Not Quite Married (10 page)

“There’s nothin’ to fear, my lady,” she declared with a worried expression. “He’s a fine, mannerly fellow, yer husband. He’ll do right by ye.”

Brien groaned and let her head fall back down on her arms.

Just after sunset, which came late in the June day, the house fell silent. With the wedding dinner over and the clearing away done, the staff and servants had withdrawn to a celebration of their own by the lake. Only Brien’s little chambermaid and the small retinue of Raoul’s personal servants remained. At Brien’s insistence, the long windows of her room had been thrown open and the occasional moan of the breeze passing through made it sound as if the house itself were burdened and anxious.

Raoul had removed his coat and waistcoat and donned a silk dressing gown over his shirt and breeches when he arrived in Brien’s rooms. He carried a bottle of wine and two stemmed goblets. His mood was quietly triumphant until he spotted Brien’s simple green muslin day dress.

“Still the rebel?” He nodded toward her choice of garments.

“You know, of course, what you wear has no bearing on what will happen tonight.”

Brien spread her hands on the back of the chair in front of her.

“For once,
monsieur
, we agree.”

He studied her ruddy face and upraised chin. “Your wedding night means so little to you,
ma chérie
?” His tone was now challenging.

“I thought it meant a great deal
the first time it happened.

Apparently I was wrong. And I do not intend to suffer such a disappointment a second time.”

“The first time?” Raoul placed the wine and glasses on a nearby table.

“When I was wedded—
or thought I was wedded
—almost a fortnight ago. I believed I was legally, morally, and honorably bound. The vows were consummated.”

His face hardened with frightening speed and intensity. “You are not serious.”

“I’ve never been more serious,” she said. The menace he exuded grew like a dark cloud to engulf her. Her heart raced. Her whole body caught fire.

“I would ask why, but in truth, it does not matter. You are mine now. And it may prove rather amusing tomorrow morning, to have you compare your two wedding nights in detail. In fact, I believe I may insist upon it.”

“Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear,” she said, feeling an alarming popping sound in her ears and a sudden rush of heat.

She was quaking all over now, and had difficulty focusing on what she had to say. “I won’t let you take anything more from me than you already have. I will not share a bed with you.”

He laughed as he watched her growing distress.

“
Will not?
What makes you think I desire
willingness
in my bed,
chérie
?” He moved closer, savoring the fear that flickered across her face. “How do you plan to resist? Scratch? Kick? Bite?
Stab?

” He paused, his grin curdling into a sneer. “It might prove interesting to add the marks you inflict to my collection of scars.”

The shiver of pleasure that depraved possibility sent through him shocked Brien into motion. She staggered backward toward the door that connected to her dressing room.

“Whatever resistance you offer will not only be useless, it will enhance my pleasure in taking you. You see, I’ve had my fill of sighing and moaning and even shrieking females. I was counting on you proving a bit more inventive.” His teeth glinted as he produced a menacing smile. “Don’t disappoint me, Brien. I’m not a pleasant man when I’ve been disappointed.”

She tried to dart behind a heavy stuffed wing chair near the hearth, but her legs would scarcely work. She stumbled and just managed to catch and pull herself around the chair, keeping it between them.

“Running? Is this the best you can do,
chérie
?”

“I will never be your wife,” she responded, panting, having some difficulty getting her breath. “Seek an annulment, Raoul. You wanted wealth and position—you can have them without the baggage of an unwilling wife.”

His fist slashed out with lightning speed, sending the glasses and wine bottle shattering on the floor. Until now she hadn’t imagined the depths to which he might sink when confronted and denied.

His smile was chilling.

“You think to rid yourself of me so easily? If you think I could be content with a few bags of money, you are sadly mistaken. And you underestimate my fascination with you.” He edged closer to the chair and she could see the cords tauten in his neck like bowstrings. He was on the edge of an explosion. “I have never been so thoroughly rejected by a woman before. It makes me want to understand how such a thing could happen. Perhaps if I put you in a jar . . . study you . . . dissect you . . .”

