The Mad Earl's Bride by Loretta Chase Page B

dropped, and gone on his merry way. If he had paid attention instead, and stayed, and helped his father care for her, they might have forestalled his grandfather and the “experts.” Even at the madhouse, when it had seemed too late, it needn’t have been, if Dorian had used the clever brain he’d inherited. He should have played on his grandfather’s overweening pride and sense of duty, and worked him round by degrees. Mother had pulled the wool over the old tyrant’s eyes for years. Dorian could have done it, should have done it.
    And he should have done it later, when the ax fell, instead of storming out of Rawnsley Hall in a childish tantrum. Then he might have accomplished something. He might have used the earl’s money and influence to good purpose, in scholarly pursuits, for instance, to further knowledge, or perhaps in a political endeavor.
    Everyone died, some early, some late. It was nothing to whimper about. But dying with nothing but regret and if onlys was pathetic.
    That, Dorian realized, was what had kept him so unsettled for these last months.
    Now, though, his soul was quiet.
    Because of her.
    He nuzzled his wife’s wayward hair. He had made her happy. He had made her forgive the Almighty for making her a woman. He smiled. He knew that was no small achievement.
    She wanted to be a doctor. Equally important, she would use the Earl of Rawnsley’s money and influence to good purpose.
    Very well, he told her silently. I cannot give you a medical degree, but I will give you what I can.
    And that must have been the right conclusion, because his busy mind quieted, and in a little while, he fell asleep.
    A FTER BREAKFAST, D ORIAN took her out to the moors, to the place where his mother had brought him eight years earlier.
    He helped Gwendolyn from her horse—treating himself to but one brief kiss in the process—then led her to a boulder at the track’s edge. He took off his coat and laid it on the cold stone and asked her to sit, which she did with a bemused smile.
    “Last night you said I was not your first lunatic,” he began.
    “Oh, not at all,” she eagerly assured him. “Mr. Eversham, who took over Mr. Knightly’s practice, was particularly interested in neurological maladies, and he let me assist him in several cases. Not all the patients were irrational, certainly. But Miss Ware had six different personalities at last count, and Mr. Bowes was prone to violent dementia, and Mrs. Peebles—may her troubled soul rest in peace—”
    “You can tell me the details later,” Dorian interrupted. “I only wanted to make sure I had heard correctly last night. I was not fully attending, I’m sorry to say. I have not listened properly since you came.”
    “How can you say such a thing?” she exclaimed. “You are the only man except Mr. Eversham who’s ever taken me seriously. You did not laugh at my hospital idea, and you were not horrified about the dissections.” She hesitated briefly. “You are rather overprotective, true, but that is your nature, and I know it is a very gentlemanly and noble inclination.”
    “Overprotective,” he repeated. “Is that how you see it, Gwen?”
    She nodded. “You want to shield me from unpleasantness. On the one hand, it is rather lovely to be coddled. Still, on the other, it is just the tiniest bit frustrating.”
    He understood how he’d frustrated her. She didn’t like being kept in the dark about his illness. He had treated her like a silly female, as other men had done.
    “I have surmised as much.” He clasped his hands behind his back to keep from gathering her up and “overprotecting” her in his arms, as he very much wished to do. “Yours is a medical mind. You do not see matters as we laymen do. Illness is a subject of study to you, and sick people represent a source of knowledge. Their ailments make you no more queasy than a volume of Cicero’s works does me.” He paused, his face heating. “I fancied myself a scholar once, you see.