Never. Never, ever. She’d never been touched … there.
And you never will. Your time has passed, remember? A spinster’s life, that’s all there is before you.
He froze as well, his arm still crossing her body. Then, slowly, he pulled it back, dragging it intentionally sideways. His fine white sleeve tugged slightly at the paper-thin chemise, rubbing the fabric into delicate flesh so tight it ached.
A sound came out of Callie’s throat. Part fear, part shock, part astonished, shivering awakening.
Never, ever.
She began to shiver now, her body caught in tremors beyond her ability to still. His arm dropped away. She closed her eyes tightly.
All he has done is take back his jewels. Perhaps he yet means me no harm.
“A virgin fantasy? Not my usual delusion, but one learns not to argue the point.” His tone was soft, odd, as if she weren’t even there.
“Seduction, then? Make her want me? Impossible. This is even worse than the damned dog…”
Callie’s eyes squeezed shut more tightly. He thought she wished to be seduced? Yet what else was a man to think, to find a soaking-wet, half-naked girl in his rooms? Horror laced through her, building in her throat, unable to be released in a scream.
One shoulder of her chemise began to slip down, down …
She started, jerking in his grasp. “Shh,” he whispered in her ear. “There’s nothing to fear, sweet wraith. You are simply too lovely to remain concealed.”
One half of Callie’s mind was gibbering in panic, running about in tiny circles and waving mad hands in the air. The other half wondered at a man who seemed so determined to be gentle with a woman so entirely in his power.
She felt his arm go around her and then the other tiny sleeve fell halfway down her elbow. A tug on the fabric was all it took to drag the damp, clinging fabric to puddle at her waist, her arms trapped at the elbow by the sleeves. The chill in the room sent another shiver through her that seemed to culminate in her ever-hardening nipples.
She felt rather than heard him drag in a long, deep breath.
“Open your eyes.”
Callie hesitated, then did as he commanded her in that roughened voice. The image in the mirror was a wicked one, indeed. Her shoulders, her torso, her breasts, bare and ivory against the larger darkness of him behind her. The crumpled chemise, pinning her arms, made her look shameless, somehow almost worse than being naked.
She raised her gaze to her own eyes in the mirror, wide and shocked above his big hand covering her mouth … Is that me?
“You yet have something of mine.”
She still wore the long strand of perfect pearls. It draped down between her breasts, gleaming ethereally in the golden glow of the candle.
Her hands fluttered up to take it off, but he caught them like butterflies, trapped carefully in his larger ones. He pressed their tangled fingers between her breasts.
“You could keep it, delicious spirit, if you wish.”
The words were broken, as if torn from a throat unused to coaxing anyone for anything.
“A small request, perhaps? No, too many in my mind to choose … I could ask for more … one for each and every pearl?”
Warm fingers trailed down the strand, brushing lightly on her skin. “There are so many pearls … I could keep you for a year or more with such a bounty. Would you return to me each night to earn a pearl? A dying man’s wish? I would release you happily in the end, if only you would bring your warmth to my cold evenings and my colder dawns…”
Callie felt some of the fear leak away at the loneliness in his deep voice. He did not know what he said, locked into his brandy-soaked fancies. She would explain herself, convince him that she was a real girl, a gently bred one at that, fallen upon his hearth in need of shelter from the storm.
Then, releasing her, his hot hands closed over her breasts and his hot mouth dove down upon her neck. Her gasp of shock and protest was lost in the deep growl of need reverberating from his throat as he drew her back hard against him.
Then he was gone, torn from her with a violence that spun her hard against the vanity. Unable to catch herself with her arms pinned to her sides, she stumbled and fell to the floor. The strand of pearls caught upon the corner of the marble tabletop and broke as she fell. Iridescent orbs bounced and scattered everywhere.
She scrambled to her hands and knees, frantically tugging her chemise back up, then turned to see two struggling forms in the shadows.
“Dade!”
On her feet once more, she grabbed her candle and held it high. Two heads, one dark and one light—that would be Dade, his hair much more golden than her own! Callie searched for something heavy to swing, ready to enter the fray in defense of her brother.
