by Mary Balogh
She continued to glare at him. "It is none of your business," she said.
"I am your betrothed," he reminded her.
"You are not," she said scornfully. "And you are not going to play the part of jealous lover now, Josh. The very idea! It is none of your business whom I have loved or whom I do love, if anyone. Kit is none of your business."
"Did he know," he asked, "that you loved him?"
"Of course he knew," she said, turning her head back toward the fire again and then setting it back against the chair and closing her eyes. "He desperately wanted me to marry him. He wanted me to give up everything-all the expectations of his family and mine-and go follow the drum with him. I was everything in the world to him and he to me. But Wulf would not give his consent. I was one and twenty and did not need his consent. It was not that he forbade me exactly-Wulf rarely does that, and of course he knew that I would have fought to the death against any such attempt at tyranny. But there was a speech on family duty and I allowed myself to be talked into announcing my engagement to Jerome. Kit fought Ralf bloody when he came storming over to Lindsey Hall and was refused admittance. Then he went off back to his regiment in the Peninsula. Last year, with Jerome dead before our nuptials had been solemnized and Kit on his way home, his father and Wulf arranged for our marriage at last. But Kit had not forgiven me. He had his revenge on me by bringing home that perfect, insipid woman, Lauren Edgeworth."
Joshua wondered if she had yet realized that even if it had started out as revenge-or simply escape-the marriage was now a love match. And he wondered how much real love Freyja still felt for Ravensberg, mingled with the very real hatred and bitterness.
"Poor Freyja," he said softly.
She surged to her feet then and closed the gap between them in three strides. He clamped one hand about her right wrist when her fist was two inches from his nose, and about her left wrist as her fist brushed the underside of his chin. He came to his feet and bent her arms behind her back. He held them there by the wrists-her hands were still fisted.
Her eyes flashed at him. Her teeth were bared.
"Don't you dare pity me," she told him in her coldest, haughtiest voice. "My story and my feelings are my concern and no one else's. Certainly not yours. We are not even really betrothed. We are nothing but strangers who happen to have been thrown together by circumstances. We are nothing to each other. You are nothing to me. Do you understand me? Nothing."
He lowered his head and kissed her. He was taking a mortal risk, he knew-she might well take a chunk out of his lip with her teeth. But she needed comforting. Not that his motive was entirely selfless. Freyja Bedwyn in a raging temper was an infinitely exciting woman.
"Nothing at all, sweetheart?" he murmured. "You wound me."
"What I will do is knock your head off your shoulders if you will just stop playing the coward and release my wrists," she said, her eyes still flashing fury. "Are you afraid of facing the anger of a woman unless you have pinioned her arms?"
He grinned and released her. And chuckled aloud as he parried blows without grabbing hold of her again.
"Ouch!" he said as one of her fists connected with his ear.
But she was not finished with him and would not be, he suspected, until she had milled him to the ground and stamped him into the dirt with her heel. It was a good thing for him that she was not wearing her riding boots. To give her her due, though, he noticed that she did not attempt to use either her fingernails or her teeth. She fought fair.
There was only one course of defense open to him short of planting his own fist in her face. He caught her up in his arms, one about her waist, the other about her shoulders, hauled her tightly against him so that her fists flailed helplessly out to the sides, and kissed her again-open-mouthed.
"I dislike you intensely," she said coldly when he lifted his head a good while later. The rage had gone from her eyes and the fury from her voice. "And you are absolutely nothing to me. Less than nothing."
"I know, sweetheart," he said, and kissed her again.
Her anger might have subsided, he realized during the next few moments, but her passion certainly had not. She opened her mouth beneath his, somehow got her arms about him, and pressed as close to him as their clothes and their anatomy would allow.
"Don't stop," she told him fiercely when he lifted his head, desperately trying to hold on to his sanity. "Don't stop!"
"Freyja-"
"Don't stop!"
Who tumbled whom to the bed he did not know, but there they were moments later, wrestling and panting together in the narrow space, their hands all over each other in a desperate effort to find bare flesh. She pulled off his coat and waistcoat with a little cooperation from him, and she was tugging his shirt outside his pantaloons and sliding her hands underneath to press against his naked back while with his thumbs he hooked the low neckline of her muslin dress beneath her breasts and took them in his hands, rolling her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. With his mouth he found the racing pulse at the base of her throat.
Somewhere sanity was trying to attract his attention. And another thought occurred to him too.
"Sweetheart." He lifted his head and looked down into her face. "Are you a virgin?"
Perhaps she was not if there had been that passionate interlude with Kit Butler. If she was not . . .
"Lift your arms."
He lifted them, and his shirt was off over his head and sailing over the edge of the bed to land in a heap with his coat and waistcoat.
"Are you a virgin?"
"Don't you dare stop." With one hand she pulled his face back down to hers. With the other she fumbled at the flap of his pantaloons.
He took it that the answer was yes. If it had been no, she would have said so and dispensed with his scruples. His bare chest came down onto her bosom and he pressed his tongue into her mouth. She sucked it deep.
"Let me do this," he whispered a few moments later, moving off her and undoing his buttons himself.
