Trapped at the Altar Read Free

was barely a question; she knew the answer.
    â€œYes,” Ivor answered curtly. “Your grandfather is dead. Who better to watch over you than your future husband? I will see you at Council.” He turned from her and began the long scramble back to the valley.
    Ariadne exhaled slowly. She shouldn’t have expected anything else. She knew the ways of the Daunt world—knew them but didn’t have to accept them. She watched Ivor’s retreating back. He was her friend, but she could never accept him as her governor. Her grandfather’s death had released her from the family’s control; she would not relinquish that independence now.
    Rising, she turned her face to the cliff top, climbing steadily until she reached the tufted grass above, sprinkledwith daisies and the occasional pink. Grazing sheep ignored her unorthodox arrival in their midst, and a few cows regarded her with lazy bovine stares as she shook down her homespun skirt and kicked dirt from her shoes before starting across the field to a small spinney at the far side.

    Gabriel Fawcett stood among the trees in the spinney, watching as Ariadne came across the field towards him. He held a small nosegay of late-summer roses from his mother’s garden and felt the customary surge of blood, the swift pounding of his heart, as she drew closer. Sometimes he wondered how it was physically possible for one body to contain so much passion, so much lust and love, as he felt for this girl. Ariadne Daunt was out of his experience, almost magical in her difference from anyone he had ever met before. She was not of his world, and sometimes he thought she was not of this world at all. But he knew that she was very much of this world. The very name of Daunt brought dread to all who heard it.
    It had not always been so. They were one of the oldest families in Somerset and one of the wealthiest in both estates and fortune, until Charles I had lost his head and Oliver Cromwell’s Protestant Commonwealth had ruled the land with a dour fist. The Catholic Daunt family had raised their standard for King Charles and lost everything back on that cold January day in 1649 when the King had been beheaded. They had barely escaped with their lives, and they had been revenged ever sinceupon all who they thought had betrayed them, on erstwhile friends and neighbors, indeed, on anyone who had bowed their heads beneath Cromwell’s yoke.
    Outlaws, they had created their own land and their own laws in a valley of the River Wye, a place easily fortified and defended. And when it pleased them to create mayhem across the usually peaceful countryside, they did so. They terrorized the seaports of Devon and Cornwall, piracy and even the vile business of wrecking were not beneath them, and they amassed a fortune rumored to rival that of any of the great landed families of the realm.
    And Gabriel Fawcett had fallen in love and lust with Lady Ariadne Daunt, the scion of one of the oldest and now the most loathed family in the West Country. And to his eternal astonishment, the lady loved him in return. It was an impossible match, an impossible relationship, and yet it was. An immutable, all-consuming fact, and as he watched her now, her light step springing across the mossy ground, her skirt hitched up to reveal slender ankles, her lovely long feet clad only in a pair of light slippers, he knew he would die for her if he had to.
    He took a step out of the trees, and Ari saw him at once. She raised a hand in greeting and ran towards him, burying herself in his embrace. She felt the swift beat of his heart against her ear as she placed her head on his chest and inhaled the fresh rosemary scent of his linen.
    â€œOh, how I have missed you,” she murmured. “It has been such a dreadful time, Gabriel. I don’t know where to turn.”
    He tilted her face and kissed her, his mouth hungryfor the taste of her. The nosegay was crushed between them, but he didn’t