Despite the unplanned-for pause at Stonehenge, Dain’s carriage drew up at Athcourt’s front entrance at precisely eight o’clock, as scheduled. By twenty past eight, he and his bride had inspected the domestic army, all turned out in trim ceremonial array, and had been discreetly inspected in turn. With a very few exceptions, none of the present staff had ever clapped eyes on their master before. Nonetheless, they were too well trained and well paid to show any emotion, including curiosity.
All was ready, exactly as Dain had ordered, and every requirement provided precisely to the minute, according to the schedule he’d sent ahead. Their baths had been readied while they reviewed the staff. Their dinner clothes were pressed and neatly laid out.
The first course was served the instant lord and lady took their seats at opposite ends of the long table in the cavernous dining room. The cold dishes arrived cold, the warm, warm. Andrews, the valet, stood near His Lordship’s chair throughout the meal and assisted with all tasks requiring two hands.
Jessica did not appear in the least daunted by a dining room the size of Westminster Abbey, or the dozen liveried footmen waiting at attention near the sideboard while each course was consumed.
At a quarter to eleven she rose from the table to leave Dain to his port. As coolly as though she’d been mistress there for centuries, she informed the house steward, Rodstock, that she would have tea in the library.
The table had been cleared before she was through the door, and the decanter appeared before Dain almost in the same instant. His glass was filled with the same silent unobtrusiveness, and his host of attendants vanished in the same ghostly quiet and quick way when he said, “That will be all.”
It was the first time Dain had had anything like privacy for two days, and the first chance to think properly about the problem of deflowering his bride since he’d realized it was a problem.
What he thought was that it had been a long day and his paralyzed arm was throbbing and the dining room was too quiet and he didn’t like the color of the drapes and the landscape hanging over the mantle was too small for the location.
At five minutes to eleven, he pushed away his untouched wineglass, rose, and went to the library.
Jessica stood at a book stand, where the immense family Bible lay open to a page containing the customary entries of weddings, births, and deaths. When her husband entered, she threw him a reproachful look. “Today is your birthday,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He approached, and his stony expression settled into the usual mocking mask as he glanced down at the place she pointed to. “Fancy that. My estimable sire didn’t black my name out. I’m all amazement.”
“Am I to believe you’ve never once looked in this book?” she asked. “That you weren’t interested in your forebears—when you knew all about Guy de Ath?”
“My tutor told me about my ancestors,” he said. “He tried to enliven the history curriculum with regular strolls through the portrait galley. ‘The first Earl of Blackmoor,’ he would solemnly announce as he paused before a portrait of a chevalier with long golden curls. ‘Created during the reign of King Charles II,’ I would be informed. Then my tutor would expound upon the events of that reign and explain how my noble ancestor fit in and what he’d done to win his earldom.”
His tutor had told him, not his father.
“I should like to be tutored in the same way,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow you will take me for a stroll through the portrait gallery. I collect it must be about ten or twelve miles long.”
“One hundred eighty feet,” he said, his eye returning to the page. “You seem to have an exaggerated view of the size of Athcourt.”
“I’ll get used to it,” she said. “I managed not to gape and gawk too much when introduced to the cathedral village otherwise known as Her Ladyship’s Apartments.”
He was still staring at the page where his birth had been recorded. His sardonic expression hadn’t changed, but there was turmoil in his dark eyes. Jessica wondered whether it was the entry directly below that troubled him. It had saddened her, and she had grieved for him.
“I lost my parents in the year after you lost your mother,” she said. “They were killed in a carriage accident.”
“Fever,” he said. “She died of fever. He entered that event, too.” Dain sounded surprised.
“Who entered your father’s death?” she asked. “That isn’t your hand.”
He shrugged. “His secretary, I suppose. Or the vicar. Or some officious busybody.” He pushed her hand away and slammed the ancient Bible shut. “If you want family history, we’ve volumes of it on the shelves at the far end of this room. It’s recorded in tedious detail, going back to the Roman conquest, I daresay.”
