Page 74 of The Dangerous Love of a Rogue
Her mother touched her arm.
Mary turned to her. ‘You would have told me not to speak to him.’
‘For good reason!’ John shouted.
Anger screamed inside her. ‘Stop it! You never told me the reason! You never told me what he’d said to Kate!’
‘I did not think I needed to spell it out to you! I thought you would trust my word!’
‘He is nice…’ The Andrew she knew was.
‘I’m sure he was,’ John growled, ‘and I do not wish to know how nice!’
‘John,’ her mother challenged, ‘you will solve nothing by condemning her. It is too late for this. I just wish, I wish…’ Her mother’s voice broke and her eyes glittered.
Mary was overcome with guilt as she enveloped her mother in a firm embrace to comfort her. ‘Mama, I’m sorry?—’
‘I am not angry with you.’ Her mother wiped the tears away. ‘I am sad because you may suffer from this choice if Lord Framlington is as bad as John thinks.’ Her voice became a whisper as though emotions strangled her. ‘I know you must love this man. It is not an easy choice to elope. I know because I eloped with John’s father. I hope Lord Framlington loves you too, Mary?’
Mary had not known about her mother’s elopement.
‘Anyway,’ she said, waving away the questions Mary would have asked. ‘Whatever the outcome, unlike when I eloped, you are not leaving your family. We will always be here. Come upstairs, now, and let us find you something pretty to wear to your wedding.’ She took Mary’s hand.
A lump swelled in Mary’s throat as they climbed the stairs, emotions gathering. ‘Is Kate here?’ she asked.
‘No, she’s with the children at Pembroke Place. We left in the middle of the night. Eleanor sent word to me. She saw Miss Smithfield at a ball. She knew you were supposed to be with her and you were not.’
‘Does everyone know I ran away? Is Emily in trouble?’
‘I am sure she is. She lied for you. I have always trusted you. Why did you not trust me?’
‘She was charmed, Mama.’ Mary had not even noticed John walking up the stairs a few steps behind them. ‘I would lay odds he told her not to speak.’
Andrew had.
‘I would say he promised her devotion.’ John’s words echoed about all the shining marble in his cold hall.
She did not want to believe what John said but Andrew had become taciturn since her family found them.
When she reached the room she had been allocated last season, as a grown woman, she felt like a child again. ‘Mama, you do not need to help me. You can send a maid.’
‘No matter the circumstances, this is your wedding day, and it is a mother’s right to help her daughter dress.’
26
Pembroke’s opulent Palladian Hall was magnificent, but when Drew saw his future wife walk down the stairs she outshone all the gilded splendour. She had changed her clothes and dressed in a pale shimmering dove-grey muslin, shot through with silver thread. The fabric caught the daylight from the long window above the door, and it made her appear unearthly. The colour engaged with her eyes; and her dark hair and pale skin made a perfect contrast for the colour too.
The bonnet she wore was a slightly darker grey, and at the edge of its brim were small white rose buds. She looked like a virginal bride. She was not that.
When she looked at him, her beauty knocked the air from his sore lungs, and a memory of how flawless her porcelain skin was under that gown dried his throat.
A slight lift of her lips, scarcely a smile, acknowledged him as she stepped from the bottom stair.
I love you, the thought spun through his head. He was certain of it. The ground shifted, tilted, beneath his feet when he had seen her.
Her look did not say,I love you too. Her eyes were cold. But then, when she’d walked downstairs, she would not have been admiring him; he sported a black eye and a bruised jaw.
Drew swallowed the knot tied in his throat.