Then he lunged and she scrambled for the dressing room. But her limbs seemed to be weighted with lead. From the corner of her eyes she saw him coming, saw his hand close on her arm. He yanked hard and she snapped back with such force that her vision blurred. Suddenly she was trapped against him and his mouth on hers was hot and devouring. Struggling and bucking against him, she succeeded in biting his lip and ripping her mouth from his as he yelped. Cursing softly, he turned his hunger on that which he could easily reach, her neck and shoulder. He fastened his mouth to her shoulder, then sank his teeth into her, trying to both punish and consume her. Her limbs seemed thick and sluggish as she cried out and beat at his back and tried to reach his face with her nails.

Then just as suddenly as the attack began, it halted, and Raoul’s grip on her loosened. Her renewed resistance finally broke his hold and she staggered away, panting, shocked by her abrupt release. She realized that he was looking beyond her and turned to see what had stopped him. Ella stood a few feet away, dressed in a damp nightdress, her eyes bright with fever, holding a cocked pistol that was aimed at Raoul’s chest.

Raoul looked from Ella to Brien, his struggle for self-control evident on his face. “So this is your game.” He wiped the blood from his bitten lip, looked at it on his fingers, then clenched both hands into fists that fell to his sides. “To have another fight for you. A servant, at that. How common.”

Brien saw Ella sway and rushed to her to steady her. The maid seemed to be on the edge of a collapse, and she thrust the pistol into Brien’s hand.

“Stay back! Don’t come any closer!” She helped Ella to the nearby chair, while holding the pistol on Raoul with a surprisingly steady hand. When Ella was safe, she turned her full attention to Raoul and advanced slowly on him.

“You won’t shoot me,” Raoul said, trying to engage her eyes.

“Don’t bet on that. You should have taken the money, Raoul.

Now
I
intend to annul this marriage—and I’ll see that you don’t get a penny in the bargain. When society hears what sort of husband you make, there won’t be a door in England open to you.”

“After your lies . . . your father will never believe you,” he spat.

She glanced down at her bitten shoulder. “He will after he sees this.” She leveled the pistol at his face. “Now get out!”

“This is not finished,
chérie
.” Again he produced that chilling smile. “Surely you know that.”

As the door slammed behind him, she rushed to it, turned the key in the lock, and braced her back against it. When it became clear that Raoul was gone, she roused and rushed to Ella’s side. The maid was slumped to one side, with her head against the chair.

Brien rushed to her, laid the pistol on the table, and seized her hands.

“Ella . . . oh, Ella, you shouldn’t have left your sickbed.”

The maid’s lips were dry and her eyes were glassy with fever.

“’E can be bad if ’e’s crossed.” She sighed. “I couldn’t let ye face ’im alone.”

“Oh, Ella.” Brien used every bit of strength she possessed to help her maid from the chair to the bed, then perched on the side of the mattress, bathing Ella’s face until the maid lost consciousness.

Brien lost track of how much time passed and of how many times she’d cooled the cloth. Then as dawn grayed the room, Brien herself was overtaken by a searing hot cloud of sensation. Her lungs felt hot and crackled with each breath, so that she bent double in a coughing fit. When she managed to straighten, her face, her body, and her limbs were on fire.

A strange, high-pitched whine began in her ears. . . . She felt strangely detached from the world . . . everything started to spin .

. . and darken. . . .

Eight

LIGHT SPLIT THE DARKNESS above her and she drifted upward toward it. There had been lights before, and voices, but they hadn’t lasted long enough to be meaningful. She was lying down; her whole body felt weighted, but still somehow detached and floating; she was chilled and sweating at the same time.

Those incompatible perceptions circled in her head until they righted and she understood them as all part of a general discomfort. She forced her eyes open and struggled to make them focus.

In the dim light provided by two small windows at the top of a high wall, she could make out that she was in a small stone chamber furnished with the bed she lay on, a few barrels stacked along one wall, a table, and what appeared to be a brazier. Her arms, outside the covers of the simple bed, were freezing. It took concentrated effort just to draw them inside the cover where there was warmth. She groaned at both the effort it required and the difference it made.

