Gareth lay flat on his back and smiled grimly at the ceiling. This was not exactly how he’d planned to spend his wedding night. Visions of Faith paraded through his mind, and always she was in his arms: whirling down that balcony in a solitary waltz, melting against him in Amanda’s garden, shaking with laughter on the settee in her sister’s drawing room.
He stole a glance at her prone form lying beneath the light blanket. She had her knees drawn up to her chest and her head cradled on one bent arm. The moonlight flowed in through the window above where she lay, seeming drawn to the pale strands of her silken hair, touching it gently until those locks glowed a cool silver against the rough floorboards. With a small pang of guilt, Gareth realized how uncomfortable she must be on the hard floor. Yet she did not move or shift, or even whimper in complaint.
He watched her for a while, watched her shoulders go from the rigid stillness that let him know she was awake to limp and relaxed, as sleep overtook her. When her breathing finally became deep and even, Gareth sat up.
Quietly, he pulled on his trousers and walked across the room to kneel beside her sleeping form. He leaned over to look at her face. Her lips were serene and her eyes closed, the russet lashes casting long shadows upon her cheeks. There was a small pucker between her eyebrows, making Gareth think her dreams must be perplexing. He stifled a chuckle. No doubt she was dreaming of him. His inward smile faded, though, as he reflected upon how very true that likely was.
Resolutely, he quelled the resentment that welled within him. Despite their differences, there was no reason for either of them to spend the balance of the night cold and uncomfortable. He gathered her carefully against his chest, blankets and all, and lifted her in his arms. He walked back to the bed and set her down. She stirred and murmured something, but didn’t awaken. Gareth walked back to the window, retrieved the pillows, and tucked one under her head.
He took a step back and contemplated her sleeping form. She still looked quite uncomfortable, dressed in her traveling gown, but he didn’t see how he could remove it without waking her. With a shrug, he tucked the blanket and the sheet around her shoulders and walked around the bed. There he yawned, unbuttoned his trousers, and stepped out of them. Carefully he climbed into the bed next to Faith, pulled up the covers, and went promptly and comfortably to sleep.
Seventeen
The felt far warmer and safer than she could ever remember feeling. Still half-asleep, Faith smiled dreamily and snuggled deeper into the cocooning comfort that enveloped her, easily slipping back into the very pleasant dream she’d been having. She couldn’t imagine being anywhere more agreeable.
At the same moment, Faith’s gentle wriggling woke Gareth. He found himself cradling her securely in his arms, her hair tumbled across his face, one of her hands curved trustingly within his. A feeling of peace stole through him. He turned his head, buried his face deep into her silken curls, and purposely lost himself in her intoxicating scent; he could indeed fall back to sleep in such perfect conditions. But then Faith wriggled again, and his peace was shattered.
With her back cradled against his chest and her long legs bent at the knees, her body closely followed the angle of his own beneath the blanket. But that wasn’t what truly disrupted his comfort. What disturbed him was the wriggling. Faith’s trim backside was pressed into the hollow created by his bent knees, and each little wriggle she made was arousing him beyond words. Arousing him to the point that he was sure she would notice.
He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, forced himself to think of the progress that should have been made on the roof at Rothmere during the time he’d been in London. When that didn’t work, he tried thinking about the modernizations he was having made to the bathing rooms. That, however, was an enormous mistake. The first image that popped into his mind was of Faith immersed in the large marble bathtub, surrounded by bubbles, her long golden hair cascading down her shoulders and across her back in wet, glistening ropes.
He gave his head an abrupt shake to clear it of the unwelcome image, but the movement finally caused Faith to stir. Yawning, she raised her arms over her head and stretched, then stopped when she felt the unresisting body behind her. Always slow to rouse from slumber, Faith looked around the unfamiliar room with a dazed frown. When she still couldn’t recall where she was, she tilted her head backward on the pillow. Her sleepy gray eyes locked on a pair of warm brown ones.
