The Clergyman's Daughter (22 page)

The man seemed to consider her words for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he judged at last. “I’m not afraid of any man, much less an overfed aristocrat like His great Lordship, and even if I was, don’t you think it’s worth the risk? I expect the fine Earl of Raeburn would pay through the nose to keep the world from finding out about his teasing trollop of a sister….”

“Trollop!” Claire wailed in anguish, staring at the groom with velvety brown eyes glazed with shock at his betrayal. “Oh, Fred, how can you…but you told me…I—I thought you…we—”

She broke off abruptly. Outside, from the direction of the house, they could hear a deep voice rough with masculine impatience call, “Jess, where the hell have you gone?”

At the sound of Raeburn’s shout, O’Shea tensed, and Jessica saw Claire go white with panic. The girl rose on tiptoe as if poised for flight, but she seemed uncertain what to do. “Oh, God,” she gasped hysterically, “what am I to do? If Graham discovers—”

Jessica glanced toward the door opening out into the starry darkness. She could hear heavy footsteps approaching. With a furious jerk of her head she waved the girl back out of the light. “Don’t be a ninny, Claire,” she hissed under her breath. “Get out of here before Graham finds you!”

“B-but Jess, what about you—” Claire began remorsefully.

“Dammit, do you think I can’t handle a man like O’Shea? I said
get out.
Go the back way!”

The girl stared at Jessica a few more seconds; then she sobbed chokingly and fled down the length of the stable to vanish into the shadows.

“Jessica!” Raeburn shouted, nearer.

When Jessica watched Claire narrowly make good her escape, she panted as if she were running each step of the way with her—as indeed she wanted to be. The patent anger in Raeburn’s deep voice filled her with dread, but she knew she would have to face him if she hoped to divert his suspicions from his sister. Tugging her torn robe into place on her shoulder, Jessica flicked her head to one side to toss her long raven hair down her back. “You’d better go too,” she said coldly to the groom. “I’ll make up some excuse about why I came out here.”

“No, Mrs. Foxe.” He laughed humorlessly as he squared his brawny shoulders. “I’ve never yet hidden behind a woman’s skirts, and I’ll not start now. I’ve been waiting for this chance for weeks, ever since His Lordship told Tomkins to keep a watch on me, like I was a thief after filchin’ the silver…. I swore then that—”

Jessica never knew the exact phrasing of O’Shea’s vow, for at that moment his words were choked off as the Earl of Raeburn bellowed her name once more, just outside. Before she could step away from the groom, Raeburn yanked open the stable door and burst inside.

“Jess!” he called as he squinted blindly against the light, and his deep voice reverberated off the beams and partitions, once more rousing the horses. “Dammit, woman, don’t hide from me. I heard you stumbling around in the house, and I know you’re in—”

“I’m right here, Graham,” Jessica said quietly, her even tone masking her apprehension as she watched his gray eyes blink painfully. She surveyed him warily, remarking his uncharacteristic dishevelment with dismay. She recognized his trousers as the satin evening breeches he had been wearing at dinner, but with them he wore white-topped riding boots and a frilled linen shirt that dangled unbuttoned over his broad chest, revealing the triangle of dark blond hair that ran down his flat stomach and disappeared into his waistband. He must have been preparing for bed when he heard her bump into that table and overset the kissing bough, she decided, and in his haste to investigate the noise, he had grabbed whatever clothing was close to hand. His ridiculous appearance augured ill for his frame of mind. “I’m right here, Graham,” Jessica said again; “there’s no need to startle your cattle.”

His eyes at last adjusted to the lamplight, Raeburn stared at Jessica—and the man beside her. For a moment he stood petrified, as if cut from the same pale, cold marble as Renard Chase; then life seeped back into his bloodless cheeks. O’Shea was watching the confrontation with avid interest, but he recoiled instinctively when Raeburn’s gray gaze touched him. With a disdainful sniff Raeburn dismissed him and turned back to Jessica. His eyes moved slowly over her, with insulting deliberation, and she saw his hard mouth thin implacably as he regarded her usually sleek hair that tumbled about her shoulders as if she had just risen from bed. Unable to face him, she dropped her head disconsolately, her tresses falling forward to mask the high, guilty color painting her elegant cheekbones, but she knew there was no way to prevent him from observing her heaving breast and the torn sleeve of her robe. His nostrils flared slightly when he saw the bits of straw that clung damningly to the hem of her nightgown. Nearly choking on the lump in his throat he sneered, “You whore.”