She opened the Bible again. “You are the head of the family and you must put me in it now,” she said gently. “You’ve acquired a wife, and you must write it down.”
“Must I, indeed, this very minute?” He lifted an eyebrow. “And suppose I decide not to keep you after all? Then I should have to go back and blot out your name.”
She left the bookstand, crossed to a study table, took up a pen and inkwell, and returned to him. “I should like to see you try to get rid of me,” she said.
“I could get an annulment,” he said. “On grounds that I was of unsound mind when the marriage was contracted. Lord Portsmouth’s marriage was annulled on those grounds, only the day before yesterday.”
He took the pen from her all the same, and made a grand ceremony of recording their marriage in his bold script, with a few flourishes to heighten the effect.
“Ah, handsomely done,” she said, leaning over his arm to look at the entry. “Thank you, Dain. Now I shall be part of the Ballisters’ history.” She was aware that her breasts were resting on his arm.
So was he. He jerked away as though they’d been a pair of hot coals.
“Yes, you have been immortalized in the Bible,” he said. “I expect you’ll be demanding a portrait next, and I shall have to move a famous ancestor into storage to make room for you.”
Jessica had hoped that a bath, dinner, and a glass or two of port would calm him down, but he was as skittish now as he’d been when they’d entered Athcourt’s gates.
“Is Athcourt haunted?” she asked, strolling with studied casualness to a tall set of bookshelves. “Should I be prepared for clanking chains or hideous wails at midnight or quaintly attired ladies and gentlemen wandering the corridors?”
“Gad, no. Who put such an idea into your head?”
“You.” She stood on tiptoe to examine a shelf of poetic works. “I cannot tell whether you’re bracing yourself to tell me something ghastly, or you’re in expectation of something ghastly. I thought the something might be Ballister ghosts popping out of the woodwork.”
“I’m not bracing myself for anything.” He stalked to the fireplace. “I am not braced. I am perfectly at ease. As I should be, in my own damned house.”
Where he’d learned his family’s history from a tutor, instead of his father, she thought. Where his mother had died when he was ten years old…a loss that still seemed to hurt him deeply. Where there was an immense, ancient family Bible he’d never looked into.
She wondered if he’d known his dead half-siblings’ names, or whether he’d read them this day, as she had, for the first time.
She took out a handsome, very expensively bound volume of Don Juan.
“This must have been your purchase,” she said. “The last cantos of Don Juan were published scarcely four years ago. I didn’t know you had a taste for Byron’s work.”
He had wandered to the fireplace. “I don’t. I met him during a trip to Italy. I bought the thing because its author was a wicked fellow and its contents were reputedly indecent.”
“Which is to say, you haven’t read it.” She opened the book and selected a stanza from the first canto. “‘Wedded she was, some years, and to a man / of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty; / And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE / ’T were better to have TWO of five and twenty.’”
Dain’s hard mouth quirked up. Jessica flipped through the pages. “‘A little she strove, and much repented, / And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented.’”
A stifled chuckle. But she had him, Jessica knew. She settled down onto the sofa and skipped ahead to the second canto, where she’d left off reading the night before.
The sixteen-year-old Don Juan, she explained, was being sent away because of his affair with the beautiful Donna Julia, wife of the fifty-year-old gentleman.
Then Jessica began to read aloud.
At Stanza III, Dain left the fireplace.
By the eighth stanza, he was sitting beside her. By the fourteenth, he had arranged himself into an indolent sprawl, with a sofa pillow under his head and a padded footstool under his feet. In the process, his crippled left hand had in some mysterious manner managed to land on her right knee. Jessica pretended not to notice, but read on—about Don Juan’s grief as his ship sailed from his native land, and of his resolve to reform, and of his undying love for Julia, and how he would never forget her or think of anything but her.
