Only when he had tripled his purse and dulled his mind had he felt himself calmed enough to return home, return to his steady wooing of his wife.
There was a soft glow from the library and Marcus made his way there, curious. The door was ajar, the lit candelabra creating eerie shadows in the corners of the room. He pushed the door open.
The room was cold and smelled of whisky. On the far side of the room, curled up on the seat beneath a window frosted from the night air, was Natasha. Her hair streamed down her shoulders and she stared at him with those wide-set eyes. He shivered at the intensity of her gaze.
Then she smirked, resting her head back against the seat, and he found himself watching the small movements of the pale, arched line of her neck.
“Would you like some?” she asked, her words slurring as she held up the near empty glass in her left hand.
She was drunk…and she was charming, elegant, the way her hand swayed through the air. He remembered the last time he had seen her this way, tipsy after they had lost themselves in two bottles of champagne. He had carried her from the carriage into the house and made love to her on the plush carpet in the entryway. They had awoken, hours later, uncomfortable and cold, so he had carried her to bed and made love to her all over again.
“What, did you drown yourself in a bottle of Scotch?” he teased, coming closer, reaching for the glass. He sat close to her on the edge of the window seat. She burned with the drink despite the chilled room. He placed the glass on the floor.
She still stared at him, though now from under heavy lids, her features beginning to twist from their relaxed amusement to something that resembled anger, and Marcus moved before he thought twice. He kissed her quickly to stop the words and the argument, cupping her head with his palm, angling her just right so that she was open to him. She pushed at him, and then suddenly she was kissing him back. He tasted the alcohol on her lips and grew drunk on her taste. She was vicious and writhing in his arms. Just as she had been greedy that night in Little Parrington a month before, she demanded now.
Her legs twisted, slid, and she was half-atop him, straddling him. His body answered immediately, hard, buzzing from head to toe with the feel of her.
He needed her.
With her nightgown and robe hiked up to her thighs, he could feel, gratefully, that she wore none of those new undergarments, and he slid one hand along her leg, savoring the smooth, silky flesh, enjoying her shiver and the way she pressed herself closer to him so that he was nestled right up against her. He could feel her burning hot and wet even through the fabric that separated them.
It was the alcohol that was making her respond to him, making her delve her tongue into his mouth and lick his skin as if he were her evening meal. It was the alcohol, yes, but she clearly wanted him.
Yet, for a moment, his hand stilled. Was this a wrong move? Would taking what she offered ruin the courtship? Horses and dogs couldn’t be pushed too fast. Likely the same logic applied to his wife. He pulled back.
When he turned his face slightly away, her lips, the pointed tip of her tongue, moved to his neck, her hands unbuttoned his falls, and in that moment, it no longer mattered if it was a mistake.
Someday soon there would be time, enough time to savor her taste, the feeling of her under his hands and his tongue. But right then he was free and hard in her hands, and the touch of her fingers on him was the sweetest torture. He moved his hand forward along her thigh, reaching for the hot depths of her. She was wet and ready for him, so that the working of her fingers, spreading his liquid slick over him, was superfluous.
He lifted her hips and she helped him, rising up on her knees. Her fingers, wet with him, found purchase under his waistcoat flat against his chest. She hovered over him, hot and coming down, opening herself up to him. He groaned as she sank down, enfolding him in the scorching moisture of her body.
He thrust up as best he could, but she was in control, on top of him, setting the pace. Torture, absolute torture. At the same time it was an erotic dream, here in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, as if the fighting of the daylight hours didn’t exist.
She ground herself on him, but it wasn’t enough. Holding her tight, urging her legs around his waist, he struggled to his feet and captured her between the wall and his body.
The first thrust back in, his vision darkened around the edges. He found her neck with his mouth, enjoying the scent of her skin, bergamot, whisky, and sweat. He wanted to devour her and yet, at the same time, with her tight, slick, and pulsing around him, he felt that he was the one being devoured.
Her thighs were wrapped around him, her muscles squeezing, drawing him in closer. He traced his tongue across the thin, sensitive skin of her neck, just as she had done to him minutes before.
She was frantic in his arms, pulling away, turning toward him, her hips thrusting back. He knew how she felt, wanting everything, yet the sensation, so overpowering, was almost too much.
And the wall didn’t offer enough support, didn’t let him get as deep as he wanted.
He slid her down the wall till he was on his knees, turned and gently lay her upon the carpet. For a moment, she was arched over his arm, still joined to him, using her thighs to hold him tight, and he stared at the pale curve of her body, gleaming in the candlelight.
He slipped his arm out and grabbed her hips. Slid out and slid back in, deeper, harder, and this time when she arched up it was of her own accord, crying out with her climax.
He sank down on top of her, found his rhythm, and with grateful oblivion, sought his own release.
…
A heavy thudding swelled inside her head. She opened her eyes, squinting, and darkness, the false night offered by heavy brocade draperies, pressed against her.
She was in their bed. Aching. Sore. Her body hurt all over. Hurt deliciously with the languor of one who had slept well and been loved well.
