The Wedding Night (31 page)

You wished too hard, Poppy
. He hadn't come for them, but for his bloody silver. She had stolen his treasure, and dragons didn't like that. He was danger and delight. The end and the beginning of her happiness. The father of her child, a man whose duty to family ran as deeply as hers.

She had long ago lost her fear of looking into his eyes; she had found so
much splendor
there. But now they were searing black and his gaze as unrelenting as his long strides that brought him deeper into the glade. She backed up a few steps, seeking a place to take her stand against him, where she could better gather her sisters behind her—once she'd disentangled them from him.

"Did you go to
Canada
already, Lord Jack?" Caro was rifling his pockets as she hurried to keep up with him. "Did you see a
bear?"

"You didn't go, did you, Lord Jack?" Anna had captured one of his hands and looked up at him with her heart in her eyes, a lamb taking comfort in the arms of a lion. "It takes more than three days to sail to
Canada
and back, doesn't it?"

He stopped two yards from her, a seething dragon come to feast upon her heart. Little hands had rumpled him, from his dark hair, to the smudge of dirt on his waistcoat, to the leaves in his trouser cuffs.

"Is that what you told them, Mairey?" His voice came from somewhere distant, filled with bitterness. "That I had sailed to
Canada
?"

"Jack, I—"

"Kiss him, Mairey!" Caro was behind Mairey, shoving her closer. "We already did!"

He was waiting for her answer, his chest rising and falling in his unleashed wrath. Nothing she could say would mitigate the situation between them. He would have his silver now, and she would do her best to thwart him in his ravaging. A great storm was brewing here in the glade; she couldn't allow the girls to suffer its fury.

She gathered Anna away from Jack. "Anna, sweetheart. Would you take Caro and Poppy to the house and help Mrs. Russell with lunch?"

"Oh, yes! Can we have a picnic?"

What a fitting tribute before Jack could turn the beauty of the glade into a slag heap. "Of course you may. But later, Anna."

"Oh,
goodeeeee
!" Poppy scrambled out of Jack's arms and ran after her sisters, their skirts and their laughter flying out behind them, kicking up a flurry of leaves.

Mairey's
stomach churned as she watched them run down the path that led through the woods and across the wheat-golden fields beyond, past the winding glint of the
Stoney
to the slate-roofed cottages of her village.

How long would it take Jack to befoul it as he had Glad Heath? The unstoppable mining magnate—he owned the world; why not her village? Resentment flared and sizzled down her spine and she swung around to glare at him.

"How did you find me, Jack?"

"Madam, if you believe that I wouldn't track you to the ends of the earth, then you misunderstand your worth to me."

"My weight in silver? How flattering."

"Damn you, Mairey! I want the
Willowmoon
Knot."

It was such a devastating echo of a long-ago time—before he'd stolen her heart; before she'd stolen
his,
and his baby and all his dreams.

"What does it matter now?" Shamed to her soul that she had failed both her father and her husband with the same duplicity, Mairey took two steps backward but met a fat maple tree and had to look up at him. "You already have it all."

"All?" His eyes glittered with molten fury, were red-rimmed and haggard. And still he was her coiling dragon, sinuous and unbridled, advancing on her, no sense of propriety to keep him from pressing his hardness against her belly, his mouth against her temple and then the hollow of her neck—an intimacy she craved and met, a richly scented memory that swept her along with the beating of his heart.

"Whom did you sell the Knot to, madam? Tell me, damn you!"

It was the silver he wanted. What did he need with the map when he was standing on top of his bloody treasure?

"I didn't sell the Knot, Jack."

"It's mine, Mairey.
You're
mine. My faithless wife." He cradled her head with the greatest of care, though his anger shook him. "Whatever is yours belongs to me. Your books, your collections, and the goddamned
Willowmoon
Knot."

"Jack, please!"

"You remember the Knot, Mairey: I found it and gave it to you on our wedding night." His mouth came down roughly on hers, made salty by his grief, filling his throat with a desolated moan that made her weep. "You took that from me too, Mairey. All my love, my trust. So I'll have the bloody map from you—as I will have the mine and all its silver when I find it."

When he finds it?
Mairey's
heart battered at her chest, her thoughts flying backward through the last few minutes. That meant he didn't know that they were standing right on top of his damnable mine! If he would only give her a clear moment to think, maybe she could lead him away from it.

Oh, love, we have a chance!

"How did you find me, Jack?"

Jack had wanted nothing more than to hate her, had determined to shut her out of his heart as easily as she'd shut him out of hers. He had expected to follow her glittering path to the
Savoy
,
and from there to the fashionable salons of
Paris
, to a woman ablaze with diamonds and laughing at her success, at him. The antiquarian who had bested the mining baron at his own game.

But he'd found his Mairey standing in a sylvan glade, magnificent in her simplicity, her eyes bright with a pain that echoed like thunder in his heart. She had leaves clinging to her hair, harrowing tears pooling in her eyes.

"You taught me too well, wife. I followed a trail of births, marriages, and deaths. Your father is buried in the churchyard below us, in the parish of Lynne, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Your mother is here, too."

She pushed lightly against his chest. "Please, Jack—"

"And who couldn't follow the trail of three little girls and an overly protective young woman, all of them dressed up as stable hands?" Sweet God, she smelled of the autumn, of
smokey
resins, spicy and vibrant, caught up in the curls at her temple. "It's difficult to hide such gilded tresses as yours, my dear. They make men think of climbing impossibly tall
towers,
and slashing through forests of thorns to impress you with their great love for you. Well, I have such a love for you, Mairey."

