by Lydia Joyce
“Slow down.” Fern’s jerk upon his hair almost made him lose control right then. But he obeyed, hardly recognizing the words coming from his mousy little wife. Her eyes were shut tightly, her face a mask of absolute concentration, as if she were trying to remember something or find something. Her breath grew more and more ragged, and then her lips drew back as she arched against him.
“There!” she cried, and then she jerked his head down to meet hers, crushing his bruised lip against her own, and Colin let himself drop to the white-hot release, spending himself in her as his veins burned and his head pounded with blood and desire.
The sensation was fleeting, as it always was, and yet it had been more than he knew what to do with, and it left him feeling changed. He rolled to the side as a wave of irresistible lassitude overtook him, only the ingrained politeness of many previous encounters keeping him from slumping bonelessly on top of her.
This must be what it is supposed to feel like, he thought, his heart still racing. Was it like this for everyone? No wonder so many young bucks could think of nothing else. Before, lying with a woman had been like scratching an itch, pleasant largely because of the relief it gave. He had thought of intercourse as a kind of draining off of excess pressure. But this … this was beyond his experience. It made him unsure of himself, unsure of everything.
Which was why he had to get to Wrexmere as soon as possible. He would deal with the fiscal irregularities there and expunge any lingering ghosts of the past, and with any luck, he would be able to deal with these strange feelings in an equally straightforward manner. The sooner he got everything sorted out and neatly put away in its place, the sooner he could go back to his regular, compartmentalized life, with no one the wiser that it had been shaken so badly.
But as he lay there, panting and fog-brained, he wasn’t sure that was what he wanted anymore.
Chapter Eight
“That did not feel so much like a theft.” Fern’s voice was a hoarse whisper full of wonder.
“I assume you enjoyed yourself.” Those words came from some automatic part of Colin’s brain that seemed to tick along regardless of everything that was happening to him.
“Yes,” Fern said, sounding rather perplexed. “Yes, I did.” She took his hand, which had been draped across her waist, and turned it palm up. Colin felt the heat of her breath against it. “Tell me more about where we are going, or I won’t bite you.” Her voice shook a little—probably at her own daring.
Colin pulled his hand back and rolled away. He pushed into a sitting position and looked at her, sprawled crosswise on the bed. “Wrexmere was in the family four generations before the death of a distant relative brought its master to an unexpected barony.”
“Why are we going there now?” She frowned at him, and he had the strange urge to smooth the delicate lines in her forehead that this caused.
“Because it is the most remote place that I have at my disposal,” Colin said, a half-truth. “I have never been there myself, but my father gave its use over to me at my eighteenth birthday. No one should be there except the steward and his wife, though there is a little village some distance away.”
“That is the only reason?” she asked guardedly.
“It is reason enough.”
“Is there really no one there?” Fern straightened up. “Not even a maid?”
“Of course not,” Colin said. “Why would there be a maid when none of my family have lived there for generations?”
Fern shook her head. “But what am I to do? Mother found a regular lady’s maid for me and has already sent her to your town house so that she would be waiting when we returned—but now I’ll have no one.”
“I apologize if it inconveniences you,” Colin said stiffly.
Her brow creased. “Who shall fasten my clothes? Who shall dress my hair?”
“I will fasten your clothes if you need assistance, and as for your hair, surely it won’t hurt you to wear it in a slightly simpler style for a short while,” Colin said, growing tired of her shallow preoccupation.
“Simpler!” She shook her head. “I haven’t any idea of how to dress it at all. I’ve never done so much as brush it on my own. I have been taught how to arrange a dinner party for sixty guests, and I can make a lace cap and booties for a new baby and create a pillow with thirty-two types of embroidery stitches, but I haven’t the slightest idea about what to do with my hair.”
“You’ll learn. Just as you learn anything,” Colin said brusquely, ignoring the strange and unfamiliar pang of guilt that he felt. Her life was so small, so very narrow in its scope and significance … and he had been glad of it. It was what he had wanted, but now everything had changed; they’d both been jerked from the paths that had been intended for them, and Colin knew that, fundamentally, it was his fault.
Fern blew out a huff of air, pressing her lips tightly together as if she’d explode with a retort if she did not.
“What is the matter?” Colin said—tried not to demand, for it was not fair to take out his frustration with himself upon her.
“That’s easy for you to say, because you still have your valet to shave you and polish your boots,” she said, something in her tone betraying that she knew how much like a sulky child such a statement made her sound.
“Do you want me to send him away?” he asked evenly.
“Yes, I do. It might be silly, and it might be petty, but yes, I want you to send him away. You’ve robbed me of a maid to haul me halfway across England to a place I have never heard of, so why should you keep your valet?” Her gray eyes flashed defensively.
Colin looked at her coldly. “I will send him back tomorrow, then.”
“Good,” she replied shortly.
Why are we really squabbling? Colin wondered. It wasn’t that their argument had any content, to speak of. Fern pushed a strand of hair back from her face and shifted restlessly. When they came together, everything had seemed right, somehow, but now, Colin did not know what to do with the young woman who sat next to him. He didn’t really know her at all—he’d had no intentions of ever getting to know her except in the most superficial way, in discussions about social banalities and empty domestic arrangements during their dinners.
