His Californian Countess (15 page)

“Oh, Jamie, it’s lovely,” Amber gasped as he carried her into the moss-green master suite with its gold-leaf stenciled boarder running near the ceiling just below the mahogany crown molding.

“That was the plan. I’m glad you like it, but the décor suddenly pales now that you’re in it. It is you who are lovely,” he told her as he kicked the door shut behind him.

He set her down and cupped her face, then reverently touched his lips to hers with the barest of pressure. She leaned in and pressed harder against him. Her tongue sneaking out to trace the seam of his lips nearly sent him to his knees. He broke the kiss.

“And once again,” he told her, “I shall thoroughly enjoy playing lady’s maid.” He immediately divested her of her now slightly askew hat. After sending it flying across the room to land on the brocade chaise longue nestled in the bay-window space, he moved on to her hair, pulling pins out and dropping them willy-nilly to the floor.

She sighed. “You’ve become a very messy lady’s maid. I fear your employment is certainly in danger. But at least as a valet, I’ll have little to live up to.” Grinning, she tugged on his cravat, untied it and sent it flying over her shoulder.

Jamie laughed at that and, not to be outdone, divested her of her jacket. Holding it by the collar, he extended his arm and dropped it.

She giggled, then dragged his coat off his shoulders and tossed it to join hers on the floor. Next her fingers went to work on his shirt buttons as he unbuttoned the ones that marched in a neat row down her back.

He noticed with pleasure her delicious little shiver when he reached the last button at the base of her spine and traced the indentation of her lower spine.

She’d finished with his shirt, her breathing quick and shallow, and had his trousers loosed by then. She cupped his swollen shaft in a soft hand. Jamie groaned. She was killing him.

In self-defense, Jamie stepped back and pulled her dress over her head. Then he shrugged out of his shirt and pants, knowing she’d unman him if she touched him again. But her ripe lips and delicate body called to him and he pulled her against him. After that, mouths fused, undergarments fell to the floor, hands—his and hers—touched and aroused with equal power.

Naked and needy, he stripped the covers back and lifted her in his arms before laying her on their high, canopied bed. Looking down at her enraptured expression, he felt triumphant. But he also read a look of love in her eyes and that pierced him to the quick.

He still couldn’t make himself say what was in his heart. His only outlet for what he felt for her was to adore her with his body. Jamie vowed this was one interlude she wouldn’t soon forget.

She held her arms out to him, inviting him to cover her with his body, but another kind of need stopped him in his tracks. “Too fast,” he whispered as he climbed in bed and hovered over her.

She gave him a confused little half frown, half smile. “I thought that was the idea.”

Tenderness swamped his imprisoned heart. “Change of plans,” he told her and eased down next to her. Cupping her breast, he leaned in and took her nipple in his mouth, suckling it until she was panting, begging, then he moved to the other. He felt her frustrated, inflamed moan deep in his belly, but he beat back the need to feel himself slide into her. To feel her envelop him in her warmth.

Instead, he moved his mouth lower, kissing her still flat belly. “Hello in there,” he whispered his lips moving over her abdomen in feather-light caresses.

Then he trailed kisses even lower. On his knees now, he pressed her restless limbs apart. Tracing kisses over her hips, he took small nips that he soothed with his tongue in the next instant. Her gasps, moans and pleas to end it only drove him on.

When he reached the soft skin of her inner thighs, she arched her back and begged him to stop, but he moved ever upward as he pressed her ankles toward her rump so her knees were bent. She called out, “What are you doing?”

He looked up into her hot and troubled gaze. Clearly she was more than confused with this new lesson. And a touch apprehensive, too. But sometimes a bit of nerves helped build anticipation. “I’m giving my lady a morning to remember. It’s fine. It’ll be wonderful. Trust me,” he urged and realized it was now he who’d turned to begging. “Let me show you what you mean to me.”

Then, without waiting for an answer he feared she wasn’t ready to give, he began again on his relentless campaign to claim and worship every last inch of her. Finally when she was near insensible, he parted her nest of golden curls and laved her with his tongue, found her core with his fingers and stroked her until her hips found his rhythm and she shattered beautifully.

Then, after soothing her to near slumber, he began again. Took her there again.

And again.

