Chapter 13

Jessica wasn't sure when exactly she'd become aware she was being carried up the stairs. It all seemed part of a dream or part of long ago, when she was a sleepy little girl, so tiny that even Uncle Frederick, who was the smallest of her uncles, could easily scoop her up in one arm and carry her up the stairs to the nursery. An uncle's arm made a hard seat, true, and the ride was bumpy, but she was perfectly safe, snugly braced against a big male body, her head nestled upon a broad shoulder.

Gradually the fog of sleep cleared, and even before she opened her heavy eyes, Jessica knew who was carrying her.

She also remembered what had happened. Or most of it. A great deal was lost in the delirious whirlpool Dain had pulled her into.

"I'm awake," she said, her voice heavy with sleep. She was still weary, and her mind was thick as pudding. "I can walk the rest of the way." "You'll tumble down the stairs," Dain said gruffly. "At any rate, we're nearly there."

There, it turned out, was Her Ladyship's Apartments. The Grand Catacombs, she silently renamed them, as Dain carried her into the dimly lit cavern of her bedchamber.

He set her down very carefully upon the bed.

Then he rang for her maid… and left. Without another word, and in rather a hurry.

Jessica sat gazing at the empty doorway, listening to his carpet-muffled footsteps as he strode down the long hallway, until she heard the faint thud of his door closing.

Sighing, she bent to remove the stocking he'd loosened, which had slid down to her ankle.

She had known from the minute she'd agreed to marry him that it wouldn't be easy, she reminded herself. She had known he was in an exceedingly prickly humor this evening—all day, in fact. She could not expect him to behave rationally… and bed her properly… and sleep with her.

Bridget appeared then, and without appearing to notice her mistress's disordered state of dress or distracted state of mind, quietly and efficiently prepared Her Ladyship for bed.

Once tucked in, the maid gone, Jessica decided there was no point in fretting about Dain's failure to deflower her.

What he had done had been very exciting and surprising, especially the last part, when he'd made her have a little earthquake. She knew what that was, because Genevieve had told her. And thanks to her grandmother, Jessica was well aware that those extraordinary sensations did not always occur, especially early in marriage. Not all men took the trouble.

She could not believe Dain had taken the trouble merely to score a point, like proving his power over her. According to Genevieve, it was extremely painful for an aroused male to deny himself release. Unless Dain had an esoteric way of relieving his arousal that Genevieve had failed to mention, he'd surely suffered acute discomfort.

He must have had a compelling reason for doing so.

Jessica could not begin to imagine what it was. He wanted her, beyond a doubt. He had tried to resist, but he couldn't—not after she'd shamelessly bared her breasts and stuck them right under his arrogant Florentine nose… not after she'd hiked up her skirts and sat on his breeding organs.

She flushed, recalling, but the heat she felt wasn't embarrassment. At the time, she'd felt wonderfully free and wicked… and she'd been hotly, deliriously rewarded for her boldness.

Even now, she felt he'd given her a gift. As though it were her birthday, not his. And after gifting his wife with a little earthquake and enduring acute physical discomfort, he had—with no small difficulty, she was sure—contrived to get her up the stairs without waking her.

She found herself wishing he hadn't done so. It would have been easier if he'd roughly wakened her and laughed at her and let her make her own way upstairs, dazed, stumbling… besotted. It would have been easier still if he had simply pushed her down, rammed into her, rolled away, and fallen asleep.

Instead, he'd taken pains. He'd taught her pleasure and taken care of her after. Sweet and chivalrous he'd been, truly.

Her husband was transforming simple animal attraction into something much more complicated.

And soon, if she was not very careful, she might make the fatal error of falling in love with him.

Midafternoon of the following day, Lady Dain discovered that Athcourt did have ghosts.

She knelt on a threadbare carpet in the uppermost chamber of the North Tower. The room was one of Athcourf's furnishings graveyards. About her were trunks filled with clothing of bygone eras, draperies, and linens, as well as assorted odds and ends of furniture, crates of mismatched dinnerware, and a number of household utensils of enigmatic function. Beside her knelt Mrs. Ingleby, the housekeeper.

