McCady shot him such a hard glare that his eyeballs ached from it. "No, I do not remember, and what is more, I don't give a devil's damn."
"Ye said: 'Let's just take the bluidy thing and put the bastards out of their misery.'"
McCady stared at the manservant, but he wasn't really seeing him. He was looking into his own future, and all he could see was a terrible, wrenching loneliness. It grew so quiet in the room he thought he could hear his heart beat. He saw a woman with wild red hair, lying on a bed; he saw Clarence Tiltwell plunging his hard sex between those long, long legs, sucking her taut brown nipples, plundering that laughing mouth with his tongue.
"Duncan..."
Duncan lifted one perfect blond brow. "Aye, yer nibs?"
"Have my highflyer brought around."
Duncan glanced up at the gilt mantel clock. "Aye, sir. But if ye dinna mind my saying so, sir, ye've cut it a bit fine."
"Bloody hell!"
Even perched high as he was on the seat of his phaeton, McCady couldn't see around the enormous country wagon filled with bales of straw that blocked The Strand. They were wedged into a jam of hackneys, dogcarts, landaus, and gigs. Ahead of him he could hear shouts and curses, a braying donkey, and the bleat of a brass horn. And in the far distance, the crashing cymbals and rolling drums of the daily parade of Horse Guards as they marched from their barracks to Hyde Park. Marched as they did every morning at ten o'clock.
He jumped down from the phaeton and started running.
He slammed into a boy who had chosen that moment to duck into the street with a shovel and bucket to collect dung. He picked the boy up, dusted him off, and started running again.
He rounded the corner into Temple Bar and collided with a man adorned head to toe with the buttons he was hawking. He looked back to apologize and almost tripped over a street sweeper's broom. He banked and caromed his way down the crowded street like a billiard ball run amok.
He cut through an alley that smelled of soapsuds and nearly garroted himself on a clothesline that was strung between two doorknobs. An enormous pair of female unmentionables somehow wound up wrapped around his head like a turban. He peeled them off and sent them whipping through the air, to knock the wig off a passing barrister.
He ran up Ludgate Hill, blowing like a sperm whale. The cathedral loomed before him, with its twin towers and great white dome. He thought he would make it in time, and then the fourteen-foot pendulum of the great bell begin to toll.
He jumped a bollard, and pain speared up his crippled leg. He sprinted up the stone steps and banged through the doors. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden dimness. She was there, at the other end of the nave, by the iron and wooden choir, standing before an archbishop of the Church of England. She was there, and Clarence Tiltwell had taken her hand to place his ring on her finger.
"Jessalyn!" McCady shouted, his voice bouncing off the frescoed ceiling. He ran down the nave, past marble columns and saintly statues and gaping mouths. "Jessalyn!"
She and Clarey both whirled, their faces stiff with shock. "How dare you..." the groom began, and ended up stepping into McCady's swinging fist. And then, because he knew how good it would feel to do it, McCady rammed a knee hard in Clarence Tiltwell's groin.
The breath whooshed out of Clarence like a boiling teakettle, and he sank to his knees, cradling himself.
McCady turned to Jessalyn. She looked as if she had been the one to take a fist in the jaw. All the color had drained from her face, leaving her eyes looking flat and glittering, like beaten silver. He stared at her as if she were the only woman on earth, ignoring the archbishop, who was bleating like a hen whistle, "I say, I say, I say, you can't do this."
"You're coming with me," McCady said, softly so as not to frighten her.
"No!" she whispered on a sharp expulsion of breath. But he grabbed her wrist anyway and hauled her with him back down the nave.
"Stop him!"
Until now the few wedding guests had been too shocked to interfere, but at the archbishop's command several of the gentlemen started forward.
Tall wrought iron candlesticks, with three flaming branches, were bolted to the end of each pew. With a strength he hadn't known he possessed, McCady wrenched one free and threw it like a fiery javelin at the legs of his pursuers.
And then he was running again and dragging Jessalyn after him.
