But Skye did not feel sure of herself. Niall Burke had not yet come to see her, and how could she know what was really in her heart until he did? Why did he not come? And when he finally did, at last, she was totally unprepared.
Autumn had been late in coming, and even now at October’s end the trees were just at their golden peak. Geoffrey had been gone ten days, down into Devon to oversee the arrangements for his wife and son’s arrival there. The Queen had finally, though reluctantly, agreed to let Skye go at least until the spring.
Skye sat, this bright October day, beneath an apple tree in her riverside garden. Her yellow skirts were spread about her like a flower. Willow, now two and a half, played nearby under the watchful eye of her nurse. The baby slumbered on a blanket beside his mother in the warm afternoon sun. Skye was relaxed and content when Daisy came to announce, “My lord Burke has called to pay his respects, milady. He is waiting in your little library.”
Skye rose slowly with far more calm than she felt. “Take Robin to his nurse, Daisy,” she instructed, then walked quietly across the lawn and into the house. She stopped for a moment to check her hair in a mirror, carefully tucking an errant lock into the golden net that confined her dark curls. Her hand was trembling, which didn’t surprise her, for her heart was racing wildly. Taking a deep breath, she grasped the door handle firmly, straightened her shoulders, and walked purposefully into the library.
“My lord, it is good to see you again.” Her musical voice did not waver, and she produced just the right note of cordiality.
Niall turned. The silvery eyes were still bold and clear and bright, but now there were tiny wrinkles around them. His fair skin was clear and he stood as tall and straight as ever. But there was a maturity, an alluring quiet strength about him now, growth marked by time and molded by suffering. His dark hair was accented by a bit of gray near the temples. Gone was the rash young man she remembered and in that young man’s place stood a mature and, yes, a most attractive, self-assured man.
“You’ve become even more beautiful—if that is possible. Motherhood becomes you, Skye.”
“Thank you, my lord.” She moved to the table. “Will you take wine?” How formal she sounded! Was he laughing at her?
“Are you uncomfortable with me, Skye?”
“It is … awkward, Niall. Until six weeks ago I remembered nothing beyond four years ago—in Algiers.”
“Sit down with me, Skye. Sit down and tell me what happened. I almost lost my mind when I lost you.”
She sat across from him in a brown velvet chair and calmly began. “I was transferred from the ship that took me to another that same day. That part is hazy. They did not harm me, for the Moslems believe the mad to have been touched by God’s hand. Believing you dead, I had temporarily lost my mind. When I became aware again I was in the house of Khalid el Bey. He cared for me. He loved me. Eventually we were married.” She told her story simply, finishing with, “I was pregnant with Khalid’s child when I fled Algiers. Willow is his daughter. The rest you know.” Her eyes never left Niall’s during the recitation.
“Did you love the infidel?”
Skye felt a cold anger surge through her. How dare he speak to her that way? “Khalid el Bey was a great gentleman,” she said, slowly and deliberately. “I loved him deeply. He was kind and good, and beloved of all who knew him. How dare you refer to him that way?”
“Skye, forgive me. My own troubles have colored my feelings toward all women lately. Thank God for Khalid el Bey. Had he not rescued you, God only knows what would have happened to you.”
“Why have you come, Niall?”
“I am returning home to Ireland, Skye. I thought I might carry some messages for you, and tell your family when you will return.”
“I do not know when I’ll return,” she said. “I am told that Uncle Seamus has taken excellent care of the business. My life is here now. All I want are my sons. I would like them sent here to me.”
“But you’re the O’Malley of Innisfana, Skye.”
“I am also the Countess of Lynmouth, Niall. But tell me, have you found your poor wife?”
“I found her. She is not well. She’ll be better off in Ireland.”
He was so bitter, she realized. Fate had not dealt kindly with him. “I am sorry, Niall,” she said. “So very sorry.”
