She'd seen a man on top of the bluff. His tall figure stood silhouetted a moment against a mist-washed horizon the color of fresh cream. He began the climb down the cliff path, and she smiled. Walk with me on the beach this morning, he'd said, and she had seen his intent in the heavy, slightly drowsy look that stole into his eyes and the tautness of his face. They had almost wound up doing it then and there, on the table among the coffee cups and toast racks.
Always there was this wanting between them. Dear life, such wanting. They wanted with a hunger as fierce and devastating as a Cornish gale. The kind of gale that blows roofs off cottages and tears up the hedges. The kind of gale that whips through a place and changes forever the lives of those caught in its path. They were helpless before the storm that gripped them.
She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun. He had reached the bottom of the path and was pausing to remove his hat and wipe his brow. Sunlight glinted off golden hair. Jessalyn's breath caught in her throat.
An oyster catcher swooped over her head with a loud cry, before banking toward the cliff in a flash of black wings. Clarence Tiltwell stopped before her, and she was shocked at what she saw. Shadows lay like soot smudges beneath his eyes, and his mouth looked bleak. A fading bruise discolored his jaw. For a moment she pitied him, the boy that he was, the friend that he had once been.
His gaze searched her face, and she had to turn away from the raw pain that glittered in his eyes. "Jessalyn, has he hurt you?"
She shook her head. "No. No, of course not. Clarence, why did you come? Can't you please just leave us alone?"
His head rocked back a little as if she had struck him. "I can't. I love you too much. I never wanted to hurt you or anger you. I only wanted to make you my wife."
"Oh, Clarence..." It was odd, but in spite of what he had tried to do to her, of what he was doing to McCady, she still ached for him. "It's too late."
"It is not too late. I can arrange for an annulment. You can say he forced you. All London saw him carry you off."
McCady was coming toward them down the beach, his hitching stride leaving marks in the sand. Her heart swelled with love for him. Her whole body tightened at the memory of his touch. "He would never let me go," Jessalyn said. "I don't want to go. I love him."
Clarence had seen the change come over her face, and his back stiffened. But he didn't turn around. "He will only bring you misery. He's going to prison, Jessalyn. I can make sure of it. What will you do when—"
"I will take rooms near Fleet Street and visit him every day," she said. She knew that McCady could hear her now. She wanted him to hear her. "I will take in piecework; I will paste cigar boxes together; I will sell watercress bunches in Covent Garden. I will do whatever is necessary to live until we can be together again."
Clarence took a step toward her, a baffled, panicky look in his eyes. He gripped her arm as if he would drag her away. "Jessalyn—"
"She is Lady Caerhays to you, Tiltwell. And you will take your hand off her." McCady slipped a possessive arm around her waist and drew her against him. Fear for him, for what would happen made Jessalyn dizzy. She thought she could actually feel her heart slamming in slow, painful strokes against her breast. She cast an imploring look at Clarence, but his gaze was riveted on McCady, and it was black with rage and hate.
"You bastard," he said.
A slow smile curled the earl's mouth. "Actually, I'm not. My parents were married... cousin."
Faint tremors shook Clarence's lanky frame. His face had blanched a sickly gray, the color of old wax. "You once made me swear to be good to her, yet you were the one who carried her off and married her over an anvil in a hovel."
"It was a taproom actually."
"Don't you care what you have done to her? You have utterly and completely ruined her."
"The act of a blackguard, I agree. But then I've never claimed to be otherwise. And she is not complaining." He looked at her with drowsy, heavy-lidded eyes, but his arm was squeezing her so tightly the breath was pushed from her lungs. "Are you, Jessa?"
"McCady, don't taunt him, please. It isn't right—"
"She's afraid," Clarence said, and he forced a high-pitched laugh. "Aren't you, my dear? You're afraid I'll tell him about our little agreement."
"Clarence, don't—"
McCady's voice cut across hers. "What agreement?"
"I was to give her your promissory notes on our wedding night. But there wasn't a wedding night, so I still have them. And you have ten days to come up with ten thousand pounds, because after that I'm sticking the bailiffs on you." His hands fisted, and he spoke between tightly held lips. "You have her now, Caerhays, but I shall have her in the end. It is only a matter of time." He spun around on his heel and strode away from them so fast the tails of his coat slapped at his leg and his boots kicked up tiny sprays of sand.
