No Other Love

by Candace Camp

  Or perhaps those kisses had simply been his way of proving that he had mastery over her, that he could control her by using her own desire. He had made her respond to him against her will, and what could prove his power more than that? Had his lovemaking been nothing more than a way of getting back at her? That was a lowering thought indeed.

  Even more confusing was the fact that Nicola did not know how she felt about him. She had loved him more than anything, had never given her heart to another man—or even been interested in one. She remembered the way her heart had leapt in her chest this morning when she saw his face and realized that Gil was alive. But the fury that had swept her when she understood that he had let her believe for ten years that he was dead was also branded into her heart and soul, as well as the searing hurt and loss when she saw how low he had rated her love. Could she love a man who thought her capable of such treachery? Was Jack Moore still the man she had loved, or had he changed beyond all recognition?

  She spent a good part of the afternoon on such gloomy considerations, so that it was something of a relief when Perry woke up later, complaining of thirst, and she had something to do besides dwell on unproductive thoughts. She brought him a glass of water and helped him sip it, glad that with him conscious, she could manage to help him raise his head enough to drink without calling Jack for help. The less she saw of Jack, the better.

  After that, she made her way downstairs and dipped out some of the meaty liquid of the stew, which she fed to Perry. It was a slow, tiring process, which required most of her strength to support him as he sipped the soup. It sapped Perry’s strength, as well, for after a few minutes he closed his eyes and slipped back into sleep.

  However, he woke up less than an hour later with a trifle more color in his pale cheeks and a clearer look to his eyes. This time she managed to prop him up on pillows into a half-reclining position, and it was easier then to spoon the fortifying broth down him.

  “No,” he said, when she moved to help him lie back down when he had finished. “Let me stay up a bit. I fancy a little time spent awake.”

  “Good.” Nicola stepped back, pleased. “As long as you don’t exert yourself.”

  “I don’t think I could if I wanted to,” he retorted. “I feel weak as a kitten.”

  “You will get your strength back before long. Don’t fret about it. Resting is the best way to let your body heal itself.”

  “I would say that your work had something to do with it. Jack told me you pulled out the ball.”

  Nicola made a face. “So I did, and no doubt I made a terrible mess of it. I apologize for causing you pain.”

  “I scarcely remember it. One of the benefits, I presume, of lying at death’s door.”

  “I suppose you could call it that.” Nicola smiled. “Well, since you are awake and feeling so well, I shall take the opportunity to change your bandage.” She went over to the small bedside table and began gathering her supplies.

  “Tell me what happened,” Perry said. “With you and Jack, I mean. He told me only that you had seen his face. He’s depressingly closemouthed.”

  Nicola had to smile. “Don’t you know that it’s not polite to pry?”

  “So my mother tried to tell me. Fortunately, I have managed to ignore most of her precepts. One so rarely finds out anything if one doesn’t pry.”

  “There is little to find out in this case. Jack removed his mask, and I saw who he was. I realized that he had let me believe for ten years that he was dead, when all that time he was alive. He also told me that he thought I was a liar, as well as shallow, traitorous, devious and generally wicked.”

  “I see.”

  “I doubt that,” Nicola replied briskly, laying the bandaging and salves on the bed beside him. “You know only what Jack has told you, and since he knows nothing of the reality of it, you cannot, either.”

  “Indeed.” Perry cast a somewhat wary eye upon the materials, but said only, “It had always seemed to me that he had a fairly good grasp of what happened.”

  “No doubt he did—of what happened to him. He sent me a note via his grandmother and the farmer’s child. And Richard, I am sure, showed up and told him those things about me and turned him over to a press gang. Richard is capable of almost anything. However, Jack knows nothing of what I did or thought or knew—because he saw fit to believe the words of a man who tried to kill him, who had him kidnapped.”

  She was untying Perry’s bandage as she spoke, her fingers moving ever more quickly and forcefully as her words grew in anger, until Perry let out a grunt of pain. Nicola glanced down, instantly contrite. “Oh, I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt you. I should not have been talking about Jack. It only makes me angry.”

  She sighed as she removed the pad and bent over to inspect the wound closely before she reapplied her ointments and placed a new pad over it. “Still red, but no pus. I think you are healing nicely, Mr.—”

  “Just call me Perry. I have become unused to more polite forms of address. So you are saying that the things this Richard told Jack were not true? You did not turn the letter over to him and—”

  “Of course not. I never received any letter. If I had, I certainly would not have given it to Richard. I hated the man! I thought he had killed Gil—Jack.” She retied the bandage and set the salve back on the table.

  Perry frowned. “But Jack did not believe him without reason. His grandmother had taken the letter to you. He knew you had it, and then Richard had it. It was not unreasonable to—”

  “Unreasonable? No. Jack was quite reasonable. Anyone who did not love and trust me might have thought the same. Anyone who did love me—indeed, anyone who really knew me—would have known that it was impossible. So you see—I have found out that a great deal of what I have based my life on was false. I thought Gil dead, but he was alive. I thought that he had loved me as much as I loved him, that at least, if I was to be alone all my life, I would have had a great and rare love. But I did not. I gave my heart to a man who did not love or trust me. I have held in my heart for ten years a memory of a love that didn’t really exist.” Tears sparkled in her eyes.