“I neither need nor want your pity, Skye,” he snapped. The words he did not say hung between them: I want your love! He rushed on. “Constanza nursed me back to health. They all said you were dead, that a lady couldn’t possibly have lived through such an experience. At first I wouldn’t listen, but even the Dey of Algiers couldn’t find you. Finally I had to listen. I was lonely, and Constanza was pretty and … so innocent. I had to marry for the MacWilliam’s sake, for the Burke name. I had forgotten the difference between just a lady and a certain Irish lady.” He sighed so sadly that she came close to weeping.
“Whatever your fate, Niall, mine would not have changed. I should still be married to Geoffrey now.”
“Would you?” His tone challenged her.
For the first time since she had entered the room Skye looked straight at Niall. Her sapphire-blue eyes with their hint of green snapped, “Yes, I would. Had my memory remained whole I would have moved Heaven and Hell to return to you, Niall Burke, but the thought that you were dead all but destroyed me. In my heart and mind I must have believed myself responsible for your death and I could not face what I thought I’d done. My mind went blank. Now my memory has returned and I thank God for it, for it allows me to be reunited with my sons and my family. But understand this, Niall. I cannot change what has happened during the last four years, and I am not sure I would want to change it. How many women have known the love I have known?”
“Love?” he shouted at her. “More likely you mean lovemaking! That’s all you damn women think about! I would have thought Dom O’Flaherty had cured you of lust!”
“And if he had,” she shouted back, “would you have been so hot to bed me? No! You wouldn’t have wanted me.” Then her heart went out to him. “Niall, oh my poor dear, how badly you’ve been hurt! Once my lord Khalid told me of women like your Constanza. It’s a sickness with her, Niall. She cannot help what she does.”
But he was infuriated by her pity. “And what is your excuse, madam. That lusty boy who howls in your nursery was no seven-month babe.”
“What a cold, self-righteous bastard you’ve become,” she said softly.
He snarled and, catching her by surprise, yanked her roughly toward him. She found she could not move and his big hands tangled in her hair as his mouth crushed down on hers. With brutal deliberateness he kissed her slowly over and over until she could not avoid responding. His mouth seared hers. He kissed her purple-shadowed eyelids, her temples, and again her mouth.
Thrill after thrill slammed through Skye. Oh dear God! His mouth forced back the memories she had so long denied. The girl she had been cried out soundlessly to him. Then, as suddenly as he had grasped her, he thrust her from him. “Yes,” he spat. “You are all alike, you women! Ready to lift your tail for any man who rouses you!”
She slapped him as hard as she could. “No wonder your wife seeks other men,” she said, and rejoiced to see his face crumble. He had hurt her and she wanted to hurt him. He turned on his heel and slammed from the room.
Alone, her hand tingling, she wept. What had happened to him in the past four years to change him so? Was it not she who had suffered the most? She could understand his bitterness over Constanza, but why did he direct his hostility toward her? The afternoon shadows lengthened, a servant came to light the fire, and still she sat with the tears running unchecked down her face.
The library door opened once again, but she did not look up. Strong arms wrapped about her, pulling her against the comfort of a familiar velvet-clad chest. “I’ll kill the arrogant bastard for hurting you,” Geoffrey’s cool voice surprised her.
“He hates me,” she sobbed. “He truly hates me. And
for what? What have I done to him?”
“Do you hate him?”
“No!” she sobbed.
“Then he’s a fool to scorn your love,” came the reply.
“I don’t love him, Geoffrey. Not now. But he was once my dear friend and now he hates me. I did him no hurt, and that is what I cannot bear.” She wept as he held her tenderly, stroking her dark hair. Finally she managed to calm herself. “When did you get back?” she sniffed.
“A little while ago. Daisy told me Lord Burke had called on you, slammed angrily from the house shortly thereafter, and that you’d not come out of the library since then.”
“Is all well in Devon?”
“All is well, and in readiness to receive us. My girls eagerly await you as well as their stepsister and half-brother.”
“Let us go tomorrow!”
“All right,” he agreed, “we’ll go tomorrow.”
“Geoffrey?”
