Make Me Love You (4 page)

Most of the staff came out to bid her good-bye.

She didn’t think she would shed tears for this place, but she did for the people she’d grown up with, servants who actually cared about her. Her groom, William, even handed her a wood carving he’d made of a horse, telling her he hoped it reminded her of Rebel. It didn’t—he wasn’t good at carving—but she would cherish it anyway.

The servants accompanying her had their instructions. They were to bring her straight back home if the wolf didn’t allow entrance into his lair. Otherwise, the servants, except for Alfreda, were to return to Leicestershire with the coach. Brooke hoped she gained entrance. She hoped she would find something to like about Dominic Wolfe other than their mutual dislike of her brother. But it was possible she wouldn’t, and possible, too, that she wouldn’t get through the door.

The emissary had come to the Whitworths first. From Leicestershire it was half a week’s ride by coach to Lord Wolfe’s home near York. The Regent’s man was only a day ahead of them on the road, which meant Lord Wolfe was still blissfully unaware of any of this. If he was going to be enraged when he
was told—and rightfully so, Brooke thought—she wished he could have more than just one day to calm down before she arrived.

It would have been logical for her family to wait until they’d learned his reaction to the Regent’s demand before sending her north. To dispatch Brooke so soon smacked of fear. They might have raged and railed about this, but they would never have called the Regent’s bluff. The consequences meant too much to them to do so.

And her brother, what a blackguard! When he’d come to her room last night, he’d had a calculating look in his eyes that warned her she wouldn’t like the “strategy” he had mentioned in the dining room.

“Marry him first, then poison him,” Robert had simply stated. “We can claim half his lands or all of them, if he has no other relatives. I know he had a sister who died, but no one knows much else about Dominic Wolfe.”

“And what if I like him instead?” Brooke had replied. It could happen. She wasn’t hopeful that it would, but it could.

“You will not. You will be loyal to your family and despise him.”

She might end up despising Dominic Wolfe, but it certainly wouldn’t be out of loyalty to her family. She hadn’t said that, though. She had kept her incredulity over Robert’s suggestion to herself. She knew he was mean and spiteful, even cruel, but murderous, too? Yet he was so handsome! He had so many blessings, was even an earl’s heir. There was no excuse for him to have turned out as he did, except that he was his father’s son. “Like father like son” had never been so true as it was in the Whitworth family.

She refused to even acknowledge his preposterous suggestion
and instead asked, “What did you do to Dominic Wolfe to make him challenge you three times?”

He snorted. “Nothing to warrant such persistence. But don’t cross us on this, Sister. We don’t want him as a relative through marriage. His death will remove any further demands the Prince Regent can make of us.”

She gestured to the door. He gave her such a vicious look for dismissing him that she thought he might use his fists on her to make his point. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done that.

But he was still scheming and in parting said, “As a widow, you will have your freedom, more freedom than family or a husband will ever give you. Keep
that
in mind, Sister.”

Her fondest wish! But not at the cost
he
was suggesting. Yet she’d lost her chance to learn something about the man they were sending her to. Robert knew him, could have told her something about him, but didn’t. She’d almost asked before the door closed behind him, but she’d never asked anything of him in her life and wasn’t going to start now.

It was ludicrous that the only thing she knew about Lord Wolfe was that he wanted her brother dead. She didn’t know if he was young or old, infirm, ugly, or even as cold and callous as her own family was. He could already be engaged to marry someone else, too, could be in love. . . . How horrible to think that his life was going to be turned upside down just because he’d wanted justice from her brother that he obviously couldn’t get from the courts. She already felt sorry for him!

When the coach stopped for lunch that day, they’d already traveled farther from Whitworth manor than Brooke had ever before been. By evening they would be out of Leicestershire! The trip to London was to have been her first long journey and
her first time out of the shire. She’d been to Leicester and a few other towns around it, but those had been short visits that hadn’t required spending the night away from home. So she was determined to enjoy this journey despite what would happen at the end of it, and she spent much of that first day staring out the window at countryside she’d never before seen.

But she still couldn’t stop her thoughts and anxieties from churning. By late afternoon she got around to telling Alfreda about Robert’s nefarious suggestion.

The maid merely raised a brow, not showing the least surprise. “Poison, eh? As cowardly as he’s always been, that boy. He’d ask this of you but he wouldn’t do it himself.”

“But he fought those duels,” Brooke reminded her. “That took some bravery.”

Alfreda scoffed. “I’ll warrant he fired his pistol before he should have. Ask your wolf when you meet him. I’m sure he’ll confirm my guess.”

“He’s not my wolf and we probably shouldn’t call him that just because my parents did,” Brooke said, even though she’d been doing just that.

“Well, you might want to.”

“Call him a wolf?”

“No, poison him.”

Brooke gasped. “Bite your tongue, I would never.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would. I will if necessary. I won’t have you suffer at his hand, if he has a heavy one.”

Despite the subject, Brooke was comforted to know how far Alfreda would go to protect her from the stranger who was to become her husband.

H
AVING JOINED THE ANCIENT
Great North Road that led all the way to Scotland, the Whitworth coach was making much better time the second day. Although the road was bumpy, Alfreda’s pet cat, Raston, didn’t seem to mind and purred on the seat between them. Raston had never been allowed in the house. He’d lived in the rafters of the Whitworth stable. Oddly, the horses had never been bothered by his presence. Alfreda had brought him food. The stableboys had given him more. Now Raston was fat and heavy to hold due to all those meals.

