A Wicked Lord at the Wedding Read Free Page B

success. An infantry officer, he knew the danger of early fire. There was always a perfect moment to make a definitivemove on the field. And so he captured her, having been her captive from the instant he had seen her face.
    And then one day he came to her with a lost child, a distraught boy of three whose father had been killed on the field. The boy’s mother had disappeared a few hours after viewing her husband’s body. The soldiers were searching a ravine where she might have been ambushed.
    “I can’t stand this anymore,” she said as she knelt to wipe the boy’s grimy face. He was shivering, too tired to sob, his body limp in Sebastien’s arms.
    Sebastien stared down at her. “I want you to go back to England.”
    His hand closed over hers, protective and strong. That same night the boy’s aunt came to claim him, and Sebastien staked his claim on Eleanor by asking her father’s permission to marry her.
    When she stood later with her father and Sebastien in the lamplight, she had to comment upon Sebastien’s arrogance.
    “You still never asked me.”
    “Well, he asked me,” her father said in his blunt manner. “And I’ve accepted.”
    Sebastien. A good officer, a good man. A bad baron at times, to judge by the way he’d chased her.
    The only time he shocked the camp was right after a grueling battle, when he persuaded a barber to carve Eleanor’s initials into his buttocks. She begged him to keep it secret, but news of Boscastle’s amusing misdeed spread through the regiment until itreached her father, who only shook his head and said it was fortunate he hadn’t gotten sepsis of the arse.
    “And I thought you were the sensible one,” she said as they trudged alongside a line of artillery wagons a few days later.
    Sebastien smiled with the confidence she adored. “Did I ever tell you that I want a large family?”
    Hot, grumpy, and happier than she’d ever imagined, she shook her head. He’d given her water from his canteen, but what she craved was cold lemonade.
    “Well, I do. And if we have a son first, I want to name him Joshua, after my father.”
    “He isn’t still alive?” she asked, waiting quietly for his answer. He’d never talked to her about his family.
    “He was murdered.”
    “Oh.” She hadn’t expected that. She managed to act as if she heard that sort of confession every day. In fact, she did. As a surgeon’s daughter, she listened to men confessing the saddest and most poignant stories anyone could imagine. And from her father she’d learned that being trusted was an honor, so she kept their stories to herself. Trust meant everything.
    “I didn’t know,” she said.
    “The man who killed him was never caught.” He looked at her intently before adding, “Yet. One of us will find him.”
    “Us?”
    “My three brothers. We’ll find him sooner or later.”
    She didn’t press him to elaborate. Every time they talked it felt natural to share things they had never admitted to anyone else.
    “I was an utter failure in school,” she confessed. “I couldn’t hold still long enough to read an entire book.”
    “You don’t hold still now.” He hesitated, mischief in his eyes. “Except when I’m kissing you.”
    “Which is certainly more exciting than reading about the Battle of Pharsalus.”
    “But Pharsalus was fascinating. The men in my company all know Pompey’s battle cry—
‘Herculēs invictus.’
”
    “You aren’t making fun of my unfinished education?”
    “Not at all.” He looked as innocent as Lucifer before his fall. “What would I want with a wife who knows more about Caesar’s cavalry than kissing me?”
    A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I do know one thing.”
    “That my kisses excite you?”
    “No. That Caesar won his battle, and Venus helped.”
    “‘
Venus victrix,’
” he said, breaking into laughter again. “Don’t you think it would sound a little silly for the British infantry to charge into battle invoking the