The Ravencliff Bride (5 page)

“
Nero!
” she cried out, as loud as she dared. There was a dreadful echo in the house, amplified by the storm, and voices carried. “Come back here!” Still the animal ran on toward the landing, and disappeared in the shadows.

Sara lost sight of him before she reached the staircase, and she hurried down to the first-floor landing, but the green baize door that led below was closed, as she knew it would be, and Nero was nowhere in sight. Why hadn’t she brought a candle branch? The halls beyond the servants’ quarters door were black as coal tar pitch. She ventured halfway down one, calling to Nero in hoarse whispers, but there was no sign of him, and she turned back when she nearly fell over a settle. It was no use; he was on his own. Why hadn’t he waited for her—or answered her call? He seemed such an intelligent animal. She was so sure he understood her.

When she reached the green door, she tried the knob. It was locked. There was nothing she could do for Nero now even if she did find him. Unless one of the servants had let him in when he came down, he was abroad for the night, and she prayed Nicholas wouldn’t find him.

There was nothing to be done but go back to her suite, and she started toward the landing, only to pull up short, her hand frozen to the newel post. Nicholas was descending from the third-floor stairwell barefoot, wearing a burgundy
satin dressing gown. It gapped in front, exposing a patch of dark hair that diminished to a narrow line, like an arrow disappearing beneath the sash. As he rounded the bend, she glimpsed a well-turned thigh, and very nearly something more. He was naked underneath. Her breath caught in a strangled gasp, and her hand flew to her lips—but not in time to keep the sound from escaping.

He stopped three steps above her, and cinched his dressing gown in ruthlessly. His hair was tousled and wet, tumbled over his brow, and his eyes were hooded dark things that drove hers away. He didn’t speak directly, and when she braved another look, she saw that he was taking her measure. She was standing beneath one of the sconces. Glancing down, she realized that her gown was transparent in the candlelight. He could see
everything
, and she tugged her wrapper closed in front with both hands.

“May I be of assistance to you, Sara?” he said, stepping down to the landing.

“N-no, thank you,” she replied. “I was just going up.” Did that sound as ridiculous to him as it did to her, considering her attire? He was so close. How he towered over her. His scent overwhelmed her, his own unique essence, freshened with the tang of sea salt, of the wind, and the rain. She was right; he
had
been outside, and he’d probably come down to collect the clothes he’d left behind earlier, not wanting to muddy the house.

“You oughtn’t be down here unsupervised until you’re familiar with the house,” he said, stopping her in her tracks. “These corridors aren’t used after the dining hall is cleared, and they’re sparsely lit at this hour.”

“ ‘
Unsupervised
’
?
” she said.

“Yes. I can’t have you blundering into danger in the dark.”

“I don’t ‘blunder,’ my lord,” she snapped. First
behave
, and now
unsupervised?
The man was certainly no study in diplomacy. “Your choice of words can sometimes be unfortunate, I’m finding out.”

“ ‘Nicholas,’ ” he corrected her. “I’m sorry if my vocabulary offends you, but I’ve never been the sort to mince words. There are dangers in this old house. Loose boards, rusty nails”—he pointed at her bare feet—“heavy old furniture to stub those pretty toes on. Browse all you want in daylight, when you can see the pitfalls, but please, do not go knocking about after dark . . .
unescorted
, if the word better suits your sensibilities. We don’t have a surgeon in residence, and the nearest one is on Bodmin Moor. Why are you down here?”

She’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask that question. She would not betray Nero—never that, though it was all she could do to keep from calling her husband to account over the condition of the animal. Only wolves had such a spare look about them, not dogs. She’d seen pictures of such creatures in books in her father’s library. Nero could have walked right off the pages.

“I . . . I couldn’t sleep, and I came down to . . . to fetch a book from the library,” she said, her reverie having prompted the excuse.

“Didn’t Mrs. Bromley take you on a tour of the house? The library is in the south wing, next to the salon.”

“Y-yes, she did. I must have lost my way, and I’d just given up. We toured so many rooms, and it all looks so different at night.”

“Exactly my point,” he said. “Can you find your way back to your rooms?”

“Of course,” she snapped, beginning to climb, but his deep voice spun her around again.

“Sara, we need to talk,” he said.

