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She felt the bed give under his weight, felt his hands clasp her about the waist and pull her under him.
“Oh damn,” Hawk said. He’d forgotten the wretched cream.
He frowned into the darkness, but was loath to leave her to fetch it from his bedchamber. He’d just have to make do.
Without further words, or sounds, he jerked up her nightgown and pulled her legs apart. He could feel her trembling, and that slowed him a bit. “Just hold still,” he said, beginning to feel like a half-wit.
He eased his hands between her thighs, his long fingers finally touching her. He slipped his finger into her, and began to move. To his relief, he felt her accommodate him, felt her small body becoming damp.
“Don’t move,” he said, and without another word, came into her.
Frances cried out, and pounded his chest with his fists.
He could feel her pain and for a moment cursed himself for treating her badly. She was so damned small, and he prayed he wouldn’t tear her. Then he was seated to the hilt within her. He stopped and waited.
She was filled with heat and pain and fullness.
“I hate you,” she said, her voice a hissing sob.
He ignored her words and began to move within her.
“You animal!”
He thrust deep, arching his back, and groaned as his seed spewed within her.
He fell on top of her, not really from the strength of his release, but from the vague knowledge that he shouldn’t leave her, not yet. His seed had to take hold in her body.
She lay still as a stone beneath him, her only sign of life the occasional bursts of rasping gasps.
His breathing slowed, and he felt himself retreating.
He pulled out, felt her flinch with pain, and rose.
“Don’t bathe just yet,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Frances.”
Even before he’d closed the adjoining door behind him, he heard her scrambling out of bed and knew she was running to the basin of water on the commode.
So much for wifely obedience, he thought, but said nothing.
He was tired, he realized, very tired indeed. And he was still furious at his father’s duplicity. And Frances was the result of that duplicity.
He sighed and eased himself between the cool covers on his bed. It wasn’t her fault. He’d acted a rutting bastard. Tomorrow night, he would use cream. He wouldn’t hurt her again.
I hate you.
She hadn’t meant that, not really. Still, it bothered him. A wife shouldn’t say such things to her husband, much less mean them. A wife owed her husband respect and obedience.
Life had become excessively grim. Hawk finally fell into a deep sleep, but his dreams were filled with shadowy women who shrank away from him whenever he approached them. He couldn’t make out their faces, but he knew that they were fearful of him, that they wanted to escape him.
10
The march of the human mind is slow.
—EDMUND BURKE
“You have the brain of a damned turtle! No, that isn’t quite true—a turtle keeps his head tucked inside, while yours, Philip Hawksbury, is aboveground and sticking out of your collar!”
Hawk eyed his father with faint interest.
