Instead, after the evening meal, Ned’s houseguests had disappeared, and Ned had made his own way to the library. He’d gone there because the room seemed safe—an empty cavern of bookshelves and shadowed furniture, lit only by a lamp on a low table and the orange light of a fire.
But as he stepped inside, he realized he wasn’t alone.
“Carhart.”
Ned heard the deep voice before he made out the dark silhouette slouching in a chair before the fire. The boughs had burned almost to coal; only a dim glow came from the grate. A glass of port, filled knuckle-high, sat on a little table beside Harcroft. Knowing the man, he’d likely scarcely touched it.
“Come,” Harcroft said. “Join me in a glass.”
Not a chance. His lip curled in awkward distaste.
Even though Ned hadn’t said a word, Harcroft must have caught his meaning. The man swiveled in his chair to look Ned in the eyes. The look they exchanged was rooted in a years-old memory, dredged from their respective youths. They’d both been at Cambridge. One evening they’d shared one too many bottles of claret. It had been during one of Ned’s bad periods—just before he was sent down for sheer listlessness. The spirits he’d imbibed that night hadn’t cured whatever it was that ailed him. Instead, on that evening, he and Harcroft had ended up getting bloody drunk.
After what Ned was sure was only the fourth bottle of wine, and Harcroft insisted was the sixth, they’d engaged in an activity that no self-respecting men would ever admit to—they had talked about their feelings. At length.
Ned still got the shivers just thinking about that night.
“A very tiny glass,” he said, holding up his fingers. “Just to hold.”
“Just so.” Harcroft’s lip quirked in understanding—and possibly in memory. He stood and walked to the decanter on the sideboard and poured Ned the barest slug of tawny liquid.
Ned took the glass and seated himself in the chair opposite Harcroft. They stared into the fire.
It was easier than looking Harcroft in the eye. Even drunk, they’d instinctively avoided direct discussion of any topics so squishy and laden with emotion as the ones that had most bothered Ned. But aside from the Marchioness of Blakely, Harcroft was the only person who knew even a hint about what ailed Ned.
That night, he’d made his veiled, maudlin confession. He had told Harcroft that he feared there was something wrong with him, something irretrievably different. Harcroft, who had been similarly drunk, had admitted the same was true for him. They’d talked around the issue, of course; even soused, Ned was not so stupid as to complain about a bewildering and inexplicable sadness that sometimes came over him. Harcroft, too, hadn’t described what happened. Instead, they’d called it a thing, an accident. That night, it had seemed a separate beast. They had drunk to its demise.
Drinking hadn’t killed it.
Instead, Ned remembered the conversation as a dim, drunken mistake. Mutual confession hadn’t brought them closer; instead, Ned had wanted to scrub all memory of that conversation from his mind. Harcroft had been a good friend, before; after, Ned had wanted to stay very, very far from the man, as if he had been the source of contagion. As if speaking about the thing that afflicted him had somehow made it more real.
The fire crackled in front of them, and Ned shook his head.
“What was it like?” Harcroft fingered his glass of port. If he’d done more than wet his lips tonight, the level of liquid in the glass didn’t show it. Since the evening of the mawkish confessions, Harcroft, too, had scarcely touched spirits. He’d barely sipped his wedding toast.
“What was what like?” Ned asked uneasily.
“China.”
A safe enough topic. So it might have seemed, were Ned’s journey not so inextricably bound with the subject of their conversation on that night. He set his own glass aside and shut his eyes. Images flashed through his head—high green hills rising steeply out of the clear blue glass of the ocean, vegetation choking every inch of land; humid heat and the overpowering stench of human waste; the glint of water off polished steel, the sun hot overhead; and then, once he’d left Hong Kong, the delta of the Pearl River, obscured by the acrid smoke of cannon fire.
This evening, Ned had no desire to delve into those feelings. Not at any length at all.
