And like the cowardly child he’d taken her for, she’d run from the room and fought to keep from vomiting. Who was this man who so disdained polite Society that he’d reject his title and his birth connection to a duke? The images he’d painted . . . She struggled to draw a breath. The images he’d painted were of violence and danger, and she who’d always longed for excitement saw the naïve lenses she’d once looked through.
Penelope touched her fingertips to the soft skin of her belly, where Ryker had placed his blade.
Which only roused thoughts of different talks of blades and spears she’d recently had.
Penelope’s mouth went dry, and she desperately tried to recall the talks of “racing hearts” and “warm bellies” given her by Juliet and Prudence. Alas, her mother’s words pealed around her brain.
The time was nearly here . . . for her spearing. She curled her toes. Though, that isn’t quite what her mother had called it, but rather the weapon she’d spoken so stammeringly of. One wondered how she’d bred five children with her absolute inability to speak of it in anything but battlefield terms.
A log fell in the hearth, and she jumped. Alas, her husband remained absent—just as he had since she’d fled his office and closeted herself away in her rooms. Penelope flipped onto her side and punched the pillow in equal parts frustration and a desire to make herself comfortable. A nearly impossible feat on the lumpy mattress.
How could a man rumored to be one of the wealthiest gaming-hell owners in England have such starkly miserable décor? As Ryker’s wife, however, this was something she could change. Penelope rolled onto her other side, and to give her mind something to do, she proceeded to inventory all the changes she’d make in her new home.
There would be new bedding and a desk. There must be a desk, and a comfortable chair. They required an additional armoire. And there was also Ryker’s equally dreary office, in need of tidying. As she went through her list, Penelope’s eyelids drifted.
The faint click brought her eyes snapping open, and she blinked in the inky darkness, trying to place herself. Then it all came back. Her marriage. Oh, goodness. Her husband and the spearing. Penelope swiftly closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing as Ryker entered the room.
Her heart thumped hard, as Poppy’s hushed whisperings echoed in her mind. Do not be silly, Penelope Pippa. Your husband is not a killer . . . At some point the fire had dwindled, leaving a chill in the air. She made herself go as still as possible as he unleashed a string of curses under his breath.
Yes, she had in her bid to create a home for her and his garments left the room in dishabille. Still, he was such a stranger, she knew not at all how a man of his volatility would respond. Would he drag her to eye level as he’d done in the gardens, barraging her with questions? Or would he order her to leave his belongings alone, in that gravelly authoritative tone better reserved for a vengeful warrior?
Instead, he walked with stealthy steps, picking his way around the garments. A wild fluttering danced in her belly. How did a man of his size move with such silent grace?
Through her hooded lashes, she peered at him as he shoved aside boots and gowns and trousers. He strode over to the makeshift desk she’d worked at and paused. His gaze went over the untouched contents of her tray, and Penelope gave thanks for the covers that hid her curled feet. He’d see that tray and no doubt assume she was either, one, a pampered lady with difficult tastes or, two, a sad bride who’d been unable to touch her tray. Both options were miserable ones.
His gaze moved to her, and she forced her breathing into the smooth, steady cadence she’d used to feign sleep when Poppy had prattled on and on as a girl. The slight groan of the chair indicated her husband had sat.
Thump.
Her heart jumped a beat as his boot landed on the floor, the sound muffled by several of her gowns.
Oh, saints in heaven on Sunday. He was disrobing.
Thump.
All early butterflies died faster than had they been hit with a winter air. He was going to come over, lift her gown, and insert his spear into her sheath.
Penelope closed her eyes and prayed. Surely there could be nothing more painful than being stabbed by a gentleman . . . there. The floorboards creaked as Ryker moved . . . away from her?
Her eyes flew open as Ryker lay on the floor.
Why he . . . he . . . “Do you intend to sleep on the floor?” she blurted, forgetting her pretend sleep.
