beating more quickly. “I’ll do anything I can for you. And if there’s a child—”

She shook her head.

“You can’t know.” He said it so gently that her heart turned over and she pulled her hand away.

“Garret—” But somehow her confession died on her lips. She wanted to be married to him. At the base of it all, there was nowhere on earth she wanted to be other than in this carriage, able to call him by his first name. And if she was going to go to hell for the blackness of her crimes…He was so beautiful, with his straight brows and serious eyes.

“Of course neither of us have been in this situation before. Our marriage may have begun in a bungling fashion, Josie, but it will be as serious to me as if we’d wed in Westminster Abbey. I know I have a poor reputation, but I said farewell to that life a while ago. I will not betray you.”

“No,” she said. “Nor I you.”

“I shall guard you a bit more fiercely than I did at the racetrack,” he said, turning her hand over. “I suspect it will take some time for you to countenance the idea of intimacies. I want you to feel at ease. We can wait for those matters as long as you wish. A year even.”

Josie swallowed. The only thing that came to mind was a forlorn line of Desdemona’s when Othello was sent off to war: the rites for which I married him are bereft me. A fancy way of asking the governor not to send her husband off to war before they consummated their marriage. But how could she say such a thing? With Mayne thinking that she was devastated by Thurman’s disgusting advances?

Of course, if she were a more ladylike person, she probably would be distraught. After all, Thurman certainly made an attempt to grab her breast, the loathsome muckworm.

Something must have showed in her face, because all of a sudden Mayne was sitting beside her.

“Who was it?” he asked. His voice echoed queerly around the carriage.

Josie’s breathing missed a hitch. How could she tell him? He’d probably murder poor Thurman, and all the man did—albeit with a singular lack of grace—was kiss her. Well, maul her. Still…

She was quite aware that if the upshot of being mauled by Thurman was being married to Mayne, she would endure it all over again. “I took care of it myself,” she said.

“What?”

Josie gulped. There was no help for it; she’d have to tell the truth. “We were behind the stables.”

He wrapped an arm around her and it felt so good that she let herself lean into his shoulder.

“Why were you behind the stables?”

“I didn’t really notice where we were going,” Josie confessed. She could hardly say that she had been tired of watching Sylvie’s darling little turban and her slim little figure and the way she clung to Mayne’s arm.

His arm tightened. “So he took you behind the stables and—”

“He started to kiss me and—things of that nature. My dress ripped.” He made a muffled sound and Josie said: “I wrenched free at one point and he came back toward me, and there was a pile of manure.” She stopped.

“A pile of manure?”

“And a shovel.”

“Oh, my God,” Mayne said.

“I slung it at him,” Josie told Mayne’s coat.

“Where’d you hit him?”

“In the face.”

There was a moment of silence. “The man still needs to die, but I’m proud of you. Now who was it?”

How could she answer that? She looked at him instead. They hadn’t been so close to each other since the time he kissed her in his turreted room. Her heart was going so quickly she could feel it against her gown. She looked at him, at the eyelashes that were longer than hers, and his eyes, and the beautiful, weary look of him. A wave of heat swept over her body. Heat and hunger.

She swallowed and felt the ripple in her throat. In fact, she felt every inch of her skin, as if it belonged to someone else.

There was something in his eyes. It was as if the sound of the horses had died away and they were both holding their breaths, or perhaps only she was…

“Josie,” he said, after what seemed like a century.

“Yes?” She whispered it.

“You’re my wife.” He looked almost comically surprised.

Josie could tell that this was the moment to make a clean breast of it. Not that it was really her fault that he had decided she was ravished, but she hadn’t clarified the matter. “Do you mind being married?” she asked, losing her courage.

“I hardly know.” The carriage was drawing to a halt. “Do you like being married? To me?”

“Yes,” she said. And she let it all sweep over her again, the masculine, warm smell of him, the beauty of him, the broad shoulder she leaned against, his blatantly seductive, beautiful eyes. “I do like being married to you,” she said, rather shakily.

His eyes searched hers, just long enough so that she quivered with anxiety. Then the door swept open and the step was out. She moved down into the crisp night air, and she wasn’t Josephine Essex any longer.

She was the Countess of Mayne.

32

From The Earl of Hellgate,

Chapter the Twenty-third

Dear Reader, have you guessed that I am not designed for the state of matrimony? My poor darling Mustardseed, to name her after another of Shakespeare’s fairies. I shall not say much of her, for our life together was short, and sometimes sweet.

T hurman was not having a good night. He had arrived home in a malodorous state and grumblingly washed himself up. He consoled himself with snapping at his man and sending his dinner back twice to be remade.

It wasn’t until the middle of the night that he sat bolt upright in his bed with an oath on his lips.He’d suddenly realized that he might find himself at the cold end of a long sword on the morrow. He stared at the gray light filtering into his room, his fingers gripping the coverlet.

“Bloody hell,” he whispered out loud. If the Sausage went back to all those brothers-in-law of hers and told them his name, he’d be married to a fat Scottish woman before he turned around. He threw off the covers and tottered out of bed, his bare legs cold under the skirt of his nightdress.

“No,” he groaned. “No, no, no.”

His father wouldn’t support him, not in this. What had he been thinking? He got a little carried away when she fought him. It was her fault, really. If she had just recognized what an honor he was paying her by deigning to kiss her, none of this would have happened.

The last sight he had of her, her dress torn and her hair falling about her shoulders, flashed before his eyes. No one would believe him when he said he didn’t tear her dress. Because he didn’t. He didn’t even know how that happened. All he did was get a handful of her breasts, just to see if they were as large as they seemed.

He couldn’t stop a little grin at that. You can’t keep a Thurman down, not when he’s got a hot spell on him. We’re all the same, and ’ware the village maidens when—

But she wasn’t a village maiden, that was the problem. And he—he almost felt like retching at the thought—he might find himself married to that great cow of a woman. Even the thought of how his brothers would laugh at him made him feel like killing someone.