All Through the Night (30 page)

Not once but three times he brought her to the edge until finally, the last time, as he held her squirming body beneath his big one, her eyes snapped open. Her feverish, accusing gaze riveted on his face.

“Now.” She sounded defiant as she jerked her hands free of his. She twined her arms around his neck and lifted her body, crushing her soft breasts against his chest. Her thighs wrapped high on his flanks, and deep within her, he felt her muscles contract like a hot, wet silk fist around him.

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she echoed almost angrily, hitching her hips.

Only another thrust, she thought frantically. Just another thrust. Just a few more seconds. His head arched back and his lips curled, revealing his teeth clamped tightly together.

He looked so strong and beautiful straining above her, his chest dense with hard flat muscle, his pectorals snaked with veins, and his throat ruddy and suffused with blood. She sobbed, her hips rising aggressively, seeking an end to the interminable wanting.

“Jack!” Some desperate note in her voice recalled him from the interior place he’d gone.

His eyes flew open. “Yes,” he rasped. “Anne. My own.”

He lifted her, twining his long arms around her and rocking back on his heels, thrusting deep within her one last time. His body shuddered with his release and it became her own, catapulting her into a dizzying, blinding whirlpool of pure sensual pleasure.

He cradled her in his arms and traced the contour of her temple with his fingertip. Her breathing was shallow and one of her breasts was scratched from his beard. She’d live. He wished he could say the same about himself. He could not ever remember anything to compare with what they’d just shared.

Her eyes drifted open. Her gaze was lambent and sated.

“I love you.” He didn’t even realize he’d spoken aloud until he saw the words register in her eyes. A shadow clouded their brilliancy and then pain and finally they grew brilliant again, this time with tears. He cursed himself for being so obtuse, so precipitate.

He smiled sadly. “It’s not worth tears, Anne,” he said ruefully. “I’ve not all that much of a heart to love with. It’s a barren bit of landscape, my heart. Post-harvest chaff mostly.”

His dull attempt at wit did not raise even a trace of a smile. If anything her tears flowed faster, hurting him more than anything had hurt him in a long, long while.

“Don’t cry, Anne. Our marriage is lawful but I wouldn’t ever try to keep you with me against your will. You’re free to go wherever and whenever you’d like. I’ll not raise a hand to stop you or raise my voice to call you back. Don’t worry, Anne, I’m not asking you to love me.”

She lifted her hand and made a weak fist, drumming his chest. He stared at her in surprise.

“You idiot,” she said with a sob, “I’m not crying because I don’t love you, I’m crying because I do. I do. And because I didn’t think I
could
love.”

Nothing had ever felt so important or so fragile. He must be careful, as wary and wise as he’d ever been before.

“Why would you think that?” he asked. Without the heat of his body to warm her, gooseflesh had risen on Anne’s naked skin. He picked up his shirt and draped it over her shoulders.

“Why would you think you were not capable of love?” he repeated softly.

She dashed some tears from her cheeks with her fingers and sniffed. “Because I married a saint and I didn’t love him.”

He waited, remaining carefully silent.

“And I fell in love with the man who hunted me. The man sent to kill me. It’s wrong.”

Seemingly casual, he guided her arm into a shirtsleeve. His heart beat thickly in his chest. “Why do you say that?”

“It is,” she said, looking at him as if he were being purposefully obtuse. “I married Matthew because he was handsome and rich and so very, very far above my touch.”

“And because you loved him,” Jack said evenly.

“I thought I loved him,” she said, her eyes mirroring her confusion.

“But he did not believe you.” He pulled her remaining bare arm through the other sleeve and began fastening her shirt. He looked up. She was staring at him as if transfixed.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve listened. I’d developed a rather personal interest in the matter,” he said with a crooked smile, “and I tried to mesh what I knew of Anne Wilder, what I’d heard of Anne Tribble, and what I recognized in the thief. You were running from something. I grew to suspect it was from the paragon whom you’d married. Or his corpse.”

She tried to pull away from him but he wouldn’t let her go. “You obviously hold yourself accountable for your husband’s death. Or should we call it what he meant you to call it—suicide?”

Her lids fluttered shut, the pain on her face was excruciating to witness. Silently Jack cursed Matthew Wilder.

“At first it was like a fairy tale,” Anne said, her eyes still closed. The words came out slowly, as if they might choke her. “He did everything for me. Everything. And all he asked was that I love him. I thought I did.” Her brow was lined with consternation. “But he saw something, he somehow knew that it wasn’t
true
love, that what I felt wasn’t real, because he doubted it almost from the first.”

“Yes?” Jack said.

“He would ask me if I loved him. All the time, he would ask me if I loved him.” Her voice held an echo of exhausted harassment. “But if I answered yes, he’d be hurt and miserable.”

