Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 02] (28 page)

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Authors: The Duke Next Door

BOOK: Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 02]
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Deirdre was sitting up in the bed, her face drawn but not flushed with fever or pale with blood loss. She was a tangled, unbathed mess and she had never looked more stunning.
Calder approached the bed with slow steps. “Good evening, my lady.” Damn! Too stiff and formal! He tried again. “You look very nice.”
She shot him a disbelieving glance. “Don’t mock me. I feel awful.” She tried to adjust her position, then winced. He rushed forward to help, but she held up a warning hand. “Stop. Don’t touch me.”
At a loss, he backed away a step. “Do you want me to fetch Sophie?”
Deirdre closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Heavens, no. I just got rid of her.” She waved at the chair. “Please sit down, Calder. You’re looming.”
When he was seated, he leaned forward to plead his cause. He took a breath, but hesitated, unsure of what to say.
I love you. I need you. Love me always.
How could he, when he didn’t deserve her? Blast, he hated being so unsure of himself! When things truly mattered to him, he had no words!
Then it was too late. In the moment of his strangled muteness, she spoke first.
“Calder, I think it’s plain that we aren’t going to get on well in this marriage.”
Pain. Tearing, breathless agony. He was not to be forgiven. Dimly he realized that he hadn’t made an actual sound. It was only his heart keening wordlessly and unheard.
“I’ve decided to reside at Brookhaven,” she went on, her tone dull and lifeless, yet like steel beneath. “Phoebe will be there with Rafe, but I’m sure the house is big enough for the three of us. Meggie may come stay anytime she likes.”
Meggie! That was the way through! Even as an inner voice warned him not to, he played that card. “I wed you to be mother to Meggie, not distant aunt.”
“That shameful prod won’t work,” she said flatly. “Meggie needs you more than she needs me.”
The gaze she turned Calder’s way shocked him to his very core. The bold, outrageous woman he knew was gone. In her place was someone cool and hard and distant. Not to mention scornful.
And leaving him.
It is an armor, really … against the world that left her.
That was how she saw him, as a male version of Tessa. He was her worst nightmare come to life. How could he hope to overcome such rigid distaste?
Deirdre waited for his response. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. She’d given up. She had wed a man who didn’t love her and now she had to make the best of it.
She very likely owed him her life, but saved was one thing.
Loved was another thing altogether.
“I see,” he said slowly. “I cannot ask you to reconsider?”
“Reconsider,” like a man bargaining for a horse or a trinket. She uttered a hoarse bark of laughter. “Why should I?”
He nodded. “Of course.” Then he stood. “I should let you rest. We’ll … we’ll resolve the details later.” With a bow, he turned away.
Don’t go! Don’t nod and agree! Stay and fight, damn you! Fight for me!
Calder, it seemed, only fought for his machines.
At the door of her bedchamber, he paused, then turned to speak over his shoulder. He did not meet her eyes. In fact, he’d hardly met her eyes for the entire conversation.
How was she to know what he was truly thinking if he didn’t meet her eyes?
“I spoke to Baskin’s family,” he said gruffly. “You should know that his lack of stability was not your doing. He was always prone to bouts of melancholy. This was not even his first attempt at self-murder. It was simply his most successful.”
Deirdre thought about that for a long moment. Then she let out a slow breath. “Thank you, Calder. That … helps.”
With that, he was gone. She leaned back on her pillows and closed her eyes. There. That was done. She’d made the most practical, intelligent decision. She’d chosen self-preservation over certain heartbreak. What could possibly be wrong with that?
It was a persuasive argument, yet somehow that didn’t stop the tears from leaking out beneath her lashes and streaming down her face.
AGAINST THE PHYSICIAN’s orders, Patricia’s worried pleas and Sophie’s glum predictions, Deirdre was on her feet the next day. Unable to bear the noise of their protests, she finally threw them all out of her bedchamber, with the exception of Meggie, who seemed to share the outrageous notion that Deirdre should get up whenever she felt like it.
Now, slowly and painfully, her shaking legs carrying her on sheer will alone, Deirdre was packing for Brookhaven. Without any real chance of completing the job by herself, the act was more symbolic than anything, but she had to try.
The fine gowns from Lementeur she would leave to Patricia’s capable hands. There wouldn’t be much cause to wear them on the estate, but Deirdre couldn’t bear to waste such exquisite work.
The ruined blue one, however, she packed herself with great care and a few secret sniffles.
“I’ve never seen Papa cry …”
Deirdre turned to gaze at her empty bed in astonishment. “Well, why would you, for pity’s sake!” A man like Calder, weep? She shuddered to think what catastrophe might cause such a shattering of that stone-walled keep.
“ … until he found you dead on the ground.”
The sheer will that was keeping Deirdre’s knees locked and her spine straight left her on a single sharp exhalation.
