The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell

Chapter 25

THE LONDONER

DEVASTATED!

The Earl of Scarsdale was purported to have been inconsolable over the attack upon his former betrothed. Perhaps soon the courting couple shall find themselves . . . as something more?

M. FAIRPOINT

If Charles hadn’t left a hole on the path he’d paced over his Aubusson carpet, there’d be one there by the end of the night.

This was hell . . .

He’d been barred from seeing her. Oh, the rejection had been polite enough. They’d insisted Emma required rest, and that they would send word for him when she awakened. But there could be no doubting . . . they were keeping him from her. He gnashed his teeth. And along with that, they believed Charles had harmed her. As if he were capable. As if he wouldn’t gnaw off his own arm with his teeth if it meant to spare her any suffering.

“I’m sure they weren’t really sending you away,” Landon said, supportive as always.

“Their butler told me to leave,” Charles responded.

“Well, that is pretty decisive, then,” the marquess allowed.

Yes, it was.

The irony wasn’t lost on him that he, who’d been capable of charming anyone, should find himself at odds with the viscount who’d called him friend.

“I’m sure you can reason with them. Eventually,” Landon said from where he sat alongside St. John. “No one is being logical. They are worried about their daughter.”

He stopped abruptly. “Worried I will hurt her,” he finished for the other man.

Landon scoffed. “They aren’t thinking rationally. Of course you didn’t hit your Miss Gately with a brick. Why, that doesn’t even make sense.” The marquess looked to St. John, and pointedly.

The viscount knitted his brows, and then nodded. “Of course he didn’t. Absolutely preposterous.” He paused. “Not to mention I was with him when he learned of the news. No one who was haunted and suffering like Scarsdale could have possibly been guilty of harming the lady.”

“Well, I wasn’t, and didn’t require that proof to know my friend isn’t a lady-killer.” Landon grinned. “At least, not in the literal sense.”

Ignoring that jesting, Charles resumed pacing. Frustration ate at him. A restlessness that came from the fact that he could be and was kept from her. That it was beyond his—and her—power.

What if she’s of the same opinion as her parents?a voice taunted. As soon as the insidious thought slid in, Charles thrust the thought aside. She knew him. As he knew her. She’d not doubt him in this.

A knock sounded at the door, and he abruptly stopped. He’d given word he wasn’t to be disturbed unless it pertained to— “Enter!” he called out, already striding across the room.

Tomlinson cleared his throat. “Mr. and Mr. Gately,” he announced, and then backed out.

The twins streamed into the room, speaking in synchronization. “Where is she?”

Oh, God in heaven.“What?” he asked dumbly.

Emma’s brothers shared a look. “She’s not here?” Morgan’s was a plea, one that Charles recognized all too well, one that contained the raw agony of a brother who’d failed his sister.

Charles moaned. Not again. No. No. No.

Pierce erupted into a stream of cursing.

“You lost her!” Charles demanded of the pair, even as he knew the guilt they carried, too fearful and furious to realize it was wrong to hold them to blame and yet . . . “She was attacked today, and no one thought to secure the damned house.” Me. I should have done it. I should have staked a place outside her family’s and demanded to be seen. Even if they’d thrown him out.

Morgan winced, his features spasming. “You are right.”

“Hey, now,” St. John murmured, resting a hand on Morgan’s shoulder and squeezing.

Charles struggled to order his thoughts and breathe.

“Of course we don’t think it is you,” Pierce rushed to assure him. “Even if—”

Their parents did. Charles had been correct. Either way, their ill opinion of him meant nothing right now.

Another knock sounded, and this time, Tomlinson reappeared . . . with a woman at his side.

Hope sprang in Charles’s chest as he took in the cloaked figure beside his butler.

Emma!

And yet . . .

She shoved back the hood of her cloak.

NotEmma.

“Olivia!” Morgan exclaimed. Desperation wreathed the gentleman’s face. “Is she with you?”

The young lady hesitated, and then silently, she shook her head.

Numbness settled around Charles’s chest as hope died once more. An ever-growing dread resurfaced, boiling inside.

“I am here about Emma.” That voice came soft and small, a pleading whisper, hoarse with grief, and he nodded to Tomlinson.

The servant immediately stepped out of the room.

“It was my brother.” The young lady’s voice broke, and she fisted her hands at her sides. “It is my brother. He is in love with her. I learned he intends to elope with her.”

