Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  “Imagine.” He said nothing more as she worked at the rubbing, holding the parchment against the wall for her when it would have slipped. She still couldn’t read him; kept waiting for him to shake the truth out of her. Her nerves were raw and throbbing when she finally finished.

  “Where do your theories take us next, Miss Faelyn?”

  Us. There would be no putting him off now; he would be more suspicious than ever. The chessboard was clear again; he would know as much about their progress as she did. Except that, in the end, she knew where the treasure lay. That knowledge would have to keep her going.

  “Runville had an heir—a son, John.”

  “As the plaque reads.”

  “We need to find the son’s will, which could be either here in Donowell or in York—”

  “Why York?”

  “It depends on which prerogative court proved the will after John died. And from there we follow the trail of bequests until it dead-ends.”

  “My schedule is clear, madam. Take all the time you need.”

  Oh, go dig in your coal pit, Rushford!

  “It’s too late this evening. We’ll have to continue in the morning.” She rolled up the parchment. “I’m staying at an inn at the edge of town—”

  “At the Belle Heather, with the elderly Misses Potterfell. So am I.” Without a glance at her, Rushford scooped up her satchel, took her arm, and started down the stairs with her.

  “What?” Mairey stopped dead. They’d had only her room left. The other had been full.

  “I told them that my dear wife and I had a falling out—” A simple tug on her arm and she was hurrying after him.

  “Your wife?”

  “That I’d been a damned fool, and that I had hoped to make it up to her tonight with flowers…and a little old-fashioned romance.”

  “You didn’t?” Stunned, Mairey stopped on the stairs again, and again the brute tugged her along after him, lifting her with such ease that she never missed a step.

  “Yes, my dear, romance. The ladies seemed quite concerned over the sorry state of our marriage.”

  “Jackson Rushford, how could you?” The tower door loomed darkly below, and Mairey tried to race ahead to be free of him and his meddling arrogance.

  But he held her to him in the well of darkness and spoke his threats against her hair. “I could and did, madam, because I doubt very much that the Misses Potterfell would have approved my sleeping in your room tonight without our being married.”

  “You’re not sleeping in my room!”

  “Oh, but I am, Miss Faelyn.” He was steaming heat against her nape, lifting her hair—and, oh, the blazing stars, were those his lips? “You see, my dear, I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not until we’ve found the Willowmoon Knot and all its precious silver. Maybe not even then.”

  His last threat frightened her most of all. Not because she wanted to be free of his prison, but because—dear God—she’d grown too fond of it.

  Everything in the Belle Heather made Jack feel enormous, a fuming, foul-tempered giant in the tree-root home of a pair of ancient, chittering elves—from the low, timbered ceilings, to the small windows, to the diminutive Potterfell sisters themselves. They were fretting over the deliciously cunning Miss Faelyn as though she’d come limping home from Waterloo on crutches, were forcing a biscuit and a cure-all cup of tea into her hands.

  “You should have told us of your husband troubles when you first arrived, Lady Rushford. You poor, frightened dear. And so newly married.”

  “So very newly married.” Mairey was having her hand patted by one of the sisters and was sending Jack a blistering, narrow-eyed scowl over the woman’s bobbing, blue-gray curls. She’d gotten herself into this particular spot. She’d run from him at the first opportunity, with a fistful of information that she had intended to hide from him. He’d had no choice but to find her and keep her.

  Keep her? Like keeping a handful of diamond dust from blowing through his fingers. Damn the woman!

  “Have you dears any children?” The other Miss Potterfell had toddled over to Jack and was smiling innocently up at him.

  “Children?” He’d almost bellowed the nonsensical word, but it had softened in his throat to a breath of air that made him look across the room at Mairey. He remembered her mimed belly at the Tower and the stirring it had caused in his chest.

  “Not yet,” he whispered through a peculiar tightness in his chest, imagining children with Mairey Faelyn. Bright haired and wild, reckless hearted, like she was. And they’d have all those incorrigible aunts to love them.

