“Brett, let me explain!”
“We have no need of explanations,” he said contemptuously. “Let us hear no silken lies. You spin your web well, Georgiana—faith, you had me snared in it!” He was tearing off his clothes as he spoke. “Take off that rag doll costume,” he snarled. “You look ridiculous!”
In truth she looked lost and bedraggled and pitiful, sitting there on the big featherbed—and he wanted to feel no sympathy for her this night.
Georgiana made haste to get out of the rag doll costume, which she felt bitterly, had brought her the worst of luck. Her fingers were trembling as she undid the hooks, and the forbidding look on Brett’s face when he had ordered her to disrobe had made her afraid to speak.
Now as she shuddered away from him, her back was turned to him modestly, but his burning eyes watched the soft white chemise slide down over her smooth lovely back and gently rounded hips, to drift down her dainty legs. As always, the sight of her naked body rocked him, but his blood this night was already stirred to boiling.
Before she could put on the delicate white night rail for which she reached, he grasped her by one white shoulder and spun her around.
“It all went on under my nose and I was too much of a fool to see it,” he said thickly. “Never did I think to hear you calling after Nicolas van Rappard, pleading with him to take you with him, begging him to come back!”
“Oh, Brett, you don’t understand,” she gasped. “There was a reason. If only you will listen—”
“Reason? Reason?" He took her by the other shoulder and shook her until she felt her teeth would come loose. His hard laughter fell like stones against her ears. “There can be only one reason— strumpet! And tonight I shall use you as no delicate lily whose petals I fear to crush—tonight you shall come to my arms as any other doxy!”
Before she could form an answer, he bore her to the bed, his long naked figure falling upon hers.
Terrified now, for she feared she had lost his love, Georgiana fitted her pliant body to his as closely as he could have chosen. There was a whimper of fright in her throat and her whole body rippled in response to him as he thrust within her—deep and hard, without his usual gentle playful build-up of lovemaking that always drove her to delicious frenzy and bore her along with him to soaring heights.
Tonight he intended to use her for his pleasure and fling her aside—as any bought woman might expect. He would humble the proud beauty who shared his bed, he would punish her for her unfaith!
But—even though his own fury was a roaring in his ears, his rage so bright that it flashed against his closed eyelids, the very silky touch of her, the sweetness of her shivering response to his brutal attack, brought back to him some measure of sanity. He loved this woman—that was the galling fact of it, loved her with all his heart. He wanted to protect her, to keep her safe from harm. In all the world nothing meant more to him than Georgiana.
Some of the tension went out of him and Georgiana sensed it, moved her hips silkily, luxuriously against his, and as he lifted himself upon his elbows that he might not crush her with his weight—an involuntary gesture of compassion, for Brett was a thoughtful lover—she sighed and arched her back and brushed the soft crests of her ardent breasts against his chest.
That little gesture of submission went straight to his heart and he clasped her with all the love that was in him. Those innocent naked upturned breasts—like her sweet half-opened lips, which he could see parted in the candlelight, for in his hurry he had not bothered to extinguish the candles—how they called to him! And as he felt those breasts upflung against him, soft as eiderdown, felt their nipples tingle to hardness against the soft furring of his chest, he felt a groan rising in his throat.
Georgiana, no matter what she did, held him in thrall. He would always love her, always....
And the woman in his arms knew from the way he held her, from the way he stroked her sweet flesh, from the joy he now built in her, from the authority, the very lightness of the way he held her to him—careful not to hurt her but to tease from each moment the last measure of vibrant ecstasy—knew that he had forgiven her.
A great happiness came over her heart, a sense of lightness, of the world well lost. She had been so close to disaster and somehow survived, so close to the fire that she had felt its very flames lick at her face and now suddenly all was right again. She melted into Brett’s arms with all her senses singing and winged with him to the very peaks of passion.
