She smiled at him some more. His lips moved in the most mesmerizing fashion when he spoke. She would have him read to her, so she could ogle him for long minutes at a stretch.
Then his words began to make an impression on her ear. On her mind. She shook her head. No, he could not have meant it. He was her fortress. He would not toss her over the rampart to her uncle.
“I mean it,” he repeated. “Out.”
She could not. She could only lie there and shake her head helplessly. “Don’t make me go. Please don’t make me go.”
Don’t make me go back to a place where I cannot take a single free breath, where never a moment passes without its share of fear and loathing.
He yanked her off the bed and to her feet, his fingers clamped about her arm to keep her upright. Without any mercy, he marched her to the still open door, then gave her a shove that sent her stumbling to the middle of the sitting room.
Behind her the door slammed shut.
* * *
An hour later Vere came out of his room for the cake. He hadn’t eaten much the entire day, and all the whiskey in the world couldn’t mask the gnawing of his hunger anymore.
He was on his second slice when he realized that she was sobbing in her room. The sound was very faint—almost inaudible. He finished the cake on his plate and returned to his bed.
Five minutes later he was again in the sitting room. But why? Why did he care? What he’d said was expressly designed to make any woman cry. And feminine tears had absolutely no effect on him: Women who were criminally inclined or mentally disturbed—not to mention merely manipulative—tended to be terrific weepers.
He went back to bed and tilted the whiskey bottle for the last drop. But bugger it to hell if he wasn’t back in the sitting room again three minutes later.
He opened her door but did not see her. He had to round the bed to the farther side to find her sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest, crying into her wedding veil, of all things.
The veil was a soggy wad. Her face was red and splotchy, her eyes puffy. She hiccupped convulsively. The front of her wedding gown, too, was damp from tears.
“I can’t sleep when you are crying like this,” he said crossly.
She looked up, a very dull expression on her face, no doubt waiting for his person to coalesce in her blurred vision. It did. She shivered.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll stop right now. Please don’t send me away.”
He couldn’t decide which one he hated more: the devious and dementedly smiling Lady Vere, or the devious and abjectly sniveling one.
“Go to sleep. I won’t send you away tonight.”
Her lips quivered. With gratitude, for God’s sake. In annoyance—and resentment and anger, which an ocean of spirits couldn’t drown—he made the mistake of saying, “I’ll wait till tomorrow morning.”
She bit her lower lip. Her eyes filled with renewed tears. They rolled down her already wet face to disappear into the bodice of the wedding gown. But she made no sound at all, her weeping as silent as death.
Looking away from him, she began to rock back and forth, like a child trying to comfort herself.
He didn’t know why it should affect him, why she should affect him—this woman had meant to force herself on Freddie, for God’s sake—but she did. There was something about her wordless desperation that made him hurt.
She had no one else to whom she could turn.
It was partly the whiskey. But one bottle of whiskey wasn’t enough to explain why he didn’t march out of her room, now that he’d effectively silenced her. He fought it, the alcohol-fueled compassion, the onslaught of her bottomless misery, and the stupid sense that he of all people should do something about it.
She had brought it on herself, hadn’t she?
* * *
She gasped as he lifted her bodily. But this time he didn’t toss her. Instead, he set her on the edge of her bed. He bent to remove her shoes. Then he reached behind her to unhook her dress. Her dress, her petticoats, her corset cover, and her corset itself fell from her.
Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped her face—carefully. Fresh tears swelled. For years she’d wiped away Aunt Rachel’s tears. But no one had ever done it for her.
She caught his handkerchief when he would have put it back into his pocket and brought it before her nose. “It smells like Lebanon too,” she said with wonder.
He shook his head briefly. “Let me tuck you in.”
“All right,” she said.
Their eyes met. Really, he had ridiculously beautiful eyes. And such unbearably alluring lips. She remembered kissing him. Even if she must take Aunt Rachel and go on the run, she would always remember kissing him.
So she kissed him again.
He let her kiss him, let her run her teeth lightly over his lower lip, nibble him on his jawline, and lick him, a tiny lick at the base of his throat. He emitted a small, strangled sound as she bit lightly where his neck joined his shoulder.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked, his breaths uneven.
Did such things have to be learned?
“I’m only doing what I want.” And what she wanted was to sink her teeth into him, the way someone would bite a gold coin to ascertain its purity.
“You are a horny drunk, Lady Vere,” he murmured.
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t wait for an answer but kissed him again. There was such pleasure in kissing him, in touching him.
He exerted a gentle pressure against her shoulder. After a moment, she realized that he meant for her to lie down. She did, holding on to him, still kissing him.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, even as he stretched out beside her. “I might prove a horny drunk too.”
Neither of them should be here. Lady Kingsley’s house should never have been invaded by rats. And the Cumberland Edgertons should have had the decency to take her in after her parents’ death.
