The Mad Earl's Bride by Loretta Chase Page A

burning, she boldly added, “I am glad you lusted, my lord. I should have been very disappointed if you did not because I have wanted you to make me yours since . . .” She frowned. “Well, I’m not sure when exactly it began, but I know I wanted it after you kissed me.” She crept toward him. “I wish you would not fret about me.”
    “This was supposed to be a business arrangement,” he said. Shadows darkened his eyes. “No one would have known if the marriage had not been consummated. Your position was secure enough. I should not have touched you. You have no experience. You do not know how to protect your feelings. Your heart is too soft.”
    She sank back on her heels. “I see. You are alarmed that my feelings will become engaged.”
    “They are engaged,” he said. “You have just told me as much. Not that I couldn’t see it for myself. I wish you could see the way you look at me.”
    Good heavens. Was she so obvious?
    But of course she was. She was not like Genevieve or Cousin Jessica. She had no subtlety, Gwendolyn was aware. But she did possess both a sense of humor and common sense, and these came to her rescue.
    “Like a lovesick schoolgirl, you mean?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, what do you expect? You are shockingly handsome.”
    He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “I have a brain disease. My mind is crumbling to pieces. And in a few months I shall be a rotting corpse!”
    “I know that,” she said. “But you are not mad yet, and when you become so, you will not be my first lunatic—any more than you’ll be my first corpse.”
    “You didn’t marry the others! You didn’t bed them! Damnation.” He flung back the bedclothes and stalked, splendidly naked, to the window. “I didn’t even want to be your patient,” he said as he gazed out into the darkness. “And now I am your lover. And you are besotted. It is macabre.”
    He would not think it macabre if he could see himself as she saw him, standing so tall and strong and beautiful in the candlelight.
    “You said yourself that Providence does not grant all its creatures a pretty demise,” she said. “It does not give each of us exactly what we want. It did not make me a man, so that I could become a doctor.”
    She left the bed and went to him. “But now I am not at all sorry I’m a woman,” she told him. “You’ve made me very glad of it, and I am practical and selfish enough to want to enjoy the gladness for as long as I can.”
    He swung round, his countenance bleak. “Oh, Gwen.”
    She understood then that she would not have long. The stark expression, the despair in his voice, told her matters were worse than they appeared.
    But that was the future, she told herself.
    She laid her hand on his chest. “We have tonight,” she said softly.
    H E’D MADE HER glad she was a woman.
    We have tonight, she’d said.
    Saint Peter himself, backed by a host of martyrs and angels, could not have withstood her. He would have let the heavenly gates slam shut behind him and taken her into his arms and devoted body and soul—eternally damned though it might be—to making her happy.
    And so Dorian scooped up his foolishly besotted wife in his arms and carried her to the bed and made love to her again. And he tasted, again, the rapture of being made love to, of being desired and trusted. And later, as he held his sleeping countess in his arms, he lay awake wondering whether he was dead or alive because he could not remember when his heart had felt so sweetly at peace.
    Not until the first feeble light of daybreak stole into the room did something like an explanation occur to him.
    Never, in all his life, had he ever done anything that was any good to anybody. He’d done no more than fantasize about rescuing his mother from a world where she didn’t belong and taking her to the Continent, where she would no longer have to lie and pretend. When he’d finally got around to visiting her here, he’d missed all the hints she