A long, slow exasperated sigh stretched on. “Yes.” He paused. “Unless you’d rather I join—”
“No,” she squeaked and her entire body went hot. The spearing her mother warned her of was entirely too intimate for two strangers. Reaching over, Penelope grabbed the other pillow and, stretching forward, hurled it across the room. It landed silently just beyond his feet.
Ryker swiped the white pillow and tucked it under his head.
She settled back into the mattress. How odd, to find of all she missed at her home, the item she’d trade her littlest finger for was her bed. Penelope wiggled, tossing back and forth.
“Do you toss every night like this?”
That beleaguered question boomed off the walls and set her heart pounding. “I’m trying to get comfortable,” she said defensively. “It is a foreign bed.”
Silence fell. And then . . . “Aren’t all beds the same?”
Penelope rolled onto her side. “Oh, not at all.” With only the faint glow cast by the hearth, she blinked, trying to bring Ryker into focus. “Some mattresses are filled with feathers. Some are lumpy. Some are . . .” She squinted in the dark. Her husband lay, motionless, on his back, staring up at the plaster ceiling. “That cannot be comfortable.” Granted, she was not wholly prepared for him to consummate their vows, and yet it hardly seemed fair to displace him in such a way.
He covered his face with his hands, and when he spoke the words emerged muffled. “I’ve endured far greater sources of discomfort than sleeping on a floor.”
“But—”
Ryker lowered his arms to his side, and her belly fluttered. How was it possible for a man to be so primitively dangerous and sinfully handsome all at the same time?
“Are you certain you don’t wish me to join you?”
Cheeks afire, Penelope promptly pressed her lips together. Except his previous question stirred her intrigue. How little they knew of one another. They were married, bound together until death did they part, and yet she knew nothing of the foods he liked or disliked. Or the books he enjoyed. She rolled onto her side and propped her chin atop her hand. “What discomforts?”
He muttered a string of pleas to the Lord, which was rather fascinating, given that she hadn’t taken Ryker Black as the religious sort. “Aren’t you tired?” His words were a faint entreaty.
She shook her head, and then recalled he couldn’t see her in the dark. “No.”
“Sleeping on the cobbled roads in the rain. And snow. That is more uncomfortable,” he grunted. “Walking barefoot through the streets of St. Giles. Eating rancid meat. Should I continue?”
Her heart wrenched. “N-no,” she whispered. The gossip pages spoke of a ruthless killer, a powerful gaming-hell owner. They did not print a word of the suffering he’d endured to rise to the level of greatness he’d attained.
“Have you ever slept on the dank London streets?” he taunted.
That gibe hit its intended mark. With her casual questions, she’d not given proper thought to what it must have been like for him, a man born to a different class, who’d struggled and ultimately triumphed. “I-I haven’t.” Her voice quavered. “I slept outside, but once.” She curled her toes so tight, the arches of her foot ached. How very wrong to even mention that long-ago night, when he’d divulged his struggles.
“Why?”
She blinked slowly at the unexpected query.
“I had a particularly nasty governess,” she shared, toying with the fabric of her coverlet. A log shifted in the hearth and exploded in a noisy hiss. Penelope
stared absently at the shadows cast by the fire’s light. “I delighted in trying to match her misery with my own. Mean Mrs. Jenkins. She had a flask of brandy she would sip from. My sister Poppy sneaked into her chambers and stole it one night.”
He chuckled, the sound rusty. “To sample your first spirits?” he ventured. How often did he laugh? Her own existence had been filled with constant giggles and mirth. She’d wager her entire collection of diaries his had been a cheerless life.
She forcibly thrust aside the melancholy. “Oh, hardly.” She warmed to her telling. “We’d tried our first sip of brandy long before that. Enough to know we weren’t interested in any more of the nasty drink.” She favored him with a wink, and a sharp laugh burst from his lips. Penelope joined in, the sound of his mirth contagious, and at it, lightness buoyed her. It felt so very good to laugh with him. She’d spent so many years shaping herself into the proper, respectable miss that she’d forgotten how freeing it was to just be—Penelope. How much better this was than the constant worry and hesitancy. “Poppy dumped the contents of Mrs. Jenkins’s flask inside her chamber pot, and when she awoke the next morning, she found it gone. The woman searched our rooms until she located it.”
