But she could see something else, and her feminine intuition told her that there was more to this story than what he’d just told her.
“You’re holding something back,” she said quietly.
He said nothing.
“Aren’t you?”
“The baring of one’s soul is rather like stripping a bed, isn’t it, lass? One sheet at a time.”
“But there’s something else. Something you don’t want to tell me.”
In the darkness, his face closed up, and his mouth took on the firmness it did when he dug in about something. “Ye’re a good lass, Nerissa. Aye, there’s more…but ye’re here with me, in my arms, and we’re both happy. Let’s savor that. There are some things best talked about at another time.”
“Was it about a woman?”
He said nothing.
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“Nerissa, love…not now.”
Not now. She frowned, feeling a deep and unfamiliar twinge of jealousy that twisted like a snake in her heart, a sudden presence amongst them that had not been there a moment earlier. So it was about a woman, then. A woman he didn’t want to talk about. Anger made the skin on her back seem to prickle and she willed herself not to be a shrew, not to push him when he wasn’t ready to be pushed, to just let the matter go so it wouldn’t spoil things between them. But it stung, his reluctance to tell her. And she suddenly felt awkward, lying here on his chest while a few inches away, his brain was filled with memories of another woman that he would not discuss. Had he loved her, then? Loved this other woman as much as he claimed to love her? Nerissa felt suddenly excluded, and deep in her soul, cold.
Wordlessly, she pushed herself up and off his chest and lay stiffly beside him, both of them now staring up at the ceiling.
Moments ticked by. The branch continued to scratch against the windowpane, and somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the five o’ clock hour, joined by another and another until all were going off in near unison.
In the darkness, he reached down beneath the blankets and found her hand.
“This is why I don’t want to discuss it,” he said. “Now ye’re angry.”
“I’m angry because you’re my husband and you’re keeping secrets from me. It hurts.”
“We have a lifetime to get to know each other. And I don’t want to talk about another woman right here, right now. I don’t want her here in this bed with us, and her name’s not fit to be uttered in the same room as yours. She’s in the past, Nerissa. Leave her there.”
“Did you love her?” she said in a tight little voice.
“Aye, I did. And she was right for Roddy. Suited him quite well, in fact. But not Ruaidri.”
The snake that was uncoiling inside her heart twisted and turned some more. Nerissa didn’t know why this hurt so much, why it should bother her, but it did. Was this unknown woman the real reason he no longer went by the hated nickname? Because she was associated with it?
“What was she like?”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
“You can’t even tell me her name?”
He sighed, released her hand, and with a sharp, irritated motion, threw back the covers, his feet already on the rug. He sat there for a moment, raking his hands through his hair, making his curls even wilder, frizzier. His breeches lay over the back of a chair and rising, he snatched them up and began to step into them. “I think I need to go take a walk.”
She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want him to stay, either, if there was going to be a sudden coldness between them. She wanted things to be the way they’d been when they’d spoken of Newburyport and their future and he had held her when she’d felt unexpectedly wobbly, and she suddenly hated this unknown woman who had, as her husband predicted, come between them.
She sat up in bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin as she watched him dress in the darkness. “Come back to bed.”
“I’m awake now.” He reached for his waistcoat and began to button it.
“I’m sorry. I…just can’t stand secrets between us.”
“You need to learn patience, Nerissa. There’s a season for everything, and the sharin’ of a person’s past is one of them.” He drew on his frock coat, rooted around in the pocket and found the piece of ribbon with which he’d earlier tied his hair, quickly securing it once more.
“Where are you going?”
“I told you, for a walk. There’s an apothecary in Market Square, maybe they’ll have something to quell your nausea besides ginger.”
“At five o’clock in the morning?”
’Twill be five-thirty by the time I get there, and if they’re not open for business yet I’ll wait. Go back to sleep. I’ll be back and maybe both of us’ll be in better temper by breakfast.” He came back to the bed and dropped a kiss on her forehead as he did every morning, but the usual tender warmth was gone and she could sense the penned-up frustration to which she’d pushed him. Anger gnawed at her insides and again, she felt the press of tears.