He had her wrist in a tight grip, but still, she could have pulled free of him. That she did not gave him hope. As they pelted through the streets, it occurred to him that he was going to need his phaeton, and he had left it abandoned behind a hay wagon in the middle of The Strand. To his relief he saw that a beadle had drawn the carriage to one side of the street and was holding the horses' heads, a look of outrage purpling his pie-round face.
"Sir!" the beadle expostulated. "You cannot leave this vehicle here."
"You are quite right," McCady said, flinging Jessalyn like a sack of hops up onto the high seat. "If you would kindly remove yourself from my path, I shall remove myself from yours."
It wasn't until they reached the relative calm of Regent's Park that he was able to look at her. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and bare arms, a living lire, held in place by a wreath of tiny white flowers. Her wedding dress was elegant, but of a pale somber gray as befitted her mourning state. Her face was as gray as the watered silk of her gown, and her lips were bloodless.
"Jessalyn?"
Slowly she turned her head, and he looked into a pair of stormy eyes.
"Damn you, McCady Trelawny," she said. "You have ruined everything."
"Perhaps ye might likes t' adjourn now to one o' the nice wedding chambers we gots upstairs," Mr. Hargraves said, producing a smile that was missing a few teeth.
The man was used to nervous grooms and brides, for he was one of the professional witnesses who performed Gretna Green's clandestine marriages. Mr. Hargraves witnessed marriages out of his taproom when he wasn't standing behind his bar of brassbound barrels, serving up wets to the local tipplers.
McCady took his wife's elbow and led her around watermarked wooden tables and benches toward the stairs. She caught her foot on an uneven flagstone and lurched into him. Immediately she stiffened and pulled away. She was unsteady on her feet, but then he, too, still felt the jolt and sway, like the pitch of the sea, that came from spending hours in a carriage.
They had not exchanged more than a half dozen words in the days and nights it had taken them to travel here from London. Before they had left the outskirts of town, he stopped long enough to hock his sword to pay for their food and the changes of horses along the way. He also bought straw for her feet and wrapped her in blankets like a human sausage.
It was while he was gently tucking the wool close beneath her chin that she spoke to him the one and only time. "I suppose you are dragging me off somewhere to ravish me," she said.
"By all means I intend to ravish you." He tried on a smile as he stroked her cheek with the back of his curled hand. "After I have married you."
She said nothing then, merely looked at him out of immense gray eyes that sent a piercing stab of fear into his chest. If she truly loved Tiltwell, then she would never forgive what he had done.
They rode in silence, except for the clink and rattle of the traces, the rumble of the wheels, the ring of the horses' hooves on the hard road. He couldn't get her to eat when they stopped at the coaching inns, though she drank a glass of purl once, standing before a fire in the inn's yard.
He couldn't get his fill of looking at her. There was so much he wanted to say, things he knew he should say, explanations for what he had done. But he couldn't begin to find the words. He doubted he could adequately explain it all to himself. He knew that he had taken her only because he could no longer bear his life without her.
So the milestones clicked by in silence as they drove through grass golden with celandines and dandelions, past farmers' fields squared and planted into a my
riad of greens and yellows, like a piece of stamp work. The roads were dry at first, and they threw out a fog of dust that settled on the hedgerows, turning them white. But then it started to rain. He was aware of every breath she took, but she wouldn't look at him.
When she fell asleep, almost tumbling out of the high-perch phaeton, he stopped for a few hours' rest. He didn't dare leave her alone, so he sat in a chair beside the meager peat fire, while she lay fully clothed on top of the truckle bed. They were right above the taproom, and the floor shook with shouts and drunken laughter. She didn't sleep. She lay there, still and silent in the dark, and he could feel her big, haunted gray eyes watching him.
When at last they got to Gretna Green, he paid the witness well to ignore a negative response to the all-important question of whether she was there of her own free will. But it hadn't been necessary. The single word hadn't been loud, but it had been an unmistakable "yes." Too late he realized he had only his signet ring to place on her left hand. Once it was on, she had to curl her fingers to keep it from falling off.
