“St. James knows of what he is speaking of, Miss Murdock,” Bertie interjected with what he believed to be a reassuring tone.
“Yes. I do,” St. James agreed, unperturbed. “And I should know also, that if one wishes to dispel it, there is nothing better than starting a countering rumor that is, although more respectable, also equally as stimulating.”
Miss Murdock was not following him at all now. She only understood that where he had been adamant in preventing her from going home before, he was now as adamant that she should leave. She grasped the smooth wood of her chair's arms and turned her head to each gentleman as they discussed her problem as if it were no more, now, than the rising and falling of the price of grain.
“You have an idea, St. James?” Bertie asked.
“I do. However, it will not be one to Miss Murdock's liking.”
And she tightened her grip on the chair arms.
St. James looked at her, “We shall have to post the banns, Miss Murdock.”
“Banns?” she asked, her voice faint.
“Your engagement to me. It will have to be announced in tomorrow's papers.”
“Oh, no, milord!” she demurred and rose from her chair. She turned her back to him, then whirled to face him again. “I thought I made it clear! I would sooner have it said I had eloped with Andrew than that I was to marry you!”
Bertie made an exclamation, but in her sudden terror, she could not grasp what he had said.
St. James took his glass again and sipped from it, but his gold eyes never left hers over its rim. She could almost see the great wheels of his mind spinning behind those two blazing eyes, and she began to realize that she was in for the real battle and that the skirmish over whether she was to return home or not had just been the calling to arms. “As bad as all that, Miss Murdock?” he asked.
She waved a hand in agitation even as she felt her face flushing. “Unfair!” she cried. “You can not mean to make me list my reasons when you must be perfectly aware of them by now. I am sure I made it blatantly clear to you by my actions this morning!”
A sudden, startled movement by Lord Tempton brought her attention to him. He was standing up from his chair, and to her amazement, his face was very red. “Ahem,” he coughed. “I shall just wait in the other room!”
Miss Murdock, with a sinking feeling, realized that her words had been quite suggestive. “Oh, sit down!” she snapped at the hapless Bertie. “He was barely conscious, let alone capable of. . .oh, nevermind!”
St. James was laughing. “Yes, yes,” he agreed between his chuckles, “for do you think, Bertie, that I would have survived any display of impropriety without receiving another blow to the cheek? Despite my already grievous condition?”
“Oh, stop it!” she cried, and broke into very unladylike tears. “Can you not see,” she snuffled into her hand, “that you are provoking me again?”
“Indeed, I do see it,” he told her, his voice tender. “And if you can forgive me for not fetching you a handkerchief, you will find one in my top wardrobe drawer.”
Bertie, who never had sat down, got this item for Miss Murdock before she could move for it, and then let himself out the bedroom door to go, Miss Murdock could only assume, to wait below in St. James' study.
“Come sit with me, Lizzie,” St. James persuaded once the door was again closed, “and tell me all of your concerns, and we shall endeavor to come up with something that you can accept.”
“No, no,” she continued to cry. “For I well know what tactics you will choose, and you can not understand—” and she was beside herself with tears and worry, “that what I do is for the best for both of us! Why can you not see it? Why must you insist upon making me wish and want when it can only make me more afraid than I already am? And if the worst does not happen then we will be sentenced to making each other perfectly miserable for the remainder of our lives.”
He threw back the sheet that covered him. His robe fell open to bare his bandaged chest, and he swung his legs around to get out of the bed. His face paled with the effort, but it was so set with determination, that she knew he would sooner pass out than admit that he could not get up from that bed.
She paled herself to see him risking the stitches she had sewn into him. “Oh, stop it! You are going to kill me with worry. How can you torment me this way?” and she went to him, where he remained on the side of the bed, robe open revealing his laced shorts beneath, his head bowed, his right hand clutching his bandage wrapped chest, but his teeth clenched in readiness to continue his effort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I will sit with you, if you will only remain in that bed!”