“‘“A mind diseased no remedy can physic—” / Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.”’”
Dain snickered.
“‘“Sooner shall Heaven kiss earth—”(here he fell sicker) / “Oh Julia! What is every other woe?—(For God’s sake let me have a glass of liquor; Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)”’”
If she’d been reading alone, Jessica would have giggled, as she’d done last night. But for Dain’s benefit, she spouted Don Juan’s lovesick declarations with a melodramatic anguish that grew increasingly distracted as the hero’s mal de mer got the better of undying love.
She pretended not to notice the large body shaking with silent laughter, so close to hers, or the occasional half-smothered chuckle that sent a tickling breeze over her scalp.
“‘“Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!” / (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)’”
The breeze tickled the top of her ear, and she did not have to look up to be aware of her husband leaning nearer, looking over her shoulder at the page. She read on into the next stanza, conscious of his warm breath on her ear and of the vibrations his low, rumbling chuckle set off inside her.
“‘No doubt he would have been more pathetic,—’”
“‘But the sea acted as a strong emetic,’” he gravely finished the stanza. Then she let herself look up, but his gaze slipped away in the same instant and the expression on his harshly handsome face was inscrutable.
“I can’t believe you bought it and never read it,” she said. “You had no idea what you were missing, did you?”
“I’m sure it was more amusing hearing it read in a ladylike voice,” he said. “Certainly it’s less work.”
“Then I’ll read to you regularly,” she said. “I shall make a romantic of you yet.”
He drew back, and his inert hand slid to the sofa. “You call that romantic? Byron’s a complete cynic.”
“In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”
“Adjustments?” he echoed, stiffening. “Adjust me?”
“Certainly.” She patted the hand lying beside her. “Marriage requires adjustments, on both sides.”
“Not this marriage, madam. I paid—and through the nose—for blind obedience, and that is precisely—”
“Naturally, you are master of your own household,” she said. “I have never met a man more adept at managing everything and everybody. But even you can’t think of everything, or look for what you’ve never experienced. I daresay there are benefits you’ve never imagined to having a wife.”
“There’s only one,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “and I assure you, my lady, I’ve thought of it. Often. Because it’s the only damned thing—”
“I devised a remedy for your indisposition this morning,” she said, stifling a surge of irritation…and anxiety. “You thought there was no cure. You have just discovered Byron, thanks to me. And that put you into a better humor.”
He kicked the footstool away. “I see. So that’s what you’ve been about—humoring me. Softening me up—or trying to.”
Jessica closed the book and set it aside.
She had resolved to be patient, to do her duty by him, to look after him because he badly needed it, whether he realized it or not. Now she wondered why she bothered. After last night—after this morning—after exiling her to the foot of a mile-long dining table—the blockhead had the effrontery to reduce her superhuman efforts to manipulation. Her patience snapped.
“Trying…to…soften…you.” She dragged the words out, and they slammed inside her, making her heart pump with outrage. “You cocksure, clodpated ingrate.”
“I’m not blind,” he said. “I know what you’re about, and if you think—”
“If you think that I could not do it,” she said tightly, “that I could not make you eat out of my hand, if that’s what I wanted, I recommend you think again, Beelzebub.”
There was a short, thundering silence.
“Out of your hand,” he repeated very, very quietly.
She recognized the quiet tone and what it boded, and a part of her brain screamed, Run! But the rest of her mind was a red mass of anger. Slowly, deliberately, she laid her left hand, palm up, upon her knee. With her right index finger she traced a small circle in the center.
“There,” she said, her own voice just as quiet as his, her own mouth curved in a taunting smile. “Like that, Dain. In the palm of my hand. And then,” she went on, still stroking the center of her palm, “I would make you crawl. And beg.”
Another silence thundered through the room and made her wonder why the books didn’t topple from their shelves.
Then it came, velvet-soft, the one answer she hadn’t expected, and the one, she knew in an instant, she should have predicted.