Fucked well.
She remembered how it had been, when she’d first heard that word, fuck, and how she had reveled in the illicitness of its vulgarity. Such a foreign word. She still didn’t know its counterpart in French or Russian.
She was damp, sticky between her legs, and those limbs were entangled with his heavy ones. When she started to extricate herself, she found him watching her with a sleepy, satisfied gaze.
He loved her.
Anger washed all that deliciousness away.
“What, so you’ve proven I’m a whore?” She threw the words at him as she rolled away and scrambled off the bed. She remembered last night. She couldn’t let him think that he had won, that she would fall meekly over and be the perfect little wife, overflowing with gratitude and love now that he’d had her body one more time.
Natasha threw open the curtains and light flooded the room. She made the mistake of glancing back. He looked confused and then incredulous.
“You’re my wife.”
His wife. It was his answer to everything, as if that label excused his actions, excused his brutish behavior.
She found her nightgown and her robe––the new, expensive garments were wadded up together on the floor by the commode. She picked up the sleeve of the robe and shook it out from the rest.
“Tasha.” As she slid into the thick winter garment, she heard the creaking of the bed’s wood frame, the thud of his feet touching the ground.
“What?” she demanded, turning to face him.
Naked. Glorious. With the winter-muted sun coating his long, lean, muscular body in its white light, Marcus looked like a dark angel. Even his sex, soft and hanging before its nest of curls, looked like the inspiration for a sculptor, for Michelangelo perhaps, if the artist’s David was really as handsome as everyone said.
She clenched her jaw tight, feeling her teeth snap together. It didn’t matter because he didn’t seem to notice that she’d been ogling his naked body with deep appreciation.
“Can we not simply start anew?”
Sickness twisted her inside. Hadn’t she
wondered that? The morning after he’d first told her he wanted to marry her, had she not thought, what if? Now she was trapped in this maddening conflict.
It didn’t matter that he loved her. It didn’t matter that she wanted to forget, that she wanted to throw herself into his arms and pretend everything would be fine.
“The past does not go away. Even if my memory were erased, it would still exist, would still stain your hands, my hands, our souls. The best we can have is a half-life. Purity is gone. Hope is gone.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” she asked softly, her tone belying the dangerous, wild ribbons of rage rising within her. She couldn’t see the way out of it, see a future different from that she had laid out. She wondered if somehow, from somewhere, he’d pull the right words and drive away the darkness. But what would those words be? She didn’t even know.
He sighed, ran a hand through the waves of his hair, and the muscles of his chest rippled with the movement.
“I need to bathe,” she said. She pulled the bed rope for the maid and stalked out of the room. She shut the door, shut him out. Shut her thoughts.
Chapter Twenty
Several hours later, his thigh pressed deliciously against that of his lady, Marcus guided the curricle up Pall Mall. This early in March, a good few weeks before the Easter holiday, it was not particularly crowded. Natasha’s well-cloaked limb radiated a heat that he welcomed on this otherwise gloomy, sleet-driven day.
Marcus was confused. But he was patient as well. At the core of his wife’s emotional fluctuations was the truth that she continued to yield, to lean toward him. Someday, she would stop fighting what was clear and inevitable.
But despite his faith, he could not hold back the low spirits that clung to him. Only one month reunited. Less than a fortnight married. His world had become an intense microcosm.
The one clear, unexpected joy was Leona. What had once been an abstraction was now a flesh-and-blood child, a miniature human with thoughts and ideas of her own. He had never imagined his first need of a morning, before a ride in the park, before breakfast, would be to see the girl. His own father had been completely absent. His mother as well had been indifferent. And Marcus had thought that was the way it was, the way it would be for him and his children as well.
But there he had been that morning, perched in one of the new miniature chairs that had been specially bought to outfit the “schoolroom.” His mother had asked Leona what color she preferred for the curtains, and as Leona had answered yellow. Thus the curtains were a cheery, dotted poplin layered over a wispy white gauze. The new nanny, Mrs. Burnham, had sat in the also-new rocking chair and worked on some inconclusive woolen project with her knitting needles. From what he understood, the governess would begin the following week. This morning, however, Marcus had attempted to explain to his daughter––the word warm and soft in his mind––about fractions. He had butted up against the girl’s very literal mind when he tore a piece of foolscap to describe the idea of half, and she exclaimed that the two pieces were clearly uneven and not the same.
Just as even now he was coming up against her mother’s insistence that the stain of the past would never fade. With his daughter, after a moment of bafflement, Marcus had much more carefully torn another piece in two. And this afternoon, Natasha was by his side because he had insisted over her initial protest that she would gain more joy from the British Gallery than she would from foreswearing his company. She had been silent for the majority of the ride, but if this was a half-life, it was still more a life than he’d had the last five years.
…
“Here we are then,” Marcus announced unnecessarily as he pulled the carriage up to the modest edifice. Natasha watched him hand the reins to their footman, Harry. Marcus jumped from his seat, rounded the vehicle, and offered her his arm. She laid hers over his, briefly met his gaze, and flinched away from his expression. Did the man need to look that way at her?
