Face to Face (The Deverell Series Book 2) (6 page)

Her temper flaring, Merry snapped with more disquiet than she wanted. “All will be well for who? The spider or the fly?”

She looked over her should at Varian.

Attractive creases softly bracketed his smile. “Is that how you see us? Which one am I?”

The telltale blush stained Merry’s cheeks like cheap rouge. It wasn’t the words, so much as how he said them, which sent her senses into greater disarray. And he was sitting too close, far too close, and his expression at times could be so cleverly misleading.

His watching gaze was thorough, and Merry, having more than a nodding acquaintance with the swift processes of his mind, worked quickly from his embrace.

“Was there something you wanted?” she said with dignity, and received back a long, hot stare.

“I can think of no less than a hundred things. Would you like me to impart them to you?”

“What I would like is for you to leave my bedchamber,” she said, her expression angry and sparkling at once.

Varian’s hands found her shoulders in a movement that was swift and Merry was drawn back into him before she had time to stop him. His mouth on hers exploded the happy fiction that understanding Varian’s games would make her more able to fight him. Not breaking his kiss, he somehow managed to pull to the floor a pillow from the chair and maintain his embrace. He guided her downward until she was curled into his side with her cheek on his chest. His hand made a wayward caressing motion against her back.

Lifting her chin so she could meet his eyes, he was smiling when he whispered, “You are a very stubborn girl, but you are starting to show promise.”

Merry’s first instinct, prompted by the slumberous warmth of his voice, was to melt against him. Her second was to hit him, and it was not until she felt a sudden pain in the curl of her fingers she realized which one she had acted upon. It was far from the first time she’d tried to hit him, but it was the first time he’d let her. She found the experience galling, since he only laughed and her hand smarted painfully.

“Damn you. I hate it when you laugh at me when you make me angry.” She was on her feet, screaming the words so loudly that the sisters below could surely hear. The pug skittered across the room under the bed. Her eyes were murderous as she stared down at him. “Isn’t there another woman out there you can go torture with your nonsense. I am tired of your games.”

Varian’s answering expression was roguishly unregretful. The smile hovered at the edges of his lips and was only slightly held at bay. His black orbs fixed on her like sparkling berries and, on top of everything else, the urge to laugh was fighting her temper.

“You are deranged. Do you know that?” she announced.

Merry was above him, hands on hips, a frustrated martyr in every way. God help him, he didn’t want to laugh. Varian couldn’t stop himself.

His laughter made her crazy. She tried to hit him again and he managed to catch her arms. She began to fight harder. He tried to choke back his laughter.

“Let me go,” she said through her struggles.

Varian pulled her down to him. “Merry. Stop it. Stop fighting me. I adore you.”

She jerked out of his arms then, her heart beat a frantic rhythm, her eyes round with frustration. “Adore me? You kidnapped me, you keep me your hostage, play your nonsensical games with me, and now you have the audacity to order me to stop fighting you. How dare you say with perfect seriousness that you adore me? I at last understand why I do not understand you. You are deranged.”

There was a faintly apologetic pause. Then, he said, “I admit that ours has not been a conventional courtship.”

The last thin thread of emotional steadiness fled Merry as she met his warmly animate gaze. Her blood flamed in answer, but logic steadied her with the warning not to trust him.

“Court me, indeed. I don’t know what this new game of yours is, sir, but I will not play it.” Her fingers had curled back into fists.

His response was not one she welcomed. She had amused him. She tried to hit him again and Varian rolled onto his side to avoid her tiny fist, then trapped both her wrists in a single hand. He studied her impassively. Finally he said, “You don’t have to hit me to protect your virtue, Little One. I can see this won’t be a simple adjustment. Though I never anticipated the adjustment to be so difficult for you. You have been pursuing me for months, my dear. This is your game we play.”

Merry puffed up like an over-inflated balloon. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard.”

She jerked her arms free from his hold and sprang to her feet above him. Against her better judgment, she dared to look down on him.