Charles rode for two hours.

And with every bit of roadway traveled, the hell of the past merged with the present so that it became conjoined and twisted in his mind . . . Camille and Emma. In the end, Camille had been ruined but spared of marriage to the cad who’d hurt her. But also a man who’d been singularly interested in the wealth she could bring him. There’d been no love involved. No emotions at all.

Unlike Mr. Watley . . . Mr. Watley, who this day had been driven only by those sentiments . . . those volatile emotions that made a person unpredictable. And dangerous. And a man who could orchestrate an entire scheme to portray Charles as guilty in the hopes of driving a wedge between him and Emma? That man was capable of any number of dark deeds . . . as had been proven this day.

Leaning forward, Charles urged his mount on all the faster. His breath came hard, little to do with the pace he’d set and everything to do with the numbing panic that had followed him as he’d galloped through the streets of London . . . until the cobblestones had given way to the green countryside, marking the moment he’d left.

The shift from soot and mud and stone to overgrown roads, lined by trees and lush emerald earth, forced his mind back.

To the time he’d loved the countryside. To the time when there’d been no greater joy than riding and running wild over the land. And for some of those days, he’d entertained a little girl at his side. Chasing her and being chased in return . . . until they’d grown up and he’d come to associate those lands and that place with resentment over his lot.

He wanted to go back and live there with her . . . Hell, he wanted to do everything with her. Go everywhere with her.

And yet a sense of hopelessness threatened to swarm him, riding hard, pushing his horse harder than he ever had, because there was no future without Emma in it.

He was lost—

Charles yanked hard on the reins; a downed tree blocked the middle of the road.

Rascal reared, pawing at the earth before settling.

Making a soothing noise, Charles patted the chestnut mount on his withers. When the skittish creature was at last calmed, Charles dismounted. His horse promptly wandered to the side of the roadway and found a patch of overgrown grass to chew on.

Stalking over to the blockage, Charles cursed, assessing the path. Upon inspection, it wasn’t a downed tree, but rather a series of branches. He frowned, skimming his gaze over the road. Ones that appeared as if they’d been strategically placed.

Where in blazes were they?

They couldn’t have been so far ahead. Watley’s sister had come immediately, and according to Emma’s brothers, she’d been in the midst of arguing with her parents over the right to see him not long before she’d been abducted. Gretna Green was the end goal for Watley. Speed would have been his concern. Unless he had taken one of those less-traveled roads, in which case, one of Emma’s brothers or—

A rock landed on the tip of his boot, and he jumped, from not the pain but the surprise of it.

“You’re late, Scarsdale.”

And then he heard it. Nay, he heard her. Or . . . he thought he did. Perhaps it was just the hungering to see her that had led to him hearing her.

Emma.

Another pebble caught him square on his other boot, bringing his eyes flying open, and he grunted. No, there was no imagining that.

“It took you long enough, Charles-love,” a voice called down.

Angling his head back, Charles scanned his gaze, frantically searching . . . and then finding. He squinted at the beloved figure high overhead, perched as comfortably as in a seating room, only in the nook of a branch.

“You were once very skilled at climbing trees to escape me, Charles. Never tell me you won’t scale one to find me,” she teased, and a dizzying lightness suffused his chest, leaving him buoyant, and he felt his lips form the first smile he’d managed since they’d been together yesterday morn.

Catching the low-hanging branch, he drew himself up, and he scaled the old oak until he reached the place just below the perch she’d made for herself. “You knew about that.”

A twinkle lit her eyes. “I had the tree across from you,” she whispered, and then winked.

His eyebrows went flying up. “You—”

“Were there? Yes. Heard everything?” She nodded. “Indeed. I climbed down before you or your parents saw me.”

His mind raced back, recalling all the remembrances of that day, the words he recalled speaking . . . and then a small figure, in the distance, hovering beside the lake. Emma. She’d been near enough to hear all. His chest tightened. “Oh, God, Emma. No wonder—”

“Oh, hush.” Emma tapped the tip of her boot against his shoulder. “I was hiding, too. You didn’t have a market on ‘child wishing to escape their betrothal’ that day.”

Some of the tension eased from his shoulders. “We were always of a remarkably similar thought,” he said wistfully. They’d just been too proud and filled with resentment to see that they were meant to be together.