“
Now?
” she breathed, raking him from head to toe in wide-eyed astonishment.

“No, not now,” he responded, his lips curled in the closest thing to a smile she’d seen yet, albeit an exasperated one. “It’s clear to me that we need to expand our dialogue of last evening. We touched on the house rules, but what we need to establish . . . are the
ground rules
. I shan’t be taking breakfast
in the morning, but if you will join me after nuncheon in the study we can talk privately. I’d rather not have the servants privy to our conversation.”

“You’re sure you will be coming down to nuncheon tomorrow, Nicholas?” she said, recalling his rude absence at table all day.

“Ah! My apologies,” he said. “What kept me from joining you at nuncheon and dinner today came up quite suddenly, and couldn’t be avoided. That may happen from time to time. I should have sent my regrets. Please forgive my want of conduct. I shall try to be more chivalrous in future.”

“After nuncheon, then . . . in the study,” she agreed. “Good night, Nicholas.”

“Good night, Sara.”

He moved on then, but the deep, sensuous echo of his voice lived after him, tampering with her balance. So did the image of that lean, corded, lightly furred body half-exposed in the candlelight. How handsome he was, mussed by the gale, this strange man she’d married. His scent was still with her, all around her—in her. Breathing deeply, she drank her fill. Yes. She was attracted to this man, but he did not want her in that way. What he did want was still unclear. Maybe tomorrow, he would answer her questions. Maybe tomorrow, she would be brave enough to ask them. Right now, as she approached her suite, she prayed that she wouldn’t find Nero crouching on his haunches in her foyer. Thank God, it was vacant.

Sara heard the howl again in the dead of night. It wrenched her from a sound sleep, and she went to the door, but there was no sign of Nero in the deserted hallway. Had she dreamed it? No. It was much too intense, so plaintive and sad it tugged at her heartstrings. She had bonded with the creature and, if anything were to happen to him, the heart he’d wrapped himself around would break all over again, just when it had begun to mend. Nero’s unexpected presence in her life eased the loneliness in her strange situation: to be married to a husband who wasn’t a husband, who showed not the slightest affection—who didn’t even want to be
touched
. How could she bear to lose the dog’s comforting presence now?

She did not mention Nero at nuncheon. The meal was passed for the most part in silence, though she didn’t miss Nicholas’s articulate eyes studying her from the opposite end of the table. There it was again—that look. She hadn’t imagined it. There was something unspoken in those eyes—something veiled, though acute, as if he were struggling with some inner demon. That hypnotic stare seemed alarmingly
soft and intense, seductive and cold all at once. How could that be? But it was. If only she could read it.

The storm had finally spent itself in the night. By dawn, the rain had stopped, and the wind had died to a sighing murmur. Though the sea rolling up the coast below still had a fearsome voice, it had ceased climbing the house’s ancient curtain wall and flinging spindrift high into the air, clear to the carved stone ravens at the pinnacle. The sun was another matter. Dark brooding clouds still hung heavy on the horizon, adding to the gloomy mood of the day, and Sara watched Nicholas stir the fire to life in the study hearth in a vain attempt to chase off the dampness that permeated the old house. She noticed, too, that the wet clothes and muddy boots were gone.

“You needn’t look so grim,” he said, surging to his full height after the chore. “You have nothing to fear from me, Sara. This isn’t the Inquisition, you know. I’m in hopes that when we leave this room today, we shall have a better understanding of each other, nothing more.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Nicholas,” she said. It was half-truth. She was very afraid of her attraction to this man, because it wasn’t returned. “You’ve been most generous, and you’ve saved me from a nightmarish existence, for which I am exceedingly grateful. It’s just that your motives are . . . unclear.”

“My motives are
suspect
, you mean.”

“If you prefer.”

“I see. You have questions. Let us begin with those then, shall we?” He took his seat on the edge of the desk as he had during their first interview. Chairs were wasted on this man.

Sara folded her hands in her lap, trying not to wrinkle the blue dimity frock she’d chosen for the occasion. She’d been hoping he would be the one to begin. This was going to be difficult.

“Very well,” she said. “Forgive me, but you do not look the
sort of man who has to choose a bride from the debtors’ prison. With so many lovely young ladies in the offing this Season, why me?”

