Portrait Of A Lover (17 page)

Everything seemed to come naturally, and when he lowered his weight upon her again—his stomach hot and sticky upon hers—she held him as close as she could, running her hands up and down the hard muscles of his back as they tensed and relaxed.

Soon they were both drenched in sweat and Annabelle threw her head back on the pillow. Tingling sensation shot from where they were joined, outward to the farthest reaches of her body, and at last she climaxed.

Crying out, she slammed her hands down upon the blankets and squeezed them in her fists.

She realized with both fear and joy that her life was never, ever going to be the same after this. Everything was going to change, because she had just experienced heaven.

And how, after today, would she ever be able to live without it?

LYING IN SILENCE
on top of Annabelle, feeling his heart pounding against hers, Magnus withdrew from the tight fire of her body and rolled to the side. He stared up at the ceiling.

He was in shock. He had just made love to Annabelle, and it hadn’t been a dream.

He laid his open hand upon his chest over his heart, and for the first time in his life he could have wept. It scared the devil out of him—for he was not accustomed to such sentimental weakness. The difficult circumstances of his life, especially during his childhood, had required him to be tough and impervious.

Not wanting to turn his head on the pillow and look at her—for he was certain she would be regretting what they’d done—he reached for her hand instead. When her fingers curled around his, he closed his eyes, relieved by that small offering, then finally turned toward her.

She was lying with her eyes closed, her hand pressed over her forehead as if she were troubled.

His gut wrenched and he braced himself. “Annabelle,” he whispered.

He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted to say it right then and there, but knew he had to tread carefully.

She took her hand off her head and opened her eyes. “I can’t believe we just did that.”

“Please, I beg of you,” he said. “Do not let yourself regret it.”

She chuckled, but there was a hint of bitterness in it. “I don’t know what I feel, Magnus. I should be regretting it, because I’m a respectable woman who just made love to a man who is not my husband, a man who is my brother’s enemy, in a hotel room in the afternoon, no less. But all I’m thinking about is the fact that it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done.”

He gathered her hand in his, brought her fingers to his lips and kissed the soft pad of each one. He did not want this moment to end.

“I can’t believe what it felt like,” she continued. “I had no idea.”

He leaned up on one elbow and stared at her freckled face for a moment before he kissed her. Her eyes were still closed when he came away, and she was smiling.

“You surprise me,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “Why? Because I was morally deficient just now, and I don’t even care?”

He knew she was attempting to make a joke, but he didn’t laugh because he could see the anxiety in her expression, the uncertainty about her future. Instead, he ran his hand over her hair and wondered if it was possible that one day she could fall in love with him again like she had the first time. If one day she would be free of all her doubts and reservations.

“It certainly was amazing,” he said. “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I wanted you today.”

For a long moment she stared up into his eyes, then glanced away. “I’m getting cold. Can we get into the bed?”

He sat back and pulled the covers down, and they both slid between the sheets, lying on their sides facing each other.

“Is it always that enjoyable?” Annabelle asked.

“Every time is different, but for you, I suspect it will only get better.”

“Better? That hardly seems possible.”

“It won’t hurt next time,” he told her. “And there are other positions one can try.”

He hoped to God they were talking about positions they could try together, because he could not bear to think of her doing this with another man. Ever. She was his now.

Annabelle laughed, but then her expression grew serious. “This is strange, Magnus.”

“Why?”

She wet her lips. “Because I’m lying here with you. I trusted you enough to get into a private coach with you. I trusted you to be gentle with me just now, and you were, and I’m completely at ease, naked in your bed. Sometimes I wonder if there are two of you.”

“Perhaps there are,” he replied. “The man I was before I met you, and the man I am today.”

She gazed at him pensively while their conversation was interrupted by the sound of laughter and footsteps in the corridor, followed by the closing of a door, then silence.

Annabelle reached up to touch his lips. He simply lay there, letting her explore his face with her gentle, caressing finger.

“Can a person really change so much?” she asked, wanting it to be true.