He raised his head enough to give her a grim smile. “Swearing like a sailor again, Lizzie?”
“You provoke me into it, milord, for even my father could not agitate me to this degree.” Then she knelt in front of him. “Please, I promise I will listen to you if you only stay in your bed and rest.”
He moved his right hand from where it had been holding his chest, laid it along her cheek and his fingers curved to feel the line of her jaw. “You intoxicate me, Lizzie,” he murmured.
“No,” she said, and lowered her eyes. With desperation, she raised her hand to his, where it warmed her face and his fingers caressed beneath the angle of her jaw. He caught her hand in his, held it and began lying back on the bed, his eyes half hooded in twin gold flames, and pulled her with him.
“Come to me, Lizzie.”
Lizzie, in an attempt to keep from falling on him, placed her free hand on the white bandage of his chest, and to her horror she realized that she was in nearly the same position she had been in at the inn, when she had attempted to button his shirt and straighten his cravat. The skirt of her dress was again between his spread legs. She was again leaning with precariousness over him, one of her hands already on his chest. In a motion of either mocking her, or reminding her, or of claiming some promise previously made, he placed her other hand on his chest also and pinned it. His other hand moved up and he held both of her palms captive above his thumping heart. Again she was aware of the movement of his breathing. And the lids of his eyes drew back and his nostrils quivered at her nearness.
Then he buckled both of her trembling arms and she landed with a thump on his chest, her small body laid out along his own. He gave a small groan and she could not discern if it were from his stitches being aggravated or from another reason entirely.
As a cat thrown into water seems to leap out as soon as its feet hit only the surface, she fought to get up. But he wrapped his right arm about her, and his legs, and held her there.
Miss Murdock, shocked and panicking at his most improper actions, raised her head and shoulders and glared down at him.
“As bad as all that, Miss Murdock?” he asked her with teasing lightness, and then his hand moved and she stiffened more in her difficult position. But he only ran it up her back, her neck, and to the ribbon in her hair, and he untied the knot of it with the same adeptness he had shown her once before when he had pinned her hair up.
“Dante,” she choked. A tear dripped from her face and landed on one harsh plain of his pale cheek.
“Shh. Do not argue with me now, Lizzie, for can you not see, can you not feel, that I am too busy to talk?”
She closed her eyes, unable to meet the tender depths of his own, and she felt the dark warmth of his body beneath hers, as hard and tightly strained as she had always sensed it would be. He shifted her, his grip loosening, so that her hips turned until she lay on her side atop him. He pressed her skirted legs up to rest in a bent position along his thighs. Finally, he slipped her head to rest on his shoulder and he turned his head and studied her eyes that had opened wide throughout all this sure maneuvering.
She was more comfortable and less threatened, lying more like a baby than a lover in his arms, even though the most of her body still lay, in fact, upon his. With a little faint but profound sigh, she moved her hand to take his.
He was quiet for a long time a
nd only his right hand moved, coming up to rub through her hair, caressing the back of her head again and again in a slow ritual of comfort that made her heart slow from where it had been quickly beating to a slow tempo that made her feel sluggish in his arms as one on the verge of deep sleep or death.
When he finally spoke, his voice husky, she heard him as someone who has been hypnotized hears the voice of he who cast the spell. “Don't ever be afraid to come to me, Lizzie.”
And without any thought at all, she said, “I won't be.”
“Tell me your concerns, Lizzie, and we shall endeavor to come up with something that you can accept.”
And she smiled a little through her tears that she feared were dampening his chest even through his bandages. “You know my concerns, Dante. There is nothing I can accept that will alleviate them.”
“Can you accept that it is too late for me to walk away from this?” he asked her. “Can you accept that if I live then I am yours, and if we are not married already, I will pursue you until we are?”
“No,” she whispered. “It can not be so. You've only known me for four days. And what is poignant and new to me is only,” and she swallowed, “diverting to you.”
