Once Upon a Pillow

by Christina Dodd

  “Don’t,” she said crossly. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  Instead of being grateful for her concern, her words only seemed to enrage him further. He grabbed the chain in both hands, yanked it over his shoulders and surged against the weight of the bed. Every muscle in his chest and arms jumped into sharp, quivering relief as he strained against it.

  “Stop it!” she cried. “You can’t possibly think you’ll be able to move that bed?”

  His lips curled back as he heaved forward, his throat, arms, and chest cording with veins and his face suffused with blood. And the bed, the huge, solid walnut bed, eight feet wide and eight feet long, with posts the span of a woman’s waist and as tall as a man, heaped with mattresses and topped with a heavy wooden canopy, groaned.

  And moved eight inches. Then twelve.

  She stared at him angrily. “Fine, you pigheaded fool! You’ve managed to drag it a few inches. But you can’t think you can keep this up—”

  She didn’t finish because he suddenly stopped straining on the chain. With a gesture of contempt, he let it drop from his shoulder.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” she said haughtily. “All that sweating and exerting, your wrists are scraped and bleeding and what have you proved? That the bed is heavy? We already knew that.”

  He regarded her with tiger’s eyes. “I can think of more interesting ways to sweat and exert, if you’re game.”

  “You’re being deliberately crude just to provoke me.”

  “Tit for tat, sweetheart.”

  She tossed her head. “I won’t be provoked. You are an arrogant, conscienceless manipulator who is only angry that the tables have been turned on him.”

  The green eyes flashed. “Brave words from a woman trapped in a gentleman’s bedroom. Though,” he snapped his heels together, and bowed with exquisite grace, sweeping his free arm toward the door, “I beg you, do challenge that assumption.”

  Her eyes widened. That is what he’d been doing! Dragging the bed just enough so that he could reach her if she tried to slip past him. Even with her shoulders pressed tight to the wall, she wasn’t sure she could elude his grasp.

  But…she might.

  She bit down on her lower lip, trying to gauge his reach, the chain, and his distance from the wall, and came to the unnerving conclusion that he’d stopped purposely right where he was, knowing that she wouldn’t be sure if he could reach her, but daring her to try. Baiting her.

  As he’d baited John.

  “You are despicable.”

  “Now who is acting sullen because her plans have been thwarted? Besides, what’s your hurry, Philippa?” he asked. “Expected elsewhere?”

  It was worth a shot. If she could convince him that all his effort simply delayed the inevitable, he might let her go. He was a practical man, she thought bitterly. “Yes. I am. I’ll be looked for soon.”

  His eyes blazed. “Damn him!”

  Maybe this would work. “So, don’t you think it would be best if you just rolled over to the other side of your bed and let me pass?”

  “And exactly why would that be best?”

  “Because you wouldn’t want to be caught like that. Especially by…” By who? Which would be a worse bruise to that monumental ego? A woman or a man finding him chained? A man. Especially John. His nemesis. “…by him.”

  “I don’t give a bloody damn if he sees me.” He took two long, earth-eating strides down the bed’s side, until he was forced to stop, his hand stretched tight behind his back. He leaned toward her. “But what of when he sees you here?” he countered. “What if he brings others? What if they see you?”

  She snorted. “What of it? Trapped in a room with a man chained to his bed? Somehow, I think my reputation will survive. After all, it survived you.”

  “Ah!” He didn’t move but the sound that tore from his throat sent her hurrying to the opposite side of the bed. And that gratified him.

  “I will never let you go, Philippa. Not tonight. Not in the future.”

  “Why?” she asked coldly. “Because I am an accessory? Try to convict me. Since I haven’t done anything, you can’t prove I have.”

  He smiled grimly. “This has nothing to do with the law, Pip. This is between you and me. I will never let you go.”

  In some perverse manner, his words excited her. He was the only man she’d ever met who could control her to any degree. He would not allow her to go too far, not without being there to protect her from her own passionate nature.

