Raven's Vow

“Perfectly,” she said. “I assure you I have it on the best authority, even if I’m a trifle unclear on the details. I’m certain Mr. Raven would be willing to explain it again. He seems to feel everyone else finds coal as interesting as he does.”

“I find human progress interesting,” Raven said simply. There was no trace of answering amusement in his voice.

“Indeed,” Catherine said primly. “How… interesting.”

“Is there a reason,” the duke began, looking at his guest, “for your call today?”

Catherine could almost see her father mentally repeating the phrase she’d used, as if fixing it in his mind.Coal merchant. She could imagine the laughter at his club tomorrow when he told his cronies about it. And she, of course, was only making it worse. Humiliation was inherent in the situation; that was why she had tried to warn the American. But he had been so sure that what he’d suggested was as reasonable as he’d made it sound.

She glanced at Raven’s face and found he was watching her instead of her father. A muscle tightened briefly beside his mouth, and then even that was controlled. His eyes moved back to the duke, and he said finally, despite her warning, what she had known he would say from the moment she had walked into the room.

“I’ve come to offer for your daughter’s hand. I would like your permission to marry Catherine.”

Her father’s face quickly drained of color, and then, his eyes never leaving those of the man who had made that ludicrous suggestion, it suffused with blood, purpling with rage.

“You—you wouldwhat?” he sputtered.

Raven drew papers from the inside pocket of his coat and unfolded them as if he had all the time in the world. “One of these is a listing of my assets. The other is a marriage agreement that the man of business I employ here in London believed might be appropriate in such a merger. As you will see, the death settlements are extremely generous, and I require nothing from you except your permission for the match to take place. Not the usual contract in matters such as these, I’m aware, but my financial success has given me the liberty of not having to be a stickler for the conventional terms. Your daughter’s hand is dowry enough, I assure you.”

Raven had just uttered more words than Catherine had heard him put together in their previous conversations, except when he was talking about coal. The speech had had a rather endearing charm, if one thought about it—not that her father would.

“How dare you!” the duke said.

Although the old man certainly presented no physical threat to the American, his fury was rather awe inspiring— to Catherine at least. She couldn’t remember seeing her father this enraged since she’d run off with the fortune hunter. Resolutely, she turned her mind away from that memory.

“Listed here also are the properties I am willing to settle on your daughter after our marriage,” Raven added.

Catherine wondered if she were to be given a coalfield as an inducement to marriage. The wordswith my worldly goods, I thee bestow ran fleetingly through her mind.

“Get out,” her father said ominously.

“Or a cash settlement if you prefer,” Raven offered reasonably. Reynolds’s warnings began to stir darkly in the back of his mind. Because the settlements were indeed extremely generous, he had believed that a man of the duke’s intelligence would immediately see the advantages for his daughter.Not of his class, the banker had counseled.Notorious for his temper, the groom had suggested. And Catherine’s own advice, given almost with regret, he’d believed:My father would never allow such a match. All the warnings Raven’s pride had ignored were repeated in the old man’s features.

The Duke of Montfort stalked across the room to ring the bell, which Hartford answered too quickly. The butler must have been standing in the hall in case of just such an occurrence.

“Get out of my house,” the duke repeated.

“Your daughter has voiced no objection to the match,” Raven averred calmly.

Not exactly the truth, Catherine thought, but he was certainly not easily discouraged.

Her father, however, had apparently had enough. “Throw him out,” he said, gesturing to Hartford.

The butler walked up to John Raven, who turned those remarkable eyes from the contemplation of her father’s face to the servant’s. As the duke’s had, Hartford’s features lost color, but for a different reason altogether. The American’s controlled smile appeared briefly at the man’s hesitation, and then he turned and walked around him.

There would be no advantage to Raven in a meaningless confrontation with Montfort’s butler. Fighting with the servants would only make him appear more ridiculous than he already had.

However, he didn’t resist the impulse to issue his own warning. He turned back in the doorway to speak to the duke.

“I intend to marry your daughter, your grace. Nothing that has been said today has changed that. I have never done business this way in the past, and I believe it was a mistake on this occasion, but because I’m a stranger here, I allowed others to influence my actions. You may name your price, but I mean to have Catherine. You can be certain of that.”

The duke’s shock held him motionless a moment. Raven’s eyes moved back to meet Catherine’s. He nodded to her and finally, mercifully, he turned to leave.

