Devil in My Bed (16 page)

A pretty dream. Only don’t forget that, unlike other women, you must wake up before the end.

Very true. Women with dirty little secrets were never rewarded with sparkling new lives.

She looked at Aidan. Nor were they granted a man who was all that was good and fine and ethical. He was everything she’d ever longed for and could never have. He would be horrified at the things she’d had to do. He would never want a fraud like her.

Aidan met Madeleine’s dark gaze and went very still. There was so much in her eyes . . . so many interpretations of the emotion in those dark brown depths. As always, he felt the pull of her mysteries, the need he had to delve into this woman, to know all of her.

All she wouldn’t share with him.

Recalling his resolve to unearth the true Madeleine, he decided it was time for a few questions.

Striving for a casual tone, he leaned back on one hand. “Did you not wish for children with your husband?”

She did not look at him. “One cannot always have what one wishes for.”

More evasion. Dismissing casual for something a tad more forceful, he leaned forward. “When you were leaving your house yesterday, where had you planned to go?”

“I was simply moving on. London had not worked out well for me.”

“That man—”

She looked at him then, straight into his eyes. “He does not concern you, Aidan. Nothing that happened after you left me concerns you.”

She had a point.

“I didn’t know my father,” he blurted. God, what am I doing? His mouth went on, spilling himself out.

“He was much older than my mother, who was his third wife. He died when I was younger than Melody.

When I was a child, I don’t remember seeing my mother for more than a few moments every evening.

“If I clung to her she would peel me off and force me back to my nurse. If I wished to stay in her presence, I had to learn to keep my needs to myself.”

Her eyes widened slightly at his sudden expansiveness, but she said nothing, only nodding slightly in encouragement.

“If I broke a toy, it was swiftly replaced, whether I still liked it or not. I never knew . . .” He shook his head. “Earlier, when you knew what to say to her, when you knew just what to do—” He spread his hands a bit desperately. “I don’t suppose that’s written down somewhere, studied by people who somehow forgot to mention it to me?”

She shook her head with a small smile. “If it is, I was left out as well.” She looked down and smoothed her skirts. “Did you love your mother, when you were young?”

He shrugged. “From afar, perhaps. I remember wanting to, desperately. I don’t know that I’ve ever become all that well acquainted with her. Even now we tend to speak about politics or Society news rather than anything personal.”

He turned his gaze to Melody once more. “I don’t want to raise a child so. I don’t want her to be as I was

. . .”

“As you were?”

Her sympathetic gaze awaited him when he turned back to her. When he hesitated, she only sat patiently, idly winding a thread around one finger.

If you wish her to let you in, perhaps you ought to go first.

“I grew up in a house of women. Some boys might have ended up the spoiled darling of the doting mob, but that wasn’t the case at Blankenship. I learned early that good boys didn’t run, or yell, or track dirt.”

Lady Blankenship was the queen, and all there were her faithful court. The queen rarely deigned to notice him, therefore the staff did their best to follow.

He was a very lonely boy.

Until the day he was packed up in a businesslike manner and driven briskly away to school. He hardly had time to become alarmed, so he had disembarked the carriage that day with his usual reserved, watchful manner—into chaos.

“At school, there were boys everywhere, running, yelling, even somewhat dirty. On first impression it was heaven. Until it turned out that I had no idea how to be a real boy. I was too clean, so I was labeled a prig. I was too serious, so I was denounced as a bore. Worst of all, I was too careful, so I was roundly considered to be a coward.

“Luckily, I was well grown enough to discourage any physical bullying, but I found myself helpless against the jeers.” His response had been to withdraw further, which only reinforced their impression of him.

Jack had saved him. Laughing, open-hearted Jack who tackled Aidan on the lawn and tickled him into gasping. At last, Jack let him up grinning. “Knew you weren’t made of wood.”

Jack was the cousin and heir to Lord Blakely, son of the Marquis of Strickland. Highborn Jack had no real expectation of gaining the title, for his uncle was a hale man of forty and Blakely was a sturdy boy at the same school—and Jack’s primary partner in crime.

