Lady Viola’s Accidental Husband (Merry Spinsters, Charming Rogues #7)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

She fell from the heavens right into his awaiting arms.

(Alas, this was precisely what did not happen.)

The unvarnished truth?

He did catch her, through some miraculous quirk of fate, more luck than anything else, really, but then promptly dropped her into a bed of nettles.

She screeched.

In that instant, he realised that the thing that had been plummeting toward him was not, in fact, a gigantic bat swooping down upon its unsuspecting prey.

Nor was it, as his panicked mind rather unhelpfully proposed, a heavy sack of oats flailing and shrieking its way through the air.

Whatever it was, it had given him scarcely half a second to decide whether he should catch it or submit to his fate of becoming crushed like a beetle under a boot.

He caught it.

“Ouff.”

The impact nearly wrenched his arms from their sockets. Then it started wiggling in his hold, and his befuddled brain realised that what he held was neither bat nor bag of oats, for it felt oddly curvy and agreeably soft in the most unexpected places, smelling bewitchingly sweet of lavender.

Good heavens. A woman.

This was when he dropped her like a load of glowing embers.

The bundle hit the ground with a thump.

“Why did you do that?” She had a pair of big, outraged eyes and a head full of unruly black hair that tumbled wildly across a very indignant face.

“Not an overgrown bat,” he noted.

“Most definitely not!” she fumed. “Next time you intend to throw me into the nettles, I should be most grateful if you gave me some warning.”

She scrambled upright, brushed dust from her sleeves, and shook out her skirts. She winced as she straightened, with a distressed sound.

“Thanks to you, I placed my hand right into the nettles.” She blew on her fingers. “I’ll probably get blisters.”

“You are trespassing.” That was probably not the thing at all to say in this particular situation, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of anything better to say to a random girl who had just fallen out of the sky right into his arms.

He cleared his throat. It was all rather unanticipated and awkward, and not at all the thing to expect when one went on a mere afternoon walk to visit the picturesque ruins of a medieval abbey that were found on the grounds of the estate.

Judging from her glare, she thought the same. “Trespassing, balderdash,” she informed him. “I live here.”

She lived here?

His brows drew together to a frown. Was she the gardener’s daughter?

One of the maids living on the farm? A milkmaid, possibly?

His gaze wandered over her simple, grey cotton dress, torn at the hem.

His eyes paused briefly at a stain on her sleeve before they continued wandering over her small, curvy figure and ended at her bare feet.

“I lost my shoes,” she muttered, wiggling her toes in the dust. And her stockings as well, it appeared. She had small feet. And tiny toes.

He tore his eyes away hastily and fixed them on her face instead.

Her eyes were too big, her mouth too wide, her small, turned-up nose dusted with freckles. There was a streak of dirt across her nose as if she had poked her face into a mud hole.

Not a beauty.

Most definitely not.

“Who are you? You look like a prig.”

“A prig?”

“Yes, one of those eternally displeased sort of people who has just discovered they accidentally stepped on a slug. You carry the same sort of expression.” Then she paused and gasped.

“Oh! Your eyes! They are most peculiar.” She stood on tiptoe to gaze deeper into his eyes, latching onto his arm for balance.

There it was again, that smell of lavender and something else that reminded him of a meadow and fresh linen drying under the summer sun.

It unsettled him immensely. “One appears to be green, and the other blue! Framed by dark, dramatic lashes. How extraordinary! Particularly in combination with that pale skin and dark hair.” She tilted her head aside as she studied him.

“It is a lusus naturae,” he replied testily, since he wasn’t quite certain where she was heading. “It’s Latin and means ‘whim of nature’. It is the way I was born.”

“I know. I am not stupid. A lost elven prince with a touch of lusus naturae,” she replied dreamily.

He’d evidently been promoted from prig to elven prince within a matter of minutes, but he wasn’t certain whether that was really a compliment.

If it was, it did not last long. “Or else some lost city swell mistaking these beautiful ruins for Almack’s Assembly Rooms,” she added.

Down his status came again to what she, no doubt, regarded as the most deplorable species of London gentlemen.

“And you look like a homeless milkmaid who’s lost her cows.” He removed her hand from his arm and took a step back.

“A homeless milkm—” She pulled herself up haughtily. “See here, sir.” Her hand waved at the ruins behind her, and at the tower, from the top of which, apparently, she must have fallen. “The ton doesn’t assemble here, as surely you must have noticed by now.”

She nodded at his outfit. “This is not a ballroom, nor is it a Bow Street club.” She eyed him rudely, presumably taking in his breeches, his fashionably cut coat and carefully starched cravat, travelling down to his Hessian boots, and up again.

Unnerved by her frank appraisal, he tugged at his well-tailored coat, flicked away a leaf of grass on his sleeve, and picked up his hat, which had fallen to the ground. He dusted it off with his hand and set it back on his head.

“I was taking a walk,” he informed her stiffly. “Not that this is any of your business.”

“Ah. So it is you who must be trespassing, but as opposed to you, I won’t hold it against you.

After all, if you hadn’t been where you were, just now, I daresay I’d be dead as Yorick’s skull.

” She paused as if rethinking her words.

“Or worse. I could have remained here half alive, with my head only partly smashed, in an immobile state, unable to call for help. Night would fall and when the full moon stood at its zenith, the wolves would howl and come hither from their lair; they would stalk through the forest, ravenously hungry, looking for prey, looking for food, looking for anything at all…” A shudder racked her body, but he had the sudden suspicion that it was rather one of morbid enjoyment.

“Wolves have been extinct since the days of the Tudors,” he said laconically. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one in all of Britain.”

She waved him away. “If not wolves, then bears.”

He scoffed. “There are no bears either. Not since the Saxons.”

She sniffed. “It is immaterial. Werewolves, then.”