She said nothing.

Her silence seemed to enrage him, “What, no excuses? You’re not going to try to convince me that you’ve come out here to the stables in your bedclothes for a little timely tutoring in animal husbandry?”

Jessica winced at his sarcasm, but her only visible reaction was an almost imperceptible lift of her chin as she remarked quietly, “I might have known that as usual you would readily believe the worst about me, Graham. That’s hardly surprising. You’ve always seemed to derive such pleasure from your misapprehensions.”

Something about her tone, some indefinable element of…disappointment made it difficult for Raeburn to look directly at her emerald eyes. Instead he shifted his gaze once more to the roughly dressed man beside her, and his jaw tightened. He had been right about O’Shea from the beginning, and he should never have listened to Tomkins’ recommendations; the Irishman was crafty, intelligent, and capable, but with those ambitious blue eyes fixed firmly on the main chance; an undeclared egalitarian who would take advantage of any opportunity to strike a blow against his superiors….

And what more deadly, more personally devastating blow, Raeburn acknowledged with a groan, could there be than to seduce their women, taking their scented softness beneath that lusty, well-muscled body and plunging…Raeburn shuddered with disgust at the image. How could she, after Andy? How
dared
she? Jessica, Andrew’s Jessica….

His
Jessica.

Painfully he looked at her again, somehow regal even in her torn robe, her head bowed like a vanquished queen, and he admitted that he loved her, loved her and wanted her—and hated her for turning to someone else. Determined to wound her as she was wounding him, he observed scathingly, “Poor Jessica, you should have been more frank with me this evening, my dear. Had I realized you were so very…desperate for affection, I might have made more of an effort to oblige you.” His deep voice lowered to a hoarse, accusing growl. “Or is it only the stench of the stable that excites you?”

At that she jerked up her head, the abrupt motion flicking her hair bade away from her face, and as she stared at Raeburn in anguished indignation he saw for the first time the deep bruise that purpled her cheek.

He caught his breath with a hiss. “I didn’t know you liked to play rough,” he muttered thickly.

Their eyes met and locked, commingling their mutual pain, and unwisely O’Shea chose that moment to speak. He regarded the earl’s discomfiture with a certain triumph and chuckled goadingly, “Now, now, me lord, don’t discompose yourself. We’re both men of the world and we know how women are….”

The temper that Raeburn had kept so rigorously in check when he faced Jessica now went skyrocketing out of control at the sound of the groom’s cocky, lilting accent. “You bastard,” he grated, turning on the man, “you goddamned insolent bandy-legged little Irish bastard.” His gray eyes narrowed into slits of steel as he glanced at the straw-covered floor and noticed the riding crop that Jessica had knocked down earlier. Quickly he snatched it up and stalked with inexorable intent toward O’Shea, one hand already raised to strike. “I’ll teach you to put your muck-covered fingers on one of my—”

Suddenly the groom’s overweening audacity failed him, as he realized that he had drastically underestimated Raeburn’s reaction to his taunts, that for all his fine clothes and fancy ways the earl was no soft, lily-cheeked aristocrat who would stand idly by and watch…. “Me lord!” he squawked, quailing at his hulking approach, O’Shea stumbled backward, but before he could retreat out of Raeburn’s range, a large hand crushed down over his shoulder, catching the neck of his shirt in a strangling grip, and the leather-covered shaft of the short whip flexed and whistled through the air. In the stall nearest them one of the horses danced and snorted nervously, disturbing the remainder of the already jittery animals, and in the charged atmosphere O’Shea’s squeals of pain were almost drowned out as the leather thong laid bloody welts across his back.

“Graham, for the love of God!” Jessica cried in protest, gaping in wide-eyed revulsion as the crop slashed again and again. The groom was young and strong, with supple, well-trained muscles, but Raeburn was half again his size, and his every blow was fueled by a fury and frustration he had kept bottled up too long. Jessica looked on sickened as O’Shea groveled at Raeburn’s feet, whimpering, his tanned, brawny arms useless against the lash except as a feeble protection for his head. Fetid orders of blood and sweat rose up to choke her and further excite the horses, and as she watched helplessly she saw a dark, humiliating stain seep through the coarse fabric of O’Shea’s trousers.

