Once More, Miranda

by Jennifer Wilde

“I’ll leave,” I said.

  “Indeed. And what would you do, take up your old profession? Aren’t you afraid you might have lost your touch?”

  “I don’t think I’d need to pick pockets, Cam.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t imagine it would be too difficult to find another man to take me in.”

  “You’d do that, would you?”

  “In a minute,” I lied.

  He moved across the floor with the speed of lightning, four quick strides and he was in front of me, his eyes a fiery blue, blazing with fury. I took a step backward, flinching. He raised his arm, slammed his hand across my cheek with such force that I fell against the wall. He struck me again, again, each blow fierce, savage. I cried out, my ears ringing, my face afire. He grabbed my throat and began to throttle me, and I kicked his shin and raked my fingernails across his cheek. He let go of my throat. I sank to the floor, gasping and coughing. He seized my hair, yanked me back up, crushed me into his arms and slammed his mouth over mine.

  I pounded his chest and shoved at him, desperately trying to break free. He released me, panting. I doubled up my fist and drove it into his stomach with all my might. I kicked him again, and this time he cried out. I darted across the kitchen and seized one of the pans hanging on the wall and hurled it at him. He ducked. The pan crashed against the wall just above his head. I grabbed another. He leaped toward me and seized my wrist and gave it a brutal twist and the pan clattered to the floor.

  “You son of a bitch!” I cried.

  “Leave me, would you! Take up with another man!”

  “Damn right I would!”

  “Not bloody likely, my girl!”

  “Let go of me!”

  “You belong to me, you little wildcat!”

  “I belong to no one!”

  “I’d kill you before I’d let you—”

  “Try, you sod! Just—”

  He stopped me with his mouth, seething with passion now, tense, fully erect in his breeches. He kissed me with a vengeance, punishing me with his mouth and tongue, and then he swept me up into his arms and carried me down the hall and dumped me onto the sofa in the sitting room. I tried to get up. He shoved me back and whipped up my skirts and fell on me and took me with an unbridled lust that left me bruised and breathless. Tears spilled over my lashes, and, spent, he frowned and kissed away the tears and cradled me to him, gently stroking my hair.

  I cried silently, clinging to him, and Cam held me close, his hand moving over my hair, smoothing it. He lifted it, caressing the back of my neck, and I tilted my head back, looking up at that sharp, lean, beloved face. There was a deep furrow above the bridge of his nose, and his lips were pressed tightly together, turned down at the corners. I could tell that he was shaken by what had happened, by what he had done to me. He pulled me closer and I buried my face in the curve of his shoulder and he held me very, very tightly, as though he feared he might lose me. I rubbed my palms over his back, feeling warm skin beneath the thin cloth, feeling the strong curves of muscle, and his arms tightened even more, telling me what he could never bring himself to tell me in words, reassuring me of emotions he would never admit. We were closer then than we had ever been, and it was worth the pain, worth the humiliation to have this silent affirmation of his love.

  I leaned back against the cushions, his body heavy atop mine, his face inches from my own. I lifted my hand and touched the four thin red streaks where I had clawed him. He winced. I kissed his cheek, kissed his chin, kissed those thin, cruel lips, and he shifted his weight, curling an arm around the back of my neck and touching my throat with his fingertips. My throat was sore and both my cheeks still burned from his blows. My whole body felt bruised and broken, yet I was filled with a marvelous languor, a delicious glow that streamed through my veins, warm and wonderful and tantalizing.

  “I—I shouldn’t have said that,” I whispered.

  “You shouldn’t have,” he agreed.

  “I could—could never leave you, Cam.”

  “I wanted to kill you.”

  “You almost did.”