McCady's furious gaze slammed into her like a blow to her chest. "Was he telling the truth?"
"McCady..."
His rough hands wrapped around her arms, and he shook her, hard. "Was he?"
"I will do anything for you."
He let her go so abruptly she stumbled in the thick sand. "So I see," he said, and there was that sneer in his voice that could be so cruel and cutting. "Including selling yourself like some Covent Garden doxy."
"Yes!" She spit the word at him, going up on her toes and leaning into him. "If that is what it took to save you from prison. Is that so terrible?"
"Yes, dammit!" he spit back at her. The sunbursts in his eyes flared with fury and frustration, and something else: a shocking bewilderment, as if she, not he, were the mystery.
She stretched up farther on her toes, going nose to nose with him. "I love you!" she shouted. "I would do anything for you. Why in bloody hell does that make you so angry?"
"I don't know!" he shouted back at her.
He swung away from her and starting walking.
"Where are you going?" she cried after him.
He didn't stop; he didn't even pause. She picked up her skirts and ran after him, wobbling in the heavy sand. "Damn you, McCady, you aren't walking away from me!" She slammed hard into his back, driving him to his knees and knocking her hat off her head. Its wide satin ribbon pulled tight against her throat. She wrenched it off and sent it soaring and tumbling into the marram grass and rocks.
He rolled, pulling her over on top of him. "What the hell—"
"I'll not let you leave!" She thumped his chest with her balled-up fist. "You aren't leaving me again, do you hear me, McCady?" She gripped his hair and slammed her mouth down on his, and it was like setting a torch to black powder. Their mouths clung, possessed, devoured, and when it ended, it was as if a fierce and violent storm had passed through them, leaving them shaken.
Her breath blew against the skin of his neck in harsh gasps. "Never again," she said. She could feel his heart pounding against her chest. "You're not leaving me ever again."
He sucked in a big breath and expelled it in a bigger sigh. "I'm not leaving you, woman. I'm going to Penzance. I was going tomorrow anyway to put the finishing touches on the locomotive. The bloody trials will still happen whether I'm in prison or... or not... dammit!" His sex stirred against her belly. It was thick and hard, and she thought she could feel the heat of it through her clothes and his. She rubbed against him in bold, sensuous circles, and heard his breath catch. "Ah, God. Even angry with you, there is this craven, aching need in me—" He cut himself off, and his hands closed around her shoulders to push her off him.
She pressed down hard against him, as if she could fuse their two bodies into one. She ran her tongue across his sullen lower lip. "I will do anything for you, McCady," she said into his open mouth. "Anything. Except stop loving you."
His fingers speared through her hair, pulling her head down for the breath space needed for their lips to connect. His kiss, which began rough and punishing, turned soft and seducing. His mouth moved over hers, parting her lips and inviting himself in. He moaned int
o her open mouth...
And tore his mouth from hers, pulling his head back. She stared, breathless, at the harsh beauty of his face, but the shadows had consumed the suns in his eyes. "Damn you," he said. "Damn you, for being able to do this to me." He pushed her off him and rolled in one swift, graceful movement to his feet.
And he was gone.
She lay on the sand until the throbbing in her lips subsided. A wide smile broke over her face, and she spread her arms, embracing the world. He loves me, she thought. He does love me. Only the silly goose didn't know how to say it yet.
She shielded her eyes from the harsh glare. The sun was hot; she'd be left with a hundred blasted freckles for McCady to try to lick off. She pushed to her feet, dusting the sand from her skirts.
Nearby a rock thrust out straight and flat from the sand like a shelf, and Jessalyn went to sit upon it. She unbuttoned her gray kid boots and tugged them off, then untied her garters and peeled down her stockings. She dug her bare feet into the wet sand. It flowed between her toes, cool and slick, stirring her like a lover's touch. His touch. She looked out to sea, at a sun-bleached sky where wisps of memories played, like shadow puppets on a wall.