“Graham, stop it, you’re killing him!” she shrilled, and Raeburn hesitated for a fraction of a second, his arm upraised to strike yet again. “Please…stop…it,” she begged hoarsely, spacing the words between painful gulps of air. He stared at her with eyes opaque with rage, lusterless, obsidian. “Don’t…please don’t…” she said again, trying to gauge his uncertainty. As he stood frozen she took a deep breath and stretched on tiptoe to reach for the riding crop.

At her movement Raeburn groaned, “You little slut!” and with all his great strength he brought the lash down across her arm.

She could not breathe. As if choked by opium vapors, she blinked and watched with the distended time-sense of the drug as the curling thong of the whip coiled about her wrist, first constricting then cutting the white flesh; she saw the strip of leather unwrap and slide away, blazing a track of livid white that almost magically swelled and pinked under her gaze. When drops of blood beaded and burned like liquid flame along the center of the welt, she lifted her green eyes to meet Raeburn’s—but before she could look at him, from the shadows of the stable behind them they heard the sleep-thick voice of Tomkins, the head groom, demanding gruffly, “What in bloody ‘ell is the matter with these—
Your Lordship!”

* * * *

In the shelter of her room Jessica bathed her wrist and bandaged it awkwardly with a strip of gauze torn from a diaper she had filched from Willa’s workbasket. She had to use her teeth to hold the clumsy knot as she tightened it, and by the time the dressing seemed reasonably secure, she was sweating with exertion and pain. Limply she sank into an armchair and waited for Raeburn to come to her.

She knew he would come. She would have known it even had she not seen the promise in his eyes in that fraction of a heartbeat between Tomkins’ appalled gasp and her own wail of mortification, between the groom’s stunned intrusion on that scene in the stables and her own harried flight. As soon as Tomkins stumbled bewildered onto the shocking tableau formed in the circle of yellow lamplight by the earl, his sister-in-law, and the servant cringing on the ground at his feet, Raeburn had drawn himself up, very much the master, the man in control, peering down his long nose and daring his subordinate to question the tightness of his judgment; Jessica in her torn nightclothes had been the one who felt sullied and shamed by Tomkins’ curious scrutiny. When she flushed and moaned with dismay, turning to run, Raeburn had made no attempt to stop her, but she had known as plainly as if he had spoken the words aloud that there was unfinished business between them.

Like an aristocrat awaiting the creak of tumbril wheels outside the Conciergerie, she waited for Raeburn’s knock, and when it came, muffled but insistent, she levered herself out of her chair and trod silently to the door, her eyes trained steadfastly on the Aubusson carpet. She turned the knob and stepped back, still not glancing up; when he closed the door behind her and leaned against it, she noticed that the white top of one of his boots was flecked with blood, and she stared at the reddish-brown stain until he said softly, “Look at me, Jessica.”

Slowly her eyes traveled up the long, strong length of him, the powerful legs encased absurdly in tall boots and skintight court breeches, the broad chest bare under the flapping lapels of his ruffled shirt. With a longing that bordered on pain, her gaze moved over his wide shoulders and the muscular column of his neck, lingering on the hard line of his jaw and his thin yet sensual mouth; then she looked into his eyes.

Even in the subdued light of her sitting room his fair hair gleamed coolly, but his gray eyes were dark and unfathomable as he regarded her in turn. She expected scorn, but his voice remained oddly neutral when he commented, “Thanks to Tomkins’ timely entrance, your lover will survive.”

“Fred O’Shea is not my lover,” Jessica averred quietly. “I have no lover.”

“No?” She watched his brows slowly come together in a skeptical scowl as he looked down at her. “I find you in the stable, in your nightclothes, rolling about in the hay with a groom, and you expect me to believe that you are innocent?’

Jessica said tiredly, “I never expect you to believe anything except what you want to believe, Graham.”

“Even when the evidence against you seems over whelming?”

She shrugged lightly. “Especially then.”

For a long moment silence stretched between them, as taut as her nerves. She wondered why Raeburn didn’t do what he came for, order her to leave his home and never darken his threshold again. As she waited for him to speak she noticed strands of her long black hair dangling over her eyes, and with an unconscious dipping twist of her head, she flicked them back over her shoulder. The movement uncovered the dark braise on her cheek, and Raeburn observed it with a frown, With a delicacy surprising in one so large, he reached up to stroke the tender contusion. “You never explained how you came by this, Jess,” he said. His steely eyes narrowed, and something threatening flared deep inside them. “Did O’Shea hit you?”