"What God has joins t'gether," the witness had finally said, "let no man puts asunder." And she was his.
He could have wished for a more elegant bridal chamber. The room was furnished with a tester bed with faded green hangings, a small clothespress, and a muted Turkey carpet. The pink grogram curtains at the window contributed the only note of cheeriness to the room.
She went immediately to the window as soon as they had crossed the threshold, keeping her back to him. He doubted she had much to look at. It was a dark, weeping day. Aside from being the place for clandestine marriages, Gretna Green wasn't known for its points of scenic interest. A few stone cottages, a small grove of firs, a little wooden bridge over the river.
He coaxed a reluctant blaze from the smoking fire, then used a paper spill to light the candles in the iron sconces. A pair of plaster figurines, a shepherd and his shepherdess, sat atop the mantel, and he stared at them for a long time, as if they could speak and tell him how he was going to get his wife into his bed if she didn't want to be there.
He joined her at the window, standing at her back, close enough to touch her, though he did not do so. He stared at the top of her bent head. He wanted to press his lips to the center part, looking white and vulnerable in the fire of her hair, but he didn't do that either. Instead he tried several sentences out in his mind before he settled on the most direct one. But when he went to speak, he discovered that his lungs must have forgotten how to work.
He sucked in a deep, hitching breath. "Jessalyn... I would very much like to make love to you."
She fingered the lace trim on the curtain. "I didn't think it necessary for a husband to ask permission before he takes his wife."
"I don't want to take you... I want you willing."
"Willing!" She spun around so fast he took a step back. "And so you abducted me from the altar just as I was about to be married to another man? You wanted me, and you took me without even bothering to ask how I felt about it." She slammed a fist at her chest so hard the white floral wreath slipped over her forehead. She pulled it off, staring at it with those haunted gray eyes, and he thought surely that he was damned. She shuddered as she drew in a great, sobbing breath. "Oh, blast you, McCady, you don't know what you have done."
Her face was the white of a fresh snowfall, dusted with gold flakes. Her hair, dark with damp, was like the last leaves of autumn. He saw himself reflected in the clear tidal pools of her eyes. Her beauty made him ache. He was going to start begging soon. He was going to be down on his knees soon and begging her to let him lay his head on her breasts, to lie between her legs, to taste of her mouth.
"I couldn't let him have you, Jessalyn," he said, his throat raw. "I know that I am worthless, a degenerate Trelawny buried in debts. But you're all I've ever wanted out of this life, the only thing I will ever need. Without you I have no reason to live." He held his hands up to her, spreading them in supplication, and they shook as if he had an ague. "I have no pride left. You have it all."
Her head cocked to one side, and her wide mouth trembled. But her voice was thick with feeling, and her words lit up his dark soul. "You silly goose," she said.
And she went into his arms.
He smelled the rain in her hair, and then he was tasting the rain on her lips. And then he was smothering her mouth in a delicious tongue-sucking kiss.
He had wanted to make love to her slowly, to savor her like fine aged wine. But his need was too great. She owned him, did this scrawny carrottop with her rusty laugh and her wide, wet mouth; she owned him body and soul. And he wanted something back from her, even if it was only the hot, exploding pleasure of spilling his seed inside her, long and deep.
He thrust her away from him. "Get undressed," he said, his voice rough because he wanted her so damn badly. "Now."
She stared at him for several heartbeats, her eyes solemn with that deep emotion that he could never plumb and that had always frightened him. Then she turned and lifted her hair off her neck so that he could unhook her bodice. She lowered her head, and his gaze was caught by the white nape of her neck. He kissed the small, protruding bone and felt her silken skin ripple beneath his lips.
His fingers worked at the hooks. "I hate this dress," he said, his breath rustling the tiny wisps of hair that fanned her neck. "You wore it for him."
"No." The word was soft as a sigh. "Not for him, McCady. I simply wore it, that is all."
