Not Quite Married (11 page)

“My lovely bride. Feeling better?”

Brien said nothing, hoping to hide the fear rising inside her. This was his doing. Ella had warned that he was capable of anything.

“I trust your accommodations are adequate.” He stopped near the table, where the candlelight enhanced the glow in his eyes. A chill coursed up her spine. How could he be so beautiful on the outside and yet so degraded inside?

“Where am I?” she asked, feeling as if that one demand took all of her strength.

“Where I want you to be.”

“Where is Ella?”

He seemed not to understand, then—“ahhh”—gave a nod of recognition. “The maid. You needn’t worry, my dear. She won’t be threatening anyone ever again.”

“What have you done with her?” Brien threw back the covers and lurched over the side of the bed. A wave of dizziness and nausea hit as she staggered a few steps and she held her head, waiting for it to pass.

“Tsk, tsk. Still you feel the effects of your illness.” He made a show of producing a silk handkerchief and holding it near his nose to mask the chamber’s smells. “Disagreeable as it is, I owe a debt to whatever illness seized you and rendered you insensible.

The housekeeper gave me the keys the next morning when the door was locked and the servants couldn’t rouse you. We found you lying on the floor. I was, of course, the perfect bridegroom . .

. so anxious for my bride’s health that I must tend her myself. For all anyone knows, you are still in my bedchamber, being tended by your devoted new husband.”

“What is it you want, Raoul?” she said weakly. “More money?”

“You defame me to imply that mere money is at issue here. I claim only that which is mine by law and right.” He abruptly seized a lock of her hair and yanked her closer. “The right to plow you deep and often . . . the right to watch your belly swell with my seed . . . the right to make you to regret your betrayal of me with every breath you take.” That flash of frightening intensity faded as quickly as it appeared; he loosened his grip on her with a caustic laugh. “Besides, your
père
has been most generous. There is nothing else you can give me . . . except the pleasure of humbling you.”

He pulled her closer, lowering his head to kiss her, and her stomach rebelled. She surrendered to the wave of sickness, retched dryly, and went limp. Revulsed, he released her as if contact with her sullied him. She slid down the side of the bed to the floor and he stood over her, staring, trying to decide whether to vent his anger on her. After a moment he stooped and lifted her head, his fingers digging into her face.

“Look at me,” he commanded in coldly compelling tones. When she complied, there was an alarming glitter to his eyes that betokened an unnatural appetite for violence.

“How long do you think you can keep me here?” she whispered.

“As long as it takes,
chérie.
”

“For what?”

“For you to be with child.” His words fell about her like a steel trap. “
My
child.”

“Never,” she breathed, paling even more around the green that circled her mouth.

“
Au contraire, chérie.
As soon as possible.” He appraised her crumpled body. “Then you cannot deny our vows, and you will be bound to me in flesh as you are on parchment.”

“I’ll never bed you,” she said, feeling another, stronger wave of nausea rising. She clamped a hand over her mouth and managed to stanch it.

He rose and his nostrils flared in disgust.

“Never is a very long time,
chérie.
” He stepped away and flourished his handkerchief to banish the taint of her illness. “I do not believe that you spread your legs for another, but I will take no chance that you bear another’s seed. You will stay here until I am certain that you are not pregnant.” He gave her weakened body a scathing glance. “And until I can bear to bed you myself.”

He strolled toward the door. “Until then, Dyso will attend you.

He cannot speak, but hears well and has orders to see to your needs.” His cold smile made her shudder. “It was he who put you to bed here, so you have no secrets from him.” At the door he paused to snarl a final command. “For your own sake, you’d better mend quickly.”

The door banged shut and the bolt slid home.

Wrapping her arms around her middle, she sat there on the cold floor for a time, wishing she could either escape into a faint or, if she was already asleep, to wake up from this nightmare. That was where Dyso found her some minutes later.

He gently lifted her back into bed and tucked the covers around her. Then he wetted a clean bit of toweling to wash her face and came back to the bedside with a small brown bottle. He dabbed some of the liquid inside it on her temples and under her nose.

