The Highwayman (Victorian Rebels Book 1)

Heavy clouds threatened to drench Farah’s wedding day. She’d fought the pull of sleep until very late, and so she hadn’t woken until noon, which generally would have distressed her. Instead, she lay beneath the cozy counterpane and watched the storm clouds crawl over each other in their haste to reach the shore, congregated by the wind and clashing like unruly children in a school yard.

Reaching for a glass of water on the bedside table, she paused, noting how the high-backed chair crowded the bed. Had it been pulled that close when she’d turned in? She didn’t think so, but then, she’d been rather distracted the night before, puzzling over the events at dinner.

She’d uncovered another crack in Dorian Blackwell’s façade, a rather large one. A chink in the armor of ice he encased around his humanity. Regardless of his aversion to touch, and despite the vow that bound them both to this course of action, Blackwell’s eyes were drawn to her. His body responded to the sight of her mouth. Her tongue. Watching her eat, enjoy, lick her fingers and her lips, those things inflamed him.

Farah hadn’t meant to entice him with her actions over dessert. But she knew she had, she’d seen the heat in his eyes. The alarm. The banked passion.

And his body wasn’t the only one affected by whatever this was between them. Something had awakened within her, as well. Something previously missing, or perhaps merely dormant all this time. Lying in wait for the perfect mix of shadow and intrigue to draw it out. Some wicked, playful thing comprised of equal parts curiosity and womanly knowledge. Of timidity and desire.

All she knew was that she came alive beneath Dorian Blackwell’s inscrutable gaze. He watched her with an intensity she’d never before seen, and she wanted to fill his insatiable mind with images he’d not likely forget.

The urges frightened her. Elated her. Stole her breath and sped her heart until it kicked against her ribs.

Tonight. Their wedding night. Would he be able to go through with it?

Would she?

Murdoch arrived with a gown of pristine cream silk, trimmed at the neck and sleeves with expensive handmade lace and adorned with nothing more than an endless row of pearl buttons that ran from the high neckline to the waist where the skirt flared and fell in simple, elegant layers.

Farah recognized the dress, as it had hung in her own closet back in London where she’d figured, if her marriage had ever come into question, she could produce the simple gown as corroboration to her story.

It wasn’t meant to be a wedding dress, she knew, but it had called to her from a shop window on the Strand, and she’d been lost to it the moment her hand had drifted over the pearly silk.

Blackwell had been in her wardrobe. He’d touched her things. A picture of him running his rough hands over her clothes, across her silky delicates, flared in her mind, and she had to focus very carefully on dressing and her conversation with Murdoch, lest he guess the direction her thoughts had taken.

Pinning her hair into a braided bun at the crown of her head, she left a few ringlets to fall against her cheek and neck. There, if she wasn’t ready to be married, at least she looked it.

Ben More Castle’s chapel was arid with disuse, and Farah announced her presence with a sneeze that disturbed the veil of white lace Murdoch had produced for her.

No prelude music preceded her and Murdoch down the aisle, just the sound of her heels on the aged stones, the staccato of heavy rain beginning to fall against the roof, and the pulsing rush of blood in her ears.

Murdoch whispered something that she didn’t quite catch, but Farah gave a stilted nod, and he seemed to take that as an acceptable answer.

The castle’s hodgepodge of outcasts lined the first pew closest to the bare and largely unused altar in front of which stood a rather harried-looking young priest. His round spectacles rested at a crooked angle on his nose, and his unruly red hair stuck out in such a way, Farah was reminded of baby chickens when they began to lose their fuzz in disorganized tufts.

The men stood when they entered, and Frank courteously and inappropriately blessed her sneeze in his booming voice. Dressed in a suit that must have fit him in the days he consumed fewer pastries, he fidgeted with his crooked tie while, next to him, Tallow watched their steady progression down the aisle, not facing the bride, but Murdoch.

Farah counted five other household staff, along with the stable master, Mr. Weston, and his stable hand. The groundskeeper, a shifty-eyed man with a Greek-sounding name, and a couple of other faces with which Farah was unacquainted.

She was grateful their expressions were blurred from behind the veil, and that it obscured hers from them, as well. It helped conceal the fact that she had yet to look at him.

Her bridegroom stood motionless to the right of the priest, a tall, broad figure swathed in black. The shadows and angles of his strong jaw and shock of ebony hair were visible, but little else. Farah found the veil made the whole ordeal easier. She could pretend that today was a happy day, long awaited and full of words like hope and promise and future instead of shadowed by vengeance, duty, and the past.

