by Kay Hooper
For the first time in his life, he was wishing another man dead, and it was an effort to keep the grinding emotion out of his voice. “You don’t have to worry about Drummond; he’s halfway to Norfolk by now.”
“Norfolk?” Julia watched him get the tether block from the buggy and tie her horse. She felt bewildered. “How do you know he’s going there?”
“He and some friends of his stopped by here hours ago, and that’s where they were headed. Didn’t you know?”
She didn’t. It was so like Adrian, she thought, to say nothing to her about a daylong trip; he preferred her to believe he was always near.
Cyrus took her arm and led her away from the buggies. He had been sitting among the clutter of lumber, brooding, when she’d driven up, and now guided her there. It was hardly cool even under the spreading oak, but at least the force of the sunlight was deflected and the lumber provided a place for her to sit. He folded his coat to make a cushion for her.
“I can’t—”
“Sit down, Julia.”
She sent him a glance and obeyed, saying only, “Your coat will be ruined.”
“It isn’t important.” He reached into a bucket on another stack of lumber near Julia and pulled out a dark bottle. “Most of the ice has melted,” he commented, “but this should still be fairly cool.” He opened it and handed the bottle to her.
“Thank you,” she murmured. It was fruit juice, and it was cool. She drank a little, feeling tense. They were too alone out here. And he was frowning, obviously not happy with his thoughts. Had she made him angry? Hesitantly, she said, “I’m sorry if I intruded.”
He looked at her, and the frown faded as he smiled. “You could never do that.” He was leaning back against the lumber no more than a couple of feet away from her, his arms crossed over his powerful chest, and his gaze was very intent on her.
She couldn’t guess what he was thinking. Those eyes…they were so relentlessly black, they gave away very little of his emotions. Desire kindled a dark fire in them, amusement made them laugh, and anger made them fierce, but whatever else he felt remained enigmatic, hidden in the liquid ebony depths. At least with her.
Julia was even more conscious of the heat when he looked at her, more conscious of him, and she glanced away nervously. “I suppose Helen must have given the wrong directions, or my butler could have misremembered them. I really should try to find Lissa.”
“She’s with friends, you said. They’ll take care of her.” His tone was reassuring.
“Yes, but, if she sent for me…”
Cyrus wondered if she had, but didn’t question aloud. He had a strong and strangely painful feeling Julia would never be able to confirm that Lissa’s friend had sent any message at all. But he couldn’t tell her so. Julia was already disturbed; he didn’t like to think of how she’d react if he told her he thought she’d been deliberately sent out here. If she had received the message when it had been delivered, she would have arrived just about the same time Drummond had stopped by—and even the most indulgent of husbands might be forgiven a twinge of suspicion when his wife turned up in this out-of-the-way place with an excuse that couldn’t be proven.
Especially when the place was a lonely construction site where a reputed scoundrel was building a house.
He wondered who could be suspecting she was unfaithful to Drummond or wanting it to look that way. It had to be someone who would have known Drummond meant to pass this way today, and when. Any number of people might have been aware of the information, he supposed. Except for Julia, who had been surprised at the knowledge.
“Lissa will be fine, Julia,” he said at last.
“You can’t know that.”
“Yes, I can,” he said absently, occupied with his thoughts. And he didn’t like any of them. If someone had gone to all the trouble to arrange this, the malicious intent was obvious. Had that person meant to hurt Julia, or simply to take the carelessly arrogant Drummond down a peg or two by planting the idea his young wife could betray him? He was certainly rabid on the subject of unfaithful wives or, at least, children sired by lovers instead of husbands.
Julia felt peculiarly reassured, though she couldn’t have said why. Searching for a casual subject to discuss, she said finally, “You’re building a new house?”
“Yes.” He pushed the thoughts out of his head because there was no way to find the answers now. And he didn’t want to squander his time with Julia; very little would be granted to him, he thought. She belonged to another man, and whatever she felt for her husband, the marriage, at least, was one she was all too conscious of—and had made him conscious of as well. “The city’s becoming too crowded for my taste.”
