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With a huff of exasperation, she turned away and started toward the front of the boat at the same moment he said, “No!”
The boat rocked jerkily. Then she was waving her arms for balance and Ripley was moving toward her, shouting. And there was his hand, which she tried to grasp, but it was a hairsbreadth out of reach. Then she was falling, and over she went, with a great, muddy splash.
He swore and swore again.
He climbed out of the boat, shoving away the watermen, who were moving toward her. He trudged into the muck to where she sat, looking very surprised, in a foot or so of murky water.
“You had to fall off the boat,” he said.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” She tried to rise, but only contrived to slide backward into slightly deeper muck.
“I told you—”
“You shouldn’t have distracted me.”
“I was warning you.”
“It is extremely annoying to be talked to as though one had no sense at all. No, don’t trouble yourself,” she added as he put out a hand for her to grab. “I am perfectly capable of climbing out of a foot of water unaided.”
An audience was gathering. In another minute, gawkers would be pouring out of the riverside taverns.
“Take my hand,” he said.
“I can take hold of the boat,” she said.
He grabbed her hand, and started to pull her up, but she jerked free at the same moment, and his foot slipped, and down he went.
He heard laughter from the shore.
He looked at her.
She still had the curst veil tangled about one arm, and the hair arrangement he’d made was slipping downward. The fall had splashed muddy water on her face and spectacles. The latter were definitely crooked now.
He felt laughter welling, but then he realized he was sitting in water, and so was she, and she’d catch a lung fever if not worse.
He swore again and pulled himself up out of the water, set his feet solidly, and bent. He grasped her under the arms—how many times was that today?—and hauled her upright. The instant she was vertical, she tried to push him away, and stumbled toward the water again.
This time he pulled her hard against him. “Are you trying to drown yourself?” he said. “Because it would be wiser and certainly easier to jump off the bridge—in the middle of the river, you see, not at the shore.”
She pushed at him. “Will you please get out of my way!”
She was wet and muddy and aromatic of river. He was aware of this. He was aware also of a supple, curving body pressed against his. His mind began to do what a man’s mind does in such cases: It yielded to a stronger power, rather lower in the body.
“No,” he said. With speech, even as little as that, a modicum of survival skill returned, and his mind produced an image of Ashmont waiting with the clergyman.
Ashmont’s bride.
He’d chosen her and he deserved her. She was perfect for him.
While she was still pushing, Ripley shifted his weight and swung her up and into his arms, a wet, muddy mass of shrieking runaway bride.
The onlookers cheered. He was used to audiences. He nodded at them.
“Oh,” she said. “You are ridiculous.”
“Says the girl who landed on her arse in the river a moment ago.”
She wasn’t one of those so-called sylphs, who weighed nothing and looked as though a mild breeze would fracture them. She was a proper-sized female, with an excellent distribution of feminine assets. But he’d managed runaway horses and he’d hauled larger and far heavier friends out of taverns, brothels, boats, carriages, stables, and so forth. Furthermore, he was a man more physical than intellectual. It was no great feat to carry her up the mild incline and on into the High Street.
She talked or scolded or something the whole time.
He didn’t know what she said because he didn’t pay attention. He had to keep his mind from dwelling on what she weighed and what she was shaped like, because from there matters would proceed to his getting ideas in the tiny little head that liked to take charge when women were in close proximity.
He concentrated on the one thing he had to do.
He had to get her to Twickenham—alive, preferably—and make Ashmont go there and get her.
It couldn’t be simpler, Ripley assured himself.
Chapter 4
As Olympia might have expected, everybody at the White Lion recognized the Duke of Ripley.
They would have recognized any of Their Dis-Graces.
Their images had been engraved in all the papers featuring gossip. They had appeared almost daily in London’s favorite purveyor of scandal, Foxe’s Morning Spectacle, and in caricatures in print shop windows.
There was no such thing, Olympia realized, as traveling discreetly with him.
Not that one could be discreet, wearing a ruined wedding dress and looking less like Ophelia and more like a drowned rat or the shipwreck the rat wasn’t quick enough to escape.
There was no such thing, either, she thought, as getting His Grace to do anything other than what he wanted to do. In the matter of being allowed to stand on her own feet, for instance, she was obliged to wait until he was good and ready.
The truth was, she wasn’t completely unhappy to be lifted out of the water and carried up the stairs past what seemed like hundreds of onlookers. While she would have held her head high—she was an earl’s daughter, after all—she wasn’t at all confident of being able to walk with anything like grace.
And while she’d rather not be quite so wet and muddy in a public hostelry, above all she did not want anybody to know she was drunk. That, she feared, was what the audience was bound to conclude if she attempted to walk on her own, dragging what felt like several tons of the Thames with her.
This was the first time since she was a little girl that a man had carried her in his arms. She didn’t feel like a child, and it was nothing like being carried by one’s father or uncle or grandfather. Awareness of his strength and size and the warmth of his body hammered at her senses. She wanted so badly to tuck her head into his chest.
It was the brandy, had to be. You’d think that having steamboat wash nearly overturn one into the Thames was enough to shock one back to sobriety. Apparently not.
He finally put her down in the hotel’s reception hall. Her legs trembling for no sensible reason, she lis
tened while he demanded of the innkeeper two rooms, both with fires and hot water for washing, and dry clothes.
It took her mind a moment to settle down and make sense of what was going on.
Then, “Fires?” she said after the innkeeper had hurried away. “At this time of year?”
“Are you keen to develop a lung fever?” he said.
“By the time they get them going, we’ll have washed and changed,” she said. “That is, if they find clothes. How do you expect them to find clothes for us?”
“The same way I expect them to make up fires,” he said. “How they do it is not my concern.”
“I wonder nobody’s tried to kill you before now,” she said. “Do you do this sort of thing all the time?”
“No,” he said. “You’re the first bride who’s kidnapped me. Naturally, though, they assume I made off with you, which suits our purposes.”
“It doesn’t suit mine,” she said. “I can’t—” She had been about to say I can’t afford to be made off with, but that was absurd. To all intents and purposes she’d run away with the Duke of Ripley, and that was what the scandalmongers would say and the papers would publish, and there would be satirical prints of the event, drawn from the artists’ imaginations. These would be lurid.
She told herself to look on the bright side. Never in her wildest fantasies had she ever imagined appearing in the print shop windows.
Never in anybody else’s wildest fantasies, either. To her knowledge, nobody had ever been voted Most Boring Girl of the Season more times than Lady Olympia Hightower.
On the other hand, she’d embarrassed her family. Disgraced them. Disgraced herself. Made herself truly unmarriageable.
But no, she could not think about consequences or she’d go mad. As it was, her mind was on shaky ground.
One thing at a time.
A maidservant appeared to show them to their rooms.
Ripley followed Lady Olympia up the stairs, telling himself the bride-overboard scene was the sort of thing a fellow could expect to happen in the course of an adventure. Not that it was the sort of entertainment he’d expect to have with a respectable girl—but then, he hadn’t had much experience with that type.