  “No!” Perry said anxiously, reaching toward her. “Do not believe that. Jack loved you. He loved you more than life itself. I know it. I heard how he talked of you. He was devastated.”

  Nicola took the man’s hand and patted it. “Shh. Please, don’t get in a taking. It is not good for you. Let us not talk of this any longer. You need to rest.”

  “Devil take it, but I’m weak!” Perry admitted, falling back against his pillow. His face was paler, and sweat dotted his forehead.

  “Yes. It was only two days ago that I took the ball out of your shoulder. So, please, stay calm. Don’t think about Jack or what happened. Just go back to sleep.”

  He sighed and closed his eyes. “All right. For now. But later…”

  “Yes, later.” Nicola watched as his breathing grew shallower and he slipped back into sleep.

  She sincerely hoped that she would not be here too much later. What she would have liked to do was ride straight back to Tidings right now and hide in the comfort of her bed. She did not want to have to see Jack, and she dreaded having to talk to him. However, she knew that she could not leave just yet. Not only did she have a patient to tend to—who, although obviously improving, was not entirely out of danger yet—but she also had to wait for Jack’s men to return with Nurse.

  Fetching Nurse had, after all, been her excuse to both Deborah and her aunt for leaving their houses. She could not return without her—or, at least, without her refusal. Jack had sent a man with her note to Nurse the night she had taken the ball from Perry’s chest. It would not take a man riding on horseback longer than a day to get to Larchmont, but escorting Nurse back would be another matter. Not only would she travel more slowly, but it would doubtless take her some time to get her affairs in order and to pack, provided, of course, that she decided to come. Nicola could not imagine her arriving before tomorrow evening at the earli
est, which meant that Nicola would have to endure at least another day of being in this house with Jack. All she could hope was that he would try to avoid her as hard as she planned to avoid him.

  Those hopes were dashed later that night, when the door opened and Jack came into the room. Nicola’s eyes went to him immediately, and she felt again the shock of seeing the man she had thought long dead. Her heart bounded, and she knew a quick rush of pleasure at the sight of his face. Following on its heels, of course, came the hurt and anger, the sense of vague humiliation at having been duped. She turned away, looking at Perry’s face.

  Jack stood just inside the door for a moment. “I came to relieve you. I will look after Perry for a while. You go and get some rest.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So am I.” Jack came over to the bed and stood across from her. Nicola avoided his eyes, assiduously studying her hands, linked in her lap.

  “I slept while you were watching Perry, and now it is your turn.”

  “There is no need for you to watch him.”

  “There is no need for you to exhaust yourself, either. What good would you be to him then?” Jack pointed out reasonably.

  “You are right, of course. I shall go lie down.” Nicola stood up, and her eyes slid involuntarily to Jack. He was watching her, and she wondered what he was thinking. Had her words swayed him at all? Or did he still believe her capable of such treachery? Nicola reminded herself that it really did not matter; what was important was that he had not trusted her to begin with.

  She started toward the door. He said her name and started after her, reaching out his hand to take hold of her wrist. Nicola stopped, acutely aware of his nearness. She could not look at him. Memories of their kisses, ten years ago and just the other day, crowded her mind, and it was humiliating to her that she should feel such a jangling rush of emotions for him when he felt so little for her.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said in a low voice, his breath brushing her hair.

  Nicola shivered. “I—I see no reason to. It is clear what you think of me. What else is there to say?”

  She managed to make herself look up into his face. He was only inches from her. His eyes were the same: bright and dark and alive with wit. How could she not have recognized them? She knew with a horrible certainty that if he kissed her, her knees would buckle.

  “We cannot escape what is between us that easily,” he replied.

  “There is nothing between us but pain. And I have no need to feel any more of that. I would like to leave here as soon as possible.”

  Nicola moved around him and walked out the door. She hoped he would never know how much it had cost her to do so.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JACK WATCHED NICOLA WALK AWAY, something hard and heavy forming in the area of his chest. He had been in a turmoil all day. He kept seeing Nicola’s face when he took off his mask, the utter and complete shock that had pervaded her features. He had known she would be startled, but he had not expected her to faint. Then there had been the flash of joy when she opened her eyes and saw him. He remembered the way she had cried out his name and thrown her arms around him, kissing him ecstatically. He thought of the things she had said, the questions she had asked, her initial cry that he was alive. How could any of that have been feigned?

  But if she was not pretending her reaction, that meant that everything he had believed for the past ten years had been wrong. And that was equally impossible. Jack thought about the night when Richard and his men burst into the farmer’s house and dragged him out of bed. He had been asleep, content despite his bruises from being dragged along the stony River Lyd, because he knew that soon Nicola would come to him and they would leave for a new life together.

  Then Richard had stormed in, and all his rosy dreams had come crashing down. Richard had looked at him, his face stamped with contempt. “What? Surprised to see me? Who were you expecting? Miss Falcourt, perhaps?” His laugh was scornful. “Did you really think that she would marry you, you worm? It’s all very well to dally with a peasant, but marriage? I can see her now, living in a hovel, a babe on one hip and another in her belly, sweating over a mess of gruel. You are a fool.”

