Moonlight on My Mind (29 page)

Chapter 32

P
atrick pushed his way up the long, winding staircase and pointed his boots toward his bedroom door. Far from steadying his nerves, the brandy had obliterated his resolve to approach this conundrum in a civilized, cerebral fashion.

The denial that had sent him searching for a bottle had been displaced by a howling sort of anger since his conversation with MacKenzie. He was livid with his friend, for machinating such a damnably brilliant fix. He was angry with his wife, for wanting it.

But most of all, he was furious with himself, for lying to Julianne in the first place.

The weather, it seemed, had spent itself out, and through the windows at the far end of the hallway he could see the beginning of what promised to be a significant sunset. But the lingering storm still seemed to hang in a bit of indecision, with gray-tinged clouds boiling low on the horizon. Long fingers of amber light splashed across the hall’s carpet runner and played about his feet, and he knew, like those shadows, he needed to make a decision which way things would go. He wanted Julianne to be happy. He had not lied to MacKenzie about that.

But he was beginning to think that he had lied to himself. Because while it might be selfish, he wanted Julianne to be happy with
him
.

He opened the door to his room, and the belligerent bump of his pulse shifted toward confusion. Because instead of packing her things in a mad dash for London, as he had half feared she would be doing, Julianne was standing over a steaming bath.

She looked up as he stepped inside, and the light from the fireplace danced across her face. She had changed into a nearly translucent wrapper, and it swung like a gossamer pendulum about her body. The room was bathed in heat, thanks to the fire that had been laid. She’d let her hair down, and it streamed down her back like the flames in the grate, halos of red and amber and always, always, those endless curls he wanted to wrap up in his fist.

“You have returned.” Her voice was steady, giving no hint as to her state of mind.

He closed the door as best he could, given that he had so recently smashed through the latch in his quest to reach her side. “I am sorry. I should have knocked.” He could think of no excuse for his poor manners, beyond the fact that his thoughts had been fixed on the dilemma of his wife’s future happiness, rather than his wife’s breasts.

Though they were certainly on his wife’s breasts
now
.

He’d come to talk, to dissect their options. To determine if even a spark of the passion she had shown him that night in the folly might still be glowing beneath her skin, waiting to be kindled back to life. But as she straightened over the bath, the hopeful evening light danced about the thin fabric and tripped across the outline of the lithe body against which it floated. And that frantic, gasping glimpse told him—beyond any shadow of a doubt—she was wearing nothing beneath that wrapper.

Bloody hell.
This was no way to end a marriage.

The physical demands of his body were already colluding against the analytical arguments he needed to make. “I have interrupted your bath,” he said, rather stupidly. “I can return when you are . . . er . . . presentable.”

“ ’Tis your bedroom, Patrick,” she said, and her lips lifted in a manner that skirted into dangerous territory. “You have no need to knock, or to leave. And this is not
my
bath. I ordered it for you.”

Her smile became as translucent as her wrapper as she stepped toward him. The diaphanous white hem billowed out around her ankles, and his eyes felt burned by the glimpses of curves beneath it. She stepped closer still, until she was upon him and his nostrils were filled with her feminine, cinnamon scent. “We must decide what our future holds. You are covered in mud, and look as though you haven’t bathed since your arrest. I would have the conversation with a cleaner version of my husband.”

He swallowed. “Even if the conversation is about whether I will no longer
be
your husband?”

She held out her hand. He watched it come, transfixed by the sight of Julianne reaching for him. Patrick struggled to comprehend the incongruity of what she seemed to be offering. Not an hour ago, she had flinched from the merest brush of his fingers, but this seemed a seduction of the highest order. Was this yet another demonstration of her superb dramatic skills?

Or something else entirely?

Her fingers uncurled slowly and his breath lodged deep in his throat. In her palm lay nothing more seductive than a bloody cake of soap.

“Do you really think a bath is a higher priority than this discussion?” he asked.

“
Your
bath is,” she told him, her lips turned down.