  Anna and Caro and Poppy. And his own sisters. And a doting grandmother who must have other grandchildren already.

  He wasn’t very good at keeping the people he loved. Love was trust and devotion. He was careless.

  Not like the dragon-hearted woman who, at the moment, looked as though she might castrate him with her bare hands if she could get close enough.

  Children? His chest felt huge, and stuffed with hope and fear.

  “Sleeping with a robin’s egg beneath your pillow helps, or so I’ve heard,” said the first Miss Potterfell.

  “Now, now, sister. Children will come to these two in God’s time. You see, my dears, neither of us have been married, but we can well imagine the trials of a young bride and the demands of an older gentleman.”

  Older? He was barely past thirty.

  And Mairey was sneering at him.

  “Come, Wife,” he said, hunching over to avoid smacking his head into the ceiling beams—though it might serve to knock some sense into him. “You and I have some important matters to discuss.”

  The leave-taking was a gauntlet of patting and taking and more fertility suggestions, but Jack finally herded his ‘bride’ through the Potterfell parlor and up the two flights of narrow stairs to the garret room. She was muttering as he ushered her through the door, but he paused on the landing long enough to give the misses below a final wave before he shut the door and faced the fuming Miss Faelyn.

  “Oh, damn you, Rushford!” She drew herself up for a huge blow. “Damn you! Damn you!”

  “Yes, you’re probably right.” He locked the door pointedly behind him, hoping to rouse the anger he’d felt that noon when he’d returned to Drakestone early, and only because he couldn’t stay away. Because even a single night seemed too long. “But once a man is past redemption he really hasn’t anything to lose, has he? Now, madam, you will show me Adam Runville’s will, and then you will tell me why you skulked away as soon as I was gone.”

  “I don’t have his will. And I don’t skulk.”

  “Runville’s probate record, then.”

  “I only have a copy, and I didn’t bring it with me.”

  “Liar.” He could see that well enough in the side shift of her eyes, a glance that swung back full of self-righteousness.

  “I traveled lightly, Rushford. I only meant to be here overnight.” She stood like a sentinel in the center of the small room.

  “You’re a brilliant researcher, Miss Faelyn; you would never have left such an important document behind, would never have relied only on your memory. Let me see the copy.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  He could play her game; he knew rules that she hadn’t even dreamed of and had the will to enforce them. “Then take off your shirtwaist.”

  The woman blushed instantly all the way to her hairline. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me clearly. I meant what I said. Now.” Jack took a threatening step toward her. “Take off your shirtwaist.”

  “I will not! And you, sir, will die trying to take it off me!”

  He’d die of it, of the sheer pleasure. She’d covered her bosom, her hands and arms crossed like wings against a storm.

  “Then so be it.” He took another, more menacing step; allowed her to dash behind a chair, deeper into the room. The move gained her nothing. It trapped her completely against the window wall and the dying light of the day, and ma
de golden webs of her hair.

  “You’re a monster, Jackson Rushford.” She was breathing as though he’d chased her down a wooded path.

  “And you are a liar, Mairey Faelyn. I want to see the copy of Runville’s probate record. I know that you keep your precious notes in there.” Jack pointed to the woman’s bosom, where her outrage billowed against the wool of her jacket. He hoped to hell that his own cheeks weren’t flushed as hotly as they felt, because his imagination was suddenly overfilled with plans for her creamy breasts, as it had been since he’d met the woman. And the room was just too close for that kind of imagining. “I’ve seen you stash your notes in your…between your…in your damn shirtwaist!”

  Her eyes had grown enormous in her outrage. “You’re mad!”

  “Perhaps, Miss Faelyn. But if you don’t remove your shirtwaist so that I may retrieve this copy from its hiding place, then I shall remove it myself!”