They were both gazing at a portrait of a young woman with curling black hair, coal black eyes, and a haughty Florentine nose. Jessica had found it in a dark corner of the room, hidden behind a stack of trunks, and thickly wrapped in velvet bed hangings.

"This can be no one but His Lordship's mother," Jessica said, wondering why her heart hammered as though she were afraid, which she wasn't. "The gown, the coiffure—last decade of the eighteenth century, no question."

There was no need to remark upon the physical resemblance. The lady was simply the feminine version of the present marquess.

This was also the first portrait Jessica had seen that bore any resemblance to him.

After Jessica's solitary breakfast—Dain had eaten and vanished before she'd come down—Mrs. Ingleby had given her a partial tour of the immense house, including a leisurely stroll through the long second-floor gallery opposite their bedrooms, which housed the family portraits. Except for the first Earl of Blackmoor, whose heavy-lidded gaze had reminded her of Dain's, Jessica had detected no likenesses.

Nowhere among these worthies had she spied a female who could have been Dain's mother. Mrs. Ingleby, when questioned, had told her there wasn't such a portrait, not that she knew of. She'd been at Athcourt since the present marquess came into the title, when he'd replaced most of the previous staff.

This portrait, then, had been hidden away during his father's time. Out of grief? Jessica wondered. Had it been too painful for the late marquess to see his wife's image? If so, he must have been a very different man from the one she'd seen in his portrait: a fair, middle-aged gentleman, garbed in somber Quaker-like simplicity. But the humble dress was in stark contrast to his expression. No gentle Friend had lived behind the stern countenance with its narrowed, wintry blue eyes.

"I know nothing about her," Jessica said, "except the date she was wed and the date she died. I hadn't expected her to be so young. I had assumed the second wife was a more mature woman. This is little more than a girl."

And who, she wondered angrily, had shackled this ravishing child to the horrid, pious old block of ice?

She drew back, startled by the vehemence of her reaction. Quickly she stood up.

"Have it brought down to my sitting room," she told the housekeeper. "You may have it lightly dusted before, but no further cleaning until I've had a chance to examine it in better light."

Mrs. Ingleby had been imported from Derbyshire. She'd heard nothing about old family scandals before she'd come and, because she would not tolerate below stairs gossip, she'd heard nothing since. Lord Dain's agent had hired her, not simply because of her sterling reputation as a housekeeper, but because of her strict principles: In her view, the care of a family was a sacred trust, which one did not abuse by whispering scandal behind one's employers' backs. Either the conditions were good or they were not. If they were not, one politely gave notice and departed.

Her strict views did not, however, prevent the rest of the staff from gossiping when her back was turned. Consequently, most of them had heard about the previous Lady Darn. One of them was one of the footmen summoned to move the portrait to the present Lady Dain's sitting room. He told Mr. Rodstock who the portrait subject was.

Mr. Rodstock was much too dignified to dash his head against the chimneypiece as he wished to. All he did was blink, once, and order his minions to alert him the instant His Lordship returned.

Lord Dain had spent most of the day in Chudleigh. At the Star and Garter, he'd met up with Lord Sherburne, who was making his meandering way south to Devonport for a wrestling match.

Sherburne, who'd been wed less than a year, had left his young wife in London. He was the last person in the world to find anything odd about a very recently married man's deserting his bride for the bar parlor of a coaching inn several miles from home. On the contrary, he invited Dain to journey with him to Devonport. Sherburne was awaiting a few other fellows, who were to arrive this evening. He suggested Dain pack, collect his valet, and join them for dinner. Then they could all leave together first thing tomorrow morning.

Dain had accepted the invitation without hesitation, ignoring the skull splitting shriek of his conscience. Hesitation was always a sign of weakness and, in this case, Sherburne might think Beelzebub needed his wife's permission first, or that he couldn't bear to be away from her for a few days.

He could bear it easily, Dain thought now, as he hurried up the north staircase to his room. Furthermore, she needed to be taught that she could not manipulate him, and this lesson would be considerably less painful for him than the one he'd given her last night. He'd rather let carrion crows feast on his privates than go through that horrific experience again.