Something in that last challenge to his authority, his pride or his honor had broken Montfort’s control, never particularly reliable under the best of circumstances. He rushed after the departing American, almost shouting in his fury. “You’ll marry Catherine over my dead body. You’ll not bring your sweat-stained lucre into my family. You’re another damned fortune hunter, and you’re not fit tospeak my daughter’s name. I’ll see you in hell before you insult her with your proposal again. You stink of sweat, and your stench offends my nose!”

Raven turned back to face the duke, and for once the warrior Scot in his heritage overcame the hard-learned Indian stoicism.

“If my money’s stained, it’s with my own sweat, your grace. Not that of the peasants your family robbed for hundreds of years. Mine’s a far cleaner stench than yours, sir,” he said bitterly. “And as for being a fortune hunter, I assure you I’m not interested in your money. It’s Catherine I want, and I intend to have her. I assure you I meant no insult to your daughter. I have made her the most honorable offer she’s likely to receive. Even if you’re both too insular to understand that.”

“Insular?” Montfort shouted. “You colonial jackanapes, don’t you dare call me insular.”

His gaze found the crop Catherine had left on the hall table that morning after her ride. It was not her custom, but she had apparently forgotten it when she had stopped to examine the calling cards in the salver that rested there. The crop’s position proved far too convenient for her father’s fury.

In his fit of blood lust, he grasped the whip, flying across the narrow space that separated him from his unwanted guest, to slash a blow across the mouth that had spoken those insults.

Raven wrenched the crop from the duke’s fist, but a slim, feminine hand caught his wrist, just as it had caught the rattan stick. Although he could have easily freed himself from the grip of Catherine’s fingers, Raven hesitated, another emotion interfering with his anger. She had touched him, slender fingers resting on the bare skin of his wrist, and he could feel the results of that realization beginning to move through his body, replacing the involuntary flood of adrenaline with a different, but just as uncontrollable, response.

“He’s an old man,” she begged. “Please don’t hurt him.”

Raven’s eyes, filled with a fury that matched her father’s, moved down to meet hers. Somehow, at the sight of russet eyes full of regret and apprehension, he found control.

She took a deep breath as she felt the rigidity gradually leave the upraised arm. “Just go away,” she whispered. “I tried to tell you this would happen. Please, just go away.”

Catherine’s fingers slipped across the back of Raven’s hand, and he allowed her to take the crop he could never have used against the old man. The welt her father had raised across his face was beginning to change from livid white to angry red. He raised his own fingers, which to his disgust trembled slightly, to explore it. The upper end was the most heavily damaged, a crimson thread there beginning to overflow and spill across his high cheekbone. He brushed his hand over the welling blood, feeling the fighting fury of his ancestors build again.

Catherine could hear the harshness of Raven’s breathing. She was close enough even to. smell him. There was no cloying perfume, but rather a pleasant aroma composed of the starch that had been used in his cravat, the fine leather of his boots and the warmly inviting, totally masculine scent of his body.

She lowered the hand that now controlled the whip and found, surprisingly, that she was fighting an urge to touch the brutal stripe her father had laid across his face. She knew that the duke’s rage was not really directed against John Raven. This blow had been struck in revenge for another insult to his daughter, for another man whohad been exactly what Montfort had accused the American of being. What had happened here this morning was not what she had wanted, but she knew very well her mockery had played a role in what had occurred. Raven would never know how deeply she regretted that.

“I’m sorry,” she offered softly.

It seemed almost as if he didn’t hear her. Finally the blue flame of his gaze focused again on what was in her face. His lips were white with the pressure he was exerting. The small, throbbing muscle jumped again in his jaw.

“Tell him,” Raven ordered, reading the look in her eyes— the look he had seen there before. He hadnot been mistaken.

“Tell him what?” she asked, truly not understanding what message she was supposed to give.

“That you’re mine. And that he might as well get accustomed to that reality.”

John Raven had disappeared into the street, slamming the door behind him, before she could think of an answer.

Chapter Three (#ulink_85c3e500-3212-5ae7-bafb-7d3d41c8ef29)

In the ensuing days, her father said little about the confrontation with John Raven. He had grudgingly admitted, knowledge assuredly gained from his friends at White’s, that the “coal merchant” was exactly what he had claimed to be.

“Rich as Croesus,” the duke acknowledged. “They’re calling him the American nabob, but I am led to understand that most of his wealth was accumulated in the East.”

“China and India,” Catherine agreed, remembering their ride.