Reaching the priest, Farah turned to face Dorian once Murdoch had given her away. They both stood silent during the ceremony, still but for her quaking legs, while the priest solemnly recited scripture in an airy lilting Scottish accent and adjusted his glasses enough times to dub the behavior obsessive.

When the priest asked for the ring, Frank stepped forward gripping both sides of a small wooden box as though he presented them with the Holy Grail.

Blackwell opened the box and extracted from the black velvet a white-gold ring adorned with a single diamond fashioned in the shape of a tear. Well, a tear only if Goliath ever cried. Or Cyclops, maybe.

The massive diamond wasn’t white, but a silvery-gray that caught each facet of the wan light filtering in from the chapel windows, its sparkle underscored by darker shadows that made the gleam more brilliant somehow.

“It’s lovely,” she breathed, holding out her trembling left hand.

Dorian held it up in his black-leather-clad fingers so it would catch the light. “Gray diamonds are the rarest and most valuable in the world,” he said. “It seemed appropriate that you should have one.”

Were she not in the middle of her own wedding ceremony, Farah would have snorted. Of course he would think that the wife of the Blackheart of Ben More should have some obscenely expensive ring to demonstrate his wealth and power to all the world. Regardless of the reason, Farah had to admit she would be glad to wear it, having never owned something so lovely or valuable in her life.

“Well, put the blasted thing on her bloody finger, lad, we’re all going to die with purple faces if we’re forced to hold our breaths verra much longer.” Murdoch’s impatient prompt broke the mesmerizing spell of the ring, and Blackwell studied her extended fingers.

He cast Murdoch a dark look and the priest flinched at the old man’s profanity, but they all watched in fascinated silence as Dorian visibly prepared himself. Pinching the bottom and diamond between his thumb and forefinger, he slid the ring onto her hand with hardly a brush of his leather glove, before snatching his fist back.

Farah learned that Dorian decided to forgo a ring, as was the husband’s prerogative, and they got on with the ceremony. Her mind drifted to another wedding, in a different small, dusty church. This one attended only by the two souls who wanted to bind their destinies together. Farah was glad that this ceremony was Christian instead of the more archaic fashion like she and Dougan had. She couldn’t have said those words to another.

“Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife…”

Ye are blood of my blood, and bone of my bone.

Blackwell’s “I do” was more decisive than hers. In fact, when she spoke the words, she may have been answering a question like, “Do you mind sitting next to the Marquis de Sade and discussing literature?”

It counted, though, and before she knew it, the priest pronounced them man and wife. The final words read in his hushed voice from his Bible sent little shocks of dread and desire through her.

“And they two shall be one flesh: so then they are no more two, but one flesh…”

I give ye my body, that we two might be one.

One flesh, the Bible said. Joined. Cleaving. The righteous words caused a wet rush of warmth to spread like a sin between her legs. Tonight they would be joined by more than words. Their two bodies moving as one. Surely such wicked thoughts were blasphemous in the church. Farah stared across at the dark form of Dorian Blackwell. Of course, when one was marrying the devil, what was one or two other blasphemies?

“What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder…”

I give ye my spirit, ’til our life shall be done.

“Amen,” Dorian agreed.

“Amen,” echoed the congregation.

“Um, Mr. Blackwell, sir, that part in the canon doesna require an amen.”

“To me, it did.”

“Well, then, I suppose … ye may kiss yer bride.”

It took Dorian an eternity to lift her veil. And another to lean down to her, his eyes two mismatched pools of determination.

Farah held perfectly still, as though one tic of a muscle might change his mind. Both of them breathed rather hard, though his inhales labored through his chest more deeply than hers. He smelled of soap and spice with a hint of wood smoke, as though the flames of hell had singed his tailored suit.

His lips parted a whisper above hers. His breath brushing her mouth in soft bursts. She could read the yearning in his eyes. The doubt. The need. The panic. And she did what he needed her to do. She closed the infinitesimal gap between them with a slight reach of her neck, and pressed her mouth to his in a chaste but undeniable kiss.

His lips were warm, hard, and still, but he didn’t pull back. In fact, he didn’t move until she pulled away and turned to a grinning Frank, not missing the surreptitious swipe Murdoch made at his watering eyes with the handkerchief Tallow had pressed into his hand.

Farah had done it. She was Mrs. Dorian Blackwell. For better or worse.

Until death parted them.