He would go away, and calm down, and put matters into perspective, and when he returned he would…

Well, he didn't know precisely what he would do, but that was because he wasn't calm. When he was, he would figure it out. He was certain there must be a simple solution, but he could not contemplate the problem coolly and objectively while she was nearby, bothering him.

"My lord."

Dain paused at the head of the stairs and looked down. Rodstock was hurrying up after him. "My lord," he repeated breathlessly. "A word, if you please."

What the steward had to say was more than a word, yet no more than what was needed. Her Ladyship had been exploring the North Tower storage room. She had found a portrait. Of the previous marchioness. Rodstock thought His Lordship would wish to be informed.

Rodstock was a paragon, the soul of discretion and tact. Nothing in his tone or demeanor indicated any consciousness of the bomb he had just dropped at his master's feet.

His master, likewise, evidenced no awareness of any explosion whatsoever.

"I see," Dain said. "That is interesting. I had no idea we had one about. Where is it?"

"In Her Ladyship's sitting room, my lord."

"Well, then, I might as well look at it." Dain turned and headed down the Long Gallery. His heart was beating unsteadily. Other than that, he felt nothing. He saw nothing, either, during the endless walk past the portraits of the noble line of men and women he had never felt a part of.

He walked on blindly to the end of the hall, opened the last door on the left, and turned left again into the narrow passageway. He continued past one door, and on to the next, then through it, and on through the second passage to the door at its end, which stood open.

The portrait that wasn't supposed to exist stood before the sitting room's east-facing window on a battered easel, which must have been unearthed from the schoolroom.

Dain walked up to the painting and gazed at it for a long while, though it hurt, badly—more than he could have guessed—to look into the beautiful, cruel face. His throat burned and his eyes as well. If he could, he would have wept then.

But he couldn't because he wasn't alone. He did not have to take his eyes from the portrait to know his wife was in the room.

"Another of your finds," he said, choking a short laugh past his seared throat. "And on your first treasure hunt here, too."

"Luckily, the North Tower is cool and dry," she said. Her voice was cool and dry as well. "And the painting was well wrapped. It will need minimal cleaning, but I should prefer another frame. This one is much too dark and over ornate. Also, I had rather not put her in the portrait gallery, if you don't mind. I'd prefer she had a place to herself. Over the dining room mantel, I think. In place of the landscape."

She came nearer, pausing a few paces to his right. "The landscape wants a smaller room. Ever if it didn't, I'd much rather look at her." He would, too, though it was eating him alive to do so.

He would have been content merely to look at his beautiful, impossible mother. He would have asked nothing… or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…

Mawkish nonsense, he angrily reproached himself. It was only a damned piece of canvas daubed with paint. It was a painting of a whore, as all the household, all of Devon, and most of the world beyond knew. All except his wife, with her fiendish gift for turning the world upside down.

"She was a whore," he said harshly. And quickly and brutally, to have it said and done and over with, he went on. "She ran away with the son of a Dartmouth merchant. She lived openly with him for two years and died with him, on a fever-plagued island in the West Indies."

He turned and looked down into his wife's pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening… with tears.

"How dare you?" she said, angrily blinking the tears back. "How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son."

"I might have known you could make even this romantic," he said mockingly. "Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to— to what,

Jess? Love?"

He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream, Why? Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him—or pitied him at least, if she could not love him—she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.

"You don't know what her life was like," she said. "You were a child. You couldn't know what she felt. She was a foreigner, and her husband was old enough to be her father."

"Like Byron's Donna Julia, you mean?" His voice dripped acid irony. "Perhaps you're right. Perhaps Mama would have done better with two husbands, of five and twenty."

"You don't know whether your father treated her well or ill," his wife persisted, like a teacher with a stubborn student. "You don't know whether he made the way easy for her or impossible. For all you know, he may have made her wretched—which is more than likely, if his portrait offers an accurate indication of his character."

And what of me? he wanted to cry. You don't know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left… to endure… and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman's soft hand.

He was appalled at his own inner rage and grief, the hysteria of a child… who had died five and twenty years ago.

He made himself laugh and meet her steady grey gaze with the mocking mask he wore so well. "If you've taken my sire in dislike, feel free to exile him to the North Tower. You may hang her in his place. Or in the chapel, for all I care."