She smiled again as she thought of that long-ago summer, when the morning breeze had touched her cheeks with fleecy softness, and the sea had seemed to pound against the rocks in time with the wild beating of her heart. When every day the sky had stretched above her head, wide and empty and of so intense a blue the soul could not bear it. When she had loved a man with all of her heart and asked for nothing.
But that he love her back.
The mouth of the blast furnace yawned open, filled with glowing coals that cast an eerie red light throughout the cavernous building. The locomotive sat on a strip of track nearby, the burning embers reflecting in its brightly polished copper box, so that it seemed it had a bellyful of fire.
With its steeply inclined cylinders, it looked crouched and waiting. It looked fast.
The earl of Caerhays leaned against a worktable, deep within the shadows cast by a huge pair of bellows. His booted feet were crossed at the ankles; a lock of mussed hair fell over his forehead. He was in shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing muscular arms that gleamed with sweat. He smelled of spent steam and grease.
His manservant, Duncan, had a splotch of green paint on his square chin, directly below the faint dimple. Both men nursed leather jacks filled with smuggled French brandy. They had been working, but now they were celebrating.
Duncan held a dripping paintbrush poised in the air, then drew a slashing cross through the big green T on the boiler. He leaned back on his heels and squinted one-eyed at his masterpiece.
"Comet. 'Tis a proper name, sir. Very fitting."
A muscle bunched in the earl's beard-shadowed cheek. "It was her ladyship's suggestion."
A dull ache settled over his chest. He missed her. She should be here with him, dammit. He had been going to bring her with him, but she had made him so bloody angry. And every time he thought about it, he got angry all over again, and the devil of it was he didn't know why. He only knew he wanted to lash out at something—her, Tiltwell, himself. But then the fury would pass and he'd be left feeling empty. And wanting her.
He thrust the thought of her from his head and took another walk around his locomotive. The boiler had been clothed with sheets of felt, covered by tightly stretched canvas that had been stitched by a Mousehole sailmaker and painted a primrose yellow. At Duncan's suggestion they had also painted the wheels a bright grass green. Every bolt and nut and rivet had been lovingly fashioned by hand. It was unlike anything the world had ever seen.
The special copper tubing, designed for a multitubular boiler, which he'd ordered from a manufacturer in Birmingham, had been installed. It was the innovation he'd first thought of six years ago, when he'd been trying to invent a horseless carriage, that day he'd been knocked senseless by a scrawny carrottop with a laughing mouth. The result was now here before him: a boiler much lighter and powerful, made for an engine that would carry passengers and freight on rails across the land.
He hooked his hip back on the edge of the worktable. Duncan joined him, pushing a pile of spanners and bolts aside, leaning back, laying his palms flat on the old scarred wood, and hefting his butt up so that he was sitting on the tabletop, legs dangling over the side. The two men drank in silent harmony for a while; then the earl said, "She is a beauty, is she not, Duncan?" He felt an odd sort of warmth in his chest that he supposed was pleasure at what he'd built. "Sleek and powerful and efficient. Pity I'll likely never know how she goes."
"Aweel. Ye tipped the dice, and ye bubbled up snake eyes, and there 'tis." Duncan punctuated this observation by taking a swig of brandy.
A faint smile pulled at the earl's hard mouth. "How profoundly and succinctly put. I gambled and lost. No sense weeping and wailing and beating one's breast over it. You're a level-headed man, Duncan."
Duncan grinned. "Thank ye kindly."
The earl frowned. "Unlike a certain female of my acquaintance, you don't allow your emotions to get in the way of your common sense. It's a pity, when one thinks about it, that we couldn't be married to each other."
Duncan's eyes popped open so wide his eyebrows all but disappeared.
The earl made a calming motion with his jack, slopping brandy onto his boots. "I didn't mean it that way, man. The point I was making—trying to make—is that the shackles of matrimony would be easier for one to bear if the one one was married to, the individual, so to speak, in an abstract way, as it were, was a man."
Duncan, who had been following the earl's jack as it waved through the air, had to blink a few times before he could speak. "I see yer point... I think."