“I always loved the country,” she said with a fleeting smile so sweet and shyly unlike her social mask, it nearly stopped his heart. “We lived in the country when I was a child. But Papa needed to be closer to the city because of his business affairs.”
“He and your mother were killed in an accident, weren’t they?” Cyrus asked, needing to know more about her than the facts he’d uncovered. “A little over two years ago?”
Julia was surprised that he knew about her parents’ deaths. “Yes, they were. It was—they were on a boat, on the river. No one knows why it went down.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought up a painful memory.”
She managed another smile. “It’s all right.”
Cyrus hadn’t intended to bring up any subject likely to trouble her, but heard himself say, “You married Drummond two years ago.” He couldn’t leave the subject alone, no matter how good his intentions were.
She looked away. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I told you I wouldn’t discuss my marriage.” She was staring off toward the house, expressionless. “I meant what I said.”
“Julia, I have to understand.” He sat down beside her on the stack of lumber, half turned so he could look at her. He knew he was pushing again, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to banish the look of fear that so often shadowed her lovely eyes, and he couldn’t until he found out why she was so afraid.
There was another reason, he knew. A more selfish reason. He wanted her. She’d never been entirely out of his mind since the first time he’d seen her, and her refusal to accord him anything but social pleasantries was maddening. He hadn’t felt even a glimmer of interest in another woman after he’d met her; it was Julia he wanted, Julia he needed in some way he couldn’t even define, some way apart from the physical desire for her that ached in him.
She set the bottle of juice aside and laced her fingers tightly together in her lap, still not meeting his gaze. “There’s nothing to understand.”
“Don’t lie to me.” He didn’t realize he’d spoken so harshly until she flinched, and that tiny indication of alarm went through him like a knife. He reached over quickly to cover her tense hands with one of his own, and made a conscious effort to hold his voice low and steady. “I’d never hurt you, Julia. It’s just that I can’t stand seeing you afraid, and I have to understand why you are. Is it Adrian? Does he threaten you? Has he hurt you?”
“I won’t discuss my marriage.” She turned her face completely away from him, her entire body rigid.
Cyrus was determined to get his answers this time. He looked at the fragile nape of her neck and told himself he had to find a way of winning her trust. He was concentrating on the problem so intensely that, for a moment, he didn’t realize what he was seeing. She was wearing a high-necked blouse with a tie, so there was little flesh visible, but just below her hairline behind her left ear was a faint mark paler than the surrounding skin, like a—
He reached up and hooked a finger under the high neckline, pulling the material away from her neck slightly. She started and made a muted sound, but Cyrus barely heard it. The scar was nearly as wide as his finger and angled down the back of her neck to disappear beneath the white linen.
He was very still for a long moment, staring, something insi
de his chest tightening with a slow pressure so intense it felt as if the breath were being crushed out of him. Then he untied her tie and cast it aside. His hands were shaking as he grasped her shoulders and gently turned her so her back was to him.
“No! Don’t!” She tried to pull away.
“Be still, Julia.” His voice was very soft, hardly more than a whisper.
She wanted to run from him, to hide herself away where he’d never find her. She didn’t want him to see, to know. Not him. Fear, shame, guilt, the remnants of her pride, all tangled together in a painful jumble inside her. But his voice held her more surely than his hands, and when he began unbuttoning the high neckline of her blouse she remained motionless, her head bent. She stared blindly at nothing, feeling every touch of his fingers as he unfastened the tiny buttons all the way down to her waist. Then she closed her eyes, her lips trembling, when he drew the edges of her blouse apart.
She heard an odd sound, a hoarse rumble like the growl of some creature in the night, and his voice sounded choked when he said, “Oh, my God.”