“He wept … for me?” She sank into the chair that had materialized next to her sickbed sometime in the last week.
Meggie crawled partially out from under the bed and propped her chin thoughtfully on her knuckles. “We didn’t think he would ever stop.” Her eyes were wide and filled with awe at the memory. “But then you went like this—” Meggie demonstrated a harsh inhalation. “And then things happened awfully fast.”
Deirdre stared down at her hands where they lay folded limply in her lap, unsure what to think of this stunning bit of information. “He felt guilt, I suppose.”
Meggie rubbed at her nose. “For what? He didn’t shoot you.”
Deirdre twined her fingers together. “He takes a great deal too much responsibility for things. He is a man of honor and integrity.”
Meggie grinned, a flash of pure evil in her pretty, childish face. “I don’t think Lady Turbantop thought so when he played highwayman and stole her carriage so he could chase down Baskin.”
Stole? Calder?
Highwayman?
Deirdre gazed at Meggie in amazement. Meggie’s grin faltered.
“Oh, blast,” she muttered. “I wasn’t supposed to talk about that.” She started to inch back under the bed, but Deirdre sank to her knees on the floor and gently captured one long black braid in her fist.
“Meggie, tell me everything or your belly will never wrap itself about another piece of my toffee for the rest of your sticky little life.”
“By God, I have had
enough!
Enough, do you hear me?”
Shocked, Calder jerked his head up from his miserable contemplation of some facts and figures he couldn’t have cared less about. In an instant he was out of his chair and across the study. “You little fool!”
Deirdre was braced in the study doorway, white-faced and shaking. He swept her off her unsteady feet and carried her to the parlor where there was a fire and a sofa. “Fortescue!”
The butler appeared instantly, already armed with a blanket and the news that Miss Blake was on her way to fetch the physician.
Deirdre lay limply in his arms but her eyes blazed. “Your physician can jolly well keep his hands to himself until I’ve finished what I have to say!”
Calder made a noise of objection, but Fortescue merely bowed. “As you wish, my lady.” Then he left, shutting the door on his way out.
Calder knelt by the sofa to deposit Deirdre very carefully on the cushions, but she refused to loosen her grasp on his lapels.
“You have to rest,” he protested. “What in the hell were you thinking, taking those stairs? You could have
fainted and broken your neck and then I’d have to live the rest of my life knowing I’d killed you!”
Deirdre tried to shake him, but her arms were too weak and he was too solid. “Shut up, darling. I have something to say before I faint in your arms.”
Darling?
Calder shut up. Easing himself down to sit with her in his lap, he kept her supported in his arms while he clumsily draped the blanket over her. Stupid, mad, stubborn, beautiful creature!
She weakly slapped the blanket away. “Calder, stop fidgeting and listen. I have had enough—no, more than enough—of your inability to speak your mind. We have been at odds with each other from the beginning because we are both too bloody tight-lipped!”
She curled her body carefully so that she faced him, then released his coat in order to cup his jaw in her soft hands. He was relieved to find them normal, not chilled and not fevered. Then he released his watchfulness, for to be touched by her sent his pulse racing!
She gazed into his eyes. “You started hiding before we were even wed. Let me tell you, my love, my stupid, stubborn darling—hiding will do you no good now. I am going to tell you the complete and entire truth, every minute of every day. You’ll hear so much truth you’ll run the other way when you see me coming.”
Never. Having her in his arms again—feeling the curve of her backside against his lap, the weight of her breast against his bicep—
“Calder! Pay attention.”
He blinked. “So sorry. You were saying?”
She frowned at him. “I’m saying I love you. I want to live with you. I want to be your wife, your lover, the
mother of your child.” She hesitated, a shimmer of doubt in her eyes for the first time. “But only if you love me as well.”
His heart rose mute in his inarticulate throat. He choked on the poetic and beautiful words of love he wished he could cast into her lap like a thousand gold coins. He swallowed, but where to start? His feelings were too intense, too overpowering—he didn’t know the words for such a longing!
She seemed to see some of his struggle in his face, for her eyes warmed with humor. “Say, ‘I love you, Deirdre’,” she prompted.
He cleared his passion-clogged throat. “I love you, Deirdre.”
That was easier than he’d thought it would be. He tried again. “I love you very much.” Still, the words were too simple, too tiny to encompass the depth of what he wanted to tell her.
He tried. “I—you were so ill—I thought—I found you on the heath—and then you wanted to leave—”
“Shh.” She pressed tender fingers over his lips. “Don’t rush yourself. There will be time to practice.” She twinkled at him, her spirit undiminished in her shadowed eyes. “Years, possibly.”
Years. At that stunning realization, something eased in Calder. They had the rest of their lives together. There was plenty of time to get it right.