Hot was finally the word Ned settled upon. “So hot you sweat buckets, and so damned humid those buckets never evaporate. I was wringing sweat from my coat half the time.”
“Ha. Sounds uncivilized.” Harcroft stretched out and hooked his feet on another chair, pulling it closer to use as a footrest. The fire snapped again, and a small draft brought the smell of woodsmoke to Ned. The faint scent seemed an echo of those sulfurous clouds of gunpowder in Ned’s memory.
“If civilization is waltzes and twelve-piece orchestras playing in gilt-edged drawing rooms, then, yes. It was uncivilized.” With his eyes still closed, Ned could feel the soft swell of water rising underneath his feet. A small smile played across his lips.
“What else might civilization be?” Harcroft’s voice was amused.
In Ned’s mind, a ragged breath of low mist obscured the mouth of the river—no mere cloud of water vapor, but smoke, acrid and sulfurous. Shredded remnants of cannon fire.
“I think we carry our civilization inside us,” Ned said carefully. “And our savagery. I suspect it takes very little for anyone to switch from one to the other. Whether you happen to be British or Chinese.”
“Blasphemy,” Harcroft said with very little heat. “Treason, at least.”
“Truth.” Ned opened his eyes and glanced at Harcroft.
The man had folded his hands around his glass. He stared into the liquid, as if he could discern all civilization in its golden depths. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “Is your savagery so close to the surface, then?”
This was coming rather too close to that drunken conversation.
As for savagery… Before he’d trekked halfway round the world, the word savage had connoted all kinds of strange and different things: cannibalism and half-clothed women. After, he thought more of Captain Adams. Or that acrid bank of mist, rising over rubble. Or the dens where the opium-eaters retreated, to escape a world they did not dare remember.
“My savagery?” Ned asked. “That’s rather the wrong word for it.” Savagery also entailed action, and for Ned, the dark times that visited him were quite the opposite of action. He’d never wanted to eat anyone’s flesh or murder anyone’s mother. At his very worst, what he’d wanted more than anything was simply to…stop. Sometimes he still wanted to stop; the only difference was, now he’d learned not to.
Ned blinked, and the firelight caught his port, the light glinting off it like steel, flashing the hot sun against water.
Harcroft simply stared into the fire. “It’s not savagery to teach someone a lesson. To show someone his rightful place in the world. Sometimes you need a show of strength to demonstrate that rules are not to be trifled with. You may call desire for order and dominance in yourself savagery, but we both know the truth. It’s the way of the world.”
“But one can go too far,” Ned interjected. “We’re the ones who continue to insist on our right to poison the Chinese with opium. We’ve killed women and children. One doesn’t need to commit savagery to show strength.”
“Sometimes these things happen by…by accident.” There was something strangely earnest about Harcroft’s tone, and he looked away, an oddly rigid set to his jaw.
“You call those things accidents?”
“Sometimes, you know—I suppose I can understand how it all starts. The beast just grabs you by the throat, and before you know it…” Harcroft looked up and met Ned’s eyes. “Well. You know.” Ned did know—at least, he knew how it happened for himself. But he had learned how to control his responses, how to pretend that he was like everyone else. But then, neither of them was soused enough to tell the full truth, and so Ned had no idea what Harcroft intended.
“I know th
at you need to be ready,” Ned said. “You need to be stronger, better than it, so that the next time it reaches out with cold fingers, you are faster than it, and it can’t touch you.”
Harcroft looked into Ned’s eyes for a very long time. Finally he looked away. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Of course.” The wood on the fire crackled, and a log fell. Sparks flew up.
“As we’re done talking about China, how do you find England, by comparison?”
Gray. Rainy. Even the birds sounded different. He had come home, but every aspect of that home had been rendered foreign in his absence. Even his wife. Especially his wife.
“I find England cold,” Ned finally said. “Damnably cold.”
THE NIGHT HAD BECOME even colder by the time Ned waved his valet away. After the servants left, he carefully snuffed the fire they’d started in the grate. He didn’t want the warmth. The chill kept his mind sharp.