“I should like to see you try,” he said.
His brain was trying to tell him something, but Dain couldn’t hear it past the clanging in his ears: crawl…and beg. He couldn’t think past the mockery he heard in her soft tones and the fury twisting his gut.
And so he locked himself in frigid rage, knowing he was safe there, impervious to hurt. He had not crawled and begged when his eight-year-old world shattered to pieces, when the only thing like love he’d ever known had fled from him and his father had thrust him away. The world had thrust him into privies, taunted and mocked and beat him. The world had recoiled from him and made him pay for every pretty deceit that passed for happiness. The world had tried to beat him down into submission, but he would not submit, and the world had had to learn to live with him on his terms.
As she must. And he would endure whatever he must, to teach her so.
He thought of the great rocks he’d pointed out to her hours ago, which centuries of drumming rain and beating wind and bitter cold could not wear down or break down. He made himself a mass of stone like them, and, as he felt her move beside him, he told himself she would never find a foothold; she could no more scale him than she could melt him or wear him down.
She came onto her knees beside him, and he waited through the long moment she remained motionless. She was hesitating, he knew, because she wasn’t blind. She knew stone when she saw it, and maybe, already, she saw her mistake…and very soon, she’d give it up.
She lifted her hand and touched his neck—and snatched her hand away almost in the same instant, as though she felt it, too, as he did: the crackling shock darting under the skin to shriek along his nerve endings.
Though he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, Dain saw her puzzled reaction in the periphery of his vision, caught her frown as she studied her hand, discerned her thoughtful glance moving to his neck.
Then, his heart sinking, he perceived the slow upturn of her mouth. She edged nearer, and her right knee slid behind him against his buttock, while her left pressed against his thigh. Then she slipped her right arm round his shoulders and draped her left over his upper chest, and leaned in closer. Her sweetly rounded bosom pressed against his arm while she touched her lips to the too sensitive skin at the corner of his eye.
He kept himself rigid, concentrated hard on breathing steadily, to keep himself from howling.
She was warm and so soft, and the faint apple scent of chamomile swirled like a net about him…as though the slenderly curved body enveloping his weren’t snare enough. She trailed her parted lips down, over his cheek, along his unyielding jaw to the corner of this mouth.
And Fool! he silently berated himself, for daring her, when he knew she could not back away from a challenge and he had never come away unscathed after issuing one.
He had walked into a trap, again, for the hundredth time, and this time it was worse. He could not turn to drink in her sweetness, because that would be yielding, and he would not. He must sit like a granite monolith, while her soft bosom rose and fell against his arm, and while her warm breath, her soft mouth, teased over his skin in brushstroke kisses.
Like a block of stone he remained, while she sighed softly against his ear, and the sigh hissed through his blood. And so he continued, immovable outwardly, wretched inwardly, while she slowly worked loose the knot of his neckcloth and drew it away.
He saw it drop from her fingers and tried to keep his attention on the tangled white fabric at his feet, but she was kissing the back of his neck, and sliding her hand under his shirt at the same time. He couldn’t focus his eyes or concentrate his mind because she was everywhere, a fever coiling over him and throbbing inside him.
“You’re so smooth,” her murmuring voice came from behind him, her breath warm on the nape of his neck while she stroked his shoulder. “Smooth as polished marble, but so warm.”
He was on fire, and her low, foggy tones were oil drizzled upon the flames.
“And strong,” she went on, while her serpent hands went on, too, sliding over taut muscles that tightened and quivered under her touch.
He was weak, a great, stupid ox, sinking into the mire of a virgin’s seduction.
“You can pick me up with one hand,” the throaty voice continued. “I love your big hands. I want them all over me, Dain. Everywhere.” She flicked her tongue over his ear, and he trembled. “On my skin. Like this.” Under his fine cambric shirt, her fingers stroked over his pounding heart. She brushed her thumb over the taut nipple, and his breath hissed out between clenched teeth.