Wordlessly, he picked up his tricorne, opened the door and slipped out into the hallway. There were a few squeaks on the stair as he descended them, a distant click of a quietly opened and shut door, and then he was gone.
The tears spilled over then, and a fresh wave of anger, this time, with herself.
Oh, what is wrong with me? Nerissa thought, and raised her fist to punch at her husband’s pillow. And then she saw the impression his head had left on the white cotton. The tears coursing down her cheeks, she pulled it to her, buried her face in the hollow, and let it muffle the sound of her sobs.
Chapter 30
He had taken the coward’s way out and he knew it.
Ruaidri stalked down the drive in the darkness, past a large anchor that lay nestled within a bed of wet autumn leaves, the night air wet and cold around him. The gale was blowing itself out, the worst of it far out over the Atlantic. Dawn was still a ways off and the scent of the sea lay heavily in the night air. He drew it deeply into his lungs, trying to clear his head.
You took the coward’s way out, you sack of shite. You put her off, built a fence around that part of your life you don’t want to talk about or share. You think you’ll lose her if she were to know, don’t you? Fool. Coward. She presented the perfect time and place to tell her what happened, the real reason you refuse to let anyone call you Roddy, the real reason you’ll never again fight a duel or let yourself look back into the past or think too much about your life before it all happened.
Yes, it.
He reached the High Street and proceeded through the darkness, rain dripping from the branches overhead and tapping against his hat. Why wasn’t life ever anything but complicated? If there was anything Nerissa should be angry with him about, it was the fact that he still planned to take her brother to Adams. A better man would set him free even at risk of his career, as Christian had done for him and the woman he had loved. A better man would not be stalking all alone through a muddy street in the dark, past sleeping houses, but would be back in bed with his wife and facing the demons that both drove and repelled him.
All alone.
Not quite.
Ruaidri wasn’t sure exactly when the churning anger—all of it toward himself—lifted enough for him to become suddenly aware of his surroundings, to realize that he was being followed. The hair on the back of his neck rose and he resisted the urge to pause and look around to find this threat, knowing instead that it was smarter to keep on, to pretend that he wasn’t aware that he was no longer alone so he could keep an advantage. He considered his situation and his surroundings. The street ahead was empty, the night as silent as the tomb, and not even a dog barked in the heavy wet darkness. But his senses had come on high alert, and he knew with a certainty he didn’t question that the presence he now felt was a hostile one.
He continued to walk, the rain, now a raw drizzle, cold against his face. He was not afraid. Newburyport didn’t exactly look to
be a place where footpads or highwaymen would thrive, and most common thieves were likely to be up to their usual mischief earlier in the night, when the taverns let out and sailors were reeling back to their ships, drunk.
No, this hostile presence was purposeful, and personal.
Intent.
Gaining on me.
There. A branch blown down by the gale, as thick around as his wrist and as long as his thigh. He bent down to pick it up, sensed a whoosh from behind and spun on his heel, the makeshift weapon already coming up to protect his face—
Bam! A wicked length of steel crashed down where his head had been not a second before, impaling itself in the wood Ruaidri still held in both hands. He shoved hard, using his attacker’s momentum to send him staggering backward, the sword still buried in the wood and splitting it nearly in half.
Ruaidri broke the branch over his knee, kicked the useless sword and the wood in which it was impaled out of reach, and instinctively dropped into a crouch.
“Ye fuckin’ bastard,” he snarled, gripping the remaining length of the branch and trusting his life to its splintered, jagged end. It felt good in his hand. A worthy defense, an even better weapon. He moved to his right, trying to discern his attacker’s weakness. “What the bloody divil ye tryin’ to do, kill me?”
