“Madam?” He used a harsher tone this time. “We’ve outrun the gentlemen pursuing you, so you’re safe now. Is there somewhere I can drop you?”
She pushed up to a sitting position, still careful to keep her face averted from the windows.
The sleeves of her gown, which he was sure had once been the height of fashion, resembled deflated balloons. But as she kneeled before him, his gaze again drifted to the material clinging to her like a second skin. Jasper deduced that she possessed what most considered to be the perfect figure: long legs, softly rounded hips, and breasts that were full, but pert.
She turned imploring eyes on him. “I was hoping to find my sister. She recently wed the Earl of Standish… but you said they are still on their honeymoon, so I…” Disappointment emanated from her.
Along with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness.
“Your sister is—”
“Lady Standish now,” the girl answered.
That was the moment Jasper’s life flashed before his eyes to immediately be replaced with the image of himself standing at an altar with an irate papa holding a pistol to his head.
If this woman was sister to the new Lady Standish, formerly Lady Marigold Hathaway, then that meant she was none other than Lady Gardenia Hathaway, eldest daughter of the Duke of Crossings.
“Aren’t you supposed to be getting married today?” The grand event had been written about for weeks in the Gazette.
She frowned, and then her bottom lip trembled. She might as well have sucker punched him.
“I was,” she admitted. “To the Duke of—”
“Dewberry.”
A God-awful excuse of a human being. Married three times and still without an heir.
His opinion of Dewberry aside, why was the duke’s bride presently kneeling on the floor of his carriage? “So your father is—”
“The Duke of Crossings.”
“And those men, the ones chasing you, were—”
“My father’s servants.” She exhaled. “And Dewberry’s. I didn’t stop to take notice.”
“You were running from St. George’s—from the cathedral.” Good lord. He’d just absconded with a duke’s prospective bride. “My lady…”
“Do you know where my sister and her husband are? If you tell me where they are, I can take a mail coach, I suppose. She’ll help me. Her husband isn’t afraid of my father. He cannot be, not if he was bold enough to marry Goldie without my father’s permission.”
She sat back on her heels now, revealing more of her delicate hourglass form. Golden tendrils of hair framed her heart-shaped face.
It was no wonder she’d been the Diamond of the Season the previous year.
Jasper considered his circumstances—which were getting more and more problematic by the second.
“A mail coach isn’t going to be of help if they’ve left country, as was suggested by Standish’s butler.” The instant the words left his mouth, he wished he could take them back. Because new tears formed in her eyes, turning her blue irises the color of a tropical sea.
“But… They cannot have.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to take a packet. Did he say where on the Continent? Belgium? Paris?”
Jasper could not, in good conscience, allow an innocent maiden to galivant around Mayfair, let alone the Continent, without protection. For an instant, he considered escorting her across to the Continent himself but quickly dismissed the notion.
To do something that stupid would certainly have him standing at the wrong end of a church. Even now, his bachelorhood stood in peril.
Had he simply gone to White’s, as he’d considered, rather than attempted to visit his old friend, he’d be safe. Amazing, really, that one seemingly insignificant decision now threatened his existence as he knew it.
Thanks to the sudden appearance of one small woman…
Incredibly, even sitting on the floor, this young woman exuded propriety and breeding. She kept her back straight and schooled her features so that, but for her tears, she appeared quite serene.