He headed for the door. "You needn't consult me about redecorating. I know no female can live two days in a house and leave anything as it was.

I shall be much astonished if I can find my way about when I return"

"You're going away?" Her tones remained steady. When he paused and turned at the threshold, she was looking out the window, her color back to normal, her countenance composed.

"To Devonport," he said, wondering why her composure chilled him so. "A wrestling match. Sherburne and some other fellows. I'm to meet them at nine o'clock. I need to pack."

"Then I must change orders for dinner," she said, "I think I'll dine in the morning room. But I had better have a nap before then, or I shall fall asleep into my plate. I have been over only about one quarter of the house, yet I feel as though I had walked from Dover to Land's End."

He wanted to ask what she thought of the house, what she liked—apart from the soul-shattering portrait of his mother—and what she didn't like —besides the offensive landscape in the dining room, which he hadn't liked, either, he recalled.

If he were not going away, he could have found out over dinner, in the cozy intimacy of the morning room.

Intimacy, he told himself, was the last thing he needed now. What he needed was to get away, where she could not turn him upside down and inside out with her heart-stopping "discoveries" … or torment him with her scent, her silken skin, the soft curves of her slender body.

It took all his self-control to walk, not run, from the room.

Jessica spent ten minutes trying to calm down. It didn't work. Unwilling to cope with Bridget or anyone else, she ran her own bath. Athcourt, fortunately, boasted the rare luxury of hot and cold running water, even on the second floor.

Neither solitude nor the bath canned her down, and napping was impossible. Jessica lay on her large, lonely bed, stiff as a poker, glaring up at the canopy.

Barely three days wed, and the great jackass was abandoning her. For his friends. For a wrestling match.

She got up, pulled off her modest cotton nightgown, and stalked, naked, to her dressing room. She found the wine red and black silk negligee and put it on. She slipped into the black mules. She shrugged into a heavy black and gold silk dressing gown, tied the sash, and loosely draped the neckline so that a bit of the negligee peeped above it.

After running a brush through her hair, she returned to her bedchamber and exited through the door that opened into what Mrs. Ingleby had called the Withdrawing Chamber. At present, it housed part of Dain's collection of artistic curios. It also adjoined His Lordship's apartments.

She crossed the huge, dim room to the door that led to Dain's rooms. She rapped. The muffled voices she'd heard while approaching abruptly ceased. After a moment, Andrews opened the door. As he took in her dishabille, he let out a gasp, which he quickly turned into a small, polite cough.

She turned a sweet, artless smile upon him. "Ah, you haven't gone yet. I am so relieved. If His Lordship can spare a minute, I need to ask him something."

Andrews glanced to his left. "My lord, Her Ladyship wishes—"

"I'm not deaf," came Dain's cross voice. "Get away from there and let her in."

Andrews backed away and Jessica strolled in, glancing idly about her while she made her way slowly into the room and around the immense seventeenth-century bed to her husband. The bed was even larger than hers, about ten feet square.

Dain, in shirt, trousers, and stockinged feet, stood near the window. He was glaring down at his traveling case. It stood open upon a heavily carved table which she guessed had been built about the same time as the bed. He would not look at her.

"It is a… delicate matter," she said, her voice hesitant, shy. She wished she could command a blush as well, but blushes did not come easily to her. "If we might be… private?"

He shot a glance at her, and back to the valise almost in the same instant. Then he blinked, and turned his head toward her once more, stiffly this time. Slowly he surveyed her, up and down and up again, pausing at the revealing neckline of her dressing gown. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

Then his face set, hard as granite. "Ready for your nap, I see." He glowered past her at Andrews. "What are you waiting for? 'Private,' Her Ladyship said. Are you deaf?"

Andrews left, closing the door after him.

"Thank you, Dain," Jessica said, smiling up at him. Then she stepped closer, took a handful of starched and neatly folded neck cloths from the valise, and dropped them on the floor.

He looked at her. He looked at the linen upon the floor.

She took out a stack of pristine white handkerchiefs and, still smiling, threw them down, too.

