Thomas wanted to yell down the moon, which was bright overhead tonight, not a single cloud in the Irish sky, a perfect spring night, the air soft and fragrant with the scent of new flowers, but he didn’t want her anymore now. His sense of betrayal was greater now that she’d admitted to it.
“Well, damn you, you didn’t get over your feelings for the bastard. Then you married me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But he was married and he didn’t want you?”
“No, but he was betrothed, something I didn’t know about until it was too late.”
“I see. If Jeremy walked through that door this very instant, told you he wanted you, would you go with him?”
“No.”
“Because you’re a damned vicar’s daughter.”
“Because I don’t break my promises.”
He plowed his hand through his hair, making it stand straight up. Meggie smiled.
“So I am stuck with a wife who loves another man,” he said finally, and hated the words as they poured out of his mouth, hated them to his gut. They were stark and ugly, those damnable words, sounded like nails in a coffin lid.
“Listen to me, Thomas. I have a very high regard for you. I very much like it when you kiss me, when you love me. You have given me great pleasure just as, I trust, I have given you. Jeremy isn’t part of my life now. Only you are. I am your wife and I will protect you and honor you until I die.”
“Wonderful,” Thomas said, and began pacing, his dressing gown flapping at his ankles. “Just bloody wonderful. An honorable wife who’s already betrayed me. Damnation.” The fingers went through the hair again.
She said suddenly, “That is why you were so very rough with me on our wedding night, wasn’t it? You were thinking about Jeremy and you wanted to punish me.”
“I’m not proud of it, but yes. I heard you talking about him and I couldn’t bear it. I hurt you.” He paced again. She could feel anger radiating off him. She realized fully what she’d done to him.
“I’m very sorry, Thomas.”
“Yes, naturally you are because you’re so damned honorable and you recognize that you’ve done a very wrong thing.”
“Yes, but you are my husband, Thomas, forever.”
“Isn’t that just dandy?”
“Why did you withdraw from me again? Two weeks ago.”
“You dreamed about him. You said his name aloud.” He slammed his fist against the wall. “Damn you, Meggie, I had just given you immense pleasure and you dreamed about that damned bastard! I wanted to kill him—I still do.”
“What do you want to do to me?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but I just don’t know. I don’t want to hurt you again, not with sex. Never with sex again.”
“I don’t remember dreaming about Jeremy. To be perfectly honest here, Thomas, I don’t think of him all that often anymore. You are my husband. Pendragon is my home. I want to be your wife, in all ways. I hate that you distrust me, that you blame me, that you don’t want me anymore.”
“Oh, God knows I want you, Meggie. I am a young man, young men are randier than goats, and I have grown up hearing that goats will bed anything that wags a tail or chews a boot.”
“That’s vulgar,” Meggie said, and laughed. It dried up very quickly. She said slowly, looking at him intently, “Do you think perhaps that we can start over, Thomas?”
“Start over? Start over what? This sham of a marriage?”
She’d been wallowing in guilt, knowing she’d been profoundly wrong. She’d been trying to exert reason and logic, trying to make him see how hideously sorry she was, but now she felt anger filling her, coming right out of her mouth. “This isn’t a sham marriage! Blessed Hell, Thomas, I wouldn’t let a man do what you do to me, and I surely wouldn’t let a man hear me scream in pleasure, if this were a damned sham marriage! I am your bloody wife. Do you hear me? I will grow old with you. Get used to it!”
She was breathing so hard that she was panting now. She realized in that instant that he was looking at her breasts, heaving and pressing against that wicked peach satin. She, the vicar’s daughter, straightened her shoulders, stuck her chest out, and said, “So what are you going to do about it, Thomas?”
He slammed out of the White Room.
Meggie stared at the still vibrating door. This was not good. She knew she’d hurt him very badly. But she couldn’t control her dreams. She tried and tried, but she simply couldn’t remember even dreaming about Jeremy. Oh yes, it had been after he’d sent her the carved statue of Mr. Cork. What could it have been?
And then she remembered.
She bounded out of bed and burst through the adjoining door into his grand and massive and very gloomy bedchamber, which she’d had cleaned, but not really paid much attention to since Thomas spent so little time in here. He was standing by one of the long skinny windows, staring out over the sea.
“Thomas, I remember.”
He turned slowly. “You follow me, even into my bedchamber, where I should have privacy if I wish it?”
“Climb down from your hobbyhorse, you ass. I remember the dream about Jeremy.”
“You have had time to make something up, Meggie.”
She ran straight across the room, right at him, and grabbed his dressing gown lapels. She stood on her tiptoes and said right into his face, “I haven’t made up a single thing. Listen to me. I dreamed about him right after he sent me Mr. Cork. Naturally he was on my mind, but not in the way you think. I dreamed about a cat race.”
“Ha.”
“Shut your trap, curse you. I dreamed that Mr. Cork was running, he was way ahead of the other racing cats. Then he began changing—he turned black, his eyes were bright orange, and then, he was suddenly fat, his belly nearly hanging to the ground. I just couldn’t believe it. And then Jeremy was saying that he would have to rewhittle him, make me a whole new statue and it would take him more time than he had, but he had to so he could be faithful to the real Mr. Cork. And I was begging him not to. I wanted my own Mr. Cork back, not this monstrous thing.”
