The Wedding Night (23 page)

She lit the lamp on her worktable, then lugged volume one of the thick gazetteer to her desk and flipped open the cover.

This Volume, intended as a Gazetteer of Minor Collections of Antiquities, is
Respectfully
Dedicated to the Most Honorable, the Viscount
Norbury
, Lord President of the Council of Antiquaries, 1778.

The
Willowmoon
Knot hadn't been in
York
; she and Jack had returned to the storage rooms in the minster and had found nothing of
Runville's
pagan collection, no mention of its ever having been cataloged. It might have been stored there unremarked for decades and then been traded to another parish, or sold to a museum or even to a private collector by one of the minster's deans.

1778
. Nearly modern. It was the most tantalizing resource yet. Inefficiently indexed, and compiled from many sources, it would be a long, hard read. She should have been thrilled at finding the
Gazetteer
, but success had tasted bitter recently.

"If you were to search for my sisters, Mairey, where would you begin?"

"Jack!" Her heart wild with relief, Mairey searched him out in the shadows that stuffed the corners of the library. She had sensed him in the darkness after
all,
she'd heard his breathing, felt his heat and his scent. She wanted to run to him and hold him through the night—an accidental friend, an inconvenient colleague … and oh, yes, a lover.

"Your sisters, Jack?" she asked instead, trying to assess his mood across the distance between them. "That would depend on what more you could tell me about them."

"Everything, Mairey." His desk chair creaked, and she heard him rise. "I would tell you everything. You can have Dodson's file full of lies and distortions, for all the good it will do you." He teetered in place, caught his hand fast around the back of his chair.

The lout had injured himself, or he'd been drinking.
Which didn't seem at all like the Jackson Rushford who planned and controlled the workings of his rigid life to the nearest inch.

"Jack, where have you been?" Concern for his recklessness made her voice far more chafing than she meant.

"Out."

"More than out, Jack. You were gone a night and a whole day." His delicate mood
be
damned. Mairey grabbed up her lamp and set it on the table beside him, then stood back to examine him as he flinched from the light, squinting down at her. He looked tumbled.

"Were you worried about me, Mairey?"

"Worried? How about terrified, good sir?"

He smiled sideways, too charmingly bashful for this hour of the night. "I didn't mean to worry you."

His hair was standing every which way, finger-combed and drooping damply into his eyes. She reached up and ran her fingers through its silky blackness.

"Your hair is wet."

He was jacketless, collarless, with his sleeves rolled to his elbow. "I took a bath, Mairey. I think I fell asleep again."

"You think?" He looked half-asleep still.

He leaned down lazily and pulled her close to whisper in her ear, "I didn't have you there to rescue me."

A very good thing, because she wouldn't have had rescue on her mind.

"Sit here, Jack, before you fall." Mairey wrestled him into the high-back chair. He landed with a grunt and a grimace. "Have you been fighting? Did you kill Dodson?"

"Christ, Mairey, I wanted to take on every Dodson and
Greel
I could get my hands on."

"And did you, Jack? Did you find Dodson and beat him to a pulp?" Hoping he had, Mairey knelt between his spread thighs and took pleasure in the intimate smoothness of his beard against her palms while she turned his jaw to examine him for injuries.

He hadn't even a scratch on him, save for the cut he must have just gotten from his razor.

"I would have, Mairey. But I didn't want you to hate me any more than you do."

"I don't hate you, Jack." Lunatic. He didn't know that she couldn't possibly hate this part of him, the lost boy who was searching for his family. Not when she wanted to be his family.

He tilted his head, and squinted at her through one wickedly smiling eye. "Not even when I'm an inconsiderate ass?"

"Not even then, Jack." What the devil had gotten into him on his wild pilgrimage? He certainly hadn't been drinking; he smelled of soap and starch.

"I'm exceedingly glad of that, Mairey."

"Well, then, sir. If you were not out looking to bludgeon Dodson for his crimes against you, where did you go?"

"I was hunting for ghosts." He looked quite serious, the way a headmaster might as he was explaining the tidal effects of the moon. "I felt like a damned ghoul, last night and all the day long, tromping through every graveyard in
Manchester
."

"You went to
Manchester
." Mairey smiled hugely, relieved that he'd found at least a little hope tucked away in his outrage. "You really hadn't spent the day stalking Dodson."

"Bastard—he's not worth the trouble. I had a more precious mission."

"Your mother." Her heart swelled and grew lighter for him, though it still ached. She bundled his hand between hers. "Oh, Jack, you're wonderful—"

"Don't, Mairey." He brought their clasped hands to his lips and set a kiss on her fingers, his gaze fastened fiercely to hers as it so often was of late. "And don't beam at me like that with your eyes all misty, as though you believe me to be the perfect son and protector. I am not."

He needed sleep—or something. But getting the enormous man up the stairs and into his bed was going to be a mighty challenge. Leaving him there—alone—might prove impossible.

"Jack, you
are
a perfect son
and
brother. I know of no one who could have been a more exemplary protector, given any circumstances."

"Do not indulge me, Mairey. I've been a damned fool."

Oh, how she could count the ways—and be at the task for weeks! But Jack had never been anything but honorable and courageous in his devotion to his family. He had been their battle-ready champion from the day his father died, and long, long before that, if she knew the boy as well as she knew the man.

"Whatever you say, Jack." The man was not ready to admit to his goodness; battering him with it would only make him more stubborn. She left him and went back to her worktable. "I only meant that I was glad you saw your mother's grave."

"I didn't." He thrust himself out of the chair, stuffing his thumbs into the back of his trousers and pacing the room in his giant's stride. "I couldn't find the bloody thing."