Then the fight swung closer to her and she saw what had been hidden from her in the mirror. Her assailant’s face, twisted and half ruined—dark and demonic!
Callie screamed and lost her grip on the candlestick. The room went entirely dark.
Chapter 2
Quite possibly the most annoying thing about attending a duel was the early-morning hour. Callie yawned behind her glove. Truly, could idiot men not just as easily kill each other in the middle of the afternoon? Say, after a satisfying meal and perhaps a nap?
Callie, being secretly of the opinion that a great number of the world’s troubles could be solved by all parties toting themselves off for a relaxing nap, yawned again and glared at her brother. Anger was safe. Much better than thinking about her scandalous moment of madness last night.
Furthermore, Dade was a safer recipient of that glare than the alarming Mr. Porter. Dade wasn’t going to glare back, or raise his hand to point to her, or open his mouth and reveal all that had truly happened.
This entire matter would be best forgotten. She hadn’t been injured, nor had she injured anyone. It had been an odd mistake, made in a strange dreamlike moment of allowing herself to be someone whom she was most definitely not.
She was very tired from her sleepless night and she was cold and she wanted to go home. She wished Dade and Mr. Porter would get over their silliness, or at the very least finish up their ridiculous male posturing quickly. Wave your pistols, fire into the air, declare yourselves avenged, or redeemed, or whatever, and let us all simply go home!
Only it didn’t look like silly male posturing. It looked very serious, with Dade stiffly formal in his blue surcoat, his face pale and ill and determined. Mr. Porter, in a hooded cape that hid his frightening face, looked none the less determined in posture and in the way his large hand gripped the pistol at his side. They stood back to back, the sturdy fair-haired young gentleman and the leaning, limping man of shadow.
Callie’s belly went ice-cold. This felt horribly wrong. Someone should stop them. Someone should do something! She looked to her parents, but they only stood arm in arm, looking worried and helpless and strangely old.
Archie glared in Mr. Porter’s direction. “It is only right that something should be done about the man. ‘He is as disproportionate in his manners as in his shape.’”
Iris leaned closer to Callie. “Prospero, you know. The Tempest, act five, scene one.”
Callie ignored her parents. It didn’t do to encourage them. They could go on for hours. She swallowed. “Dade—”
A sharp motion of his hand cut her off. Morgan, acting as second for Dade, began to count off the steps. “One. Two. Three.”
Both men moved out, Dade in a slow, purposeful stride, Mr. Porter in an off-center lurching gait.
“Ten.”
Twenty paces apart, the two men turned and pointed their pistols simultaneously. Mr. Porter fired at once. The explosion of gunpowder in the silent morning sent birds winging from the trees and Callie’s heart into her throat.
The bullet tore into the grass at Dade’s feet, sending soil and roots up in a spray to spatter his boots. Dade started, looked down, then looked back up at Mr. Porter, his jaw hardening.
“Do not think
that will save you.”
Mr. Porter lowered his smoking pistol and tossed it into the grass. “Fire, then.”
Dade firmed his grip on his pistol and aimed.
Callie felt sick. Oh, why didn’t someone do something?
Mr. Porter began to walk forward, grim determination evident in every lurching step. “Go on. Fire. Don’t you think I deserve to die? Isn’t that why you gave challenge in the first place?”
He came closer and closer. Each step brought him farther into range. Dade could not miss now, not unless he intended to. One look at her brother’s face told Callie that he did not intend to.
Mr. Porter did not intend to stop, either, apparently. He continued his slow lurching walk directly toward the ball about to hurtle from Dade’s pistol.
What was he doing? Was he mad? Did he not see that Dade would fire?
Mr. Porter stopped at last when his chest was no more than eighteen inches from the barrel of Dade’s pistol.
“I’m waiting.” Mr. Porter’s rasping voice was clearly audible in Callie’s ears. “Fire. Do it. Wrap your finger around the trigger and pull it.”
Dade’s jaw worked. “You think to daunt me with this game?”