  “What are you doing here?” Jack had gasped out, dazed and struggling to sit up from where they had thrown him on the ground. “How did you know—”

  “Trifle slow, aren’t you? Good gad, what did Nicola see in you? How do you think I knew? Nicola told me. She showed me your pathetic little letter, driveling on about marrying and going to live in blissful poverty. Thank God she has more sense than you. She knows that she will marry a peer, an equal. It is the life she knows, the life she expects to lead. She would never throw herself away on the likes of you. Of course, when she read your letter, she could see that getting rid of you would be a problem, so she came to me, asking me to send you away. Which is precisely what I intend to do, as I plan to be the peer she marries.”

  Jack remembered the slashing pain that had pierced him at the Earl’s words, worse than any physical pain that Richard’s men had inflicted on him as they tied him and gagged him and tossed him callously in the back of a wagon. At first he had struggled against the truth, refusing to acknowledge that Nicola could have betrayed him. But on the long ride to the port of Plymouth, he had had nothing to do except think about it, and he had realized that Exmoor’s words must be true. How else had Exmoor gotten hold of the letter? He trusted his grandmother implicitly, and she had said that she would take his note to Nicola. She would never have taken it to the Earl. It had to be Nicola who had given it to Exmoor. Denial had gradually settled into despair.

  Despair had turned into anger and hatred for both Exmoor and Nicola. He had survived the ordeal of his enforced service in the British navy by focusing on his determination to somehow make the two of them pay. Even after all the years since he had escaped the cruelty of the naval ship, his hatred had burned fiercely. Becoming a success in the New World had not been enough to satisfy him. He had burned with a desire to inflict actual damage on Exmoor, and so he had returned with Perry and his men to hurt Richard in one of the few ways he could be hurt, by taking his money. His intent with Nicola had been less clear. He had known only that he had to see her again to prove to himself how dead his feelings for her were, how glad he was that she had not agreed to marry him.

  He had been sure he would find her married to some bloated lord, years older than herself and thoroughly obnoxious. Her looks would have faded after ten years and several children. She would be shallow and boring, having turned into a copy of her mother from years of living that way of life. He had not been prepared to find her still beautiful, a little less vibrant, perhaps, with a touch of sadness in her wide gray eyes, but achingly lovely, and neither married nor a typical noblewoman. He had not expected a huge fist of longing to slam into his gut when he first saw her, nor had he thought that images of her would haunt him, both waking and sleeping, distracting him from his purpose.

  He had been unprepared for the jealousy that seared him when he thought she was married to Exmoor, as well as the intense relief that had flooded him when he found out that it was her sister, not she, who was Lady Exmoor. He had been even less ready to deal with the fact that, from the moment he saw her, all he wanted to do was kiss her and caress her, a desire that owed little to revenge and much to simple need. Even worse, he was reluctantly finding that he liked her, just as he had when he first met her. He enjoyed talking to her; he admired the things she did. And now this…

  Burning with desire for her and irritated by his own attraction to a woman he was supposed to hate, it had snapped the last bit of his self-control when he heard her use himself as an excuse for not giving in to passion. She had dared to claim that she was still faithful to her first love, spinning a touching story that he had died—with no mention of the fact that, if so, it had been because she helped send him to his doom. Anger had surged up in him, and he had ripped off his mask. Let her see that the man she held comfortably d
ead was anything but that.

  It was not the way he had planned to reveal his identity, if he ever did. But it certainly had had an effect on Nicola. The only problem was that the effect was not satisfactory. There had been no guilt, no shame, not even an admittance that she had been caught in the middle of a lie. Instead, Nicola had turned it all around on him, leaving him feeling empty and confused and somehow in the wrong.

  She could not be telling the truth. It must have happened the way he had always thought it did. And yet… He could not get out of his mind the look in her eyes when she saw him.

  NICOLA HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING. After two hours, she sighed and got out of bed and dressed again. She would go and sit outside for a while, she thought. No doubt part of her restlessness was due to the fact that she had been cooped up inside this house for so long. There would be enough moonlight that she would be able to see. Wrapping her cloak around her, not bothering to pin her hair up, she moved quietly down the stairs and out the back door.

  The night was quiet and chilly, the woods wrapped in dark silence. She could hear the distant hooting of an owl. Silvery moonlight filtered down through the canopy of the trees. Not far from the back door was the stump of a tree long ago cut down, and after standing for a moment, she walked over to it and sat down.

  There was the scrape of a boot heel behind her, and she jumped up, whirling around, her heart pounding. Jack stood a few feet away from her, his hands in his pockets. The moonlight touched his face, lighting the planes and casting his eyes into shadow. He looked so much the same, yet so different. Nicola wanted to look at that face for hours, to reach out and touch it. She wanted to smooth her thumbs along the sharp lines of his cheekbones, to trace his brows, his lips. She curled her hands into fists, keeping them resolutely by her sides.