  And he would find that place far too enticing. She was too lovely, smelled too fragrant. He’d never had to threaten a woman to remove her clothes, and prayed to God, who had once walked the earth and fought all of its temptations, that the foolish woman would cooperate and show him Runville’s record. But he would have it one way or another, if only to make a point that he was in charge and that he would not tolerate secrets between them.

  “Very well, Rushford. If you insist. But I am disappointed in you!”

  She shrugged off her jacket, revealing tiny pleats of linen, and rich, round, unstayed bouncing that entreated his hands like just-picked summer pears. And now the foolish woman was reaching behind her neck for…what? The buttons of her shirtwaist…

  He shouldn’t have dared her, and was about to call back his demand when she tugged a silver chain from beneath her crisp collar and slipped it off over her head. A tiny key dangled from the end.

  “The copy of Runville’s probate record is there in my Gladstone, in an envelope. You’re welcome to it. It’s nothing more than I told you when you asked.”

  Swallowing hard, Jack thunked the Gladstone onto the chest at the foot of the bed and managed to fit the key into the lock on his first try. She stood over him as he fumbled past her silky smallclothes and her stockings before finding the envelope and the probate records.

  “There, you see,” she said, her indignant huff riffling the underside of his jaw. “Just as I told you.”

  It took all his concentration just to read, “‘…six gilt knives, bonne-handled; one silv’red disk, anciently ornamented; one brass ewere…’”

  “One silv’red disk, anciently ornamented,” she repeated, retrieving the note and stuffing it back into the envelope, as though that were the end of it. “The Willowmoon Knot.”

  “That’s all? You came all this way, made this fuss for a ‘silv’red disk, anciently ornamented’?”

  “It’s the Willowmoon Knot, Jack. What else could it be?”

  “A fish plate, a pot lid, a coronation medal.” He dropped onto the bedchest, utterly bewildered and frustrated to the core.

  “I’m sorry, but that is the way and the risk of looking for treasure. Down one trail until it’s cold, then up the next. If you find it too frustrating, then maybe next time you should stay behind and leave it to me. I was right not to wait for you.”

  “You couldn’t have been more wrong.” He’d partnered himself with a lunatic: a head-spinning, riddle-speaking lunatic, one whom he would and might have to follow to the ends of the earth and back again. “You could damn well have left me a note.”

  “What would that note have said?” She leaned down to him, her nose an inch from his. “‘Found clue to the treasure. Am going to Donowell to pick it up.’ You’d have skinned me for breaching your security.”

  “You’re intelligent enough to have been more cryptic than that.” He stood up and she stayed, her chin nearly touching his chest. “My point is that you’re a woman. You shouldn’t be traipsing around the countryside without an escort. Without me.”

  “It’s what I have always done.”

  “Not any more. Not while you and I are partners. Do you understand me?”

  “So very, very well, sir.” She circled behind him and dumped the contents of her Gladstone into the middle of the bed. “Now, please, go take a long walk. I’m tired, and I would like to wash up and go to bed.”

  “Oh, no, madam. I’m not going down those stairs alone. You’ll have to trust me that I will keep my back turned.” Jack shoved the chair toward the window and dropped himself onto its flower-flouncy cushion.

  “Afraid to face the Misses Potterfell and their questions about our troubled ‘marriage’?”

  “Terrified, madam.”

  “So am I.” He loved her laughter, loved that she was ever free with the rippling rise and fall of it, whether she was angry, wistful, or plainly amused—as she seemed to be at the moment.

  He heard the dash of water in the basin and a rustling of clothes, apparently taking his promise to avert his eyes as gospel.

  Not wishing to disabuse her of the notion, he settled firmly into the chair, enjoying the sounds of her, enjoying the soft, evening breeze as it blew in off the blue-dark sea through the open window.

  He still didn’t know what to make of the woman’s artful trip to Donowell, or of her conveniently discovering Runville’s probate records the moment he was gone to Cornwall.

  She’d told him all she knew of the Willowmoon’s history, and was forever regaling him with her Celtic legends. Yet sometimes he felt that his sense of control over the situation was entirely an illusion, concocted by Mairey for his benefit.

