by Lucy Monroe
Releasing her hand abruptly, he surged to his feet and began pacing the floor, his expression every bit as black as it had been when he found her on the tower roof the night before. “Love? You have withdrawn from me because of a romantical concept even the poets cannot agree upon defining? I do not believe this.”
“Is the thought of loving me so horrifying?”
He turned and faced her, his body drawn in stiff lines, the expression in his blue eyes its own answer to her plea. Horrifying did not begin to describe his reaction.
“Our relationship is based on factors much more lasting and concrete. Love does not come into it.”
What could be more lasting than love? “How can you say so? We are discussing marriage, not a business investment.”
He ran his fingers through the black silkiness of his hair as he towered over her bed. “You are not a green girl, Irisa. You are nearing one and twenty. Old enough to have put such romantic nonsense behind you.”
“Wanting to marry a man who loves me is not nonsense.” She was so incensed that she threw back the coverlet and leapt from the bed in order to face him squarely.
“People in our world marry for a lot of reasons and love is rarely one them.”
She put her fists on her hips and glared up at him. “It’s going to be one of the reasons I marry, the chief one in fact!”
“You should have thought of that before you agreed to marry me. You’ve given me your promise, Irisa. How can you honorably withdraw it? I never misled you in this area and I haven’t changed my expectations.”
All right, perhaps he had a small point. She hadn’t realized love was a motivating factor for her either right at first, but she knew it now and feared marriage to a man with such exacting standards without it.
“In fact, I’ve been bloody accommodating with your fits and starts,” he added when she didn’t answer immediately.
Fits and starts? His arrogance knew no bounds.
She stormed across the room, not wanting to be near enough to throttle him. She just might try. “I assumed you must have a strong degree of affection for me when you asked me to marry you even though you were aware of my family’s scandalous past,” she ground out.
If he felt he had been misled by her expectations, he was not alone.
Lucas didn’t answer, but his expression shifted from annoyance to something else altogether and Irisa became aware of three things simultaneously. The first was that her nightrail was a very fine lawn and almost see-through. The second was that by moving in front of the window, she had succeeded in rendering it completely transparent. The third was that Lucas had noticed. She turned to dive back under the covers, but was not quick enough.
Lucas moved with the speed of panther striking. She was still several steps from the bed when his hands gripped her shoulders and spun her around. She barely had time to register the savage desire on his face before his lips took hers in a hot, consuming, and wholly possessive kiss.
He backed her up to the wall, pressing his body against hers and she made a discovery. He did not need to be ragingly angry, merely annoyed, for his ardor to be aroused. As soon as the knowledge registered, she stiffened in Lucas’s tight embrace. Not again.
She shoved against his chest and broke her mouth away from his. “Stop.”
He complied only insofar as that he did not return his lips to hers, but instead kissed a sensitive spot under her ear. The caress sent all manner of sensations pouring through her, but she would not give in to this false passion again.
She struggled. “You must cease your attentions, my lord. I insist.”
When she realized that she could not break his hold and even the use of the hated title did not faze him, she began to despair. She was fast approaching a state of not wanting to fight and that way lay disaster. There was nothing else for it.
She kicked him in the shin and sharp pain shot up her foot. “Ow.”
He made an exclamation of surprise and she decided the pain had been worth it when his arms loosened.
She wrenched herself away from him, scooting from her position between him and the wall.
He spun to face her, looking bewildered but still quite dangerous. “Why did you do that?”
She glared at him. “You deserved it. I will not allow you to mislead me in this fashion again.”
***
Lucas’s sex ached. Perhaps that was why her words made no sense to him, but what in the bloody the hell was she talking about? “Explain yourself.”
She limped over to the bed, her expression aggrieved. She yanked the coverlet off, and then wrapped it around herself. His muscles tensed with the desire to rip it right back off again. He controlled the savage urge with difficulty.
“The only time you want to kiss me is when you are angry. I won’t tolerate that sort of pretense of affections. If you cannot bring yourself to want physical intimacy unless your other darker passions are aroused, then I prefer you to keep them to yourself.”
“You think I only want to touch you when I’m irritated?” he asked, unable to believe what he had heard.
“Do not bother to deny it.” She faced him squarely. “You have not shown the least interest in a physical relationship with me otherwise.”
He shook his head. “You’re mad.”
“I am not crazy. I am being logical, though I don’t expect you to see it. Gentlemen can be quite dense, I have decided.”
All of those darker emotions she was so bloody concerned about came to the fore. Irisa had been pushing him since the beginning of their engagement and he’d had enough.
He backed away from her, knowing if he did not, he would kiss her again. He wanted to settle this issue of his lack of desire for her once and for all. It should not be necessary, would not be with any other lady of the ton, he was sure, but Irisa insisted on being unique.