“I believe so. Especially if that person has something to live for.A hope.A desire.”

“I must not have been enough of a desire for you the first time, thirteen years ago.”

He took hold of her hand and kissed her palm. “Yes, you were, Annabelle, but I did not feel worthy of you. Everything changed when I went to America.”

She rolled onto her back and draped a slender arm across her forehead. “It must be a remarkable place.”

“It wasn’t just the country,” he said. “I could have gone anywhere and the effect would have been the same. I just had to break away from the life I knew—when I was always keeping my head down—and become the man I wanted to be.”

Annabelle’s eyes darkened with emotion. “There is so much I don’t know about you, Magnus. Why were you always keeping your head down?”

He paused a moment before he spoke, for he had never talked to anyone about his childhood. “Because I was treated with cruelty and brutality by people who had heard the stories about my father.”

“But Whitby has always insisted that you were a villain and bullied his brother, and that you caused his death.”

Magnus shook his head. “That’s not true. John was the one who started the fights, and Whitby would always come along to help finish them—at least until I learned to defend myself. And the afternoon John died, I was long gone. We had fought that day, yes, but he had ridden off afterward.”

Annabelle sat up. “But what about your mother demanding money from him?”

He shrugged. “I know she asked John to take me in after my father died, but he refused.”

“Whitby says your mother threatened John.”

Magnus inhaled deeply. He didn’t like talking about this, didn’t like to think about his mother’s odious conduct, or the fact that in this regard, Whitby was probably telling the truth.

“I wasn’t aware of her threatening him,” he said with a sigh, “though knowing her, she probably did. That would explain why John picked fights with me, wouldn’t it?”

Magnus found it strange that he could feel so numb upon hearing this. He supposed he’d shoveled a great deal of dirt over his age-old bitterness.

“Sometimes I just don’t know what to believe,” Annabelle said. “I trust my brother. He wouldn’t lie about things. But my feelings for you are so…”

She didn’t finish. She merely closed her eyes and shook her head, as if she didn’t know which way was up.

Magnus, however, did know. He leaned on one elbow and resolved to say what needed to be said.

“All of that is in the past, Annabelle. I’ve left it behind, and I need you to do that, too. Come back to America with me. As my wife.”

She blinked repeatedly, her face going pale before she replied. “Please don’t ask me that now, Magnus. This has all happened so fast.”

“But what were you thinking when you saw me at the station and decided to come away with me? Surely something had changed.”

He had hoped she’d realized she still loved him, and was willing to move forward. In a way, he had wanted her to choose him over her brother.

“To be honest, I wasn’t thinking beyond the moment,” she said.

It was not what he’d wanted to hear.

When he raked a hand through his hair in frustration, Annabelle sat up, hugging the covers to her chest. “Please don’t make demands on me, Magnus. Not now. This is all so very confusing, and I can’t be impulsive about a decision that will affect the rest of my life. This morning I wouldn’t even have believed I would be in your bed with you. I still can’t believe it.”

He slowly rolled away from her and sat up. He thought about how angry she had been with him when she first came to see him at his gallery. She had hated him then, and it was barely a month ago.

He said nothing for a long time, then picked his trousers up off the floor and pulled them on.

“Are you angry?” Annabelle asked.

He shook his head, strode to the window and pulled the drapes aside to look out. “No, but I suppose I am waiting for the axe to fall, one way or another.”

He remembered something of the sort once before, when he was a boy. He recalled the stories his father used to tell him to distract him from the hunger pains in his belly when there had been no food in the house. He used to talk of a fairy-tale life that might someday be his.

But then his ailing father died and his mother had dropped the axe. She told him the truth about that fairy-tale family—that they had tossed out one of their own sons—Magnus’s father—and banished him to hell because he had been a disappointment.

He had not been good enough for them. He’d been weak. Sick. Not normal.

And his mother had told him that they didn’t want him, either.

Magnus heard the bedclothes rustling, Annabelle’s tiny feet touching the floor and padding toward him. When he turned, she was standing before him, wrapped in the sheet.

