Undoing of a Lady (19 page)

“And you think that
this
is the appropriate attire for riding?” His voice shook so much he could barely force out the words. “And in front of every one of my friends and acquaintances?”

Her chin came up. She made no attempt to cover herself. Once more her bright auburn hair covered her shoulders and tumbled over her provocative little breasts and she put her hands on her hips. “No doubt they envied you,” she said, her gaze going to the immense bulge in his pantaloons.

“No doubt they thought you a whore and wanted to have you on the banqueting table,” Nat said. The
mere thought of any other man possessing her—or even wanting to possess her—drove him to insanity. “Was that what you wanted?”

The fury sparked again in Lizzie eyes. She threw the brush at him. He ducked as it sailed over his head.

“Bastard!” she said. “I hear my cousin bribed you to marry me. All that talk of honor and saving my reputation and
caring
for me—” Her voice broke. “Oh, I knew you needed the money, too,” she finished bitterly. Her breasts were rising and falling rapidly with each gasping breath she took. “At least you were honest about that. But you had my dowry for that. You did not need for Gregory to
sell
me to you, as well—”

Nat made a grab for her, but she slithered from his grip, lithe and slippery, and snatched the riding crop that was on the table. She held it out toward him like a weapon.

“Don’t touch me or I’ll hit you! I mean it!”

“Lizzie,” Nat said. “Please…” He made a desperate final grab for his control. “Can we talk about this?”

In response she brought the crop down on his arm, the pain so jarring he caught his breath.

“Keep away from me!”

“All right,” Nat said, the fury whipping through his blood. “If you want to play it like this.”

He did not recognize the jumble of lust and fierce violence and frustration within him. It felt as though he had been propelled far beyond his normal self by feelings and emotions that were completely uncon
trollable and absolutely alien to his nature. He grabbed the end of the crop and used it to drag Lizzie toward him. She wriggled her arm free again and brought the crop down hard against his buttocks. The sensation, the pleasure and pain, burst through his body in an explosion of sparks. His cock jutted fiercely. He groaned. She did it again, with a wicked flick of the wrist and he froze as even more intense feelings racked him. A third time and he almost came where he stood. He tore the crop from her hands and snapped it in half, throwing the pieces into a corner. She did not take the opportunity to run away. She stood in front of him, her eyes and the tilting smile on her lips, taunting him.

“I warned you,” she said.

“And I’m warning you.” Nat was panting. “Parading yourself before all those men…I am the
only one
who can have you.”

She shrugged an insolent shoulder. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it—the sex and the money. Well, if you want me you’ll have to take me.”

Even as he reached out to her she whirled away from him and ran for the door. She was quick, but now he was quicker. He caught her by the upper arms and spun her around so that her bare back was against the rough brick wall of the store. He yanked her head back with one hand tangled in the silken tresses of her hair and ground his mouth against hers and in return she bit his lip hard and he tasted blood.

This was madness, this frenzied, desperate need he had for her. He knew it and the fact that it was so far removed from his usual rational demeanor filled him with equal measures of despair and arrant desire. He did not understand why he felt driven by the need to tame her but he grabbed one of the leading reins from the table and looped it about her wrists, dragging them above her head and securing the leather over a jutting metal hook. The expression in her eyes when she realized that he had restrained her was feral. She kicked out at him but he brought his body in close to her, trapping her flailing legs between his thighs. She writhed and wriggled now to no avail.

“Lizzie,” he said. They were close, staring into each other’s faces, her breasts touching his chest as they both panted for breath. And then that impudent smile twitched her lips again.

“Nat,” she said. “How far would you go?”

“As far as you,” Nat said. “Further.”

The dare was in her eyes. “You think so? Try me. Test me. Take me.”

Her words snapped the last of Nat’s control. He ran his hands down her body, over the breasts that had so tormented him with their pert, pouting beauty when she had flaunted them in the face of every man in Fortune’s Folly.

Take me…

Now at last he could pinch and squeeze and suck
on her until she cried out and arched to his mouth, satisfying himself with both her submission and her eagerness. He could part the silken softness of her thighs and find the slick center of her and feel the way that her body closed about his marauding fingers just as it would squeeze him to an excess of pleasure and lust. He could run his thumb over the nub of her and revel in the way that she twitched and jerked in her bonds, and the way in which he could demand this response from her and she would give all she had because she was as desperate as he.

