The Mad Earl's Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the other, blocking the door.
    Dorian was not yet weak and helpless, as his mother had been. He’d find a way out of this so long as he kept a cool head.
    H ALF AN HOUR later, Dorian was galloping along the narrow track that led to Hagsmire. He was laughing, because the ruse had worked.
    It had been easy enough to feign a sudden attack of remorse. Given years of practice with his grandfather, Dorian had no trouble appearing penitent, and grateful for Abonville’s efforts. And so, when Dorian requested a few minutes to compose himself before meeting his bride, the two guests had exited the library.
    So had he—out the window, through the garden, then down to the stables at a run.
    He knew they wouldn’t pursue him to Hagsmire. Even his own groom wouldn’t venture onto the tortuous path this day, with storm clouds roiling overhead.
    But he and Isis had waited out Dartmoor storms before. There was plenty of time to find the cracked heap of granite where they’d sheltered so many times previously, while Dorian beat back the inner demons urging him toward the old habits, the illusory surcease of wine and women.
    Even if they searched, his unwanted guests would never find him, and they would give up awaiting his return long before he gave in. He had not yielded to his private demons or to his grandfather, and he would not yield to an overbearing French nobleman obsessed with genealogy.
    There would be no more submitting to Duty. The new Earl of Rawnsley would be dead in a few months, and that would be the end of the curst Camoys line. And if Abonville didn’t like it, let him uproot one of the French sprigs and plant him here, and make the poor sod marry Bertie’s cousin.
    Because the only way she would marry Dorian Camoys, he assured himself, would be by coming into Hagsmire with the entire bridal party and the preacher, and even then someone would have to pin the groom down with a boulder. Because he would dive into a bottomless pit of quicksand before he would take any woman into his life now and let her watch him disintegrate into a mindless animal.
    Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance.
    Or so Dorian thought at first, until he noticed that the rumble didn’t pause, as thunder would, but went on steadily, and steadily grew louder. And the louder and nearer it came, the less it sounded like thunder and the more it sounded like . . . hoofbeats.
    He glanced back, then quickly ahead again.
    He told himself the recent confrontation had agitated him more than he’d suspected, and what he believed he’d just seen was a trick of his degenerating brain.
    The ignorant rustics, who believed pixies dwelt all over Dartmoor, had named Hagsmire for the witches they also believed haunted the area. During mists and storms, they mounted ghostly steeds and chased their victims into the mire.
    The hoofbeats grew louder.
    The thing was gaining on him.
    He glanced back, his heart pounding, his nerves tingling.
    Though he assured himself it couldn’t be there, his eyes told him it was: a demonic-looking female riding an enormous bay. A tangled mane of fiery red hair flew wildly about her face. She rode boldly astride, a pale cloak streaming out behind her, her skirts hiked up to her knees, shamelessly displaying her ghostly white limbs.
    Though it was only a moment’s glance, the brief distraction proved fatal, for in the next instant, Isis swerved too sharply into a turning.
    Dorian reacted a heartbeat too late, and the mare skidded over the crumbling track edge and down the slippery incline—toward the quagmire waiting below.
    T H E PALE MARE managed to scramble back from the edge of the murky pit, but she threw off her master in the process.
    Gwendolyn leapt down from her mount, collected the rope she’d brought, and climbed down the incline to the edge of the bog.
    Several feet from where she stood, the Earl of Rawnsley was thrashing in a pit of grey muck. In the few minutes it had taken her to reach the bog, he’d slid