“Do you honestly want me to believe that, Meggie?” He spoke very quietly.
She backed away from him, a good two steps. She said slowly, “Have I ever lied to you?”
“You lied by omission.”
“Ah, that’s a grand sin, isn’t it? Will you chew on that until your jaw locks? No, that was rhetorical. Have I ever lied to you, Thomas?”
He was silent. She opened her mouth, but he raised his hand. “No, be quiet. I’m thinking. We were together a goodly amount of time before we married. I’m trying to remember if you lied to me.”
Now it was Meggie who began pacing that dismal gloomy room. It was filled with shadows and every step she took sent her into deeper gloom. She hated gloom, she knew too well how it felt inside her. He turned to look out the window again, at the beautiful moon that glistened over the water.
It was magic, a night like this.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t remember you ever lying to me.”
“Well, good,” she said, nearly at a loss for words since she’d fully expected him to come up with something. She was only human, after all. “Then may we please try to begin again, Thomas?”
“Meggie,” he said, staying where he was, which was very far away from her indeed, “what if I loved another woman and couldn’t have her, then I married you, all without telling you a thing about her?”
Meggie stopped cold. She was shaking her head, then she stopped that too. She stared across the gloom at him. “Oh dear,” she whispered. “Oh dear.”
“Yes,” he said. “There is that, isn’t there?”
“I would throttle you if I found out. I would stomp you into the mud. I would shave your head and blacken your eyes, both of them. Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of the shoe on the other foot.”
He was pleased, but he wasn’t about to let her see it. “What I did to you was bad enough—forcing you on our wedding night.”<
br />
“No, what was worse was the last time when you just went away from me and didn’t say a single thing. That is horrid, Thomas. Please, don’t do that again. If you want to stomp me, I will allow it.”
She’d walked into the moonlight again, and that peach thing she was wearing shimmered all the way from her breasts to the floor. He could see too much of her.
“If I slam out of this room, I will be in the White Room again, your room.”
“Please don’t leave me,” she said and came up to him. She didn’t touch him, just stopped an inch short and looked up at him. “Thomas, why did you marry me?”
“Because I love you, you twit, because I believed you loved me as well.”
“But you never said anything about love to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He said very slowly, “Because there was just something about you, Meggie, something that made me understand how very young you were, how very innocent, untouched. You weren’t ready for that.”
“All that young and innocent, yet you believed I loved you? That it wasn’t some sort of schoolgirl infatuation?”
“I sometimes hate the way your brain works.”
“So does my family.” She sighed. “There is so much going on here at Pendragon. There is the someone who doesn’t want me here, enough to try to kill me. Then there’s you, Thomas. You don’t know whether you want to strangle me or kiss me or just slam out of the room.”
“If you are giving me a choice, then I would prefer to kiss you.” He had to touch her breasts, had to mold his fingers around her through that satin, and so he did and he closed his eyes as he cupped her in his palms, as his fingers roved over her.
He felt her pushing against his hands, and he opened his eyes. He smiled down at her. “I believe you want me as badly as I want you.”
“More,” Meggie said. “You taught me, Thomas, and you taught me well.” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his mouth. “Please open to me,” she whispered and he did, and all his heat, all the strength of him, all his passion and the immense hurt she’d dished out to him, it was all in that kiss, in the way he held her so tightly, she believed her ribs would crack, and then she just didn’t care.
The huge old bed was only ten feet away. When he lay her on the Aubusson carpet that was so threadbare she felt pricks of cold air touching her shoulder blades, he forced himself to stop, just for a moment, and said, his voice thick and deep and guttural, “I want this to be hard and fast, Meggie.”
Meggie couldn’t think of a single word, she was thrumming, mewling like her racing cats she was so excited, she felt so very urgent, it was beyond anything she could begin to understand. She grabbed him around his neck and pulled him down to her. “Please, now, Thomas. Now.”
He was a wild man, all over her, not a touch of gentleness, and Meggie hummed with power and urgency. She also hummed with something else, but she didn’t know what it was.
Meggie would swear that the gloomy room lightened, that the air itself lifted and fluttered when she yelled to those beams in the darkened ceiling. But he wasn’t through, bless him, and within a very short time, she was breathing hard again, beside herself, her hands all over him, pulling and caressing and hitting, and her cries heaved out of her mouth against his shoulder.
“I’m going to die now,” she said, “a happy woman,” and she didn’t move a single muscle.
He grunted beside her.
“I felled you.”
He grunted again, and she would swear she felt a smile on his mouth before he kissed her hair and collapsed again.
“Will you give me another chance, Thomas?”
“Your timing is excellent,” he said, and was asleep, sprawled naked on the Aubusson carpet, a smile on his face.
Meggie’s brain began to function again only when she realized she was shivering from cold. She came up on her elbow over her husband, looked down into his hard face, not so hard now in sleep, and said, “Thomas, how am I going to get you into bed?”