“It just took us some time to see it.” She spoke that thought aloud. Snapping her notebook shut, she returned it to the valise she’d set up in the crook of an enormous curved branch.

“I’m sorry.” About so much. For betraying her. For not seeing her as she’d deserved to be seen.

“I’m sorry, too. For the lost time,” she murmured.

“I don’t want to lose any more with you,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the tears stuck in his throat. “I’ve wasted so much . . . and yesterday, today . . . thinking I’d lost you—” The agony of that brought his eyes shut. As every ugliest nightmare and possibility battered him. “It was as though it were happening again, and I was hopeless to stop—”

“Shh,”she whispered, and her palm stroked his cheek, the tenderness of that loving touch making it possible to look at her once more. “I didn’t doubt you’d find me.”

“I feared I wouldn’t.” His voice broke as he, at last, surrendered to the pressing fear that had gripped him since they’d been separated and since he’d set out after her. “I just rode, imagining all the while that I would be too late. That you were lost to me, and I didn’t . . . I couldn’t live if you were.”

Emma pressed a finger against his lips. “I didn’t doubt you would be here.” She glanced the eight paces below to the blockage in the road.

“Your work?”

She lifted her head in proud acknowledgment. “Of course. But I had my reticule and was prepared to walk if I needed to save myself.” She paused, a twinkle sparkling in her eyes. “Completely, that is.”

He chuckled, his chest rumbling, that mirth coming more from the relief of knowing she was here with him.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Olivia came to see me. She . . . learned of her brother’s intentions and came posthaste. She was . . . is . . . devastated by his betrayal and believes herself responsible.”

“No! I would never—”

“I assured her as much. Guilt, however, isn’t always rational.” He knew that from all he carried about Camille’s struggles, a remorse that would always remain with him, no matter how much Emma had helped him see that he wasn’t to blame.

“You were right about him,” Emma murmured, her voice soft and sad, and he set aside his own tumult because it didn’t really matter. She did. What she felt and what she’d suffered, and the hurt of a lost friendship that had been important to her.

“I am so sorry,” he said quietly, and finished his climb until he’d found a seat directly next to her. “I wish I hadn’t been.”

“Me too.” She lightly swung the leg she’d hung over the side. “For not listening to your warnings. My pride,” she muttered, and her face pulled in a grimace. With a sigh, Emma rested her cheek against his shoulder.

Charles placed a lingering kiss upon her forehead. “So how’d you handle the pup?” he asked, and Emma’s smile was back in place.

“He underestimated me.”

“Of course he did. Foolish man.”

Emma turned so she sat facing him, her knees drawn up to her chest, with an ease but also a precariousness that sent another swell of panic cresting. “The Duke of Wingate taught the Mismatch Society some clever skills in putting a man to sleep.” She lifted her right hand, angling it. “You just hit with the edge in this portion of the neck”—Emma demonstrated a slow slashing movement toward the upper portion of Charles’s neck—“and it puts a man to sleep.”

He ran his gaze over her face. “My God, you are breathtaking.”

She laughed. “I swear, Charles Hayden, you are the only man in London who’d be impressed by a lady knocking out a gent, and not absolutely horrified.”

“You are a glorious warrior, Emma Gately, a woman that I would be honored to spend the rest of my days attempting to make gloriously happy.”

Emma stilled, then let her legs fall so they hung over the side of the branch. “What?”

She didn’t know? How could she not know every wish he carried for a future that included them two together in it? Lowering himself onto his stomach, he scaled back down. The moment his feet hit the ground, he dropped to a knee. “Emma Gately,” he called up. “Will you marry me? Will you give me the gift of living only for your happiness?”

There came the rustle of leaves, and a moment later, Emma lowered herself to the ground, her eyes wide circles of emotion. Her mouth trembled, and she touched her fingers to those lips he would never tire of kissing.

Charles turned up his palms. “I love you endlessly and to distraction, Emma. My life is empty without you in it, and if you’d have me—”

A sob burst from her, and Emma lunged forward.

Charles already had his arms open, and he let himself fall back until they lay there with the yew leaves fluttering overhead. He brought up both hands to smooth the cherished planes of her face. “Is that—”

“Yes,” she cried against his mouth, a blend of tears and laughter. “That is a yes.”

Charles smiled.