No Other Love (24 page)

“I want to talk to you,” he said in a low voice, his breath brushing her hair.

Nicola shivered. “I—I see no reason to. It is clear what you think of me. What else is there to say?”

She managed to make herself look up into his face. He was only inches from her. His eyes were the same: bright and dark and alive with wit.
How could she not have recognized them?
She knew with a horrible certainty that if he kissed her, her knees would buckle.

“We cannot escape what is between us that easily,” he replied.

“There is nothing between us but pain. And I have no need to feel any more of that. I would like to leave here as soon as possible.”

Nicola moved around him and walked out the door. She hoped he would never know how much it had cost her to do so.

J
ACK WATCHED
N
ICOLA WALK AWAY
,
something hard and heavy forming in the area of his chest. He had been in a turmoil all day. He kept seeing Nicola’s face when he took off his mask, the utter and complete shock that had pervaded her features. He had known she would be startled, but he had not expected her to faint. Then there had been the flash of joy when she opened her eyes and saw him. He remembered the way she had cried out his name and thrown her arms around him, kissing him ecstatically. He thought of the things she had said, the questions she had asked, her initial cry that he was alive.
How could any of that have been feigned?

But if she was not pretending her reaction, that meant that everything he had believed for the past ten years had been wrong. And that was equally impossible. Jack thought about the night when Richard and his men burst into the farmer’s house and dragged him out of bed. He had been asleep, content despite his bruises from being dragged along the stony River Lyd, because he knew that soon Nicola would come to him and they would leave for a new life together.

Then Richard had stormed in, and all his rosy dreams had come crashing down. Richard had looked at him, his face stamped with contempt. “What? Surprised to see me? Who were you expecting? Miss Falcourt, perhaps?” His laugh was scornful. “Did you really think that she would marry you, you worm? It’s all very well to dally with a peasant, but marriage? I can see her now, living in a hovel, a babe on one hip and another in her belly, sweating over a mess of gruel. You are a fool.”

“What are you doing here?” Jack had gasped out, dazed and struggling to sit up from where they had thrown him on the ground. “How did you know—”

“Trifle slow, aren’t you? Good gad, what did Nicola see in you? How do you
think
I knew? Nicola told me. She showed me your pathetic little letter, driveling on about marrying and going to live in blissful poverty. Thank God she has more sense than you. She knows that she will marry a peer, an equal. It is the life she knows, the life she expects to lead. She would never throw herself away on the likes of you. Of course, when she read your letter, she could see that getting rid of you would be a problem, so she came to me, asking me to send you away. Which is precisely what I intend to do, as I plan to be the peer she marries.”

Jack remembered the slashing pain that had pierced him at the Earl’s words, worse than any physical pain that Richard’s men had inflicted on him as they tied him and gagged him and tossed him callously in the back of a wagon. At first he had struggled against the truth, refusing to acknowledge that Nicola could have betrayed him. But on the long ride to the port of Plymouth, he had had nothing to do except think about it, and he had realized that Exmoor’s words must be true.
How else had Exmoor gotten hold of the letter?
He trusted his grandmother implicitly, and she had said that she would take his note to Nicola. She would never have taken it to the Earl. It had to be Nicola who had given it to Exmoor. Denial had gradually settled into despair.

Despair had turned into anger and hatred for both Exmoor and Nicola. He had survived the ordeal of his enforced service in the British navy by focusing on his determination to somehow make the two of them pay. Even after all the years since he had escaped the cruelty of the naval ship, his hatred had burned fiercely. Becoming a success in the New World had not been enough to satisfy him. He had burned with a desire to inflict actual damage on Exmoor, and so he had returned with Perry and his men to hurt Richard in one of the few ways he could be hurt, by taking his money. His intent with Nicola had been less clear. He had known only that he had to see her again to prove to himself how dead his feelings for her were, how glad he was that she had not agreed to marry him.