  He wanted to believe that she was plain-dealing and honorable. But too often he recalled their initial meeting: her outrage and her refusal. And her absurd declaration that she would mine the silver with a shovel if she found it. His partner was as passionately intent upon the treasure as he was; she had been raised up from childhood to see its discovery.

  But Mairey Faelyn wasn’t a fortune hunter. She was crafty, intelligent, and heroically devoted to her family; her clothes were simple, and she found her pleasure in telling fairy tales to her sisters. He couldn’t imagine her sweeping through Paris on a shopping holiday, throwing lavish dinner parties, or buying villas in Spain.

  “What will you do with your part of the Willowmoon treasure, Miss Faelyn?”

  “Do with it?” She became so silent that he thought she had vanished. He almost turned to see for himself, but then she spoke. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far.”

  He heard her strike a match, then her corner of the room filled with light. The sea breeze gusted and nudged the window on its hinges, the gentle movement catching her reflection in a single pane.

  The glass was old and rippled, making silvery clouds of her nightdress and her hair.

  He would have closed his eyes, but there was no rest for him there.

  “Thank you, my lord.” He heard the bed creak, and he turned slightly in the chair, wondering if she’d meant that she was safely tucked beneath the counterpane and that he was free to move.

  “For what?” He stood casually, hoping for the best.

  “For keeping your word.” She was sitting in the middle of the bed, covered to her waist by a quilt of blue-printed country scenes, bent over one of her field books, making small notes with a pencil.

  “What’s that you’re writing?”

  “‘Sleeping with a robin’s egg beneath your pillow helps’…Hmmm.” She looked up at him and touched the end of her pencil to her mouth. “Do you suppose that Miss Potterfell believes that the robin’s egg aids in the conception of a child, or that its presence under the pillow acts as an agent to increase passion, thereby bringing the hopeful parents together more fervently?”

  Jack knew his mouth was agape, but he couldn’t help it until he took a deeper breath. This wasn’t a subject for idle conversation.

  “I don’t know, Miss Faelyn. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to go downstairs and ask her.”

>   “I didn’t mean you to ask. I should have done so myself, but I was too furious with you at the time.” She was looking around the room, studying every stick of furniture. “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “On the floor.” He’d decided on that strategy the moment he’d seen the bed.

  “That’s absurd. There’s room here.” She patted the pillow and moved to the left side.

  There was nothing like confession to clear the boards and point out the threats. “Do you know that I’m mad for you, Miss Faelyn?”

  She put her notebook down on her lap. “What do you mean, ‘mad’? What have I done now?”

  “I mean that I feel very much like one of your Oxford swains. Every thought I have in my head right now involves making love to you until dawn.”

  “Really?” Damn the woman for not being shocked, appalled, threatened at the very least; for searching his face and then lighting so boldly on the front of his trousers.

  “Really. So I am trapped here with you, madam, in a very precipitous state—”

  “Hoisted on your own petard.” She cocked her head, smiling—actually waiting for a reply—not a bit repentant over her inexcusable knowledge of the male anatomy. What else did she know? And who the hell did she learn it from?

  “If we weren’t all the way up in a third-floor garret and if the ocean cliffs weren’t a hundred feet below—”

  “And if the formidable Potterfell sisters weren’t just outside our marital chamber, waiting for our reconciliation and news of a child on the way, you’d take yourself off to a dip in the ocean.”

  “Exactly.” The word came out in a strangled heap.

  She leaned over to the bedside table and blew out the light, plunging the room into a milky, moon-on-the-sea darkness. She made soft noises into her pillow, sighs that he wanted to feel against his mouth. He was still hard as a rock for her, his fists clenched as firmly as his teeth.

  “Sleep wherever you like, my lord. I wouldn’t be here with you alone in the dark if I didn’t trust you absolutely.”

  He slept the night on a very uncomfortable rug.