“I just want us to enjoy ourselves,” she said, the fresh afternoon sun bathing her in soft light, gilding the highlights of her wild, unruly hair. “I’m not ready to think about tomorrow, much less the rest of my life.”

He touched her then, because he couldn’t resist the rosy pink of her flesh, her freckled cheeks still aglow from their lovemaking. Gently, he traced the slender beauty of her neck and delicate shoulders, then the line of her collarbone, marveling at the silky warmth of her skin under his fingertips.

Watching her eyelids fall closed under the teasing lightness of his touch, he recalled that he had once told himself he would do anything to have her—so if that meant making love to her tirelessly until she finally surrendered to him heart, body, and soul, he would indeed make love to her tirelessly, with or without promises.

“Look at me,” she whispered, her eyes still closed, her breasts rising and falling with breathless yearnings. “I’m trembling. How do you do this to me?”

He shuddered with anticipation and need, and answered her with a kiss that quickened his blood like nothing he’d ever known. Then, driven by lust, by the consuming need to possess her, he swept her off her tiny feet and carried her back to the bed.

F orty-eight hours later Annabelle woke naked in Magnus’s bed, wondering if it was possible for a person to die from too much sex.

She sat up groggily and tried to make sense of the sheets, which were tangled chaotically at the foot of the bed. The pretty crimson and gold cover had been tossed aside early that morning and was piled on the floor near the window, while their clothes were strewn everywhere.

And her hair…Well, it looked like some strange little creature had built a nest at the back of her head.

She yawned and nudged Magnus, who was naked as well, lying on his stomach, stretched out in a careless sprawl, snoring. Her gaze drifted over his sleeping form, the corded muscles of his back and buttocks, the wavy black hair spilling heedlessly across his face, his well-built, broad-shouldered frame taking up more than half the bed. He was a gorgeous specimen of manhood, she reflected with a sluggish, blissful smile, and even now, after two days of lovemaking, she was certain she could still manage a little more.

If it weren’t for the niggling sense of responsibility to make contact with her family and assure them she was still among the living, she most definitely would.

She nudged him again. “Magnus, wake up. They’re going to think we died in here.”

“Who?” he asked, still half asleep, his lips puckered against the pillow.

“The hotel staff, that’s who.” She swung her legs to the floor. “And my maid has probably contacted the police by now and reported me missing.”

“Surely not. She saw you go off with me.”

“Precisely,” Annabelle replied, smacking her tongue against the dry roof of her mouth.

She walked to the table by the window to pour herself a glass of water, but discovered she was rather sore in southerly regions and had to waddle like a duck.

“Come back to bed,” Magnus said without opening his eyes or moving.

“No, I can’t come back. You’ve done me in.”

Hearing that, he rolled over at last. “You’ve done me in as well, woman. Do you think I’m made of steel?”

“There are times you appear to be,” she replied with a smile.

“Well, not now. I’m spent.”

“You need food.”

“Food. I’d forgotten about food.”

She waddled back to the bed and lay down on her back, her body crossing diagonally over his. “Maybe we should get dressed and go out.”

He lifted his head off the pillow. “But you’d have to comb your hair.”

“Where is a lady’s maid when she is most needed?”

Magnus dropped his head back down. “What’s her name? Josephine? Maybe you should let her go. She’s been hopelessly ineffective. Look at this place. Your corset is hanging off the curtain rod, for God’s sake.” He pointed. “Look at that.”

“You’re absolutely right. I will fire her tomorrow.”

Two minutes later Annabelle had forgotten about her responsibility to her family, and both she and Magnus were snoring again.

“
I CAN’T BE JUST YOUR
LOVER,”
Magnus told Annabelle that night, his voice heavy with desire as he made love to her slowly and gently, sliding in and out with great care and attention to detail. “I must be more than that. I need to be your husband, Annabelle. For life.”

She inhaled sharply at the sound of those words and the scorching heat of his penetration. Your husband for life. To be given that guarantee—that he would be hers and she would be his and they would share pleasure like this forever—it was beyond her imagination.

