by Julia London
“Och, are you so bloody thick? ’Tis that common blood that runs through your veins, that’s what.”
“What are you saying!” Nichol demanded loudly, and grabbed the coverlet his father held. “I will have the truth, spoken plainly.”
“Your mother was a whore,” his father spat. “The only thing she ever did for me was give me Ivan, aye? But you? You are the spawn of some common blackguard. You are no more my son than a bairn birthed in England!”
Nichol gaped at him. This possibility had never occurred to him. Not once in all the hours he’d spent agonizing over his father’s hatred had Nichol thought that perhaps his mother might have had an illicit affair. It astounded him that it hadn’t, particularly in the years he’d spent in his occupation, dealing with issues such as this.
His father chuckled unpleasantly, then coughed again, his whole body racked with the painful force. “What a bloody fool you are,” he said, his voice rough from the coughing. “Did you never wonder why I hated your whore of a mother?”
His mother had died shortly after Ivan was born. He couldn’t possibly recall his father’s treatment of her. “I never wondered because it is your nature to hate,” Nichol said quietly. “Why did you never tell me, then? I should think it would have given you immense pleasure to tell me I am a bastard born, aye?”
“And have the shadow of scandal taint my son?” the baron snapped. “Have the stain of you his burden to bear all his life? Och, you’re a bigger fool than I believed.”
“If you meant that no one would know for the sake of Ivan, then why did you no’ accept me as your own? I was a bairn, for God’s sake.”
“You were a bastard,” he said roughly, and closed his eyes. “Every day I had to look at you was a day I was reminded of what she’d done to dishonor me.”
Nichol let go of the coverlet and straightened.
He felt both agitation and relief. Relief that somehow, his life suddenly made sense to him, even if the truth was bitter. Agitation that he’d never known, had never guessed it.
He turned away from the bed, his thoughts spinning, his desire to be anywhere but near this man.
“That’s it?” his father—rather, the baron—said to his back. “You’ve nothing more to say, then?”
Nichol clenched his jaw. He turned back to the bed and considered the old man lying there. I am not him. I am nothing of him. He could rejoice in that, at least. And because he was not him, he would not put himself on the same despicable level, either.
“I was a lad,” he said calmly. “I was no’ to blame for how I came into this world, aye? But you will have to answer to your Maker for how you treated me. I wish you well in that.”
A sneer curled the gray cracked lips. “Do you think you can frighten me? I’ve a lot to answer for, that I do, but I donna have to answer for you,” he said. “Your whore mother was held to account for that.” He turned his head.
Even in death, the man would treat him ill. Nichol turned and walked out of the room, relieved that he would never have to lay eyes on him or hear his name uttered again.
But as he walked down that hallway, expecting Ivan to be waiting, but finding himself utterly alone, an old but familiar ache began to spread in his chest. For what might have been. For his mother, a woman he remembered only in snatches of images. For all those nights as a lad he’d cried himself to sleep, not understanding and feeling as if something was terribly wrong with him. Something heinous that he could not see. For the doubts he’d suffered as a young man, certain that something must be terrible about him. Unlovable. It had kept him from true intimacy, certain that anyone who got close to him would see the heinous thing that was so apparent to his father, but that he himself could not see. Where might he have been today with a loving father? Married? Children of his own? True friends? A brother who revered him yet, instead of looking at him with such rancor as Ivan did now?
Nichol took the stairs to the first floor, his thoughts tossing and twisting inside his head like so many snakes. He remembered how frightened he’d been when he’d been sent off to the Duke of Hamilton. He remembered coming home from that apprenticeship, certain that whatever had been wrong with him had been corrected. But he’d been treated with cold indifference by everyone but Ivan, who, even at that young age, already lived on the edge of his frayed nerves. The baron may have considered Ivan his son and one true heir, but he treated him scarcely better than Nichol. He’d set impossible standards for Ivan to reach, and when he failed, his father berated him.
