The Nude (full-length historical romance) (38 page)

Elsbeth began to tap on the table with the tip of her slender forefinger. She turned her gaze down to watch her own repeated movement.

“I would never ask you to.” Her finger kept tapping. “Do you love her?”

Now there was a question. Six years ago Nigel believed himself in love with Bess. She smiled for him and always welcomed him into her bed. Her brand of erotic affection was like a soothing balm.

“Bess let me forget. Uncle Charles has never approved of the man I became. I am a dreamer like my father, he says. And he is right.” She continued to tap her finger on the table. “I’ve always struggled to please my uncle. When I was with Bess, she let me forget my responsibilities, my title, my name. When I was with her I was able to control my obsession to—”

Her hand stilled, and she glanced up.

He’d been on the verge of admitting to her that being with Bess quieted his obsession with painting. Bess had given him a glimpse of what peace must feel like.

Was that love? No, she’d simply given him an escape from his life.

“After Michael was born I came to realize I wasn’t prepared for the responsibilities that come with illicit relationships. Like so many of the gentry, I cannot ignore a bastard child. A child is a child no matter which side of the blanket he is born.”

When he saw his words were having no effect on Elsbeth, he stood. “Bess is Michael’s mother. For the past six years, that is all she has been to me.”

“Where are you going?” she demanded. For the first time since their marriage he heard a note of true anger in her voice. But since he was embarrassed by having to answer for an indiscretion that had happened six years ago, he didn’t realize that her anger was a step in the right direction.

Instead of sweeping her into his arms and kissing her until she was breathless with need, he slammed his fist against the table. “That, my prickly wife, is none of your concern.”

“Is it not?” Fire leapt from her heated gaze. “Is it not?” she repeated louder this time.

“You’ve made yourself clear from the first day of our marriage. You don’t want to have anything to do with me. So why should I feel the least bit obligated to answer to you?”

“Because—!” she shouted. Tears glistened in her eyes, but she swiftly blinked them away.

“
Because
. . . ?” he whispered in the long silence that followed.

“In case you have forgotten, my lord,” she said, her voice crisp enough to frost the crystals hanging from the chandelier, “your life is in constant danger. Yet you walk the streets with no apparent concern for your own welfare.”

“Careful there, sweet, you sound almost as if you care.”

“I do care, damn you!” She gave a little scream and pushed past him as she fled from the dining room. Shortly afterwards, a door somewhere in the house was slammed shut in a most unladylike manner.

* * * * *

I do care . . .
Her words—words that had sounded as if they’d been ripped from the deepest depths of despair—echoed in Nigel’s head as he disappeared into the cellar to paint . . . to do what he knew best.

Alone and apart. Life was easier that way. He didn’t wish to cause her any more pain. Yet everything he did seemed to hurt her.

He didn’t know what to do. So, for Elsbeth’s sake and his own, he stayed in the cellar all night. He was too much of a coward to see if she would come to his bed, if she would still let him make love to her body even though it was her soul he yearned to touch.

The next day Elsbeth’s cousins, Olivia and Lauretta along with their elderly maiden aunt, Violet, spent hours sequestered behind the parlor doors laughing and enjoying themselves. What they discussed, Nigel could only wonder.

As soon as her family left, he sought her out.

His senses alert, he quickly found Elsbeth in the small gold parlor in the back of the house. She was sitting next to Gainsford and, by the looks of it, in the middle of reviewing a complicated menu.

Gainsford took one look at Nigel and jumped to his feet. He stuttered some nonsense about needing to check on the butter and then rushed from the room.

“Good afternoon, my lord,” Elsbeth said. She looked as fresh and clean as a new day after a week of heavy rain. She was dressed in a simple yellow and white striped gingham gown, and with her hair pulled back and tied up with a wide lavender ribbon.

“Please,” he said. He might as well been that awkward, lanky boy painting flowers and a certain young maiden in Oxford. “Please, sit with me for a moment.”

She pursed her dewy lips and tilted her head as she paused to consider the request. With the grace of a queen she glided over to the settee he stood beside and lowered herself onto the cushion. She sat with her back gently arched and her head slightly bowed.

He settled in beside her with considerably less grace. “I wish to hold your hand.”

He uncurled his fist, ungloved and chilled, and waited to see if she would touch him in the bright light of day. “Remember that day at your uncle’s?” he said while he bided his time. “I was so certain you would refuse to touch my hand. And that, my dove, made me even more eager to win your favor.”

He was beginning to feel foolish sitting there with his empty hand raised. She had turned her head and was staring at his palm, wide-eyed.

With sad resignation, he closed his hand and pressed his knuckles into the plush cushion.

“You’ve been trained too well to hold your tongue, Elsbeth. My darkest wish is for your Lord Mercer to be alive again so I could kill him.”

She recoiled from the violence of his words.

“What was your life with him like?” he’d not wanted to ask that question. He feared the answer. But Lord Mercer and the life Elsbeth had with him seemed to hang between them like a leaden curtain.

“I’d rather not talk about him.” She reached for the locket that had curiously disappeared from her neck. Finding it gone she clasped her hands in her lap.

“For the sake of our marriage, I need to know more about the ghosts that haunt those lovely eyes of yours. You told me once that Mercer was a monster, and I don’t wish to cause you any more pain by asking you to remember, but you have to talk about this. The torment was evident in your eyes even before you met me. I know, I’d noticed you and your troubled eyes at your uncle’s ball. Let me try to take on some of that burden for you. Let me in, Elsbeth. Even if it’s just a little.”

