Lord of Regrets (9 page)

“I’m certain the local magistrate will agree with me. Lord Parrington has influence, does he not?” Marcus hated himself, but he was desperate. Had he not said just hours earlier that he would not force her? What was this, if not force? “Leona comes with me. I would prefer that you do as well. But that is your choice.”

“That is no choice,” Natasha cried.

He steeled his heart against her despairing tone, against the exhaustion and fear he heard. She would remember soon enough, or she would learn, that their solace could be found in each other’s arms. There was no need for this fighting.

“Come, let me take you home. We will discuss this in the morning.”

“No,” Natasha said, but her refusal was pointless. Methodically, he went about negating her response. He took her valise and attached it to the saddle.

Then Marcus pulled Leona from her grasp, aching as he heard Natasha choke back a sob. He mounted, settled Leona in front of him, and held out his hand to Natasha. Reluctantly, she took it, and he swung her up behind him.

“I hate you,” she whispered, and he understood. This was not the way he had wished it to be, but he would do what he must.

She tentatively held on to his waist, more firmly as the horse began to move, and the touch of her arms, of her hands clutching him, was the most welcome embrace in the world. With his daughter settled before him, and his future wife behind, Marcus walked the horse back to her house, careful to pick the most cautious route.

For the first time that evening, his tension dissipated. Despite the wrongness of his actions, the three of them together was right.

The journey back to Natasha’s house took little time for she had traveled scarcely six miles. It was still night when Natasha firmly shut her bedroom door in his face.

Marcus settled himself on the floor in the hallway, in front of Natasha’s door, behind which both she and Leona slept. He did not believe she’d try to leave again this night, but there was a point to be made.

In the morning, when Mary arrived, the maid stared at him in appalled fascination. He crawled to his feet, wincing at the pain of his stiff limbs. He put himself in some semblance of order and left the house, aching but satisfied. At the sight of his man, he stopped and chided him for having let Natasha flee, then set him to a new position from which the servant could see both front and back of the cottage.

Then, with clear intention, Marcus returned to the village. He had work to do this day and not a moment to waste.

…

The day passed slowly, painfully. Leona slept late, exhausted by the night’s adventures. But even after her daughter disappeared beyond the door of the bedroom, Natasha refused to leave her bed. Later, she could hear the girl talking to Mary; Natasha marked the day by the sounds of their activity around the house.

When the smell of fresh-baked bread rose to her room, she staggered to the washbasin. The water was not fresh, but it was cool on her face as she scrubbed and brushed away the grime of the previous night’s journey. Refreshed, she stared at the door. The different permutations of the day lay out before her. She could descend as she was, eat, then take a bath, or perhaps in the other order, a bath and then a meal. The thought of making a decision exhausted her and she climbed back into bed, drawing the covers up to her cheek.

Leona entered a while later, and Natasha waved her away, keeping her eyes shut until she heard the solid
thunk
of the door closing. Even the guilt that stung at her breast was not enough to rouse her from the bed.

When Marcus returned late in the afternoon, Natasha was still beneath the sheets. She wondered at Mary having let him in, but it hardly mattered anymore. She peered at him from over the veil of the coverlet, aware that she was a mess, her hair disordered, circles under her eyes.

The expression on his face was almost pitying, and it angered her.

“Have you taken ill?”

She was sick with worry, anger, despair, but she couldn’t say that. Nor would he care if she did.

“What do you want?” she whispered, with no real strength behind her words, just the age-old weariness of one who was trapped, who could no longer run, who was facing certain death and knew that.

“If you wish to be with your daughter, you will marry me,” he said bluntly.

He would do it, too. He would tear her daughter from her, just as he had once threatened to kill the innocent. As he had once endangered Natasha’s own life with the threat of dangerous surgery.

And she was doing nothing about it. She was letting him win.

Sick at the thought of herself lying there while her freedom disappeared, she pushed herself up to sit. She wiped her hair away from her eyes. The press of her palm against her forehead made her feel as though she were Leona, as though she were a little girl.

“You’ll lose your inheritance,” she managed to say. For this inheritance, he had once been willing to murder their baby.

“Only the funds. I’ve been working to finance my independence. I don’t need my grandfather’s money.” He looked darkly handsome, boyish and pleading, despite blackmailing her, manipulating her to his bidding.

She laughed bitterly. “Of course you don’t.
Now
.”

“Yes,” he said.

It would always be between them, the awful choice he had made. He was forcing them into a lifetime of misery. She wanted to lie back down, to hide beneath the heavy winter linens, but there had to be some way to reason with him. Some way out.

“And what of my home here? What of Leona? Mr. Duncan has offered to educate her, as fully as any boy.” But even as she spoke, the words rang hollow. There was no future for her in Little Parrington, and now Mr. Duncan––

“She’ll have a governess, tutors.”