But she helped him remove the pantaloons after he had pulled off his Hessian boots and stockings. He drew her dress down her body, taking undergarments with it. Sanity, he half realized after he had pulled off her silk stockings too, had been stripped away with their clothes.
They came together again with fierce passion. If she was a virgin-and he would wager she was-there was no shrinking self-consciousness in her for either her own nakedness or his. But then he had known that being in bed with Freyja would be akin to lying with a pile of explosives with the fuses lit.
When he touched her between her legs, she opened to him, feverish and urgent. She was hot and wet and ready. He was hard and throbbing with need. He rolled fully on top of her, pushed her legs wide with his own, slid his hands beneath her to lift and tilt her, and mounted her.
She was a virgin. She was small and tight, and there was a barrier to impede his progress. She was also hot and wet, and her inner muscles were contracting about him and her hands were pressing down on his buttocks while her feet pushed her up from the bed. He pressed inward, heard her involuntary cry as he broke through, and embedded himself fully in her.
He might have taken her slowly and carefully after that, but she would have none of it. She was hot and fierce with passion, and he, God help him, felt an answering hunger that needed no further encouragement.
What followed was more like a wrestling match than lovemaking. He had no idea how long it lasted. He only knew that somehow he held on to some measure of control until she cried out and shuddered into a powerful release. Then he plunged toward his own pleasure and allowed his seed to spill into her.
They were both slick with perspiration, he discovered moments or minutes later-he had become strangely unaware of time-though the fire in the hearth had died down. They were also panting as if they had run ten miles apiece into a stiff wind. He lifted his head and looked down at her in the dim lamplight.
Her hair was in wild, wavy disarray about her head and shoulders. She
was flushed. Her lips were parted, her eyes heavy-lidded.
"Well, sweetheart," he said, "if we were not in a scrape before, we certainly are now."
CHAPTER XIII
Freyja's legs were trembling as she dressed. So were her hands as she fumbled with her hairpins, dragging them all out and trying to tame and rearrange her hair without benefit of either a mirror or a comb. She was very thankful that Joshua had dressed faster than she and was at the moment kneeling at the hearth, cleaning out the remains of their fire and building a new one.
Glancing at him, she had a stomach-churning feeling of knowledge.
Gracious heavens, that splendid male body had just been naked and . . .
Well, never mind.
"This," she said in a firmly practical voice, "was all my fault."
He came to his feet and turned toward her, his eyes laughing, though there was a certain grimness about his mouth.
"Will you put a further dent in my self-esteem, then?" he asked her. "Have I just been seduced, Free?"
"You would not have done it," she said, "if I had not insisted. I will never blame you. It was all my fault."
Don't stop. Don't you dare stop.
How excruciatingly humiliating.
"If that were a bird's nest," he said, nodding toward her hair, which she was holding on top of her head while she jabbed in hairpins to keep it in place, "it would be impressive indeed. But I would guess it is meant to be an elegant coiffure?"
He came closer, batted her hands away, and then, when the hair came cascading down about her shoulders again, he sat her down on the end of the bed and played lady's maid with surprisingly deft fingers.
"It was a mutual outpouring of lust, Freyja," he said. "It was mutually satisfying too, though I cannot see that I did not hurt you rather badly. I daresay you would rather be stretched on the rack than admit to that, though, and so I will not ask. You do agree, I suppose, that we are now in a very serious scrape indeed."
"If you mean," she said, holding still as he anchored her hair in place with the pins, "that we are now obliged to marry, then of course you are speaking nonsense. Don't you dare propose marriage to me. I am five and twenty years old, and I imagine you are older. Why should we not go to bed with each other if we wish? I thought it was remarkably pleasant."
"Pleasant." He chuckled softly and stood back to admire his handiwork. "Remarkably chic, even if I do say so myself. Pleasant, sweetheart? You certainly know how to wound a man where it hurts. But I can answer your question in one word. Why should we not bed each other if we wish? Babies! They have an annoying and sometimes embarrassing habit of resulting from such activity as we just indulged in."
How utterly foolish of her not to have thought of that-especially on the day of a christening.
"It will not happen," she said briskly, getting to her feet and setting the bed to rights again.
"If it has happened," he told her, "we have both of us acquired a leg shackle, sweetheart. For now we had better get back to the house and hope that no one has noticed quite how long we have been absent."
They bundled up in their cloaks, and she waited outside, getting her bearings in the dark woods, while he extinguished the lamp, locked the door, and put the key back where they had found it. They walked back to the driveway and across the bridge without talking.
It was strange that she should feel so strongly opposed to marrying Joshua, she thought. It was not that she did not want to marry at all. She did. And she was five and twenty already. Joshua was handsome, charming, witty, and attractive, and he liked the same sort of vigorous outdoor activities as she. They had been to bed together and it had been a glorious experience.
Why did she not wish to marry him, then?
Because he did not wish to marry her? Because she might be in danger of falling in love with him? Why would that be undesirable?
Because she would feel disloyal to Kit? Or because she would destroy her foolishly romantic dream of love by proving that it was possible to love two different men in the course of a lifetime?
Because she was afraid that her heart might be broken-again?