“I-I don’t know that I can. I don’t know that I should. You have to understand, I was disloyal to my marriage vows. I was disloyal to him.” She smiled painfully. “I was not a very good wife. I don’t know if I can be one.”

Her admission broke his heart. “You wrongly put the blame on yourself. From what you and Molly have told me . . . and from what I’ve heard about Mercer from other sources, it sounds as if he was the worst sort of husband. By being cruel to you, he was the first to break the marriage vow. And once that vow was broken, you were no longer under any kind of obligation to him.”

“He was an angry man,” she conceded. “It started soon after the wedding. He’d been boasting to his friends how he’d married the most beautiful woman in all of England. And—” she hesitated.

Nigel waited in silence.

She squeezed her hands together and then cleared her throat. “You probably need to know this. Your cousin, Charlie was visiting at the time. I had met him once before, but only briefly. He’d flirted shamelessly with me that first time we met, vowing that we’d marry. But I was already in love with . . . with . . . Well, I put Charlie off, and I don’t think he forgave me for it.

“And then at that cursed dinner party, where Mercer was boasting how he’d married the most beautiful woman in all England—much to my mortification—Charlie listed at least a half dozen ladies whom he believed more lovely. Some of the other men at the table had nodded in agreement. That night—”

She looked away suddenly. Her voice turned rough. “That one comment put Mercer in a black mood for the rest of the evening. He kept glaring at me. I puzzled over his odd mood, naturally. It was really quite embarrassing. That evening, after we retired, I confronted him. He struck me across the face. I remember falling to the floor.” She fell silent again. “He pulled me back up and hit me again . . . and again . . . and again . . . and . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Oh dear God,”
Nigel whispered.

“By the next morning, no one would think me lovely looking like that, which only made him more cross.” She turned back to Nigel, her gaze searching his. “Learning that I was barren only made him hate me more. And yet he was the one who had pushed so hard for our marriage. He was the one who had given me those paintings, claiming that he had created them. He was the one who’d claimed that the paintings had been made for my eyes, and my eyes alone.”

That last part had been true. Nigel always thought of her when he painted. Ever since he’d first seen her as she’d danced across the field, his paintings were for her. Only for her.

“But I quickly learned he wasn’t an artist. He didn’t even
like
art.” She sighed and closed her eyes as if remembering something that had once brought her pleasure. “For many years into my marriage I foolishly held onto a fantasy, hoping that there might be a knight-in-shining-armor lurking in the home wood and planning to rush the gates to save me.”

She lifted her head. Her blue eyes shivered. “You knew me, before my marriage? Bess says that you knew me even then.” She swallowed hard. “Loved me. Because of Dionysus?”

He searched for the words to tell her the truth.

Her shoulders fell and she lowered her head again. “Of course that couldn’t be true. You are a good man. You would have never allowed me to suffer at Lord Mercer’s cruel hands. I waited for someone like you to come along . . . for Dionysus to find me. Surely, if you had known about my situation, you would have stormed the gates. You would have saved me.”

“If only I had known . . . If I had it all to do over again I would have been a better man. I would have sought you out. I would have protected you.”

Elsbeth did an amazing thing then. She reached out and took his hand, uncurling his fingers, smoothing out his tightly held fist.

“Your fingers are cold,” she said. With both hands she vigorously rubbed away the chill. She then took his other hand within her palm and began rubbing. “Gainsford and I have decided to serve chicken for the ball, if that will suit. He tells me that Cook does wonders with some exotic spices and the chicken. I cannot remember the name of the dish.”

“Khorma.”

Elsbeth nodded as she continued to massage his hand and wrist. She seemed quite unconscious of her actions. He closed his eyes and imagined that they were alone and in the master suite. In the middle of the night she often touched him this tenderly. Under the cover of darkness she was a different woman, a sensual woman unafraid of her husband. In those late night hours he was grateful for what she’d given him. And yet, even though he was afraid of hurting her again, he wanted to be intimate with her in more ways than just the physical.

“Cook spent several years preparing meals for a general in India. She picked up several recipes.” With nimble fingertips she worked to relax the sinews crisscrossing the back of his hand. Did she know what she was doing to him?

It was amazing how intuitive her movements were in finding the tension buried beneath his skin.

“Will that suit?” she asked, pressing quite hard on a particularly sore spot.

“What? Yes, yes, of course. The chicken dish will be fine. Elsbeth, do you truly find marriage to me distasteful?”

She dropped his hand and jumped up from the settee. “Oh, you are a vexing man, my lord!”

“Vexing, Elsbeth?”

“Terribly, horribly, so. And you know it well. So, please, don’t pretend to not know that you’re able to twist my head around.” Her pretty little fists were pressed against the most exquisite hips he could ever hope to encounter.

“Twist your head—? How so?” He rose and stood directly in front of her. She was trembling like a small bird longing for the freedom of the vast sky. Her wide eyes remained riveted to his. Her stare fed the fire burning in his chest.

“You continually confound me, my lord.”

“Nigel,” he said. “My name is Nigel. I insist you use it.”

He held out his empty palm. “Place your hand in mine.” When she hesitated, he said, “I insist.”