“Where was it?” he asked, very quietly.
“In my armoire.”
“Mrs. Jenkins attributed the actions to you,” he correctly surmised.
“Rightly so. She backhanded me for stealing it.” Penelope brushed her fingertips over her cheek, the sting of that blow still fresh all these years later. “Told me how even young ladies were sent to Newgate for stealing, and the guards would take me apart, limb by limb. So I ran away.” There had been no cobbled, dirtied London road. “There was a copse my sisters and I would often play in. There was a lake, is a lake, there,” she modified. The place she’d first learned to swim. “I spent the night waiting to be carted off.” Unlike the dank streets he’d spoken of, her earth had been softened by leaves and lush grass.
A primal growl better suited to a ruthless beast sounded where Ryker lay. But he said nothing more. There were no questions. No tender reassurance.
She’d not shared the story of Mrs. Jenkins with anyone; not her mother, not her brother. The truth had lived only between her and Poppy. As a sister, she loved her siblings, and loved them and protected them at all costs.
For the differences between her and Ryker’s birthrights and views on laughter and love, he shared a familial devotion to those dependent on him. It spoke to the greatest possible bond they could share.
A wave of homesickness assailed her, a longing for her sisters. They would never step foot inside her new home. They would never bring their children to visit.
Penelope turned onto her back once more and stared at the whitewashed ceiling. A faint crack ran an uneven path from the center, and she followed it with her eyes. “I’m unable to sleep,” she said aloud, needing more company than the silence of her lonely thoughts. When her sisters married, had they known this sadness at what they’d left behind? At his silence, Penelope shifted her head on the pillow to look again at Ryker. “You are supposed to ask me why I’m unable to sleep.”
Her husband sighed. “If you wanted me to know, why didn’t you just state the reasons you can’t sleep?”
That was a fair point. And yet . . . “You’re my husband now, and I’m your wife,” she said pragmatically.
“I gathered the particulars of the day.”
Ignoring his droll reply, she proceeded to explain it to him. “When you are married, you take time to notice when a person is happy and learn what makes them smile.” Her mind wandered to the art room Jonathan had commissioned for Juliet. Her sister-in-law’s joyous surprise. The couple’s laughter as Juliet had hurled herself into her husband’s arms. The loving kiss. Penelope’s lower lip trembled. “And when they are s-sad, you attempt to gather why and drive it away.”
“Oh, God. You aren’t going to cry again, are you?”
At that pained question, she frowned. Momentarily distracted from her own miseries, she glanced over at him. “There is nothing wrong with crying.”
“There is everything wrong with it.” He turned onto his side. “It shows weakness, and it can be used by others who wish to destroy you,” he said in a telling admission that spoke to his jaded existence.
“I do not have enemies,” she said simply.
“Don’t you?” Tension underscored those curt syllables. “Someone saw you ruined in those gardens that evening. If those are not enemies, my lady, then I do not know who is.” That pronouncement rang with finality; the stiff words brooked no room for further discussion. Ryker again rolled onto his back.
Penelope lay immobile, with the air trapped in her lungs. By God, he was correct. She’d been so consumed with the death of her dreams and the significance of her scandal that she’d not thought to the very point he’d made: someone had deliberately ruined her. Stolen her hope for a loving, devoted husband.
But mayhap you can have that with Ryker. Granted, he would never be the affable, charming rogue her brother-in-law Christian was. Or the gentle, teasing one Weston had proved to be with Patrina. Yet those were her sisters’ marriages. Why couldn’t Penelope and Ryker make a go of their union and ultimately find more?
She’d been gripped by terror since he’d yanked her out from under her hiding place. But the man who’d entered this room was not the gruff, growling, hulking bear of a man who’d made her teeth chatter.
He was—
A bleating snore filled the room.