A smile warmed the black depths of his eyes, in a way she had never seen before. “Be fair, Little One,” he whispered affectionately. “We have to find some way to settle your fate. I have decided to be obliging to your wants.”

She shook her head, with no reasonable thought on how to manage him. “You could oblige me back to Falmouth.”

Varian’s smile this time was breathtaking, lush with emotion. He lifted a hand, his fingers moving in a gentle tease over the delicate curve of her bare calf. “Love, it is the only option you have left me with. Total surrender to Merry. Battle done. Now, give me your mouth, Little One, and let me adore you.”

The feel of Varian’s fingertips on her leg was an unfortunate distraction. “I do not wish to be adored…” and before Merry could finish her words, he was kissing her again.

~~~

Last night they slept together, her body curled into Varian on the floor. The next morning Merry woke without him. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, to find a quilt laid across her and pug soundly sleeping in the space where Varian had been. She touched the floor. It still held his warmth. It had not been long since he’d left her.

There was something very intriguing about the night that had just passed, about slumbering against the firm flesh of a man, feelings his arms holding her, and listening to the pattern of his breath moving in concert with her own. Her quickening pulse warned she had already followed him too far into the web he was spinning. Still, Merry could not stop herself from pushing pug aside, to lean into the pillow and find the whisper of his scent there.

There bloomed a hungry ache deep within her that never freed her of her yearning for him. Yet oddly, without her knowing how it had come to be, the trapped feeling of loving Varian had vanished with the night. She felt a change in her body, a wild giddy weightlessness, since she knew it was not only possible to feed her hunger, but her want to feed it was shared by him as well.

Knowing it was possible to surrender to her desire for Varian—that he wanted her to—was a dangerous thing. She resolved to avoid him and stay busy this day.

She worked with the sisters on recipe books, neatly trimming the handwritten sheets and pasting them onto the pages. She took a morning walk with them in the fields and continued her lessons on tobacco planting. By midmorning, she could not count the number of times she carefully peeked to see if Varian had returned from wherever he went each morning.

Last night he had told her he adored her and held her through the night. This morning he had left her before she woke. The question—what drew him away every morning—changed after the darkness spent in his arms. What drew him away from her? That made it a mystery Merry was more than a little anxious to solve.

After they finished their walk in the fields, the women found a morning tea awaiting them in the front garden. The garden was shaded of vine climbing trellises and magnolia trees in purple bloom. The flower beds were brilliant of color with opening buds of roses, pansies and wildflowers.

The sisters went eagerly to the benches.

Merry glanced at the meticulously raked walkway. “Where does the Captain go each day?”

Aline, busy with teapot in her grubby fingers, nodded with her head toward the east. “Up that small rise to the top of the hill. It’s a long walk. You would do better to be patient and wait for his return.”

Patient, Merry was not.

She soon found herself climbing the gradual incline of the path that disappeared beyond the carefully tended grounds of Winderly. The landscape was lush and natural, though even here, far from the main house, the walkway was expertly tended. It seemed to go endlessly into the forest, and she more than half suspected Aline had been right, it would have been better not to have started this.

Perspiration beaded Merry’s upper lip, and she wished she’d taken Aline’s worn straw hat since the sun high in the sky was blistering today. She’d been walking over an hour before it occurred to her she had no idea what she’d find, and that it was definitely not among her wisest moves to give into her impulse to discover the cause of Varian’s mysterious absence each day. After the night she had passed in his arms, she did not trust her heart not to behave foolishly.

She was about to turn back when she spotted a stone bench on a patch of green grass surrounded by bushes of yellow roses. Then not far beyond it, beneath the arching branches of trees, was a small chapel. There was just such a chapel at Merrick Hall, where her Grandmamma went every morning to pray in faithful devotion to her grandfather.

Merry felt her emotions commence to frantically churn again. This she understood without effort, though finding the chapel was no more a comfort than what she had expected to find here.