Finally with a strength born of what her expression said was beyond desperation, she grabbed him and pulled him over her. Tears flowing into her hair, she hooked her legs around him and drew him home. “Jamie,” she sobbed, breathlessly. And the muscles surrounding him began contracting at once. “I love you. I cannot help it. I am sorry. I love you. Please. Please.”

He was no fool. He knew what she needed of him. She needed the words. But he couldn’t make himself say them. He wanted to. His heart ached with the need to say them. He even opened his mouth, but the words had long ago been locked inside him. When he loved openly he lost or was crushed by those who’d muttered those dangerous words. Consumed with so many needs he couldn’t sort them out, Jamie followed her into the storm and his climax took him under with her.

In that transcendent moment, he hated the people who still held the key to his inner self. He hated them with a fierceness that frightened him. She would never know that hers weren’t the only tears soaking into the pillow as they fell into weary sleep.

His last thoughts before exhaustion claimed him were,
Does she understand that if I could say it, I would? Know it, Pixie. Please, know that I don’t know what this is I feel. If it is love it so mixed up with pain that I’ve locked it inside me and lost the key.

A
mber woke and rolled toward the other side of the bed. She reached out a hand. Jamie’s place was cold. She was alone in the room.

The musky scent of their lovemaking brought it all back to her. All the things he’d done. She remembered the words he’d wrung from her with his relentless loving.

But it wasn’t
love
making. Not
lov
ing, either. He’d left love out—banished it—by his silence. She’d begged for those words, but he hadn’t said them.

He’d claimed he’d been trying to show her what she meant to him. Or had it been what he
thought
of her? Well, actions had certainly spoken even louder than his silence. So what had his actions said? That he enjoyed her body. That to him what they did was about pleasure—not love.

Which made her what?

His bought-and-paid-for whore? A brood mare? Both?

Why couldn’t he have lied?

“No. I don’t want a lie,” she said to the empty room. “I wanted him to love me the way I love him. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

After his silence earlier, she’d lost all hope that he would ever love her. After all that time on the ship together, now when the daily chores of life were about to intrude, how much chance was there that he’d even notice her enough for deep feelings to emerge? They should already be there.

Weary even after what felt like hours of sleep, Amber sat up and noticed her clothes had been picked up. They lay neatly arranged on the chaise longue. It must have been Jamie who’d done that. Lily, her new lady’s maid, would have hung them up.

A mantel clock ticking in the quiet room drew Amber’s attention. She squinted in the low light and started when it rang three times. “So I did sleep for hours,” she muttered and swung her feet off the bed and slid to the floor.

The carpet under her feet was thick and plush. Top quality like everything else Jamie bought—everything but his wife.

Trying to shake off the melancholy, and naked as the day she’d been born, she padded to the doors on the other side of the room, peeking in the first. Jamie’s clothes hung to one side of the small dressing room. A club chair and an occasional table sat near a window on the far wall and a small dresser and shaving stand occupied the other. Next to the door was a foldaway bed. Praying that wasn’t for his valet, she backed out quickly to close the door, lest Hadley catch her standing there naked.

The next room was a bit larger and was another dressing room. Hers this time. As with Jamie’s, her clothes hung on a pole along the one wall. No, not hers. The only ones hanging there were Helena’s castoffs.
Apparently, Lily O’Donnell didn’t approve of homemade dresses for the wife of an earl and wealthy businessman.

Her trunk sat just inside the room next to a dresser. There was also a dressing table and low backless chair sitting before it. A pretty beveled glass window allowed the late afternoon sun in and filled the room with rainbows.

She walked to the trunk and found her dressing gown and her other things. The robe had been part of her trousseau, made for her by Joseph’s mother. She put it on and wrapped her arms around her middle. The soft fabric soothed her a little bit, though it left her hungering for the arms of someone who loved her.

She saw herself in a full-length cheval mirror, remembering the first time she’d seen the wrapper. The very next Saturday she’d been going to marry the man she’d loved. But by Wednesday he’d been clinging to life, when death would have been a mercy, just so he could put voice to his love for her one last time.

She sank onto the dressing-table bench and her tears fell like rain. She could no longer see Joseph’s face in her mind. Love had a new face. A new name. Several names. Jamie Reynolds. Earl of Adair. Husband. Father of her unborn child.

She could no longer hear Joseph’s voice, either, but
it
had been replaced by heartbreaking silence. Jamie was a man who couldn’t love her.

Because he loved another woman.