*   *   *

Dorian’s cock was hard. It pressed against the fabric of his tailored trousers with an aching persistence that made walking damned inconvenient. He’d been worried it wouldn’t be, that the blood rushing in his ears and pounding in his chest and throat might not leave enough for his manhood.

It had happened before.

But, though he’d legally taken Farah as his wife, he could not truly call her his own until he claimed her body and planted his seed in her womb. She knew it, demanded it. And so did his cock.

He stood outside of Farah’s room for what could have been a few minutes, or may have been an hour, the door handle gripped in his leather glove.

She was his, her name no longer tied to the past, but to him. The sweet, innocent girl who’d become a Newgate legend, now an unspeakably desirable woman about to be sullied by his corrupted, repellent, vile body.

He couldn’t let her touch it. Or look upon it, even. She would be revolted, disgusted, or worse.

Of all the things Dorian had coveted, a wedding night had never been among them, and yet, here he was. But what of his bride? Had she dreamed of this day, this night? Did she have mysterious and romantic expectations of the virginal explorations of a tender lover? Or had she accepted that he was incapable of both love and tenderness? His wife was no fool. She had agreed to marry the Blackheart of Ben More. A man who gave nothing. No compassion and no mercy. A notorious thief who only took and only when it pleased him to do so.

He’d made the promise to take her tonight, and Dorian Blackwell always kept his promises.

Farah had passed restless and settled on anxious a half hour ago. At first, she’d arranged herself in a pretty picture on her blue and cream counterpane with a book, the first button or two on her high collar undone, and her skirts spread about her legs in a pool of silk. She pictured herself posing for a Marie Spartali Stillman painting, serene and mysteriously aloof, but approachable.

That had lasted all of five minutes.

Slipping off the bed, she’d lit candles and placed them on various surfaces about the room, hoping to cast just the right amount of flattering golden light. That done, she’d positioned herself on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, and decided not to move a muscle until he entered.

Oh, dear, what if she was supposed to go to him? What if, even now, he awaited her in his own lair? They hadn’t really discussed the particulars after the meal that neither of them had touched, as they’d listened to the sound of masculine merrymaking around them.

A slightly drunk Murdoch had escorted her back here, announcing loudly that he’d been waiting on this day for decades and it was about bloody time she and Dorian seized their happiness, and each other.

Farah knew enough not to argue with a Scotsman in his cups, so she declined to remind him that she and Blackwell had only known each other a few days, and that neither of them were particularly happy about the marriage.

She wasn’t unhappy, though, which amazed her. One would expect to feel morose trepidation about such a match. But she didn’t. In fact she felt surprisingly calm, hopeful, even. Almost as though—as if—

If Dorian Blackwell didn’t show his face soon, she would go raving mad.

What if he didn’t come to her tonight? What if he’d been lying to her when he promised to get her with child?

I’m not above lying to you to get what I want.

Oh, she would skin him alive. If Dorian Blackwell meant to stand her up on her own wedding night, she had more than a thing or two to say about that! Farah paced the floor for a few minutes, organizing her rant into specific and chronologically important points, the last one beginning with and furthermore, because when one predicated a statement with that, it was impossible to ignore it. Even if you were the bloody Blackheart of Ben More.

Having worked up a sufficient amount of righteous indignation, she marched for the door.

It burst open, missing her face by inches.

Farah shrieked.

Blackwell stared.

“What do you think you are doing?” she demanded.

“Where do you think you are going?” he said at the same time.

She answered first. “I was coming to find my husband.”

“Well, here I am,” he said with a droll glance around her room, twitching his nose at the rosewater scent she’d sprayed on the pillows and curling his lip at the carefully placed candles.

“You could have knocked,” Farah indicted, unwilling to show the hurt that squeezed within her breast.

Blackwell entered her room, forcing her to take a step back. “I’ll be a dead man before I knock on a door in my own castle.”

“What if I wasn’t ready?”

He speared her with those eyes. Ones that could be so full of mystery and flame. Ones that could be so dead and cold.

Like now.

“There’s no amount of preparation for what we’re about to do.” He strode past her, barely giving her an assessing glance, and claimed the seat by her bed as though he owned it. Which he did, of course. Shadows gathered near him as they were wont to do, despite the candles she’d so carefully placed. Cold menace and a dangerous, unstable element rolled off him and reached for her like the mist that blanketed the Highland shores of a morning, shrouding the dangers of the ancient volcanic rock and the shapes of predators.

For a predator he was, that had never been clearer than in this moment.

“Now,” he said in that deep, chilly voice, examining the fine leather of his fitted gloves. “Take off your dress.”