Dangerous to Hold (31 page)

“You should have told me.”

“Why should I? I had my revenge when I forced you to marry me.”

They stood like two statues, glaring at each other. Marcus finally broke the silence. “Revenge? You spied on me for revenge?”

She let out a shaken breath. “No. That’s not what I said. That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“I mean that in Spain, when I forced you to marry me, it wasn’t only because you’d been trifling with my affections. I was thinking mainly of Amy and what you’d done to her.”

He slapped the bedpost with the flat of his hand, making her jump. “Why am I to blame? She had other protectors before me. Why did you decide to punish me?” He let out a low laugh. “What a stupid thing to ask! Blind chance brought us together and you seized the opportunity of taking your revenge. Well, let me tell you something, you sanctimonious little prude.” She fell back as he advanced on her. “I’m not apologizing for Amy. She chose her path in life. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t her first lover by a long shot, and I won’t be her last.”

When he paused to draw breath, she plunged in. “Will you listen to yourself?
She chose her path in life.
Amy is my sister. Could you dismiss Samantha as easily as that?”

He opened his mouth, shut it, then said in a driven tone, “We shall leave my sister out of this discussion, if you please.”

She bared her teeth at him. “I understand. I really do. Samantha is as pure as the driven snow. She and Amy aren’t in the same class, are they? The one is destined for the estate of holy matrimony, the other is a toy, a play-thing
for a rich man’s pleasure. And where do I fit into your scheme of things, Marcus? I’d really like to know.”

His voice was as cold and grim as his expression. “You are my wife.”

“And what about women like Amy? Can’t she be a wife too?”

“I repeat, Amy chose her path in life. No one forced her into it, least of all me.” His voice changed, became harsher. “For God’s sake, Cat! Don’t you know your own sister? Amy is a high flyer. She likes the things money can buy. She’s not like you. She could never be satisfied with the life you lead.”

“And you should know, I suppose?”

“Better than you.”

She flung away from him with no clear idea of where she was going, then flung back as another thought occurred to her. “You once asked me to be your mistress. Am I a high flyer? Is that how you see me? Do I remind you of Amy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You and Amy are nothing alike.”

“Who are you insulting—Amy or me?”

“I would never insult Amy. That is to say—”

“Ah, so you’re insulting me, Then why did you ask me to become your mistress?”

His frustration was rapidly coming to boiling point. “I thought we would suit. I knew you wanted me and I wanted you.”

She gasped. “You thought we would suit! I wasn’t good enough to be your wife, I suppose. And did I suit, Marcus?” The words spilled from her lips before she knew what she was saying. “In bed, was I as good as Amy? Was I as good as your other mistresses?”

He ground his teeth. “I’m not going to answer that question, and you shouldn’t ask me.”

All the passion suddenly drained out of her, and she stared at him in shocked silence. She couldn’t believe she had said those words, couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. But what horrified her more was that she’d discovered she was jealous of her own sister. Just thinking of Marcus and Amy together scourged her worse
than any whip. Amy was beautiful, polished, experienced, whereas she had been sitting on the shelf for years.

His face was pale and he was frowning. “This conversation,” he said, “should never have happened. My relationship with Amy is long over. You are my wife. That’s the end of it.”

His words snapped her out of her reveries, and she remembered her resolve. “There’s something else you should know,” she said. “It wasn’t because Amy had been your mistress that I wanted revenge. It was because she told me you had ravished her. That’s why I hated the name Wrotham. That’s why I forced you to marry me in Spain.”

He could hardly breathe, and he said harshly, “Your damn sister lied to you!”

“I know that now. But I didn’t know it at the time. I know you couldn’t do such a thing.”

“How can I believe anything you say? From beginning to end you’ve hated me.”

“That might have been true once,” she whispered, “but it’s not true now.”

“Oh no, Cat, that’s too easy. You’ll want proof of my innocence. Well, it just so happens I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not.”

He went to her writing table and found a piece of vellum.

“Marcus, what are you doing?”

