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.
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.
The old man’s eyebrow lifted. “God’s teeth, Catherine, exactly how well do you know this damned miner? Surely you must realize what you’re doing by this ridiculous delay—making it appear youdesire the attentions of men like this American. Choose a man of your own class, suitable for your birth and position, and do it damned quickly. I’ll not be accosted by any more importunate jackanapes with coal dust under their fingernails.” The duke’s slender, elegantly erect frame shuddered dramatically, illustrating his distaste.
“Importunate?” Catherine repeated. “I should think that would be one adjective that wouldn’t apply in this case. He’s hardly the fortune hunter you called him.” Recalling her father’s fury over the disastrous incident of two years ago, she added, “I should think you’d be glad you don’t have to worry about that with Mr. Raven’s proposal. Actually…” she began, savoring the rather exciting bluntness of that proposal.
“Don’t press me, Catherine. You think to wind me around your finger as you’ve always done, but I warn you, girl, this is no trifling matter. Pick a husband, or I shall do it for you. And be damned sure that I will, Cat. Damned sure.”
The problem was that she knew very well his temper might cause him to do exactly that, regardless of his promise to her. Despite her father’s warning, she had found herself reliving that last encounter with John Raven more times than she wished, mentally watching her crop descend across the high cheekbone. The memory that was most clear and, to her disgust, most often repeated in her mind, was what he had said just before he’d departed.