His hand continued its movements through her hair, working through the strands in an endless combing over his fingers.
“Diverting,” he mused, and his voice questioned, pried into his own soul. “No.” And he shifted, kissed the tip of her nose. “Enchanting, I think is a better word. You are enchanting and I am enchanted. I lay in this bed with you and I wish to ravish you, and make your skin glow as bright as your cheeks. I could easily grow drunk on you, for you are like wine in my blood, fine, dark and full. And I curse all the blackness around me that keeps me from courting you and wooing you as you should be, and which, I think, I would enjoy very much,” and he smiled but his eyes seemed in equal measure sad and divine. “And yet, if it were not for all of this, would I have ever known you, Lizzie? And would I have ever loved you as I do?”
His mouth met hers on the end of his words, his lips caressing across hers in faint greeting and she trembled. His lips came again, caressing across in the opposite direction, and she turned her head in following. And he returned his lips to her, and as hers were openly seeking his, he settled his mouth upon her lips at last with finality, and what Miss Murdock had thought had been love before she realized had only been the vague thunder one hears before an oncoming storm.
His mouth was in constant and almost violent motion. It left her lips and widened until he scraped his teeth gently but urgently along her jaw. He moved down her neck and kissed up the point of her chin. His hand tightened in her hair, until he had a knot of it around his fist, and when his body moved so that she was slipped to the bed and he rose over her and onto his elbows, she could not have told when it happened or if she even noticed it. She only knew that her arms wrapped about his neck, as someone clinging to life. And he spoke, hurried, thick murmurings of satisfaction and frustration that were muffled against her skin, in her hair and her neck. And when he reached her ear, she understood what he was saying, “Marry me, Lizzie. Tell me you'll marry me. For if I can not have you soon, God help me but I may as well die.”
With an effort, he pulled back and his gold eyes were above her, demanding answer, demanding she accede, and she did by nodding once, her eyes very large and hart-like. For an instant, he looked pained, as though she were a hart, and he had just pierced her with his oft too often deadly aim. And mayhaps he had a sudden picture of Steven saying 'Da' and his thumb dropping on the hammer, and that brief, eternal silence between the man's words cutting off, God, no, Steven! Say t'isn't you, la—, and the final deathly boom of the gun, like thunder following lightning that had already struck.
Then he lowered his head until his mouth found once again her trusting one and any thoughts or memories were swept into oblivion.
By the time Effington tapped on the door Miss Murdock felt as possessed as any woman ever had in a man's bed, and he had never, in fact, done more than kiss her. Dante, with a curse, raised his head enough to call out in a thick voice, “Another minute, Effington, blast you!”
“No, milord. Pardon me, milord, but you've been in there,” and he coughed, “long enough. Lord Tempton bade me to tell you that he is still waiting. Perhaps you need some help with your attire?”
St. James stared down at Miss Murdock, and he shook his head as if to clear it. “Mayhaps, you are right, Effington. I seem to have lost track of the time. You may go tell Lord Tempton that he may come up and I will speak to him while, yes, you dress me.” Then more softly, he said, “Miss Murdock, if you think we are adequately finished for now?”
She blushed furiously, pushed up so that she was sitting next to him. “As I have agreed to marry you, then you have achieved your objective, milord, so I can not see any point in—”
“But I have not met my entire objective,” he teased. “Ah, I can see you are becoming angry. But unless you wish Effington and Tempton to see you here in my bed, I suggest that you save your ire and tiptoe to the sitting room.”
“I should box your ears for you are insufferable.”
“But if you do that, Miss Murdock, everyone will see that I have been taking liberties with you again,” and he raised his brow. Then he took her hand, kissed the back of it. “Go, Lizzie, before they burst in here and you are left to feel embarrassed, for if either one makes a snide remark to you, I shall have to call him out, and then whatever will I do without my valet or Bertie's keen intellect?”
