She collected an armful of shirts and flung them onto the floor. “We have been wed scarcely three days,” she said. “You do not desert your new bride for your sapskull friends. You will not make a laughingstock of me. If you are unhappy with me, you say so, and we discuss it—or quarrel, if you prefer. But you do not—”
“You do not dictate to me,” he said levelly. “You do not tell me where I may and may not go—or when—or with whom. I do not explain and you do not question. And you do not come into my room and throw temper fits.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “If you leave this house, I will shoot your horse out from under you.”
“Shoot my—”
“I will not permit you to desert me,” she said. “You will not take me for granted as Sherburne does his wife, and you will not make all the world laugh at me—or pity me—as they do her. If you cannot bear to miss your precious wrestling match, you can jolly well take me with you.”
“Take you?” His voice climbed. “I’ll bloody well take you, madam—straight to your room. And lock you in, if you can’t behave yourself.”
“I should like to see you tr—”
He lunged at her, and she dodged an instant too late. In the next instant, she was slung up under one brawny arm, and he was hauling her like a sack of rags to the door she’d entered.
It stood open. Luckily, it opened into the room, and only one of her arms was trapped against his body.
She pushed the door shut.
“Bloody hell!”
Swearing was all he could do about it. He had only one usable hand, which was occupied. He couldn’t move the door handle without letting go of her.
He swore again. Turning, he marched to the bed and dumped her there.
As she fell back onto the mattress, her dressing gown fell open.
Dain’s furious black gaze stormed over her. “Damn you, Jess. Curse and confound you.” His voice was choked. “You will not—you cannot—” He reached out to grab her hand, but she scrambled back.
“You’re not going to put me out,” she said, retreating to the center of the huge bed. “I’m not a child and I will not be locked in my room.”
He knelt on the edge of the mattress. “Don’t think, just because you’ve crippled me, I can’t teach you a lesson. Don’t make me chase you.” He dove at her, grabbing for her foot. She pulled away, and the black mule came off in his hand. He threw it across the room.
She snatched the other one off and threw it at him. He ducked, and the slipper hit the wall.
With a low growl, he flung himself at her. She rolled away to the opposite side of the bed, and he lost his balance. He fell face-first, sprawling across the lower half of the big mattress.
She could have leapt from the bed and escaped then, but she didn’t. She had come prepared for a battle royal, and she would fight this one to the bitter end.
He dragged himself up onto his knees. His shirt-front had fallen open, revealing a tautly muscled neck and the dark web of tantalizingly silky hair her fingers had played with the night before. His big chest rose and fell with his labored breathing. She had only to glance up at his eyes to understand that anger was but the smallest part of what worked on him at this moment.
“I’m not going to wrestle with you,” he said. “Or quarrel. You will go to your room. Now.”
She’d lost the sash of her dressing gown, and the top part had slid down to her elbows. She shrugged out of it, then sank down upon the pillows and gazed up at the canopy, her mouth set mulishly.
He moved closer, the mattress sagging under his weight. “Jess, I’m warning you.”
She wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t turn her head. She didn’t have to. That deadly tone of his wasn’t quite as ominous and intimidating as he wanted it to be. She didn’t have to look, either, to understand why he’d paused.
She knew he didn’t want to look at her, but he couldn’t help it. He was a man, and had to look, and what he saw could hardly fail to distract him. She was aware that one of the narrow ribbons holding up the bodice of her negligee had slipped down over her shoulder. She was aware that the gauzy skirt was tangled about her legs.
She heard his breath hitch.
“Damn you, Jess.”
She heard the indecision in the husky baritone. She waited, still fixed upon the black and gold dragons above her, leaving him to battle it out with himself.
A full minute and more he remained unmoving and silent, but for the harsh, unsteady breathing.
Then the mattress shifted and sank, and she felt his knees against her hip and heard his muffled moan of defeat. His hand fell upon her knee and slid upward, the silk whispering under his touch.