Spirits of camphor. The smell was astringent, but somehow reassuring. It was what her old nurse had always used when she or her sister were ill.

Tears suddenly bloomed and rolled from her eyes back into her hair.

She felt a touch on her hand and looked up to find Dyso staring at her with a look of genuine concern . . . almost . . . compassion. As she dissolved into sobs of misery, she managed to utter two words.

“Thank you.”

THE SOUND OF a key in the lock awakened Brien the next morning, and she lurched up, her heart pounding, clutching the covers to her. Dyso entered almost noiselessly, carrying a breakfast tray. Placing it on the table, he removed the basin and chamber pot and was quickly gone.

Stifling a rising despair, she forced herself to think about her dangerous position here. There was no help to be had. Everyone believed them preparing for or already on a wedding trip. With Ella out of the way and Raoul now in charge of the household, she was completely at his mercy. If it weren’t for her illness, she would already have been subjected to Raoul’s appetite for blending lust and cruelty.

Worse still, she’d caught this vile contagion from the false vicar who married her to Aaron Durham. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and poured a cup of tea from the tray, ignoring the milk-and-bread sops that were meant to help settle her stomach.

The thought of him made her spirits sink unexpectedly. He appeared again in her mind: tall, striking, enigmatic, tender. She had no idea whether or not he was a party to the money-making dodge Ella’s uncle had perpetrated on her. But how could he not be? Wasn’t he the one who had demanded more money? Four thousand pounds. He’d known they could get more out of her and had held out for it, the wretch.

Again and again in the days between the fraudulent wedding and the forced one, she had refused to think about him. It had been so humiliating to learn how ruthlessly she’d been swindled, that she couldn’t bear to remember anything more than that. But now, in her weakened state, she could no longer resist the full memory.

The exhilarating sense of discovery. The tenderness with which he touched her. The bittersweet realization that this would be her one chance to experience passion and pleasure. She thought of Raoul’s plans for her. Aaron Durham’s loving might indeed be the only pleasure she would experience in life, no matter how manipulative it had been. Desperately, she folded that memory away in a safe chamber of her heart.

She had not heard the key in the lock or the sound of his step, but she sensed that someone was in the room and jerked around.

Dyso stood a pace away, his large, dark eyes unreadable as he stared at her. Brien shrank back on the bed, feeling fragile and unable to contain even one more scrap of horror or despair.

He went down on one knee by the bed and she gasped as his fleshy paws reached for and began to gently stroke her hand. She turned her tear-streaked face to him in surprise. He was offering her comfort. His eyes looked sad, and Brien wondered if it was mere pity he felt for her, or a deeper, more complicated kinship.

For the first time as she searched that scarred face, she wondered how many of those wounds had been caused by Raoul.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she whispered.

He nodded and made a sweeping hand motion from himself to her. What did he mean? Was he offering her something? She didn’t know how to read the signs he made.

“Have you been with Raoul and his family long?”

He nodded and made a cradling motion with his arms.

“Since you were born?” she guessed.

He nodded again.

“Does he beat and mistreat you?”

The big man’s face darkened and he drew back, giving such an emphatic shake of his head that Brien knew instantly it was true.

“Please”—she couldn’t stop herself—“help me. I beg of you. If there is anything you can do to help me get out of here . . .”

He released her hand abruptly and rose. He seemed agitated, and began to pace back and forth. Then he looked back at her with a fierce glare and exited, slamming the door behind him.

Tears sprang to her eyes. There was no help for her in this place; she was on her own. If she were to survive, she would have to put all of her energies into getting well first. She turned to that tray of food, reached for the milk-and-bread sops, and made herself eat.