“I am not interested in empty-headed debutantes, who parade themselves in Town as bait for husbands. They may as well be on the block at Tattersall’s.”

“Or could it be that you thought someone liberated from the Fleet would bow and scrape to your every whim?”

“That is insulting, not only to me, but to yourself.”

“What, then? You must admit that at best all this is bizarre.”

He hesitated. “All right,” he said. “If I am to be completely truthful, I will admit that you are partly right. I did hope that someone in my debt might be more inclined to put up with my . . . idiosyncrasies, but I shan’t let that damn me. I told you what I was looking for in a wife. That I found her in the Fleet and not at Almack’s matters not. I have found her—end of issue. I assume there’s more?”

“Yes,” Sara said, with as much confidence as she could muster. “I find it hard to accept that you do not want an heir.” She had come this far—too far to stop now. “A handsome, prosperous aristocrat such as yourself, a man with property and wealth to leave after him, surely needs someone to leave it to.”

Again he hesitated. “My reasons are . . . private, Sara,” he said.

“But we are
married
, Nicholas.”

“Married people do keep some things to themselves, and this is not your usual marriage. You need to accept that.”

“I can accept anything I can understand,” she sallied, “and I do not understand this! It is beyond my comprehension. Will you allow me to be blunt?”

He ground out a low chuckle. There was no humor in it. “I’m sure you will be, whether I ‘allow’ you or not.”

“It is unfortunate that you force me to take the initiative in
this conversation. It offends me and I shan’t forgive you for it, I’m sure, when you could so easily spare me. You asked for my questions, my lord—”

“Indeed, I did,” he flashed, “but I made no promise to answer them. Don’t let that deter you, however. Speak your mind.”

“All right, since you insist. Do you . . . prefer the company of men?” she blurted. There! It was out. Maybe the key to conversing with this man was to let anger mouth the words.

He did laugh, then—rich, deep, throaty laughter that resonated through her body like the shuddering vibration of a snare drum, right down to her toes. It was the first time she’d seen him laugh, and it thrilled her, despite the sarcasm.

“If it were only that simple,” he said on the wane of it. “No, Sara,” he said. “I do not ‘prefer the company of men.’ ”

“What then? It isn’t just the matter of an heir. You have no interest in . . . in sharing your bed with—”

“I haven’t said I have no interest,” he interrupted her. “I said it shan’t be part of our arrangement.”

“Don’t mince words with me, Nicholas. The result is the same. Am I unsatisfactory in some way? Am I not what you expected? Is my hair too long, considering the current fashion? Do you have a mistress?
What?
For pity sake, it’s only natural that I would be curious about such things. I need to be clear upon what to expect from this union. I am amazed that you haven’t explained yourself without my having to embarrass myself by dragging it out of you like this.”

He slid off the desk with a sinuous motion more animal than human, and took a step nearer. That strange look had come again into his eyes. For a moment, she was certain he was going to take hold of her, and she leaped from the chair and put it between them.

His posture collapsed, and he raked his hair back from his brow. It glistened with sweat. “No, Sara,” he said, “you are most definitely not unsatisfactory, and I have no mistress. You weren’t plucked from the Fleet at random, either. I
won’t have you thinking so. I thought I made it clear in my proposal that our fathers were long-standing friends. I was hoping it would ease your mind to know that there was some sort of a link between us, even a tenuous one.”

“You did mention it, yes, but how would you even know of it? All that would have been before you were born.”

“Quite so. My father kept journals of his war adventures. They came into my hands, along with all his other effects after Mother passed on. Colonel Ponsonby, your father, was mentioned quite often. He and Father were together in India at the beginning of the British Occupation, and on one occasion, he saved Father’s life out there. But that is a tale . . . for another time. When I heard of your misfortune, I realized who you were, and took the liberty of engineering your rescue. If I had known before the fact, you never would have seen the inside of Fleet Prison. So you see, I knew what I was getting before it was gotten. There is no . . . ulterior motive here, unless you want to count my doing something that I knew would please Father, albeit posthumously, as ulterior.” Jamming his fisted hands into his pockets, he strolled back to the desk. “I’m not prepared to go into detail in regard to my not wanting an heir, but this much I will tell you: There is a defect in the blood that I do not wish to pass on to future generations. It is best that the Walraven line end with me.”