And she did go, for she realized that he would kill for her (for was that not what St. James was about? Killing for those he loved?) and her heart stopped rather coldly in her chest. She managed to softly close the connecting door behind her and then she heard the outer door opening a mere second later and St. James said with a tone of laziness, “You needn't look so scandalized. I had merely lost track of the time, you know.”
And Miss Murdock, who had been standing numb for that brief few seconds, stumbled over to the chaise lounge and collapsed not upon it, but on the floor beside it. She rested her elbows on the seat of it and her head in her hands, and dwelled on the fact that St. James professed to love her and had indeed convinced her with a great deal of skill that he did.
She gave a soft laugh and then her hands dropped from supporting her face and she cried into the seat of the lounge, her hands clawing at the fabric as she made an effort to restrain her great, gulping, heart-wrenching sobs, for she would rather die than have him hear her crying for no other reason than that he loved her and she was terrified.
Strangely enough, when her sobs subsided to some degree, and the silence in the next room told her that Effington must have in fact dressed St. James and helped him below so that he and Bertie could discuss whatever plans St. James had in mind now while she had been in the midst of her fit, she thought of Lady Lydia.
She certainly was not dense, as Miss Murdock had discovered once before. She had proclaimed it her duty to help Miss Murdock elude the improper attentions of St. James, and spreading the rumor that Miss Murdock and her son had eloped must have seemed the perfect way to go about it.
But at the dreadful blow to Andrew's reputation? No. Miss Murdock could not believe that Lady Lydia would warrant any crisis serious enough to sacrifice her son, not for Miss Murdock's virtue or anything else.
So, in the end, Miss Murdock concluded, she must be a great feather-brain, after all, and all that had come about had only been because of Lady Lydia's foolishness and not from any cunning plan to save Miss Murdock from a Fate Worse than Death.
Chapter Twenty-one
At some point, Miss Murdock's mind and indeed, probably her heart, just refused to dwell on all the horrible possibilities that her active imagination could create for it any longer, and with her head still bowed on her arms, she dozed there resting on the damp seat of the chaise lounge.
She awoke with a start sometime later, but she was not disoriented as she
had been before for it felt as though she had not slept at all, but had spent the entire time running. She was certain that St. James had been in her dreams but whether she had been running toward him or away from him, she could not be certain. In some manner, it seemed she had been doing both things at the same time, which only showed how curious dreams could be, for that was quite impossible.
She got up from the floor, her knees stiff for the room had grown chilly and the fire in the fireplace had burned low. Her first instinct was to go to the connecting door. Opening it, she noted that the room was indeed empty, and in all honesty, she felt nothing but relief, for she felt if she had to face St. James again at this minute, or even Bertie or Effington, that it would be the final straw and it would kill her.
She noticed a pile of clothing in the chair, and another tray of food had been left for her. The curtains were drawn closed and the fire was not as low as the one in the sitting room, showing that someone had attended to it recently. She investigated the food, ate so mindlessly that after it was gone, she was not even sure what she had eaten. She stared at her plate, saw that it had been something with gravy, and the empty bowl beside it seemed to indicate some manner of soup, but there was not even any lingering taste in her mouth to give her a clue. Her mouth was only dry.
The fire crackled and the shadows of it danced across the walls, the furniture and the now neatly made bed. And if she did not know any better, she could believe that nothing had happened to St. James the night before, for there was nothing out of place to indicate otherwise. Except for her own presence, of course.
She sighed and rose from where she had sat at the secretary to dine and again noticed the clothing in the chair. The amount of material that was neatly folded seemed to indicate something other than a man's attire, and she went to it, saw that it was, indeed, a splendid riding habit. It was black, as Effington had followed St. James' direction on procuring something dark, but it was also a very fine, gleaming silk which made her smile for the first time since she had awakened. And although it would not really suit her coloring, it did suit her mood.
In the Brief Eternal Silence Page 39