She was inordinately remorseful. Of course he had every right to be angry with her. She’d manipulated—indeed, wrangled—him into this marriage. And he’d been very kind and very tolerant. Was it any wonder she looked to him for safety and guidance in such a confusing and uncertain time?
She lifted herself to her elbows and kissed him again, a straight trail down the center of his torso.
He stopped her, but only to unspool her hair. It spilled in a long cascade over her right shoulder. “So much of it, but so light, like spun air.”
She smiled at the compliment and lowered her head to his navel. He stopped her once more, his fingers sinking into her shoulder.
A question suddenly popped into her head. “What makes you grow hard?”
His gaze took on that peculiar tautness again. “Your kissing me and pulling me into bed, among other things.”
“Why?”
“Arousal is necessary to performance.”
“Are you aroused now?”
A beat of silence. “Yes.”
“What is to be this performance then?”
“I really shouldn’t,” he said, even as his body turned in to hers and she felt his arousal very clearly. “I’m not thinking with my head.”
“Is there anything else you can think with?” she wondered aloud.
He chuckled briefly. Then, at last, he touched her. He’d touched her before, of course, but always to do something else: escorting her to her seat at the dinner table or shoving her away from him, for example. This was the first time he’d touched her for the sake of touching her, for no other purpose than to feel her.
Before Aunt Rachel completely faded, sometimes she’d petted Elissande on her hair or her hand. But that was many years ago. Elissande had not known until this moment how desperately she missed it, the simple grace of being touched. He stroked her slowly, on her face, her shoulders, her arms, her back.
Still stroking her, he kissed her. She swam in pleasure. When he pulled away, she told him, “I want more.”
“More what?”
“More you.”
That was when he disrobed her, peeling away her combination, leaving her wearing only a pair of white stockings.
She should feel mortified to be so naked before him. But she did not. She felt only a little shy.
“What am I doing?” he murmured, even as he pressed kisses to her collarbone.
She shivered with the pleasure of it. “You are making me very happy,” she whispered.
“Am I? Will you remember it in the morning?”
“Why won’t I?”
He gave an enigmatic smile and kissed her down the center of her torso, as she had done with him. The air he exhaled teased her nipple. She tensed with the indescribable sensation of it, which grew a hundred times more indescribable when he took her nipple inside his mouth.
“It doesn’t appear to be very difficult to make you happy,” he said.
Indeed, it was not. A little freedom, a little security, a little love. It was all she’d ever wanted.
He continued to extract divine sensations from her. And she continued to be near teary eyed from happiness. When he removed his trousers at last, the size and weight of his arousal almost did not surprise her. She trusted that he would know what to do, even though she had trouble conceiving what he would do in relation to her.
“I shall regret this in the morning,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“I shan’t,” she said earnestly, eagerly.
He kissed her chin. “Actually, I have a presentiment you will—very much. But I cannot seem to stop now.”
He captured her mouth. His body settled over hers. He was hot and hard. And he—he—
She screamed. She hadn’t meant to, but it hurt. It hurt so much.
All the kisses and caresses that led to this moment, then, were but to make it more palatable. But they did not. It was the most terrible burning in a most sensitive place.
Tears streamed anew down her face. Everything was always so difficult. Everything. Even this, so sweet and pleasurable, must turn out to entail such agony. But it was not his fault. Hadn’t the Good Book declared “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”? No doubt this was what it had ominously prescribed.
“I’m sorry,” she said shakily. “Quite sorry. Please, do go on.”
He withdrew. She hissed at the pain of it and braced herself for more. But he left the bed altogether. She heard him dress. When he returned, it was with the handkerchief that smelled of Lebanon. He wiped away her newest tears.
“I’m quite done,” he said. “You can go to sleep now.”
“Really?” She could not believe her good fortune.
“Yes, really.”
He pulled a cover over her and turned off the light by the headboard. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she said, trembling with relief. “And thank you, sir.”
In the dark, he sighed.
Chapter Eleven
In the gray light of morning, she slept uneasily—and naked, the sheet twined about her like Eve’s serpent. He touched her, her cheek, her ear, her hair. He should not touch her again. But that knowledge only made the illicit, forbidden sensation of her wholly and sharply arousing.
She shifted, revealing a small smear of blood on the bed, a sight that hit him with the force of a stone to the temple. He remembered very well what had transpired the night before, but to stare at the evidence, to know that she would see it too…
He covered her and stepped away from the bed. From her. What had happened to him? His plans had been simple: The marriage would exist in name only, until the time came for a convenient annulment. The execution of such a plan had promised to be equally simple: She wanted to be near him about as much as a fish wanted a walk.
And yet he had failed.
He’d meant only to put her to sleep. Instead, he’d allowed himself to be seduced by a Machiavellian virgin.
Her skin had been velvet, her hair silk, her body a geometrician’s fantasy of curves. And yet her fleshly charms had not been his downfall. His undoing had been the pleasure she took in his company, her wholehearted, drunk-naïve delight—her inebriated infatuation.