And afterward, after she had slid away from him with a luxurious sigh and lay on her back listening to his strong even breathing, she told herself that somehow, somehow she would get that packet back from Nicolas. No need to worry Brett about it—for he might go charging out and challenge Nicolas. And when the affair was over, one of them would lie dead in the snow while the other cleaned the blade of his sword.
No—she did not want that. She did not want Brett to risk his life by challenging a dangerous adversary like Nicolas—nor, scoundrel though he was, did she want the golden Dutchman killed.
At last she drifted into a light sleep to be waked by some sound in the next room. She blinked, realizing that pale winter sunshine was pouring in through the small-paned windows. The candles had all guttered out—and Brett was gone.
She would have sat up but that he came striding in through the adjoining door, unsmiling. He was already fully dressed.
“Where are you going?” she asked, for the look on his face told her that there was more afoot than breakfast.
“There are two men dead in a cottage on my land,” he said tersely. “The schout will be arriving and I will have to piece the story together for him.”
“Mattie will tell you about it,” she said quickly, remembering Mattie’s terrified. Who will believe that I killed him by accident? They will hang me!
“I have already spoken to Mattie. What do you say?”
“I am sure whatever Mattie has told you is true,” she hedged.
Her words had been too glib. Brett was watching her narrowly. “If your friend Mattie is to be believed,” he said slowly, “her husband, Arthur, was here seeking you, to carry you away with him—and he forged a note in your handwriting, saying you had run away with Nicolas.”
“That is true. It was Arthur who abducted me—not Nicolas. He had infiltrated the ball, dressed as an executioner.”
“Yes. I saw the fellow and wondered who he was.”
“So did I, but when I tried to find out, he kept slipping away from me. It was Arthur who abducted me—not Nicolas. He seized me as I crouched in the bushes near the lake, having just traded places with Linnet.”
“I gathered as much.” The lunacy of that impersonation on the ice caused him to shake his head in wonder—it came to him that he would never understand women. “And do you know how Arthur planned to hang on to another man’s wife? Especially if the wife was unwilling?”
“Arthur still had my signed Articles of Indenture,” she said bitterly. “He had not destroyed them as he told us. He planned to spirit me away to Boston hidden in a trunk and pass me off as demented!”
Brett digested this. “Maybe he was mad,” he murmured in an altered voice. Then abruptly, “It is not to my advantage to have the world know you were ever a bond servant. Far better that they continue to regard you as gently reared. Better for my claim.”
“But I was gently reared,” she protested, flushing.
“Even so, speaking of it—after having given the impression that you were a Bermuda heiress as well as heiress to the van Rappard fortune—would make us seem clandestine, tricky, possibly even fraudulent.”
Georgiana winced, for she alone knew that her claim to Windgate was fraudulent—no, now Nicolas shared that knowledge with her. She opened her mouth to make a clean breast of things, but Brett was speaking again.
“I have told your friend Mattie this, and she says she has mentioned to no one Arthur’s reasons for spiriting you away.”
Good for Mattie, thought Georg
iana grimly. At least that was one less worry!
“It seems better to suggest that Arthur had gone mad, assaulted his wife and was seeking you to wreak some insane vengeance for an imagined slight in Bermuda, that Belter tried to dissuade him and they killed each other in the ensuing argument, and that Nicolas van Rappard, having sailed upriver with the Kincaids, had at last guessed his intentions and come to ‘save’ you”—his voice was ironic—“and you were entreating him to come back and take you back to Windgate so you could again trade places with Linnet, not knowing that your masquerade had already been discovered.”
“Now they can all be heroes,” she said bitterly.
“Have you a better solution?”
“No.”
“Then that is the story your friend Mattie will tell. She has already agreed to it. Talk with her, be sure your accounts of what happened are the same. Enough scandal whirls about our heads already—we do not need to add to it.”
He had not once asked for the truth, she thought sadly. Well, he would hear it anyway!