“Why?” Jack asked.

“He said that if I
really
loved him, he wouldn’t have had to ask me. Yet when I told him I loved him, he would probe, he would be suspicious, he’d keep asking me if I were sure. And then ...”

“And then you were not sure,” Jack said. And he’d thought Jamison was a monster. “And how did he react? By withdrawing from you?”

Anne shook her head in violent negation. “No! No. He wooed me.” A look of utter exhaustion filled her face. “He courted me all over again. He gave me gifts, took me traveling, and plied me with attention. He did everything in his power to make me love him.”

Her voice grew flat, lifeless. “And then he decided that I was not capable of love. That I wasn’t ever going to be able to harbor for him even a degree of the love he felt for me. Because I’m not really gentry, you know. And my sort aren’t capable of experiencing the same level of emotion that bluebloods can.”

“Did he hate you?” Jack asked. His chest felt tight and he waited for the pain to wash over him and be gone. But it stayed, building in his chest.

“No.” Once more she shook her head, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. She stared off into some distant past, and when she began to speak her voice had gained an edge of vehemence. “He still loved me. My deficiency didn’t affect his . . .” She fumbled for the proper word.

“ ‘Superiority’?” Jack supplied softly.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “yes, I suppose so, though he never put it that way. It was his curse, he said. To love better than he was loved. But it was a curse he would live with. We would just go on that way forever.”

She looked at him with a blasted, cornered expression.

“But
I
couldn’t go on that way!” she exclaimed. “One day, after one of our scenes, I told him I wouldn’t hurt him with my presence any longer and that we’d both suffered enough. I told him I was going back to live with my father. He begged me not to. He swore he couldn’t live without me. But, Jack, I could
not
stay there any longer. It was killing me! And I told him so.”

“So you left,” Jack said.

“I didn’t have a chance. He’d spent a few years in the navy as a youngster and he had some sort of connections at the Admiralty and ... I don’t know.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “Within the week he’d somehow finagled a captaincy. Jack, he wasn’t fit to command. He led his crew to disaster and himself to death.”

Narcissistic fool. So bent on punishing Anne that he dragged innocent men to their deaths to do it. Well, he’d done a fine job of punishing her. Might he find that comforting in whatever corner of hell he occupied.

“He wrote a letter, of course.” Jack’s jaw was tight with fury. He’d seen much evil in his life. He’d shaken hands with many devils and spoken with Satan in a hundred different guises. He thought he’d known its every aspect, but he’d yet to see this one.

“Yes.” Anne nodded.

She didn’t even have to tell him what it said. There would have been the thinly veiled accusation, the suggestion that if she’d been different, tried harder, he wouldn’t have been thrown into despair, and then there would be a long, impassioned declaration of undying love and prayers for her happy future. Jack felt physically ill.

“And he called what he felt for you love?” he asked incredulously.

Anne looked up, staring at him in amazement, reading his fury. “Yes.”

“Matthew didn’t love you, Anne. He wanted to own your soul, and when he couldn’t, he wanted to destroy it. And damn him to hell, he very nearly did.”

“No, Jack,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “He wasn’t evil. He just wanted something from me that I couldn’t give.”

He wouldn’t convince her of Matthew’s malevolence. He could only hurt her by trying. So he told her what she needed to hear, the simple truth. “No one could have given him what he wanted, Anne.”

She stared at him, releasing a long, shaking breath. Her back tensed, her shoulders went back as if she were preparing to accept a verdict.

“I never told anyone. I never said a word, not even to myself, but, Jack”—she turned her head slowly, her eyes stark—“I
hated
living with him. I hated the presents and the parties and the trips and the gowns.” With each word, her voice gained strength and passion. “I hated his accusing glances and his suffering silences. I hated his sobbed pleas and vicious tantrums. I
hated
his adoration. It smothered me, it crushed me, and it choked the very soul of me. I tried not to.” Her fingers dug deeply into her flesh and she began rocking back and forth in her seat. “God help me, I tried not to hate him!”

Tears began racing down her face. She made no attempt to wipe them away. She let them fall, hot, salty rivulets running from her eyes.

“It’s all right, Anne.”

“I swear, I swear to God, I didn’t want him dead! Everyone told me how lucky I was to be so adored. And they envied us. You could see it, Jack. They envied me and I would have traded places with any one of them!”

“I know,” he murmured. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. He reached out and gently drew her into his embrace. She clung to him, crying softly now, the poisonous guilt and remorse finally spending itself in tears. And after a while she lifted her head and searched his face.

“Jack,” she said, her gaze questing and somber. “I love you.”

