Games of Pleasure (19 page)

She slid her fingers into his wet hair and met the fire of his mouth with her own. He seized her around the waist and half lifted her in his damp arms, until she knelt between his spread thighs, her breasts pressed into his chest. The kiss deepened. Her lips searched, sweetly, sweetly, for the honeyed firmness of his. Her tongue found hot, rough velvet. Her hands strayed over his shoulders and strong spine. His erection caught against her skirts.

Mad sensations plummeted down to her stomach. If his arms weren't supporting her, she knew she would fall, trampled by desire. Yet she kept kissing, allowing the splendor and the excitement and the stunning magnetism of his naked body to enthrall her.

He pulled away at last to draw breath, still holding her by the waist. His eyes were wide and opaque, as if he absorbed his own shadow.

“No,” he said, grinding out the word and opening his fingers. “This is a very bad idea, especially when we're not intending to make love again.”

Miracle took his hands and lifted them unresisting to kiss each one in the center of the palm. Denying all of her own desires, she called on self-control.

“But when the opportunity presents itself, a woman of easy virtue must steal whatever she can get. Now, get dressed, my lord, before I ravish you on the spot. It would definitely disturb His Absent, Beady-Eyed Lordship of the Spear-Topped Fences, if he discovered us here in flagrante delecto. Because, if you kiss me again, that's exactly what will happen.”

He laughed, sitting back on his heels, still splendidly rigid, as she scrambled to her feet and stepped back.

Miracle marched away into the maze of little paths, her body in flames and her mind reeling. As soon as he could no longer see her, she stopped to stare up at the sky through a bright blaze of tears.

For as long as she lived she would treasure this memory of this man—slick and wet and aroused, kneeling beside the dark pool like a pagan deity of the deep water—on fire for her, but opening his hands and letting her go.

 

 

THEY rode back up onto the ridge track. Thunder boomed and rolled, far away as yet, but coming ever closer. Hot oppression still hung heavily in the air, though a cool wind gusted now from the west. Near where their path turned, a tall spire broke above the treetops at the head of a valley.

“See that church?” he said. “Thanks to our detour to the grotto, this storm is about to break onto our heads. We'll take shelter there. We can rest the horses and have a bite to eat. Are you tired?”

“Not really,” she said. “Just brimming with trepidation.”

His glance was sharp. “Why?”

“Because we'll be trapped together in a holy place during a storm.”

“And you think pagan grottoes better suited to our circumstances?”

“To mine at least. Unlike you, my shining lord, I'm very much a sinner.”

“God, I'm no saint,” he said.

“Then perhaps that church will be where you'll tell me what memory was imprinting itself so strongly on your mind when you carried me down from the loft.”

A shadow flitted over his face. He frowned for a moment. “I will, if you like. It's certainly nothing to cause you any grief.”

“Yet it's a grief to you, isn't it?”

“It was at the time. It's not any longer. There's no reason for my not telling you.”

“Yet perhaps it will be a test of your faith in me. After all, I might hear your revelations and still refuse to give you mine.”

“No, you won't.”

“You think that I'm too honest to cheat you? Or simply that I know better than to risk it?”

Beauty sidled and pranced at a fresh gust of wind. Ryder corrected the mare without apparent effort. “Something like that.”

Lightning crackled across the clouds. The thunder rumbled closer. The birdsong stopped abruptly. The sky was growing ever blacker, as if they were being surrounded by demons. A few cold drops of rain spattered into Miracle's face.

“Come,” Ryder said, glancing up. “We just ran out of time. Ride!”

As Jim galloped after the mare, the horses carried both riders straight into a driving downpour.

They arrived at the church soaked. Ryder swung down from Beauty and led her clopping into the porch. Keeping her head down against the pelting rain, Miracle followed, leading Jim, then she stopped. Her companion had pushed open the heavy door to the nave and was leading his mare inside.

“We can't take the horses inside the church!”