She cried out, a muffled sound of indulgence as her fingers dug into his back and her legs squeezed around his hips. He withdrew partially, then thrust back inside.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded, voracious for him, needing more of this rapturous pleasure he offered.

“Marry me,” he said.

She wanted to say yes. She wanted to scream it, but she couldn’t think. All she could comprehend was ecstasy and sensation, and somewhere inside her mind something was telling her to wait—to be sensible, not to make a decision in such a wild state of emotion and arousal.

Was it her fear speaking to her? Or her common sense?

“Annabelle, I love you,” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot as flame, his intense physical rhythm incomprehensible.

“I love you, too,” she replied. “I don’t care about anything else.”

His movements stilled and he drew back, just far enough to look her in the eye. “Then marry me. It’s the right thing.”

“I don’t know, Magnus.”

“Just trust me. You know you can.”

There it was. That which was holding her back…

“I know I want to.”

He slid all the way in, pushing firmly while swiveling his hips. “You want to trust me?” he asked. “Or you want to marry me?”

She considered it for a moment, but was losing herself in the pulsation of a mounting orgasm. “Both. I want both. Yes.”

Then the world outside of Annabelle’s mind and body disappeared, and she gave into her desires once and for all, welcoming the force of Magnus’s climax as he finally groaned and poured into her.

He collapsed upon her, heavy and exhausted, and lay there for a moment until their breathing returned to normal and their bodies regained their natural rhythms. Then he gently rolled off her and took her into his arms, holding her close with a different kind of tenderness, until the sun rose in the morning and light spread across their glistening, sated bodies.

ANNABELLE WOKE FROM
a deep sleep as if an alarm bell had gone off inside her head. Groggy and disoriented, she sat bolt upright and looked around.

The suite was quiet except for the ticking of the clock and a cart with a squeaky wheel rolling by outside the door. Light was pouring in through the crack between the drapes, and the room was still a mess. She had no idea what day it was.

She gazed down at Magnus asleep beside her, naked under a single white sheet, one arm draped over his face, and suddenly remembered what had occurred the night before. He had been making love to her, and somewhere in the wild, spinning fury of her passions, she had agreed to become his wife.

All at once the old familiar doubts and fears came rushing back at her, and she wasn’t sure she could move. She managed only to bury her forehead in a hand.

What had she done? She should have taken more time to think about the consequences of her decision, but she supposed she hadn’t exactly been thinking with her brain.

“Good morning,” Magnus said, his hand coming to rest upon her back.

Annabelle hesitated before she lifted her head to look down at him. “Good morning.”

For a long quiet moment he studied her face. He tossed an arm up under his head, and somehow she knew he understood what she was feeling. How could he not? He must have been expecting this.

His fingers began to brush lightly across her back. “Don’t worry,” he said.

Annabelle swallowed with difficulty. “How can I not? We’ve been out of our minds with lust the past few days, and last night I agreed to marry you. What will Whitby say when he finds out?”

Magnus’s eyes clouded over with momentary displeasure, but it vanished quickly as he continued to rub her back. “It won’t matter what he says. We’re together now, Annabelle, and I won’t let anything or anyone tear us apart.”

Still feeling unsure, she rested a chin on her knee and gazed pensively toward the window.

“Come here.” He urged her back down to lie beside him.

Annabelle rested her head on his shoulder, and the heat of his body warmed hers.

As she lay there, she contemplated the misgivings still hammering away in her mind, and suddenly a far worse fear overcame her.

She imagined taking Whitby’s side and telling Magnus she could not marry him. She imagined saying good-bye to Magnus, never making love to him again, never seeing him again—and quite frankly the thought of that was worse than death.

Nothing seemed to matter now but the joy he gave her. When he was holding her close in his arms like this, she didn’t care about the past or what other people thought. She didn’t want to be suspicious and worry that he was using her to hurt Whitby. She wanted to believe in him. She wanted to believe that he was telling her the truth—that he had come back to London for her, and revenge upon Whitby had nothing to do with it.