And now he was shut in with her in a room so small that they could barely move, there to remain until morning. The minutes seemed to heap around him like smothering drifts of snow. What was to be done with all of them? How were the two of them to spend them together, with no other diversion than their own company?
They could try to spend as many as possible in the one activity certain to require no extraneous meaning. Despite the violence of his last climax, his body was already beginning to stir again. Yet he should be able to talk to his wife. It was wrong that there was an intractable barrier, for he did not even know enough about her to ask her a more significant question than how her sisters and parents were doing. She fidgeted next to him, staring at her hands, avoiding his eyes.
Finally he said, “You look uncomfortable. Let me help you undress for the night.”
“I have no nightdress to wear.” Her tone carried traces of resentment. “It is in my trunk.”
“I know,” he said. “Stand up.”
Slowly, she obeyed.
“Come here.”
She stepped forward, and he stopped her with a hand splayed against her waist. He stood and began unfastening her bodice one button at a time. He could see the flutter of her pulse in her throat, could see the tightening of her jaw. Colin’s movements became provocative without his making a conscious decision to do so. It was easier this way, when their bodies could talk and nothing else mattered, even if he knew it would not be enough …
He freed the last button and traced a line from the shadow of her throat downward, between her breasts and along the stiff steel busk of her corset. Fern gripped his elbows as if to steady herself.
“I think I am better than any maid,” he said softly.
“It depends upon one’s objectiv
es,” Fern said, but her trembling voice belied the tartness of her words.
“What are yours, then?” he asked, suddenly serious. “What do you want out of all of this?” His nod encompassed everything that was between them.
Her eyes were bright and round. “Happiness.”
“Happiness.” He blew out a rush of air. “The ruby of a maharaja I might be able to procure for you, but happiness … I feel inadequate to such a demand. What is happiness? Who can say?”
“You can’t?” She looked curiously at him. “Why, happiness … just is.”
“Do you make it?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “Make it? Of course not.”
“Then why did you look to me to provide it for you?”
Fern stared at him silently for a moment. Then she burst out, “Oh, you think I am a dolt!”
“No,” Colin disagreed quietly. “I think I don’t know what you want or why.”
She made a frustrated noise. “I have this picture in my head of how my life is supposed to be—me a contented wife with a pleased husband and a well-mannered brood of children, cheerful servants, and friends from good society. And it’s all rosy and lovely … except I am afraid the woman in the picture isn’t really me. She looks like me and she smiles like me, but inside, she doesn’t feel the things I feel, doesn’t have the thoughts that I have or the anger or the fear. She’s perfect. The perfect wife, and she has the perfect husband.” She stopped. “That’s what I thought you were. You seemed like the picture I had in my head. And if you were enough like the picture, then maybe I would be like it, too.”
A man in a picture. The flat appearance of social perfection. She was right about him, precisely correct—that was what Colin had made himself to be. But what was behind the stiffly painted physiognomy? It would not have occurred to him that there might be something else until that day, but now he had the sudden fear that he would find himself incomplete.
“I wish we were at Wrexmere,” he said abruptly. He pushed her bodice from her shoulders. Her hands lowered with deliberation to her sides, and the garment slid off, revealing the smooth curves of her shoulders.
“I still don’t understand,” Fern pressed. “What is at Wrexmere?”
“Nothing is there except an estate that needs attention. It’s what isn’t there.”
Fern stared at him blankly, and Colin spun her away from him and unbuttoned her skirt so that he could get to the ties of the petticoats beneath. He forced himself to focus upon the fabric under his hands, ignoring the soft flesh that was a mere corset’s thickness from his fingers. He could still smell her on him, like a drug. He clenched his jaw. “There isn’t anyone there. No one I know. No one who knows me. Not of consequence, anyhow.” The strange steward, with his cryptic letters, hardly counted.
“Why don’t you want to be among people?” There was a strained note in her voice, one that he instinctively knew had nothing to do with their conversation and everything to do with the fact that he was undressing her and their mutual awareness of that fact.
“People!” He snorted. “People don’t bother me. Society bothers me.” He tugged the skirts downward, trying to ignore the tantalizing path they took from her neat waist over the curve of her hips. He was silent for a long moment, savoring her body so close to his. She was going to ask him more if he did not provide a better answer; for all the tentativeness of many of her questions, she had a remarkable persistence. Finally, he spoke the words aloud. “I am not myself right now. Or, more properly, I have just realized that I don’t know who I am. I would prefer to have no one scrutinizing my actions until after I figure that out.”
“Until you can fashion a new facade, you mean.” The response was quiet.
Colin stared at the back of her chemise, which was slightly creased with sweat from being pressed against her body in the heat. He grasped her waist in both his hands and pulled her back against him. She fit so well there, the top of her head resting on his throat just below his chin. She trembled slightly—she was still afraid of him, or herself; he wasn’t sure which. She, who had shaken his world, was afraid of him because he was larger, stronger. A part of him was very glad, for it seemed to be the only advantage he had over this small coddled woman.