  “The thought of another man touching you—”

  He scowled and kissed me long and hard and I squirmed beneath him, trying to alleviate the pain of his weight bearing down on me. He parted my lips with his and thrust his tongue inside my mouth and waves of sweet agony swept over me and I was drowning in sensation. Cam raised his head and looked at me again and scowled again, strong and stern and in command and not about to show any sign of weak, unmanly emotion. He took me again, slowly, deliberately, giving me the pleasure he had denied earlier, and for all his control there was tenderness in every stroke, the final, brutal thrust plunging me into a shattering oblivion of bliss. He shuddered and went limp, using my body as a cushion, and the glorious ashes of aftermath warmed us both.

  Later, much later, we were back in the kitchen and Cam was at the table eating the food I’d prepared for him and I was wearing another dress and. my face was clean, my hair newly brushed. He’d brushed his hair, too, and it gleamed a dark blue-black and he looked very sober as he devoured the food. Worked up quite an appetite, I thought, smiling to myself. Cam glanced up and saw my smile and gave me a grim, reproving look. Lovely, savage Scot, not nearly as fierce as he pretended to be, and I gave as good as I got. There was a nasty bruise on his shin, and those claw marks were going to be on his cheek for several days. Good thing I hadn’t really tried to hurt him.

  “Finished?” I inquired.

  “Delicious,” he said, “particularly the cake.”

  “Mrs. Wooden sent it over. It’s her specialty.”

  “You’ve been spending quite a lot of time with her, haven’t you?”

  I nodded, removing the dishes from the table and setting them on the draining board. Cam moved his chair back and folded his arms across his chest, slouching indolently with his shoulders resting against the back of the chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Chin tilted down, the heavy black wave slanting across his brow, he raised his eyes, watching me as I stacked the dishes. He looked like an indolent pasha, I thought, well fed and pampered. What a pleasure it was to pamper him.

  “I assume she’s the one who’s been teaching you to speak properly,” he said.

  “So you have noticed?”

  “Couldn’t help noticing, could I?”

  “You didn’t say anything.”

  “Didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “She’s giving me all sorts of lessons. I’m learning how to walk properly and how to use tableware and how to select wines. Last week I learned the proper way to eat an artichoke. Seems an awful lot of trouble for so little satisfaction, all those leaves you have to pull off. We’ve set up a reading program, too. She owns thousands of books.”

  “And what’s the purpose of all this?”

  “Why, to make a lady out of me.”

  “That’s what you want to be? A lady?”

  “I—I want to be someone you can be proud of, someone you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with.”

  “I’ve never been ashamed of you, Miranda,” he said quietly.

  “I know, but—”

  “I like you just the way you are.”

  “A person has to grow. A person has to—”

  “You’re utterly unique,” he said, looking at me with hooded lids. “You’re also extremely appetizing in that pale pink dress.”

  “It’s not as pretty as the one I had on earlier.”

  “Your cheek’s a bit swollen. There are faint bruises on your throat. I really gave you a beating, didn’t I?”

  “I—suppose I provoked you.”

  “You’re a most provoking wench. You ever talk about leaving me again and I’ll beat you twice as hard. You’ll be black and blue for a week.”

  “You—like having me around, then?” I asked cautiously.

  “If I didn’t, I would have thrown you out months ago.”

  “Cam—”

  He frowned, afraid
I was going to turn sentimental and demonstrative. Cam Gordon would face a pack of armed robbers without turning a hair, would stand in front of a firing squad without the slightest display of emotion. He feared neither man nor beast, yet he was desperately afraid of any overt display of affection, any expression of tender sentiment. Grim, thorny, he carried Anglo-Saxon restraint to an absurd degree and would go to the stake before admitting that he felt as other men did. It was part of his enigma and, strangely enough, one of the things that made him so endearing and vulnerable.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “It must be almost seven. You—you aren’t going out again, are you?”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “I have—everything under control.”

  There was a slight hesitation in his voice. We were on dangerous ground again, but I wasn’t content to let the matter drop.

  “You won’t be seeing your rebel friends, then?”

  “Not for a while,” he replied.

  “It—it’s just that I worry so.”

  “You don’t need to worry, Miranda.”

  “You didn’t really buy gunpowder, did you?”

  “I had to tell you something.”

