Laura Kinsale (53 page)

She ceased moving. His whole body was hot and tense beneath her. He reached up and cradled her cheeks, slid his hands down her shoulders and her waist, under her buttocks, ardently urging her against him. “Please,” he said, a grated appeal through his teeth.

She held still, held him in physical imprisonment. “You won’t leave,” she said—command and enchantment.

“Never,” he said, wetting his lips.

“You’ll stay at Swanmere.”

“Anywhere. Anywhere.” She could feel his hands up under her shift, his fingers pulling her desperately toward him.

She lifted her heels from the carpet, leaning forward. The motion drove him deep, so deep that it hurt, but with a piercing bliss that radiated from their joining. Her body pumped against him, eager to be filled, gasping, driven to shameless demand by the stark sound of ecstasy in his throat. His fingers closed with convulsive strength. He moved under her, arching back, meeting her with a powerful thrust at the height of her passion.

A radiant shudder seemed to seize her, a bright joy as his life surged into her, permeating her again. She held him to her, clutched his head to her breasts while their bodies throbbed together.

Zenia clung to him, whimpering. Her mind was blank and yet full of energy, sliding from wonder back to the present, slowly regaining awareness of herself; of him; the sharp stretch of her legs, the tickle of his hair against her skin, the hard press of his body bearing her weight.

He turned his face, rubbing it against her, drinking air with a harsh, hungry sound. “Thank you,” he said. He rested his arms limply about her waist. “Oh my God, thank you.” He took a deep breath, a rise and fall of his shoulders and chest against her.

Zenia bent to the top of his head. “Does one always say thank you?” she said into his hair.

“Hmm?”

“You always say thank you, after this.”

“Do I?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What a polite fellow I am,” he said with a faint chuckle. “The urbane Lord Winter.”
 

“I thank you too.”

“Oh, any time! Your servant, madam.” He sighed, relaxing against her. “Any time you please.”

Zenia bit her lip. She curled her fingers through his black hair. She did not believe his promises made in extremity, promises that he would stay. He made them to get what he wanted; but she had thieved what she wanted. She felt a selfish, hidden triumph; an ugly little miserable joy that she could hoard a part of him to herself; that he could go but never really leave her. As long as she had Elizabeth, and now another—she was sure she had another by him now—and he could not take them, she was safe from the fear of being left alone, a force that lay so dark and threatening within her that it was like a djinni itself.

“This position is even more delightful than I had imagined it could be,” he murmured, “but it seems that my toes are falling asleep.”

Zenia pulled away, rediscovering shyness as she stood up and found herself with her shift all down about her waist. She turned her back to him, lifting the shoulders hastily.

He came behind her, enfolding her in his arms before she could restore her shift. “I’m not an entirely backward abductor,” he said. “I forgot dry clothes for you, but I did remember to bring the license.” He nuzzled her throat. “Would you like to wait until morning, or shall I go and fetch a curate now?”

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Zenia stiffened. “Now?”

“If you wish,” he said. “It can be done here—your friends the lawyers tell me that this license is good for any time or place.”

“It’s snowing,” she said nervously.

“I don’t mind,” he murmured. “It won’t take long to bring them.” He rocked her back against him. “On the other hand, I’d be perfectly pleased to be snowed up here with you for days, if this weather turns to a serious storm.”

“Snowed up? Trapped here, do you mean?” she asked, pulling away.

“It’s not likely,” he said. “But there’s no danger. The place has stores and fuel enough.”

“Elizabeth!” she exclaimed. “I can’t be trapped here!”

“Beth is right as a trivet, and perfectly happy. You left her with Mrs. Lamb, did you not?”

“Yes, but—” She reached for her clothes. “Oh, these are still soaking wet!”

“You aren’t going anywhere tonight,” he said as she shook out the dress, flinging drops of water. “Zenia, don’t be a fool.”

“If there is to be a snowstorm! I cannot abandon her for so long!”

He pulled the dress from her hand and tossed it over the chair. “Perhaps you should have thought of that before you started north.”

Zenia snatched the gown back. “It’s your fault! You lured me here!”

“You came to marry Jocelyn,” he growled. “Precious perfect as I’m sure he is, he’s got no more control of snowstorms than I do.”

“I want to go!” she cried. “I want to go to Elizabeth!”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you. By way of the vicarage. I want us married before we leave.”

“There is no time for that,” Zenia said, squeezing water from one of her stockings. “It may already be snowing too hard.”

He pulled a lantern down from a hook on the wall and lit it. Striding to the door, he opened it to a swirl of wind and cold and stepped outside.

“It has stopped,” he said, holding up the lantern.

Hugging herself against the frigid air, Zenia peered around the door. His shirtsleeves were plastered against his arms in the wind, his breath a bright frost in the circle of the lamplight. No snowflakes fell, and the lamp only sparkled on a dusting of less than an inch on the ground.

“It might begin again,” she said, retreating toward the fire as he came back in. She sat down and began to work the damp, unpleasant stocking onto her foot. “We should leave now.”