Then, suddenly, he knew precisely what he most needed to tell her. “I did kill Melinda. I ignored and neglected her, yet when she left me I pursued her. The carriage turned over because I was gaining on it, drunkenly whipping my horse to a reckless speed. That regret was the most devastating thing I’d ever known … until
I met you.” He slid her from his lap, then knelt on the floor before her. “I am wreckage before you. You have broken me, my love. All the walls of my life have come tumbling down and I stand in the rubble.”
She smiled proudly. “You stand freed in the rubble.” She wrapped his hands in hers. “You were already broken, my darling. Broken and badly mended. I had to take apart the pieces so you could become whole again.”
He bowed his head over their clasped hands. “So what will hold me together now? I don’t have the strength to rebuild myself, I fear.”
She slipped his arms about her waist, then lay her head on his shoulder. “We both are in pieces, I think. Love will have to be the glue.”
He gusted a sigh as his arms tightened carefully about her. “Well, we’ve plenty of that lying about, at least.”
She choked out a damp laugh. “That we do, my darling. That we do.”
Then she glanced down. “Calder, I hate to break this to you, but it might be some time before I can take care of that properly.”
He laughed out loud, a deep rumble that brought her a whole new pleasure. She made an instant decision to make him laugh often.
“I’m sorry, my love,” he said, his smile half-eager, half-embarrassed at his obvious erection. “But you do bring out the Beast in me.”
The dream was of a place she’d never seen, although she knew it to be Brookmoor in her mind. Deirdre walked through a lonely wild space, with the wind pulling at her hair and the heather higher than her knees.
“Mama!” The small voice was hardly louder than a distant seabird’s cry, yet she turned immediately toward it.
“Meggie?”
“Over here, Mother.”
Over the softly rolling heather a girl came closer. She was tall and lovely, nearly a woman. Meggie’s dark eyes flashed laughter as her hair was whipped about her face by the wind.
“Mama, look what I found!”
Deirdre looked down at the child who clutched at Meggie’s skirts with one hand and cradled something in the other. “What is it, my darling?”
The boy looked up at her with great pride. “It’s a bug!”
Deirdre peered at the slimy tail whipping indignantly from the boy’s grubby fist. “It’s a salamander.”
He held it out proudly. “It’s for you!”
“Oh, my,” she replied faintly. “Thank you so much.”
He waited, fist extended. She took a breath and held out her cupped hands. The wiry black creature dropped into them and went still as it assessed the new threat.
She was very proud that she didn’t drop it.
Meggie chortled. Deirdre shot her a “just you wait” glare, then smiled at her tiny son. “It’s marvelous. Wonderful. I love it.”
Then she leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered in his ear, “I think Meggie’s envious. Why don’t you catch another for her?”
The child gazed up at her with Calder’s dark eyes. “And one for Papa, too?”
She caressed his dark hair while surreptitiously letting the little creature slither to freedom at her side. “Oh, yes. For Papa, too. He’s been simply longing for one.”
Meggie’s tinkling laugh rang out over the moor to dance with the wind … .
“Shh, Lady Margaret. His lordship and milady are still asleep,” Patricia scolded with a smile in her voice.
Deirdre opened her eyes to the dimness of the private space behind the closed bed curtains. She was curled against Calder’s large warm back, skin to skin with him. Drifting in and out of sleep still, she listened while Patricia shuffled Meggie out of the marquis’s bedchamber and shut the door quietly.
There was no need to wake yet. She could sleep the morning away if she liked. Fuzzily, she wondered what Brookmoor looked like. She wondered if it was windy … and covered in heather … .
Reaching for his arm, she tugged Calder about to cradle her and snuggled deep into his sleepily welcoming arms. Hours yet to sleep …
Suddenly her eyes flew open in surprise. Scrambling
naked from the bed, she raced across the grand chamber to the tiny room that held the commode.
Calder joined her seconds later, still naked, his brow furrowed over sleepy, worried eyes. “You’re ill. I’ll send for the physician!”
Deirdre wiped her mouth and sat back on her heels. “No … I think I’m all right now.” She shook her head. “That was so odd. You’d almost think I was …” Her heart stuttered. Her breasts were sore and she’d been quite inclined to sleep—
She lifted her head swiftly to gaze at him, hope dawning within her.
Something flashed bright in those dear, dark eyes. “That would be … quite delightful.”
Deirdre pressed her palms to her belly, paying no mind at all to the long jagged scar there, healed for months. Calder’s arms came about her as he knelt behind her, covering her hands with both of his.
“Is it possible, do you think?” His voice was careful, but she heard the joy behind it.
“Why not?” She leaned her head back against his bare shoulder, feeling his strength surround and support her. “Sophie never did put much stock in doctors.” She closed her eyes. In her memory came the faintest call, hardly louder than a distant seabird’s cry.
Why not indeed?

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