The attacker, dressed in a black greatcoat, calmly reached into his pocket and withdrew a pistol. “That is exactly what I am trying to do and I can assure you, you parasite, that I will not fail in my attempt.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Lucien de Montforte.”
Lucien de Montforte.
The Duke of Blackheath.
“Her brother,” he said aloud, as the two circled each other. Oh, why was he not surprised?
“Yes, her brother. Surely, you did not think your offenses against my family would go unchallenged, did you?”
“I thought ye were in England, not skulking around out here in the dark at five in the mornin’. What kind of pervert are ye?”
A muscle twitched in the duke’s jaw. “Even you should know that only a fool would go in blindly without noting the lay of the land or planning his attack. Another ten minutes and I might’ve knocked on your host’s door and demanded the release of my siblings, but you rather made that all quite unnecessary with your unexpected appearance.” He calmly produced a handkerchief and wiped the barrel of the pistol, his eyes as black as the night around them. “It was not hard to identify you, given the physical descriptions that have been given me.”
Ruaidri eyed the pistol. If he were quick, he could disarm the duke and do it before either of them got hurt. But out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, and two shapes materializing out of the darkness, one dressed in the uniform of a Royal Navy officer.
A complication.
Nothing more.
Blackheath put the handkerchief back in his pocket. His smile was cold and deadly. “Where are my siblings?”
The duke had a still, deadly, urbane way of delivering his words, a deliberate calm veiled in steel and wrapped in a nauseating upper-class English accent that scraped at Ruaidri’s nerves and made him think, fleetingly, of English superiority and Irish abuse, of class privileges, subjugation, and land ownership denied. The knowledge that this man considered him as lowly as a maggot and most likely saw him as less than human was enough to make him want to lunge in and finish this fight. And he could, too. The duke would be trained with sword and pistol, probably quite deadly. But he would fight like a gentleman, and for the first time in his life Ruaidri was glad that he himself was no such creature, that he was nothing but a cur who’d been raised in the dirt and had had to fight his way out of pubs and scrapes and everything in-between from the time he was a starving Irish lad in distant Connemara.
The duke would fight like a gentleman.
Ruaidri would not.
And suddenly Blackheath, his face all but indistinguishable in the darkness under his tricorne, represented everything Ruaidri had ever hated about the English, every slight that he as an Irishman had ever suffered, and he took a savage delight in throwing down a gauntlet of his own.
“Yer brother’s me prisoner, and yer sister is back home—in my bed.”
Blackheath’s smile faded and he raised the pistol. He put a hand over its pan, shielding the powder from the drizzle, and Ruaidri heard the silent, deadly click as he cocked the weapon and began to advance. Beneath the tricorne his eyes were black, burning with controlled rage, and Ruaidri had time only to credit his attacker with a modicum of self control in the face of such a deliberate taunt before Blackheath, the pistol gripped in both hands and extended to aim point-blank at Ruaidri’s face, moved in.
“I’ve waited for this moment for the last two months,” he seethed. “Nobody…nobody harms my family. Ever.”
The duke moved purposely, confidently, closer.
Ruaidri held his ground, his own hands coming up in a gesture of surrender, the broken branch gripped and ready in his right fist and his attention divided between the duke and the two figures watching in the darkness. Now, his senses screamed as Blackheath moved in. Now! In that last second he lunged forward, knocking the duke’s arm high with his own weapon, grabbing his wrist and flinging him hard to the muddy street. The pistol went flying.
God help me, I don’t want to hurt him. It would kill her…she’d hate me forever.
Blackheath was getting up, his eyes murderous. Calculating.
“So it’s to be like this, then,” he murmured.
“You started it.”
“You started it when you abducted my little sister.”
“Let it go, Blackheath.”
“I’ll let it go when you’re dead.”
“She’s happy. Whatever comes of this fight will destroy that happiness and break her heart.”
Blackheath was advancing. Again, Ruaidri moved back, the splintered branch still in his hand, ready to repel another attack as the duke moved forward, unbeaten, unapologetic, furious in a way that might have made the blood of a lesser man run cold.