  But that time was past. In the future she would only be courted by tractable, tame men. She would learn to guard her tongue and consider her action. In short, she would become a tame hearth tabby rather than the wildcat all of Trecombe had named her.

  “When did you discover who I was and what I was doing here, I wonder?” he asked, recalling her to the present situation. “Was it before we ever kissed? In fact, was it before my arrival? Did you know that first night you claimed to come to be able to say you were the first to set eyes on the Masterson heir? Was it by his design?”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head and her hair flew about her shoulders in angry denial. “I am not the one adept at subterfuge.”

  “No. You have other talents.” He looked down at the thick bulge in his trousers. She averted her head sharply and he laughed without humor.

  “You know what you are, Philippa?” he asked, prowling up and down like some big, chained cat.

  She didn’t answer.

  He smiled, almost tenderly “You’re the worst kind of cheat. You’re a tease.”

  Her head flew back as if he’d slapped her. “I am not.”

  He braced his arms wide on the edge of the bed and leaned over it. His chest leapt into sharply delineated detail. His stomach corrugated with muscle. His biceps bulged, revealing a tension belied by the throaty purr of his deep voice. “What else do you call a woman who makes promises she does not deliver on?”

  “I promised nothing.”

  “Not in words,” he allowed. “But every touch, every stroke of your tongue, every shift of your hips, made promises. Vows.”

  He might sound as if he’d calmed down, but his eyes tracked her ruthlessly

  She took a step back, determined not to pay any attention to his words…or his eyes.

  “You don’t scare me.”

  He laughed grimly and straightened. Casually, he wrapped one big hand around the bedpost and slouched against it. “Then you’re not only a tease, you’re a fool. Because right now, darling, I scare me.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “But you do. Unless, you want to take a shot at it…?” He nodded toward the door. She vacillated. “Go on, darlin’, give it your best go. Or is this, like the rest of our relationship, to be hallmarked by your refusal to finish what you start?”

  “Stop talking to me that way!”

  “Make me.” His lips barely moved.

  “I am saving someone I love from you. Even you should be able to understand that. You have no right to be angry with me.”

  “No right?” he mused quietly. “Oh, darling. I beg to differ. You entice me with your body, you play me for a fool, you use my weakness for you to chain me here and then, after arousing me to the point of agony, you manacle me to this cursed bed, unsated, heavy with want, and humiliated beyond endurance.”

  His knuckles turned white from the stranglehold he had on the bedpost but his voice remained soft, even calm, and was all the more frightening for it.

  “Forgive my presumption in arguing with a lady, but damn it, I do, indeed, think I have earned the right to be angry.”

  Chapter Four

  “As for the ‘someone you love,’” Ned sneered, “to hell with him. To bloody hell with him. If he were half the man you take him for, he wouldn’t be hiding behind your skirts. And if you were half the woman you pretend to be, you’d let me go finish my business with him.”

  “Yes,” Philippa shot back sarcastically. “That is a fabu
lous plan. You destroy the only man left on this green earth who means anything to me and I stand back and allow it to happen without so much as a sigh of discontent. What sort of woman would I be then, Ned? Less than half. A dribble of a woman.”

  His expression grew stony, his eyes like jasper shards. “Do not call me by my Christian name.”

  “Why?” she demanded, hands on hips. He’d whispered love words to her, stroked her with lips and hands, and now she was forbidden to use his Christian name? After all they’d done and so nearly done?

  She was angry, furious, but it had always been like this between them, a tinderbox of emotions awaiting ignition. Once she had yearned for that fire, been willing to step into the very heart of conflagration that erupted around them whenever they touched, spoke…did anything. Now, she simply wanted him to burn. She was already a cinder.

  “You never took exception to my use of your name before. Or is it only when a woman is nearly undressed and lying beneath you that she has permission to speak your hallowed name?” she spat out derisively.