He weighed carefully the responses he might give her: vows of love, a promise for the future, pledges of fidelity, guarantees that her hurt would fade. But he couldn’t promise any of those things but the first, and that she already knew. So finally he gave the one response he could and it proved the most healing one of all.

“I know,” he said, gazing steadily into her eyes. “I know.” And Anne smiled.

Anne’s hand rested lightly on Jack’s forearm as he escorted her down one of Windsor Palace’s long, silent hallways. A sepulchral hush permeated the old palace though scores of servants and attendants hurried among the rooms and chambers, all assiduously at work on the monumental day-to-day tasks required in running a palace.

They came to a closed door. The liveried footman standing beside it bowed and preceded them in. “Colonel and Mrs. Henry John Seward,” he announced loudly.

Inside a small, lavishly appointed chamber a gloriously handsome young footman stood behind the chair of a stout, balding man. Farther in stood Jamison, leaning heavily on his silver-headed walking cane. And at the far end of the room, her wizened and hunched body huddled beneath mismatched clothes, quaked Mrs. Mary Cashman.

She spied Anne and pitched herself forward. “That bald gent comes to me down t’Home, Mrs. Wilder. I thought he was from the Admiralty and that they finally be givin‘ me my Johnny’s back pay but they drug me here. And I don’t mind tellin’ ye, I’m scared.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Cashman,” Anne said soothingly. “Let’s find you a seat until all of this comes clear.” She escorted the frightened woman to a small upholstered chair and bid her sit while she found her something to drink.

She returned to Jack’s side. “Jack, do you think that footman could possibly find Mrs. Cashman—”

“Bastard.”

Anne spun around. Jamison moved toward them across the floor, his progress painfully slow.

“Ungrateful, thankless bastard,” he repeated coldly.

In alarm, Anne looked at Jack. Not a flicker of emotion passed over his lean countenance, not regret or injury.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Jamison did not spare her so much as a glance. To him, she was supremely inconsequential. All that mattered was Jack and the letter.

For the first time, Anne realized that in his own, corrupt fashion Jamison cared for Jack as one cares for a possession of great and irreplaceable value.

“Do you?” Jamison demanded again.

“Indeed I do, sir,” Jack replied calmly. “I am seeing that some personal correspondence completes its journey.”

“The owner of that letter could bring down the government,” Jamison said.

“I doubt that, sir,” Jack said.

“Didn’t you read it?” he asked incredulously. His voice was low; no one farther away than Anne was would be able to hear his words. “Do you know what that letter suggests? It suggests that the government, in complicity with the royal family, knowingly hanged an innocent man.”

“Which they did.”

“That’s not the point,” Jamison said angrily, stamping the end of the cane against the floor. The sudden sharp sound echoed in the big, quiet room. “We needed to make an example to these revolutionaries. John Cashman was not framed. He
was
in that gunsmith’s shop.”

“John Cashman was drunk, angry, and not in full possession of his faculties at the time of his ‘crime.’ I saw him hanged, you know.” And now Anne heard a thread of anger, intense and white-hot, enter Jack’s rasping voice. “I could not believe you were actually going to allow his death, so I went and instead witnessed your depravity.”

“Bah!” Jamison swung away, but when Jack did not recall him, he stopped and turned again. “This letter could ruin us all. I could have used it to good advantage. I could have secured a position of power from which I could achieve great things.”

“As I said, I think you far overestimate its importance.”

“Are you mad?” Jamison asked.

Jack simply returned his gaze with his own cool, disinterested one.

This is how he survived, thought Anne. He’d buried himself; he hid his humanity from that evil man.

“Well, you’ve done it now, Jack.” Jamison shook his head. “You and your bride have done it now.”

Something in the way he glanced at her made Anne shiver. It struck Jack, too, because he moved closer. Jamison saw his protective attitude. He smiled.

“I hope this noble gesture is worth it, Seward. I hope you—”

“His Majesty, the king.”

The announcement brought every head swinging toward a small door in the back of the room. A footman entered followed by a huge, fresh-faced young man carrying a small, elderly man draped in silk bedrobes.

The king, Anne thought breathlessly. He was pink and wrinkled and wizened-looking. Long wisps of white hair fell to his shoulders. His eyes were sunken and filmed over with a milky glaze. Completely blind, Jack had said.

Anne swept into a low, formal curtsey and Mrs. Cashman, seeing her action, stumbled from her chair and did her best to emulate it. The man who had preceded the king’s entrance saw them and smiled.

“Your Majesty.” The portly balding man who’d been sitting quietly watching Jamison, Jack, and Anne struggled to his feet. He bowed, followed by Jack and the blond footman and finally Jamison.

“What is this all about? Who is here?” The imperial voice had not lost its timbre or its accent.