But Lady Freyja Bedwyn did not fear anything or anyone. Ever.
"If I were an enemy army watching you march into battle against me," Joshua said, "I would not wait and stand my ground but turn and flee in panic and terror."
"What nonsense you speak," she said.
"Why the grim look and the long, purposeful stride, my charmer?" he asked her.
"It is cold, if you had not noticed," she said. "I am eager to get back to the house."
"Our outing has served its purpose, then, has it?" he asked.
She turned her head and looked at him in the darkness.
"You must understand," she said, "that everyone in my family and Kit's, everyone in the whole neighborhood, I daresay, knew that he was coming home to marry me. And then he came with Lauren Edgeworth and presented her as his betrothed. I have never been accustomed to humiliation. I thought it a ploy to anger me, to punish me. I thought it a fake betrothal because they seemed so very unsuited to each other. In fact, the circumstances seemed very similar to yours and mine now. Except that I thought he really meant to have me in the end. But he married her instead. I am not abject, Josh. I am not an object of pity. I am just . . . angry."
"It is a love match," he said. "Take it from someone who has met them for the first time today. It is very much a love match, Free."
She laughed softly as they approached the house across the lawn. "Are those meant to be words of comfort?" she asked.
"I would not so insult you," he said. "You like straight talk, sweetheart. You like the truth more than falsehood and directness more than evasion. Your Kit is very deeply in love with his wife."
"My Kit." She laughed again. "He was raw with pain that summer four years ago. He had just brought Sydnam back from the Peninsula, broken and maimed and closer to death than life. He blamed himself. He was Sydnam's only companion on that reconnaissance mission and his superior officer. When they were trapped by a French scouting party and one of them had to court capture so that the other could go free to complete the mission, Kit was the one who went free. He was mad with guilt that summer-and he turned to me. My Kit-he was never mine."
She had never faced up to the truth of all this before now. While he had been as desperately in love with her as she with him that summer, for him it had been a transitory thing, a way of coping with his guilt and anxiety. She wondered if Wulfric had realized that and so had taken the unusual step of interfering in her life, of actually lecturing her about duty. She wondered if the Earl of Redfield had realized it. And Jerome.
Everyone but her.
There was no one strolling on the terrace now. Everyone was indoors.
"This is the moment," Joshua said, "at which we must hope that our absence has not been too particularly remarked upon and that every pin in your hair does not decide to clatter to the carpet as soon as we step into the drawing room."
Their long absence had not, of course, escaped the notice of Freyja's family. Aidan raised his eyebrows when they entered the drawing room, Alleyne waggled his, Morgan smiled knowingly as she caught Freyja's eye, and Wulfric fingered the handle of his quizzing glass. Only Rannulf did not react-he was deep in conversation with Kit and the viscountess and Judith.
Kit was sitting next to the viscountess, his arm draped along the back of her chair, his fingertips just touching her shoulder on the far side. It was an almost shockingly informal pose, but it was late in the day and everyone seemed more relaxed than they had been earlier. They were both engrossed in listening to something Judith was saying.
Yes, it was true, Freyja thought. She had known it for a long time, of course-perhaps even from the beginning. It was a love match. And perhaps they were even suited, the two of them. Certainly they were a handsome couple.
She did not wait to consider whether or not the admission brought pain with it. She glanced at Joshua, who was looking d
own at her quizzically, linked her arm through his, and strode across the room with him.
"I hope," he murmured, "I am not about to be embroiled in a scene, sweetheart. I do find scenes embarrassing."
Freyja smiled, first at Kit, who looked suddenly wary, and then at the viscountess, whose gracious smile hid any sign of trepidation she might have been feeling.
"I do apologize," Freyja said, "for missing seeing the baby when you brought him down a while ago. Josh suggested a walk, and I was longing for some fresh air and dashed off without a thought. I should, of course, have waited a few minutes."
Although she was eating a great deal of humble pie-or perhaps because of it-she was also speaking in what she recognized as the haughty voice she always used when on the defensive. Nevertheless, all four of them looked at her in some astonishment. Joshua, she noticed, was hugging her arm tightly to his side.
"Oh, but he is still awake," the viscountess said, her smile bright and warm as she got to her feet. "It just did not seem kind to leave him down here when he is used to the peace and quiet of his nursery. Will you come up and see him now?"
Freyja grimaced inwardly but maintained her smile.
"If you are not afraid I will disturb him," she said.
"Oh, no." The viscountess looked at Joshua and a certain merriment danced in her violet eyes. "But we will not drag you up there, Lord Hallmere. Do take my chair."
For a moment Freyja thought that the viscountess was going to link an arm through hers, but if she had had such an intention she thought better of it and led the way out of the room and up the stairs to the nursery floor.
"I am afraid," she said, turning her head to smile at Freyja as they approached the nursery, "new parents can be very tedious, Lady Freyja. We dote upon our children and make the assumption that everyone else must be as charmed as we are."
"Perhaps it is time," Freyja said, "that you dropped the 'Lady' every time you address me."
The viscountess looked quickly at her. "And you must start calling me Lauren," she said. "Will you?"