He reached out his hand and took it. The soap warmed in his hands, releasing its scent. It smelled . . . well, “heavenly” was the word that came to mind. He could see now why she always smelled like cinnamon. She was a cosseted, perfumed, damnably inconvenient intrusion into his easy, ordered, unhygienic life.

And he was convinced of the need to keep her there.

He sat on the edge of the tub and began to pull off his boots. At the moment, he was anxious to plunge into the arguments of keeping their marriage intact, not plunge into a bath. But if dislodging the worst of his dirt would help her sit quietly through this coming conversation, he supposed he ought to delay the inevitable another five minutes, even though every instinct in his body told him that this reckoning needed to be taken by the throat.

As he began to work on the buttons of his shirt, the scrape of heavy furniture across the floor caught his attention. He turned to see Julianne shoving his reading chair in front of the door. “What are you doing?” he asked, perplexed.

“Ensuring we will not be interrupted. You’ve destroyed the latch, after all.”

Patrick shouldered out of his shirt. There was that damned “we” again. Maddening, perplexing woman, when she had just demanded her freedom.

How was he going to do this? If she was going to strip him down to his most vulnerable and settle in to watch, she was going to see that he was fast becoming interested in doing things more intimate than talking.

She glided toward him, her hand held out for his shirt. “I’ll take that now, thank you.”

Instead of dropping it on the floor, as he would usually do, he placed it hesitantly in her open palm. Incredibly—
inconceivably
—she accepted the filthy thing, folded it carefully, and laid it on top of the bureau. “Now the trousers,” she said, then treated them to the same exacting process.

“Why take the time to fold clothes that I probably ought to burn?” he protested.

“Because it is the natural order of things. And it hurts my eyes to see them tossed about on the floor.” She beckoned with her fingers. It was to be smallclothes next, then.

Oh bloody, bloody hell.

“If we are discussing natural order, you should know that a gentleman usually shaves before his bath,” he told her, turning over his smallclothes and the last shreds of his dignity. Any hope of wrangling his unruly body into something approaching respectable was lost. He’d been at attention from the moment he’d stepped into the room, and that interest had no hope of flagging now that at least one of them was naked.

“I thought it was well established sometime ago that you were not a gentleman.” She raised a brow. “Should I shave you then?”

He shook his head. Julianne and sharp objects and his neck were a combination of events best avoided in the heat of an argument. “If you think I am handing you a razor, given the conversation we are about to have, you are mistaken,
wife
.”

If she was startled to hear his proprietary claim, she hid the emotion well. Her lips pursed, and he felt the scrape of her eyes against his jaw as acutely as any straight razor. “That is just as well, because I find I rather like this rakish, unshaved look.”

And then her gaze arced downward, sliding along his body to pool somewhere far too low for comfort. “And the rest of it as well.”

“J
ulianne.” The sound of his voice echoed like the snap of a whip, jerking her gaze in a more northerly direction.

Her cheeks flamed warm against his stern, knowing gaze. Did he know what the sight of his body did to her? Did he understand that despite her offer to end this marriage, to give him his happiness, the loss of him—if it came down to that—would cripple her?

“Yes?” she answered hoarsely.

“What game do you play here?”

Julianne swallowed. “I wish to test a theory.”

He swore, something filthy and flush-inducing. “You’ve said you wish to end our marriage, and yet you are sending rather mixed messages in that regard. For God’s sake, have a bit of mercy here, wife.”

Julianne moistened her lips, which felt as dry as glass paper. He had called her “wife” again. And he had not yet said
he
wished to end the marriage. “If you would think back to our discussion before you stormed out, I did not say I wished to procure an annulment. I said we ought to discuss the possibility.” She paused, her heart in her throat. “Have you? Given it any thought, I mean?”

He jerked away from her with a snarl of frustration. She had a meager, heart-stuttering glimpse of the bare arse she had once ogled from Summersby’s foyer, and then he was lowering his tall frame into the bath. Water sloshed heavily at the sides as he worked the soap into a frenzied lather. “MacKenzie says there may be a way.” He scrubbed up one arm, and then down another. “Your age is misrepresented on the wedding documents.”