“Your father told the damned driver to make haste,” Alfreda grumbled when she was jostled on the seat for the third time that morning. “But this is too much. I don’t think Lord Whitworth wanted you to arrive in York
before
the Prince Regent’s emissary did. I will warn our driver to slow down when we stop for lunch today. They can go as fast as they like on the return trip.”

Brooke grinned. “But this is fun. I really don’t mind a bouncy ride.”

“You will tonight when you feel the aches from it. But I’m glad to see you smiling. You know you can be yourself now, laugh when you want, cry when you please, even lose your temper from time to time if you feel like it. Away from that house that choked the life out of you, you no longer need to keep your inner self contained, poppet.”

Brooke raised a black brow. “You’re suggesting I let this Prince-picked groom see who I really am?”

“You could. Why pretend with him?”

Brooke laughed. “I’m not really sure who I am anymore.”

“Of course you are. You are yourself with me and always have been.”

“But only with you, and only because you were the only one in that house who actually loved me.”

“Your mother—”

“Don’t defend her to me. She spoke to me only when she had to, or when my father and Robert were away and she was in one of her chattering moods. And even then she only wanted me to sit there and listen, not participate in a real conversation.”

Many times Alfreda had tried to convince Brooke that Harriet loved her. At times Brooke had thought it might be true. Occasionally, her mother would smile at her when no one else was around or stand in the doorway of the study watching her during a lesson with her tutor. Once, when Brooke cut her arm, Harriet brushed Alfreda aside to tend it herself. She’d even given Brooke Rebel, her most prized possession, for her thirteenth birthday. Yes, a few times Harriet had acted like a mother toward her, but Brooke knew what love felt like and
what it looked like. She saw it every time Alfreda looked at her. She never saw it in her real mother’s eyes. Yet she knew Harriet was capable of love because she displayed it in abundance for Robert.

“She could be like two different people, Freda. Most of the time, cold and indifferent, and on rare occasions, caring and interested. Sometimes I thought . . . but if I’d been myself with her, I would have been caught in the crosshairs when she reverted to being as cold as my father. The hurt she caused me would have been so much worse if I’d allowed myself to hope it could be otherwise. But you—I wished so many times that you, not Harriet, were my mother.”

“Not as many times as I wished you were my daughter. But you are the daughter of my heart, never doubt that.” Then Alfreda cleared the emotion out of her throat and added more formally, “We know why you hid yourself from that unnatural family of yours. It was the only way to save yourself pain and abuse. Let us both hope those days are gone for good.”

“What d’you think will happen if Dominic Wolfe doesn’t like me and sends me back home?” Brooke wondered aloud.

“Nothing other than you will likely get that Season in London that you were promised, and soon after, some other husband. But there would have to be something very wrong with Lord Wolfe for him not to like you, poppet.”

“But he hates Robert and will hate me because of it.”

“Then he would be a fool.”

“He could be that anyway.” Brooke sighed a little forlornly. “I knew I would marry eventually, but I expected a courtship.”

“As well you should have.”

“To at least know my husband well before we reached the altar.”

“We have passed beyond ‘usual’ circumstances here. You could ask for a brief courtship, though. If your wolf is a good man, he might agree.”

“Or he could be as afraid of the royals as my family and drag me straight to the altar instead.”

Alfreda chuckled. “Which is it you want, to be turned away at the door or married straightaway?”

Brooke sighed again. “I won’t know until I meet him. I wish none of this had happened.”

“Take heart, poppet. This northern lord could be wonderful. The Prince Regent could be doing you a very big favor.”

“Or Robert could have done me the biggest unplanned ill yet. Getting me stuck with a husband who could well repulse me.”

Alfreda tsked. “Then perhaps we shouldn’t speculate?”

“Perhaps not.”

On the third day of their journey, when they stopped for lunch, no one at the inn knew who Dominic Wolfe was. But they found out that the Regent’s emissary was traveling so swiftly that he was probably on his way back to London by now. Apparently, he was traveling day
and
night, merely changing horses when he could, and sleeping in his coach.

That night, they were only a few hours away from Lord Wolfe’s estate, but Alfreda refused to continue on in the dark. She wanted Brooke to be refreshed and looking her best when she faced the wolf for the first time. They took a room at an inn and Alfreda went down to order a bath for Brooke and to have food delivered to their room. When she returned, she had information about the Wolfe family.

“You aren’t going to like this,” Alfreda said with a dour look. “As if you already don’t have enough worries on your plate, this family you’ve been ordered to join apparently has a
curse hanging over their heads, so I think now we need to hope you get turned away at their door.”

“What sort of curse?”

“The nasty sort, centuries old, a curse that has killed all the firstborns in each generation in their twenty-fifth year—unless illness or accident takes them sooner.”

Round-eyed with amazement, Brooke said, “You’re joking, right?”

“No, just repeating what the barmaid, then the cook, and then one of his own villagers who is visiting a relative near here had to say about Lord Wolfe’s family.”

“But we—I mean, I don’t believe in curses. D’you?”

“Not really. The thing is, poppet, many people do, including those who are supposedly cursed. If you are told you are going to die by a certain age, you might be more reckless with your life so the harm invoked by the curse ends up happening anyway. But I doubt the Wolfe heirs just dropped dead for no reason. Ask yours to explain when you feel comfortable with him.”

“I will. There’s obviously some simple explanation that the family just doesn’t bother to share, thus the rumor never got quashed as it should have.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And maybe they like having such a rumor floating around—for some reason.”

“You don’t need to convince me, poppet. But it’s the ‘centuries-old’ part that worries me. That means this rumor has been around for a
long
time and has been kept alive because firstborns
have
died, and at least a few of them in their twenty-fifth year. That’s a lot of bad luck for one family to have if it is only bad luck.”