“Why not?” The stone floor rang as Beauty spun about behind her master. “Where better to shelter them than in a house of God? You don't think He created the dumb beasts? He doesn't care like a Father for their welfare?”

The pillars supporting the ceiling flashed into stark relief as lightning hit somewhere nearby.

“We may find out,” Miracle said. “If the tower is struck and falls through the ceiling, would that be a sign of divine disapproval, do you think?”

He grinned. “No, it would simply mean that there's no proper lightning rod on the spire. Come, you're wet through, and we can't risk the horses being hit.”

He took Jim's reins from her hands and tied both mounts to the handles of a large chest that sat near the door. Miracle pulled off her sopping cloak and looked about. There were no seats or pews, just one solitary bench at the base of a pillar, so she draped the wet fabric over the time-worn stone font. At the far end of the nave, an elaborate wooden pulpit boasted of a more prosperous past, yet the altar stood empty except for a single large cross.

Beauty and the pony stood quietly, heads drooping, as Ryder unsaddled them. The empty spaces echoed with hollow booms as more thunder rolled. Their human voices seemed to disappear into whispers.

“There must once have been a village here, as well,” she said. “I imagine a few tumbled remains could still be found out there in the woods, long covered over with brambles.”

He glanced around. “Yes, abandoned after the Black Death, perhaps, or diminished little by little when ever fewer men were needed to extract the wealth from wool.”

“So the houses returned to the earth.”

“And the church, being solid stone, still stands.” He propped the saddles at the base of a pillar. “Not used regularly, perhaps, but even now a place for an occasional funeral or maybe a wedding. Someone left flowers in the graveyard quite recently. It's still hallowed ground.”

Miracle strolled away, glancing up at the traces of paint clinging to the arches. “When I was a young child, the Sunday walk twice a day back and forth to church was often the only time I ever saw the outside world.”

“You never went out except on Sundays? Why?”

“It doesn't matter. We've promised to exchange more immediate confidences than that, haven't we? So, are you ready to tell me your secret remembrances?”

“They're no secret.” He offered her some bread and cold meat, unpacked from his saddlebag.

She walked back to take the food. “Thank you. Then why did the memory so disturb you?”

“Because of what I believed I had seen.” He sat down on the bench. “Because of the way it made me feel.”

She perched on the opposite end of the wooden seat and tore off a piece of bread. The atmosphere seemed to have changed, as if charged with the darkness of the storm.

“Don't tell me if you don't want to.”

“There's no reason—other than a lingering discomfort that will probably seem ridiculous to you—why I shouldn't. Almost everyone at Wyldshay, except my sisters, soon learned exactly what had happened. And I think perhaps I should tell you. After all, I've been pressuring you for your secrets. Why shouldn't I offer you one of mine?”

“Not if it's something that causes you distress—”

“I'm not that much of a coward,” he said. “It happened at Wyldshay. My cousin, Guy Devoran, was with me. He and I had just walked into one of the enclosed gardens in what was once the outer bailey. We were deep in conversation when I happened to glance up.”

She bit her lip at the mention of his cousin's name, but it would not help to complicate this tale any further. “And you saw something that shook you to the core, or outraged you?”

“Outraged? Yes, I suppose so. I was certainly angry and appalled and bitterly disappointed.” He wrung wet hair from his forehead. “Jack and Anne were together on the edge of my grandmother's fountain. It was before they were married, or even engaged. Anne was a dissenting minister's daughter. She was a commoner, desperately unsuitable to wed a St. George. Yet they were oblivious to our presence, until Anne looked up—”

“Ah! They were making love?”

“Yes, it was love, but that's not what I thought I was seeing.”

“Because you thought you saw something else in her face?”

Ryder seemed to have forgotten his food. “What I saw was guilt and shame and a kind of blind horror, mixed with an indescribable ecstasy. I stood frozen in a mad agony of grief as she turned her face into Jack's shoulder and started to weep.”

