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He’d brawled in an innyard like a common yokel while his wife looked on. He had
consumed enough wine to float an East Indiaman and, instead of considerately passing out in the bar parlor, he’d let his oafish friends haul him up to the bridal chamber. As though it hadn’t been enough for his new bride to see him filthy and rank with sweat, he must also display himself in all his drink-sodden grossness. Even then, he hadn’t shown the courtesy of collapsing on the floor, well away from her. He’d dropped his great wine- and smoke-reeking elephant’s body onto the bed, and let his dainty lady wife haul off his boots.
His face burned.
He rolled away and stared at the ceiling.
At least he hadn’t violated her. He’d drunk a good deal more than even he was accustomed to, in order to make sure of that. It was a miracle he’d made it up the stairs.
He could have done without that miracle. He could have done without a few other things, such as remembering anything at all. He wished the rest of him were as paralyzed as his left arm.
Satan’s blacksmith was using his head as an anvil again. Lucifer’s chief cook was mixing a foul brew in his mouth. At some point during Dain’s pitifully few hours of sleep, the Prince of Darkness had apparently ordered a herd of raging rhinoceroses to stampede over his body.
Beside him, the source of Dain’s troubles stirred.
Cautiously he hauled himself up, grimacing as thousands of vicious needles jabbed his left arm and burned and pricked his hand.
He got out of bed, every bone, muscle, and organ viciously protesting, and staggered to the washstand.
He heard a rustle of movement from the bed. Then came a sleep-clogged feminine voice. “Do you want any help, Dain?”
Whatever conscience Lord Dain possessed had sunk into a fatal decline and expired sometime about his tenth birthday. At the sound of his wife’s voice offering assistance, it rose, like Lazarus, from the dead. It fastened its gnarled fingers upon his heart and let out a shriek that should have shattered the window, the water jug, and the small washstand mirror into which Dain was gazing.
Yes, he answered silently. He wanted help. He wanted help being born over again and coming out right this time.
“I daresay you’ve the very devil of a head,” she said after a long, silent moment. “Bridget will be up and about by now. I’ll send her down to mix a remedy for you. And we’ll order you a light breakfast, shall we?”
While she spoke, there was more rustling. Without looking, he was aware of her leaving the bed. When she approached to get her dressing gown from a chair, he turned his gaze to the window. Hazy sunlight dappled the sill and floor. He guessed it was past six o’clock. Monday. Twelfth of May. The day after his wedding.
It was also his birthday, he recollected with an unpleasant jolt of surprise. His thirty-third birthday. And he’d wakened in the same condition with which he’d greeted the last twenty, and in which he’d greet the next twenty, he thought bleakly.
“There’s no cure,” he muttered.
She had started toward the door. She paused and turned. “Would you care to place a small wager on that?”
“You’re only looking for an excuse to poison me.” He lifted the pitcher and clumsily splashed water into the basin.
“If you are not afraid to try it, I promise close to full recovery by the time we set out,” she said. “If you are not feeling worlds better by then, you may claim a forfeit of your own choosing. If you are better, you will thank me by stopping at Stonehenge, and letting me explore—without having to listen to sarcastic remarks and complaints about delays.”
His glance strayed to her, then quickly away. But not quickly enough. Her tangled black hair hung loose about her shoulders, and the faint flush of sleep yet clung to her cheeks, a wash of pearly pink on creamy white porcelain. Never had she appeared more fragile. Though tousled, her face unwashed, her slim body sagging with fatigue, she had never, either, appeared more beautiful.
Here were Beauty and the Beast with a vengeance, Dain thought as he met his reflection in the mirror.
“If I’m not better,” he said, “I shall use your lap as a pillow all the way to Devon.”
She laughed and left the room.
At half past seven o’clock in the morning, two miles past Amesbury, Dain was leaning against a monolithic stone on a rise overlooking the Salisbury Plain. Below and beyond spread an undulating blanket of green with a few rectangular patches of bright yellow rape fields. A small number of houses dotted the landscape, along with the occasional lonely heard of sheep or cattle, all looking as though some giant hand had idly strewn them. Here and there, the same careless hand had stuck a cluster of trees against the horizon or thrust it into the cleavage between the gently swelling slopes.
Dain grimaced at his choice of metaphors: blankets and cleavage and big, clumsy hands. He wished he hadn’t swallowed the mugful of odoriferous liquid Jessica had given him. The instant he’d begun to feel better, the itch had started again.
He hadn’t had a woman in weeks…months.