“If you’re so damn logical,” he gritted out, “then by all means, enlighten me. Why, if I do not want you, do I wake from dreams about you naked and writhing in my bed every bloody night with my sex hard enough to drill wood? What other than an almost ungovernable desire for you could explain why I spend the majority of the time we are together fantasizing about when I can finally claim your body?”
Her eyes widened in shock until the golden brown depths were almost swallowed by the blackness of her pupils. “Really, Lucas. There is no need for that kind of talk.”
“According to you, there is every need or I will be accused of wanting you only when I allow my anger to overcome my good sense.”
She tugged the coverlet more closely about herself, her face scarlet. “I never said anything about good sense.”
“I did. And I’ve lost what little I had upon entering this room.” He started toward her.
She put a hand out, the palm toward him. “Stop, Lucas. This is exactly what I was talking about.”
“What?” He stopped when her outstretched hand touched him.
She quickly snatched it back. “You are annoyed with me.”
“Yes.” He could hardly deny the truth.
“There. You see.” She looked triumphant.
“What the hell am I supposed to see?” he demanded.
“That you only want me when you are angry.”
How did the female mind work? “I’ve wanted you for a very long time, Irisa. If you will recall, I was the one who wanted the wedding date moved forward.”
“That proves nothing.”
“Are you really so naïve?”
She opened her mouth, no doubt to argue with his assessment of her sexual knowledge and he raised his hand. “Please. Let us not have yet another argument about your naïveté, or lack thereof.”
This crazy conversation wasn’t getting them anywhere. He had himself under control again. Barely. The fact that the coverlet hid her too tempting curves helped, but his desire was on too precarious a leash for him to tempt fate once again. After they were married, he would have sufficient time and privacy to prove to the maddeni
ng woman that his ardor did not require the spark of anger to ignite.
Until then, they would both have to live with the frustrating limitations of their relationship.
At the moment, making arrangements for her safety was of paramount importance. He contemplated the fading bruise on her cheek. It was almost gone. She could easily hide it with powder. As much as he preferred to stay in the country, living under the same roof with her parents was a risk he refused to continue to take.
“We will return to Town tomorrow.”
She sighed. “We’re through discussing passion, aren’t we?”
He leaned down and kissed her softly on her slightly parted lips. “We will discuss it to your heart’s content on our wedding night, little one. I promise.”
She gave him a disgruntled frown. “You are taking a lot for granted in assuming there will be a wedding night.”
“No, I am not. The one thing that drew me to you above all else was your strong sense of personal honor. Once you make a promise, you keep it and you have promised to marry me.”
“You sound very certain of yourself, Lucas.”
“I am. You risked your own reputation and the wrath of your parents because your sense of commitment would not allow you to cry off, even believing I had been unfaithful. You attempted to force me into withdrawing my proposal by acting outrageously.”
“It did not work,” she grumbled.
“Lucky for both of us, I realized what you were about.” He smoothed the furrowed skin between her brows with his finger. “I have accepted that by not telling you about Clarice, I’m responsible to a certain extent for your reckless behavior.”
“Is that why you are still insistent on marriage?” Her soft brown gaze held his own. “You believe you are at fault for my besmirched reputation?”
“There are many reasons I want to marry you.” He dropped his hand, turned and headed toward the door, stopping to look back at her when he reached it. “You must trust me, Irisa. We will have a satisfactory marriage.”
“Will we?”
“Yes. We share many common interests. Apart from your aberrant behavior of late, we also have a mutual respect for our place in society and the responsibility it entails and as you will learn after we are wed, we share a deep passion uncommon amidst our peers.”
Lucas believed that would be enough, but the doubt that darkened Irisa’s soft brown eyes told him she was not so sure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lucas rode toward his estate manager’s cottage, enjoying as he always did the lush green lands surrounding his home and fresh breezes untainted by the many smells that polluted London’s air. Returning to town held little appeal.
Once he and Irisa were married, they could retire to the country for a year or more without being considered recluses. As newlyweds, it was expected they would focus on establishing a nursery to protect the title. He would enjoy rusticating, but would not make his father’s mistake of withholding all Town pleasures from his wife.
Lucas wanted Irisa to be happy with him. Did her happiness lie only in a union based on mutual love?
His father had dismissed love as unnecessary in a society marriage, saying that integrity and respectability would do. Irisa had rock solid integrity and her respect for him was not in question, at least not now that she had learned Clarise was not his mistress. However, it now seemed those two elements were not enough to guarantee a pleasant marriage.
Why had he ever believed they would be?
His parents had not been the most convivial of couples, but he had always dismissed the unpleasant facets of their marriage. Weighed against the fact his mother had not started down the path to her own destruction until she no longer had the bonds of matrimony to restrain her, those aspects had seemed minor. She had not been ecstatically happy, but she had been alive.
For the first time in all the years since her death, Lucas wondered if the trade had been worth it. His father had not loved his mother and from that lack of love, he had found it easy to refuse her every wish for a style of living that would please her.