He had been sure he would find her married to some bloated lord, years older than herself and thoroughly obnoxious. Her looks would have faded after ten years and several children. She would be shallow and boring, having turned into a copy of her mother from years of living that way of life. He had not been prepared to find her still beautiful, a little less vibrant, perhaps, with a touch of sadness in her wide gray eyes, but achingly lovely, and neither married nor a typical noblewoman. He had not expected a huge fist of longing to slam into his gut when he first saw her, nor had he thought that images of her would haunt him, both waking and sleeping, distracting him from his purpose.

He had been unprepared for the jealousy that seared him when he thought she was married to Exmoor, as well as the intense relief that had flooded him when he found out that it was her sister, not she, who was Lady Exmoor. He had been even less ready to deal with the fact that, from the moment he saw her, all he wanted to do was kiss her and caress her, a desire that owed little to revenge and much to simple need. Even worse, he was reluctantly finding that he liked her, just as he had when he first met her. He enjoyed talking to her; he admired the things she did. And now this…

Burning with desire for her and irritated by his own attraction to a woman he was supposed to hate, it had snapped the last bit of his self-control when he heard her use
himself
as an excuse for not giving in to passion. She had dared to claim that she was still faithful to her first love, spinning a touching story that he had died—with no mention of the fact that, if so, it had been because she helped send him to his doom. Anger had surged up in him, and he had ripped off his mask.
Let her see that the man she held comfortably dead was anything but that.

It was not the way he had planned to reveal his identity, if he ever did. But it certainly had had an effect on Nicola. The only problem was that the effect was not satisfactory. There had been no guilt, no shame, not even an admittance that she had been caught in the middle of a lie. Instead, Nicola had turned it all around on him, leaving him feeling empty and confused and somehow in the wrong.

She could not be telling the truth. It must have happened the way he had always thought it did. And yet…
He could not get out of his mind the look in her eyes when she saw him.

N
ICOLA HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING
.
After two hours, she sighed and got out of bed and dressed again. She would go and sit outside for a while, she thought. No doubt part of her restlessness was due to the fact that she had been cooped up inside this house for so long. There would be enough moonlight that she would be able to see. Wrapping her cloak around her, not bothering to pin her hair up, she moved quietly down the stairs and out the back door.

The night was quiet and chilly, the woods wrapped in dark silence. She could hear the distant hooting of an owl. Silvery moonlight filtered down through the canopy of the trees. Not far from the back door was the stump of a tree long ago cut down, and after standing for a moment, she walked over to it and sat down.

There was the scrape of a boot heel behind her, and she jumped up, whirling around, her heart pounding. Jack stood a few feet away from her, his hands in his pockets. The moonlight touched his face, lighting the planes and casting his eyes into shadow. He looked so much the same, yet so different. Nicola wanted to look at that face for hours, to reach out and touch it. She wanted to smooth her thumbs along the sharp lines of his cheekbones, to trace his brows, his lips. She curled her hands into fists, keeping them resolutely by her sides.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I saw you from Perry’s window. It’s a little late to be out, don’t you think?”

Nicola shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. What’s the matter? Did you think I was trying to escape?”

“No. I—” He stopped. “I don’t know what I thought. I thought—that I would join you.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Nicola retorted tartly. “Feeling as you do about me.”

“You must have noticed that I—” He glanced away. “I seem to have trouble staying away from you.”

“I have noticed that you have a perverse desire to torment me,” Nicola snapped back. “Is that why you returned to Dartmoor? To punish me, as well as Richard?”

“I wanted to punish Richard. I am afraid I never had a very clear idea what I wanted to do with you.” He grimaced. “I expressed that badly. I think we both know what I want to do with you. I should have said, I had no plan for revenge.”

“Why not?” Nicola asked, looking him squarely in the eye. “You think that I turned you over to a man who hated you, who had tried to kill you once already. I would have said that that would make me worse than Exmoor. After all, he at least was straightforward in his intentions. I, on the other hand, was a deceiver. A liar. A coward. Why stop at the Earl? Why not wreak havoc on my life, as well?”

