Devil Takes A Bride by Gaelen Foley

at last!”
    â€œMy lady, I pray you, do not set your hopes too high,” Lizzie warned with an earnest shake of her head. “I doubt His Lordship will be able to stay long.”
    Especially when he realized the truth of her deception.
    â€œOf course he won’t stay long, silly chit. One can hardly expect a Corinthian of Devlin’s mettle to spend his days squiring his old dragon aunt around Bath. Now, do hurry, Miss Carlisle. It is a grand occasion!” Lady Strathmore gripped the wheels of her Bath chair and rolled herself out of the ground-floor parlor and toward the entrance hall.
    Change my gown, indeed. For what?
Lizzie scoffed. Glamorous, highborn rakes did not even
see
plain, sensible women like her, she knew from experience. Besides, she had too much self-respect to go prancing about in finery merely to attract the notice of a loose-living scoundrel whose character she doubted and whose manner of living she disparaged.
    But despite her employer’s urge to hurry, she lingered in the parlor a moment longer, a trifle apprehensive to learn what manner of man she had deceived. Hearing his horse’s hoofbeats approaching even now, she sidled over to the window, nudged one of the lace curtains aside, and stole a discreet peek out.
    Instantly, her eyes flared with alarm—and a certain measure of confusion.
    There must be some mistake. The man she saw did not match her expectations one iota—not a pampered prince, but a fierce-eyed, black-haired warrior-hellion, who yanked his snorting horse to a clattering halt and flung down from the saddle, his sodden greatcoat whirling around his massive frame with the motion. A brooding scowl hardened the ruthless planes and angles of his fiendishly handsome face, sun-coppered, she realized, by his adventures in more sultry climes.
    Stalking swiftly toward the house, he was wild and wind tousled, dripping with the elements, his chiseled face flecked with mud and cold with hellbent will. He paid no mind to the groom who dashed out to meet him and captured the pawing horse’s bridle. His battle stare was fixed on the front door.
    Lizzie’s heart stopped for a second in sheer disbelief as she stared at him, fascinated and appalled. It was all too easy, in a flash, to imagine him in flowing desert garb, strapped with a huge, curved sword; too easy to picture him roaring orders at his crew from the storm-lashed rigging of his gun-ship.
    Good heavenly Lord.
She gulped.
    Surely this ruthless-looking giant was not the man she had crossed. Not the decadent London rake she had planned to take to task like a truant schoolboy.
    Devil Strathmore could not have been more intimidating if he were clad in black chain mail with a broadsword in his leather-gauntleted hands.
    His jet-black mane was a wild tangle that flowed over his shoulders. Her eyes widened to spy the small gold hoop that glinted in his left earlobe, paganlike.
    Then he cast a glance over his shoulder at his horse—perhaps making sure he had not killed the animal in his haste—and it was then that Lizzie spotted the scarlet streak of blood that marred his right cheek, beneath the spatters of mud and grime from the road.
    With a gasp, she clapped her hand to her mouth. He was bleeding! But why? What had happened? He marched on, and she leaned forward so fast to keep watching him that she bumped her forehead on the wavy glass, but he exited her line of vision, disappearing into the house.
    Oh, dear.
She winced and rubbed her brow in dazed dismay as she withdrew from the window.
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
For the first time, the possibility occurred to her that she might have made a…serious miscalculation. She heard the front door open from a distance through the house, but suddenly did not know what to think. Until this moment, the main evidence on which she had based her admittedly low opinion of the dowager’s nephew was the steady stream of his bills that arrived each month on Her