CHAPTER SIXTEEN
London, 1861
Her husband did know his liquor. He kept an excellent scotch at his bedside—peaty, an Isla variety. Anna had been sipping it as she watched the sunbeams intensify and sprawl across the room, then shrink again, until darkness fell.
The air held a chill. A maid had come earlier to start the fire, but Anna had sent her away. An hour ago, the household had settled into a deeper quiet, the servants having retreated to their beds. Now and then, the grandmother clock in the hall announced the time.
He had been gone for seven hours and forty-five minutes. She had not moved, save to refill her glass. She had promised herself that she would give him eight hours to work through his anger and fear. For, yes, it was fear. His anger was simply a mask for it.
She tried not to be angry in turn. Did he truly imagine she would shrink from him, be repulsed by what he’d endured? That he had wept made him human. That he had begged made him practical. That he had survived made him stronger than anyone she knew.
But running out on her—that was cowardly. Knowing him no coward, she would give him eight hours to remember himself. Then, and only then, she would give chase. She had learned her lesson four years ago. She had failed to hunt for him then. Tonight, after eight hours, if he did not come home, she would start looking—and she would not cease until she found him, no matter how long it took.
As the clock at last began to toll midnight, she reached for her shawl—then heard the distant commotion of his return, the slamming, far off, of the front door, and an indecipherable exchange between him and Wilkins.
She sank back into the chair. The breath that burst from her seemed to have been pent up since his departure. A brief dizzy relief swam through her, until she inhaled again sharply and willed it away. It felt too close to weakness, and for what came next, she would only need strength.
But oh, God be thanked, he had come back.
She bolted the remainder of her glass and filled it from the bottle sitting at her feet. She had been drinking very slowly for hours, on an empty stomach, but her senses felt painfully alert. She heard his footsteps on the stairs—scented his approach, the musk of his skin and the astringent soap he used in his hair.
Now came his passage through the sitting room. At the bedroom door, he briefly hesitated. Did he sense her presence? Wilkins would have told him that she had not left the house.
The door opened, the light from the outer room silhouetting his figure and blotting out his features.
“You’re home,” she said casually. “Good. We will finish our conversation now.”
Some slight, abrupt movement suggested his surprise. Perhaps he noticed that she still wore her afternoon dress. Perhaps he smelled the scotch, the decanter uncapped by her foot.
An empty glass sat beside it. She nudged it forward with her stockinged toe. “Have some, if you need it.”
He stepped inside, closing the door. With a soft hiss, the gaslights rose.
Wherever he had gone today, he had not gone gently. A smudge of dirt rode his angular cheekbone. His coat and cravat were missing, and mud encrusted his boots. He stared at her for a long moment, his mouth pressed into a hard, flat line, evidently deciding what to do with her.
He did not want to speak of love. He’d made that plain.
Very well, then. They would speak of revenge.
“I thought you’d understood me,” he said. “You go, or I do.”
She settled deeper in the overstuffed chair, considering this. “No,” she said. “That is—you spoke clearly, but not with any clarity. And before either of us goes, there are questions to be settled.”
His sigh sounded weary. He leaned back against the door. “Such as?”
“Who was responsible for your abduction?”
“That is none of your concern.”
“Wrong. I am your wife. Whoever took you, took you from me. It is entirely my concern.”
He pushed himself off the door, reaching for the buttons of his waistcoat as he walked to the window. “I am not going to discuss this tonight.” He yanked open the curtains. Whatever he saw in the street below did not impress him. He threw his waistcoat to the floor and yanked the curtains shut again. “Get out,” he said as he faced her.
“First, we finish this conversation.”
He nodded once, curtly, and then strode for the exit.
She waited until he had taken hold of the door latch. “Don’t make me follow you, Liam.” She said it very neutrally. “I gave you eight hours. That’s all you will get.”
He pivoted toward her. Even before he spoke, she saw the tack he meant to take in the sneering of his mouth. Viciousness was so foreign to his nature that it transformed his expression entirely. “Poor Anna. Always being left. I thought you had at least grown accustomed to it. Or had more pride than to give chase.”
She rose. “Who did this to you?”
A beat. Then he shrugged. “He’s dead.”
Her hands curled into fists. That could not be true. She wanted a pound of flesh—or several. “His name?”
“Harold Marlowe.”
She did not know the name. “Who was he?”
“An inventor. He required rare metals for his devices. He purchased several mines overseas, including Elland, which had formerly been a penal camp.”
“And? How did he fix on you?”
