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

reeking disgrace.”
    Another screech, another wounded friend. Some days did not go the way you expected, Ash thought. Like wedding days. If this were, indeed, his wedding day.
    “Parson, parson,” Ash shouted to halt the man reeling down the street, a huge book beneath his arm.
    The intoxicated cleric who’d performed the seedy ceremony turned and waited for Ash to catch up. Ash took five guineas from his pocket and held them palm up. “They’re yours if you answer a question in God’s own truth. Are you or are you not a man of the cloth?”
    The parson shrugged. “An unworthy sot to be sure, but a man of the cloth all the same.” He showed his closed book and there on the cover etched in gilt Ash read the words, “Parish Register, St. Adelbert Church, London.”
    “You are married in the eyes of God, my son, though I will regret my part in your downfall until I take my next drink, and forget you exist, and that’s the sordid truth of it. I pray you will someday forgive me.”
    “If downfall I face, seek God’s forgiveness, never mine.” Ash opened the cleric’s shaking hand and dropped the coins into it one by one. “For the poor box not the drink.”
    “You trust I will do as you say?”
    “Inasmuch as I consented to my own marriage,” Ash said, and though the parson flinched, he pocketed the guineas and turned to walk away.
    Ash returned to his carriage. “I’ll thank the two of you to wish us happy,” he said to Myles and Hunter. Then he turned his bride toward his open carriage door and pushed her trouser-clad bottom up and inside, to her mortified screech and sailor’s curse. He climbed in behind her and tipped his hat to his friends. “I’ll thank you to stop calling my bride a wench.”
    Said bride’s face filled with mottled fury, her posture poised to bolt, so Ash tripped her on her hastening way. By the seat of her trousers, he pulled her back in, and shoved her to the seat opposite. “Sit, wench, and shut up, while I decide what the bloody hell to do with you.”
    “You told them not to call me, wench.”
    “But I can call you anything I choose. Brinks,” Ash said as his coachman made to shut the carriage door. “Home to Gorhambury, if you please.”
    For the first full fifteen minutes of the two-hour journey, Ash regarded his bride, and she him, with a mutually murderous rage. For the next half hour, they both looked away and out their respective windows, though Ash peeked her way at odd intervals.
    Truth to tell, he’d needed a bride and now he had one. Problem was—getting up enough courage to bed her. “Hunter is right. You need a bath,” he said, regarding the unexpected fulfillment of his grandfather’s maniacal will—the bloody devil of a bad night’s work—hell a bad life’s work, more like.
    Thank God for a closed carriage, he thought, for he would not want even a servant, to espy his consolation “prize” of a bride. Hair the color of … a dirty floor … though somewhat less tidy, and much less appealing—sooty of face, bruised of eye—though not his doing, much as he’d considered it—she stood nearly as tall as him. She stood reed-thin of body, but for a fine flair in her hips, which he’d discovered with his hands while rolling on the filthy taproom floor.
    Her tiger’s eyes, he must admit, were amazing and possibly her best feature. Her heart-shaped lips, he thought, might be her best, though he would reserve judgment on that score until after her bath.
    No wonder he’d thought her a boy at first glance, though suddenly he could barely mistake the curvaceous hips he’d so recently handled, the feminine arch in her brow, the tilt of her nose.
    “Are you certain you’re nearly twenty-two?” Ash asked, opening a window against the sweat and stale-pub stench of her before settling himself more comfortably against the squabs, trying to calm his roiling stomach even as he tried to catch a glimpse of her faceted eyes in moonlight.
    “So he