“Some said the worst of their scrapes were Blakely’s ideas, but Jack never voiced a word of blame. His loyalty, once won, was absolute.”

Sometimes, however, it was bestowed upon some very incomprehensible objects—namely the brilliant but astringent young Sir Colin Lambert.

From the first, Aidan and Colin circled each other like wary hounds. Jack doused them both with unconditional camaraderie and relentless jests, forcing them to get along for the sake of the only true friend either had ever known.

Jack’s friendship also raised them in the estimation of the other lads and Aidan’s early misery at school was soon forgotten. “It took a while, but at last I began to join the human race.”

Madeleine smiled gently at him. “You seemed quite human when I met you in that alley.”

He snorted. “Well, that was not one of my shining moments. If I’d been any clumsier, I would have landed on his knife and made a murderer of the poor fellow.”

She laughed, a soft, full, contented sound. It made something inside him thaw further. He reached out—

was that his hand?—and took hers.

“I know we are still beginning . . . again . . . but I wish you would tell me—”

She slid her hand from his grasp and turned to Melody. “No, dearest, you mustn’t stick my pins in the carpet. You wouldn’t want to find them later with your toes, would you?”

Aidan waited for her to retrieve the pins and come back to him, but she didn’t return to her seat.

Instead, she began to busily tidy the room, folding the new pinafore she’d made for Melody and packing her sewing things back into the small wooden box she’d brought with her in her valise.

Ah. There would be no secrets from Madeleine today.

He felt empty, as if he’d poured himself out for her only to watch his soul seep unnoticed into the sand.

An old wound began to ache anew within him. God, why did only Madeleine have the ability to hurt him so?

He stood abruptly. “Let me have those,” he said, taking Melody’s things from Madeleine. “I’ll put them away.” He walked into the bedchamber and shut the door.

Madeleine watched him go with hot eyes. How she loathed lying to him like this! He’d just cracked open his heart like an egg, and she couldn’t return the favor. His hurt throbbed inside her like it was her own wound.

What a rare man. Even when he was hurt and angry, he remained considerate and thoughtful! How she wished she could keep him forever.

Tucking her sewing box into her pocket, she leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window. If she could ever tell the truth, what would she say?

I married a monster. I burned down his house and killed someone to hide my escape. I ran away.

That would go over splendidly.

When Critchley reached his own rented rooms—not the sort of thing he was accustomed to, but having a pub downstairs made drinking convenient—he yawned again as he opened his door. He’d sleep through the day. When night fell, he would go downstairs for a plate of beef and ale and a grab down the gathered neckline of that plump publican’s daughter. A lovely plan, just l—

“Critchley! Bon ami, I am so very glad to see you.”

Critchley pulled up short at that smooth, friendly tone. Nothing good ever came of that charming manner. His jaw dropped and his second chin jiggled as he gaped helplessly. “Wil—” He shot a furtive glance toward the fireplace, but the hiding place beneath the stone looked undisturbed. “I—didn’t expect you quite so soon.” Damn it, he was never going to get his hands on Madeleine now!

“Oh, shut your gob, you witless lump.” Lord Wilhelm Whittaker, master of Whittaker Hall and husband to the unlucky Lady Madeleine, sat in the room’s only chair with one leg crossed elegantly over the other.

Something glinting and gold dropped from Wilhelm’s fist, dangling there on a finely wrought chain.

Critchley’s gut went cold. Damn, he’d found that bloody wild-rose locket. No one betrayed Wilhelm, not more than once.

Wilhelm smiled kindly, his head at a congenial tilt. “Is there something you forgot to tell me, my dear friend?”

Still alone in the sitting room, high in the quietest reaches of Brown’s, Madeleine closed her eyes and tried to bring up Wilhelm’s face in her memory. The ugly face of fury was easy enough to recall. It was the handsome one she’d first known that she had begun to forget.

She’d been young and romantic and perhaps just a bit conceited, for she’d never stopped to wonder what a man of Wilhelm’s rank and wealth would want with the daughter of an impoverished baronet.