She lay still while he slowly stroked up over her hip, over her belly. The warmth of the caress stole under her skin and made her feverish.
He paused at her bodice, and traced the eyelet work over her breast. It tautened under his touch, her nipple hardening and thrusting up against the thin silk…yearning for more, as she did.
He pushed the fragile fabric down, and brushed his thumb over the hard, aching peak. Then he bent and took it in his mouth, and she had to clench her hands to keep from holding him there, and clench her jaw as well, to keep from crying out as she had done the night before: Yes…please…anything…don’t stop.
He had made her beg last night, yet he had not made her his. And today he thought he could turn his back and walk away, and do as he pleased. He thought he could desert her, leave her wretched and humiliated, a bride, but not a wife.
He didn’t want to want her, but he did. He wanted her to beg for his lovemaking, so that he could pretend he was in control.
But he wasn’t. His mouth was hot on her breast, her shoulder, her neck. His hand was shaking, his touch roughening, because he was feverish, too.
“Oh, Jess.” His voice was an anguished whisper as he sank down beside her. He pulled her to him, and dragged hot kisses over her face. “Baciami. Kiss me. Abbracciami. Hold me. Touch me. Please. I’m sorry.” Urgent, desperate, his voice, while he struggled with the narrow ribbon ties.
I’m sorry. He’d actually said it. But he didn’t know what he was saying, Jessica told herself. He was lost in simple animal hunger, as she had been, last night.
He wasn’t sorry, merely mindless with primitive male lust. His hand worked feverishly, pulling the gown down, moving over her back, her waist.
He grabbed her hand and kissed it. “Don’t be angry. Touch me.” He pushed her hand under his shirt. “The way you did last night.”
His skin was on fire. Hot and smooth and hard…feathery masculine hair…muscles quivering under her fingers…his big body shuddering under her lightest touch.
She wanted to resist, to remain angry, but she wanted this more. She’d wanted to touch and kiss and hold him from the day she’d met him. She’d wanted him to burn for her, just as she’d wanted him to set her ablaze.
He was pulling the negligee down, over her hips.
She grasped the edges of his shirtfront and, with one fierce yank, tore it in half.
His hand fell from her hip. She tore the shirt cuff away, and rent the seam up to the shoulder. “I know you like to be undressed,” she said.
“Yes,” he gasped, and shifted back to give her access to the other, useless arm. She was no more gentle with that sleeve. She ripped it off.
He pulled her against him, pressing her bared breasts to the powerful chest she’d exposed. His heart beat next to hers, to the same frenetic rhythm. He grasped the back of her head and crushed her mouth to his, and drove out anger, pride, and thought in that long, devouring kiss.
The ragged remains of his shirt came away in her hands. He stripped away her negligee in the same frantic moment. Their hands became tangled, tearing at his trouser buttons. Wool ripped and buttons tore from the cloth.
He pushed her legs apart with his knee. She felt the hard shaft throbbing hotly against her thigh while her own heat pulsed against his questing hand. He found the
place where he’d tormented her last night, and sweetly tormented her again, until she cried out and her body spilled its feminine tears of desire.
She clung to him, shaking and desperate, and “Please,” she begged. “Please.”
She heard his voice, ragged with longing…words she couldn’t understand…then a shaft of pain as he thrust into her.
Her mind went black and Please, God, don’t let me faint, was all she could think. She dug her nails into his back, clinging to him for consciousness.
His damp cheek pressed against hers, and his breath was hot on her ear. “Sweet Jesus, I can’t—Oh, Jess.” He lashed his arm about her and rolled onto his side, taking her with him. He hooked his arm under her knee, and lifted her leg up and around his waist. The searing pressure eased, and her panic faded with it. She shifted upward and buried her face in the curve of his neck. She held on tightly, savoring the sweat-slickened heat of his skin, the musky scent of passion.
