by Thea Devine
Nicholas saw the item first, in The Chronicle, the very first paragraph:
The Woman in Black and lord's lady in blue—one and the same, or a separate two? One's face was covered, the other's not; one was so cool, the other was hot. Born in the same place and at the same time, could they be sisters of the same clime? One lord's low-born lady, seeking notoriety and fame, not content to sit home—cards are her game. This on-dit speaks with words that are true: The Woman and The Lady are the same one—not two.
And it was all he needed to read.
"Trenholm! Tren-holm! Start packing my bags —we are going to Southam, today!"
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Chapter Twenty-Three
So—Annesley had spread his poison, she thought savagely, and now she must be removed from the lights and delights of London and made to rusticate in some far-off place that Southam himself had not been to in years.
And didn't that work out deliciously well for everyone concerned?
Southam could continue to pursue his course and squander massive sums of money on making himself agreeable to those fat aging buddhas who attended the feckless Prince Regent.
The women of London could rest secure in the fact that she would not be around to tempt their husbands or usurp their daughters.
Annesley had got his revenge in the nastiest way possible, and neatly put her out of the way so that he could discharge his debt at some later date.
And over and above that, her father would be ecstatic that Southam had immured her away in some fairy tale castle, away from witches, trolls, elves and magical princes—and the temptation to reveal secrets.
They were going deeper and deeper into woodland as they left London behind. She toyed with the idea of trying to escape him at the layover which was two-thirds of the way there by his calculation, and a day's ride when he travelled alone.
So it didn't seem likely she could abscond when she could not ride or handle a team, or even know which way she should go.
He had sent word on ahead by a groom that they would be arriving on the succeeding day and that all should be in as much
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readiness as possible, but he had not been there in years and subsequently did not even know the state of the house.
"So you will enclose me in ruins and go off to London to your heathenish entertainments, my lord. It does not sit well with me at all."
"And yet you sit still for it because you know there is no choice."
"I know nothing of the sort, and I was going on perfectly well at Lady Badlington's before you intruded."
"And as a result, a new scandal erupts and the rumor that you had been playing the tables long before you appeared there as my lady wife. How much money, Diana?"
"Perhaps it was not me."
"The coincidence is glaring."
"You are glaring, my lord; I have done nothing of which to be ashamed. And you will have me back down and they will all titter and talk behind their hands that every word of the gossip was true."
"Or they will forget about it in a day and take up some new sensation."
"Yes, such as your losing some other deranged bet with Coxe or one of his ilk; or Charlotte Emerlin winding up under your feet one morning when you have drunk too much with your 'intimates' in the back rooms of whatever hells you frequent. Oh no, my lord. You are removing an obstacle from the path of your comfort, pure and simple."
He refused to be drawn by that challenging statement. "It is spring in the country, Diana—the perfect environment for the huntress."
"And what shall I chase, my Lord? Deer? Rabbits? Gameskeepers?"
"Your conscience?" he said grimly. How like her to bring a man into it. Or was it that he would never be able to trust her. She was no passive lady, dependent on her lord for everything. She had shown everyone she had no need of anyone else, and that with her own skill and ingenuity she could take care of herself.
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He had counted that pile of markers on the table beside her: he knew how much money Annesley was in debt. She could walk away from him tomorrow with it. She could disappear forever and never be in want so long as she was clever with the cards.
He hated it. Everything else was secondary to that. She must not go; scandal-mongers and boredom must not influence her to leave him. It was a matter of a month. The stories would die down, the season would be over, everyone would retrench and she would, in retrospect, be applauded for her resourcefulness and her candor.
And she would be his.
But his statement, to her, meant that he had not forgotten any of the mistruths she had foisted on him. She could never feel secure, she thought. The lies, in one form or another, would come back to haunt her. And the only thing that had kept Dunstan from keeping his threats was that he knew she could not reveal his true identity to Nicholas. But he trusted her not: all the moving shadows were Dunstan by surrogate, waiting for the least little misstep on her part.
All the little shadows would follow her straight to Southam and finally call her to account.
She felt her whole body grow cold with dread. What if it were true? What if it were possible that Dunstan was following them even now?
As they drew in to the courtyard of the inn, she surreptitiously looked around to see whether there were anyone suspicious following the two carriages. But that too would be so obvious, and Dunstan Carradine was never obvious.
The likelihood was, he had no idea that Nicholas had decamped for Southam in the wake of the tittle-tattle in the morning paper; there wasn't even a stowaway hanging on under the carriage bearing the luggage and the servants, and Jainee felt foolish in the extreme for allowing her amorphous fears to let her imagination run away with her.
It was early evening by then, and the landlord, by virtue of having been informed by Southam's groom, had a fire going and dinner awaiting them.
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"This is country hours," Nicholas said as they sat down to a hot meal of mushroom soup, chicken, sweetbreads, sauced tongue, vegetable pudding, peas and a dessert of almond custard.
