She pulled his mouth to hers, as though to take the words inside her.
“I love you,” he repeated. The sounds trembled in the darkening room. Again and again he told her, and the words hung in the air as he surged into her…and carried her to rapture…then spilled his love upon the ragged sheets.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Esme lay in her husband’s arms, listening while his breathing slowed. She felt the tension growing between them even as their bodies quieted.
The words he’d uttered had made her drunk with happiness. Now she understood she’d heard only the madness of passion. She tried to persuade herself passion was enough; it was a miracle he still wanted her, this man for whom desire was but the whim of a moment.
Even if she wasn’t a whim, she must represent an aberration. She was without beauty, grace, or lover’s skill. Coming of a race he viewed as savage, she had brought into his life everything he most disliked and avoided: hardship, confrontation, violence.
He’d stumbled into wedding her only because lust had wiped out reason. In these last two months away from her, though, he’d surely had second thoughts. While she was his wife, like it or not, she need not be the mother of his children. He’d not pollute the noble blood of the St. Georges with that of a foul-tempered barbarian.
When he nuzzled her shoulder, she tensed.
Varian raised his head to look at her. She fixed her gaze upon the ceiling.
“Esme.”
“Go to sleep,” she said. “You are weary.”
“You’re upset.” He sighed. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice. That was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. Go to sleep, Varian.”
“No. We’ll discuss it, as we should have done long ago if I’d possessed a grain of forethought. But I didn’t.”
Wrapping his arms about her, he pulled her round to face him. “I’ve two younger brothers to carry on the line,” he said. “I’d always assumed they would, for obvious reasons. You’re not obliged to give me an heir, Esme.”
“I understand. You do not want children.”
“It isn’t that. Our situation is difficult enough—nigh impossible, in fact.” Bitterness edged his voice. “In fairy tales, the prince and princess wed and live happily every after. But I’m not one of those pure-hearted princes. I took your innocence, knowing it was criminal, then wed you, which was more criminal still. Now we’re both paying. I won’t make an innocent babe pay as well.”
He held her too tightly, and his voice betrayed too much pain. The words he meant as reassurance only confirmed her fears. He blamed himself, blamed desire. But it was she, its object, who’d spoiled everything for him, made his life ugly and weary. With each passing day, his unhappiness would erode his desire for her. In time, he’d come to hate her for what she’d done for him…and she’d have no child. She’d have no permanent remembrance of their passion, no babe conceived in love, no child for her to love when its father turned away from her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We have only this night together, and I cause you distress.”
“It’s my own doing.” He brought her hand to his lips. His mouth was warm, so gentle upon her fingers. “I didn’t want you to see this moldering ruin I live in. I didn’t want to make love to you in this tawdry room.”
“I do not care where we make love, Varian. I do not care where I am, so long as I am with you. Even for a short time,” she added hastily.
“But you care about children, very much.”
Yes, she wanted to cry. Your children.
“I am not even nineteen years old,” she made herself answer. “There is time. Many years. It is not as though my only chance is now, this once.” Her heart rapped sharply with anxiety.
He smiled. “Of course not. I certainly don’t wish to keep repeating that nerve-wracking experience all the rest of my life. You’ve a talent for putting good intentions to naught, my dear. Behaving responsibly nearly killed me.”
“It—it was not the most agreeable way of—of ending.” Her countenance heated.
He touched her burning face. “There are other methods, but equally disagreeable, I’m afraid. Shall I embarrass my delicate flower with the gruesome details?”
She was deeply embarrassed, because preventing conception seemed a most unnatural act. All the same, she was aware he was trying to distract her, trying to be kind. “How gruesome?” she asked.
He chuckled, and as he went on to describe sheaths made of sheep bladders or fish skin, Esme giggled in spite of herself.
“You tie it with a string?” she asked incredulously. “Where? How?”
“Don’t be stupid. Where do you think?”
“It does not sound comfortable. You must not do it, Varian. If you tie the string too tight—”
His roar of laughter lightened her heart. He was made to laugh, to amuse and be amused. Because it amused him, Esme encouraged him to tell all he knew—of the sponges women were being urged by certain radical reformers to use, and of the various herbal concoctions some resorted to. Men dosed themselves as well, some with honeysuckle juice or rue, others with castor oil. There was an endless assortment of potions to be drunk or applied.
“There are also some benighted persons who believe violent lovemaking prevents conception,” he said, grinning.
“They are not logical,” she said. “How many children have resulted from rape? How can the civilized English believe such nonsense?”
“Wishful thinking, perhaps. Speaking of which…” His hand slid down her spine to cup her bottom.
“Oh, Varian, you’ve no need to wish. “
“But it’s not as you want, is it, love?” His hands moved over her so tenderly. Yet even the gentlest of his caresses was magic, making her crave more, crave all.
“It’s you I want,” she said.
She needed him. It was more, she knew, than her body’s hunger. She wanted all that he was: the lazy charm, the careless grace and easy laughter…the sin as well, the shadows darkening his soul. He was the Devil’s gift—and snare as well, for a woman. But she was glad to be so ensnared. He taught her pleasure, and his grace touched her earthbound warrior’s soul, to lighten it with dreams and delight.