“He used convict labor in the mines,” he said in a clipped, bored drawl. “But his overseers’ methods did not suit the government. They ceased to supply him with labor. So he found a new source. Rich men paid him to dispatch their enemies, whom he sent to serve as slaves at Elland.”
How neatly and coldly he summarized it. Obviously he had practiced this explanation, silently, in his own head. He probably did not know, or had not admitted to himself, that he’d been practicing it for her.
But the man who had built that office for her at Lawdon, who had promised her at Muirswood Links that she would never again be alone if she wished it, and who had become her family the day of their wedding—that man had realized that one day, if he survived, he would owe her a reckoning.
She held his gaze. “You’re certain he’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Very well. One down. “And who paid Marlowe to target you?”
He brushed past her, retrieving a glass and the whisky bottle. “My cousin,” he said, and splashed a generous amount into the glass before throwing it back.
His reply made sense. Stephen Devaliant would have had the most to gain from his cousin’s death: the title, at the least, and some of Anna’s wealth, too. No wonder Devaliant had written so many probing letters to her, anxious to know about the care of the estates, and the legal entailments of her properties. “What have the authorities said?”
“They aren’t involved.”
He had dealt with this alone? “Whyever not?”
“There is no evidence,” he said through his teeth.
“None? But the letters your cousin wrote me—he kept insisting that you must be dead. Surely that proves—”
“It suggests a great deal. It proves nothing. And the law requires proof.”
She understood, suddenly, the dark weight under which he’d been laboring. To survive, to return to freedom—and to see one’s enemy walking free, without fear. “Then we’ll find evidence.”
“A waste of time.” He sat in her wing chair and looked at her, his expression oddly lax, as though drained of all emotion. “There are other ways.”
“What ways?”
“Financial destruction, to start.” He paused. “Social destruction next. And then I’m going to kill him.”
She caught her breath. “You mean you will have justice.”
“No,” he said. “I mean I will wrap my hands around his throat and choke him to death.”
Some restless energy seized her. She paced a circle, stopping in front of him. “Don’t be stupid. They hang people for murder here.”
He shrugged. “Then maybe I’ll hang.”
As though it made no difference! Anger blazed through her. “A fine thing to have survived for!”
“Survival doesn’t require a reason,” he said wearily. “Any dumb beast, from a slug to a roach, will try to persist.”
To hear him discuss himself so—to treat his future, his very life, as though it were disposable, to be squandered on his disgusting cousin—infuriated her. “Shut your bloody mouth for once.”
That startled him. He lifted a brow. “I beg your pardon?”
She knelt in front of him, gripping his knees hard. “How dare you speak of yourself so. I will not let you do it. You are mine, do you hear me? And no one speaks of me and mine that way.”
He took a breath—loosed it, then licked his lips. “I don’t—how many goddamned times must I say this? I have no interest in being—”
He started to stand. She scrambled up and seized his shoulders, shoved him back into the chair. “Listen to me,” she spat. “You wept, Liam. You begged. You were beaten, degraded, you were tortured. Why flinch as I say it? Why recite these things as though they were sins of yours?”
“You have no idea—”
“Shut up! Listen for once! Did you think I needed telling? I saw what was done to you—I saw it from every angle. I bathed the scars on your back. I traced the initials on your chest. And you tried to hide them? Why, you should walk naked in the street to boast of what you survived. Other men would learn then what it means to be a man—to survive all that, and to come home triumphant.”
“Triumphant.” The word, spoken against her palm over his mouth, burned like a curse. “Is that what you think?”
“I think you a survivor,” she said fiercely. “And I think you mine. And I will not let you throw yourself away on that bastard. You are mine, and I am keeping you.”
He was going to throw her off. As his muscles coiled to reject her, she hooked her hands through his hair. When he sprang out of the chair, she yanked him forward, hard, into a bruising kiss.
“Strip,” she said into his mouth. “Strip and I’ll show you what to do with yourself.”
She felt a tremor move through him—and his immediate resistance to it. But she was done letting him set the lead. His cravat and waistcoat were already gone; his shirt must go, too. She gripped the collar and ripped it apart.
He went still, staring at her, his face taut. Now, a moment too late for credibility, his lip curled. He was going to say something mocking, something cutting.
She slammed her palm back over his mouth and put her lips to his throat, letting him feel the edge of her teeth. With one hand on his shoulder, she shoved him back down into the chair.
“Hands over your head,” she said.
As he tipped his head back, he regarded her through lowered eyelids, his gaze glittering and opaque. His smirk bloomed, his mask firmly in place. He was silently laughing at her. Mocking her. Between the two of them, she was not the expert in this game.