Only a single candle on a chest of drawers cast a little light. Now yellow light fell on the door that connected his room to the room where his wife slept. Without asking, the servants had put him up in the master’s quarters; even the architecture seemed to think a marital visit was a foregone conclusion.
Any other man would not have needed to think any farther than that. Kate was his wife; and she was willing—if grudgingly so. She was also damnably arousing. There was no reason not to take her, then—no reason that would have signified for any other man.
Ned set his jaw and walked to the connecting door. He had been expecting a rusty squeak—some resistance to signify that this door had remained closed for years. But it opened easily. Some servant with no sense of the symbolic had kept the hinges well-oiled during the years of his absence, as if their marital life had merely been cast into temporary abeyance.
Her curtains were pulled back, and the moon cast a shimmery light along the floor, highlighting a path that led to her bed. Her seated silhouette was outlined in silvered clarity. Her slender limbs were drawn up in front of her; her arms were clasped about her knees. He could see the delicate arch of her foot, peeking out from underneath a white chemise.
She turned abruptly at the sound of the door. “My God, Ned. You nearly scared me out of my skin.”
Aside from that long fall of muslin, it appeared that skin was essentially all she was wearing. His mouth dried.
It had been a long time. And damn, he wanted her. He wanted to claim the curves that lay under that fabric. He wanted to cross the room in one bound and press her against the feather tick. Desire coursed through him, pounding in his ears as powerfully as a flooding river, pulling all his good intentions downstream.
She pushed her legs out in front of her, exposing a smooth curve from foot to calf. Her feet flexed, pointed, and then she stood in one graceful movement. The moonlight rendered the white stuff of her shift translucent. He could see the curve of her waist through that thin fabric. His hands yearned to touch her.
She’s yours. You might as well take her.
She frowned at him. “You’re wearing a surprising amount of clothing.”
“I am? I hadn’t realized.” The thick fabric of his trousers was the only protection he had, the armor behind which he could hide the truth of his physical response. He’d been erect since he’d walked in the room.
He didn’t move forward. Instead, he concentrated on the rise and fall of his breath. He was in control, not his pounding desire. Not his fevered imagination. He was in control. He wasn’t a savage.
But then she moved toward him. The gown rippled about her, fading into translucence where the light from the moon shone through. She set her hands on her hips—a movement that only cinched the fabric about that gentle curve. The material slid against her skin in a soft whisper. It was a challenge she issued him, even if she didn’t know it yet.
“Really, Ned. How hard can this be?”
“Excruciatingly hard.” And long. And thick.
“Well,” Kate said, “I’m your wife. We both know how to proceed from here.” She let out a hard-put-upon sigh. “Can we just get this over with? I won’t protest.”
She promised not to protest in the ill-used tones of a servant, agreeing to shovel manure. But even with so little encouragement, Ned went from hard to rigid. His rationality was shredding around him. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“It doesn’t work?” She glanced down in surprise. “I see. Your years abroad did change you. It never had a problem working before.”
It stiffened upon being so directly addressed. For a second, he berated himself for not changing from trousers to a loose robe, one that would hide it. “It works. Trust me. If you waved your hand about, you could verify that it is working right now.”
She reached out, and he caught her fingers before they could explore the depth—or rather, the length—of his attraction.
“That was a rhetorical device.” Her hand fluttered in his. “Not an invitation. Not twelve hours ago, you were telling me you didn’t need anything as complicated as a love affair.”
“Goodness.” She pulled her hand from his grip and shook her fingers. “We’re married. It would hardly be a love affair. It’s not as if you need to seduce me. No other man has such scruples.”
No doubt. Most of Ned’s peers thought that “scruples” meant that a man took pains to keep his mistress far from his wife. One demonstrated scruples by taking out subscriptions to charity, by supporting the parish’s poor. Scruples were inconveniences, to be set aside in the dark of night when a woman whispered that she was willing.