She wanted all he was and to be his entirely. When he was inside her, in that long moment of joining, she could believe it was so, eternally so. She knew she’d no right to forever. She had this moment, though.
“Just love me, Varian,” she whispered. “Love me beautifully, as you do.”
No one disturbed them. The others, it appeared, had given up waiting and gone to the Black Bramble without them. The house was still, and night had long since fallen. In the darkness, Varian made love to his wife once more. Afterward, unwilling to waste their precious hours together in sleep, they talked.
Esme told him of her dancing master, her coiffeur, her dressmaker, and of Percival, who was always by to lend moral support. While her stories made Varian laugh, he hurt inside as well. It should have been her husband, not her young cousin, with whom Esme practiced her dance steps. It should have been Varian to whom she complained of hairpins and corsets, and Varian who unraveled the baffling intricacies of English etiquette.
At least, he consoled himself as he lay beside her, she was here to tell him. At least he could listen in the darkness to her faintly accented voice. He’d missed her voice, just as he’d missed the tumultuous intensity of her presence. He would have been happy to spend the night so, but sometime near midnight he remembered he’d kept Esme from dinner.
He gave her his shirt to wear, donned his trousers, and found an oil lamp—for candles were a luxury at present.
In its yellow light and reeking fumes he led her down to the kitchen. There they ransacked the dowager’s remaining travel stores, devised a meal of sorts, and settled down by the vast empty hearth to eat. While they ate, Varian found himself telling her of his own activities. Though the details of patching together his ravaged estate were dreary at
best, mortifying at worst, it was better, he found, to tell her. In trying to shelter Esme from the truth these last months, he’d only made her feel shut out.
Watching her face while he talked, he saw the unhappiness fade, and that eased his own. Later, when they went upstairs together, she thanked him in her own way.
“I am glad you have told me all these things,” she said when they entered the bedchamber. “I like your letters with their amusing stories and clever nonsense, but I wish as well to know your troubles.” She looked up at him. “You never had a wife before, and so you are confused, but I will explain. A wife is not like a concubine, only for amusement and pleasure. A wife is to quarrel with and complain to as well—to ease your heart as well as your body.”
He shut the door. “Very well. Every other letter from now on shall be filled with nothing but my grievances. However, you must do the same. You scarcely write me at all, you know,” he chided.
“Because no one can read my hand. Jason said he could write better with his feet.”
“I have no trouble deciphering. If you want reams of the ugly truth from me, you must provide the same. I shall expect lengthy, detailed epistles from London. You must at least tear yourself away from your flirts long enough to boast of them.”
Frowning, she crept onto the bed. “I did not know I must flirt as well. No one told me. They have taught me to dance and how to eat with twenty different spoons and what to say to this one and that. But no one has taught me to flirt.”
“Not even the all-knowing Percival?” He slipped in beside her and arranged the pillows so they might sit comfortably. “Then it’s a good thing you came to Mount Eden first, my dear. Tonight you shall learn from a master.”
The following day, about the time Lady Brentmor’s carriage left Mount Eden, Sir Gerald Brentmor, sick with anxiety, was pacing his study.
As soon as he’d realized the black queen was under his mother’s roof, he’d offered to go after it. He’d even offered to take the distrustful Ismal with him.
“I beg you not to mistake me for a fool,” Ismal had answered amiably. “It is nearly three days’ journey from London to your mother’s house. You might easily be rid of me on the way, get the queen for yourself, and flee abroad. This would be a stupid and needless risk for me. No, Sir Gerald, you will remain with me in London, and we shall lure the queen to us.”
After a frustrating discussion, Sir Gerald had been obliged to unearth an invitation from Mrs. Stockwell-Hume, his mother’s closest friend. Not only had Ismal imitated her lavish script beautifully, but the forged letter’s contents could not have been better calculated to send the dowager thundering into London forthwith.
It had been futile to remind Ismal there was no assurance the black queen would arrive with her, that for all they knew, Percival or Esme—whichever of them had it—might have buried it in Corfu or in her ladyship’s garden.
“The night of her arrival, we shall have several hours to search thoroughly,” Ismal had replied, “because you will see that all your household lies in drugged slumber. If we do not find the queen, rest assured you will compensate me another way. There are several alternatives, Sir Gerald. All, I regret to say, will prove much more awkward for you than this simple matter of finding the black queen.”
The baronet paused in his pacing to gaze despairingly at the chess set. Rest assured, indeed. He’d blackmailed enough men and women to know extortion never ended. Worse, he feared that even a copy of Bridgeburton’s letter might destroy him. The words alone were damning enough to trigger an investigation…at the end of which he’d hang.
He took out his pocket watch. One o’clock. His mother had written that she’d arrive before nightfall. Time was running out, and he had not yet devised a way to extricate himself from Ismal’s nets. He couldn’t even leave his own house. Every time he’d tried, a huge ugly fellow had promptly appeared in his path. It was no use explaining that one had business appointments. The brute understood no English and spoke only the five words he’d evidently memorized: “You go home now, please.”
The man always appeared, whether it was early morn or the small hours of the night. Sir Gerald had finally given up trying.
