Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Read Online Free

less accepting his fate, “but only because I am desperate for a wife.”
    His words brought a renewed surge of fury to his grimy bride’s face, and he was forced to fight her to take one of her hands in his, then he found himself looking for something in the way of reassurance in her eyes. But when all he’d previously glimpsed now seemed closed to him, Ash called himself a fool and ran his thumb along her jagged fingernails to root himself to earth.
    Her father relaxed, as did his toadies, and Ash knew if they could get away from here alive, married or not, they had choices, a future.
    He could scrape the incrustation off her and see what he found beneath. He could get to know her and see what he found inside. And if she turned out to be as dreadful as she appeared, there was always banishment, or at the worst, annulment.
    At the improbable best, he had himself a bride he could get with child before Christmas, which would fulfill his grandfather’s requirements and save the estate for his mother. Revenge and repentance at the turn of a card, imagine that. Had he been offered as much when he quitted his botched nuptials earlier, he might have accepted with gratitude.
    Prodded and further sobered by a second kiss of the pistol barrel, Ash repeated his own vows with a slur he could not seem to shake and in a discordant voice that echoed as if it belonged to another.
    Once the stipulations to grandfather’s will were fulfilled, if he and his bedraggled bride did not suit, he could set her up with a small house and an allowance. Either way, she would live better in the future than she had in the past.
    However, if the depth of her hidden need, the sound of her voice, and her willingness to marry him to save him, was any indication of what lay beneath the crust, then perhaps, with some effort on both their parts, they might make a decent night’s work of this, after all.
    Likely not, Ash cautioned himself, but devil it, alive they could find a way to make it work. Dead, neither of them had hope at all.
    “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
    The room swayed again, not so much from drink as shock, Ash feared. “Tell me this is better than being dead,” he begged Myles … and Hunter belched.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    At the finality of the vicar’s pronouncement, Ash and his bride seemed to pale as one, Ash uncertain as to which of them seemed more like to retch.
    The cleric placed the parish register before them for their signatures, but McAdams shoved it aside to get Ash’s signature first on his thousand-guinea voucher.
    Ash wished his head was not so muzzy or his stomach so unsettled. If he had his wits about him, he might refuse this final step for a chance to think, but the pistols rose again, aimed again, and the thought of getting himself killed, in this intoxicated stomach-sick condition did not sit well with him. He signed the voucher, then the register, vowing to God on High that he would never drink again.
    After that was done, and his bride had made her mark—God help him—beside his name, the big-bellied innkeeper slapped his filthy apron, laughed and offered a toast. When his henchmen lowered their weapons to get their share of life’s nectar, Ash’s former friends belatedly relieved the thugs of their weapons. Not that the pistol-wielding poltroons seemed to care any longer, for they seemed more interested in drinking now, than killing, and well, the harm had already been done.
    After the parson filled his tankard, McAdams raised his own. “To my daughter,” said he, “the Lady Blackburne.”
    Ash groaned and rolled his eyes as Myles and Hunter cocked the pistols they had confiscated—now that the bloody horse had escaped the bloody barn!
    McAdams raised a brow at the sound, but he tipped his tankard back for a good long, greedy swallow. At length, when he finished swilling the stuff, and slammed his empty vessel on the table, he swiped his mouth with a grimy sleeve, belched, and nodded at the