“What, my darling?”
“I love you!”
A happy grin split his handsome face. He walked to the library door and turned the key in the lock. She saw the grin fade into a look of passion. “Oh, yes!” she breathed in answer to the unasked question. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” And holding out her hand to him, she drew him close. For a long, long moment he held her face in his hands, looking down into it. Then his mouth touched her gently, searchingly, and her lips parted eagerly beneath his, sending shivers of hot and cold up her spine. His kisses deepened and she became aware that his hands were loosening her laces, drawing her skirts off. Her own fingers were pulling at the bone buttons on his doublet, and when they had undressed each other, they slipped to the floor before the warm fire. His elegant fingers stroked her long back, her rounded buttocks. She grew bold, pushing him onto his back, her small tongue lapping eagerly at his nipples. “Damn you, Skye,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Ahhhh, God, sweetheart!” Her tongue followed the thin golden line of hair downward from his belly. She breathed deeply of his warm male scent, like a kitten licking lovingly at a kindly hand. She loved his great manroot with her tongue. He shuddered with pleasure. For several months now he had been denied the delights of her body. Strangely, he had remained faithful. Once having loved her, no other woman could satisfy him.
To fall upon her would have been so easy. He ached to bury himself deep within her, but Geoffrey Southwood was that rare man who gained his greatest pleasure by giving pleasure. Skillfully he turned her onto her back and slowly rained burning kisses over the long pure pillar of her throat. “I have longed for weeks to love you again,” he murmured, placing his lips against the jumping pulse at the base of her throat. His mouth moved to the tiny star mole at the swell of her breast. “Sweet, ah my darling, how sweet you are.”
They were lost in each other. Hands and lips loved and loved and loved again until the line between reality and fantasy wavered and finally disappeared altogether. They caressed, they tasted, they hungered until finally they were joined in one undying blaze of love that left them physically shaken, but strangely stronger. The gold-orange firelight played over their entwined bodies like a jealous third lover. Exhausted, they slept where they lay, waking an hour later to cuddle, to speak in hushed whispers of little things. They were man and wife, they were lovers, and yet they sometimes felt momentarily shy of each other.
“The harvest was good on the estates,” he said.
“Did you visit Wren Court?” she asked.
“They eagerly awaited Dame Cecily.”
“She’s as anxious to get home as we are. Oh, Geoffrey! Thank you for loving me, really loving me!”
“I love you as you love me, my darling. ’Tis love returned.”
“ ’twill always be returned, my dearest husband.”
What Niall Burke would not have given to hear those words. He had left Lynmouth House in a high rage. The meeting had not gone at all as he had planned. He had dared to hope that she would fling herself into his arms and beg to be taken home to Ireland. He had believed she would be ashamed of what had transpired in Algiers. Instead, she had behaved totally unlike the sweet Skye of his memory. His memory was faulty: Niall had conveniently forgotten the woman who had led her men into battle with Barbary pirates.
Moving through his house, he unlocked the door to his wife’s bedchamber and walked into the room. “Good evening, Mrs. Tubbs, and how is your patient tonight?”
A tall, stocky woman rose from her chair by the bed and came forward. “She was able to take some soup this evening, my lord.”
“Good. Go and get your own meal now. I will sit with Lady Burke until you return.”
“Thank you, my lord.” The big woman bobbed a curtsey and was gone.
Niall Burke sat down by the bed and stared at the sleeping woman who was his wife. Her beautiful pale golden skin had grown sallow, her glorious dark golden hair—braided now in two plaits—had become a lusterless brown, and lank. But a few months ago she had been the loveliest girl alive, and now—He sighed. Poor Constanza. He could never forgive her for what she had done, but they might begin again, and if he could get her with child perhaps she would become once more the sweet girl he had fallen in love with back on Mallorca.
Her pansy-purple eyes opened. “Niall?”
“I am here, Constanzita.”
“Take me home, Niall.”
“When you are strong enough to travel, my dear, we will go home to Ireland.”