“Brett." she said, throwing back the coverlet and starting to rise. “Stay abed,” he ordered. “I will send Mattie in to you. I think all our guests have departed but I do not want you prowling about downstairs, in case they have not. Questions would be awkward at this point. Indeed you would do well to continue to hold your head high and answer nobody’s questions. Let them think the worst of you—they will anyway.” He reached for his sword and turned to go.
“But Brett,” cried Georgians indignantly. “There is an explanation. If you will only wait—”
His head swung around to consider the beauty on the bed and a mirthless smile twisted his lips but found no answering gleam in his cold gray eyes. She had won him again last night with her soft yielding body, the sense of trust he had felt in her—but morning had shown him a beautiful but faithless wife. A woman who, even if her actions at Jack’s cottage last night had been entirely innocent and herself a victim of circumstances, had still fallen to her knees in the snow calling out heartbrokenly to Nicolas van Rappard. He had heard her with his own ears!
“I will brook no more explanations, Georgiana,” he said in a hard voice. “Except for what we must tell the schout, we will not speak of this again.’ His face was grim as he gave a final jerk to his belt as he buckled on his sword. “But then,” he muttered, giving her a look both sad and fond as he heaved a great sigh, “I suppose ye are no better and no worse than Erica Hulft.”
No better than Erica Hulft! Indignation made Georgiana leap from the bed and follow him to the door, meaning to plead her case in the hall if necessary. But the door that he opened to let himself out was closed firmly in her face. She could not run after him down the hall naked!
In panic she turned to seize a dressing gown and pursue him but then thought better of it.
And then it came to her that Brett would not believe her, no matter what she said, that he would never believe her again. The bright trust he had had in her was gone, she had destroyed it— forever. Her own folly in baiting him with Nicolas’s attentions, in flirting with Nicolas to arouse his jealousy, had written the ending of their love affair—and all the tears in the world would not wash it away.
She pressed her forehead dizzily against the plastered wall. She had thought last night that Brett had forgiven her. But—only his body had forgiven her, not his heart. He considered her now no better than Erica Hulft.
Hot tears scalded her eyelids as she told herself she had broken his heart—and now she must cost him Windgate!
BOOK VII
The Runaway Bride
The wrong she has done him she cannot undo,
For the ink on the parchment is dry.
And to her death she must always rue
What has turned her world awry!
Part One
The Flight Downriver
Her back to the past, she looks her last
On the world she used to know
And the future’s unclear as she wavers here
Yearning and loath to go.
Chapter 35
It humiliated Georgiana to stand there in her own drawing room and tell the sturdy schout that she had been pleading with Nicolas to take her back to Windgate to change places with her serving maid so that she might fool her assembled guests as to her prowess upon the ice, but she forced herself to do so. She hoped she sounded believable.
Mattie told her story again—and told it more coherently now that it had been carefully rehearsed. She stuck to it. Arthur and Jack had killed each other. Georgiana corroborated it—after all, what purpose was to be served by bringing the whole ugly story out into the open, how Arthur had shamefully abused his young wife, how she had in terror shot him? And—she dared not make Nicolas look bad, for he had the packet!
“But why did Mynheer van Rappard sail away?” demanded the puzzled schout. “Did he not realize it would seem that he was fleeing the scene?”
“I suppose he did not think of that. He came to save us—and found us already saved, quite surprisingly, "by Arthur and Jack disposing of each other. Mynheer van Rappard has some litigation pending with us here at Windgate. He did not wish to bring down scandal upon all our heads.”
Brett was watching her very steadily as she told the schout that. He looked big and competent today and very calm, lounging back on a carved high-backed chair with one long booted leg thrown casually across the chair’s massive wooden arm. His hawklike face was impassive, the lids over his gray eyes drooped slightly—even though, to Georgiana’s penetrating surveillance, they held a wary gleam. His fingers drummed lightly against his knee as the schout questioned the two women, and he looked if anything slightly bored with these proceedings. Georgiana could not help but admire him, for who knew better than she that it was all a pose, that Brett was as tense inside as she was, and waiting for who knew what to spring out.