It was another woman Varian went to each day. But it was not a mistress; it was his wife. And Ann held his heart in a way no flesh and blood woman could ever claim him. Indy had warned her about this. Indy had warned and been right about many things.

She could not stop herself from going to the entrance to see if Varian was inside. He was a lone figure on his knees, head bowed before God as he quietly prayed. Merry’s eyes rounded in surprise. The infamous pirate Morgan at pray. Seeing him thus rattled her in a way unexpected, and she cautiously eased back out of view.

Gathering her skirts up in her hands, she ran from the chapel. For some elusive reason, she stopped at the bench on the grass and settled herself there. The world was quiet all around her, so quiet she could hear the distant bird songs, the gentle swish of air from the valley below, and the sound of her own blood gushing through her veins.

She was anything but quiet internally, and could not begin to understand why this discovery distressed her. A man in pray. Her stomach was taut and tears burned behind her lids. What a foolish thing to become distraught over.

The sky was a rich oiled blue and the breezes licked with the rich scent of newly turned soil. Merry could understand the allure of this place, why Varian had built the chapel here and planted the small rose garden, which surely was intended for Ann. It was a peaceful place, of richly colored beauty and solitude. She was well aware Varian had loved his wife, and yet this confused her more than any other thing she had learned of him. What manner of man was Varian truly?

Some time passed before Varian exited the chapel. He settled on the bench beside her, his blood-warmed fingers a feather-light lay atop her hand. He didn’t speak and she couldn’t speak, but the quiet they shared had a strange kind of blending closeness to it.

Through the fabric of her gown, Merry could feel the long elegant muscles of his body, his awareness of her and what she now knew was a potent intimacy that was
them
. It came to her that what she was feeling was no surprise to him, he had felt
them
first and understood it, this blending closeness in the quiet that was them.

The wind tousled his hair, and in his sculptured face his black eyes had an intent, peaceful glow. Twice her eyes strayed to his face and then lowered in a shaken way. He was not angry she had followed him here. He had expected her to, and she knew he had wanted her to and had led her here.

His voice, though quiet, was powerful. “Why did you not come in?”

“I don’t know.” As she inspected his hand atop hers it occurred to her his stillness and quiet were deliberate. His question was not as simple as her answer and she added, “It seemed a private thing you do. I did not wish to disturb you.”

His smile was warm, understanding and very human. “All men, Merry, pray at the moment of their death. A wise man prays long before that moment.”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip. “It was not so much the praying, but why you pray that made me not wish to disturb you.”

Varian’s heavy lidded eyes widened in response. “I pray for wisdom, counsel, and forgiveness for many things in my life. You would not have disturbed me, Little One.”

It was a cleverly worded answer, true and yet evasive. Merry didn’t miss one nuisance. “You pray for her. To be close to Ann in the only manner left to you.” Her eyes shifted to the roses. “Just as you had this bench placed here and the garden planted. For her.”

In a low tone that was oddly devoid of emotion, he said, “Yes.”

A truthful answer, direct. It was the last thing Merry expected or was prepared to deal with. Her love for him, long denied, was urging her closer to him, even as it urged her to run from him.

Varian’s fingers tightened slightly around hers. “And now I sit here with you.”

That was far from a casual remark, and Merry felt her insides sharply adjust yet again. The tender parts of this man, potent with his sensitivity, were more dangerous than all the other parts of him. Merry looked away, as though to study the valley, so he could not see and read her thoughts in her eyes. Shay had been right. Being on land with the Captain was a curse, not a blessing. It was not Morgan who drew women to him. It was Varian.

Over her shoulder, she heard Varian say, “You need to be more careful, Little One.”

Merry didn’t look at him.
Yes. More careful. But I am not a careful girl, Varian. You must have care with me.

Killing her thoughts, she turned her face and saw he was staring at her feet. She looked in the direction of his gaze. She’d climbed the path without her shoes, and there were cuts here and there on her pale flesh. She had not felt a single cut as it was made. It seemed to her a distressing omen underscoring her danger with him. She had cut her feet to ribbons following him and hadn’t even known she’d done it.