Constanza shuddered. Ireland. That wet, gray land. The MacWilliam’s stronghold would be cold and gray too. She longed for warmth, for the sun, for Mallorca. “If you take me to Ireland I shall die. I want to go home to Mallorca.”
“We will see what the doctor says, Constanzita,” he said. “Go to sleep now.”
Her eyes closed wearily, and he was struck by how frail she was. It amazed him that she had managed to withstand the rigors of the London underworld where he’d found her. She had fled with his head stableman. Knowing her nature quite well, Harry had set her up in two rooms and pimped for her. He sold her jewelry, then began to live riotously on the proceeds, setting himself up in quarters in a nearby tavern. Lavish spending soon emptied Harry’s pockets, but his taste for high life abated not one whit. He beat his mistress cruelly, accusing her of not working hard enough. She could earn twice as much if she’d cut down on the amount of time she spent with her customers and if she took only four hours to sleep a night.
Polly the kitchen maid, hearing of Harry’s whereabouts from her married sister who lived in the same slum, crept above stairs to find her master. Niall had taken Polly up on his horse ahead of him and, breathless with excitement, she had directed him to where Constanza lived.
Niall was hard put not to become sick when he found his wife, half-delirious with fever, on the floor in a tiny room. She lay on a filthy pallet, the stink of the unemptied chamber pot permeating the room. Even little Polly, raised in the same degree of poverty, gasped with shock.
“ ’Er ’ull be no good to ye,” cackled the old crone who owned the house, “unless o’ course ye likes to swive ’em when they ’alf dead.”
“Close your trap, old hag,” snapped Polly. “We’re taking the lady out of here.”
“Lady, is it? Lady?” screeched the old woman. “She owes me for rent, that one.”
“Where is the man who was with her?” asked Niall.
“ ’Andsome ’Arry? ’E ain’t been around since she got ill. Got ’imself a newer, younger doxy.”
“How much rent is owed?”
The old woman eyed Lord Burke craftily. “A shilling,” she said.
The Irishman reached for his purse, but Polly intervened. “You wouldn’t get a shilling for this room in two years’ time, old hag,” she declared, outraged. “Give her no more than two silver pennies, my lord.”
Instead Niall Burke pulled a half-crown from his purse and handed it to the woman, whose eyes bugged with greed and shock. “This woman was never here, and neither were we,” he said quietly.
&nb
sp; The landlady snatched the coin, bit it, and stuffed it into her apron pocket. “I ain’t never seen any o’ yese,” she declared, quickly disappearing from the room.
Niall and Polly got Constanza to her feet. “You’ll ride with her, lass, and I’ll lead the horse,” he said, thankful for the rainy dark night that would cover their return to the Strand. Niall Burke had long ago tired of feeding the gossip mills of Court. When they finally reached the Burke house the servants had all retired excepting one sleepy stable boy who took the horse off to its stall. Lord Burke carried his unconscious wife up to her rooms, where he and Polly stripped the filthy garments off her thin body. Niall then filled the small oak tub with warm water he and Polly lugged up from the kitchens themselves. They washed her, including her matted, lice-ridden hair. Constanza, half conscious, protested weakly. They hauled her from the tub, toweled her off, put a clean gown on her, and plaited her dried hair into two braids. She was finally tucked into bed.
Back down in the kitchens of the house, Lord Burke emptied the little tub and sat down at the table. Polly rummaged about in the larder and found half a roasted capon. She put it on a wooden trencher with some bread and placed it before her master. She then poured him a goblet of brown October ale, and stood back. But Niall motioned her into the bench opposite him. Tearing off part of the capon breast, he shoved the meat toward her. “Eat up, lass! You’ve worked hard this night. And pour yourself some ale too.”
Shyly, Polly obeyed him, somewhat astounded. “Thank you, my lord.”
“That was a kind thing you did, lass. I might never have found my wife without your help. She’s a very sick woman, Polly. Sick in spirit and body.”
Skye O'Malley Page 43
