Page 39 of The Hidden Heart

“You will regret making a fool of yourself,” he retorted grimly. “And that is precisely what you are about to do. I am not bedding down with you tonight, and if you continue in this way, it will simply be embarrassing for both of us.”

“Don’t be so stuffy,” Leona said, running her forefinger teasingly around one nipple. “Come on. We can do whatever you want. How long has it been, Richard, since you’ve been inside a woman, felt her tight and squeezing around you? I can guarantee that you’ve never felt anything like me.”

She reached out and took his hand in hers, pulling it to her breast. Richard jerked it back, cursing. He swung around and marched to his wardrobe, opening it and pulling out one of his dressing gowns. Then he turned and went back to Leona and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling it together in the front, and clamped one of her hands around the lapels to keep it mostly closed.

“Goodbye, Leona,” he said flatly, taking her elbow firmly in his hand and steering her toward his door. “Since you are persisting in this idiocy, I must tell you—I am not interested in bedding you. I feel no desire for you. It is a fool’s mission, and whatever you hope to accomplish by it is not going to work. Now leave.”

He jerked open the door and pushed her out into the hall. “By the way, I notice that your ankle is miraculously healed. I think it would be a good idea for you and your husband to leave first thing in the morning.”

Leona gaped at him in astonishment, her hands falling to her sides, letting the too-large dressing gown slip open. For a long moment they stood there looking at each other. Richard reached for her arm, thinking he was going to have to propel her bodily down the hall to her room.

Just at that moment there were footsteps at the top of the stairs, and both Leona and Richard whirled toward the staircase. Jessica stood there, just turning down the hall toward the bedrooms, frozen in place. She was dressed in one of her plain dark gowns, but her hair had been taken down and brushed for the night and lay caught back loosely at the nape of her neck in a ribbon. In the crook of her arm, she held a book.

She stared at the couple down the hall from her, Richard’s hand reaching out toward Leona, who was dressed in a man’s robe that was hanging open down the front to clearly reveal her nakedness.

Jessica could not even find the air to gasp. He had turned to Leona with his passion!

She turned and ran away from them, not knowing where she was going, desperate only to get away from the scene she had just witnessed. She could not have gone to her room, for it would have meant moving toward them instead of away, as her room lay only one door down from Richard’s. She fled instead to the one place she knew, running down the hall, then up the narrow back stairs to the floor above.

“Jessica!” Richard exclaimed. He started for her, then turned back to Leona. “I want you out! Tomorrow!” he rasped, his face thunderous. “Now get back to your room!”

Leona nodded, too frightened by the look on his face to do anything else. She scampered back to her room, and Richard strode off down the hallway after Jessica. He guessed she would go to the nursery, and when he reached the next floor and saw its door closed, he was sure he was right.

Striding down the hall to the door, he grasped the doorknob and turned, but the door would not open. She had obviously locked it from the inside. He rattled the knob. “Jessica. Open the door. I have to talk to you. Jessica! It wasn’t what it looked like. Damn it, open this door!”

“Go away. I have a right to my privacy,” Jessica said from the other side of the door.

“Let me explain.”

“There is no need to explain to me. What you do is your own business.”

She was right, he knew. He had no obligation to explain anything to her. But he knew that it was unbearable for her to think him a randy lord of the manor who tried to bed a different woman every night. Even worse for her to think that he had wanted Leona tonight the way he had longed for her yesterday.

“I have to talk to you. I am not leaving until you open this door,” he warned.

“Then I am afraid you will look rather foolish, spending the night in the hall,” Jessica replied crisply. “Good night.”

He heard the sound of footsteps inside, then the firm clunk of the inner door to her bedroom closing. Richard stood for a moment, looking at the blank door. Then, with something like a growl, he swung around and stalked off back down the hall to the stairs.

CHAPTER 9

Jessica awakened the next morning to snow. It was falling in great puffy flakes, and already the ground below was almost covered in white. Gabriela came bounding into her room before Jessica had finished dressing, babbling about the snow.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Miss Jessie? Can we go out and take a walk in it later? I just love the snow, don’t you?” She went over to Jessica’s window and looked out, enraptured by the scene. “It makes everything look so pretty, all white and…and sort of mysterious, too. Don’t you think?”

“Mysterious?” Jessica questioned, twisting her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck and securing it with pins. “Why do you say that? It’s so clean looking, I think. Pure.”

“Yes, but it’s the way it covers everything up that makes it mysterious. You know, all the bushes and walls and everything that’s outside are just white lumps, and you’re not sure what anything is. Or where it’s safe to walk. What if you tramp across a snowy piece of ground, only to discover that it covers an icy pond and you fall straight through. Or what if there is a hole, but it looks solid because of the snow, but then, if you step in it, you sink right down.”

“What appallingly morbid thoughts you have. I think you are reading too many of those novels with mad monks and wicked counts.”

Gabriela laughed, unoffended. “No. They never have snow in those. It’s always stormy and raining. Or they live on a cliff above the sea, which pounds at the rocks below.”

“That’s true. And it’s always nighttime and dark.”

“With the candles guttering.”

There was a knock on the door, startling them, and they jumped, then looked at each other and began to laugh. “Come in,” Jessica called.