“You should not have provoked me,” he said against her mouth whilst his fingers still invaded her, sliding, stroking. “You did not understand what would happen.”

Her eyes were a slumberous green from sensual arousal now, her lashes a dark flicker against her cheek, her lips parted on each needy breath.

“Oh, I understand this well enough,” she said. “It is the only thing between us that I do understand.” She writhed. “Finish me. Please. I don’t mind begging.”

Nat shook his head. “Consequences,” he said. He twisted his fingers inside her a little and heard her gasp.

“I’ll come anyway,” she said, “just to spite you.”

“And then you’ll come again,” Nat said, kissing her in such gentle counterpoint to his words, “and again until I say you can stop.”

She did come then, against his hand. And again, still restrained, at the insistence of his lips and
tongue, and then he could wait no longer and unfastened her bonds and tossed her down into the pile of hay. He held her with one hand whilst he freed his shaft with the other. He lowered his mouth to hers again and she kissed him back, as insatiable as she was angry, her hunger as violent as his own. He was so hard by now that he thought he might explode, simply shatter. She pulled up his shirt, scoring his back with her nails, biting his chest and shoulders. There was no gentleness in her touch. She wanted revenge and it hurt. And when she dug her fingers into the stinging marks that the crop had made on his buttocks he spread her and plunged into her with hot, ruthless strokes and came immediately, shouting her name. Lizzie screamed and her body arched and convulsed about him. It was over in seconds.

Afterward, when he had recovered a modicum of strength, Nat wrapped her in the tattered remnants of her gown and carried her into the house. Her body felt soft and compliant in his arms, her head against his shoulder, her eyes closed. The edge had gone off Nat’s anger now but he felt bruised and tired yet still unsatisfied. He hunted that satisfaction and fulfilment all night long, seeking oblivion in Lizzie’s body, driving her to wild peaks of pleasure, making her climax again and again until she was spent. He woke her simply so that he could touch her at will and do whatever he wished with her pale, tantalizing body. She did not refuse him once. He lay with his
shaft buried deep within her, hard and hot, for several hours, not moving, resisting the twitch and spasm of her body about him as though determined to show he could resist the power she held over him. He felt as though he was in a dream in which he pursued something so elusive that it was forever within reach and yet it slipped away from him just when he thought he had captured it. Even when he took her for the final time the pleasure overwhelmed him only to ebb away and leave him exhausted and empty, deprived of whatever it was he sought.

Nat fell asleep trying to puzzle out what it was that he was searching for and awoke as the summer dawn broke into the room in all its shimmering golden glory. He turned instinctively to search for Lizzie’s warmth and found the bed empty. The corresponding barrenness inside him seemed to deepen and grow. He felt at the same time scoured clean of the anger of the previous night and yet even more hollow and lonely than he had before. And he felt shocked. Shocked with himself and appalled at what he had done. He could not escape the thought that his marriage, for all its extremes of physical pleasure, was a complete disaster in other respects and he did not know what to do to put it right. He did not even know where to start.

Where was Lizzie?

Nat’s apprehension started to increase. Last night…Last night he had been intolerably angry
with his new wife, so furious and possessive and distraught that he had taken her and used her. He had probably frightened her or given her a disgust of him. Lizzie was wild, his perfect physical match; she aroused in him emotions that he had never dreamed he possessed and that made him forget to be gentle. He had been so incensed that he had made no allowances for her relative youth and lack of experience.

Guilt twisted his gut. She had run from him now just as she had after that first night in the folly. On the thought he got up, grabbed his dressing robe and went to the door that connected their rooms. It was locked.

“Lizzie?” He rattled the handle. “Lizzie!”

He went out into the corridor and was about to try the other door into Lizzie’s room when he heard a step behind him.

“May I be of assistance, Lord Waterhouse?”

Mrs. Alibone was standing in the corridor behind him, wearing a long black dressing gown of formidable respectability, a candle in one hand. “If it is locked I could fetch the spare set of keys,” she continued. Her eyes were bright with prurient excitement and suddenly Nat felt sick.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.” He was not having the housekeeper intruding into Lizzie’s room and perhaps finding her distraught, in floods of tears. It was bad enough that the entire household knew that Lizzie had ridden out naked the night before—and that when they returned he had ravished her in the
stables. There would be plenty of talk without providing a sequel. Suddenly, despite his anger the previous night, he felt desperately, feverishly protective of Lizzie.