  “All that talk about renting a house, buying perfume and satin gowns. You were trying to make me think you had another woman.”

  “Maybe so,” he drawled lazily.

  “I’d scratch her eyes out.”

  “Would you?”

  “I certainly would!”

  He liked that. His thin lips curled in a lazy half-grin, and his eyelids were heavy, half-veiling his eyes as he studied me. The eyes told me clearly what was on his mind. I felt a purely feminine satisfaction, a sense of power that only that look in a man’s eyes can give.

  “Come here,” he ordered. There was a husky catch in his voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want an encore.”

  “You hardly touch me for two weeks, and suddenly you can’t get enough of me.”

  “We have the whole evening before us. I’m going to take you upstairs and show you a few new wrestling holds.”

  “Not tonight you’re not,” I said.

  “No?”

  “You’re going upstairs, all right, and you’re going to work on Spoils.”

  “Am I indeed?”

  “And if you’re very, very good, if you do at least ten pages, I may permit you to show me those holds.”

  “I have a powerful yen, Miranda.”

  “Sublimate,” I told him.

  “Jesus! Where’d you learn that word?”

  “I’ve learned a lot of new words.”

  “Can’t say I care for all this learning. It’s mucking you up, making you altogether too cocky.”

  “Get to work, Cam.”

  “Making you bossy, too. I’m boss around here, remember.”

  “Ten pages,” I said. “At least.”

  He gave me another fierce look, but he went upstairs and he took out the manuscript and started to work. Content, glowing with happiness, I read downstairs in the sitting room, finally putting the book aside and thinking about the day and all that had happened, nourishing the love that shimmered inside, as inebriating as the headiest wine. How lucky I was, how very lucky. He wasn’t easy to live with, no. He was an impossible man, moody, enigmatic, violent, full of faults, but he was mine and I loved him beyond all reason.

  He was still working when I went upstairs. The quill was fairly flying across the page, and there were several wads of paper on the floor and he was gritting his teeth, eyes flashing dark blue as he visualized the scene he was committing to paper. I went into the bedroom and removed my clothes and climbed into bed, falling asleep soon after, and several hours must have gone by before the mattress sagged and the springs creaked and I awoke to find him crawling in beside me. He pulled me into his arms and I sighed, only half awake, and he covered me with his body and nuzzled my throat with his nose and I wrapped my arms around his smooth, naked back and wound my legs around his.

  “Ten pages?” I asked sleepily.

  “Twenty,” he told me.

  His body was warm and heavy and the skin across his shoulders was moist and he smelled faintly of perspiration, a delicious, virile musk as potent as the strongest aphrodisiac. The room was in darkness, only a few shimmering silver-gray moonbeams stealing through the windowpanes. He caught my earlobe between his teeth and I struggled and we tussled for a moment and he applied one of his wrestling holds and trapped me flat beneath him and I was helpless, his willing captive. He spread my arms wide and pinioned them to the mattress and stretched over me, our stomachs pressing together.

  “Twenty pages,” I whispered. “Guess you’re entitled to your encore.”

  “Two,” he murmured.

  “Sure you’re not too tired?” I teased.

  “I’m raring to go.”

  “You’re raring, all right.”

  “You noticed.”

  “I noticed. Oh, Cam—”

  “Number one,” he said.

  24

  The clerk showed me down the hall and rapped lightly on the door and opened it for me. A lot politer than he’d been to me the first time, he was, treated me like I was someone important. I thanked him in my grandest manner and stepped nimbly into the office, clutching the manuscript as though it were the most valuable of art objects. The office was as grand as I remembered—that rich golden wood gleaming like dark honey, the green velvet drapes ever so elegant, soft brown leather chairs inviting—and this time Mr. Thomas Sheppard popped right up and hurried around the enormous mahogany desk to greet me.