It had aged Ivan. He was a prisoner here, unable to leave his ailing father, unable to find his own place in this world. Tethered to a bitter old man’s side. Bitter himself now, it seemed.
And yet, through all the heartache Nichol had suffered in silence, Nichol had never lost hope that his father might one day have a change of heart. To think he might have set Nichol free years ago, might have spared him the burden, infuriated him.
It broke him, too.
He turned into the hall on the first floor and strode along, bound for his room. At the end of the hall a door was opened, and inside, the glow of a brazier. He thought it was Ivan, waiting up to hear how the meeting with the baron had gone. But then Miss Darby stepped into the open door, her hand on the jamb. She looked at him expectantly. Anxiously.
Nichol paused. Had there ever been a bonnier or more welcome sight in a drab day gown? His bitter disappointment, his feeling of emptiness, slowly began to dissipate, and the memory of this day, of a beautiful woman lying lazily on his plaid beneath a winter sky, filled his thoughts. This woman was an unexpected port in the private storm that raged in him. There was no one else who might possibly understand his grief, no one else who could fathom what it was to be cast out without regard. No man, no woman, who had ever looked at him the same way she looked at him.
Nichol was suddenly moving again, his stride long, his need to feel her arms around him so great that he shivered with the force of it.
Miss Darby kept her place in the door’s frame. She nervously dragged her fingers through her unbound hair as he neared her. “Is everything all right, then?”
No, everything was not all right. Nichol walked to the open door and hesitated. He took her in, from her winter-blue eyes, to the necklace of diamonds and emerald that glittered at her neck, to the fit of the worn gown, and the tips of her shoes, stained with the dust of the road. He watched her nervously suck her lower lip in between her teeth. She was uneasy. She didn’t know what he wanted of her.
He didn’t know what he wanted of her, either. He only knew that he wanted to be with her. It was imperative, as if she was the only thing standing between him and breaking into bits and pieces of angry flesh. He took a single step forward and put a hand on her waist.
She did not resist him. She kept her gaze locked on his as he tentatively pulled her closer, his hand sliding around to the small of her back. He cupped her face with his other hand. “Miss Darby.”
“Maura,” she said. “What has happened to you, Mr. Bain?”
He couldn’t help his lopsided smile at the absurdity of the question. “What has no’ happened to me, then?” He lowered his head and kissed her, quite tentatively, because he didn’t know what he was doing or what he intended. Everything was wrong. This house. The baron. Kissing her. The fact that she was off to marry Dunnan Cockburn. Everything was wrong but the desire he felt for her with a fierceness that was unconscionable.
The fierceness bled into his kiss. The touch of her tongue glittered in every one of his nerves. Miss Darby—Maura—stood uncertainly at first, her arms hanging by her side, as if she didn’t know what to do with them. Maybe she didn’t know how to resist him. Maybe she didn’t want this at all. But when he slipped his tongue into her mouth, she made a soft sound that sounded like aha, as if she’d been waiting for exactly this. She slid her arms up his chest and around his neck and somehow leapt onto him
, hooking one leg around his back as he caught her. She took his face in both her hands and kissed him back with gusto.
Nichol was both surprised and emboldened. He kicked the door shut, then twirled around, putting her back to the door. “What are we doing?” he growled as he nuzzled her neck.
“This,” Maura whispered, her eyes closed as she bent her neck to give him better access.
“We are fools, then, both of us,” he said, and slid his hand to her breast, squeezing it. “This canna happen—”
Maura stopped him from finishing his thought—she caught his head again and kissed him fully, until white-hot heat was blooming in every muscle. Nichol was breathless with longing, and he knew that if he allowed this to continue, if he didn’t drop his hands from her now, he would be hard pressed to turn back. “Maura,” he whispered against her cheek. “I am mad with desire, that I am, but I canna do this to you. There are consequences—”
“Diah, say no’ another word, Mr. Bain!” she said, and caressed his face. “If I were a debutante and you a suitor, aye, there would be consequences. But we are no’ those people. We are different than everyone else.” She lifted her face, her lips just a moment from his. “We have our own rules.”