"I'm sure I will get very used to them," Jainee said coolly.
"You are not being put in prison," Nicholas snapped.
"No, a mere vacation for my shattered nerves."
"Everyone in London is aware your nerves are made of shiny shiny silver, my dear. Stacks of it, as you bore your way through the pocketbooks of London's wealthiest men—including me."
"Ah, so we come to that, do we? Well—I did very well at the tables when I went as the Incognita, my Lord, and I am perfectly willing to repay you for all that you have expended on my behalf."
And that was what he hated about her the most: she would never beg, never bend. She had the wherewithal as well as he, and when it came down to it, hers was the more admirable stance. She had, in effect, earned her money, and he had had it handed to him on a silver salver.
"And how do you calculate the energy, the invitations, the near ruin of poor Lucretia . . ."
"Pooh — Lucretia Waynflete would have survived that little tempest, my Lord, as would have I."
"How little you know of society, my dear. How very little you know. Lucretia would have closeted herself at Tazewell for years over this ostracism, and they would not have let her forget it, either. When one of their own commits a gross folly, it truly is unforgivable, because it means any of them could fall from grace as well. And were Jeremy to try to contract an alliance, Lucretia's solecism would taint his chances as surely as any lack of fortune or patrimony."
"And so my noble lord, with one mighty stroke of his mythical honor, has made all right with the world for Lucretia Waynflete and saddled himself with the burden for the rest of his life."
How did he answer that? He did not know how to answer it, nor did he wish to point out to her that she could vanish from
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his life forever if she chose to do so. He felt a gripping terror at the thought, and more than that, a desperate urge to constrain her somehow, because
the vast spaces in and around Southam would not be enough to impede her if she truly desired to go.
"There has been but a month since the wedding, Diana. I would not invalidate the union quite yet."
"This is not a union, my Lord," Jainee said grimly, "this is a battle, and one that I am determined to win."
******************
But when she slept, she looked like an angel, with her hair in wild disarray all over the pillow, and her body boneless and fragile and heavy with dreams.
He was taking her to Southam, where he had not been since his mother died. Always, he had lived in town and wintered over on the smaller estate that he had occupied until the death of his father. He had not wanted to go back there ever again, lest he hear the echoes of the child and his endless yearning.
He had buried the child when he interred his parents.
He had given the house over to the care of the servants, on the massive pretext that he did not care about it himself.
It was the first place he had thought to take the woman he had made his wife when the need arose to protect her.
She moved restively in her sleep, almost as if her body could not acclimate itself to the earlier hour of retirement. He wanted to put his hand on her and calm her. He wanted to mount her and claim her. He wanted to run as fast and as far from her as he could go and he wanted to stay with her forever.
The goddess at rest... He felt a coiling sense of possession: he had found her, he had named her. No one else could have her, no one.
And if there were nothing else between them but that raging ongoing battle for control, he would fight with her and for her to eternity.
He got up to poke at the fire; this small and cozy room seemed barely big enough to contain the both of them, with its large bedstead and washstand and a chair by the fire. But the
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room was warm and drenched with his emotions, dredged up from the place where he had hidden them for so long. And all because he had chosen to return her to Southam and nowhere else.
She stirred again, pulling at the cover, stretching and turning finally to face the other way.
How innocent her face was in the depths of her sleep; how strange it was to be with her in silence.
Without words, she was a vulnerable child, as scared of the night as he. Perhaps she even used the words to fill the night, to give shape and sound to an emptiness that could be conquered no other way.
He had welcomed the night and the oblivion of losing himself in the restive world of the bored and the disenfranchised aristocrats all and looking for communion.
And he had found it in the least likely place.
He bent over and touched her face, compelled by the thought, the second one that had come from a place and a feeling he did not know he had.
She awoke in an instant. "My lord?” Her voice was sleep-fogged, almost drowsy as if it were the aftermath of another kind of awakening.
"You have never called me by my given name. Diana."
"Nor you me," she muttered, a little disconcerted by this soft side of him. "Or perhaps you have forgotten it."
"More likely it is not how I perceive you, Diana—you have never been Jainee to me."
"And you will always be 'my lord' to me," she said, prickling up instantly.
"I cannot envision a lifetime wherein you address me only this way."
"I cannot imagine a lifetime we might spend together, my lord. It is merely until such time as we agree that we will go on our separate way."
"Imperious Diana—ordering things around again to suit her whim. There has been no talk of this union dissolving."
"We have gone through this, I thought. I did make myself
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clear on the matter," she said, struggling now to sit up so that she would be in a more aggressive position. It was purely impossible to argue with the man when she was prone. She was wide awake now and listening.
He would not stop trying: he wanted in the worst way to make her docile and biddable. Lifetimes! Who would ever think in lifetimes but a man who expected a woman to become a servant and be at his beck and call.
