“I asked her to marry me last night,” Thorn snarled. “She refused me, so I could hardly claim to be married to her. I planned to ask her again.”
“You asked her to be your wife after you slept with her? You thought that Lady Xenobia India St. Clair would marry you because you were gracious enough to offer your hand after bedding her? Why would she want to marry you?”
“She might have been carrying my child,” Thorn said tightly. But a bitter chill was sweeping through him. Vander was right. Why the hell would India want to marry him?
Vander made a guttural sound of disgust and spat his words. “You didn’t use a sheath? What in the hell were you thinking?” His eyes glittered at Thorn in the darkening room.
“I don’t think around her,” Thorn said, telling him the truth. “When I asked her to marry me, she refused. She said that she’d give me the child if we had one.” Vander—more than anyone else in the world—would know what that meant to him. The agony that her comment roused.
But Vander just snorted. “You believed her? Damn it, Thorn, you don’t really want her. You don’t even know her!”
“I didn’t realize she was lying to me until later,” Thorn said tightly.
“She baited a trap and you fell into it. You might have had a chance with her—after all, she took you into her bed—but that’s gone.”
Images tumbled through Thorn’s mind: Rose looking up at India as she read her a book, and India telling him about her parents’ desertion. Vander was right. She had tested him, and he had failed.
He stood up, slowly, knowing that he would be covered with bruises in a few hours. They had gone at each other like rabid animals.
Vander still sat against the wall, his arms on his knees. Without raising his head, he said, “She’s mine, Thorn, and the sooner you get used to it, the better. You treated her like a doxy, and you didn’t protect her when she needed it.”
Every word struck Thorn’s gut like another blow from a balled-up fist.
Then Vander looked up, pushing back hair soaked with sweat and brandy. “You had your shot, and you lost. I’m going to marry her. I’ll leave it to you whether we remain friends.” He got up, lurching slightly, one hand pressed against his side, and left without a backward glance.
Thorn walked into his own room reeking of spirits, with vision only in his left eye.
The hell with it. That dream was over. He’d had it for, what, half a day? The dream that India was his, that he could marry a woman like her: brilliant, glowing, beautiful . . . funny. As wild in bed as she was elsewhere, the kind of woman who lunged at life, fear be damned, and embraced it.
But Lady Xenobia India was a lady. And he was a bastard, who had behaved like a bastard. Of course she didn’t want him. She’d let him down kindly, in fact.
He sank into a steaming bath and forced himself to face the truth. He would offer his hand in marriage one more time, if only to prove to India that his proposal was motivated by far more than the possibility of a baby.
But it was a useless gesture. Daughters of marquesses didn’t marry bastards, not in any part of England that he’d heard of. India would marry Vander. She was meant to be a duchess. They would be happy together, shining, beautiful examples of England’s peerage.
He got out of the bath and dressed swiftly. If he was going to ask a future duchess to marry him, he would do it like the gentleman he wasn’t. Not by dragging her into an alcove and treating her like a whore. No, he would go on one knee, he decided, tying his cravat in a Gordian knot.
And once she rejected him, that would be that. He would lose his oldest and truest friend and the woman he loved in one blow. Suffocating darkness welled inside him at the thought.
By now it was nearly time for the evening meal; presumably India would be downstairs, sipping a sherry with the others. He briefly wondered if Lady Rainsford had departed for London or was still cowering in her room, then he discarded the thought. He didn’t give a damn what happened to the lady or, frankly, to her daughter.
He descended the stairs, planning to draw India to his study—respectfully—in order to request her hand in marriage. His father was waiting in the entry.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t speak now,” Thorn said, heading for the drawing room.
“Son.”
Something in Villiers’s voice made Thorn pause and turn back.
“You are looking somewhat the worse for wear.”
Thorn gestured impatiently. “Surely you heard the uproar.”
“Fleming did a fine job of keeping everyone on the ground floor.” The duke’s face was expressionless, but his eyes weren’t. “They took the special license, Tobias. If you leave now, you can catch them; they won’t be able to marry until morning. They went to Piggleston, where the parish church has a resident vicar.”
Thorn felt as if a hammer smashed into the back of his neck. The feelings that coursed through him had nothing to do with civilization and everything to do with carnage.
He was going to kill Vander. Murder him. Tear him limb from limb.
Blood began pounding through his limbs, and suddenly he knew, with absolute certainty, that he could murder his closest friend without turning a hair. The hell with being respectful to India. She was his, and no damn duke was going to have her, not if he had to rip her away from Vander at the altar and throw her into his carriage.
“Right,” he said, turning to the door, his mind churning. He had to get on the road, find them, kill Vander, and marry India.
Of course she left with Vander. What else could she do? Thorn had never claimed her, not really.
“My carriage is waiting,” his father said.
Indeed, the duke’s traveling coach stood in the drive, horses stamping their hooves and grooms standing at the ready.
Thorn nodded to his father, caught a flash of wicked amusement in his eyes—yet another sign of the duke’s warped paternal instincts—and climbed into the carriage, directing the coachman to the largest inn in Piggleston. He spent the next few hours alternating between berating himself and suppressing stifling waves of anger at Vander. Finally, the horses trotted off the post road and moved onto cobbled streets.
When they pulled into the courtyard of the Coach and Horn, Thorn leapt down and roused the innkeeper. But though he handed out five-pound notes as if they were ha’pennies, every man he talked to, at all three inns in Piggleston, swore up and down that no couples resembling Vander and India had been seen. By that point a muscle was jumping in Thorn’s jaw, and his face was apparently so distorted by rage—not to mention his black eye—that men fell back as he approached.
There was nothing more he could do. He’d marked the location of the church, and he would be there in the morning to stop the wedding.
India would not marry Vander, if Thorn had to assault the vicar at the altar.
He took a room, but he couldn’t lie down. Every time he pictured Vander and India on a bed together, scorching pain shot through him. The memory of her face when she lied to him and he believed her . . . the scorn on her face when she told him that she’d been a virgin, though he hadn’t noticed.
That was why she would marry Vander. He had broken what they had . . . in fact, he was afraid that he had broken her.
She hadn’t fought back against Lady Rainsford’s ugly insults. She hadn’t said another word after coming forward to claim Rose as her own. That wasn’t like her.