“You’re going to write to Major Carruthers. You mentioned a password. Use it. I want him here immediately. Now.”

She wrote exactly what he’d told her to write. He took the letter from her and said, “Don’t leave this room until I come back.”

He didn’t wait for her reply.

Major Carruthers kept his smile firmly in place until His Lordship’s butler had closed and locked the doors behind him. It was between two and three o’clock in the morning, and though there were plenty of hackneys coming and going, conveying members of the fashionable set to
their next party, no one took any notice of him. Wrotham, he decided, should have had the decency to call out his own coach to take him home. Of course, the man was preoccupied, and he’d given him plenty to think about. Even so, this was not the best of hours to be abroad in the city, especially when one left the hallowed precincts of Mayfair.

He swung his cane in an arc, just in case any stray footpad got a nasty idea in his head, and he resigned himself to the long walk home. An hour later, when he entered his own house, he cheered up a little. It was a small cozy house, with small cozy rooms, much friendlier than that big drafty barn Wrotham called home.

There was no candle waiting for him in the vestibule. When he’d gone tearing out of the house, he’d left his wife in bed, and he was too cautious to leave a flame going when there was no one around to guard it. He mounted the stairs in darkness and pushed into the chamber he shared with his wife. A few minutes later, robed in his long white nightshirt and with his nightcap snug on his head, he climbed into bed.

This was where he did his best thinking, and he sat up, propped against the pillows, sorting things through in his mind. “A bloody fiasco from beginning to end if you want my opinion,” he told his wife’s sleeping form.

Whether by instinct or training, even in sleep, she murmured something soothing.

“They were two of my best agents in Spain, and now look at them. They’re worse than useless. One has fallen in love with the prime suspect, and the other is mooning over a whore.” He didn’t name names. Though there was no one there to hear him except his sleeping wife, he was ever a cautious man.

Something of what he’d said must have penetrated his wife’s dreams, for she repeated, quite distinctly. “A whore?”

“Oh, not that he knows I’m on to him. What did he think—that I’d let him gallivant all over town with London’s most notorious courtesan without keeping an eye on him?”

A rote answer.

“Not that I suspected anything. No. I thought we
owed
it to him for all the help his partisans gave us in Spain. The thing is, he’s been, well, strange since the campaign came to an end.” He heaved a long sigh. “And my prime suspect turns out to be a great disappointment to me. If he were behind things, he would have eliminated my agent. Instead, he’s … well, let’s just say he’s taken my agent under his wing.”

An incoherent murmur.

“And to think that my agent was withholding information from me!” He yawned hugely. “At any rate, it’s out of my hands now. The only suspect left is the Rifleman and he’s obviously got clean away. As I told His Lordship, the trail has gone cold, and we can only assume that our villain has accomplished his goal. It’s time to call off my men.

“Now, respecting the murder of Freddie Barnes—”

His wife heaved herself up. “For heaven’s sake, Charles, go to sleep.”

He grinned from ear to ear. “Now that you’re awake, love, how about a little kiss?”

“You wakened me on purpose! What are you doing? Oh, you wicked, wicked man! Oh, Charles!”

When Catherine heard Major Carruthers leave the house, she went to the door and stepped boldly into the corridor. A glance to her left told her that the same footman who had been there when she’d tried to go downstairs shortly after the major arrived was still on duty. He hadn’t let her pass then, and of course he wouldn’t let her pass now.

“Just taking the air,” she told the footman cordially. She seethed with resentment at Marcus’s methods of controlling her, but she wasn’t going to take her anger out on poor William. She just wished Marcus would come upstairs so that she could tell him to his face exactly what she thought of him.

The library door opened and she saw Marcus framed in the doorway. “Giles,” he called out, “bring me a fresh bottle of cognac.” Soon after, a footman came running with a bottle under one arm.