Opposite the bed was a massive wooden door that was reinforced with hammered-iron bands. The strangeness of it all finally registered. This looked like a cellar. Where was she? At Byron Place still? She tried to sit up, but it took too much out of her and she wilted back onto the bed.

Her head felt spongy and allowed words and images to leak away before she could link them together into coherent thought. What was the last thing she remembered? It took a while for her to recall the wedding. Then her rooms. Ella. Ella was ill and she had— The gun! Raoul! What had happened after she forced Raoul to leave?

Alarm shot through her and she drew on the strength it provided to sit up and look around. Her hair was loose and lay in damp clumps around her shoulders. She wore a thin nightdress that felt clammy and clung to her. On the nearby table she could make out a pitcher and glass and what appeared to be medicine bottles like those she’d administered to Ella. It began to knit together in her head.

She’d been ill and, from the searing aches in her chest and lungs, she was still recovering. But why here? She slid her feet over the side of the bed and pushed herself up. Steadying herself on the bed, then a chair, then a barrel, she made for the door.

“Hello?” She pounded on the massive oak planks with her fist but was so weak she produced only a few dull thuds. “Is anyone there?” She bent over in a fit of coughing, then tried again. “Can anyone hear me?”

The cold of the stone floor seeped up her legs and her teeth began to chatter. She staggered back to the bed and collapsed, exhausted by that small bit of movement. Her last thoughts as she sank again into unconsciousness were that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be and that Raoul was somehow to blame.

When she roused from that troubled sleep, there was light around her and someone moving nearby. She looked up to find a mountain of a man with no hair and a face full of mismatched features squinting down at her. Raoul’s man, Dyso. The one Ella had found so frightening. Brien had seen him occasionally from a distance. He kept mostly to the stables and was assigned to care for Raoul’s . . .

“Noooo!” she croaked out, shrinking back as he reached for her.

His coal-black eyes remained fastened on her as she recoiled. She was suddenly seized by a painful round of coughing and he cocked his head as if analyzing the sounds. Moving back to the table, he mixed something from the bottles in a cup and carried it back to her. His movements were slow but far from clumsy. She looked at the delicate china cup in his big, blocky hands and then up at him.

At close range it became clear that the numerous scars on his chin and jaw and around his eyes were what gave him that odd

“patchwork” appearance. His head was not just bald, it was shaven, and beneath his frayed clothing, massive muscles bulged.

But despite those formidable elements, something about his manner and clear, steady gaze spoke of patience and a nature free of deception.

She finally gathered the courage to reach for the cup.

“What’s happened to me?” Her voice was alarmingly weak.

“Why am I here?”

He said nothing, but backed toward the door and unhooked a ring of keys from his belt. In one fluid movement he ducked out and closed the heavy door behind him, sealing her in once more.

Her blood rushed to her head. She was a prisoner here. Raoul’s prisoner. And that hulk was her jailer.

Looking down at the cup she was gripping, she sniffed and recognized the aroma. Tea. With honey. She sipped and when it proved to be just that, she drank gratefully. She rallied enough strength to place the cup back on the table and then turned back to the bed. That extreme heaviness overtook her again and she sank to her knees by the bed.

When Dyso reentered moments later, he found her on the floor, leaning against the edge of the bed, asleep. With a softening in his battered face, he collected her and tucked her back into the bed, tidying her nightdress around her and braiding her hair loosely to keep it out of the way. He sat with her for a few moments, listening to her breathing, then with a strange little smile of sympathy, padded out.

The next time she awakened, the chamber was entirely dark.

How long had she slept? She was certainly more aware of her surroundings and coherent enough to realize she was at Raoul’s mercy and thus in real danger.

The key scraped in the lock and the door swung open to admit Dyso, carrying a large candelabra and a tray of food. He placed both on the table, then pulled it to the bed so she could reach it.

The light was so welcome that she wasn’t aware she had held her breath until he moved back toward the door and she exhaled with relief.

Then she spotted her jailer standing just inside the door, with his arms folded and a shoulder propped against the wall. Raoul spared not a glance for his henchman as he ordered sharply, “Get out.” When they were alone, he straightened and walked toward her at a slow prowl.