The Dragon's Bride by Jo Beverley Page A

there, do you think?”
    “I believe he had a pair.”
    She saw him brace to return to the room, and then give up the idea. “Before Traynor arrives, I’ll have Pearce check the room for danger. No need to accompany him, Mrs. Kerslake. You can trust him with the key.”
    They were back to formality, when for a moment back there it had slipped. “Very well, my lord.”
    Then he said, “You’d have married him to become Lady Wyvern?”
    “No.”
    “It never crossed your mind?”
    Ah.
    “I was a girl, Con.” All she seemed to have to offer him was honesty, tarnished though it was. “Yes, I thought of it, but I’d never met him. I’d hardly seen him. He was as mythological to me as a dragon. I sought the position as his assistant with the idea in the back of my mind. But then I learned that he wouldn’t marry anyone until he was sure they were carrying his child, and I could not do that. Which made me see that I could not be intimate with the mad earl before or after marriage. And that was before I saw that bed.”
    “He demanded a trial marriage? Did he think to get a local lady to marry him that way?”
    ‘The local
un
-ladies were willing enough.“
    “He would have married
any
woman carrying his child?”
    “Apparently.”
    “And no one fooled him?”
    “He was mad, Con, not stupid. Any woman had to come here during her courses—and he checked to be sure it was real—and then stay here until she bled again. As you know, there are no male servants other than his valet, who was fanatically devoted.”
    “The old goat.”
    “They came willingly enough, and he gave them twenty guineas when they left. A handsome amount for simple folk. In fact,” she added with a distinct flare of mischief, “some may come up here hoping you’ll be interested, too.”
    “Hell’s hounds! I’ll pay them twenty guineas to go away.”
    “Don’t let word of that out in public.”
    She thought he might laugh, but then he shook his head. “We should progress to the dungeon, I suppose, and get this over with, but I promised de Vere the treat.”

    Con set off down the corridor, hoping it looked like a steady, well-ordered retreat, not the panicked flight it was. He believed her. She’d not seriously contemplated joining the mad earl in that bed, and yet the image haunted him.
    She’d thought of marrying the old earl.
    She was behind him. He sensed her even though she made no sound in her soft slippers—like a memory, or the ghost of a memory.
    She’d only thought of it.
    He’d thought of doing a good many things he was blessed not to have done. Suicide once, even. Only the thought of it.
    He’d contemplated desertion once, too. In the early days before he became hardened to men and animals in agony, to causing men and animals to be in agony. For a few days it had seemed the only sane choice, and he’d planned how to go about it.
    But then they’d come suddenly under attack and he’d fought to survive and to help his comrades survive. Somewhere in the process he’d committed himself to the fight against Napoleon and been able to carry on.
    He’d almost raped a woman once.
    He’d been with a group of officers drinking in a taverna in a Spanish village. It had been not long after battle, though he was damned if he could remember which one or anything else about the place. Blood had been running hot still, and they all wanted a woman.
    Some of the women were willing, but a few were not, and their protests and attempts to escape had seemed amusing. Exciting, even.
    He could look back at it now as if from the outside and wonder how he could have behaved like that, but he also remembered feeling a godlike ecstasy. That the women were his warrior’s due.
    Pressing the struggling, sobbing woman down on a table with the cheers of the men and the wild Spanish music still playing …
    His cock had been throbbing, jumping with eagerness and he’d had his flap half undone. Other hands had been helping hold her down.
    But something in his mind had clicked. Some shard of sanity had shot icy