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“HEAVENS!”
Margaret’s heart quickened, and this time it was not because of the loveliness of Jasper’s touch. She recognized the piercing voice.
“My daughter has been compromised!” the voice wailed.
Jasper scrambled up. His face paled, and his smile, which seemed so consistently present, had vanished.
Lily barked and nudged her head against his legs, and he bent and patted her absentmindedly.
Margaret scrambled up from the ground. She smoothed her dress, conscious that leaves clung to it in an indecent manner. Fire swept up the back of her neck and settled onto her cheeks.
Mama turned dramatically to the duke and raised her finger in an accusatory gesture. “You were kissing my daughter.”
Jasper was silent. His gaze darted about, then Margaret realized more people were here. She stared at the shocked expressions of Jasper’s closest friends.
“You are my witnesses,” Mama declared. “My poor dear daughter. My only daughter. Being taken by this man.”
Jasper was always confident, always prepared, but in this position, he was none of those things. His lower lip dropped down, as if he’d decided to impersonate one of the fish that swam in the lake.
Finally, he inhaled. “Mrs. Carberry, I assure you—”
Mama flung her hand up. “Don’t ‘Mrs. Carberry’ me. I know what I saw.”
“Your daughter’s maidenhood is intact.”
Embarrassment moved through Margaret at a faster pace. She didn’t want to hear Jasper explain that what they’d done had meant nothing. She didn’t want him to claim he didn’t need to marry her—that he didn’t want to marry her—that there was no child on the way.
And so, Margaret ran.
She sprinted down the end of the maze, forcing herself to remember how to exit.
“Margaret!” her mother called. “Come back here!”
Her feet thudded over the padded dirt of the maze, and when she exited it, she continued to run. Her lungs burned, and she had the horrible sense that all manner of leaves and twigs were clinging to her dress. She was ruining the dress, just as she’d ruined everything else.
Jasper was going to be forced to marry her.
She knew that.
She’d seen all the witnesses.
Whatever Jasper’s faults, he was a gentleman. He’d try to do the right thing.
Love swept through her. It filled her, it buoyed her. Life was good simply because he existed, and that would have to suffice.
After all, she wasn’t going to allow herself to fantasize about a life with him like some silly schoolgirl. She wasn’t going to let her mother take her back to Madame Abrial’s, this time for a wedding gown. She wasn’t going to become the Duchess of Jevington, as if she actually belonged beside him.
No.
He would marry her reluctantly. She’d already heard him attempt to persuade her mother that nothing untoward had occurred. So, she needed to make certain he wasn’t forced to marry her.
Jasper was too wonderful to be confined to marry for anything less than for love. Jasper deserved everything.
There’d been one person who hadn’t discovered her in the hedge.
One person who might agree to help her.
Her lungs burned, and she couldn’t be certain it was simply because of the speed with which she’d reached the manor house, and not because of distaste for her next task.
Time was of the essence, and she refused to waste any. She marched into the castle.
“Good afternoon, Miss Carberry.” The butler’s voice sounded behind her, surprise evident in it.
“G-Good afternoon.”
She hurried up the steps. He needed to be in the library.
She strode over the corridor, past the gilt-framed portraits of the duke’s ancestors, and past the ornate furniture from his travels. Finally, she pushed open the door to the library.
Mr. Octavius Owens sat at a table. His eyes widened somewhat, and disapproval flickered over his face. “Are you unwell, Miss Carberry?”
“Unwell?” Her voice squeaked.
Whatever she’d expected him to say, she hadn’t expected that.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Er—good.”
A mirror hung over a sideboard, and she glanced at her reflection, appalled at her unkempt appearance. No wonder he had asked if she was unwell. She patted her hair, but she needed a brush and twenty minutes to devote to it, before she might return it to a respectable state.
She sighed.
Perhaps she should have gone to change her attire. She didn’t have time for that. At some point, her mother would be finished scolding the duke for a crime he did not commit, and they would return to the castle.
Margaret needed to be gone before that happened.
But she couldn’t do it alone.
“Mr. Owens,” she said. “I have a proposition for you.”
