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“I will see this through.” Her voice was unsteady and she tried to smile. She glanced at his…there…She thought she could see its shape beneath the robe but that was probably just the candlelight and her feverish imagination. “It would help if I knew why.”
“Because it’s splendid.”
Wicked and playful again, but also sharp and intense, and his eyes, so heated, calling to her body, amplifying those sensations, uncomfortable and yet, well, almost splendid too.
“How can it be…Oh, never mind. I don’t want…I mean.” She took a deep breath, tried again. “Tonight. Your father. What…” She caught herself tracing the outline of his fingers on her thigh and stopped. “He did wrong, but he is still your father,” she said. “And surely you owe some of your current success to whatever reparations he made you.”
“Reparations? Oh, the innocence.” He rolled onto his back again and folded his arms behind his head, staring at the pink canopy. The sleeves of the banyan fell back to reveal his forearms, incongruous against the pink silk brocade of the bedcover. “As soon as our parents’ marriage was annulled—once it was proven that Father’s first wife had died only the year before, so our mother was never legally his wife—Bram, Isaac, and I were hauled out of school like criminals and sent back to Treyford Hall. We expected our mother to be there, but she had run off somewhere with Miriam—that’s my sister; she was four then. The house was shut up, no servants but a couple of old retainers, and all anyone told us is that solicitors were seeking some cousin or other to take us in.”
“But your father?”
“We never heard from him again.”
“Oh, Joshua.”
He still seemed at ease, but his voice was flat and hard, and she fancied she could sense his tension.
“That first night in that big empty house…There was no fire, so I tried to light one, but I didn’t know how to,” he went on, still talking to the pink canopy. “I knew the theory, but had no practice. All my life to that point, other people had done everything for me. There we were, my two little brothers and me, with nothing, and I thought—if I can just light this fire…”
She pictured a dark-haired youth staring at the fireplace with such intensity it might have burst into flames from his glare alone.
“And did you?” she prompted.
He snorted. “Felt like hours before I even got any sparks from that blasted flint. Striking it over and over until my fingers were sore and numb. Until then, I had never realized how useless I was. But yes, I got it lit in the end.”
The words sounded like the punchline to a bitter, humorless joke.
“I don’t understand. If your father did not help you, how did you get from three disowned boys to wherever you all are now?”
“Another man came,” he said quietly. “Another man, whom we had never met before, but who was disgusted by the whole business. He came to Treyford Hall, unannounced, uninvited, and he stayed and talked to us about it, when no one else would, and he vowed to help us carve out new lives. Isaac, he was only ten, he wanted to join the Navy and travel the world, and Bram, he was twelve, he wanted to go to India and catch tigers, and I wanted…” He paused. “I said I wanted to be rich. That man owed us nothing, but he came to help us anyway. The best man I ever knew.”
Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them away. “Papa? He helped you? That was the debt you owed him?”
“Curse you. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“I’m not crying.” She rested her cheek on her knees. “That’s why you married me.”
“I married you because he asked me to marry you and I’d have done anything for him. And speaking of marriage and debts—”
Oh dear. His mood had shifted again.
“You’ve delayed long enough, Mrs. DeWitt. It’s time for my reward.”
* * *
He moved like a cat,all power, no effort, one moment lying on his back, the next kneeling down in front of her, hands resting on his thighs.
Cassandra mirrored his position, feeling a secret, unexpected thrill. He dwarfed her massive bed, through his physical size and sheer energy. She enjoyed looking at him, she realized. She enjoyed the long, lean shape of him, the contours of his broad shoulders draped in dark-red silk. She enjoyed the warmth that radiated off him. The quick flash of his smile. Those gleaming coffee eyes. His intensity. His focus. Even his discombobulating changeability. This was uncomfortable but surely it was good. Ladies never spoke of lust, were taught that it was shameful. But it must be good, she decided now, though she would die sooner than admit it.
Maybe he would hold her first. Or kiss her. That would be nice. It was so long since anyone had made her feel special.
She waited. He drummed his fingers on his thighs and looked about the room. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he did not know how to proceed either.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to do next.”
“Perhaps I should go first. To show you.”
Her imagination tried to picture that and rebelled. “How can you reach?”