“I want you to do that,” she said, “to me.”
He wanted to, sweet Mother of Jesus, how he wanted to. The knuckles of his tightly fisted hand were white, and his clenched jaw was aching, and those sensations were pure delight compared to the vicious throbbing in his loins.
“Do what?” he asked, willing the syllables past his thickened tongue. “Was I…supposed…to feel something?”
“You bastard.” She pulled her hand away, and he felt one coursing thrill of relief, but before he could draw the next breath, she was scrambling onto his lap, drawing up her skirts as she straddled him.
“You want me,” she said. “I can feel it, Dain.”
She could hardly fail to. There was nothing between hot, aroused male and warm female but a layer of wool and a scrap of silk. His trousers. Her drawers…soft thighs pressing against his. God help him.
He knew what was there, beneath the drawers: a few inches of stocking above her knee, the knot of a garter, the silken skin above. Even the fingers of his crippled left hand twitched.
As though she could read his mind, she lifted that useless hand and dragged it over the rumpled silk of her skirt.
Under, he wanted to cry. The stocking, the garter, the sweet, silken skin…please.
He clamped his mouth shut.
He wouldn’t beg, wouldn’t crawl.
She pushed him back against the sofa cushions and he went down easily. All his strength was focused on keeping the cry from escaping.
He saw her hand move to the ties of her bodice.
“Marriage requires adjustments,” she said. “If it’s a tart you want, I must act like one.”
He tried to close his eyes, but he hadn’t the strength even for that. He was riveted upon her slim, graceful fingers and their wicked work…the tapes and hooks giving way, the fabric slipping down…the swell of creamy flesh spilling from the lace and sagging silk.
“I know my…charms…aren’t as immense as what you’re used to,” she said, pushing the bodice down to her waist.
He saw twin moons, alabaster smooth and white.
His mouth was dry, his head thick, filled with cotton wool.
“But if I come very close, maybe you’ll notice.” She lifted herself up and bent over him…very near, too near.
One taut rosebud…inches from his parched lips…woman-scent, rich, coiling in his nostrils, swirling in his head.
“Jess.” His voice was cracked and harsh, parched.
His mind was a desert. No thought. No pride. He was mere sand, whirling in a windstorm.
With a choked cry, he pulled her down, and captured her mouth…sweet oasis…oh, yes, please…and she parted to his frantic plea. He raked her sweetness thirstily. He was dry, burning, and she cooled him and inflamed him at once. She was the rain, and she was hot brandy, too.
He dragged his hand down over her smooth, supple back, and she shivered, and sighed against his mouth. “I love your hands.” Low, the caressing whisper of her voice.
“Sei bellissima,” he answered roughly, his fingers curling and tightening at her waist. So firm and supple, but oh, so small under his big hand.
There was so little of her, but he wanted it all, and wanted it desperately. He raked his famished mouth over her face, her shoulder, her throat. He rubbed his cheek against the velvety slopes of her breasts and nuzzled the fragrant valley between. He made a winding path with his tongue to the rosy nipple that had teased him moments ago, and captured it. He caressed it with his lips, his tongue, and held her shuddering body fast while he suckled.
From above him came a soft, startled cry. But her fingers were tangling in his hair, moving restlessly over his scalp, and he knew the cry was not pain, but excitement.
The tormenting she-devil liked it.
Then, heated and maddened as he was, he knew he wasn’t powerless.
He could make her beg, too.
His heart was racing at a gallop and his mind was thick and drunk, but somehow he summoned a fragment of control and, instead of hurrying on, he laid siege to her other breast, more slowly and deliberately…
She went to pieces.
“Oh. Oh, Dain. Please.” Her fingers moved spasmodically, over his neck, his shoulders.
Yes, beg. He took the quivering nipple lightly between his teeth, and gently tugged.
“Dear God. Please…don’t. Yes. Oh.” She was squirming helplessly, arching toward him one instant and trying to twist away in the next.