  “Miss James,” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

  I nodded politely, all dignity, very conscious of my new polish and poise. I was Miss Miranda James now, elegantly attired in a lovely silk frock of the palest cream with thin bronze stripes, my hair artfully arranged in upswept copper waves, three ringlets dangling in back. Took me forever to get it pinned up, it did, and the ringlets were hell, but I felt quite the young lady of fashion. Mr. Sheppard smiled, and there was a definite twinkle in his eyes. Did he find my new mode and manner amusing?

  “I told you I’d bring you the early chapters, Mr. Sheppard,” I said, employing my most refined tones. “I have here almost two hundred pages of The Spoils of Dowland. He should easily have it finished by June fifteenth.”

  “You think so?”

  “I intend to see that he does.”

  Sheppard smiled, relieving me of the manuscript and placing it on the smooth surface of the desk beside the silver and onyx inkwell. He was dressed in a pale tan suit, a mustard silk neckcloth at his throat. His large blue-gray eyes still twinkled, and those old-parchment cheeks were flushed a faint pink. He was quite pleased to see me, and why not? He had half of Cam’s book in his hands now with every expectation of receiving the rest within the next two weeks.

  “Apparently you’re a very good influence on him,” he said.

  “I try to be.”

  “Gordon has rarely worked so well. He’s usually shockingly late turning in his manuscripts.”

  “He has some very bad habits. I’m trying to break him of them.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a tremendous task,” I admitted.

  “Won’t you sit down, Miss James? Could I have my clerk bring you a cup of tea?”

  I was honored. He would never have offered Duchess Randy a cup of tea. I shook my head nevertheless, eager to be gone. Nervous as all get-out, I was, a tremulous feeling inside despite my admirable poise.

  “I know how valuable your time is, Mr. Sheppard, and I won’t take any more of it. I just wanted to bring the manuscript myself. I wouldn’t trust none of them—uh—any of those messenger boys with it. It’s much too precious.”

  “I’m eager to read it.”

  “It’s terribly exciting. Got quite caught up in it when I was copying it. A bit too much torture and bloodshed for my taste, but his readers seem to love it.”<
br />
  “They do, indeed,” Sheppard agreed. “Do sit down, Miss James. I want to talk to you about your own book.”

  Here it comes, I thought, a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. I had been jittery about it all morning, had dawdled on Fleet Street, building up my courage, hoping against hope he’d have the tact not to mention it. Thoroughly miserable, I sat down on the edge of one of the deep leather chairs and folded my hands primly in my lap, trying to look casual. I didn’t dare sit back in the chair, afraid I’d sink into the soft leather. Back straight, my expression composed, I gazed at the spines of the lovely books displayed behind his desk, dreading what I knew was to come.

  “I read it,” he said.

  “Did you?”

  “I read it twice, in fact. I took notes the second time.”

  “It—it was awful, wasn’t it?” I said glumly.

  “I’m afraid it was, Miss James.”

  “I told you it would be a waste of time.”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  I stared at him, puzzled. Mr. Sheppard smiled, looking for all the world like a dapper, dried-up little pixie. I adjusted the long ringlet that dangled over my shoulder. It was beginning to grow limp, and the waves were beginning to slip, too. What ever had possessed me to attempt such a pretentious style? I must look as ridiculous as I felt.

  “What—what do you mean?” I asked.

  “You have a great deal of talent, Miss James.”

  “The book was awful. You just said so.”

  “Indeed it was—stilted and contrived and artificial—but the prose style was quite vivid. I could see your characters, dreary as they were, and I could see the park and the manor house, although I must say you botched up a number of details. It’s quite obvious you’ve never been in a grand ballroom, never heard a lady issue instructions to one of the servants. ‘Run put the kettle on, Meg,’ gave me quite a chuckle.”

  A blush tinted my cheeks. Why didn’t he just take out a knife and stab me in the heart? It would have been kinder. Quicker, too. He clasped his hands behind his back and paced slowly back and forth, warming to the subject,

  “It was perfectly clear that you were writing about something you knew absolutely nothing about, a society you’ve never even glimpsed in passing. The plot was preposterous—what there was of it—and the transitions were most unwieldy. I could hear the wheels grinding.”