She was sobbing, clutching her arms around her waist and shaking her head. "I'm
sony
, Jack. You can't know how much I love you. I didn't want to hurt you."

"But you have—you've wounded me as no one else in the world could."

"Please!" She twisted out of his arms and he let her go. "Jack, I'm sorry it turned out this way."

"This way? Which way is that, Mairey?" He caught her shoulders and turned her. "That you betrayed me for another man's treasure?"

"I didn't! There's no other man! How could you think that?"

"For your own, then? Have you bought your pick and your cart or will you wait until you have found your silver? Damn it, Mairey. There is nothing right about this whole enterprise. I
know
you. I know your heart and
all of its
splendor. I know its fullness, because I've been there, Mairey. I'm
still
there, inside you. In here." He spread his hand over her belly, his heart aching with all that she'd stolen from them. All their hopes, their happiness. For what? "Tell me why you ran from me."

"I can't, Jack. I never should have loved you."

"But you do love me, Mairey. You belong with me."

Yet she also belonged here in this glade, among the willows and the maples, where the sun wove its rich traceries into the paleness of her dress. Was she homesick for this place—for her father and mother? For a peaceful village far from the likes of
Drakestone
House?

He had crossed the same river three times to find her. He had followed a steep trail through a fragrant meadow, climbed a hillside to these woods. Her woods. And her home, it seemed. The shale hills, too, as they rose like the
dorsals
of a serpent into the brilliance of the sky. The sort familiar to him, because at their roots, they would be rich in lead and tin and—

Silver
.

Oh, God. A winding river, a chevron of hills, a forest of willow. His pulse surged with recognition.

"Christ, Mairey. This is where the
Willowmoon
led you."

She gasped, paled, and caught hold of a branch. "Don't be absurd, Jack." But she laughed too brightly, falsely. She paced away through the trees, touching the trunks and fingering the yellowing leaves. "I would have engaged an engineer to meet me here, if I suspected that there was silver hereabout."

"Like hell you would have." He found a likely spot near an outcropping of shale, then knelt down and yanked away the moss, then dug in the sweet-scented earth.

"What are you doing, Jack?"

"I'm looking for my silver mine." Three inches further, and he was scraping at solid, crumbling rock.

"Stop it, Jack!" She was on her knees beside him, had a fierce hold of his wrist. "
Please
don't. If you love me, you'll stop. We can start over again."

But he was already pinching a raisin-sized rock between his fingers, holding its dark, sharp-edged tarnish in front of her. Holy hell! He'd pulled many a nugget from the rivers of the
Yukon
, but none were ever as pure as this.

"Silver, Mairey."

He'd never seen a face so filled with defeat. She hung her head, her shoulders drooping. "Yes."

"You knew where to find the silver from the moment I handed you the Knot. While you lay there in our marriage bed. You recognized the river and this hillside of willows."

She said nothing, but rose wearily and turned away from him to look up at the hills.

"You made plans to leave me, and then you made love to me." He stood, wishing for understanding. "For auld
lang
syne
, Mairey?"

Her prideful shoulders shook with a sob. "Because I love you. And I would miss you."

She hunched over her knees as though he had beaten her, as though be would.

He had his answer, and yet something deep inside of him knew that the answer was wrong. This was Mairey, not some greedy industrialist, not a social climber. She was the clear-hearted woman who loved him, who loved their child and her sisters. Who loved the woods and the innocent
places.
Who had gone to heroic lengths in her devotion to her family and to her father's memory
—

Her father. There it was, splendid and bright. Erasmus Faelyn was buried in the village below.

This was
Mairey's
home, not a coincidental place she had discovered by following an ancient map.

"My God, Mairey. The
Willowmoon
wasn't legend to you; it was fact. You wanted to find the Knot because it would lead someone like me to the fortune in silver lying just beneath the ground."

"Please don't spoil my village." The sun lit her face, making shimmering streams of her tears. "Don't let this beautiful glade come to be like Glad Heath. Let me keep my promise to my father and to my grandfather."

"And to all the
Faelyns
who have ever been? Is that it, Mairey?" Christ, his fierce-hearted wife was a champion like none he had ever known. She hadn't stolen the
Willowmoon
Knot; she'd only returned it to what she knew to be its rightful place, driven by promises far older than his own. No wonder she had known his heart so well.

"Please, Jack. I can't stay here to see it happen."

"I don't imagine you could."

Sweet Mairey. She wasn't a deceitful, dishonorable thief, but an indomitable warrior, prepared to sacrifice her own life to protect her family—an incomparable woman who would love him till the end of time.

"Who owns this land, Mairey?"

"The Crown." She stood her ground, her chin firm but her face streaked with tears. "It always has."

"And the name of your village?"

"It doesn't have one. Our family kept it off the maps that way. An unremarked part of
Yorkshire
,
overlooked for its plainness."

"But loved for its beauty?"

Another shattering sob wracked her, and he loved her for it.

"Please, Jack, don't bring your blight upon my village. Think of Anna and Caro and Poppy, our unborn child—"

"Oh, Mairey, my love." He gathered her into his arms, letting her sob her tears into his waistcoat where they warmed him to the marrow. "I think of them every minute, as I think of my own sisters. I think of the fortune I would gladly give if I could have them back. You see, I always believed that if I opened more mines, one day I might find them."