Miracle stared at her cold meat. She was hungry, yet she also seemed to have lost her appetite. “Because she was a virgin?”

“She'd certainly been so, when they'd met only a few days before. It was obviously terrible to her to be discovered like that. Then Jack's eyes met mine. I'll never forget his face. He knew right away how I was stricken, yet he seemed filled with defiance and something almost close to mockery.”

“Your distress over this isn't ridiculous at all.” Miracle crumbled her bread, then made herself swallow a piece. “He's your brother and you love him. You thought he had betrayed that love, along with his own honor and Anne's.”

“Betrayed
my
love?”

“Yes, certainly!”

“Perhaps, but that didn't matter. What mattered was what it did to my mother—”

Miracle laid aside the remains of her meal and hugged herself. “I have no one in the world besides my brother, Dillard. The love for a sibling is surely the most important of one's life? Why did you think that your love for your brother didn't count?”

“Because the true disaster came after Guy dragged me away, insisting it was none of our business, and we ran straight into the duchess. She guessed immediately what had happened—”

“How could she?”

“Because what she saw in my face confirmed exactly what she had most feared all along: that Jack had lost all claim to norms of morality, that he defied her and everything she had ever wanted for him. With Anne his pawn, caught in their cross-gambits. My mother and I didn't exchange a word. I simply left her there among her roses.”

Tension radiated from her taut fingers. Her shoulders ached. Miracle tipped her head back against the wall. “Because you knew that was what the duchess would want?”

“She needed to be alone. Jack had always been her favorite. She had nothing to say to me.”

“You didn't mind that?”

“What? That she loved my brother the best? No. My mother's obsession with Jack has always seemed nothing but a cruel burden, one I've been relieved not to have to carry myself.”

“Have you always been so lonely?”

He seemed genuinely puzzled. “What? This isn't about me!”

Miracle glanced down. A lonely elder son in the midst of a large family? Even lonelier than she had been? “No, of course not. Though you had burdens of your own.”

“Mine are simply part of who I am, not something I've ever questioned or doubted.”

“Yet Lord Jonathan took the weight of your mother's love very hard?”

He seemed almost relieved to have moved the focus back to his brother.

“Yes, I think so. Jack escaped into travel and into the arms of countless women. He sought out courtesans throughout the farthest reaches of the East, where he indulged in every possible erotic experience. Anne was entirely innocent of all that esoteric knowledge and—as I wrongly thought—simply a victim of his heartless seduction. It seemed that he had no compunction about corrupting her. My own brother!”

A flash of lightning seared across the nave, flinging grotesque shadows. Brasses blazed suddenly in the stone floor: knights in armor, ladies wearing dresses like shrouds. Ryder leaped up to stride away, then stopped to gaze up at a plaque on the wall, a memorial to some sixteenth-century baronet.

Miracle stared at her wet boots. Her pulse beat heavily. “And so he broke your heart?”

“I wanted to kill him.”

Silence filled the church, haunting against the storm's drumming outside. Cold seemed to sink into her bones. For men like Lord Ryderbourne there were only two kinds of female: the innocent, like Anne—the untouchable virgins whose honor any gentleman must defend to the death—and the fallen, who existed only to satisfy that same gentleman's baser needs. Women like her.

“I'm not a priest who maintains that there's virtue in confession,” Miracle said. “Why are you telling me all this?”

He spun about. “Because you insisted on knowing.”

“No, I didn't!” She shot to her feet. “Are you trying to tell me that you understand the impulse to murder? The impulse, but not the act, of course!”

“No, but for that one moment—” He took a deep breath. “I was determined to punish him, at the very least. He'd brought me back an exquisite jade horse from the Orient. A little carving, with every detail perfect. I smashed it. Then I went back to find him.”

Her boots rapped as she marched to the font. Water streamed down the church windows as if the sky were a lake bed, suddenly ruptured. “Because you were furious and wounded and horrified. Yet what recourse did honor leave open to you? To challenge your own brother to a duel?”