Lucas reined in his huge gray stallion. The same hills and valleys that gave him and his father before him such pleasure had been prison walls to her gay spirit. Had the lack of love in her marriage accounted at all for her obsessive search for it in widowhood?
She had bandied the love word about with disturbing frequency as she flitted from one paramour to another. Lucas distrusted so fleeting an emotion, but Irisa believed herself in love with him.
She must, or his love would mean nothing to her.
He could not believe she identified love with the spurious and temporary emotions his mother had so madly reveled in. However, he was unsure what the true emotion, if indeed it existed, consisted of.
It could not be the insatiable passion of a new sexual liaison. That palled too quickly. Nor was it the desire to control another’s life at the expense of their every happiness like his father had done to his mother. But what was it?
A better question might simply be to ask what exactly he felt for his fiancée.
He wanted her, more than he’d ever wanted another woman and her happiness meant more to him than his own comfort. She belonged to him on a level he did not understand, but he suspected was more primitive than gentlemen of the ton were supposed to be. The thought of losing her made him feel as if he’d swallowed ground glass.
He needed her.
Was that love? If he told Irisa he loved her, she would cease balking at the prospect of marriage, he was sure of it. Only his innate sense of honesty prevented him from turning his horse around and seeking his fiancée out to tell her just that. Until he was sure this amalgamation of feelings burning inside him was what she considered love, he must remain silent.
He knew only that love or need, it did not matter...he would never let her leave his life.
***
Irisa attempted to study the investment portfolio in front of her. She wanted to diversify some of her holdings, but she could not summon her usual keen fascination with the process of putting together snippets of information from several different sources in order to make wise investment outlays.
Her mind insisted on fixing on her and Lucas’s relationship.
Plans for the wedding moved inexorably forward. Mama moaned about the imprudence of going through with the big wedding breakfast every time she visited Irisa at Aunt Harriet’s townhouse. She insisted that after Irisa’s scandalous behavior, no one important among the ton would attend. Yet, that did not stop her from sending out invitations and ordering an exorbitantly priced buffet prepared by a hired French chef.
If Irisa cried off now, her mother would never forgive her. Not that Mama was particularly warm toward her since the fiasco last week, but at least she was speaking to Irisa again. She had unbent enough to give Irisa the talk that she was sure most mothers dreaded and a great many daughters might prefer to do without. She would not have minded avoiding it herself.
Until this point, Irisa had looked forward to the passionate side of marriage very much. She still did...at least after the first night. Mama had been more candid than consoling about this aspect of marriage, encouraging Irisa to bring something to the marital bed to set her teeth into so that she might be able accept her duty without protest.
She had said that while many aspects of this side of marriage could be quite pleasant and even lead one to believe the first time would be similar in nature, it was better to be prepared for an altogether different experience. Mama had then comforted her with the news that intimacy improved over time.
However, she had ended her lecture with the admonishment to prepare for significant pain during initiation into her conjugal duties and not to plague her husband with a waterfall of tears afterward.
Irisa was almost certain Lucas would never allow her to be hurt to that extent, but Mama said men’s passions could not always be controlled. On one or two occasions lately, Lucas had left just that impression with Irisa.
Before leaving, Mama assured Irisa that Papa would be in attendance at the wedding even though he had not seen fit to visit Aunt Harriet’s townhouse since Irisa had moved in.
It was his duty, after all.
Irisa’s heart constricted at the knowledge that her own father would come to her wedding out of nothing more than a sense of duty. Could he not summon even a smidgen of tender feeling for her?
A footman entered the small library, interrupting her gloomy thoughts.
She looked up from the papers strewn on the desk in front of her. “Yes?”
“A message has come for you, milady.” He handed her a sealed white envelope of heavy parchment.
“Thank you.” She nodded her head, dismissing the footman before opening the envelope and pulling out a single sheet of white stationary.
It took her a moment to assimilate the words and she had to read them twice before she accepted that they truly said what she thought they did.
Lady Irisa,
One might think congratulations on your upcoming marriage are in order, but do you really think a man of The Saint’s impeccable standing amongst the ton could find happiness with a woman such as yourself?
You have fooled the Polite World for twenty years with your fakery, but you aren’t really a lady at all are you? The saintly Lord Ashton would be appalled to discover you are no more than Lord Langley’s bastard daughter. As would the rest of the ton.
Your drive through Hyde Park with a former actress would be nothing compared to the news that your parents’ legal marriage occurred less than four years ago, not the twenty-one the Polite World believes.
If you wish to keep this secret safe and your family’s reputation intact, you will cry off from your engagement and stay away from The Saint. After all, could a man so far above reproach ever find his happiness with a woman such as yourself?
It was unsigned, but who would put their name to something so foul and cruel?
Irisa’s first thought was that another lady had set her cap for Lucas and having discovered Irisa’s secret, was intent on using it to dispose of the competition.