“I have been here before, you know,” she murmured in a dampening tone once her feet were on the ground and the only part of her that touched him remotely was her arm. The air was heavy with moisture but no actual rain.
“Ah, but that must have been years ago.”
She didn’t bother to acknowledge the truth of his statement and instead returned to the silence she had kept most of the morning. She felt clearly that she had lost something in last night’s exchange, had lost some integrity, some final point she needed him to understand. If she gave into him now, no matter how much she wanted to, her true happiness would be lost forever.
They passed through the galleries, the collection sparser and more elegantly laid out than some other galleries and museums in London. Daylight poured through high windows and illuminated the works: Gainsborough’s exquisite portraits, Hogarth’s wittier pieces, and Wilson’s picturesque landscapes. They stopped at a collection of antique stained glass as well, curated carefully from around England and from as far off as Holland.
But Natasha could hardly focus on the art, on anything other than Marcus’s proximity, Marcus’s heat. He was everything there was in her world and impatiently, she went from painting to painting, past the occasional artist with his easel and brushes, her shoes clicking against the wooden floor.
She saw them halfway across the room, standing by a large portrait of a woman in what must have been rose silk. Count Nagy, his sister, Anna Boros, and Marta Antal, all Hungarian expatriates––friends of her parents, of an age with them as well. They were staring at her.
She raised a hand to wave, her lips tilting up in a smile. She took a step toward them, her other hand slipping from Marcus’s arm.
They turned their backs on her, whispering.
Natasha lowered her hand, her gloved fingers clutching at her pelisse.
“Who are they?” She heard Marcus’s question, felt the warmth of his hand on her back, folding her toward him, away from them.
“No one.” She refused to ask Marcus for shelter. But the count and his sister were not “no one,” at least not among the society her parents kept. She hadn’t thought about what they would have told their friends when their daughter ran off to be a man’s mistress. Or what they would tell their friends now that she had returned. Her mother’s words from the week before came crashing back. Suddenly the impatience with which she had stalked through the galleries bloomed into overwhelming emotion.
“Let us leave, shall we?” she asked, but didn’t wait for him to respond.
They were on the street within minutes, the wet, chill air reminding her of the windswept days on the Norfolk coast, only it wasn’t cold enough, raw enough. She could still feel.
“Well then,” Marcus said, staring around them. She stared, too. At the people who passed by, the carriages, the horses, the muddy street. “Perhaps you would prefer to stand inside while we wait for the carriage?”
“No,” she said vehemently. She couldn’t be inside. She wanted to be out here where the present was the present, and the future nothing to think of.
“Templeton!” She turned to see a face that she could not quite place. Marcus stiffened, his body tensing next to hers, and she wondered at that, grasping at something other than her own tortured emotions.
“Morning, Underwood.”
She knew him. John Underwood. He had been one of Marcus’s friends years ago. They had supped together at Vauxhall, attended one of the masquerades at the opera. She had danced with the man even.
“Miss Polinoff,” Underwood exclaimed, and Natasha flinched at the name that was no longer hers said so loudly on the street. Where the count and his sister could come out at any moment. Where anyone else of Marcus’s acquaintance could hear them. And then she realized this was Marcus’s acquaintance. This one man who recognized her, who knew her for what she had been.
“But this is a surprise.” Underwood’s voice lowered, an aside to Marcus that Natasha could still hear. “I thought you newly married?”
“I
am.” Marcus voice was cold as ice. She’d never heard him sound that way, and for a moment, she was both thrilled and scared. “Natasha has made me the happiest of men.”
Underwood’s expression changed to one of confusion, then shock, then embarrassment.
“Oh, do forgive me,” he said, almost stuttering. Then he laughed. “But no harm done, is there? Best of both worlds you’ve gotten yourself, haven’t you?” He winked broadly.
She couldn’t feel anymore, so stunned was she by horror, by sudden revelation. Life would be this way. People would know her past, would either cut her or humiliate her. She was a bawdy joke, a tragedy.
She hardly knew that she moved, backing up until she turned to run. Marcus’s hand on her arm stopped her, pulling her toward the carriage that awaited them. She glanced at Underwood, and the man stared at her as if she were an elephant descended upon Pall Mall. There were other passersby staring as well, and she realized what she must have looked like, poised to run.
Marcus near pushed her into the carriage, grabbing the reins from the tiger. She hadn’t noticed she was damp from the misty air until she was sheltered by the roof of the carriage. She shook with tension, with the fear and shame that she would never escape.
“It was uncomfortable, I know, Tasha, but you’ll have to learn.” The calm of his voice angered her. He was the one who had torn her from her life, twice now. But no one would ridicule him, censure him for his actions. All at once the knot within her burst apart.
“What do you expect? That I’ll play the perfect little wife for you? ‘The wife who was his mistress.’ A man’s dream,” she said scornfully.
“No, of course, I know––”
…
She didn’t wait for him to explain, to apologize the way it seemed he was always apologizing.
Lord of Regrets Page 16