“I play no game. You have a grievance against me. I have none against you. Take your vengeance and be done with it. Let us all bloody well be done with it.”
Bloody well be done with it. Callie’s thoughts skittered back to the night before. Mr. Porter’s strange manner of speaking—as if he thought himself to be soon lying cold in death. Did he want to die?
Yet his hands, his touch, his words, while dark and lonely, had thrilled her with their hunger and need. He wanted to live, she just knew it.
Perhaps he simply doesn’t know how.
Bastard. Sudden fury enveloped Callie. To put them all through this, simply because he wanted to give up the fight, to slip beneath the waves of his misery?
And what of Dade? What was he to do now? If he put down his pistol, could he ever forgive himself for the dishonor? If he fired, could he ever forgive himself for taking a life?
But … he wouldn’t take a life. Would he? On her behalf, on behalf of the family honor, would her honorable misguided brother actually kill Mr. Porter?
With horror she saw Dade exhale, swallow, and blink.
Oh, dear heaven, he would.
Mr. Porter saw it, as well, for he straightened somewhat and lifted his head. And waited.
As if watching a play, Callie could see the future unfolding before her. Mr. Porter’s still, bleeding body on the ground. Dade, pale and undone, standing over him, pistol smoking. Mr. Porter, buried here on these grounds, no one in attendance but the vicar. Dade, standing trial, denounced as guilty of murder. Dade, swinging lifelessly from the hangman’s rope, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth.
Callie wasn’t precisely sure how she got there. She must have already begun to run across the dewy grass before the moment arrived, because just as Dade’s finger began to tighten on the trigger, she slithered to a stop in front of Mr. Porter.
“You can’t shoot him!”
Dade jerked the pistol high with a curse. “Bloody hell, Callie!”
Callie planted herself squarely in front of Mr. Porter. In fact, her back pressed right against him—that was how close the pistol had been. “Dade, you mustn’t kill him!”
Dade snarled. “I rather think I must.”
Mr. Porter exhaled. “Please do.”
“Shut it!” Callie ordered Mr. Porter over her shoulder.
“Get out of the way, Callie. This no longer concerns you.”
“No longer concerns me?” Callie plunked her hands on her hips. “Well, I like that! Was it not I that Mr. Porter … er—”
“Interfered with?” Mr. Porter said helpfully.
“Batten it down!” Callie hissed over her shoulder. To Dade, she held out placating hands. “I didn’t want to tell you before but…” Blast it, now she was going to have to tell her overprotective, adoring older brother that she’d been a semiwilling participant in her own seduction. She opened her mouth to do just that. It wasn’t her fault that entirely different words came out.
“He made me a proposal!”
“He did?”
“I did?”
Luckily, Mr. Porter’s low and rasping question reached her ears only. She turned her head to glare at him. She could barely see one shadowed side of his face, the relatively unscarred side. His eye regarded her with surprise and a certain amount of cynical appreciation.
“Yes, you did,” she whispered urgently, unable to hide the desperate plea in her voice. “You must.”
He leaned close. “I only recall a certain proposition regarding pearls.” His breath was hot on her ear.
Callie elbowed him sharply. He caught her arm and kept her gaze. “But I have no wish to wed.”
“Can it truly be a fate worse than death?” she hissed at him.
“Well, when you put it that way…”
Callie shot a glance at the fuming Dade, then turned back to Mr. Porter. “So you agree?”
“Pearls,” Mr. Porter reminded her.
She narrowed her eyes, thinking quickly. “Wedding pearls? With the same terms of completion?”
His other arm slid securely—or perhaps it was acquisitively—around her waist. He nodded sharply. “I believe I can live with those terms.”
“Then ’tis a bargain.” Callie turned back to where Dade was gaping at their tense, whispered exchange. She smiled widely at him from Mr. Porter’s possessive embrace.
“Mr. Porter and I are to be married!”
* * *
Callie found herself standing in the Amberdell village vicar’s austere parlor, overseen by the vicar’s austere wife, clutching a minute posy of lily-of-the-valley—the only flowers Mama could find blooming in the vicar’s austere garden—being married to a hooded stranger.