"Jessica, I don't know what game you're at, but it is not amusing," he said very quietly.

She collected an armful of shirts and flung them onto the floor. "We have been wed scarcely three days," she said. "You do not desert your new bride for your sap skull friends. You will not make a laughingstock of me. If you are unhappy with me, you say so, and we discuss it—or quarrel, if you prefer. But you do not—"

"You do not dictate to me," he said levelly. "You do not tell me where I may and may not go—or when—or with whom. I do not explain and you do not question. And you do not come into my room and throw temper fits."

"Yes, I do," she said. "If you leave this house, I will shoot your horse out from under you."

"Shoot my—"

"I will not permit you to desert me," she said. "You will not take me for granted as Sherburne does his wife, and you will not make all the world laugh at me—or pity me—as they do her. If you cannot bear to miss your precious wrestling match, you can jolly well take me with you."

'Take you?" His voice climbed. "I'll bloody well take you, madam— straight to your room. And lock you in, if you can't behave yourself."

"I should like to see you tr—"

He lunged at her, and she dodged an instant too late. In the next instant, she was slung up under one brawny arm, and he was hauling her like a sack of rags to the door she'd entered.

It stood open. Luckily, it opened into the room, and only one of her arms was trapped against his body.

She pushed the door shut.

"Bloody hell!"

Swearing was all he could do about it. He had only one usable hand, which was occupied. He couldn't move the door handle without letting go of her.

He swore again. Turning, he marched to the bed and dumped her there.

As she fell back onto the mattress, her dressing gown fell open.

Dain's furious black gaze stormed over her. "Damn you, Jess. Curse and confound you." His voice was choked. "You will not—you cannot—" He reached out to grab her hand, but she scrambled back.

"You're not going to put me out," she said, retreating to the center of the huge bed. "I'm not a child and I will not be locked in my room."

He knelt on the edge of the mattress. "Don't think, just because you've crippled me, I can't teach you a lesson. Don't make me chase you." He dove at her, grabbing for her foot. She pulled away, and the black mule came off in his hand. He threw it across the room.

She snatched the other one off and threw it at him. He ducked, and the slipper hit the wall.

With a low growl, he flung himself at her. She rolled away to the opposite side of the bed, and he lost his balance. He fell face-first, sprawling across the lower half of the big mattress.

She could have leapt from the bed and escaped then, but she didn't. She had come prepared for a battle royal, and she would fight this one to the bitter end.

He dragged himself up onto his knees. His shirt-front had fallen open, revealing a tautly muscled neck and the dark web of tantalizingly silky hair her fingers had played with the night before. His big chest rose and fell with his labored breathing. She had only to glance up at his eyes to under-stand that anger was but the smallest part of what worked on him at this moment.

"I'm not going to wrestle with you" he said. "Or quarrel. You will go to your room. Now."

She'd lost the sash of her dressing gown, and the top part had slid down to her elbows. She shrugged out of it, then sank down upon the pillows and gazed up at the canopy, her mouth set mulishly.

He moved closer, the mattress sagging under his weight. 'Jess, I'm warning you"

She wouldn't answer, wouldn't turn her head. She didn't have to. That deadly tone of his wasn't quite as ominous and intimidating as he wanted it to be. She didn't have to look, either, to understand why he'd paused.

She knew he didn't want to look at her, but he couldn't help it. He was a man, and had to look, and what he saw could hardly fail to distract him. She was aware that one of the narrow ribbons holding up the bodice of her negligee had slipped down over her shoulder. She was aware that the gauzy skirt was tangled about her legs.

She heard his breath hitch.

"Damn you, Jess."

She heard the indecision in the husky baritone. She waited, still fixed upon the black and gold dragons above her, leaving him to battle it out with himself.

A full minute and more he remained unmoving and silent, but for the harsh, unsteady breathing.

Then the mattress shifted and sank, and she felt his knees against her hip and heard his muffled moan of defeat. His hand fell upon her knee and slid upward, the silk whispering under his touch.

She lay still while he slowly stroked up over her hip, over her belly. The warmth of the caress stole under her skin and made her feverish.

He paused at her bodice, and traced the eyelet work over her breast. It tautened under his touch, her nipple hardening and thrusting up against the thin silk… yearning for more, as she did.