With a gasp she came fully awake, horrified at the rush of information flooding her mind. Before she could fully process a thought, the next tumbled through her head, worse than the one before. She was, she recalled, at an inn a half day’s drive from London. She was in bed with a man who was, apparently, wearing no shirt. That man was her husband. And she was lying, quite comfortably, within the circle of his arms.
At that last realization, she gave a startled yelp and sat up, frantically clawing her tousled hair from her face. When she could at last see clearly, she looked down at the mess she’d made of the bed and the covers and realized Gareth was not merely shirtless. He was also trouserless.
Heat flooded her cheeks. In a flurry of tangled bedclothes and petticoats, Faith scrambled to escape the bed, catching an ankle in the twisted sheets. She reached for the wall, caught nothing but air, and tumbled unceremoniously to the floor.
Gareth leaned on his side and looked down over the edge of the bed. Faith was sprawled in an angry, undignified heap below. He grinned. “I’m so sorry. May I help you up, my lady?”
Faith glared at him. “You have no clothes on,” she accused.
“You talk in your sleep,” he countered.
Her mouth dropped open. “I do not!”
Gareth gave her a smug smile, happy just to have shaken her from the calm, icy demeanor she’d displayed the previous evening.
Faith realized her mouth was still hanging open and closed it with a snap. “Just what was I doing in that bed anyway?”
Her husband raised his brows. “Sleeping,” he replied, then thought a moment. “And talking.”
“No,” she argued, her teeth clenched in exasperation. “I meant how did I get there?”
“I put you there.”
Faith looked perplexed. “Why?” She raised questioning gray eyes to his deep brown ones and held his gaze for a long moment. Something passed between them, an intangible feeling Faith almost recognized. She’d felt it even in their earliest conversations. It was as though she knew him, had always known him. Her eyes softened imperceptibly. “Why, please?”
Gareth, too, felt the impact when her stare met his, but that only served to remind him of all he’d hoped would come of their union—all he now suspected they’d never have. He scowled at her softly put question.
“Because, princess,” he drawled, “you’d be nothing but a damned nuisance to drag about the countryside if you became ill from sleeping on the cold floor.” Abruptly, he rolled from beneath the covers to the far side of the bed, standing and reaching for his trousers.
Behind him he heard Faith’s shocked gasp and the rustle of her wrinkled skirts as she turned away from the sight of his naked form. He dressed quickly and walked to the door. “We’ll depart in half an hour,” he told her, and raked her with a contemptuous glance as she finally turned to look at him. “I trust you can make yourself presentable in that time?”
Faith remained silent, but her lips thinned and two bright spots of color appeared on her cheeks—testament to her barely suppressed anger. Gareth gave a low chuckle, opened the door, and left, pulling it firmly closed behind him. An immediate thud on the wooden panel told him he’d just narrowly missed being clobbered by something, most likely one of the slippers she’d worn the day before. An identical thud followed a second later, confirming his theory.
Smiling broadly, Gareth made his way down the narrow hall to the stairs. Provoking his wife beyond the limits of her self-control had definitely improved his mood.
He was nearly finished with his breakfast twenty minutes later when Faith
appeared, a sweet expression on her face. She sat down across from him, nodding regally as he politely rose.
“Thank you, my lord,” she murmured, and began eating from the plate a footman set before her, taking delicate bites of the poached egg and creamed beef on toast. There was no hint of the anger she’d displayed earlier, neither in her expression nor demeanor. Gareth sat back down to finish his breakfast, then politely waited for her to do the same.
Faith kept her expression neutral. Inside, though, she seethed with fury. She stole a quick glance at her husband when he bent his head to light a cheroot. He looked a bit impatient, she thought, watching his eyes fall pointedly on her still-full plate.
With immense satisfaction, Faith took a delicate bite half the size of one she’d normally take, laid down her fork, and folded her hands in her lap. Deliberately, she chewed her bite a full twenty times before she picked up the fork again. Four bites later, Gareth finished his cheroot and roughly pushed back his chair. Faith looked up at him, her gray eyes wide with innocence.