“That’s the thing.” The words scraped harshly in Ned’s throat. “You see, I don’t want to be just any man. I intend to be better.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m quite sure of it. You’re better. And longer. You forget, I’ve spent three years here, with gentlemen clamoring to seduce me. It’s just your luck that I don’t need sweet nothings to succumb tonight.”
“Kate, I know I’ve made mistakes these last years. Hell, the only reason we married was because I made a mistake.”
Her chin lifted at that. “You arrogant…arrogant…” Her mouth worked.
No doubt, Ned thought, the phrase she was searching for was son of a bitch. He wanted to hear those vulgar syllables delivered in the perfect tones of a duke’s daughter. But alas. Her ladylike vocabulary failed her.
“Arrogant cad,” she finished. “We married because I said yes.”
“I convinced you to meet me alone. We were caught together because I—”
“I met you alone, Ned. Why on earth do you suppose I did that?”
A sense of unease grew in him. He shook his head, starting over. “It was a marriage of convenience, and—”
“Oh, do be quiet,” she snapped. “I was raised to be practical about marriage, Ned. I don’t need a declaration of love. I don’t want you to swear your undying affection, and if you did, I wouldn’t believe it, anyway. I just want—” She cut herself off, and then turned around. Her hair spun with her, pale gold decorating her shoulders.
“You want what?”
She looked at him over her shoulder. In that instant—even with the dark of night shielding her expression from his eyes—he guessed at the truth. He didn’t want her to answer. He didn’t want to hear whatever it was she was about to say.
“You,” she said quietly. “I just want you.”
He could hear three years of hurt echo in her voice, and he shifted from one foot to the next.
“It wasn’t all about convenience,” she said softly. “I married—”
“You married a scrawny little mister,” Ned said dryly. “An arrogant cad.” And, apparently, a bigger son of a bitch than Ned had realized.
She smiled faintly at that.
“Well. Yes.”
“You’ve never asked me for much.” The only time she’d ever asked him for anything was when she had asked him not to leave. He hadn’t listened then.
Matters had become bad around here. She accepted Harcroft’s sligh
ts so easily. She was willing to submit to Ned—and God, what an image the thought of her sweet submission still made—even though he’d hurt her. She accepted that she was to have nothing from this marriage but dry dust.
Had he made them that bad?
Ned was afraid he had.
“Just come to my bed,” she said with an exhale.
If he had been any other man, he might have done so. He wanted the taste of her badly enough to do it. But then, even though she’d never asked him for anything, he could hear the entreaty in her voice. No matter what she said, she didn’t deserve an emotionless coupling in the dark.
Other men might set their scruples aside after nightfall and then take them up again in the morning. But Ned was laboring under another burden. When he let his control lapse, he’d found himself slipping down into darkness.
No. He couldn’t be just any man. He had to be better, stronger and more in control. After he’d hurt her, he owed her more than a few minutes with his trousers bunched at his ankles.
“When I take you again, Kate, you won’t be offering yourself to me out of a sense of duty or obligation or whatever this happens to be.” He slid a finger under her chin.
She shivered under his touch and took a step back.
“You won’t flinch when I touch you. And you won’t tell me it’s not a love affair. You won’t ever tell me that.”
More important, he would have control over himself—control over the inexorable wants that she brought up in him. He would be able to trust himself around her, trust that this time, he would not go careening off into the abyss again.
She looked up at him, the gray of her eyes silver in the moonlight. Her lips were parted. She didn’t say a word; she just stared at him, a strange combination of innocence and seduction, desire and hurt wafting off her. She drew him as strongly as any siren would have, and without any notion of the rocks that waited to dash him to pieces if he were to give in.
He pulled his finger from her chin and rubbed it surreptitiously against his trousers. “You told me earlier that our marriage might dry up and blow away in one great gust. If a little wind could do us in, what do you suppose would happen if I just used you?”
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