“No,” he said, and felt a crack open somewhere inside him. The truth of him, the baseness of him. “I have nothing, Maura,” he said, surprised that he’d uttered the words aloud, that the truth would come tumbling out. “I have no home, no family.” He gave a sudden laugh of bitterness and dropped his hands. “I donna even have a name.”
“Of course you have a name—”
“I changed my name long ago so as never to be associated with the man who has caused me nothing but misery all my life.”
“Your father.”
Nichol laughed bitterly. “So I believed all these years, but no, he is no’ my father. On his bloody deathbed,” he said, gesturing wildly to the floor above, “the old man has at long last told me why he sent me away, why he could never abide the sight of me, aye? Because I am no’ his son. I am a bastard born. My father is unknown, my mother unfaithful—and it appears that he has hated me for her sin all my life, has taken out his anger on me.”
“Diah, Mr. Bain,” she whispered. She reached for him, but he shook his head.
“I esteem you, Maura, Diah help me, I do. But I can offer you nothing. Do you hear me? I am nothing.”
He meant to turn away from her, but Maura caught his arm. “I didna ask you to offer me a bloody thing, did I? I just want... You want...” Her voice trailed away and she looked wildly about the room, as if trying to find the right words to describe their mutual yearning.
“Aye, we both want,” he agreed. “More than words can adequately describe.”
“Aye,” she whispered.
He tenderly stroked her face. “I will take you to Luncarty on the morrow—you know that, do you? I’ve no choice.”
Her breath lifted her chest with each inhale. “I know, Mr. Bain. But I also know that no’ everything is lost, for you or me. We still have a choice. Here and now, we have a choice.” She tentatively moved closer.
“What you suggest is unconscionable, Maura. I canna deliver you to Luncarty a ruined woman.”
She gave a short bark of bitter laughter. “The ruin already has been done. But this night, this one night, we who have nothing have each other, aye?” she asked, wrapping his hand in both of hers. “Night will most assuredly turn to day, and our lives will move on as they are meant, and this will be naught but a memory, but tonight, we have each other, Mr. Bain.”
For a man who had honed his skill at being unaffected, for keeping himself at a distance from others, he was strongly affected by her words. They reverberated in him, constricted around his heart, breathed life into that old thing. He realized, as she clearly had, that they were two lost souls in this world, clinging to each other for one night before their lives whisked them away to solitary paths unknown. “Diah, Maura,” he said low, and laced his fingers with hers, pulling her closer. “My name is Nichol. Nichol Bain.” He clasped her head in his hands and kissed her with sudden and dogged determination to have this one night.
The kiss felt different than any kiss he’d ever experienced. It was full of intense desire, of lust. But it was also full of extraordinary yearning for the affection he’d never had. The desire for that was so powerful that he had to check himself, slow down, gentle his touch. He was tumbling off a cliff, and flailing along into the rough business of wooing.
He was astounded by his intense emotions and didn’t know how to interlace them with the pure lust surging through his blood. His heart beat like a drum; he grabbed Maura’s hands, lifted them over her head, and pinned them against the wall. He greedily moved over her, his mouth against her skin, acquainting himself with her body.
Her breathing raced along as he moved over her. She remained pressed against the wall, her eyes closed, her mouth parted slightly with the force of her breath, her skin rosy from her desire. It astonished him how starkly this woman could arouse him. He felt impossibly virile, his heart pumping with lust enough to fill a loch, his blood burning with ultimate desire.
She pulled her hands free of his grip overhead and ran her hands down his arms, and then into his coat, pushing it from his shoulders. He helped her, shrugging out of it as he dipped to press his mouth to her throat. Then lower, lightly nibbling the swell of her breast above the bodice of her gown.