Tasha closed her eyes. “She’ll still be a bastard.”

“I know.” His voice broke on the words.

Of course he knew. He seemed sorry as well. Had even apologized. But he would never live the shame as she and Leona would. Only days ago, she had almost welcomed his renewed attentions. The past had begun to seem so far away, and there he was before her, vibrantly alive, sliding himself into her life. Two days ago, the choice would have been hers.

That distinction mattered so much.

Yet what alternative did she have? Perhaps there would be a quiet life somewhere, at his country estate–– She stopped, the thought of the future too much.

“Post the banns then,” she said finally, empty.

“No need. I’ve been to see the Bishop of Norwich. He understood my haste.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

“We’ll marry here in the morning, if Mr. Duncan will be so kind.”

“Mr. Duncan…I really don’t think he…”

“He will,” Marcus stated, in that same tone of finality. “And then we will go to London. I have business there I left unfinished. Certainly your parents will be glad to learn you still live.”

He was taking over her life so calmly, so conclusively. Making decisions for her that he had no right to make. But he would have that right if she married him. Which she would. Escape was no longer possible.

“Would you leave, please?” she asked, rage and despair equally valiant in her heart. “I need to think.”

He was silent a moment, and the air pressed densely between them. She thought he would step forward, force his presence upon her longer. Finally he spoke. “As you wish.”

She let out her held breath, listened to the scrape of his boots against the floor. He stopped at the threshold and turned back to her. She met his gaze despite herself.

“You are done running, Natasha.” She heard the words with a sinking acceptance. And with the tiniest, most insignificant, irritating measure of relief.

Chapter Twelve

Lady Alinora’s sitting room looked like an exotic turquoise jewel in an already opulent home. Natasha had never been in such luxurious surroundings, and she had certainly never expected to be here, a maid attending to her hair and a borrowed fringed shawl of fine cashmere resting on the bed, awaiting her use.

Marcus’s carriage had conveyed her early in the day to the manor house, and the crowd of six seemed like hundreds to her. There was Lord Parrington, who watched the affair with amused detachment. Behind him Mr. Duncan mumbled a greeting, his face florid with suppressed anger. Then Marcus stepped forward, impassive and dark, claiming her with his hand and his gaze in the instant before he introduced her to Lady Alinora. With her arm soaking up Marcus’s heat, it took an effort to return the greeting.

Then Lady Alinora whisked her away, out of the drawing room and into the lady’s private chambers. Natasha was grateful to her, most of all for giving her a chance to gather her thoughts and breathe before committing herself into Marcus’s care forever.

Marcus’s care. A contradiction in terms, that.

“Such an event,” Alinora said cheerily, staring at Natasha’s reflection in the glass, just as Natasha was. It had been five years since anyone other than she had dressed her hair, and the effect was…captivating. Where Natasha twisted her hair up each day in the most efficient configuration possible, the maid teased out strands this way and that. Now, the arches of her cheekbones were highlighted, the line of her jaw made more elegant, small details that made Natasha remember she was a woman and not simply a mother.

In those long-ago days when she would sneak out of her parents’ home to meet Marcus, she had taken pride in her appearance. Everything had been for him. About him. She had planned her days longing for his next touch. Had begged off social calls to simply spend an afternoon in hidden alcoves along the Serpentine, lazily watching clouds float by, Marcus’s arm curling her into where she fit perfectly against his body. And she had seen herself through his eyes. The features she had thought heavy, he called striking. The eyes she thought too widely spaced, he claimed stunned him into speechlessness. A silence he would then fill with kisses.

“You really are too kind,” she said yet again, looking up to meet Lady Alinora’s fascinated gaze. Her sudden pleasure faded. This was what a lady should look like, eyebrows black and winged like night. Face pale and free of blemish. Lovely and delicate.

“Would you mind terribly if I asked––” Lady Alinora paused, her white, little teeth worrying her bottom lip for a moment.

Natasha tilted her head to the side, curious but apprehensive.

“Well, what was it like? Being a…well, being in Lord Templeton’s employ, in many men’s employ…”

Heat flooded Natasha’s body, and for a moment she could not move a single finger or eyelash to respond. She had the clear understanding, in that silence of rushing blood, that the question Alinora voiced would be a frequent echo.

“It was only Lord Templeton.” No quaver laced Natasha’s voice. Her gaze flitted quickly away, back to her own reflection in the mirror. She had no one to please. This coerced wedding was a farce.