Her spirit sank into the mud; she leaned against the table. "
At St. Simon
's Chapel?"

"You didn't say which church." He sliced
her a
self-directed indictment as he paced past her toward the bank of windows.

She followed him, feeling guilty. "I'm sorry, Jack—"

"Don't you dare,
Mairey!
" He abruptly turned back to her. She ran into his chest nose first and stayed there to sniff a little of his starchy tang. "The fault was mine—all of it. I should have damn well asked you where she was before I went storming off. Instead I raged at you like a feral beast, accused you of … what was it I accused you of?"

"Nothing that matters, Jack." Nothing mattered but his shamefaced smile and the shadows that planed his jaw. "I understand—"

"You couldn't possibly." He planted himself on the edge of her desk, leaving Mairey standing between his spread knees. "But I am belatedly and enormously grateful for your trying to knock some sense into me, and entirely unworthy of your persistence. And I'm damned sorry for being a jackass, though it won't be the last time. I'm notoriously stone-headed."

"Indeed, you are." But he had a heart of bread pudding, sweet and soft and impossible to refuse. "As for Dodson, I would have kissed you if you had given him a good wallop."

"Kiss me now, Mairey." His voice was rough, filled with longing, and he tugged her closer. He gazed at her mouth as though he'd been lost in a desert and she was a cool oasis. A kiss wouldn't be very wise, not with the way her hands were trembling, the way her heart was pounding. He was leaning forward, had cocooned her nearly completely in his arms as he rested his hands on his knees. His cheek was soft, scented with citrus.

He was whispering feathery things to her. "Home, Mairey. Beautiful Mairey. Forgive me, Mairey."

"I do." If she didn't kiss him soon and be finished with it, the kiss would become his, and outright volcanic.

He was so very close, nudging her ever nearer, stealing her pulse and the air between them, until she found his mouth and covered it with hers. Oh, such a soft and impatient place.

He made a sound like her name, a plea, an exaltation that made her want to sing. Then he was growling low in his chest, his breath shuddering past her lips.

"God, Mairey, I want you." He plowed his fingers through her hair, tilted her face to him and plundered her mouth. "I want you forever."

Forever?
Oh, yes, Jack!
She wanted him completely, wanted to stay and stay,
wanted
children with him and to putter in his garden. But his life was mining and hers was already claimed by secrets and silver and that blasted village that she loved, and her lovely and sheltered family.

It isn't fair, Papa!
But it was fact. And as dreadful as death.

Mairey scrambled to her feet and backed away from him, her arms aching from the need to hold him.

He was shaking, his grip on his knees a white-knuckled clench, and his breathing like a horse after the
Derby
.

"You're exhausted, Jack Rushford."

He straightened from the desk in all his rumpled, quaking wonder. "I was."

"You need to be in bed." Mairey bolted away from him and ran a few steps up the spiraling iron stairs that led to the mezzanine—and then across to the back door of his room.

"We need to be in bed, Mairey." He stood in the middle of the library, a glint-eyed,
unsated
dragon looking too pleased for his own good.

Her heart was racing, thrilled when his ringing footfall hit the landing a few steps below her.

"That wasn't my meaning, Jack."

"Oh, but it is mine, Mairey. I want to make love with you in my bed.
Our
bed, if you please."

"Ours?" What was the man talking about?

"Or in the lodge where you keep your heart." He started up the stairs relentlessly, his eyes fixed on hers, making her pulse thunder against her throat. "Or in the woods, or here in the library."

"You didn't sleep at all last night, did you, Jack?" That was the reason for his intimate confessions—not a passion for her. Certainly not love, as
Tattie
had suggested. Jack had said nothing about love.

She'd be lost completely if he ever did.

"I did sleep, Mairey," he said, closing in on her and her very illogical idea of getting him safely into his bed. "Dreaming always of you and the priceless gifts you've given me."

Odd, but she couldn't remember a single one. "How much sleep did you get?" She spun away and scooted up the stairs, five steps ahead of him. Then only two.

"I got enough."

She stopped at the mezzanine and turned to him. An even greater mistake. "Enough for what?"

He scooped her up in his next stride and started toward his room. "Enough to make love with you till next Tuesday."

"Jack!"

"Till Wednesday, then, if you like."

She liked Wednesday too, too much.

"Jack, put me down."

"No."

His chamber door loomed—immense, shiny mahogany, and a fat brass latch that opened too easily to a room bathed in the dim light of slumbering lamps. She saw starry glints of gold and emerald and ruby glittering in the periphery. His bed was as huge as he
was,
tall, oak framed, and four posted, heaped with pillows and overlain with an undulating sea of autumn-hued counterpane.

Heaven on earth—a place to sprawl, wild-limbed, and collect his kisses wherever he cared to lay them.

"You wanted me in my bed, Mairey."

And everywhere else, Jack!

"Well, here it is." He let go of her legs and caught her up against the length of him, so warm and so vibrantly hard in so very many places. "Here
I
am. And damn me, if you're not wearing your nightgown."

His smile was loose and tilting and far too charming; and he was watching her through half-lidded eyes, with a pulse-pounding, possessive hunger that she had
badly
mistaken for exhaustion.

"Jack, I just came to the library to get a book. And I really shouldn't be … oh. Oh, yes." Mairey sighed long and deeply as he trailed his beguiling mouth and then his tongue down the column of her throat; she watched in dizzying expectation as he slipped his splendid fingers past her coat and into the neck of her nightgown, then lifted it aside, exposing the yearning hollow of her throat to his spice-steamed breath and the fevered tracing of his mouth.