Snoring? Why . . . Why . . . He’d simply fallen asleep. In the midst of their discussion. Granted, it hadn’t been a truly meaningful discourse. Penelope looked around the large four-poster bed. Given the fears she’d had of her wedding night, to a man whom she’d only just met, she should be relieved that he now slept twenty paces away. And she was. Relieved. Grateful, even.
Penelope closed her eyes. Now, she could rest.
The hum of silence buzzed loudly and blended with the ticking clock and her husband’s soft, shuttery snores into a riotous cacophony of night sounds.
Abandoning hope for sleep, she cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ryker?” she called on a whisper. “Ryker?” she repeated, in louder tones.
He groaned. “What?”
“You never explained your name.” As a person’s name was the first mark of his identity, and they were now inexorably twined forever, it was a part of him that she’d understand.
“My name?” he repeated blankly, his voice hoarse with sleep. For the roughness of his tone, he may as well have been slumbering for five hours instead of the five or so minutes since he’d previously stopped talking.
Penelope scooted over, so that she clung to the edge of the mattress. “During our vows, the vicar indicated your name was Ryker Banbury. Not Black,” she clarified. When he still said nothing, she attempted to further jog his memory. “I attempted to ask you about it and you said—”
“I remember the exchange,” he spoke, sounding pained.
She tapped her fingertips on the smooth coverlet. “Well,” she prodded.
“My mother, Delia Banbury, was the Duke of Wilkinson’s mistress,” he rattled through his telling the way Cook had composed a list for the market. “The day I was born, there was no fanfare or celebration. There was no laughter. No smiles.” He painted such a bleak picture of that May twenty-first that sadness suffused her heart for the babe he’d been. You asked to know more about him. And now he’s shared it. “The midwife who delivered me sold me to a man named Mac Diggory.” Her husband spoke of that act in such emotionally deadened tones that she burrowed within the folds of her coverlet. Only the chill remained, freezing her through at the ruthless beginning he described so she feared she’d never be warm again. “When I was a boy, I picked my own name. I wanted no part of the bastard who’d bought me and even less part to the woman who’d birthed me. So that is the story of my name, Penelope. Does that satisfy your curiosity?” The angry, snarling ques
tion should lead to a cessation of her probing. It was what he wanted.
She swallowed hard around the pain stuck in her throat. “Why did you select Black?”
He snapped his head sideways, and the whites of his eyes glared bright in the dim space. “Because even as a boy, I learned quickly that my soul is black. And you would do well to remember that, Penelope.”
Did he want her to fear him? To rouse terror was no doubt the safest way to keep people out and protect oneself from feeling . . . anything. Oddly, staring back, there was no fear of this man. There was no panic in being alone in this bedroom with him. Instead, she ached to take down the mighty fortress he’d built about himself and learn just who Ryker Banbury, in fact, was.
She was the first to look away.
This time, when he resumed snoring, she allowed him his rest.
Who was this man she’d married? She squinted in the dark trying to make out the harshly beautiful, scarred features of her husband. But the distance between them and the dimly lit space made it impossible. He was the one whispered about in the gossip pages. Feared by many . . . and if she was being honest . . . herself included, in those ranks. He was also a man who’d married her to save his club. It spoke to his love for the establishment.
Her racing mind made sleep impossible. Penelope flopped onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. How did a man go about starting a gaming establishment? Who had he been before he’d become the successful proprietor? His faint snores filled the room, oddly soothing and distracting. Those faint exhalations marked him as very real. Human in ways that made him far safer than the scowling, snarling stranger.
Penelope closed her eyes—and oddly, for the first time since she’d climbed into the large, lonely bed, drifted off into a peaceful sleep.
“Oh, God. No. Please don’t.”
Pulse pounding loud in her ears, Penelope surged upright. Mind dulled from sleep, she blinked in the inky darkness. Where was she? Then it came rushing back. Her wedding. Her wedding night. She rubbed her hands over her eyes, and then fell back onto the mattress.
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