Chapter 20 #2
Tremaine wanted to both send her fleeing and demand she stay by his side forever.
“Your family hates me. Trust them. They are right to. I’m not good enough for you, Linnie.
I’d rather kill some other man before seeing him have you as his wife, but even more, I’d see you happy, and that means setting you free.
” His throat moved. “Because that is what you deserve.”
A soft, serene smile crossed her face. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said. Tenderly, she took his tense hands between her relaxed ones. Raising them to her mouth, she placed a kiss upon them, one at a time. “You are good.”
She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Not truly. If she knew what he’d orchestrated, she’d never speak those words and never with the utmost confidence.
“I’m not,” he said, his voice strained. “I’m a blackguard in every way, and you will discover it, and you will hate me.”
Suddenly, the idea of that inevitable day left him queasy.
Linnie attempted to suppress her perpetual smile, but as always, the corners of her crimson lips betrayed her. “I will never hate you,” she said adamantly. “I could never. I love you.”
I love you . . .
There they were.
The three words he’d been running from. The ones he’d known were coming in the past, and he’d cut Linnie off before she could speak them because he didn’t believe in the emotion.
Because he didn’t deserve Linnie’s heart.
Because his mind shuddered at the thought of her giving him that gift and then discovering his betrayal.
“You love me,” he repeated carefully.
Linnie nodded. “I do. I love you with my whole heart, my soul, and with my entire being.” She lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. “I always have.”
Terror should have sent him bolting, and yet a lightness suffused his chest. An absolute sense of rightness kept Tremaine’s feet grounded.
He wanted to steal her for his bride, as had been the plan early on, but right here, right now, it hadn’t a thing to do with revenge and everything to do with how good she made him feel.
He sucked in a breath through his mouth. “You’re certain you want me as your husb—”
Linnie cut him off. “Are you certain you want me as your wife?” Her eyes twinkled.
“I’m certain you’re better off without me, but I’m even more certain I want you to be Lady Jeremy Tremaine and have my name and share my life.” For the short while until everything fell apart.
“Ahem. Linnie-Lou . . .”
Lost as they’d been in one another, they had failed to hear the approach of her brothers.
Tension whipped through Tremaine. These bastards had been careless with their sister. They’d left her prey for Tremaine and Culross and deserved only disdain. She’d be far safer with him than any of that lot, which was something he could give her.
“Say the word, Linnie,” Brone said quietly.
Linnie’s other brother, Campbell, jumped in. “If you have had a change of heart, Linnie, you need just say so. We’ve weathered countless scandals—” He tipped his head in Brone’s direction. “This one here eloped.”
Dallin McQuoid, the Viscount Crichton, piped in from his seat, “I broke up a wedding.”
“Ah, yes.” The fellow’s viscountess, Lady Alexandra, raised her husband’s fingers to her lips in the same tender way Linnie had done just moments ago to Tremaine. “But I broke a betrothal contract and left a groom at the altar.”
“I boarded the wrong gentleman’s ship.” The Marchioness of Winfield added her voice to the growing chorus of scandals. “And fell in love with him, even though he was slated to wed an—”
The Countess of Abington gave a shrill clap of her hands. “I do believe we’ve all clarified quite nicely that our family is not unfamiliar with scandal.”
Properly chastised, the McQuoid-Smiths fell into line. The rare silence lasted but a second.
“I was forgotten by my parents and left behind one Christmas, and then I fell in love with my neighbor and now husband,” the Duchess of Aragon added.
The countess groaned. “You were not forgotten, you were . . . you were . . .”
“Yes?” the young duchess asked in a patently feigned innocence.
The McQuoid-Smiths descended into their familiar chaos, and the familiarity of this family all came rushing back to Tremaine.
Tremaine had been so mired in his hatred for Captain McQuoid, he’d forgotten how much he’d enjoyed being part of their sloppy fold.
For a moment, he imagined a different scenario.
In it, there’d been no betrayal on McQuoid’s part and no Culross, and Tremaine would have been as much a part of the McQuoid-Smiths as he’d always been.
In this make-believe vision, he’d have returned from his last sea voyage and joined the big, boisterous lot and discovered in his absence Linnie had grown up.