If he didn’t get relief soon, he would have to hurt somebody. A lot of somebodies. Beating Ainswood had not relieved the condition one iota. Drinking himself blind had only deadened the itch temporarily. Dain supposed he could find a proper-sized whore between here and Devon, but he had a disagreeable suspicion that wouldn’t do much more good than fighting or drinking.
It was his slim, woefully fragile wife he wanted, and hadn’t been able to stop wanting from the instant he’d met her.
The place was quiet. He could hear the swish of her carriage dress when she moved. The teasing rustle was coming nearer. He kept his eye on the vista straight ahead until she paused a few feet away.
“I understand that one of the trilithons fell not so very long ago,” she said.
“Seventeen hundred ninety-seven,” he said. “A friend at Eton told me about it. He claimed the stone toppled over in fright the day I was born. So I checked. He was wrong. I was a full two years old at the time.”
“I daresay you beat the true facts into your schoolfellow.” She tilted her head back to look at him. “Was it Ainswood, I wonder?”
Despite a walk in the brisk morning air, she looked tired. Too pale. Shadows ringed her eyes. His fault.
“It was someone else,” he said shortly. “And you’re not to think I brawl with every fool who tries to exercise his feeble wit upon me.”
“You don’t brawl,” she said. “You’re a most scientific fighter. Intellectual, I should say. You knew what Ainswood would do before he knew it himself.”
She moved away, toward a fallen stone. “I’d wondered how you would manage it, with but one arm.” She dropped her umbrella onto the stone and posed, fists clenched, one held closer to her body. “How, I asked myself, can he shield himself and strike simultaneously? But you didn’t do it that way.” She ducked her head to the side, as though dodging a blow, and backed off. “It was dodge and retreat, luring him on, letting him waste his strength.”
“It wasn’t hard,” he said, swallowing his surprise. “He wasn’t as alert as he might have been. Not nearly so quick as he is when sober.”
“I’m sober,” she said. She leapt onto the stone. “Come, let’s see if I’m quick enough.”
She was wearing an immense leghorn hat, with flowers and satin ribbons sprouting from the top. It was tied under her left ear in an enormous bow. The carriage dress was the usual fashionable insanity of flounces and lace and overblown sleeves. A pair of satin straps buckled each sleeve above the elbow, so that her upper arms appeared to be made of balloons. The satin cords lacing up the lower sleeves ended in long tassles that dangled from the middle of her forearms.
He could not remember when he’d seen anything so ludicrous as this silly bit of femininity gravely poised upon a stone in approved boxing stance.
He walked up to her, his mouth quivering. “Come down, Jess. You look like a complete addlepate.”
Her fist shot out. His head went back, reflexively, and she missed…but only by a hairs-breadth.
He laughed—and somethin
g struck his ear. He eyed her narrowly. She was smiling, and twin glints of mischief lit her grey eyes. “Did I hurt you, Dain?” she asked with patently false concern.
“Hurt me?” he echoed. “Do you actually believe you can hurt me with that?”
He grabbed the offending hand.
She lost her balance and stumbled forward and caught hold of his shoulder.
Her mouth was inches from his.
He closed the distance and kissed her, fiercely, while he let go of her hand to wrap his arm around her waist.
The morning sun beat down warmly, but she tasted like rain, like a summer storm, and the thunder he heard was his own need, his blood pounding in his ears, his heart drumming the same unsteady beat.
He deepened the kiss, thirstily plundering the sweet heat of her mouth, and instantly intoxicated when she answered in kind, her tongue curling over his in a teasing dance that made him dizzy. Her slender arms wound about his neck and tightened. Her firm, round breasts pressed against his chest, sending whorls of heat down, to throb in his loins. He slid his hand down, cupping her small, deliciously rounded derriere.
Mine, he thought. She was light and slender and curved to sweet perfection…and she was his. His very own wife, ravishing him with her innocently wanton mouth and tongue, clinging to him with intoxicating possessiveness. As though she wanted him, as though she felt what he did, the same mindless, hammering need.
His mouth still locked with hers, he swept her down from her stony pedestal and would have swept her onto the hard ground as well…but a raucous cry from above jolted him back to reality.
He broke away from her mouth and looked up.
A carrion crow fearlessly alit on one of the smaller bluestones, and offered a beaky profile from which one glinting eye appeared to regard Dain with mocking avian amusement.
Big Beak, Ainswood had called him last night. One of the old Eton epithets—along with “Earwig,” “Black Buzzard,” and a host of other endearments.
His face burning, he turned away from his wife. “Come along,” he said, his voice sharp with bitterness. “We can’t dawdle here all day.”