Her frozen stillness shattered, she reached one hand back over her shoulder in a pathetic attempt to cover herself again, a shudder racking her body. But his arms closed around her, drawing her back against the hardness of his chest, and his embrace was so gentle and protective she wanted to weep.
Cyrus couldn’t believe it. When he’d asked if Drummond had hurt her, he had thought her husband might have slapped her or treated her roughly. That kind of brutality would have been bad enough, but this— How any man could hurt a woman as Julia had been hurt was beyond Cyrus’s comprehension, but what he had seen when he’d opened her blouse was a sight so starkly vicious he knew he would never forget it. Even when he closed his eyes the image wouldn’t leave him.
He hadn’t seen it all; he felt the sickening certainty of that. Above the lace-trimmed edging of her chemise, very little of her back and shoulders had been bare to his gaze. But it was enough. Thin, pale scars—God, so many of them!—marked her creamy flesh with the pitiless imprint of a horsewhip or some other kind of monstrous lash, overlaid by more recent, half-healed welts that were the wider marks of a belt or strap. And there were tiny crescents, gouges in her skin that might have been made by the heavy blows of a buckle—or a ring on a driving fist.
Drummond wore a heavy gold signet ring, Cyrus remembered, and a black fury stronger than anything he’d ever felt in his life twisted inside him. He thought of Julia, so young and frightened, her body small and delicate, unable to defend herself against the strength of a man. He thought of her in an agony that must have been more than physical as the man who’d vowed before God to love and cherish her had brutally scarred her body and soul.
Burning in hell was too good for the bastard. Cyrus wanted him to suffer now.
Julia could feel tremors rippling through his big, powerful body as he held her silently, feel the hard tension in his jaw as it rubbed slowly against her temple, and she understood, with a wounded animal’s bitterly learned awareness, that he was so deeply angry he literally couldn’t speak. That anger made her apprehensive, but she was surprised by it as well, and a little bewildered. Until then, she hadn’t thought that a man could feel both tenderness and rage in the same moment.
She couldn’t believe it was possible. His kindness had to exist only in her imagination. “Please let me go,” she whispered, rigid in his gentle embrace. She wanted to find some defense against him, and felt helpless. It was all she could do to hold her body stiff when it wanted to relax against his and accept a comfort her mind didn’t trust. He knew the secret of her life, knew what no one outside her bedroom could ever have guessed, and she had a confused idea that this was a greater betrayal of her husband than infidelity could ever be.
“Julia…” His voice was a low rasp, as if it hurt his throat to speak at all. “You have to leave him. He’s an animal, you can’t stay with him.”
She swallowed hard and repeated, “Please let me go.”
His arms tightened a little, and then Cyrus slowly released her. She was painfully conscious of him behind her and of her unbuttoned blouse. She was shivering despite the heat, her emotions in turmoil.
“Julia—”
“My…my blouse. Could you—?” The sheer unseemliness of the entire scene struck her, and she clamped her teeth together to hold back a wild sound of despair. Unseemly? Dear God, what was the sense of worrying about propriety now?
He swore, so softly she barely heard him, then silently buttoned her blouse. She leaned down to pick up the tie he’d dropped to the ground and put it back in place, her fingers shaking. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t dare to meet his eyes.
“You can’t stay with him,” Cyrus said, a little roughly now.
She rose to her feet and then went still, because he’d gotten up as well and towered over her. “He’s my husband,” she murmured, refusing to meet those black eyes.
Cyrus grasped her shoulders. “Look at me, Julia.”
“No,” she whispered, more a plea than a refusal.
He surrounded her face with one big hand, gently pushing her chin up. “I said, look at me.”
She flinched a little at the soft, fierce command and instantly obeyed. She thought his face was unnaturally pale and curiously hard, as if all the flesh had been stretched tightly over the bones beneath. And his eyes…so dark, for the first time nakedly expressive and filled with an incredible gentleness she didn’t believe. She had the mad notion that there was safety in his eyes, and peace, and caring.