When it came right down to it, all she cared about was this crazy, mad love, and every instinct in her body was pushing her to trust him. Maybe that was all that mattered.

She leaned up on an elbow and looked down at him with love. “I don’t want anything to come between us, either,” she said.

Magnus took her face in his hands. “I’ll make you happy, Annabelle. I promise. You’ll never want for anything.”

“I don’t need anything except for you.”

His eyes flashed with desire, and he pulled her down for a kiss, but Annabelle laid a hand on his chest to stop things before the kiss progressed to something more.

“We can’t start this again,” she said with a smile, “because we have to get up and get dressed. I’ll need to go home today, Magnus.”

He settled back, disappointed. “Why?”

“Because I have to tell them.”

His chest rose and fell with a deep intake of breath. “Why do you have to go back there? Why don’t we just leave? You could write to them from New York.”

“No, I could never do that. They’re my family and I care for them—Whitby, Lily, and the children. I can’t leave without saying good-bye.”

He sat up against the brass frame of the bed, his dark eyes sweeping over her face with a measure of discontent.

“You don’t have to come,” she said.

“Oh, yes I do. I will not have you going alone, as if you are ashamed of me. We must stand together.”

“It wouldn’t be like that,” she assured him.

Magnus looked away toward the window. “He might think so. Or he might think I’m afraid to face him. He’ll certainly try to change your mind.”

Annabelle felt a chill come over the room with this change in Magnus’s mood. She wished he would look at her. “It shouldn’t matter what Whitby thinks,” she said. “And nothing will change my mind.”

Magnus looked off into the distance as if he hadn’t heard her, then finally returned his gaze to her face. His eyes warmed, and she was relieved.

“You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I am only thinking of you. I hate that you must do something so difficult. If you like, I could do it. I could go and face him alone.”

Annabelle tried to imagine that, but could not. Whitby probably wouldn’t even believe that she had consented to marry Magnus. Whitby would think it a lie, or that Magnus had kidnapped her or some such foolishness.

She squeezed Magnus’s hand. “No, you were right the first time. We must stand together. And I’m going to do my best to convince him that he’s wrong about you.”

Magnus merely nodded, and Annabelle’s stomach began to churn with a slow mounting dread. She rested a hand on her belly, thinking she would be very glad when this day was over.

CENTURY HOUSE IN BEDFORDSHIRE
was hailed by some as one of the most majestic palaces in England, and though Annabelle had lived there all her life, she never failed to be moved by its magnificence whenever she returned after time away.

The coach rolled past the ornamental fountain and came to a smooth stop at the front entrance. Annabelle glanced briefly at Magnus, who was looking out the window in the opposite direction of the house.

He does not want to be here.

“Shall we?” she said nonetheless.

“Of course,” he replied. “Allow me.”

He climbed out of the coach and offered his hand to Annabelle to assist her down. She started off toward the front entrance, but stopped and turned when she realized he was not following. He was still standing beside the coach, his dark eyes moving slowly from left to right across the front of the house.

“I haven’t seen this place in eight years,” he said, “and I’ve certainly never made it past the front doors.”

Annabelle was uncomfortably aware of a change in him. There was no warmth in his eyes, no flirtatious spark or seductive appeal. Nevertheless, she spoke with confidence. “You’ll make it past them today.”

He nodded and followed behind her.

They walked up the steps and were met at the door by Clarke, the butler, who politely greeted Annabelle, but when he recognized Magnus, his expression turned to shock.

Annabelle removed her gloves as she spoke. “Mr. Wallis is my guest here today, Clarke. We wish to speak to Whitby, if you will please inform him.”

The butler stared perplexedly at her before he closed the door behind them and recovered his aplomb. “As you wish, Miss Lawson,” he said.

“Please tell him we will be in the gilded drawing room,” she added.

Clarke bowed at the waist before he turned to go. Annabelle could see the panic in his gait. It was not something she had ever seen before.

When she faced Magnus, he did not look pleased.

“It’s this way,” she said, wanting only to get through all this as quickly as possible.