Part of him had perceived perfectly that she was stewed, that she was not herself, and that the stars in her eyes were but reflections of the Sauternes flooding her veins. But it had not been the clear-seeing part of him in charge last night. It had been the lonely, deprived, stupid him, the one who was still affected by her smiles, who was all too eager to let a mere bottle of whiskey be excuse enough. When she gazed at that him with wonder and marvel, when she murmured that he made her happy, when she touched him as if he were made of God’s own sinews, nothing else had mattered.
Illusions, all illusions. He’d gladly succumbed to their seduction, to that false sense of intimacy and connection. And if it had not been for her cry of pain shattering the bubble—
He looked back at her. She stirred, whimpering as she did so.
I want more.
More what?
More you.
And he had believed her. More fool he.
* * *
The room he’d marched into the night before and marked for his own contained her belongings. Most of her things were in two large trunks, but there were walking boots, gloves, hats, and jackets scattered about.
On the writing desk sat her treasure chest, approximately fourteen inches wide, nine inches deep, and eleven inches high, with a lid that was curved on the top and flat on the bottom. Vere had already looked through its contents, which, except for the Delacroix, were souvenirs meaningful only to her.
He opened the chest again and looked at her parents’ wedding photograph. Such antecedents—his father would have expired of an apoplexy. He had not even mentioned in front of Freddie the worst Lady Avery had told him; that given her birth date six months after the wedding, no one knew for certain whether her father was really Andrew Edgerton, her mother’s husband, or Algernon Edgerton, Andrew Edgerton’s uncle and Charlotte Edgerton’s erstwhile protector.
Absently he ran his thumb down the underside of the edge of the lid. Something caught his attention—a tiny aperture, and then another one, and another. He turned on the electric light, opened the chest fully, and peered at it.
The chest was inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl on the exterior and padded with green velvet on the interior. The underside of the lid too was lined in green velvet, except around the edges, which were painted with scrolls and cartouches.
The slits, almost invisible, narrowly scored the left edge of the lid down the center of a black stripe. They were thin as a fingernail and little more than a quarter inch in length. He examined the right edge of the lid. The same, a line of tiny slits.
What were they, decorative grilles?
A knock at the suite’s door startled him. Reluctantly he left the chest to answer the door: it was the arrival of his breakfast, along with a cable from Lady Kingsley.
My dear Lord and Lady Vere,
It is with much relief that I inform you all traces of the rats have been eradicated from Woodley Manor. And although we still have yet to discover the culprits behind the prank, the local constable is eagerly on the case.
Lady Vere will be relieved to know of my guests’ orderly departure from Highgate Court yesterday, under Lady Avery’s oversight. She will also perhaps be relieved to know that Mr. Douglas had yet to return as of this writing—a delivery boy I passed on my way into the village assured me that he’d just come from Highgate Court and that the master of the manor remained absent.
I enclose many more congratulations on your marriage.
Eloisa Kingsley
He stuck the telegram into his pocket, returned to the bedroom, and scrutinized the chest further. With the blade of his razor he sliced off a fraction of a calling card and folded that fragment into a thin, but still relatively stiff stem. The slits were not deep; most of them cut into the lid’s edge by barely one-sixth of an inch. But there were two s
lits—one on either side of the lid—into which the card stem sank more than half an inch.
He suddenly remembered the minuscule key in the safe in Mrs. Douglas’s room.
* * *
Elissande awoke to an epic clash in her head. Or rather, a titanic clash. For weren’t the Titans defeated by Zeus? Her head, too, must have been split by a thunderbolt. She pried her eyelids apart, then squeezed them shut immediately. The room was unbearably bright, as if someone had shoved a torch directly into her eye socket. Her head splintered further in protest. Her innards, in contrast, decided to die in slow, roiling agony.
She moaned. The sound exploded in her ears, discharging shrapnel of pure pain deep into her brain.
How ironic that she was not even dead, when she was already fully in the embrace of hell.
Someone removed the blanket that covered her. She shivered. The person, careful not to jostle her, further disentangled her from more sheets that were twisted and bunched about her. She shivered again. She was vaguely aware that she was not wearing much—if anything. But she could not care; she was skewered on Beelzebub’s spit.
Something cool and silky settled around her. Her unresponsive arms were lifted and stuffed into sleeves. A dressing gown?
Slowly she was turned around. She whimpered: The movement had intensified the pounding in her skull. Once she was facing up, her head was raised, causing her to cry out.
“Here,” said a man’s voice, his arm strong about her. “A cure for your bad head. Drink it.”
The liquid that came into her mouth was the vilest concoction she’d ever tasted, swamp ooze and rotten eggs.
She sputtered. “No.”
“Drink it. You’ll feel better.”
She whimpered again. But there was something at once authoritative and soothing about the voice, and something at once authoritative and soothing about the way he held her. She complied.
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