“Were-what?”

She nodded. “Most certainly. It must be werewolves that live here. Especially here. In these forests, amongst these ruins. At night, when the ghosts, ghouls, and vampires come out…”

“Vampires?”

“Naturally. This area swarms with them. There’s a hidden, forgotten graveyard here somewhere, isn’t there?

” She leaned forward with a stage whisper, “A vampire graveyard! Which is why I decided to climb the stairs to the tower to get a better view of the area to see whether I could find it. I thought I’d be able to see it easier from the top of that tower.

” She waved at the decrepit stone tower that was the only construct which remained of the ruin that had once been an abbey.

No one in their right mind would climb that tower unless they harboured a death wish.

“I saw something in the distance that could’ve been a hidden graveyard, but then I leaned out a tad too far, my foot slipped and, err. ..”

The girl was mad. Entirely beyond all hope. Most certainly, she was.

“Let me see whether I understood this correctly. You climbed this tower, this ruinous pile of stone, to see whether you could find a hidden graveyard? Because you expected to find werewolves and vampires there? Did you read too many novels? By that woman...” He snapped his fingers several times in succession.

“What was her name? Radcliffe. She writes utter balderdash.”

She mumbled something.

He leaned forward. “I did not catch that.”

“I said, it appears to have been that way.” She overenunciated each word. “And Radcliffe is all the crack, by the by. But of course, a man like you would never understand that.” She sniffed.

“A man like me?” he echoed.

She nodded solemnly. “Yes. Name me the title of the book you last read.”

He scowled. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“That is because you don’t read.” She nodded to herself as if she’d unriddled his personality, and somehow that irked him more than any of the other nonsense she’d uttered so far.

“Institutiones Juris Naturalis,” he grated forth between clenched teeth, then regretted having allowed her to nettle him. He should have just walked off without comment. “That was the last book I read.”

Predictably enough, she pulled a face.

“I daresay you don’t know what that even means.” There. What milkmaid knew how to read in Latin?

She snorted. “It means ‘Foundations of Natural Law’. You must be a lawyer, politician or magistrate, or some such boring thing.”

He was momentarily thrown. So the milkmaid could not only read, but she understood Latin? Earlier, she had also seemed to understand the term lusus naturae. He eyed her curiously. What sort of milkmaid was she?

Before he could ask what her name was, she cut in.

“Now that we have established that, you need not worry that I shall shower you with unnecessary gratitude. For I suppose I owe you some sort of thanks,” she said grudgingly.

“For having saved my life. But from the way you are looking at me like I’m an insect beneath your impeccably polished boots—bought at Hoby’s, correct?

Not that I have ever been to London, but I have read that is where the city swells buy their boots—Anyhow.

What was I saying? Oh yes. I shan’t embarrass you and offer you my soiled hand to shake, for heaven forbid I besmirch you any further with my presence. ” She dropped into a crooked curtsy.

He had indeed bought his boots at Hoby’s. “You certainly are an outspoken, saucy young thing, aren’t you?”

She opened her mouth as if wanting to come up with a heated retort, then pressed her lips to a thin line. With a huff, she turned and dropped on all fours to the ground.

What in all the name that was good and holy was the vexing creature doing now?

Flummoxed, he watched her crawl upon the dusty ground, her bottom turned towards him, wiggling about in a tantalising manner.

“Ah. Here it is.” She picked up something from the ground.

“I wouldn’t know what to do without you, my dearest, my treasure,” she crooned, kissing the—pencil?

Then she picked up a small leather journal that had fallen amongst some blackberry brambles and wiped it off.

“Oh! Blackberries!” Her eyes lit up, and, setting aside her journal again, she proceeded to harvest the berries, collecting them in her skirt that she lifted, revealing a set of slim knees and finely shaped thighs.

He looked away hastily.

She stuffed some blackberries into her mouth as she picked them.

“Do you want some? They are wonderfully sweet.” She held out a handful to him.

He shook his head. Now she had blackberry juice running down her chin. He watched, appalled, how she wiped the back of her hand across her lips, smearing it even further.

Picking up her journal, she checked it for torn pages, no doubt smudging the paper with blackberry stains. Then she sat on a stone, licked the pencil, and began to write.

He shook his head, blinking.

She looked up and dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

“You may go now. I think I have collected sufficient material. It has been a disappointingly unproductive afternoon, but at least I know now what it feels like to fall out of the window of a tower.” She scribbled down some more words.

“I must record that feeling before I forget it.” Her pencil hovered in the air.

“That moment shortly before one crashes to one’s death.

That moment of inevitability. Of catastrophically impending doom. ” She paused. “Of irreversible—”

“You really are mad.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “And you are an insufferable, arrogant prig.”

They glared at each other.

She shrugged and turned to her notebook.

Several minutes passed.

“You are still here,” she said, without lifting her head, still scribbling. A pink tongue peeked out of the corner of her blackberry-smirched mouth.

He snorted.

She looked up, irritation flashing through her eyes.

Big and black, they were, and slightly unfocused, as though she was in a different world entirely.

“What?” She addressed him as though he were a stable boy.

“You are very young, are you not?” The moment he uttered those words, he felt as old as Methuselah.

She lifted her chin proudly, which made her appear even younger. “I am not. Let me inform you that I am seventeen. Almost eighteen. In fact, I am to marry soon. Not that it is any business of yours.” She softened that statement by adding, “How old are you, anyway?”

“I am twenty-three.” So the milkmaid was betrothed. Huh. He pitied the fellow who was to marry her.

“You are positively ancient.”

“And you have blackberry stains on your cheek and nose.”

She was merely a mad, barefoot, dirt-smudged girl who fell from the sky and insulted him.

Truly not worth the bother.

Not at all.

With a huff, he turned on his heel and strode off.