“Leave him. Come to me,” he said.
“No.” She didn’t believe what she saw in him was real.
“Julia, I won’t let him hurt you anymore.”
He didn’t know Adrian, she thought wearily, if he believed that. There were so many ways to be hurt. There was Lissa to fear for. Even if Cyrus could—and would—protect both her and Lissa, even if he wouldn’t hurt her as Adrian had, and even if she could bear the public and private shame of leaving her husband for another man, what would she do when he tired of her? Men tired of mistresses, she’d heard.
“I won’t leave my husband,” she said quietly.
Cyrus swore under his breath again and pulled her into his arms, holding her so close that her breasts were pressed to his broad chest. Before she could do more than gasp, his mouth covered hers.
If he had been the slightest bit rough with her, she might have been able to fight the instant, bewildering response of her body to his desire. But the powerful arms holding her, though hard and curiously inescapable, were also gentle, and his warm lips moved on hers with a hunger tempered by tenderness. When he held her and touched her this way, her body had no memory of pain and her mind forgot even the last shred of reason.
She couldn’t fight him. Or herself. Her mouth opened to him, her body molded itself against his, and her arms rose of their own volition to slide around his lean waist. A wave of heat that had nothing to do with the summer day washed over her, bringing all her senses so vibrantly alive, it was as if she had never felt before.
She was less aware of the differences between their bodies than she was of the rightness of how they fit together, as if all the contrasts had been designed specifically for this passionate contact. There was pleasure and excitement stirring to life inside her, a primitive and unfamiliar urgency she didn’t understand, and a growing need to give herself to him that was almost a compulsion. She had the strangely certain feeling she already belonged to him, and if any man had the right to claim her, it was Cyrus.
“God, Julia,” he muttered against her mouth. One big hand slid up her back and cupped her head as his other arm drew her even closer, and he deepened the kiss with a surge of desire so intense she actually jerked at the shock of it. Her breasts ached as they were pressed to his hard chest, and somewhere deep in her belly she was suddenly conscious of a throbbing emptiness. Fire inside her, molten in her veins and licking along her nerves until they felt seared and raw with a
pleasure so acute it bordered on pain. A muted whimper caught in her throat and her hands clutched at his back almost desperately.
The strength of her own response was so stunning it brought her at least partway to her senses. She couldn’t believe this was possible, couldn’t believe it was any more real than the intense emotions she’d seen in his black eyes. Seduction…But that was it, wasn’t it? He had a power over her she never would have thought any man could have, and with that influence he would compel her to do as he wanted.
His methods were different from Adrian’s, but the result would be the same. One man controlled her mind through pain and fear; the other sought to seduce her mind by seducing her body. What she wanted counted for nothing.
“No, please,” she whispered when his mouth left hers to feather over her upturned face.
“I want you so much, Julia,” he said thickly. “And you want me. You can’t deny that.”
She was shaking with the desire he’d brought to life in her body and knew he felt it, knew she couldn’t deny the painful truth. She couldn’t force her arms to fall away from him, or struggle to free herself from his embrace. So she clung to the only protest she could make, the only fact that was indisputably real. “I’m married!”
Cyrus lifted his head and stared down at her, his gaze fierce. “To a man who beats you! He might have married you in a church, but he broke his vows to you and God a long time ago. You owe him nothing. Julia, no one would blame you for leaving him.”
“I can’t.”
“Come to me. I’ll take care of you.”
A chill trickled along her spine, and she finally found the will to put her hands against his chest and push herself back away from him. He let her withdraw only far enough to put an arm’s length between them, his hands on her shoulders preventing her from completely escaping him.
“That’s what Adrian said,” she murmured.
For a moment Cyrus was so stunned by the comparison that his first emotion was sheer, incredulous rage. How could she liken him to the sadistic monster she’d married? Then he saw the blind look in her beautiful, wounded eyes, and for the first time he had some real understanding of how deep her scars went.