She was aware of him moving again, inside her, but her untutored body was yielding, and pain was a distant memory. He’d pleasured her already, and she expected no more, but gradually it came, pulsing through her with each slow, possessive stroke.
Pleasure bubbled up inside her, warm and tingling, and her body arched up to welcome it, and joy bolted through her, sharp and sweet.
It wasn’t the same joy he’d taught her before, but every instinct recognized it and hungered for more. She rocked against him, matching his rhythm, and more came, faster and harder, and faster still…a furious race to the peak…a lightning blast of rapture…and the sweet rain of release.
Chapter 14
“Hell and damnation,” Dain muttered as he gingerly withdrew from her. “I’ll never make it to Chudleigh in time for dinner now.”
He rolled onto his back and focused intently upon the embroidered gold dragons above, to keep himself from leaping up and subjecting his wife to a thorough physical examination. Fortunately, with his lust appeased, for the moment, his intellect had resumed normal operation. And with the return of reason, he could sort out the simple facts.
He had not forced himself on her. Jessica had invited him.
He had crashed into her like a battering ram and been incapable of exercising much restraint thereafter, yet she hadn’t screamed or wept. On the contrary, she had seemed to get right into the spirit of the thing.
He looked at her. Her hair had fallen over her eyes. Turning toward her, he brushed it away. “I collect you’ve survived,” he said gruffly.
She made an odd sound—a cough or a hiccup, he couldn’t tell. Then she flung herself against him and, “Oh, Dain,” she choked out.
The next he knew, her face was pressed against his chest and she was sobbing.
“Per carita.” He wrapped himself about her and stroked her back. “For God’s sake, Jess, don’t…This is very…troublesome.” He buried his face in her hair. “Oh, very well. Cry if you must.”
She would not weep forever, he told himself. And upsetting as it was to hear it and feel the tears trickling over his skin, he knew matters might have been worse. At least she had turned to him, not away. Besides, she was entitled to cry, he supposed. He had been rather unreasonable these last few days.
Very well, more than that. He’d been a beast.
Here she was, a new bride in this mammoth house with its grand army of servants, and he had not helped her. He had not tried to make the way easy…just as she’d said about his father.
He’d been acting like his father. Cold and hostile and rejecting every effort to please.
For Jessica had been trying to please, hadn’t she? She had read to him and tried to talk to him and she’d probably thought the portrait of his mother would be a lovely surprise for him. She had wanted him to stay, when any other woman would have been in raptures to be rid of him. She had offered herself to him, when any other woman would have swooned with relief to escape his attentions. And she’d given herself willingly and passionately.
He was the one who ought to be weeping, with gratitude.
The cloudburst ended as abruptly as it had begun. Jessica squirmed away, rubbed her face, and sat up. “Lud, how emotional one becomes,” she said shakily. “Is my nose red?”
“Yes,” he said, though the light was failing and he could scarcely see straight anyhow.
“I had better wash my face,” she said. She climbed off the bed, picked up her dressing gown, and put it on.
“You can use my bath. I’ll show you the way.” He started to get out of bed, but she waved him back.
“I know where it is, ” she said. “Mrs. Ingleby explained the layout.” She headed unerringly across the room, opened the correct door, and hurried through.
While she was gone, Dain quickly examined the bedclothes and cleaned himself off with a piece of his shirt, which he threw in the fire.
Whatever the cause of her weeping fit, it hadn’t been a reaction to serious physical injury, he comforted himself. He’d found a spot of blood on one of the coverlet’s gold dragons and there had been a bit on him, but it was nothing like the carnage his overwrought imagination had pictured these last three days.
He could not believe his mind had been so disordered. In the first place, any cretin might have understood that if the female body could adapt to dropping brats, it must certainly be able to adapt to the breeding instrument—unless the man was an elephant, which he wasn’t, quite. In the second place, any imbecile might have recollected that this woman had never, since the time under the lamppost in Paris, recoiled from his advances. She had even spoken plainly enough—more than once, without a blink—about his breeding rights.