Catherine whisked herself into her room and banged the door shut. She was avid to know what the major and Marcus had talked about, but the cursed man had evidently no intention of sharing that information with her. She’d been right to be afraid of telling him that she was his wife. As plain Miss Catherine Courtnay, she could come and go as she pleased. As the Countess of Wrotham, she was under her husband’s thumb. Major Carruthers was powerless to help her now.

She prowled her room until the prowling got on her nerves. The bed seemed inviting for all of five minutes, then she was up and prowling again. It was impossible to sustain her anger at that pitch, and as it gradually ebbed, she realized that there was more to her anger than Marcus’s high-handed methods of controlling her.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to identify exactly what she was feeling. Disappointment? Despondency? It was closer to despair. How could she ever win his trust and respect after what she’d done? How could she ever win his love? It occurred to her that he had never wanted her to be his wife. All he had ever offered was to take her as his mistress.

She stretched out on the bed and stared sightlessly into space. The truth was she couldn’t imagine what the future would hold for them, but it looked bleak. She shut her eyes and waited for Marcus to come to her.

As soon as she heard the door latch click, she pulled herself to a sitting position. Many hours had passed and she hadn’t slept a wink. The candles were still lit, and she saw that he had discarded his coat and neckcloth, and his shirt was open to the waist. There was a smile on his face, and she knew he had been drinking, but she did not think he was drunk.

A little tremor of fear stirred inside her as he came away from the door. He was a powerful male animal and she couldn’t read his mood. When he leaned over her, she could smell the brandy on his breath, but she had the presence of mind not to show her fear.

He said, “I swear on everything that is holy that I did not ravish your sister.”

She touched a hand to his lean, harsh face. “I believe you.”

“Tell me you don’t love
El Grande”

“I don’t love him, Marcus, not the way you mean, and that’s the truth.”

He leaned closer. “Tell me the passion was real. Give me that much at least.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “It was real. The passion was always there, even from the beginning.”

Those were the last words they spoke. He extinguished all the candles and joined her in the bed. He used her as he had never used her before. There was no gentleness in him, no tenderness. His passion swept everything before it, and there was no restraining him. He was mastering her in some primitive way that found a response in the darkest reaches of her psyche.

When it was over, and she lay shuddering in his arms, he slipped from her body and went instantly to sleep. She lay motionless for a long time after, thinking about the future and how she could bear it.

The following morning, they met in the breakfast room. She’d been downstairs for hours waiting for him to appear. He didn’t look like the man who had taken her to bed last night with such savage passion. He looked his usual urbane self.

He dismissed the servants with a nod, went to the sideboard, and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Major Carruthers had some interesting things to say for himself last night,” he said as he sat down.

She didn’t want to hear about Major Carruthers right now. She wanted him to say something that would make everything right between them, something that would show he felt more for her than physical desire. “What did he say?”

“He said that I’m no longer under suspicion and that he’d reached a dead end.”

Pride came to her rescue and she found herself responding
automatically. “Why are you no longer under suspicion?”

“Because I didn’t kill you when I found you out.”

“Then who does he think killed all those English soldiers?”

“Our unknown Rifleman.”

He glanced at her and looked away. She didn’t look like the woman who had responded to him with such abandon only a few hours ago. Last night, he’d taken her with a merciless passion that shocked even himself. He’d discovered something about himself. He wasn’t the civilized gentleman he’d always assumed he was. He’d spent an hour or two in his library after Major Carruthers had left, reliving all the torment of her betrayal. The brandy hadn’t helped. It had destroyed whatever it was that kept him civilized. That primitive side of him had beat violently through his blood, making him want to be master of his own woman. He would wipe the memory of
El Grande
from her heart and soul. Now, she wouldn’t even look at him. God, what had he done?

“Did you say something, Marcus?”

“I said that Carruthers has a theory. That the reason all those soldiers were murdered was because they would recognize the Rifleman. For some reason that only he knows, he didn’t want that to happen. You and
El Grande
and I have been spared because we never came face-to-face with him, and wouldn’t be able to recognize him. The Rifleman must know this, or he would have eliminated us too. It seems a reasonable theory, don’t you think?”