He slid his hand up under the rumpled, tangled skirt and stroked over the silken drawers. She moaned.
He released her breast and she sank down and dragged her parted lips over his until he answered, and welcomed her in, and let jolts of pleasure shake his frame while she ravished his mouth.
And while he drank in the hot liquor of her kiss, he was pushing up the flimsy silk leg of her drawers, stroking over stocking and upward, to the knot of her garter. He swiftly untied it and pushed it away, and drew the stocking down, and slid his fingers over her thigh and up, over the bunched up silken drawers, to grasp her sweetly rounded buttock.
She came away from his mouth, her breathing shallow, uneven.
Still grasping her bottom, he shifted position, moving her with him, so that she lay on her side, trapped between his big frame and the sofa back. He kissed her again, deeply, while he moved his hand to the fastenings of her drawers, and untied them, and eased them down. He felt her body tense, but he held her mouth captive, distracting her with a slow, tender kiss, and all the while his fingers were moving over her thigh, stroking, caressing, stealing toward her innocence.
She squirmed, pulling away from his mouth, but he would not let her escape, and he could not keep from touching her…the fine, taut skin at the juncture of her thigh…a wanton tangle of silky curls…and sweet womanliness, warm, butter-soft…and butter-slick…the delicious evidence of desire.
He had stirred her, roused her. She wanted him.
He began to stroke the tender feminine folds, and she went very, very still.
Then, “Oh.” Her voice was soft with surprise. “Oh. That’s…wicked. I did not—” The rest was lost in a smothered cry, and the sweet warmth pressed against his finger. Her slender body twisted and turned restlessly, toward him, away. “Oh, Lord. Please.”
He scarcely heard the plea. He was beyond hearing. His blood pounded in his veins, thundered in his ears.
He found the tender bud and the narrow parting beneath, but it was so small, so tight against his great, intruding finger.
He caressed the sensitive peak, and it swelled. She was clutching his coat, making soft, breathless sounds, trying to burrow into his hard body. Like a frightened kitten. But she wasn’t frightened. She trusted him. His own trusting kitten. Innocent. So fragile.
“Oh, Jess, you’re so tiny,” he murmured, despairing.
He stroked gently inside her, but slick and hot as she was, the way was too small, too tight for him.
His lust-swollen rod strained furiously against his trousers, a great, monstrous invader that would tear her to pieces. He wanted to weep, to howl.
“So tight,” he said, his voice raw with misery, because he couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t stop caressing what he couldn’t, dare not, have.
She didn’t hear him. She was lost in the fever he was feeding. She was touching him, kissing him.
So restless her hands, her innocently wanton mouth. She was smoldering in the fire he’d built to conquer her, and he could not stop adding fuel to the blaze.
“Oh, don’t…yes…please.”
He heard her gasp, then a sob…and her body shuddered, and the tight flesh clenched against his fingers…and eased…and clenched again, as another climax shook her slender frame.
He drew his hand away and found it was shaking. Every muscle in his body was taut with strain, aching with the effort it had cost him to keep from ripping her apart. His groin felt as though it had been clamped in Satan’s own vise.
He drew a ragged breath. And another. And another, waiting for her to come back to the world, and hoping his loins would calm before then, before he had to move.
He waited, but nothing happened. He knew she wasn’t dead. He could hear, feel, her breathing…slow, steady, peaceful…too peaceful.
He stared at her incredulously. “Jess?”
She murmured and burrowed in, nestling her head in the cradle of his shoulder.
For another full minute he gazed, slack-jawed, into her beautiful tranquil, slumbering face.
Just like a damned man, he thought exasperatedly. She got what she wanted, then curled up and went to sleep.
That was what he was supposed to do, blast and confound her bloody impudence. And now—curse her for a selfish ingrate—he would have to figure out how—with only one arm working—to get her to bed without waking her.