“Thank you, Mrs. Alibone,” he said pointedly, when the housekeeper made no attempt to leave, “you can go now.”

Only when Mrs. Alibone had slid silently away did he turn the handle. By now he was shaking. The door was not locked, but Lizzie’s bed was neat, turned down for the night but untouched.

Nat snatched his clothes, dressing haphazardly in shirt and pantaloons, and managing—just—to drag on his boots without the assistance of his valet. He ran down the stairs, through the waking house and out into the garden.

Where was Lizzie? Where would she run?

Almost as soon as the words formed in his mind he saw her, sitting on the wooden swing under the wide spreading branches of an ancient apple tree. She was swinging very slowly backward and forward. Her head was bent and the early-morning sun burnished the deep auburn strands of her hair, setting them alight. She wore a bright yellow gown that looked fresh and pretty. Nat felt some strange sensation squeeze his heart as though it were clenched tight inside a fist.

She had not run from him after all. Despite everything she was still here. The relief overwhelmed him.

He moved toward her across the dew-drenched grass. A blackbird sang in the tree above her head. The scent of roses was on the air. Then Lizzie looked up and the misery he saw in her green eyes made Nat’s heart clench again, this time in shock, for it was stark and painful to witness.

“Lizzie,” he said. “Sweetheart—”

She stood up and let the rope of the swing slip from her hand.

“This has to stop, Nat,” she said. “I cannot bear it any longer.”

L
IZZIE HAD WOKEN
before the dawn, when the very first call of the birds had broken the quiet of the night and the very first rays of the sun had barely started to lighten the eastern sky. She had been profoundly glad that Nat had not stirred when she slipped from the bed. She had known she had to get out of the house, into the fresh air, to breathe,
to think
.

In the peace of the early morning she had sat in the garden and thought about the disaster that was her marriage. She had been so angry with Nat last night for his mercenary acceptance of Gregory Scarlet’s bribe and even more so because he had not told her about it, and he had been equally angry with her for her wildness and her outrageous behavior. They had been pushed as far apart as the poles. That such mutual fury had erupted into equally mutual desire had not surprised her in the least. That was the way that it was between herself and Nat.

That was the only thing there was between herself and Nat.

And it was not enough for her.

Oh, she knew that sex without love was possible. Hundreds, thousands of people had sex without being in love with one another and evidently Nat was one of those people who had no difficulty in separating out the two things. She was not. And now, finally, it had broken her heart and she knew she could never do it again.

She looked at Nat now as he approached her across the grass. He was in no more than shirt and breeches and he looked casual and disheveled, as though he had pulled on his clothes carelessly. The breeze flattened his shirt against his muscular torso and ruffled his dark hair. He looked troubled and harried, and the love she had for him pounded through Lizzie with every beat of her pulse. She knew it was a catastrophe to feel like this but she could not help herself. She could not deny her love or fall out of love with Nat simply because he was unable to return her feelings.

Last night she had wanted to be able to provoke him and to know that she could rouse a response from him. She had done so. But this morning she faced the hard truth that it was not the response she wanted. She wanted to know him properly, to feel as close to him emotionally as she was physically. She wanted his love, and he could not give that to her. Each time they made love it became more difficult for her to hold back her feelings because although she could respond to him and take pleasure—great
pleasure, she admitted—in the act, it left her feeling cheated and desolate, more acutely aware than ever that outside their bedroom they barely spoke.

“This has to stop, Nat,” she said. “I cannot bear it any longer.”

She saw the expression of bewilderment deepen on his face. “I don’t understand,” he said.

No. And she could not explain to him, not completely, because in doing so she would lay her feelings beneath his feet and he would crush them, not deliberately, for she was sure that he would never seek to hurt her on purpose, but simply because he could not match her love for him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sorry about last night. I was very angry and upset to discover that you had taken money from Cousin Gregory to marry me. It made me behave very badly.”

Nat rubbed his forehead. “I am sorry, too,” he said. “I treated you very badly. Your anger seems to fuel mine and then it is madness between us.”

Lizzie chose her words with care. “I think that we need to get to know one another better,” she said. “We have barely spoken since we wed. It feels as though we are strangers to one another now. And until we have resolved our difficulties I feel we should not sleep with each other again.”

The look of bewilderment on Nat’s face was replaced by a rather comical look of horror. If Lizzie had not felt so wretched she might even have laughed.

“Not sleep with one another?” he repeated.