Furious in a way that would, Ruaidri hoped, make him careless. Prone to make a mistake that could let him end this with minimal bloodshed.
“You have no idea what makes her happy,” Blackheath said coldly. “None.”
“Considering she chose to make her life with me here in America and not back in that ancient pit of snobbery and privilege ye call home, I think I’ve a damned good idea.”
“You forced her, you cunning knave.”
“No, I did not.”
Ruaidri moved back, and out of the corner of his eye saw the two other men drawing their swords, ready to assist the duke should he need help. “Ye’re used to having things yer way, Blackheath, but yer sphere of power and influence is in the halls of British government and society, not on a dark street in a little town in America. You and I are on that dark street in America, and ye’ve just met your match.”
The duke was stripping off his muddy greatcoat now, tossing it aside.
“You want to fight like a common piece of scum now, do you?” he asked, also removing his hat.
“Given that’s all ye think I am, ’twould seem to me I have no choice.” He gripped his weapon. “Shear off, Blackheath. I’m warnin’ ye.”
Blackheath was unbuttoning his coat, pulling his arms out of the sleeves, tossing it atop his greatcoat until he was down to just waistcoat and shirt in the wet drizzle. “You abducted my baby sister and probably raped her. You abducted my little brother and for all I know might have killed him. You harmed members of my family…and you want me to let this go?”
At that moment, the two other men moved in, one heading to Ruaidri’s left, the other to his right. That one came in fast, tackling him around the neck with one arm and pummeling him hard with the other. One punch slammed into his jaw and lit his night up with stars, but as Blackheath’s accomplice came in again Ruaidri twisted, clubbed him in the throat and dropped him, choking, to the mud. A second l
ater the weight of the other thug hit him in the back. A flash of steel, a twist of his body and Ruaidri drove his elbow viciously back to catch the man in the ribs hard enough to crack bone and spin him around on his heel. A hard knee between the legs and he, too, dropped to the mud, there to lie moaning in agony.
“Impressive,” the duke allowed.
Breathing hard and still brandishing his splintered club, Ruaidri eyed the duke as the two began to circle each other once more. “Three against one and ye still can’t manage me. Got any more hired thugs in your employ, Blackheath? Odds too long for you against one Irish parasite?”
The duke, his flat, cold gaze never leaving Ruaidri’s, sidestepped to the first fellow and extended a hand to help him up. The man rose, swaying, his eyes wide with grudging respect as he eyed Ruaidri and prepared to come in for more.
“That is enough, Cooper,” Blackheath murmured. “I will handle this.”
The second attacker was pulling himself up, grimacing with pain and dressed in the blue coat and breeches of the Royal Navy. A lieutenant, Ruaidri thought. The other looked like a common seaman. No matter, both had come from whatever damned ship had brought them here as protection for Blackheath. They’d be easy to deal with and so would the duke, who wouldn’t know how to fight as anything other than a gentleman.
And in that moment Blackheath proved him wrong.
The duke’s fragile veneer of control was gone. He snatched up the lieutenant’s sword and with a guttural snarl, came in hard at Ruaidri, swinging viciously at his ribs. Ruaidri spun and kicked upward but the duke was onto him now, no longer allowing any surprises, no longer expecting a fair and gentlemanly fight and his boot hit only empty air. The sword slashed into his coat, parting the fabric, parting his skin, sending a sudden flow of blood down his side, damn, damn, damn. No time for that, he thought, no time to register the pain or what the blood loss would cost him because he knew that to give his attention to anything but his next move would only result in the death that Blackheath was intent on delivering him—and he was fighting for his life.
Blackheath came in again, feinting and lunging with the sword, his mouth tightening with resolve and his eyes going colder, blacker, deadlier with every parry that Ruaidri made with his chunk of tree-branch. Both men circled each other now, neither giving an inch, both of them looking for weaknesses in his opponent.
The Wayward One Page 31