Where in the name of heaven had he obtained the idea she was fragile or missish? This was the woman who’d shot him!
It was the strain, Dain decided. The trauma of finding himself married, combined with crazed lust for his bride, had been more than his mind could cope with. The portrait of his mother had finished him off. With that, his brain had shut down altogether.
By the time Jessica returned, Dain had himself and everything else in proper order. Andrews had carried away the heaps of discarded traveling clothes, the valise was put away, the lamps had been lit, a footman was on his way to Chudleigh, and dinner was being prepared.
“It seems you’ve been busy,” she said, glancing about as she came up to him. “How tidy the room is.”
“You were gone rather a while,” he said.
“I had a bath,” she said. “I was agitated, as you saw.” She studied the knot of his sash, her brow furrowed. “I think I was hysterical. I wish I hadn’t cried, but I couldn’t help it. It was a…deeply moving experience. I daresay you’re used to it, but I am not. I was much affected. I had not expected…Well, frankly, I was expecting the worst. When it came to the point, I mean. But you did not seem to experience any difficulty, and you did not seem inhibited by my inexperience or annoyed, and, except for a moment, it did not feel like the first time at all. At least, not what I’d imagined the first time to be like. And what with having my anxieties relieved and the extraordinary sensations…The long and the short of it is, I could not contain my feelings.”
He had read the signs more or less correctly, then, for once, finally. The world was in order. All he needed to do was step carefully, to keep it that way.
“My temper has not been altogether even, either,” he said. “I’m not used to having a female about. It’s…distracting.”
“I know, and I’ve taken that into account,” she said. “Nonetheless, Dain, you cannot expect me to go through this again.”
He stared at the top of her head and watched his neatly ordered world tumble back into chaos. In an instant, his previously light heart became a lead casket, bearing the corpse of a fragile infant hope. He should have known better than to hope. He should have realized he’d make everything go wrong. But he didn’t understand now, any more than he ever had, how he had turned everything so very wrong. He didn’t understand why she’d been sen
t into his life, to give him hope, and kill it in the first moment he dared to believe it.
His face set and his body turned to stone, but he couldn’t muster the callous laughter or the clever witticism needed to complete this too familiar scene. He had tasted happiness in her arms, and hope, and he could not let them go without knowing why.
“Jessica, I know I’ve been…difficult,” he said. “All the same—”
“Difficult?” She looked up, her grey eyes wide. “You have been impossible. I begin to think you are not right in the upper storey. I knew you wanted me. The one thing I’ve never doubted was that. But getting you into bed—you, the greatest whoremonger in Christendom—gad, it was worse than the time I had to drag Bertie to the tooth-drawer. And if you think I mean to be doing that the rest of our days, you had better think again. The next time, my lord, you will do the seducing—or there won’t be any, I vow.”
She stepped back and folded her arms over her bosom. “I mean it, Dain. I am sick to death of throwing myself at you. You like me well enough. And if the first bedding didn’t prove we suit in that way at least, then you are a hopeless case, and I wash my hands of you. I will not permit you to make a wreck of me.”
Dain opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it and walked to the window. He sank onto the cushioned seat and stared out. “Worse than…Bertie…to the tooth-drawer.” He gave a shaky laugh. “The tooth-drawer. Oh, Jess.”
He heard her slippered footsteps approaching. “Dain, are you all right?”
He rubbed his forehead. “Yes. No. What an idiot.” He turned and met her frowning gaze. “High-strung,” he said. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? I’m high-strung.”
“You’re overwrought,” she said. “I should have realized. We’ve both been under a strain. And it’s harder on you because you are so sensitive and emotional.”
Sensitive. Emotional. He had the hide of an ox—and about the same intelligence, apparently. But he didn’t contradict her.
“A strain, yes,” he said.
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