Dark Torment (11 page)

“Sarah! You look positively unkempt! If I didn’t know
better, I would think you had been cleaning out the stables!” Lydia was
coming down the stairs just as Sarah started up them; her distaste made the
frown lines that she was usually careful to avoid crease her forehead. Sarah
sighed as she approached her stepmother, who swept her skirt aside as though to
avoid contamination when they passed on the stairs. An older, plumper version
of Liza, with the same dusky brown hair worn in nearly the same artless style
and with her daughter’s spaniel eyes, Lydia had never made any secret of
the fact that she merely tolerated her husband’s daughter. Sarah, for her
part, could not summon for Lydia any of the fondness she had learned to feel
for her stepsister. The daughter of a minor baron, Lydia’s first husband
had been a wealthy cit, attracted as much, Sarah suspected, by Lydia’s
noble connections as by her person. Lydia had come to Australia with the very
young Liza in tow when her husband had died and left them, against all her
expectations, nearly paupers. Edward had been dazzled by the widow’s
charming smiles during one of his twice-yearly visits to Canberra, and had
married her within the week. Sarah’s mother had by then been dead for
nearly five years, and although Lydia’s and Liza’s advent had been
something of a shock, Sarah had been prepared to be fond of her new stepmother.
Certainly she had admired her. With her dazzling array of bright silk and satin
dresses, her perfumes and lotions and soft femininity, Lydia had seemed to the
fifteen-year-old Sarah the very epitome of a lady. For months she had
tried—futilely—to emulate her. When, finally, Lydia had driven it
home to her that, with her too-thin body and pointy face and hopeless hair, the
best Sarah could hope for was to be clean and tidy, Sarah had been crushed. All
her secret longings to be beautiful ruthlessly exposed for the idiocies they
were, Sarah had determined to eschew fashion entirely. Lydia had made it clear
in a hundred different ways that Sarah could never hope to rival her own and
her daughter’s looks; Sarah, accepting Lydia’s evaluation with the
humility of the young and untried, had never again attempted to compete.

“I had an accident,” she said now, briefly, to her
stepmother. She knew Lydia would not be concerned enough to press her for
details. Quite simply, she was not interested in what happened to her
husband’s daughter, as long as it was not something that would interfere
with her own comfort.

“I would hope so.” The faintest suggestion of scorn
was discernible through the British upper-class accent Lydia carefully
cultivated. “I would hate to think that you had taken to aping the style
of a ragamuffin. Although, now I come to think of it, it wouldn’t be much
of a difference.”

“Excuse me.” Ignoring Lydia’s dig, as she had
learned to do over the years, Sarah passed her stepmother and continued on up
the stairs to her room at the back of the house.

Edward and Lydia shared one of the large bedrooms at the front of
the second story, and Liza had the other. Sarah’s room overlooked the
orchard and was adjoined by a very pretty little sitting room she had converted
from an unused bedroom. Furnished in palest green and peach, her bedchamber was
dominated by the large four-poster that had been her mother’s marriage
bed and in which she herself had been born. Lydia had banished it from her new
husband’s bedroom almost as soon as she had hung up her clothes, and
Sarah had rescued it from the attic to which it had been ignominously
consigned. What Sarah wanted more than anything just at that moment was to
fling herself on it and never leave its soft comfort again; what she did was
strip off her ruined clothes, sluice her face and body with water, and tidy her
hair before donning a clean dress in a nondescript calico print that, like her
other clothes, had the advantage of not showing dirt.

Glancing at herself in the cheval mirror to make certain that her
dress was properly buttoned and her hair pinned up securely, Sarah was suddenly
struck by a wave of dissatisfaction with her looks such as she had not felt in
years. With her hair skinned back from her face into the cumbersome knot at her
nape, her face looked all eyes. The gold tone of the dress brought out their
color but unfortunately made her skin appear sallow. Buttoned primly to the
neck, the looseness of the dress disguised what few curves she possessed. Her
bare arms looked as brown as an aborigine’s from constant exposure to the
sun.