He’d have properly courted her. Wooed her. And married her in a ceremony that wasn’t a product of nefarious intentions. There’d have been genuine elation at the Tremaines being joined to the McQuoid-Smiths.
“I wager you did not miss this,” his bride-to-be dryly predicted amidst the cacophony.
“You’d lose that wager,” he said wistfully.
His skin prickled and he glanced over.
Linnie, with a hand at her throat, stared at him with impossibly wide eyes.
Tremaine stiffened. Good God, what madness was this, letting nostalgia creep in?
What’d been and would never be again. After a betrayal of McQuoid’s magnitude, there could be no going back to the way it once was.
Just as the unfailingly loyal McQuoid-Smiths would never choose another over one of theirs—or, now with Linnie dragged into the fray, two of theirs.
Hart caught Tremaine’s eye from over the top of Linnie’s head. “Now’s the chance to run, little brother,” he mouthed.
Discreet as he’d been during their naughty boyhood years, in a crude rejoinder, Tremaine lifted a middle finger.
“Here I’d believed once we got past the part of ‘no objections,’ we were smooth sailing,” Beaton muttered.
Linnie laughed, and the clear, bell-like quality pealed around the din, startling a laugh from Tremaine’s brother and pilot. The three launched into a lighthearted banter like they were on the side of a ballroom and not in the midst of a wedding.
These two life-hardened, cynical bastards now laughed because of Linnie. But then that was the sway she had over a man.
The Smith siblings coughed, demanding his attention.
“Uh . . . yes,” the eldest brother said. “Just to clarify—”
“I love him, Campbell,” Linnie said flatly.
Campbell nodded. “That is all I needed to hear, little Linnie.”
“That is all we needed to hear,” Brone clarified.
No, it’s not, you bloody sods, Tremaine screamed silently. The damned witless brothers had an obligation to look after Linnie, to protect her, and that included them seeing Tremaine as the villain he was and meeting him on a damned dueling field for what he’d done.
As if they felt his thoughts directed their way, both men turned grave expressions on Tremaine.
Tremaine silenced the voices in his mind and stared mutinously at his almost-brothers-in-law.
Campbell spoke for the two of them. “Never had a problem with you, Tremaine. You’ve been like a brother to us, and it’s . . . the whole situation.” So that was how they’d refer to McQuoid’s perfidy, then. “It’s been unfortunate. Hated to see it.”
Tremaine was besieged by the need to scratch at a sudden itchiness that’d broken out on his body.
Linnie’s other brother nodded. “Aye. Regardless of your relationship with Arran, we know you care about Linnie and will see she’s looked after.”
“I’ll protect her with my life,” he said gruffly, giving them the only assurance he could. “As long as she is with me, she will never know hurt.”
That is, aside from the pain you yourself inflict upon her . . .
A rusty blade of guilt entered Tremaine’s chest.
Unable to meet their gazes, he slid his focus to where Linnie remained conversing with Hart and Beaton.
The Smiths weren’t done with twisting the barbed, poisonous spear. “We know we can count on you to see her not only happy but safe from harm.”
The Duke of Aragon’s booming voice reached across the din and silenced the side discussions occurring. “Are we continuing or not?”
Linnie’s cousin, Arran McQuoid’s younger sister, Myrtle, jumped up. “What my darling husband means to ask is are you both still desperately in love and eager to continue your vows?”
Oh, Christ. A thickness settled in Tremaine’s throat, making it impossible to swallow, let alone recite the vows the duchess cheerfully spoke of.
The Devil wasn’t even close to done exacting a pound of flesh from him.
“We are.” Linnie’s declaration rang with all the conviction of a woman confident in the man she’d join herself with.
That was all Beaton needed to hear.
Popping the Good Book open, he picked up where he’d left off.
“Wilt thou, Jeremy Renwood Tremaine, have this Woman to thy wedded Wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her . . .”
Tremaine’s chest cinched. Linnie deserved nothing less than that.
“Comfort her . . .”
Was it even possible Tremaine, the one who would hurt her most, could confer any comfort?
“. . . honor and keep her in sickness and in health . . .”
He’d battle the Lord God himself before he saw her taken from this earth.
“. . . forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her . . .”
Fidelity. A foreign concept for a rogue like him, and yet since he’d found her in the art room at Lord Rutland’s, he couldn’t even think of another woman. Thoughts of Linnie, and Linnie only, consumed him. It wouldn’t be that way forever, but . . .
“. . . so long as ye both shall live?”
“I will,” he said solemnly.
When it came time for Linnie’s turn, she recited hers with the same passion and fervor with which she’d declared their regard for one another moments earlier.
“Let us pray. O eternal God, Creator and Preserver of all mankind; Send thy blessing upon these thy servants, this Man and this Woman, whom we bless in thy Name; that, as Isaac and Rebecca lived faithfully together, so these persons may surely perform and keep the vow and covenant betwixt them made . . .”
As if she felt Tremaine’s eyes upon her, Linnie glanced over.
Her eyes sparkled with sweet, unadulterated happiness.
How quick that joy will die when she learns the truth.
I cannot stand this . . .
The air remained trapped in his tight chest.
Betraying McQuoid had always been one thing, but hurting this woman, hurting Linnie, was different. Oh, he’d done a bang-up job convincing himself he could do anything and hurt absolutely anyone to get his vengeance on McQuoid and Culross.
He’d believed he could divorce the two, and yet here at his and Linnie’s wedding altar, he discovered too late he couldn’t bear to hurt her.
Maybe you don’t have to . . . a voice in his head prodded.
He went motionless.
Yes, he’d initially pursued Linnie on account of her connection to McQuoid. The great captain had intended to use Linnie to cement an alliance with Culross, and there’d been no doubt Tremaine had needed to prevent that at all costs.
McQuoid and Culross trusted they knew the actual motives behind Tremaine’s offer of marriage, and they were correct—to an extent anyway.
That being true, neither man ever had to learn they’d actually been correct.
His mind began to race.
He wasn’t so small that he’d need to gloat about his having gotten the upper hand. It was enough for Tremaine to know he’d thwarted their plans and won Linnie in the process.
There was no reason for anyone, and certainly not Linnie, to discover the depth of Tremaine’s maleficence.
Yes.
And for the first time this day, the pressure eased from within him. He could have it all.
He would have it all and be content enough in knowing of his triumph . . . while being made to suffer in silent guilt about what had compelled him to marry Linnie.
“I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Amen.
It was done.
All of it.
And like they’d stepped back into a past when the world wasn’t fractured between the Tremaines and McQuoid-Smiths, happy cheers went up, and guests clambered around him and Linnie to congratulate them on their nuptials.
The rest continued in the blur of signings and official documents being sealed, and their family members proceeded to the breakfast room.
Linnie slipped her fingers through Tremaine’s and held them back. “Are you happy, husband?”
Husband.
The primally male part of him wanted to rise up and thump his chest at hearing her address him so.
Tremaine used their joined hands to draw her close, so her body lay crushed against his. “Happier than I’ve ever been. Happier than I’ll ever be,” he said huskily, stunning himself with the truth of his words.
Dipping his head, he kissed her slow and long.
Sighing against his mouth, Linnie twined her hands about his neck. Melting into Tremaine, she kissed him with a sweet, delicious abandon.
Knowing what he wanted, she parted her lips. He slid inside and drank of her, stroking his tongue against hers, until Linnie’s hungry moans filled his mouth. She still kissed with an innocence and eagerness that fascinated him. Never had a kiss so moved him. Never had any woman moved him so.
Out of breath, he forced himself to pull away. He placed a last, lingering kiss on one of the freckles on her neck.
“I lied,” he breathed, blowing lightly.
Dazed, her cheeks flushed, Linnie endearingly wrinkled her brow in confusion. “Y-you . . . ?”
“I said I’ll never be happier than I am now.” He kissed the slight groove in her throat. “Tonight, love. Tonight, when you are in my bed and in my arms, is when I’ll find the greatest happiness.”
Her cheeks pinkened. “I will like that, too.”
Her timidity, coupled with her unrestrained ardor, was the hottest aphrodisiac.
Everything would be fine, better than fine.
Hand in hand, they made their way to the revelries celebrating his marriage to Linnie.