She locked eyes with him. She was a quick learner. So he’d discover.
“Raise your arms,” she said.
His fisted hands rested on his broad thighs. He rolled his knuckles, cracking them leisurely against his thumbs.
And then he raised his hands.
She reached for the hem of his shirt. But he moved faster. He caught her by the waist and dragged her down on top of him. A quick, deadly kiss. His tongue stroked the seam of her lips, then broke inside. His hand clamped over the back of her head; he held her gripped, sprawled awkwardly across his lap, as they kissed deeply.
The heat of his palm closing around her ankle called her back to her wits. She knew what he intended. This would be no quick clothed coupling.
She wrested free of him and pulled off his shirt. His undervest now remained. “Get up,” she said. “Stand.”
A beat of inaction. She found herself holding her breath, her heart pounding. She did not, in fact, have the strength to force this.
But she had other means.
Her sacque unfastened simply, not meant for public wear. With fumbling hands she loosened the ties at her waist, the tapes beneath it. The dress split around her, taking her petticoats with it. She stepped backward, out of it, wearing only her corset and chemise and drawers, and stepped squarely in front of the nearest gas sconce, so the light limned her body through the linen. “Get up,” she repeated softly.
His jaw tightened as he looked her over. His nostrils flared.
Then, at last, he uncoiled from the chair—rising as sinuously as a snake, shucking his undervest as he came toward her. Her hands closed on the hot, rough skin of his waist—her fingertips tracing the rough map of scars around to his back. She felt him stiffen slightly, and dug her fingernails into his ribs as she pulled him against her.
Their mouths met again. Yes, kissing was the way, the trick, the magic that made his body loosen and grow limber, molding to her own. He stepped into her, one hard thigh coming between her legs, and held her tightly pinned as he kissed her again.
She pushed him off suddenly, sharply enough that he stumbled. His head came up, his eyes narrow, glittering with animal intelligence as she turned, silently commanding him to unlace her corset.
He pounced, his hands clever and quick with the laces, his mouth hot on the join of her neck and shoulder. He lifted off her chemise; her drawers, too, fell away. His broad palm covered her bare belly and pulled her backward against him, his erection thick and solid against her naked flesh.
No shame: there could be no shame between them. This commandment brought with it a curious and dizzying liberation. She rolled her hips against him and heard him growl into her ear. Her scrabbling hands groped blindly behind her for the fastening of his trousers, and now he worked with her, his own hands taking over, so when he turned her back toward him, their bare bodies pressed together. His grip held her there against him, and she tried twice to pull free before she slapped her hand against his arm, a sound so sharp and furious that it would have shocked her had it not worked to make him let go.
Her mouth fell to his pectoral, to the initials scored into his flesh. She felt him flinch—felt his fingers dig cruelly into her upper arms. He mistook this for pity.
She reached down, closing her hand over the hard length of his cock to show him differently.
His grip loosened.
She kissed her way down his body, in the light of the gas lamps turned high, with the mirror behind him showing her, in brief glimpses, the brazenness of their postures. But without shame, the brazenness became a blessing. Let him look on her—let him stare, his breath audibly rasping in his lungs. She was staring, too—pulling away now to admire the sight of her fingers stretched across the scarred muscled ridges of his abdomen. And her other hand, gripping the jutting length of him, stroking now, at first softly, and then, as his rough noises guided her, more firmly, the length of him.
An idea came to her. He had done similar before. She put her mouth on him and licked him, tasting the salty tip of his cock.
A noise exploded from him. He lifted her underneath the arms, carried her to the bed, and threw her down, coming over her now with no hesitation, his strong hands gripping her face as he kissed her again.
“Always like this,” she gasped moments later as he kissed down her throat. “Always in the light.”
For the briefest moment, he stilled—stretched over her, leonine, his muscles long and taut, the line of one leg outstretched on the mattress to brace his weight above her, the most glorious line of geometry in the universe. Calf flexing, long foot balanced, thigh sculptured and thick.
And then he kissed her mouth again—gently, so gently. A whisper of lips.
“Anna,” he said very softly. “Light becomes you.”
The mood changed. Softened. Now his hand combed through her hair, and they rolled lazily over each other as they kissed and stroked each other’s bodies. The contrast between the roughness that warped his shoulder blades and ribs, and the smooth hairlessness of his lower back and buttocks, ceased to shock her palms—instead, these variations became fascinating, well worth study.