Sarah turned her back on her reflection, disliking it intensely.
Why did she have to be so hopelessly plain? And why, suddenly, did it bother
her so much? She had thought that she had successfully ridded herself of every
last lingering quiver of female vanity years ago. Then, as she forced her mind
to turn to the tasks that awaited her downstairs, Sarah realized that the
answer to that last question lay there, in a tall, hard-muscled body, a lean,
handsome face, and a pair of breathtakingly blue eyes.

Dominic Gallagher flexed his shoulder muscles and grimaced. The
pain in his back was almost gone now, but it had been replaced by a lingering
stiffness that made it difficult for him to lift his arms above his head and
hold them there for any length of time. Not that that scrawny witch could have
guessed, of course, when she had set him to washing windows. He would have
grimly endured a dozen beatings like the one that had caused his present
discomfort before he had confessed any weakness to her—or, for that
matter, to anyone. He had never asked for quarter in his life, and he never
would—not even if his arms fell off. Which they were clearly threatening
to do. Today she had him washing windows, which involved a great deal of
reaching and stretching. Yesterday she had set him to whitewashing walls, which
called for much the same thing. The day before that, it had been his lot to
remove what must have been thousands of tiny pieces of crystal from a
chandelier in the front parlor, dip them in soapy water, rinse and polish them,
and then rehang them. For someone with no knowledge of his difficulties, she
was fiendishly accurate in assigning him jobs that caused him physical
discomfort.

He could see her now, through the window he had just finished
washing, that bossy mouth moving as she directed the poor, defenseless little
aborigine maids to perform some no-doubt impossible task. The maids nodded
respectfully, and, armed with feather dusters, attacked the furniture like twin
dervishes.
Miss
Sarah—the respectful form of address stuck in
his craw like a swallowed chicken bone, although it was no more or less than he
would have called any gentlewoman in Ireland or England with whom he was not
intimately acquainted; he suspected that it was the enforced servility of his
position that made him despise the title so much when it came to
her
—oversaw
their efforts for a moment, then left the room. Dominic watched the faint
twitch of her skirts as she walked, and scowled. She was skinny, bossy, plain,
not his type at all. What was it about her that appealed to him so? He could
not for the life of him explain why he should find her attractive—unless
it was because, underneath her air of prim propriety, he caught an occasional,
tantalizing glimpse of another woman entirely. A staggeringly passionate woman.
He had not missed the hungry way she looked at him sometimes, when she thought
he wasn’t aware of it—damn, sometimes he thought
she
wasn’t
even aware of the way she looked at him—or the faint tremor in her
fingers when she had occasion to touch him. But that kind of reaction was
nothing new to him. Without conceit, as matter-of-factly as he knew that the
sun would rise in the morning, he accepted that his looks made most women find
him attractive. It was alternately awkward, amusing, and useful, depending on
his degree of attraction for the female concerned. And he had to admit that
Miss
Sarah attracted him inordinately. He could not fathom the how or the why
of it, but the thought of bedding her, of stripping the hideous clothing from
her slim body and holding her naked in his arms while he kissed and caressed
and possessed her, was keeping him awake nights.

Dominic fingered his cheek where she had struck him with her
reins. The narrow cut had healed now, but he could still see the fire in her
eyes when she had lashed out at him, hear the rage in her usually quiet,
courteous voice. She had surprised him then, as had her temper that first night
in the inn’s stable. Who ever would have thought that such a do-gooding
old maid was capable of such a fine flare-up of fury? Certainly not he. The
spitting tigress she had become on both occasions was a fascinating contrast to
the dowdy spinster who ordinarily inhabited her body. Maybe that was it: maybe
he just wanted to discover which of the two women was the real one. Maybe then
this aggravating, unbelievable attraction would disappear.