She couldn’t blame the vicar. He did his austere best to induce Mr. Porter to remove his cape, but Mr. Porter simply ignored him. The vicar dared not press too far upon the area’s wealthiest landowner, although Callie saw the man pocket enough gold to weigh down his weskit before agreeing to the ceremony, hood and all.
Iris chose to express her maternal emotions by sighing loudly and waving a long lacy handkerchief as if she bid good-bye to a troop ship. Archie did a great deal of harrumphing and dabbing at his eyes. It seemed to Callie that her parents were tiptoeing right around the matter standing in the middle of the room—hood and all!
I don’t even know this man! Someone should really do something to stop this!
Dade would have if he could, she knew. He looked furious and miserable the entire time, and if he didn’t relax his fists eventually, his hands were going to freeze that way.
Yet what could he do? What could anyone do?
From beneath the cloak emerged a hand that reached for hers. Callie took a breath, took that hand, and turned to face the vicar.
The vicar was talking. She was sure of it, because the man’s mouth was moving and everyone was nodding along. However, all she could hear was the roaring in her ears and the hummingbird beat of her own panicked heart.
I cannot do this. I cannot. Not.
The large warm hand tightened on hers, squeezing nearly to the point of pain. It was precisely what she needed. She clung to that hand, grateful for the heat and solidity of it, as if it were her only tie to certainty. With great concentration, she found her feet still on the earth and the earth still rotating on its axis.
The bizarre ceremony proceeded to its end. After the vicar closed his book, a moment of awkward silence reigned. Archie interrupted it with a double harrumph and Iris blew her nose with a great, goosey honk.
People began to breathe and move again. When Mr. Porter released her hand, Callie was surprised to find that she could stand on her own. Her knees, although weak, were still very much in existence.
I am wed.
In the vicar’s office, Dade and Archie
witnessed the marriage contract, along with another gentleman who Callie dimly recalled had come in with his wife just before the vicar began the vows.
Vows. Vows to a stranger.
Callie watched Mr. Porter’s hooded form bend to sign the contract, his hand swift, his signature decisive. After a moment, she managed to remember her own name and sign it as well. Yet, it was no longer her name, was it?
Her life, her forever, in this odd recluse’s hands.
Well, perhaps not forever. He’d bought himself a wife today, but only a strand of pearls’ worth. Callie resigned to stay and live up to Mr. Porter’s possibly dastardly demands, but she would hold him to his devil’s bargain—when the last pearl was restrung, she would take his name and leave him behind forever!
Oh, dear. Demands. Tonight would be her wedding night! She felt faint again. She really would have rather had some time to prepare. Did she even have a decent nightdress among her things? Was it clean? Would—would she need one? Resolving at that moment to dress like a swathed nomad for bed, she lifted her chin and reminded herself of her vow to love, honor, and obey until death did part them.
Or until I earn back those pearls. Whichever comes first.
As if he knew where her thoughts had wandered, Mr. Porter turned and regarded her from the shadow of his hood.
I find those terms acceptable.
Callie looked away. When the papers were all signed and witnessed and sealed with the vicar’s seal and Mr. Porter’s ring, Callie found herself tightly wrapped in her mother’s arms, wafting handkerchief and all.
“Oh, my pet, I don’t know what we shall do without you!”
Burn the whole madhouse down, most likely. I give you all a month at the most.
She smiled at Iris and the harrumphing Archie. “You will be fine. Dade will look after you and Orion hardly ever explodes anything anymore.”
Iris’s dreamy gaze focused on Callie for a single moment. Callie blinked at the sudden canny knowledge she saw in those faded blue eyes.
Iris tapped the tip of Callie’s nose with a finger. “Don’t tolerate any foolishness from that fellow, my darling—you’re a Worthington and don’t you forget it!” Then the unaccustomed asperity faded away and Iris began to drift slightly to port. “Such a fine set of shoulders on him, though…”
When She Said I Do Page 2