The dress pooled around her feet in a whisper of gray silk. His hands clasped her slender waist, and he turned her to face him. She wouldn't look at him. Her fingers became entangled in the ribbons of her shift. It was all tucks and frills and lace, and she had put it on for Tiltwell, not for him, so he hated it as well. He shoved her hands roughly aside, and hooking his fingers into the lacy yoke neck, he ripped it down the middle.
Her breasts spilled free, and he caught them in his hands. A harsh groan tore from her throat. She shuddered violently and fell against him, and he gathered her into his arms and carried her to the bed.
He fell with her across it, rolling her onto her back, pinning her down with his weight. Her eyes stared up at him, two molten silver pools, and he saw within them his surrender. And his triumph.
"You are mine," he said. "My wife."
Her hair spilled over the pillow like a pool of canary wine. He buried his face in it, and her scent filled him, made him sigh. "Primroses," he said. "You always smell of primroses."
He shifted his hips, trying to ease the agony between his legs. He had never felt so enormous, so hard. He was going to have to take her now. He couldn't bear it. Later there would be time to taste the silken skin on the backs of her knees, to run his tongue along the underside of her breast and take her nipple between her teeth, to trace the smooth curve of her bottom with his lips. Later.
His fingers struggled with the drawstring of her drawers. "Damn this thing."
"Don't rip it, McCady."
"No... Hell! No, I've got it." He tugged, and she lifted her hips so that he could get rid of the offending garment. He left her stockings on because he thought she looked deliciously wanton that way—gloriously naked except for those thin bits of silk covering her coltish legs and the frilly white garters tied around her slender thighs. He spread her legs wide with his knees and then knelt between them.
He looked down at her, and with reverence and a strange sense of possession, he cupped her fiery mound. He slid a finger inside her, and God, but she was so hot and dripping wet. For him, she was hot and wet for him. Something squeezed his chest and brought the sting of tears to his eyes. It wasn't lust, or only lust. But he didn't want to understand it, so he thrust the thought of it away.
He straightened enough to unbutton his breeches and pushed them down over his hips. His sex sprang free, but he felt no relief. He was hard and aching, and when her hand closed around his thick length, he nearly shouted. She squeezed and pulled, forcing him to grow harder, thicker, and his breath
hissed out his tight throat in a shattering groan.
He stilled her hand. "Do you want it now, Jessalyn?"
"Yessss." Her eyes were almost black. Her full mouth wet and parted.
"That's good, that's good. 'Cause now is when you're going to get it."
He braced himself on his outstretched arms so that he could watch her face as he took her. He rubbed the smooth, round tip of himself between the hot, slick lips of her sex, relishing the tiny whimpering noises she was making in the back of her arched throat and the way the white skin of her inner thighs rippled like a wind-licked lake.
He eased into her, stretching her, filling her. Her silk-clad legs wrapped around his hips, sucking him deep, and his breath left him on a keening moan. She throbbed around him, gripping him with the wet, hot mouth of her sex. He lifted his buttocks, almost pulling out of her, then drove into her again and again, stroking her clenching tightness. Again and again, until he was plunging wildly and she was bucking her hips so that with each frenzied thrust he seemed to spear her deeper. A powerful explosion was building within him, like a steam boiler stoked to bursting, and when it came, he knew it was going to kill him, to shatter him into so many pieces he would never be able to put himself back together again. Not yet, please... oh, God, not yet. Not yet, not yet, not yet...
His head fell back, his lips pulling away from his clenched teeth in a rictus of pleasure and pain. She was turning him inside out, utterly destroying him, and he didn't care. She was heaven and hell and everything in between.
And she was his.
CHAPTER 25
The sun beat down on her straw-bonneted head, and what little breeze there was smelled tartly of brine and seaweed.
Jessalyn Trelawny walked along a beach of sand that was soft and dry, like crushed sugar. She paused to turn over a piece of driftwood with her foot. Stringy seaweed had caught on one end of it, looking like a hank of witch's hair. She started to bend over, to pick it up, but then she let it be.
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