“I thought about it, believe me,” he shot back, his eyes glittering. “I played out many scenes in my head that had you down on your knees, begging for my forgiveness. However, most of them involved things I would not do in real life. Too, most of them involved breaking your heart, and I did not think you had one to break.”

Fury and hurt welled up in Nicola, and her eyes blazed. “Indeed, I would have said you were right, for when I thought you were dead, my heart died, too. Or, at least, I thought it had until this morning, when you broke it all over again. Congratulations. Even if you did not intend revenge on me, I think you have accomplished it.”

She whirled and started for the house, but his hand lashed out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back around to face him.

“Do you honestly expect me to believe that?” he asked, an odd note in his voice. “That you loved me all this time? That you didn’t—”

“I don’t expect you to believe anything except whatever you wish to. That is what you have done for the past ten years. And, frankly, I don’t really care whether you believe me. I know now the quality and extent of your love, how easily it is severed and how weak it is under duress.” Tears hovered at the edge of her voice as she spat out her words to him, and she was all but quivering under the force of her emotions. “You are not
worthy
of my love! You are not capable of giving or receiving it.”

“Not capable!” His dark eyes flamed, and he jerked her roughly to him. “I’ll show you how capable I am.”

His mouth came down on hers, and his arms went around her like steel bands. She could feel heat flare up suddenly in his body, and her own flesh flamed in response. His kiss was familiar and exciting, at once the old Gil and the new Jack, the haunting sweet kiss of the boy she had loved and the harsh, searing one of this stranger who wished to punish and defeat her. She wanted him. She wanted to kiss him back and wrap her arms around his neck, give herself up to the treacherous power of her desire.

But something in her, some strength or pride or will, would not let her do so. She would not be the weak vessel he obviously thought she was, ready to melt with desire for him no matter how he had hurt her or how little he loved her. She was not the kind of woman he believed her to be, the sort who would betray the man she loved, then fall back into his arms like some trollop.

Nicola pulled back, and when his arms stayed tightly around her, not letting her go, she stomped sharply with the heel of her shoe on his instep. Breath hissed out of him as he jerked back, his arms falling away from her.

“Bloody hell, woman! What are you trying to do?”

“I am trying to get away from you!” Nicola responded. “Did you really think that you could treat me as you have treated me, say the things to me that you have said, and I would just swoon in your arms? Well, I won’t! I am not here for you. I am here because your friend Perry needed help. I will take care of him, and then I will leave. I won’t betray you and your men to Exmoor—and if you think that I couldn’t find my way back to this cottage, then you are a far stupider man now than Gil ever was—any more than I would have betrayed you to him ten years ago. But what I will
not
do is dally with you. Don’t try to kiss me. Don’t try to touch me again. Or I swear that you and all yours here will find yourselves subject to a sudden and violent illness. Do I make myself clear?”

She did not wait for his response, just turned on her heel and marched back into the house.

J
ACK WATCHED HER GO
,
SLIGHTLY STUNNED
.
He sat down heavily on the stump where Nicola had been seated and put his elbows on his knees, resting his head on his hands. He sat that way for a long time, then finally rose and made his way back into the house and up the stairs to Perry’s bedroom.

As he walked across the dimly lit room, he could see that his friend’s eyes were open and his color better. Perry had already awakened once while Jack was sitting with him and had managed to drink more liquid from the stew and even swallow a few bits of meat.

“You look better,” Jack said as he plopped down in the chair beside Perry’s bed.

“You don’t,” Perry replied bluntly.

Jack groaned and shook his head. “Oh, Perry…what if I have made a mistake? What if I was wrong about her all those years ago?”

Perry did not need to ask about whom he spoke. He looked at his friend sympathetically. “I think you may have been, my friend.”