Ever His Bride Read Online Free Page A

Then Mr. Dolan
would fire her! She’d have no money at all! How could she live?
    “Blast it all!” She tried the low-slung attic
door again. It was locked, as it had been all night. She gave the
panel a good smack with the heel of her hand, then turned back to
the bed. She’d given up pacing. The ceiling hung so low and sloped
so steeply that her neck had a crick in it. She was hungry and
cold, and so deeply in debt she might not see another inn until the
middle of the next decade.
    “Miss Mayfield? Are you there, girl?” Mrs.
Cobson’s voice from the other side of the door seemed almost
friendly in the gloom.
    “Where would I have gone, Mrs. Cobson?” she
asked through the keyhole.
    The lock rattled and the tiny door opened.
Mrs. Cobson entered in a shuffling crouch, then straightened when
the ceiling allowed.
    “You’re to come with me,” she said.
    “Is he here?” Panic raced up her spine,
settling like cold dread on her shoulders.
    “Mister Claybourne? No, no. He’s sent for
you. There’s a carriage downstairs.”
    “Where is it taking me? I have the right to a
trial, and to speak with my solicitor. Mr. Biddle will know what to
do. Claybourne can’t simply throw me into prison!”
    “With his kind of money, he can do anything
he wants.” Mrs. Cobson snorted and smiled as if such a grimace was
meant to comfort her. “But Mr. Claybourne isn’t going to hurt you.
His ways are a bit odd, but he’s not a murderer. Leastwise I don’t
think he is. Come along, Miss Mayfield.” Mrs. Cobson shook her ring
of keys like a dinner bell.
    “I’m not going to marry him.”
    Mrs. Cobson set her fists against her
apple-round hips. “Then he’ll probably drop you off at the Queen’s
Bench when he’s done with you. He’s paid your charges to us for
your time at Cobson’s Rest, and now you’re to be put into his
brougham. Where you go from there, I don’t know, and I can’t waste
my time caring. Now, do you come with me peaceably, or do I get Mr.
Cobson to haul you downstairs like a sack of potatoes?”
    Hoping there might be a way to escape once
she was outside on the stoop, Felicity snatched up her portmanteau
and shawl, ducked her head and willingly followed Mrs. Cobson
through the tiny door and down two flights of canted, squealing
stairs to the vestibule into the waiting grip of Mr. Cobson
himself. Flanked now by both Cobsons, she was whisked out the front
door and handed up into the cab of the brougham. The carriage door
slammed behind her and was locked down tightly from the outside.
Shutters shot across the window glass in the doors, restricting her
view of the outside world to a pair of small round windows set into
either side of the carriage wall. A perfect prison cell on wheels!
Claybourne must practice this sort of kidnapping regularly.
    Before she could bang a protesting fist
against the ceiling, the carriage shuddered forward into the
smoke-bound fog.
    “Damn the man!” He couldn’t just deliver her
to a prison without a trial; there were laws against such things.
And yet she believed Mrs. Cobson, that Hunter Claybourne could, and
would, do anything he wanted without the slightest twinge of
conscience or consequence.
    But in the next moment, the brougham turned
sharply away from the Queen’s Bench Prison, crossed London Bridge,
rolled up King William Street, and finally stopped in Cornhill
Street across from the front of the Royal Exchange, and opposite
the majestic edifice the Bank of England.
    The Bank of England? Had Claybourne learned
of the thousand pounds her uncle had put into the bank for her? Did
the piggish lout think to make her entirely penniless before
dashing her into prison?
    The carriage door opened to Claybourne’s
stone-faced footman, but instead of crossing the busy confluence of
Threadneedle and Cornhill, she quickly found herself escorted in a
grip of iron, up a wide set of granite stairs and into a cavernous
lobby. What wasn’t fashioned of icy-white marble was