“I’ll just go see if the coach is ready, my lady,” he said, hoping she’d take the hint to eat faster. He strongly suspected she was deliberately goading him but couldn’t prove it without giving her the satisfaction of knowing she had succeeded. Refusing to concede even a small victory, he bowed and strode from the dining room without a backward glance.
Faith waited until she was sure her husband had gone, smiled to herself, and began eating at her usual pace. When finished, she counted slowly to one hundred, stood, stretched, then sauntered slowly toward the door. Just before she stepped outside, she pasted a calm, serene smile on her face and glided out into the inn yard.
Gareth was pacing impatiently back and forth in front of the lowered steps of the coach. When he caught sight of her, he stopped and waited beside the steps to help her inside. “We’ve a great deal of time to make up if we’re to reach Rothmere before nightfall,” he stated flatly, a note of reproach in his voice.
Faith nodded in apparent deference, her eyes cast carefully downward to conceal the gleeful glint she knew must be there. This, she vowed silently, would be the longest, most frustrating trip of her husband’s life. Between not allowing her to express her misgivings before the wedding, his surly demeanor during the ride to the inn, and the entire farce of a wedding night they’d just shared, she’d had enough. And the peremptory way he’d begun ordering her about this morning had quite pushed her over the edge.
She climbed in and settled comfortably back against the velvet seat, watching through the open door as Gareth issued some last-minute instructions to the coachman. In profile, his face was starkly handsome, a face the great artists of the Renaissance would have loved to capture on canvas. Something one of the outriders said made him break into sudden laughter, and Faith felt her heart constrict wistfully. Laughter transformed his face from a thing of chiseled beauty to one of boyish roguishness, but the metamorphosis vanished when he climbed into the coach, the momentary glow of humor fading and turning his eyes from warm chocolate back into glittering chips of obsidian.
Faith swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat and looked down at her hands, willing herself to remember the reasons they were at odds. With that forced memory, her resolve came flooding back, restoring her serenity.
They’d only been traveling twenty minutes when Faith delicately cleared her throat. “My lord?” She made her voice as weak as she could manage.
Gareth looked up from the document he was reading. “What?” he asked, his voice curt.
“May we stop a moment, please?” she asked. “I’m quite unused to traveling at this speed, and I’m afraid I’m feeling rather ill.”
Gareth bit back obvious annoyance. “Perhaps if we slow down a bit,” he suggested, though clearly loath to lose more time and possibly end up spending another night on the road.
Faith shook her head. “No, my lord,” she protested with a hand to her stomach. “I really must get out for a moment.”
She looked as if she would retch at any moment, so Gareth rapped abruptly on the roof. Seconds later the horses slowed and came to a halt. As soon as the doors opened, Faith bolted from the coach, leaving Gareth to stare curiously after her. Funny, he thought, he’d never imagined he would see Faith bolt anywhere. Mostly she seemed to glide from place to place.
Faith slipped into a grove of elm trees without looking back at the coach. She walked until she was sure she wouldn’t be seen, then turned and crept carefully back until she could just make out Gareth’s conveyance. Nobody had followed to be sure she was all right, she saw thankfully. Gareth was still standing near the door, staring at the grove of trees.
For a moment it seemed his eyes met hers, and Faith shrank back involuntarily. She leaned against a tree trunk and for the second time that day counted to one hundred. Then, carefully, she peered at the carriage again. Gareth was pacing alongside the road, looking like a thundercloud. Faith smiled to herself and smugly counted backward from one hundred.
When she reached zero, she straightened from the tree trunk upon which she leaned and smoothed her skirts. Carefully, she pulled a couple strands of hair from the sedate chignon she’d fashioned that morning. Satisfied, she sauntered slowly out of the woods and back up to the waiting coach.
Eighteen
It was nearly midnight and raining when they finally pulled up in front of the caretaker’s cottage at Rothmere. Gareth climbed out unassisted and glanced back inside at his sleeping wife. He turned to the dripping footman and put a finger to his lips, indicating they would leave Faith to sleep for the time being.