He’d admired her and fed her vanity, and she’d thought he was mad for her. “I must have you for my very own.”

Her father had always indulged her irreverent temperament, applauding her cleverness even as her mother fretted over her pert tongue.

“You’ll not fare well in marriage, girl,” Mama had said bitterly. “No man wants to be made a fool of.”

Her father had brushed off his wife’s dire warning, more interested in being entertained by Madeleine’s wit than worried about her chances of pleasing a husband.

Why was it so sour to admit that one’s mother was right all along? Not a week after the wedding of her dreams, her husband had opened her lip with the back of his hand.

She couldn’t recall what she’d said to anger him—some fresh rejoinder to a complaint, perhaps. It wasn’t the blow that had shocked her the most. After all, her mother had lost her temper more than once during Madeleine’s “difficult” years.

No, it was Wilhelm’s complete self-possession at that moment. He’d not lost his temper at all. He’d simply swatted her away as he would an annoying insect. Then he’d gone on to finish his complaint about his tenant as if she’d never spoken out of turn.

She’d soon learned never to do so again.

For a time she’d allowed him to convince her that his petulant rages were brought about by the extraordinary passion he held for her—she was the eye of his storm; she was the rod to his lighting.

For a time, she even took a little naïve pride in the power of that storm, for it made her special, made her powerful.

When she’d eventually realized that his passion was control and his violence was cruelty and his need for her extended only to his need to completely dominate and possess her, it was crushing to accept the extreme triteness of her position.

She was no more special than the most common village wife walking about with a bruised cheek and a wary eye. Her marriage was a farce, her heart no more wanted than last dinner’s leavings. She was no one’s siren, no one’s goddess. She was only a very ordinary, rather gullible woman who had made the mistake of a lifetime.

She tried to play the game then, to observe and to serve, to coolly anticipate his needs so that she need not bear the brunt of his temper, to manage the house and the staff carefully so that none would suffer for her when his anger turned outward.

Her life became a checklist of accommodations and services. Had she inquired about his day? If she forgot that, he would respond with petulance or worse. Had she worn the gown he favored? Had she forgotten and worn the hat she quite liked but that he found dowdy? She gleaned her wardrobe for only the things he found attractive, wore her hair only in the ways he preferred, wrote into the menu only the foods he found delicious—and told herself that these were the things any good wife would do. One made compromises in marriage; one made allowances for men—they weren’t as patient as women.

One buried oneself, gown by gown, hat by hat, until one hardly recognized oneself in the mirror.

She’d had no friends. He’d made sure of that. Whenever she’d felt the opportunity to become close with another woman, he’d found fault and discouraged further association. He kept his sphere of influence mobile, so that they never saw family more than a few times a year. He didn’t care for “prying fools,” so she wasn’t allowed to receive callers of her own. Her few journeys from the estate dwindled down to an annual visit to her family, then even that vanished when her parents passed away.

Without friends, without any real influence in her own house—for who would defy the master when he was known to be heavy-handed?—without even the support of her parents who had died believing Wilhelm could do no wrong, her world shrank until there was nothing but him.

And when the unthinkable happened, there was no one to turn to for help. She was in trapped in an ornate and inescapable prison, and no one even realized she was missing from the world.

How could she explain such sickness to Aidan? How could she tell him what had happened to her without telling him what she’d done about it in the end?

Yet she almost did tell him. She almost gave him everything he wanted when he proposed—but she was afraid he’d never see her again. He wasn’t that sort of man. He was scrupulous and ethical. He would leave her and might very well feel obligated to tell people in authority what she’d done.

In the end, however, more than her own survival, she loved him too much to involve him in her sordid, nasty problem. She loved his clean, beautiful honor and she knew he’d never forgive her besmirching it.

Now, however, her resolve wavered. Freeing Aidan hadn’t actually done him good, as she had hoped.

Although she realized now that he wasn’t capable of infidelity, it certainly appeared that he’d immediately turned to some woman who hadn’t even told him about her child!