*
THIS WAS NOT WHAT JASPER had wanted to happen.
Having Margaret’ parents and his best friends encounter him when he was kissing her was dashed embarrassing. It was the sort of mortifying thing that happened to other people.
Not Jasper.
Jasper preferred to give a woman privacy on such occasions. It was the polite thing to do.
Even his married friends didn’t go about kissing in front of him. A man had standards, even if he possessed roguish tendencies.
He cleared his throat. That kiss had been bloody good.
It had been everything a kiss should be.
And the fact that they’d discovered him had meant it had been going on for quite a while.
“You’ll need to marry her,” Mrs. Carberry said, raising her voice to a wail. “We must go to the Archbishop of Canterbury immediately.”
Jasper closed his eyes. “Don’t you think that’s a trifle unnecessary?”
“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Carberry said. “You are going to marry my daughter.”
He sighed.
Margaret deserved more than a hasty wedding in Canterbury. Kent wasn’t exactly near Dorset, and he didn’t want to show up at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s rooms without warning. That was the sort of thing that would assure scowls from the archbishop every time they saw each other. Jasper might not be particularly religious, but this didn’t seem the cleverest way to go about doing things.
Not to speak of the fact that special licenses were expensive. If he wanted to give Margaret a good wedding, he’d much rather spend that money on catering for the wedding breakfast. Oysters for everyone. And Chef Parfait could do some of his sugary concoctions that everyone adored. He could marry Margaret at St. George’s in London, or if she preferred, at the village church here.
Because there was one thing Mrs. Carberry was absolutely correct in: he was going to marry Margaret. He was going to make her his wife, and he was going to make her very, very happy.
And he had the delightful feeling that she was going to make him very happy as well.
“I don’t think Jevington was literally defiling her,” Hammett said loyally.
“And she didn’t look upset,” Brightling added, in what Jasper hoped was an attempt at assisting him, because Jasper certainly didn’t desire to imagine his friends watching and assessing their respective enjoyment levels.
“Of course, Margaret enjoyed it,” Jasper exclaimed. “The whole point of pleasure making is to create pleasure. Any idiot knows that. If some poor souls are flummoxed at how to create pleasure, well, that is sad, but I do not fall into that category of unfortunates.”
Ainsworth coughed, and Jasper’s cheeks heated.
“Are you smiling?” Mrs. Carberry shrieked to her husband. “Men are beasts!”
“I can assure you that animals do not have smiling abilities,” Mr. Carberry said.
Mrs. Carberry turned to her husband. “That’s your contribution to this conversation? Of all the things you could say, you choose to say that?”
“Er—yes,” Mr. Carberry said uncertainly. He raised his chin. “It is important to not be lax in the facts, my dear. Details are important.”
Mrs. Carberry rolled her eyes. “Right. That’s how you became rich.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have happened with a lackadaisical approach to ledgers,” Mr. Carberry said stiffly. He bore the peeved look of a schoolmaster at the end of term who has realized that his students not only have not learned anything, but that they also failed to respect him despite his obvious mastery of bewildering formulae.
“We are not speaking about you,” Mrs. Carberry said. “We are speaking about how your darling daughter has been ruined by a duke.”
Mrs. Carberry did not precisely wink, but the stress on Jasper’s position was unmistakable.
Margaret didn’t deserve to have her marriage start in this manner. No woman did. Mrs. Carberry shouldn’t be speaking so openly about how her daughter had been compromised. That was the sort of thing gossips might choose to chitchat about when they tired of their normal rotation of topics.
If Margaret was going to be his duchess—his wife—she shouldn’t think it was just because her dog had powerful nostrils and had dragged her parents there in an innocent attempt for attention. She should think he chose her because he loved her, not because of convenience and threats from her parents. Even the most terrifying matchmaking mamas in the ton normally adopted a milder approach to marriage.
Because Jasper did love her.
He would always love her.
He was hers, on this day and forever.
Perhaps he’d only realized it when they’d been kissing, but that didn’t make the revelation less powerful, less true.
He sighed. He didn’t want to think about what Margaret must be thinking now. He turned to find her, then frowned. “Where is Margaret?”