With a low moan, he sat down at the chess table. Every night since the first terrifying one, Ismal had slipped into the house when the skeleton staff was in bed. He came for conversation, he’d said. And chess. Every night they’d played, and ever night Ismal had won. He played brilliantly. One could almost believe he could read his opponent’s mind.
Jason had been like that, Sir Gerald remembered. Frighteningly perceptive—except, of course, on one occasion a quarter of a century ago.
But if his ghost was about, he must be laughing now. A fine revenge this would seem to him: six days of purgatory Sir Gerald had endured, and there was hell to come.
Taking up the black queen’s humble substitute, he cursed himself for the moment of panic in which he’d given up the original to Risto. If not for that, the set could have been sold by now, and he’d have at least five thousand pounds to start fresh with abroad.
If he survived this night, he’d have to flee England with next to nothing. His countrymen would soon know him for a criminal, a traitor. The shock would likely kill his mother. Small comfort in that, when he’d never be able to put his hands on her money. The family would be disgraced, and Edenmont as well, having wed into it. Sir Gerald shook his head. Another poor consolation.
Edenmont had been putting on a fine show of saintliness—an obvious ruse to win the dowager over. After denying the modest loan her own son had requested, she’d turned around to throw away a fortune on a mannerless, barbarous little whore of a granddaughter. Oh, Jason in his grave must be delighted. All the trouble Gerald had taken to cut the black sheep out of the family had been for naught. Jason’s offspring—Percival and the little whore, along with her dissolute baron—would get all the dowager’s money.
“Laugh then, you filthy bastard,” Sir Gerald growled. “You always got everything: the looks, the cleverness, the charm. And the women, all of them. You had scores, but you have to have her as well. Even when she was mine, you got to her, and got your bastard on her.”
Low as he’d spoken, the words seemed to echo in the still room. He was talking to himself. Worse, to a dead man.
His hand shaking, Sir Gerald returned the queen to her place. He was not finished yet, he told himself. He’d been a match for his brother when Jason was Ismal’s age. And Jason was burning in hell, where no one laughed but the Devil.
One must be calm, focus on priorities. The highest at present was getting out of this debacle alive.
He sat staring at the chess set, his mind working furiously, until four o’clock when the butler announced that Lady Brentmor’s carriage had arrived.
By five o’clock, the baronet was closeted with his mother in the study.
“Someone will see us,” Percival objected.
Esme glanced about the narrow, walled garden of Sir Gerald’s townhouse. “Not from the outside, unless they can see through walls. And the servants are all busy inside.” She removed her shoes.
“You can’t stand on the ledge. I’ve tried it. You can’t keep your balance. It’s too narrow.”
“I shall keep one foot on your shoulder.”
“You won’t hear any better than we could inside. The window’s closed.”
“Not completely.”
Moving back a few paces, Percival looked up. Though the curtains were drawn, the window was open a very little. With a sigh, he came back to Esme, linked his hands, and bent.
“We will not be caught,” she promised as she accepted the boost up. “You must trust me.”
Ismal had no need to see through walls. He’d only to peer through the narrow slit of the garden gate.
Smiling, he turned to Risto. “She spies upon her uncle and makes his son help her. She entertains me vastly.”
Risto scowled. “It will not be entertaining if she calls attention t
o the open window. What if she demands the chess set be locked up securely?”
“Then Sir Gerald must un-secure it while she sleeps,” his master answered.
“I don’t like it. The old hag brought too many servants with her.”
“And all will partake of a feast as fine as their betters. The greedy ones will sleep very soundly. The others will be too heavy-headed to think or act. We, meanwhile, shall act, quick and silent as death.”
“Second thoughts, indeed,” the dowager said coldly. “You had plenty of chances to be kind to the gel before. But you left ‘em stranded on that godforsaken island and come home and tried to poison my mind against her. Not that I was surprised. You’ve ever resented anything Jason had. You was always jealous of him.”
She had taken over the big chair behind the desk. Sir Gerald stood by the chess table. He’d just raised his wine glass to his mouth. Now he paused. “Jealous, indeed. I wasn’t the one who insisted Papa cut him off. I wasn’t the one who made Diana break off her engagement.”
“I did it for her own good, as the rest was for the good of the family. He’d have dragged us to ruin.”
“You did it to punish him, because your precious baby wanted no part of your plans for him. You thought he’d come crawling back, begging forgiveness, promising to be a good boy. But he didn’t, and now he’s dead. And you’ve learned nothing.”
“I’ve learned dredging up the past don’t mend anything.” Eyeing him with dislike, she took a swallow of wine. “And it won’t win you no favors from me, Gerald.”
He calmly set down his own glass. “I never won a favor from you in my life, though I always did what you wanted. Stayed with the business, while you planned a Parliamentary career and an earl’s daughter for Jason, and stayed with it after he was gone. Stayed with Diana, and had to wed her at last because you didn’t care to do better for me. I even held my tongue through her infidelities—even the most intolerable of all.”
“She was never unfaithful,” the dowager snapped. “You made her wretched, yet she stuck it out, even after I told her she needn’t.”
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