"Of course, you see my point. That is because you are a man." He thumped Duncan on the shoulder with his finger. "If, for instance, I had preserved your sixteen-year-old virtue at considerable cost to my physical self, not to mention my peace of mind, and, I might further add, all the while you"—he thumped Duncan's shoulder again—"were cavorting around the countryside, possessed with a laugh that could make a man's blood run hot and lips created to do things to a man only the devil could have invented...." He paused for breath and a hearty swallow of brandy. "Why, the more I think on it, I was a bloody saint. But did she thank me for it? Ha!"
Duncan responded with a solemn shake of his head. "I would ae thanked ye for it. I would ae been so grateful, I would ae kissed... uh, I would ae thanked ye. Sir."
"Of course, you would have thanked me. Polite thing to do. And if I had then saved you from a fate worse than death—"
"What's worse than death?"
"Marriage to Tiltwell."
Duncan shuddered dramatically. "I wouldna at all think ill of ye for such chivalrous behavior."
"Of course, you wouldn't. You're a man. Just as a man would not seize upon such a cabbageheaded, cork-brained, bird-witted notion to give himself in marriage to a toplofty, niggardly bastard, merely to rescue the one he lov—cares for from debtor's prison."
Duncan helped himself to more brandy. He cradled the jack between his spread knees and stared into the shimmering golden liquid, a solemn, thoughtful look on his face. "Have you told her ladyship that you love her, sir?"
The earl glared at him. "That is just the sort of question a woman would ask. I fear we would not suit after all."
Duncan shrugged his big shoulders. "My heart is promised anyway. To Miss Poole. Only she willna have me. I'm not good enough for her. I'm too handsome."
Helped along by the brandy, McCady gave this statement careful consideration. "I have just come to a profound conclusion, Duncan. Women are incomprehensible. There is nothing for it. We are going to have to go home."
Duncan had a bit of trouble following the leaps in his lordship's logic. He settled for making a practical observation. "Can't. 'Tis dark out, and we're drunk."
The earl stood up. The world listed slightly. He sat back down. "Tomorrow will be soon enoug
h." He tipped the lip of the brandy bottle over Duncan's jack, filling it to the brim. "In the meantime, you'll be needing to build up your strength, man, for the ordeal ahead of you. Because once we are home, you will drag Miss Poole by the hair up to Gretna Green and you will marry her whether she will have you or not."
"I will, sir?"
"It worked for me, didn't it? Sort of worked. Will work, dammit, once Jessalyn accepts the fact that she belongs to me and that if anyone needs rescuing around here, it's supposed to be her. By me. It's not the woman's place to do the rescuing. A man would know that."
"I still think it would help matters along if ye was t' tell her ladyship that ye love her. Sir."
"You look to your own affairs, Duncan."
Duncan belched. "Aye, sir."
Black Charlie sat hunched like a massive spider in a corner beneath the arcade at Tattersalls Repository. Neat rows of stacked coins of various denominations were arranged on the table in front of her. She was settling last week's bets.
"Morning, Charlie," Lady Caerhays said from beneath the big floppy brim of a stableboy's hat.
The leg flashed a mouthful of brown teeth and clay pipe. "Ere now! 'Tis Miss Jessalyn. I hardly recognized ye in them togs. I don't owe ye any blunt, does I? I thought we was all settled up."
"Oh, we are, we are. I'm just here because, well, I'm having a dispersal sale."
Black Charlie's bristly brows disappeared into a grimy mobcap. "Are ye now? Guess ye don't have the 'eart for any more racin' now that yer granny's passed on, eh? Ye'll get a pretty penny fer the lot, ye will. Especially that Blue Moon of yours—he's a prime un. A tiptop goer and no mistake."
Jessalyn's smile felt a bit wobbly. "That he is. A tiptop goer..." A sudden rush of tears filled her eyes, and she had to blink hard and look away.
A dandy in green-striped trousers and a purple coat with brass buttons the size of eggs came sauntering up just then, wanting to lay a pony on the favorite in next week's Rowley Mile, and so Jessalyn drifted away. The auction yard at Tattersalls was always busiest on Monday mornings, for that was when the horses passed under the hammer and the legs settled last week's bets.
Once in a Blue Moon Page 39