That night as she lay in her cellar chamber on her prison bed, a pair of gold eyes escaped forbidden realms in her mind. Together with a reckless smile, they formed the core of a face . . . clean, angular features . . . coppery hair . . . a rakish scar . . . a smile that caused warmth to suffuse her skin. Freed along with that memory, physical need stirred within her . . . a hunger for touch and comfort and sense of safety she had known briefly in his arms. Even if it was an illusion, it was still the deepest contentment she could recall. As she had looked into his eyes, felt his hands on her, and reveled in the warmth and security of his presence, she had known it was more than a legal strategy, more than even curiosity that had made her agree to those two hours together. Now, as she looked again into those eyes, in memory, she understood she would never be able to banish him entirely from her heart. He had taken something precious from her, but had left something of his own in its place.

Even imprisoned and threatened by Raoul, it was the charming rogue Aaron Durham that filled her thoughts.

If that was really his name.

Nine

NEAR DAWN, Brien was awakened abruptly and sat bolt upright. For a long moment she searched the darkness and silence around her, clutching the sheet, her heart racing. Detecting nothing out of the ordinary, she gave a tense sigh and loosened her deadly grip on the coverlet. For an instant she had thought it might be Raoul returning. A second shuddering exhalation expressed her relief that it was not.

Then it came again. Something almost audible, just out of her range of hearing but detected all the same. Fully awake now and at the edge of her nerves, she slipped from the bed and padded across the cold paving stone to the iron-bound door. A faint change—the merest of sensations—raised the hair on the back of her neck. In the deep gloom of the chamber, she could make out the outline of the door clearly and began to search it for some clue to the cause of her rising anxiety. Nerves stretched taut, she ran her hands along the planks and bands until she reached the lock. She snapped upright, drawing in a sharp breath.

“Smoke.” As if conjured by its name, the acrid smell seemed to grow stronger. “A fire. There must be a fire!”

Recognition sent a trill of panic through her. She was locked in a cellar with no possibility of escape. She was sealed in a place that would be her tomb!

Desperately, she grabbed the iron handle and pulled with all her might. The door swung open and she stumbled backward over her own feet in surprise. Catching herself, she rushed into the opening and peered into the dim light of a stone passage outside.

Her eyes widened on wisps of smoke that could not have come from the torches hung in brackets farther down the passage. She had to find a way out!

Gathering up her gown, she ran down the passage, looking frantically for a means of escape. The hallway led past several half-open doors of storerooms to a long series of steps. If she was in a cellar, the only way out was
up
. She mounted them quickly and encountered thickening smoke that stung her eyes and burned her throat.

At the top of the steps, she spotted an open doorway through the growing haze and groped her way toward it. It was warm to the touch and seemed swollen in its frame. Throwing herself against it, she managed to knock it free and found herself in a wide hallway filled dense with smoke and that was lighted on one wall by hideous tongues of fire. She stopped dead. In front of her hung a familiar painting. This was indeed Byron Place! And this was the core of the house—a warren of servant stairs and passages.

Oriented now despite the smoke and darkness, she charted a course for the front doors but found that path—then another and another—blocked by heat and flames.

Weakness in her limbs slowed her, and she panted, dizzy with the effort required to breathe . . . slowing with every step. The carpets and drapes in the dining room were ablaze and the golden light revealed intense fire farther on in the hall and drawing room.

Exhaustion and smoke overwhelmed her and she dropped to her knees, feeling as if her very lungs were being seared. She crawled until she could move no more, then collapsed into a heap on a polished floor that burned brilliantly only a few yards away.

Unconscious, she did not feel the strong arms that lifted her up and carried her through the inferno into the cold night air. She didn’t hear the shouts of the stablemaster sending his son for the physician and directing the servants to a place of safety. And mercifully, she did not see the roof collapse a short while later, or hear the awesome, thunderous rumble that signaled the end of the glorious old house.

FIRST, THERE WAS darkness and muffled pain, and then an unrelenting thirst. Something heavy was sitting on her chest, making it hard to breathe. She tried to open her eyes, but they stung and kept slamming shut. With effort she forced them open for a few seconds, to behold blurred faces near hers. She couldn’t be sure they were real.

She thought she heard someone calling her name, but she was powerless to respond. The sound died away and once more there was blackness.