Alison DeLaine – A Wedding By Dawn (страница 1)
‘A fearless debut! Alison DeLaine pens a stand-out romance.’
‘Unusual and engaging … DeLaine keeps the pages turning.’
ALISON DELAINE
A Gentleman ‘Til Midnight
A Promise by Daylight
A Wedding by Dawn
ALISON DELAINE lives in rural Arizona, where she can often be found driving a dented old pickup truck out to her mining claim in the desert. When she’s not busy striking it rich, waiting on spoiled pets, or keeping her husband in line, she is happily putting characters through the wringer.
Alison DeLaine
To my parents, for their support.
Contents
FOR FIFTY THOUSAND pounds, Nicholas Warre didn’t give a damn what his bride looked like.
He curled his hand around the jamb of the tavern’s side door, with Malta’s night breeze at his back and a host of raucous Mediterranean drunks shoving their way past him, and glanced at William Jaxbury. “You’re absolutely certain?”
Jaxbury’s gaze leveled on their prize, Lady India Sinclair. His gold earrings glittered in the muted candlelight that spilled through the doorway, and his dark red Barbary turban made him look like a corsair devil. “Recognize that tricorne anywhere,” he said, and ducked quickly out of view on the other side of the doorway. Amusement danced in his eyes, damn him. Always laughing when there wasn’t one bloody thing to laugh at.
Inside the tavern, Nick’s betrothed perched on a stool, deep in conversation with a companion who could only be Miss Millicent Germain. Lady India’s full attention was fixed on something—someone?—across the room. That tricorne blocked her face, and a black waistcoat obscured her figure, but he had a clear view of a shapely leg clad in breeches and a white stocking. Her black buckled shoe tap-tap-tapped the stool’s leg.
“Second thoughts?” Jaxbury asked, eyes gleaming.
“No.” A man didn’t have second thoughts about a bank draft that would finally put an end to his misery. “I shall go in through the main door, while you stay here and wait for my signal.” And then—
Good God.
She’d turned her head, and he found himself staring across the tavern at her profile. Even as he watched, she glanced at something over her shoulder and gave him a quick but full view of her face. His hand constricted around the doorjamb. “Jaxbury, you bloody bastard. You could have warned me she’s got a mouth that’ll have every man in London reaching for his breeches.”
The words scarcely left his tongue before Jaxbury had his fist clenched in Nick’s shirt. “Besmirch Lady India again, and you’ll answer to me.” There was no laughter in those eyes now.
“Did I besmirch her? I could have sworn I merely commented on her beauty.” And beauty was the dead last thing he needed in a wife. He thought of Clarissa—so lovely yet so deceptive—and checked a sudden urge to lay his fist into something. Jaxbury’s jaw, for example.
Even from this distance and dressed like a man, Lady India screamed sensuality. The men in that tavern were either sodomites or blind.