…

Marcus waited nervously in Parrington’s drawing room. A large, grand room as opulent as the rest of the house, it felt small and cramped with the assemblage of people. Natasha was upstairs, Lady Alinora having decreed that a marriage could not take place without some attempt at beauty. Parrington waited, stiff and formal, as if the events of the day were yet another battle. There might have been a different way to arrange this match, to not have it conducted by a man who smoldered with an anger he couldn’t quite conceal, and thus have the wedding performed under that shadow. Marcus’s fear that Natasha might still run, that introducing new strangers to the situation would jeopardize it all, had focused his plan. And so there they all were at Lord Parrington’s.

Looking very much like a miniature adult, Leona was clothed in what was likely her best dress. She stood close to the rector, as if the anger seeping from Mr. Duncan didn’t exist at all. As if Marcus were the dangerous one. From that safe distance of some dozen feet, she peered at him, and the wrongness of it twisted in his gut. But he understood. He did not yet feel like a father, so why would she see him as a father?

His daughter
. A fierce protectiveness gripped Marcus’s gut. He was marrying her mother, but this little girl would be illegitimate, even with her future, full-blooded siblings perfectly legitimate.

A flash of movement caught his peripheral vision and ripped him from his morose thoughts. He turned to the doorway.

His heart beat rapidly, even as his breath was trapped somewhere in his throat. Natasha––in the dark of the night, in the first light of morning, in the kitchen washing dishes, frozen by snow––was beautiful.

Her arm linked with that of the more petite Lady Alinora, she stood on the threshold of the drawing room, watching him watch her. Their linked gazes were heavy with awareness. They knew each other––they had always known each other. He had always loved her.

He blinked, suddenly aware that he had stepped forward and was halfway to her side, his arm outstretched. She cast her gaze down, her lashes hiding her eyes. What he could see of her expression was cold, belying everything he had known a moment before. Yet when he reached her, she hesitated only an instant before taking his arm.

“Your lady is ravishing,” Lady Alinora said.

“That she is,” he agreed.

With Natasha’s hand scorching his forearm, he realized the room had fallen into awkward silence. Leona watched them, eyes wide, searching looking for a signal that she must have found because she ran forward as if she weren’t in a room of adults, as if this weren’t the home of Lord Parrington, and she buried her face into her mother’s skirts. Natasha let go of his arm to embrace their child and he felt bereft. Lost.

“Perhaps we should begin,” Parrington said, calmly taking charge, and Marcus was grateful for the intervention. “Who shall give Mrs. Prothe away?”

“Miss Polinoff,” Natasha corrected, her admission sending another fierce surge of satisfaction through him. “And I have no one to do so.”

“Then might I have the honor?” Parrington asked, as if he had been prepared to step in with this offer.

“Thank you, Lord Parrington.” Marcus felt her shiver beside him. She pulled her shawl tighter around her with her. “The honor, sir, is mine.”

The weighty silence as they all moved into position was punctuated by the too-jovial chattering of Lady Alinora, who seemed to feel the need to pretend this day was in any way usual. It wasn’t. What Marcus wanted more than anything was to take his family home. To London. Eventually, to Woodbridge, to his home.

Duncan fidgeted with his bible, clearly struggling to keep his reverend-like mien, but he wouldn’t meet Marcus’s eyes. Natasha, too, thrummed with a simmering anxiety, and Marcus tempered his impatience. Only Parrington maintained his usual calm.

“Are you certain this is what you want?” Duncan asked.

“It’s our wedding day, Reverend,” Marcus said sharply, cutting off Tasha’s answer. “Please keep your conversation to the service.”

“It is what I must do,” Natasha said. Marcus ignored the constriction of his heart, the heat that rushed through him. He had chosen his course of action. He could not live without her, would not live without his child, and Natasha would not hate him forever. Surely.

Duncan began the service. Marcus said his words, his vows of love and fidelity. But Natasha did not look at him once as she flatly said her own. How different this scene would have been if he hadn’t driven her away five years ago.

Finally, she was his wife, and Parrington was offering him congratulations as if he hadn’t heard the whole, as if he didn’t suspect that Marcus had blackmailed Natasha into marrying him.

He turned from his host to find Leona hanging back, clutching the hand of Natasha’s maid.

His daughter
.

He knelt down on one knee and opened up his arms.

“Come give your papa a kiss?”

The girl glanced at her mother, but Natasha did not acknowledge the questioning look. After a moment, Leona dashed to Marcus and threw herself into his embrace. She was stiff and trembling, so he patted her back, smoothed down her hair.

With his daughter held tightly in his arms, Marcus stood. She hid her face in his shoulder as if pretending she were invisible.

Lord Parrington had offered them a wedding breakfast, but Marcus had refused, wanting only to leave this corner of Norfolk.

“My lady,” he said, catching Natasha’s attention. “Shall we be off?” He watched Natasha eye their daughter, purse her lips, and hold back whatever caustic thing she wished to say.

She nodded.

He smiled grimly. And so married life began.