Trust a man to pick up on that point first, Lizzie thought. “Not have sex with one another,” she elaborated. “A sex ban,” she said, warming to her theme, “like the Lysistrata in Ancient Greece. No touching, no kissing until we know one another better.” Her classical education had been somewhat neglected—in fact, her entire education had been somewhat neglected since governesses had not stayed long at Scarlet Park and even less time at Fortune Hall—but she had a vague recollection of a play in which the women had withdrawn their sexual favors.

“Lizzie, we have known one another for nine years,” Nat said. “It is not as though we are strangers to each other.”

And you do not really know me at all, Lizzie thought, nor do I know you. She started to walk slowly across the lawn toward the house.

“I realize that,” she said, “but for almost all our acquaintance I was no more than Monty’s little sister to you, and you…”

You were like a hero to me
.

He had been. Nine years older and with all the glamour that age and experience could bestow, he had always seemed out of her reach.

“There is a vast gap between the friendship we had before,” Lizzie said, “and being husband and wife.”

“Many people who marry are practically strang
ers to one another when they wed,” Nat said. “It is accepted.”

Lizzie thought of Flora Minchin. Flora and Nat had been virtual strangers who would have wed and perhaps Nat would have been more comfortable with a wife he did not need to know well. All he had wanted was someone who was rich and could one day fulfill the role of Duchess of Waterhouse with aplomb. Instead he had got her, rich, it was true, but a complete hoyden.

“I know,” she said. “Unfortunately I cannot live like that.” She looked him in the eyes. “It makes me unhappy to give myself to you with such abandonment and yet to feel so remote from you the rest of the time,” she said. “It feels wrong to me. I need to know you better, Nat. I need time.”

I need to try to make you love me…

She trembled a little at the thought. Perhaps she was mad even to imagine that she could turn his caring and his desire for her into something deeper and more profound. She did not know; all she knew was that she owed it to herself to try and that she was determined that she would give them this chance.

“I understand that you might need time to adjust to your new situation,” Nat said. “This is strange for you and new, and you are young and have experienced so much loss lately…” He stopped, frowning more deeply. “If I hurt you last night…”

Lizzie knew that he thought she was shocked at
the physical demands he was making on her and so she was withdrawing because she needed time to come to terms with them. In an odd way, although he had misunderstood her reasons, she loved him all the more for trying to give her what she wanted even when he did not understand.

“You did not hurt me,” she said, “but I do need some time. I am sorry. It is true that I am in mourning and I feel very angry and resentful all the time and that is why I go a little mad and do such scandalous things…” She stopped. She knew that one day soon she would need to talk to him about all the pent-up anger and frustration and misery that was inside her or it would poison everything. This morning her hurt was too fresh and new to try, and she felt so weary, but she would explain as best she could very soon.

“Will you do it for me, Nat?” she appealed. “Will you try to know me better, do things together, talk to one another?”

She could see that he still did not understand why she needed it to be this way but that he could also see how passionately it mattered to her. He took her hand and she tried not to shiver with hope and longing.

“Very well,” he said. “I know you are angry and unhappy.” The lines about his eyes eased as he smiled a little. “Indeed I would have to be blind not to have noticed and I am sorry that I have been angry, too, and not more patient with you.”

Lizzie felt almost winded with love for him in that moment. “You would have to be a very complaisant husband indeed not to be infuriated by my behavior,” she whispered, and he smiled at her again, looking tired and sad, and she wanted to soothe that sadness away.

“Would you like to go riding with me later—take a picnic, perhaps?” Nat said. “We could make a start on getting to know one another better.”

“I should like that very much,” Lizzie agreed, smiling with dazzling pleasure. A tiny seed of hope was unfurling in her heart, so new and delicate that she was almost afraid to put too much trust in it.

Nat’s thumb moved gently over the smooth skin on the back of her hand. “But this idea of not touching,” Nat continued. “Perhaps you could reconsider?”

Lizzie looked up at him. The soothing movement of his thumb and the warm clasp of his hand on hers were very seductive. She was tempted to compromise. But that way lay danger and weakness. In no time they would kiss and then they would make love again and she would be back where she had started having lost the chance to win the thing that she so desperately desired, Nat’s love.

She removed her hand from his. “I am sorry,” she said. “No compromises.” Despite herself, her voice came out a little huskily from the effect of his proximity. Nat heard it and immediately his eyes narrowed to a predatory gleam.