Pleasure built in quiet, leisurely movements. The lingering stroke of his tongue across her nipple. The teasing play of his hand between her legs, his fingers plucking and flirting with her. She found his cock again, rubbing her palm over the head of it, timing her movements to the music of his breath. And at last, when he fitted himself to her and pushed slowly inside, she felt gentleness swell into something hotter and sharper, an urgent staccato that overtook her hips, and guided his own as he thrust inside her, deeper and deeper, their limbs tangled, his head in her hands, her hair trapped in his, their mouths locked, sealed together, unbreakable.
Pleasure took her first—and a moment later, as though swallowing her cry had overset him, he came as well, shuddering on top of her, then rolling over to pull her atop him, never letting go.
Sweat sealed their bodies together as their breathing slowed. He stroked her hair, untangled it in long, light touches, spreading it in pieces across her back, dropping a kiss now and then on her bare shoulder when she twitched with lingering echoes of delight.
Gradually his hand fell still. The silence grew deep again, pressing on them. But it was a comfortable weight, the respite after a long labor. She felt no need to speak, until suddenly words filled her mouth and pushed out.
“You are mine,” she said. “All of you.”
His face turned, so his mouth pressed against her temple. But he did not reply.
She had courage enough to speak as long as it took, though. “I mean to keep you. Do you understand?”
The barest suggestion of a smile. Not wide enough to reassure her.
“You vowed to act as my equal, not my better. I mean to hold you to that, too.”
Now, at last, he eased away a little, so their eyes could meet. “Your better,” he said softly. “God save me. I have never thought that.”
She brushed the hair from his eyes, pausing to trace the firm, full length of one dark brow. The shape of his face was beautiful, the bones strong and thick, laid at angles by a masterly hand. “A man is what he makes of himself,” she said softly. “Not what is done to him. And so, too, a woman. You know I believe that. Otherwise, I would not have gone looking for a husband four years ago. I simply would have let some man find me. Yes?”
He exhaled. “Yes,” he said. “But—”
“No buts. And if there’s no justice to be had but Stephen’s life, very well. But it won’t come at the cost of yours. For your life is mine, and I won’t pay that price.”
Some shadow fleeted over his face, gone when she smoothed his brow again. It would be small steps, she understood. But they would not go backward; she would not allow it.
She cleared her throat. “As your equal, I can decide this. And I say, your life is mine, and it will not be risked without my say-so. Do you agree?”
His mouth flattened. She kissed it gently.
“You had best agree,” she whispered. “Unless you think my life worth the wasting, too.”
He gripped her face and took over the kiss, his tongue inside her mouth, his thumb stroking hard over her cheekbone.
“All right,” he said when at last he broke away.
“Carefully,” she said, to be sure they were clear. “You will go about it carefully and secretly, if there is no other way.”
He lay back again, staring at the ceiling. “I’d have help.”
“Who?”
“Auburn. An old friend.”
Yes, he had told her of the Duke of Auburn, long ago, in Scotland. School friends, very close. “He knows what happened?”
“Yes. And today . . .” He rolled back toward her, coming up on an elbow, studying her. “Today, I did such a favor for him.”
A shock jolted through her. Did he mean . . . ? “Go on.”
“Miss Martin was having some trouble,” he said. “An old enmity, from before the war in India. Jules and I . . . ended it.”
“Speak plainly.”
“Her villain attacked. He is dead. Auburn fired the shot, but my finger was on a trigger as well.”
She kept her face carefully blank. He was communicating with her now, and they would not go backward, even if her conscience, shaped by homilies for children, squirmed at these tidings.
“Was that the first time,” she asked steadily, “that you found yourself ready to kill?”
He sat up, and for a moment she feared he meant to leave. But, no, he was only taking a deep breath before he faced her. “I have killed before.”
The words sounded heavy and dark. He took no pride in them.
She sat up, too. “When?”
“First in Botany Bay. Two men. They wanted me dead. But I killed them first.”
“Good,” she said quietly, and watched his gaze fall, his downcast lashes veiling his expression briefly. But she sensed his relief, and put her hand over his, squeezing.
“We do what we must to survive,” she said softly. “And later? In the camp?”
“It did not end peacefully.”
She hesitated. One day, perhaps, he would tell her the whole of it. But now was not the time to push.
The gaslight limned the musculature of his upper body. It gleamed off the thick, solid bunching of his upper arms. He was tense again. She regretted it.
She knew how to cure it.
“Come here,” she murmured, and pulled him back into her arms.
He lay down with her again, and delighted her by smiling as she stroked her hand over his waist, then lower.
“Again?” he murmured. “You have quite a thirst for a child, Lady Forth.”
“I have a thirst for my husband, and four years to make up for.”
“I can help with that,” he said, and came over her.