She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Apparently you are forty. Or else, pretending to be.”

“But . . . that is ridiculous. I do not even reach my majority until next month.”

“You signed a document stating otherwise. MacKenzie has suggested it could be used to argue a claim of fraud.” He lifted his soapy hands to his head and scrubbed his hair for a long moment. “Apparently, I must pretend I’ve a taste for older women. You are to be a disappointment to me.” His lips firmed. “Or something of that ilk.”

Julianne felt as though she were being pushed under the very tub in which he sat. As he submerged his head to rinse the soap from his hair, her eyes fixed on the sloshing, brown water. She had hoped—prayed, actually—that Mr. MacKenzie would tell Patrick the contract was unbreakable. That they were well and truly sewn into this marriage, despite her offer to free him. She had hoped there would be nothing for it but to regroup, accept their situation, and fall back into each other’s arms.

But apparently, this marriage could be dissolved as easily as the blasted soap.

He came up sputtering, groping a hand for a towel. She snatched it up and stepped forward, dangling it in front of him. “And are you really willing to lie about this?” she demanded. “You knew exactly how old I was when we married. There was no fraud involved in the negotiation of that contract. And you seemed remarkably
pleased
with me that night in the folly.”

He reached for the towel, but she jerked it higher, angry now. How
dare
he contemplate an annulment that required her to lie to procure it for him?

How dare he contemplate a blasted annulment at all?

“It is the only way.” His brown-eyed gaze shifted from the towel to her face. “And yes,” he told her. “I am willing to lie for you.”

“What do you mean, lie
for
me? I am not the one about to destroy this marriage!”

A very clean hand snaked out of that very filthy water. And then she was seized in his grasp and tipping into the tub, towel and all.

“Aren’t you?” he all but growled as he hauled her against his damp chest. The shock of the water was nothing compared to the shock of his skin, humming through the meager layer of wet muslin. “I am not the one who broached this subject.”

“You spoke of an annulment with MacKenzie before I ever mentioned it,” she protested, her hands pushing ineffectively against the wall of his chest.

His hands came up to cup her face, holding her still to his gaze. The horror of the used bathwater fell away to the thrill of his touch. “That conversation happened before we married, before I even knew you. I married you with the understanding it could not be undone.”

“You married me for revenge—”

His fingers gripped tighter. “What kind of lunacy is that? I’ve
never
wished to hurt you, not even in the worst of it. Do not pretend to me an annulment is logical, or necessary to right a great wrong. You married me knowing I didn’t love you—I never pretended otherwise. But how can you leave me, knowing I love you now?”

His words swam upstream in her brain, seeking a coherence that continued to outwit her. “You . . .
love
me?” she asked.

“Yes.” His eyes darkened. “Christ. You really can’t see a thing in front of your face.”

And then his lips slanted over hers, warm and brandy-touched and violently
right
.

She sank into him. Shimmered there, floating, until the press of his mouth was no longer enough. He loved her. Merciful heavens, how had it come to this? She’d imagined only convincing him to keep her. This was a gift beyond hope.

She lifted her hands into his damp hair and yanked him closer into her. They clashed there, wet heat and open mouths and pounding hearts. “I love you as well,” she gasped against his mouth. She sucked in a breath, unable and unwilling to take it back. “But I thought . . . I thought you would no longer want me, now that you had been freed of the murder charge.”

“Bloody hell, Julianne, I want you in my sleep. You are the only thing that kept me sane over the last week, during those long, dark days in gaol. When I thought you were in danger, I was tossed back to hell, staring down the barrel of a rifle with no future in sight.” He tipped his wet head against hers, breathing hard. “And then, just as I was clawing my way out, just when I could see the end of this nightmare, you told me you wanted to live apart. But I can’t face it. You belong here, with me.”