He grunted, then opened a dark eye and looked up into her shadowed face. “If I really concentrate on this, I can move.”
“What will I do,” she said, lightly caressing his shoulder, kissing his face, light nipping, sweet kisses, “when you are an old man and we end up on the carpet?”
“You will just roll me up in the carpet and leave me be.”
She laughed even as he scooped her into his arms and carried her into the White Room. She kissed his shoulder, whispered against his neck, “Are you willing to let me perhaps kiss your belly the way you kiss mine?”
His breath whooshed out and he ran through the adjoining door, nearly knocked Meggie in the head when he ran too close to the wall. He was laughing until her hair cascaded over his belly and she touched him with her mouth. He nearly heaved himself off the bed. Nothing could be better than this, he thought, and nearly expired. Dear God, her mouth.
His last thought before he fell into a blessedly numb sleep was that his wife, the vicar’s daughter, would come to love him. He was smart and he was persistent. He was also determined.
The following morning, however, Thomas wasn’t smiling.
30
“YOU DAMNED IDIOT, you’ve been home only a fortnight and you’ve already done this?”
William didn’t feel well, he really didn’t, and here was his too-sober half-brother, his voice black as the misery William was feeling, each word staccato, colder than an Irish winter morning, slamming right into his ear. He wanted to bolt behind the wainscoting. He wanted to seal up his ears until he knew his head wouldn’t explode.
Thomas said, “Teddy MacGraff was here, fists at the ready, his face so red I was afraid he would fall over with apoplexy, that or come up here to your bedchamber and wring your damned neck.”
“Let him,” William said. “I want to die.”
“Damn you, you’re a man, get up and face this!”
Thomas jerked his half-brother from his bed and dragged him across his bedchamber to his dressing table, where there sat a pitcher filled of water, waiting for soap and his razor.
Thomas poured the water over William’s head. William howled, flopped about, but it didn’t matter.
Thomas let him slide to the floor, then called for his valet. “Wring the little sot out, Dickie. When you have poured enough coffee down his throat, bring him to me in the estate room. Oh, and don’t let him out of your sight, he’s liable to slink out of here and try to hide.”
He heard Dickie say in a far-too-kind voice, “Come along, Master William. It’s not a good thing you’ve done and you’re in for it. Best face it like a man.”
William moaned.
Thomas was shaking his head, wondering how he was going to handle this one, when he nearly ran into Meggie, who was dancing down the corridor, humming an arpeggio. He grabbed her arm to keep her upright. She squeaked in surprise, looked up at him, blushed—it was that blush that alerted him—then gave him a fat smile, and he knew, knew all the way to his belly, exactly what she was thinking, saw it clearly in his mind. She was kneeling over him and her mouth was on him. And her hands. And the feel of her hair on his belly. Oh God. He couldn’t bear it. He was shaking.
“Good morning.” He kissed her hard and fast, then straightened, took two steps away from her. When she reached for him, he said, “Don’t, Meggie, I can do nothing about it, at least for the next couple of hours. William has gotten another girl pregnant. Her father came here, fully prepared to send William all the way to Botany Bay. In a boat without a paddle. Perhaps without a boat as well.”
“That’s it, Thomas. I’m going to kill the little sod, right now.”
He managed to grab her before she ran around him. She was breathing hard.
“No, sweetheart, you can’t.”
“Of course I can. Just watch me.”
“I mean, since I’m the magistrate and I would be a witness to the crime, I would have to take you to the gaol in Dublin.”
B
ut Meggie had already moved ahead. “But how can William have gotten another girl pregnant? He’s only been here a matter of weeks.”
Thomas sighed. “The little sod was home before.”
“This is just too much, Thomas. Let me go. I will get a gun. I will shoot him in the feet, make him crawl away from Pendragon. You won’t have to be a witness and arrest me.”
“No, Meggie, keep away from William. If you would, please ask Aunt Libby to come to the drawing room. It is time that she faced what William is, what he has done, what he’s obviously done every chance he’s gotten since he was old enough to figure out what to do.”
“Aunt Libby doesn’t know about any of the other girls? She doesn’t know what he’s like?”
He shook his head. “I don’t see how she could. William certainly would never tell her, you can wager your last groat on that, and I’ve kept quiet, protecting her. But now this cannot continue. She needs to know. If she has any control, any influence over him, now’s the time she used it.”
“I’ll fetch her, Thomas.”
At least, Meggie thought, watching her husband stride down the corridor, head down, hopefully planning punishments for William, he wasn’t thinking about Jeremy.
Jeremy. Meggie paused a moment, and blinked. It was strange. For the first time since she’d known him, Jeremy wasn’t all that clear in her head. How odd that she could be so very fickle.
Odd but good. She had honestly believed he was her world, believed that when he had married Charlotte that her world had come to an end, at least all the fun part of it.
But no longer.
She found Aunt Libby in her bedchamber, humming as she carefully selected a sweetmeat and popped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes as she chewed. Meggie also saw that Libby was writing something. She quickly slid the piece of foolscap beneath several books—both of them, Meggie saw, were Lord Byron. Now, what was this all about?