“You will be the one who breaks the terms first,” he said softly.

“No, I will not,” Lizzie said.

“Yes, you will because you have no patience.”

Perhaps, Lizzie thought, he knows me better than I imagined. But I will show him.

She smiled into his eyes. “I’ll wager I do not.”

Nat smiled straight back at her and Lizzie felt her head spin. This was different. This was new. Her husband was flirting with her. Nat Waterhouse, whom she had known since she was eleven years old, who had viewed her as the rather troublesome little hoyden whom he was always extracting from scrapes, was actually flirting with her.

This is the bit we missed out, Lizzie thought suddenly. We never had a courtship. We went straight from a rather strained friendship to an even more strained marriage and there was no time to adjust. But now we can change that…

Suddenly she felt light-headed with excitement.

Nat took her hand again and kissed the palm and Lizzie snatched it away from him. She could feel the imprint of his lips on her skin and curled her fingers over the place where the kiss had been. “You are cheating already!” she protested.

“I’ll wager you lose, sweetheart,” Nat said. “I will see you at breakfast.” He strolled away across the grass and Lizzie watched him go, her heart suddenly lifting. He had never called her sweetheart before that
morning. He had probably never thought of her in that way. Of course Nat had no idea that she was gambling on far more than he was, on the chance of his love, but suddenly she thought this wager with her husband might prove a great deal more fun than she had imagined.

“SO,” L
AURA
A
NSTRUTHER SAID
, “you rode naked into The Granby Hotel, you quarreled passionately with Nat—”

“I’m guessing that you then made love even more passionately,” Lydia put in slyly.

“And now you are refusing to sleep with him again until he falls in love with you,” Alice finished.

“That’s about the sum of it,” Lizzie said. She looked around the circle of her friends. “Well? Do you think I am mad?”

They were sitting in Laura’s library later that morning and the summer sun was streaming in through the long windows. Alice and Lizzie had been into the village and brought back the news and gossip for their friends and now they were taking tea, all except Lydia who was eating a pickled egg.

“I can’t help it,” Lydia said defensively, catching Lizzie’s grimace as she reached for the jar, “I developed a taste for them a few months ago and now I cannot stop. It’s not my fault—being
enceinte
has given me a liking for all manner of strange food.”

“The vinegar smells horrid,” Lizzie said.

“It tastes wonderful,” Lydia said, beaming as she popped another egg into her mouth.

“No, you are not mad,” Laura said to Lizzie, patting her hand, “but I do think you are very brave in risking your heart like this. I’m surprised that Nat agreed,” she added.

“Well of course he thinks that I am shocked by his demands on me,” Lizzie said, coloring a little. “And he did not precisely agree. He sees it more as a wager and thinks I will lose.”

“And meanwhile he will be falling in love with you,” Alice said.

“If he does not—” Lizzie began. She had not allowed herself to think what might happen if she set out to win Nat’s love and failed. Presumably life would feel as desolate as it did now, only worse.

“He
will,”
Laura said. “You have had men falling at your feet for years, Lizzie.”

“And the one that I want, my own husband, is indifferent to me,” Lizzie said. “There’s some irony in that.”

“Nat is not indifferent to you,” Laura said thoughtfully. “He cares deeply. He has always been there for you, Lizzie, for as long as you have known him. What he has not done yet—” she paused thoughtfully “—is to let that regard for you grow into love. But I think he is close and now that you have changed the rules of the game, well…” She smiled. “We shall see.”

“There is a horde of people approaching up the lawn,” Lydia commented, peering out of the library
window. “Whatever can they want? There is Mrs. Broad, and Mrs. Morton from the dressmakers and the haberdasher and the milliner and the florist—”

“And Mrs. Lovell the solicitor’s wife, and Mrs. James the doctor’s wife, and my mama, and the servants from Fortune Hall—” Alice said.

There was a thunderous crash at the front door as the first of the visitors applied themselves to the knocker, then there was a babble of voices and then Carrington, Laura’s aged butler, staggered into the library followed closely by about forty people.

“A number of ladies from the village wish to speak with you, Mrs. Anstruther,” Carrington shouted, over the tumult. “There is Mrs. Broad and Mrs. Morton and—”

“Pray don’t feel you must announce everyone, Carrington,” Laura said hastily as the butler looked as though he was about to expire with the effort. She raised her hand.

“Ladies, please!” The room fell obediently quiet. “What may we do for you?” Laura added.