In the dressing-table mirror, she caught the reflection of Helena’s clothing hanging along the opposite wall. She wanted to scream. Defiantly she dried her tears on her hem and went back to the trunk. She pulled out her
sprigged muslin and hung it up. Then she went into the next room, a modern bathroom, and ran a warm bath.

She added bath salts, determined to wash Jamie’s scent away. After pinning her hair up, she soaked and scrubbed then dried off and dressed. In
her
dress. The one she’d made with Joseph in mind. Joseph, the man who’d loved her and had endured the torture of being carried, crushed from the mine, so he could tell her one more time before he’d let death take him.

Then she went to explore her new home. She had always made the best of any situation and she wouldn’t stop now. Jamie didn’t treat her poorly. His lack of feeling for her wouldn’t hurt so much if he did. He was her baby’s father and she did love him. She would have to find a way to live with the circumstances life had thrown in her way. But it wouldn’t be easy.

She went out the back door of the dressing room and found a narrow hall that ran along the side wall of the house. It serviced the dressing rooms and bath. The hall connected to a branching set of back stairs.

The other branch of those stairs led to three bedrooms. Meara and Mimm occupied two of them and the third, which looked like a combination classroom and playroom. It could be used for the baby if Jamie decided to stay in San Francisco for a while. Along the other side of the building was a bedroom and bath to care for the needs of the inhabitants of the four minor bedrooms. The bedroom was decorated as a guest room.

It wasn’t a large house by some standards. Certainly not if compared to the places where she’d stayed in the summers of her college years. But it was comfortable, very pretty and, because it was Jamie’s, built of the finest materials.

She went down the back stairs to the kitchen. Attached to kitchen was a cozy breakfast room. Then she moved into an elegant dining room with thick moldings, dark-paneled wainscoting, silk wall coverings above an intricately carved chair rail. A gleaming Chippendale table and chairs sat in the center of the room with a shining crystal chandelier hanging over it. The table was already set for dinner with some of the same china displayed in the Chippendale breakfront. A server sat in a bay window with two crystal lamps on its marble surface. The afternoon sun streaming in caught in the crystal prisms and bounced light around the room.

She heard Jamie talking somewhere down a short hall off the dining room. Hurt though she was, she went toward his voice, drawn to him as always. He couldn’t help how he felt or didn’t feel, after all. And she had to make the best of her situation for their child’s sake. She hoped his smile would help cheer her.

Then his words became clear and her heart nearly seized in her chest.

“You’re reasonably sure Miss Conwell headed west, yet you say your agent could track her only as far as the depot in St. Louis? Then why do you believe she stayed at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio?”

He was looking for Helena. Again. Still. She didn’t understand what he hoped to gain, but he couldn’t have hurt her more had he tried. He’d fathered her child because he’d been so determined to make their marriage work. Yet he didn’t love her and he’d renewed his search for the woman he did love. He must have renewed the search while she napped on Monday.

At practically the first moment available to him.

Again his actions in their bed that morning returned
to haunt her. What had he meant? Oh, yes. She’d forgotten. She was his brood mare to get an heir on and only a bit better than a whore he used to slake his lust.

“We had looked for her for another client, but he canceled our contract. We’d been using a picture of her in our files,” the man with Jamie said. “Using it, we definitely tracked her to St. Louis, and several people place her arriving in San Antonio.”

“But you’ve lost her there.”

Almost like a moth drawn to the flame that would destroy it, Amber moved into the open doorway. Jamie sat behind a desk facing the door, and the man, his back to her, sat facing Jamie.

“Our agent is once again on the trail of a young woman he thinks—”

Jamie’s gaze collided with hers and he put his hand up, stopping the man midsentence. Guilt swamped Jamie’s expression as he stood. The man looked over his shoulder, then stood, as well.

Amber forced her posture straight and as regal as she could make it while her patched-together heart was busy breaking into a million pieces. She walked forward. “Have a seat, gentlemen,” she said, her voice not as steady as she’d have liked it.

They both sat rather uneasily.

“Please, go ahead,” she told the short balding man. “Helena is a particular friend of mine. We are so alike we are practically interchangeable. Isn’t that right, my lord? Oh, pardon my poor manners. I am the earl’s wife.” The man’s surprise showed this was new information for him. “Didn’t you know he had one? I might be inconvenient, but he’s apparently stuck with me. When was it you thought you would know more of dear Helena?”