  He trembled, the sleek elongated muscles shivering to life beneath the clear pale skin. “No. Yes.”

  She turned away, aching with hurt.

  “Yes,” he continued, “only when you’re beneath me. You. Fool that I am, I don’t want to hear you speak my name with contempt. I don’t want that supplanting the voice in my mind. I want the memory of you panting my name, your throat arched for my kiss, quivering with desire. Desire only I could satisfy. Tell me, Pip, damn you, tell me, who satisfies you now?”

  She blanched. He could not believe that she’d done this with other men. But of course he would. She’d acted the wanton with him and thus, wanton she was and always would be. Still, it wounded her that he thought she would immediately seek to replace him and gratify desires he’d evoked with the first convenient candidate.

  “You are no gentleman,” she said.

  He laughed. “And don’t try to tell me you weren’t damn glad of it. A gentleman couldn’t have done to you what I did, Pip. He wouldn’t have the imagination. Or the skill.”

  He was intolerable. And this conversation was at an end.

  “Fine, Captain Masterson, I won’t call you by your Christian name.”

  But having discovered a way to torment her, he wasn’t going to give it up. He leaned against the post, crossing his legs nonchalantly at the ankles, ignoring the jangle of the chains as he folded his arms over his chest. He might have been a young buck, lounging outside his club in Mayfair. He regarded her with lazy interest. “Not that you weren’t a prize pupil, Pip. You were. But I see you’ve added some new tricks to your repertoire.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The slight smile on his lips dissolved and when he spoke again his tone was rough and accusatory. “Who taught you to accommodate a man’s body so lushly, to open your mouth so deliciously?”

  How dare he!

  “You!” she shouted furiously. “You and you. If I am expert, you are my tutor. Are you proud of your student? Would you like a further demonstration of what I learned at your hands?”

  For a second something stark appeared on his face. “God. Come, Pip. Let me go and when I return we’ll finish this matter.”

  But she heard only his threat to John. Let this creature with his sculpted body and his savage eyes have her brother? Never. “No!”

  “Coward.”

  “I’m not going to be baited by you.”

  “Pity. Does he really mean that much to you?” He spoke so easily, so conversationally, yet the look in his eyes promised violence and the muscles in his body stood out even more sharply. She only wished that she could ignore his nakedness, his dangerous masculine beauty and coiled strength.

  But John was all the family she had left. “Yes.”

  He regarded her stone-faced, a tic jumping in the side of his throat. “How sweet. And here I’d thought what we—” He broke off. “I could have sworn there was a day that you felt something for me. When did that end?”

  She wheeled around and faced him. “The same day I realized that you’d used me to find the smugglers.”

  “I didn’t.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Excuse me for doubting you, Captain, but to my overly suspicious mind it seems too convenient, this sudden decision of yours to see your inheritance, the hitherto neglected Masterson Manor. And how timely your courtship of me!”

  “Courtship,” he repeated. “Is that what we were doing? It seems an insipid term for what we enjoyed.”

  She flushed. “I am only country-bred gentry. If I prefer to think you were courting me rather than simply seducing me, you must excuse my gross naiveté. I misunderstood.”

  If she pricked his conscience, he gave no sign. “I never seduced you. You’re a virgin, still. Or were.” She did not honor that with a reply and his face turned dusky with anger.

  “So, we were both deceived, Pip,” he continued. “Because I mistook you for a woman who would only give yourself to a man you loved.”

  “Then you were not mistaken,” she replied haughtily, head raised and eyes flashing.

  For some reason she could not divine, her words bled the color from his face, leaving him stricken looking. “So,” he said softly, as if to himself. “So. I see.”

  He looked up, shook his head as if clearing a blow. “Brava, Pip. Just when was it that you realized how important he was to you? Before or after I came?”

  Philippa hesitated, frustrated by the absurd bent of the conversation. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  He sounded so terrible, and while she wanted him to suffer, she could find no satisfaction in refusing to speak.