“And lose ourselves on the moor at night in a storm? A great lot of good that will do Beth. If you insist on making a start tonight, we’ll go as far as the vicarage at Grosmont—I can find that. The priest can marry us on the spot, and we’ll put up there for the night. Then we can take the train tomorrow.”

“You dare not!” She looked up. “They’ll arrest you for attacking the train.”
 

“No they won’t,” he said.
 

“You can’t be sure of that.” She stood up.
 

“I can be sure that I own half the bloody railway.”
 

Zenia gasped. “You own it!”

He gave an impatient nod, reaching for his cloak. “I don’t interfere in the thing—but no doubt they’d think twice about prosecuting their leading stockholder. Particularly when I didn’t do anything but ride alongside and get shot at.”

“And pull me off!”

“My wife,” he said. “I have a right to do that.”
 

“I’m not your wife.”

“Well,” he said, with a dangerous gleam in his eyes, “we are about to remedy that, are we not?”

She avoided his hold. She gathered her shift up onto her shoulders and hugged herself. “I’m sorry. I should not have—I don’t wish to do this.”

His face changed, transforming from suspicion to a black rage. “I knew it!” He flung the cloak away. “I knew this wasn’t about Beth. What have I done?”

Instantly, hysteria rose to her tongue. “I was wrong! I’m tired! I won’t marry you! I want to leave!” She could hear her mother in herself, but it only made her more frantic. She burst into frenzied tears. “Let me go, let me go.”

“No,” he said, his voice a cold knife amid her weeping.

“I want to go,” she cried.

“So you’ll leave me,” he said with a sneer. “So we all pay the price of your crazy fears! Beth too. Just like your mother made you pay for her pride.”

“I have to go. You have to let me go.”

“No,” he said.

“You’re going to leave me.” Her voice reached a height of panic. “I’ll be alone!”

“My God, you claim I’m the one who has to be free—but it’s you!” His voice rose to match hers. “You have no faith in anyone but yourself. I’ve found what I was hunting out there! I found you. I don’t need to search anymore.”

“Don’t, don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s not true. I can’t believe that.”

“What can I do to make you believe it? What can I say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!”
he shouted. “You’ve been living as my wife for two years; I want to marry you; you let me—” He pointed. “In that chair—that was hardly a rape, by God! What are you going to do after
that
—marry Jocelyn?”

“Yes. I’m going to marry him!”

“You’re out of your mind! He won’t have you now!” he said with a wild bewilderment.

“He will!” she shouted recklessly. “He will, he will! You could give me a hundred children, and he would still marry me! He wants children, but he doesn’t want to do what you do!”

He stared at her. “You’re as mad as your mother.”

“I’m
not!”
she cried, covering her ears. “He wants children!”

“And what am I, then—the stud service? Is that why you let me—” His raging voice broke off. He took a step toward her. “Is that why?”

“Yes,” she sobbed, “yes, yes, yes!”

She was shaking all over, hunching with her hands to her head. Her eyes were squeezed shut. In the long silence, she fell to her knees, weeping.

There was no sound in the cottage, nothing but the wind hissing past the walls and muttering in the chimney.

“Very well,” he said in a voice of ice. “Get dressed. I won’t importune you any further, madam.”

Though she was chilled in her damp dress, he had wrapped the bed quilt about her, and she barely felt the wind as she rode before him out onto the cloud-lit moor. They had come so far from the railway that Zenia had expected it to be a long distance to anywhere. But it hardly seemed more than a quarter hour before she realized that the dark mass the mare was approaching was not a grove of trees clustered at the end of a shadowed valley, but a house.

The wind howled about it. It stood alone on the edge of the moor, outlined by the dull glow of snow and sky behind it. As they drew nearer, the tearing breaks in the cloud cover let moonlight through to glitter on a double row of dark tall windows.

It was not a huge house, like Swanmere, but still it was imposing, rising black and silent from a treeless prospect. He turned the horse in between stone columns and rode across the level expanse, the mare’s hooves crunching in the snow crust. Instead of stopping at the balustraded double staircase, shimmering with streamers of snow that blew from each landing, he guided the horse around the corner to a smaller set of steps. He dismounted, leaving Zenia, and strode up to pound on the door.

After a long interval, someone opened it. The gleam of a light fell across the steps and the snow. She could not hear what Lord Winter said, but a man came quickly down with him, the collar of his coat turned up, carrying a lantern.

Zenia held the quilt about herself as the servant guided her up the steps and then left her with Lord Winter inside the door. They stood in a dim, paneled passageway full of trunks and boots.

His face was remote as he held a brimstone match to several candle sconces. “I suppose you saw that the clouds were breaking,” he said, shaking snow off his cloak. He did not look at her. “It’s not going to storm tonight. If you can possibly bear it, I suggest that you remain here until morning, and I’ll have Mr. Bode drive you to the station then. Your case from the train is here, so you have dry clothes now.”