He pushed the fragile fabric down, and brushed his thumb over the hard, aching peak. Then he bent and took it in his mouth, and she had to clench her hands to keep from holding him there, and clench her jaw as well, to keep from crying out as she had done the night before: Yes… please… anything… don't stop.

He had made her beg last night, yet he had not made her his. And today he thought he could turn his back and walk away, and do as he pleased. He thought he could desert her, leave her wretched and humiliated, a bride, but not a wife.

He didn't want to want her, but he did. He wanted her to beg for his lovemaking, so that he could pretend he was in control.

But he wasn't. His mouth was hot on her breast, her shoulder, her neck. His hand was shaking, his touch roughening, because he was feverish, too.

"Oh, Jess." His voice was an anguished whisper as he sank down beside her. He pulled her to him, and dragged hot kisses over her face. "Baciami. Kiss me. Abbracciami. Hold me. Touch me. Please. I'm sorry." Urgent, desperate, his voice, while he struggled with the narrow ribbon ties.

I'm sorry. He'd actually said it. But he didn't know what he was saying, Jessica told herself. He was lost in simple animal hunger, as she had been, last night.

He wasn't sorry, merely mindless with primitive male lust. His hand worked feverishly, pulling the gown down, moving over her back, her waist.

He grabbed her hand and kissed it. "Don't be angry. Touch me." He pushed her hand under his shirt. "The way you did last night."

His skin was on fire. Hot and smooth and hard… feathery masculine hair… muscles quivering under her fingers… his big body shuddering under her lightest touch.

She wanted to resist, to remain angry, but she wanted this more. She'd wanted to touch and kiss and hold him from the day she'd met him. She'd wanted him to burn for her, just as she'd wanted him to set her ablaze.

He was pulling the negligee down, over her hips.

She grasped the edges of his shirtfront and, with one fierce yank, tore it in half.

His hand fell from her hip. She tore the shirt cuff away, and rent the seam up to the shoulder. "I know you like to be undressed," she said.

"Yes," he gasped, and shifted back to give her access to the other, useless arm. She was no more gentle with that sleeve. She ripped it off.

He pulled her against him, pressing her bared breasts to the powerful chest she'd exposed. His heart beat next to hers, to the same frenetic rhythm. He grasped the back of her head and crushed her mouth to his, and drove out anger, pride, and thought in that long, devouring kiss.

The ragged remains of his shirt came away in her hands. He stripped away her negligee in the same frantic moment. Their hands became tangled, tearing at his trouser buttons. Wool ripped and buttons tore from the cloth.

He pushed her legs apart with his knee. She felt the hard shaft throbbing hotly against her thigh while her own heat puked against his questing hand. He found the place where he'd tormented her last night, and sweetly tormented her again, until she cried out and her body spilled its feminine tears of desire.

She dung to him, shaking and desperate, and "Please," she begged. "Please."

She heard his voice, ragged with longing… words she couldn't understand… then a shaft of pain as he thrust into her.

Her mind went black and Please, God, don't let me faint, was all she could think. She dug her nails into his back, clinging to him for conscious-ness.

His damp cheek pressed against hers, and his breath was hot on her ear. "Sweet Jesus, I can't—Oh, Jess." He lashed his arm about her and rolled onto his side, taking her with him. He hooked his arm under her knee, and lifted her leg up and around his waist. The searing pressure eased, and her panic faded with it. She shifted upward and buried her face in the curve of his neck. She held on tightly, savoring the sweat-slickened heat of his skin, the musky scent of passion.

She was aware of him moving again, inside her, but her untutored body was yielding, and pain was a distant memory. He'd pleasured her already, and she expected no more, but gradually it came, pulsing through her with each slow, possessive stroke.

Pleasure bubbled up inside her, warm and tingling, and her body arched up to welcome it, and joy bolted through her, sharp and sweet.

It wasn't the same joy he'd taught her before, but every instinct recognized it and hungered for more. She rocked against him, matching his rhythm, and more came, faster and harder, and faster still… a furious race to the peak… a lightning blast of rapture… and the sweet rain of release.