The man cut a glance at Jamie, who closed his eyes and nodded. The man went on. “We can find no record of her actually staying at the Menger, but our agent in San Antonio feels sure she stayed there because someone recognized the woman as a person she directed there. Our agent in San Antonio is one of Pinkerton’s best. He’ll run her to ground.”

Amber forced herself to smile. She’d reached California so her promise to act as a decoy was actually finished. And he had implied that Franklin Gowery had cut off his search. Abby had wired her first thing that morning with her congratulations and with the news that Brendan and Helena were safe.

“Perhaps a little more information might help your search,” she said. “I assume you’re still looking for Helena Conwell. Perhaps if you looked for her under another name.”

The man gave her a slightly nervous glance, but his condescension showed through. “Yes, we do think she’s using aliases, ma’am. But that makes it harder, you see, because she’d change it often.”

“No, it is you who doesn’t see,” she said, anger entering her voice. And she let it. She let it wash over her. “Neither does my husband. You should be trying to find Helena
Kane.
Or Mr. and Mrs.
Brendan
Kane. They were married the night they left Wheatonburg.”

She turned to Jamie then and took in his startled expression. “You see,
darling,
Helena’s been married to the man she loves since February. I got a wire from Abby Wheaton this morning. Abby’s husband, Joshua, has managed to clear Brendan’s name in spite of her guardian’s lies. So you see, there’s nothing you or Franklin Gowery can do about any of it. She’s beyond
your reach. Unfortunately, I am not. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I find I need some air.”

She turned and fled through the house, heading to the back garden. Tears blinding her, she stumbled on the steps, but Jamie had followed and caught her. He helped right her balance. She grabbed onto the railing and yanked her arm from his grasp. She turned at the foot of the steps and backed away as she looked up at him. He stood as if frozen on the steps.

“Leave. Me. Alone,” she screamed. “Haven’t you hurt me enough for one day?” He looked as if she’d stabbed him, but he’d already cut her heart out so why should she care?

Still she found she couldn’t look at that hurt in his eyes so she turned away. She saw a gazebo far off at the back of the yard and ran there.

So angry. So hurt. She found she couldn’t cry. Not noisily. Not with the rage she felt. Silent tears fell as she collapsed onto the seat in a daze.

There she sat with what she’d once have thought was the perfect life. A little girl to mother and help raise and she already seemed to love her just for being. Her own child was on the way. She had a handsome, wealthy husband whom she adored. Yet she was miserable—miserable because he loved some other woman.

“Pixie,” Jamie called softly, stepping into the gazebo. He slid on to the bench beside her. “Please calm yourself. You’re hysterical. This can’t be good for you or the baby. Suppose you’d fallen?”

“Then maybe you’d be rid of your inconvenient wife. I warn you, though, even if you were free of marriage to me, I know Brendan Kane well enough to know he won’t easily give up what’s his. If at all.”

“I don’t want to be free. And I am
not
in love with Helena. I don’t want her. Only you.”

“Then why are you so
obsessed
with her?” she shouted.

Jamie winced, then pursed his lips. “I’m not obsessed,” he swore. His jaw flexed as if he were gritting his teeth. “When I met Helena I thought she was lovely, I won’t deny it. And I was interested in her, but she had the wrong idea about why. She thought I was interested only in her money. But I didn’t know that until after both of you had left Wheatonburg.

“I told you I was with her father when he was killed. And I told you I came to fear the bullet that killed him was meant for me. I promised him I’d make sure she was safe. I owed it to him, don’t you think?

“When next I saw Helena it was nearly a year later. She’d already met Kane. Gowery contacted me to see if I was still interested in her. He treated her as if she were on an auction block. I was trying to save her, but she didn’t understand that. To get rid of me, she told me she was damaged goods. That she’d slept with Kane and that he’d rejected her. I swear there was no love in her voice, only bitterness. I was incensed for her sake and I told her guardian what he’d done to her. That is how he rooked me into getting involved in the Pinkerton investigation. He said he was convinced Kane had killed Harry Conwell. But Kane wasn’t the man I saw that day. I needed the truth for my own peace of mind. And Helena was in Wheatonburg, so I thought I could check to see if she was all right.

“Everything awful that happened to her was because of me. If she is with Brendan Kane and you think he can be trusted, I’ll call off the search. That is it. That is all there is to it. I swear.”