He stared at her rebellious face for a long time, his eyes flicking with the emotions his heart would not admit. "There will be no dissolution of this marriage."
She gave him a knowing, rather snide look. "You will soon reconsider that, my lord."
"What would you do if I chose not to?"
She felt it instantly: this was the crux of the conversation and instinctively she knew her answer was very important to him. And it could not be born out of her natural combativeness or any urge to have at him.
"I do not know, my lord," she answered finally, and it was as honest an appraisal as she could give.
But he knew: he would bind her up so tightly in those blue satin strips she would never get away, never. The ferocity of his feelings were like a firestorm in him, sweeping, burning, devouring, unbearably hot.
"Say my name," he demanded in a voice rough with emotion.
"My lord?"
He put out his hand and touched her lips. "Say my name, Diana."
She felt the heat rise between them, catching like tinder. "As you wish, Nicholas."
His fingers followed her lips as they shaped his name. "Say again."
"Nicholas," she said painstakingly, her body heated instantly by his touch. It didn't matter where, or how: the conflagration ignited immediately and totally at just the scent of him so close to her and the simple act of his placing his fingers on her lips.
"Nicholas . . ." she whispered and it seemed like an admis- 411
sion, that when she voiced his name, he then became real. And when he was real, he was not the enemy she was fighting with her very soul.
His fingers moved, feeling the texture of her lips, the sensation of his name in the sound of her voice, testing the pliant shape of her mouth. He bent toward her as he moved his hand from the exploration of her mouth to her strong-willed jaw; and he cupped it, and raised her lips to his.
Ever so slowly, he fit his mouth against hers, slowly, slowly he claimed her, gently, so gently sliding his tongue into her mouth, feeling for her, stroking her, feeling her melt under his hand, under the heat and lush possession of his mouth.
He had kissed her before, but never had he kissed her like this, with no acrimony between them, no duel of provocation, with the light so low and tender, and somewhere, caught between them, the definition of his name and the burgeoning of something tenuous and strong.
He lowered her downward so that his weight became a part of the connection between them, welcomed, cradled, sought just for the feeling of pressure of body on body.
He melted into her, his heat defining her, his hands entwined in her hair; she strained against him, she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into her sensual essence.
And still they kissed, hungry for each other in this other place where there were no boundaries, no strictures, no ties. Here was a place, time out of tide, where no one was watching, no one need know. The fire was tender, the embers burning low, banked like the passion between them as he explored with kisses the honey sweet recesses of her mouth.
She ached with his kisses, wine-hot kisses lush and ripe, arousing her body, seeping into her soul. Ever many kisses, endless, unbroken, wet, promising . . . perfect.
The feel of him so tightly and intensely there, content to nestle against her, made her weak with longing.
And when he began finally to untie the ribbon on the neckline of her one virginal nightgown, she felt like hurrying him on.
But this was slow, sweet love; she had never had this—the lei-
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surely loverly exploration of her body with the sole intent of arousing her, feeding her desire, fanning her passion. Slowly, sweetly, over, under—she needed to do nothing, for he would do it all.
He put her on a lush cloud of feeling, he made her queen, he kissed every inch of her as if he had never touched her before; h
e took her with reverence and with feeling, and at long slow last when he had done with her, and had removed his clothes and come back to her in all his naked glory, only then did he possess her in the fullest most meaningful sense of the word.
Slow, slow—he probed her, he entered her welcoming fold: she was ripe for him, ready for him, melting at the first firm thick fulfillment of her.
She surrounded him, she pulled him tightly against her, reveling in this lucid perfect joining; she never wanted to let him go.
He moved, so lightly at first, softly, the faintest twitch, a thrust, a sigh deep in his throat as she answered the movement with a squirming of her hips. And again, that thick twisty thrust, and again, with more momentum this time, as if he were seeking her concurrence that the time had come to surrender to this thick hot passion that enveloped them.
The time was past—in a minute, the movement of her body turned from teasing to urgent, pulling him on, demanding, goading him with the rocketing gyrations of her hips.
He drove her and he drove her; he could not stop the wild and furious thrusts, he couldn't contain his overpowering desire to utterly permeate her body and her mind with the drenching residue of his passion.
The heat, the closeness in the room enclosed them, their own private cave, primitive with their passion, explosive with the moment of climax.
He reached, she thrust, pounding the fragile cradle of her hips voluptuously against him; again, again, again, the thick steady driving force of him pushing her, commanding her—"yes, yes, yes . . ." the words sibilant, guttural in her passion urging him on, "yes—"
It was coming, it was coming—always it felt like it started in
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some nether place, building from a little nub of feeling deep within her center, stretching, elongating, expanding into infinite possibilities, always molten, crackling like lightning, breaking all over her body like a wave, sunlight dancing in pindots all over her skin all the way down to her toes.
A wave it was, pounding and crashing, and sunlight heat, coursing and flaring all over her, streaming and shimmering all over the pure power of his utterly drenching release.