“A facade,” he repeated, amusement making him honest. “No, I have no facade. If I had a facade, I would not have needed to leave Brighton.”
“But you are so empty,” Fern whispered. She grew stiffer against him, inclining away without actually moving.
“It is no facade,” Colin repeated.
She made a ragged sound and pulled away, turning to face him. “I can’t believe that. You are merely distant. Hard to know. Shy, maybe. My sister Flora is shy, and many people think she’s aloof.”
“Fern, I am not lying,” he said wearily. “What you saw was what I was.”
“But I look at you now, and I see … you,” she whispered. “You are there, looking back at me.”
Colin closed his eyes, and the words came almost unbidden. “I feel different. I feel alive. I don’t think I knew what that meant. But I also feel dissatisfied.”
Fern’s face shuttered. “With me?”
“With everything.” He chuckled quietly. “Except … not with what you do to me.”
Fern nodded slowly, her soft face shadowed. “I do not think that I dislike it quite so much anymore. I’m scared it may be wrong of me, but it feels good now. Extremely good, most of the time. Sometimes it felt bad, but that was good, too.” She lifted a hand to his neck and caressed it softly. The salt on her skin burned a little in the raw scratches. “I liked that,” she whispered. “I needed it, just as you said you did.”
“Yes,” Colin said. She placed her hand flat against his throat as he spoke, her eyes going half-lidded at the vibrations against her palm.
“I could squeeze,” she breathed.
His heart quickened. “You could,” he agreed.
Her eyes got wider. “I can feel that.” She smiled. “I can feel what I do to you.”
“I can feel what I do to you, too. I can feel your heat from here,” he said. “I can smell your desire.”
Her brow creased. “This is all we have, isn’t it?”
“But we do have this,” Colin insisted. “This is important.”
“This is a start,” Fern said, as if only half convinced of her own words.
“We will have more.” It was a promise. “We might not have it now, but we will.”
“Oh, I do hope so, Colin,” she said earnestly.
He quirked a corner of his mouth. “For now, let us at least enjoy what we have.”
“I couldn’t refuse you. Not last time, and not again.” Another shiver went through her, and this time, it held more desire than fear. “I want it too much.”
“Good,” said Colin.
She sat on the bed, drawing him with her, and it was a long time before either of them spoke again.
Chapter Nine
“There it is.”
The words jerked Fern awake. She blinked woozily out the coach window and saw … nothing. Fog eddied low across the road, gathering in the hollows and tangling the occasional twisted shrub that rose on the higher hillocks of moorland intertwined with the bog.
Bog land. Fern’s father had once mentioned the numerous schemes to exploit the peat or fill in the low places that various entrepreneurs had undertaken in order to try to wrest a fortune from the poor land. But the bog had defeated them all. As they had traveled on from the inn where they had spent the night, the countryside had grown more and more damp and desolate, and it seemed as if they were traveling farther back in time the deeper they went. The last livery stable had been many miles ago, and the old man who ran it seemed suspicious to see a stranger there. The cold chicken lunch that Colin had bought had at least been hearty, if unflavorful, the remains of it in the hamper that lay on the floor between them.
“I don’t see anything,” Fern said. She looked at Colin. As the land grew mo
re bleak, he had seemed to become more forbidding. He sat across from her in pristine and chilly elegance, his green eyes dark and inscrutable, and she could not truly believe that he had been the man with whom she had shared such a confusing, tumultuous night. But she knew that under that crisp gray superfine and white linen were her marks—the marks of her nails and her teeth, the proof that she was not without power over herself and over him. She still ached from their encounters the night before. It was easier to do … that … than to talk, and even easier to try not to think—about anything. Thinking was dangerous.
They could not lie easily next to each other, and when they spoke, they got tangled in each other’s words and hopes and mangled dreams, and so they had consumed the night with action in which no words were needed. Their bodies had spoken, but what had it all meant? The next morning, Colin’s valet had attended upon him one last time before being sent away, and Colin had helped Fern to put back on a fresh traveling dress, as he had promised. Her efforts to dress her own hair had resulted in less success, though, and already the unkempt bun at the nape of her neck was beginning to slide.
“I saw a sign,” Colin said. “Wrexmere. There is supposed to be a village—”
Even as he spoke, the coach lurched, turning off the main road onto a rutted lane. Fern grasped the balance strap to keep from being pitched into the far wall.
She peered anxiously out the window. “I don’t see anything but more moor and bog.”
“It should be here,” Colin repeated, in the tone of voice of a person for whom should always became is.
They rounded a corner. Fern would have sworn that the landscape was too flat to hide anything, but the fog must have distorted her perceptions, for there, on a slight rise, was a cluster of cottages around the cold gray block of a stark country church.
Fern watched it fixedly, glad to have the excuse to look at something other than her husband. They were already quite near, and as they drew even closer, she could see the ruined outlines of the foundations of other houses that had once stood among the survivors.