  “I have always loved him but…” She hesitated, seeing Ned raising his chin fractionally, a soldier facing the flog. “But I never appreciated how important he was to me or what I would be willing to do for him until I realized you were planning to send him to rot in some stinking hole.”

  For some reason, her words seemed to relieve him. “You heeded nobility’s call. Of course, you would,” he murmured. “Tell me, my dark angel, if I had been a murdering, thieving coward instead of the man sent to stop him, would you have taken my part, too?”

  She eyed him coldly. “But you aren’t. And you seem to have missed an important part of the picture, Captain. You aren’t my—”

  “I know!” He broke into her statement that John was her brother before she could finish it. But he’d understood. “I’m not.”

  He turned his back to her. “It won’t matter you know,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get him eventually.”

  “Not tonight,” she vowed.

  “What difference does a night or two or even a week make, Pip?” he asked. “He is what he is. He’ll not change.”

  “No!” she said. “No. I’ll convince him to quit this. He listens to me sometimes. We’ll leave here. Maybe go to London. Or somewhere on the continent. He’s not stupid just—”

  “Just vicious. Oh, haven’t you seen that side of him, darling?” He turned back around. “He cut a fifteen-year-old’s finger off to make sure the boy understood the gravity of the pledge he’d been forced to take. Or didn’t he tell you that?”

  Calm swept over her. For a moment, she’d considered letting Ned go to plead with him to stop her brother from the course he’d chosen. She’d almost trusted him to be merciful. He’d always been just.

  Now, she regarded him scornfully. Clearly, he would say anything to get her to release him. But in this instance, he’d misjudged her. He’d lied and she knew it. John was reckless and hotheaded but he was not cruel and nothing Ned Masterson said, no matter how convincingly, could make her believe it.

  “Give me the key, Pip,” he urged her, fatigue creeping into his voice. “He’ll never change. Not even you can change a man like that.”

  “No. Not now. Not any time soon.”

  “For God’s sake, woman, I am trying to save people’s lives.”r />
  So many lies. But she knew him now. He’d revealed himself with that ridiculous tale about John. He’d lied to her before, he’d lied to her again, and sooner or later, because he was a very, very good liar and she was not, he might even persuade her into believing one of his lies. Because she’d believed them before.

  She backed toward the window. Outside the thunder rolled in on a dark bank of clouds that slowly eclipsed the star-bright night.

  “Pip…”

  She threw open the window and leaned out, her arms braced on the casement. The rising wind caught her hair and lashed it across her face. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the elements as spray pelleted her forehead and cheeks and stung her lips. Far below, the dark ribbon of the river churned swift and angry. “A storm’s coming.”

  “Philippa.”

  She heard the sound of the chain clatter against the post and when he called her again, his voice was raised in urgency. “Philippa!”

  She looked down longingly. But, creature of the cliffs and moors that she was, even she could not descend the wall of the manor at night in a storm.

  “Phillipa, don’t! For God’s sake!” Behind her the bed groaned. She turned. He stood at the end of the chain, his pale skin white as frost, bright blood beneath the steel bracelet, his eyes burning like the heart of an emerald, the bed a half foot closer to where she stood.

  She didn’t care. She wouldn’t care. “You always could get ‘round me, Ned Masterson. But you’ll not talk me into letting you go. I swear it.”

  Chapter Five

  The wind whipped Philippa’s hair into a gorgon crown of inky black locks. With her face flushed with victory and the chill night air coloring her lips and brightening her eyes, she looked just like she had the night he’d met her nearly a year ago.

  One of Philippa’s friends had bet her that she wouldn’t be the first to meet the lord of Masterson Manor. Philippa had never backed down from a challenge in her life. Within the hour, she’d ridden from town, arriving in a rainstorm at his doorstep. He’d come out of the library and found her standing in a pool of water in the hall, shaking the silver droplets from her black hair, her cloak sodden, her boots mud- spattered but her eyes triumphant and amused.