He hadn’t had a woman in months, of course, but that
wasn’t it. If that had been all it was, he would have been hot for that
young stepsister of hers, who was much closer to the kind of woman he usually
preferred. The younger girl was round and soft in all the right places, and not
afraid to
be
a woman—but he was not in the least attracted to
her. And this despite the way she had taken to following him about the place,
flirting with him so blatantly that he was hard put sometimes not to laugh, or,
when
Miss
Sarah had just finished giving him another order in that
uppity way of hers and he was feeling more enraged than usual, box the little
minx’s ears. Young Liza was clearly ripe for a man. It would be the
easiest thing in the world to take what she continually, and none too subtly,
offered him. At nearly seventeen, she was old enough, so it wasn’t her
age that held him back; he would wager the best horse he had owned in Ireland
that she was more sexually mature than her prim and proper stepsister. But he
could not summon up a single spark of desire for the chit, or for that
rapacious bitch of a stepmother, either, whom he had caught eying him once or
twice, and who, like her daughter, had suddenly begun taking a
“healthful” afternoon walk. With his escort, of course. At least
Mrs. Markham was more subtle than her daughter. Only her eyes had told him that
she found him attractive. No, the only one of the Markham ladies he could
envision in his bed was Sarah—
Miss
Sarah. And he was beginning
to be positively haunted by visions of bedding her, if for no other reason than
so that he could once again get a decent night’s sleep.

“I’ve brought you some lemonade, Gallagher. You look
dreadfully hot.” It was Liza, of course. Dominic turned to look at her,
dropping the cloth he had been using on the window into the bucket of soapy
water at his feet and flexing his shoulders again, which were stiff as a board.

“That was nice of you. Thank you.” Ignoring her coy
smile, Dominic reached for the glass and downed its contents thirstily. The
unaccustomed heat of this infernal country was making him sweat like a chunk of
ice near a bonfire; he needed all the liquids he could get. When he was
finished, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and handed her back
the glass. She took it, her eyes fixed on the expanse of chest that showed
through his unbuttoned shirt. He would have shed the garment entirely if it
hadn’t been for the marks on his back; not for anything would he
advertise the shame of having been beaten like a dog—or a slave. Which,
of course, was exactly what he was.

“You’d better go back inside. You don’t want to
get your nose sunburned before your ball.” The words were a dismissal. No
matter that it wasn’t for a slave to dismiss a lady of the house.
He’d be damned before he’d act the part of humble servant to a
seventeen-year-old chit!

“We’re in the shade.” Her eyes were fixed on his
face, and she was batting her eyelashes at him. If he hadn’t been so out
of humor, he would have been amused at her blatant flirtation. But he was out
of humor; being ordered around like a damned lackey by Miss Prunes-and-Prisms
Sarah was beginning to set his teeth on edge.

“So we are.” He acknowledged the valiant eucalyptus
that cast a meager patch of shade over this bit of ground at the side of the
house. “But I’ve finished this window, and the next one is not in
the shade.”

She sighed impatiently, planting her hands on her hips and looking
up at him with a pout that he was sure she must have spent hours practicing in
the mirror. The dress she had on, a white dimity strewn with pink rosebuds,
left her shoulders and the tops of her breasts bare. He wasn’t certain of
how things were done in Australia, but in Ireland revealing so much so early in
the day would have been considered highly improper. And he suspected that
Australia was no different. Today young Liza was gunning for bear.

“I want to go for a walk. Pa said you were to come with
me.”

Dominic looked her up and down, his eyes guarded. She was
posturing prettily, her plump bosoms thrust forward, one hand on a rounded hip
while the other fluffed the dark curls that cascaded over her
shoulders—in what, he thought, must have been a hellishly hot style. With
those sparkling brown eyes and pink cupid’s-bow of a mouth, she was a
remarkably pretty girl. Why did she arouse in him nothing but the desire to
shake her until her teeth rattled?

“Your sister particularly asked me to finish these windows
this afternoon. Your walk will have to wait, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, bother Sarah! You don’t have to do what she tells
you—at least, you don’t have to mind her any more than you do me.
I’m your mistress as much as she is!”

“Now, that may be true. But, you see, she got in her orders
first. So you will agree that she has prior claim on my time.” The words
were another unmistakable dismissal. Liza looked affronted as Dominic bent to
pick up the bucket. But before he could complete the action, another voice
arrested his attention and brought him upright, the bucket forgotten at his
feet.