Golden light glowed from the windows on each side of the door to the cottage. Gareth ran toward their beckoning warmth, his shoulders hunched against the chill downpour.
The outriders he’d sent ahead had done their jobs well. A fire had been started in the cozy fireplace, and a small pot of soup hung steaming from an iron hook above the flames. He looked through the open door to the only other room in the cottage: a small bedchamber that was as neat as he’d left it. He regarded the comfortable bed he’d thought to share with his wife, then turned bitterly away. It would likely be a good while before he slept in that bed.
He swept his eyes around both of the two small rooms he’d considered “cozy” until now. He wondered what his bride would think of her new living quarters, accustomed as she was to living in luxury. The furnishings, which had once seemed more than adequate, now looked shabby, and he knew that the cottage would feel much smaller when shared by two people—especially when those two people could hardly stand being in the same room. He turned back to the fire and stared pensively into the dancing flames, dreading the thought of waking his wife to more disappointment.
Something was tickling her hand.
Slowly, Faith woke up, wrinkling her nose in confusion at her surroundings. Distant thunder rumbled, making her aware of the pounding rain on the roof. She looked around for Gareth and realized the carriage was no longer moving. He was not even in the vehicle.
Her hand was tickled again. This time, the sensation moved up her arm in a decidedly skittering fashion. In sudden dread, Faith looked down and saw the large brown spider making its leisurely way across her wrist.
With a bloodcurdling scream, Faith brushed the creature from her arm and leapt for the door. She wrestled frantically with the catch on the door handle, but wasn’t able to open it. The skin on her back crawling, she pounded, desperately calling for a footman, and pushed heavily against the door with her shoulder. Right then, it opened from outside. Faith fell headlong from the vehicle. She felt a sudden, burning pain as her cheek scraped the edge of the door, then her head struck a rock on the ground and everything went blessedly black.
The muffled scream startled Gareth from his reverie in front of the fire. Cursing under his breath, he ran to the front door and wrenched it open. The steady rain had strengthened into a cold downpour. He could just make out the shapes huddled near the ground by the coach, and with
an awful sense of dread he plunged into the torrent and ran the few feet to the vehicle. Impatiently, he pushed the footmen aside. His wife lay crumpled in the mud.
The worst fear he’d ever known quaked through him. He knelt in the puddle next to her unmoving form. “Faith!” He felt quickly at her neck for a pulse and breathed a sigh of relief when he found it. Gathering her gently into his arms, he stood and carried her limp body into the house.
“Go get the doctor,” he called to the footman. He crossed the room in three long strides and gently laid Faith on the sofa.
“You,” he ordered, pointing to the first of several servants who had begun arriving. “Get some water boiling. Find me something to use as a bandage, then warm some bricks and wrap them in flannel for the bed.” He turned back to the sofa and knelt beside Faith. “Somebody find me a blanket.”
Her eyes hadn’t opened, and Gareth now saw the long scratch oozing blood on her right cheek. Knowing the scratch alone wouldn’t have caused her to lose consciousness, he gingerly began running his hands through her wet hair and found what he sought. On the right side of her skull, up near the crown, was a swelling lump. He gently pressed her scalp around the contusion, wincing as he did so, and looked at his hand. It was wet, but thankfully only with the rain that had soaked her hair, not blood.
Without warning, Faith began shivering violently. Gareth looked over at the servant who was placing bricks on the fire. “Help me move this sofa closer to the hearth,” he said. Quickly, the man complied.
When the sofa was warmly situated, Gareth began working on getting his wife out of her wet clothes. He struggled with the catch on her soaked cape, cursing under his breath and finally breaking it when the dratted thing wouldn’t cooperate. He pushed the cape back and grimaced. The gown she wore fastened in the back. Carefully, he rolled his wife against him. She moaned softly but gave no other indication that she knew what was happening. Nestling her face against his chest, Gareth clumsily undid the frustrating row of tiny buttons, then eased the garment off her shoulders and worked it down the rest of her body.
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