Maura gasped softly, her breath hot on his skin as she began to work on the buttons of his waistcoat. Nichol’s body was hard with want, and he pressed against her pelvis.
She looked into his eyes when she reached the last button of his waistcoat and pushed it from his body. He saw no trepidation there, nothing but want, and he was happy to oblige. He grabbed a handful of her gown and began to pull it up, gathering more and more of it as he hiked it higher, until he could slip his hand between her legs.
Maura’s lips parted with the sharp intake of her breath. She was slick, and he was lost. He buried his face in her neck as he slipped his fingers into her body. He was beyond himself, in a space that was an explosion of soft light and primal scents. He cupped her face and kissed her gently in what felt like a futile effort to pace himself, to go gently.
Maura mewled with pleasure so softly in the back of her throat that Nichol all but disintegrated. He had surrendered to his blood, had lost all perspective, and reached for her waist, unbuttoned the robe of her gown from the petticoat beneath. Maura shimmied out of it, letting it pool at her feet, then removed her stomacher as Nichol, his eyes locked on hers, removed his shirt. Her eyes widened at the sight of his bare chest, her lips parted, and she reverently ran her hands from his abdomen to his collarbone.
He pulled the tie of her chemise and it fell open, revealing her breasts. He took them both in hand, kneading them. His need was desperate, and he slipped his arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet, turning around to the bed behind them and setting her down again. His unspoken question rose up between them: Are you certain? Is this what you want?
Maura sat on the bed. She took his hand, kissed his palm, his knuckles. It was the answer Nichol needed. He moved over her, pressing her back onto the bed.
Whatever doubts played at the corner of his mind were being strangled by his own desire and her ardent response to him. He felt like an unearthly king, invincible, as if he alone could summon the tide or slide the moon across the sky.
Her hands were on his body now, inflaming his heart—it beat hard without restraint. He had never met a woman who aroused such improbable passion in him. He pulled her petticoat from her, then the chemise. She wore nothing but the necklace, a symbol of their extraordinary journey together.
His expedition of her body was slow. His hands searched, his mouth explored. He touched her everywhere, aroused by the little moans she made, the grip of her fingers in his skin. She explored him,
too, her hands running over the planes of his back and hips, her mouth on his neck and his chest, until Nichol had disappeared entirely into sensation.
She was panting, groaning, her body pressing against his, silently demanding more. They were moving together, these two who had nothing, both of them lost in this night and in this moment. He pressed the tip of himself against her soft, wet entrance, and released a silent cry into her hair. They were desperate for each other, desperate for release. He lifted his head and looked down at her. “Now?” he asked, uncertain what he meant by it.
But Maura answered him with a single caress of his brow and a nip of his bottom lip. She opened her legs, wrapping one around his back, and then locked her gaze on his as he slowly slid into her, fraction by fraction, allowing her body to open to him. Only when he pressed against her maidenhead did she close her eyes and swallow.
Nichol stopped moving. He gritted his teeth to hold himself back, but it was no use. Her body was a siren call, and he pushed past her maidenhead with a groan of relief.
Maura’s breath caught, but after a moment, she began to breathe again, and she began to move against him, wanting what her body knew it wanted. Something in Nichol’s chest fluttered. His heart was a slow boil, and he moved slowly, carefully, his strokes matching his caress of her face, his desire pressing hard and long into her, the anticipation unfurling. He wanted to prolong it, to stay here, with her, in this moment. He tangled his fingers in her hair; she scraped her fingers down his back, as if trying to hold on. He slid deeper and deeper into a fog, and she slipped with him, moved with him.
Nichol reached his hand between them and began to stroke her in time to his body sliding inside her. Maura groaned and arched into him, dug her fingers into his shoulder as if she feared she might fly away. He kept up his ministrations until she gasped with the release of her body.
He thrust hard one last time, then quickly pulled away, spilling onto her thigh.
For several moments afterward, neither of them moved as they struggled to catch their breath.