Georgiana held her head high and cast a look at Mattie, sitting there downcast in a plain black dress they had hastily found for her and dabbing at her eyes—as a widow should.
The schout scratched his sandy head. It was a very strange story, but—this was a patroon’s wife speaking. And a patroon’s wife’s widowed friend. There was no one to challenge their testimony—indeed they were both more or less corroborating the story that he had just heard from Nicolas van Rappard at Haerwyck! Nicolas had been wearing a large bandage around his thigh at the time and there were some who muttered that he had come by his wound when the patroon of Windgate hurled a sword at him in an attempt to speed him on his way while the patroon’s lady called to him wildly from the shore, “Come back, come back!” But Nicolas himself, when the schout remarked it, had been vague about his injury. “An accident,” he had muttered. He had, it seemed, collided with something.
Ah, well, if the gentry wished to brawl among themselves over a lady—and such a lady!—that was up to them. So long as they did not see fit to call in the law—or kill each other—the schout was content to leave well enough alone. There was enough mayhem and quarreling about to keep him occupied!
They walked him to his sloop, Georgiana and Brett, for it had been tacitly agreed between them that whatever their differences, they would present a unified front to the world. They could not have been more affable or seemed more lighthearted as they urged him to stay for tiffin.
The schout declined their hospitality with regret. He had urgent business back at Haerwyck, which he had just left—a wife beating, and a violent argument over the ownership of a suckling pig, which had led to blows and broken windows in one of ten Haer’s outlying bouweries, plus some stolen beaver skins, which he doubted he could ever trace.
Georgiana was half surprised that the schout did not seek to take Linnet into custody for theft of the diamond pendant, for he had just left the ten Haers and Katrina, like her mother before her, was a vengeful woman. Earlier this morning a tearful Linnet had told her everything and she had promised to stand by the girl, who was still sojourning in
bed after her bad fall on the ice. But the schout had said nothing about the pendant and now he was halfway down the slope. She supposed that Rychie had persuaded Katrina that they would only kick up a great scandal if Linnet were brought to trial.
She wondered how Nicolas had squirmed out of that escapade, and a wry smile crossed her face for she had no doubt of charming Nicolas’s ability to get himself out of practically any scrape.
“I see ye came in Govert Steendam’s sloop,” observed Brett, raising his eyebrows.
“It was kind of him,” said the schout. “He is staying the week at Haerwyck and he told me he would have no use for it while there.”
“At Haerwyck?” Georgiana said in surprise, for she knew how Rychie and Katrina felt about Erica.
“Yes. I take it he got only as far as Haerwyck before he fell ill and they took him in.”
Brett frowned. “Govert ill? And at Haerwyck? What is the matter with him?”
The schout shrugged his massive shoulders. “Dr. Pos is also staying at Haerwyck, for he too was en route downriver on the sloop. He calls it only a slight chest cold caught from exposure—it seems Mynheer Steendam and Jufrouw Hulft stood out on the deck in the snow on the way downriver. He was coughing and Juffrouw Hulft felt it best to put in at Haerwyck rather than continue the journey.”
At the first sneeze no doubt—as an excuse to put up at Haerwyck! Georgiana felt her lip curl. Erica undoubtedly wanted to stay close to Windgate—in case the patroon there decided to make a change.... She felt chilled by more than the whipping wind that lanced along the Hudson.
Brett was frowning as they walked back up the bluff. Absently he steadied Georgiana on her tall pattens. She wondered if he was thinking of Erica.
“I am going upriver.” he told her restlessly at the front door. “One of my tenants, Pieter Kolp, has a son of an age to take a wife, and Pieter tells me young Kolp fancies the daughter of one of Huygens ten Haer’s tenants, but has no place to take her as she refuses to move in with his family or remain with hers. I will go up to Kolp’s bouwerie and offer young Kolp Belter’s bouwerie; ’tis best it be occupied over the winter months even if they choose to set themselves up in some other place in the spring.”
Rich Radiant Love Page 49