Island of the Swans (53 page)

His eyes traced an imaginary line from the hollow of her neck, down between her breasts, to her dimpled navel.

“Aye, I’ve thought of you…” he said. With some lust but not kindly, he added to himself.

Could he ever forget the burning fury that had coursed through his veins on that wild ride from Antrim Hall to Philadelphia, where a ship waited at anchor to take him across the ocean and back to Jane—or so he had thought? Had Arabella truly asked for forgiveness? Or was this… display… simply part of some trick?

Arabella interrupted his silent musings by placing one of her hands behind his neck, pulling him toward her, and offering her right breast to him to be kissed. A low, almost purring sound erupted from her throat as his lips touched her. He moved his hands to her naked back and marveled at the softness of her flesh. He could feel an urgency flowing from her in the way she kissed his hair and licked his earlobe, just as he sensed his own physical need rising hot within him. She was hungry for him to touch her, and made no pretense of her desire to envelop him with the warmth of her body.

“Ah… yes!” she breathed, as he began tracing kisses along her neck, to just below her ear. Then she captured his hand, guiding it to the softness between her thighs.

She was a woman who understood men, understood
him
, he thought, drawing on that tiny portion of his mind still functioning rationally. She seemed to revel in showing him what pleased her, what transformed her into the passionate, demanding woman she had become. She merely wanted him to fill her need, just as she was willing to fill his, he thought, as his bones seemed to liquefy. She was twice married, initiated into the mysteries of human passion. He was violating no code. No doubt this rendezvous in the summerhouse was just as much a part of her plan as it was his.

Arabella’s lips, her voluptuous breasts, her long legs, firm from years of riding along the creeks and bottomlands, all combined to offer him a startling revelation: that his inability to separate himself from the warm, soft body clinging to him had nothing to do with that secret place in which he hid away his abiding love for Jane. The woman who kissed him fiercely this sultry afternoon, so far from Scotland and home… this woman was a vessel aching to be filled… just for the moment… just for today. She was
here…
in his life
now.
For today, at least, she could make him forget.

“This may be madness, Arabella…” he groaned, making one last effort to break the spell of her bewitchment. “I don’t fancy leaving a bastard Fraser to add to your cares.”

Arabella stared at him with a look of such undisguised tenderness, he was flooded with guilt.

“There’s no danger,” she said softly, her hand seeking the fastenings of his trousers. “I’ve just finished my flux… there’ll be no baby. But you were sweet to think of—”

He stilled her lips with another kiss and quickly shed his clothes. Settling her beside him on the bed, he watched the corners of her mouth turn up provocatively as her hand closed around the object of her desire.

“Does this please you?” she asked, smiling saucily at the expression spreading across his face.

Thomas leaned against the large cushions at his back and closed his eyes, allowing pure sensation to sweep over him. He felt as if he were about to sail effortlessly over a tall barrier, like a sixteen-hand hunter at a five-barred gate. With a pleasurable moan, he flung his arms around her, pressing her body beneath his own. She cried out softly when he entered her, and quickly matched the cadence he set.

“Aye, lass, you please me, wench,” he whispered hoarsely, angered somehow that she should have the power to give him such pleasure—when she had caused him such terrible pain. “Now, ’tis my turn to please
myself.
”

Bearing down on her with his pelvis and longer legs, he held on tightly to each of her wrists, pressing them against the pillow that supported her head.

“I find this pleasing—do
you
?” he demanded, shunting his torso sharply against her. “And this… and
this
?” he cried, ignoring her low whimpers.

He kissed her with a fervor that could not quite erase thoughts of Jane that now flashed, unwanted, through his brain. He cursed the vision, and roughly grasped Arabella’s white shoulders, silently cursing her as well for the role she had played in the traumatic events of a decade earlier.

“Am I goin’ about this rightly, Mrs. Boyd?” he demanded, fighting a wave of desolation welling up within him.

Settle an old score…
part of him raged.

Arabella ceased meeting his thrusts. He felt her stiffen beneath him just as he found his release. Tears escaped from beneath her dark lashes, and spilled down her flushed cheeks. When, at length, his breathing returned to normal, he raised himself on his elbows, absently smoothing a few wayward strands of her hair from her perspiring forehead. Bitter shame flooded through him as her shoulders began to shake. The sounds of her quiet crying filled the room. Thomas closed his eyes and heaved a sigh.

“I ask you to forgive me for the unforgivable, Arabella,” he said abjectly. “’Tis punishing, I’ve been to you, and I’m truly sorry,” he added, noting ruefully, “What a way to accept your apology.”

Thomas withdrew from her gently and sank onto his side, reaching to comfort her. He was surprised when she allowed herself to be held, although tears still streamed down her face. Suddenly, she sat up abruptly, pounding her fists against the bed with a fury that shocked them both.

“Filthy wretch!” Her curse slid into a sob. “A pox on it
all
!”

“Arabella, lass… I’m sorry… I—”

“That
not
why I’m crying!” she wept.

Propelled by some inner turmoil he didn’t understand, she jumped up from the bed and reached for her petticoat among the heap of clothing on the floor, clumsily wrapping it around her body.

“Then why
are
you crying?” he said, reaching out: to stay her hand.

“Because I-I can n-never have what I
want
!” she hiccupped. “I fell in love with you ten years ago, and I told you so,” she said brokenly. “But you’ll
never
forgive me for what I did… and maybe you shouldn’t! But you needn’t put on a show—
now
—when you don’t care about me at all… when all you’re trying to do is hurt me for my having hurt you!” Fresh tears cascaded down her cheeks. She turned away from him and leaned against the wall, her face covered in her hands. “Nobody cares how
I
feel… nobody
ever has
cared! But I thought, at
least
you weren’t like every other man I’ve taken to my bed. But I was wrong,” she cried, turning to face him, her eyes suddenly flashing. “You’re just like the rest. You
pretend
to have a thought for my feelings when it suits you, but all you
really
care about is—is—
servicing yourselves
! You… Colonel Boyd… Hugh Delaney… even my
own father
!”

Arabella stopped stock-still. She was breathing heavily, and her eyes dilated unnaturally.

“What are you saying, lass?” Thomas asked, taken aback by what he thought he had heard. “Are you telling me that your father and
you…
?”

“
Nothing!
” she screamed, her hands clenched at her sides.

Thomas stared at the frozen mask her features had become. Gently, he reached for her hand.

“’Tis
not
nothing, Arabella,” he said quietly. “What are you saying? That your own father bedded you…?”

His question hung between them like a corpse on a gibbet.

Her face remained immobile, but her eyes stared away from him with a haunted look. She pulled away from his grasp and walked toward a window half-shuttered against the suffocating afternoon sun. Dark, shameful images loomed before her glassy eyes as she tried to shut from her brain the long-hidden memories of the year preceding her father’s death. She leaned her forehead against the wooden casement and felt sick to her stomach. She wondered whether she would ever escape the nausea that swept over her whenever she remembered the events of that terrible night.

Helpless to prevent the vision that rose before her eyes, she once again saw Seamus O’Brien stumbling down the hall, drunk from a month of dreadful binges that had followed her mother’s funeral.

“We had to bury my mother quickly, because of the heat,” Arabella murmured, as if to herself. “For days, Father just sat on the porch, hour after hour, drinking homemade gin. One night, he started slamming doors and shouting at the servants, so I ran to my room to hide.”

“How old were you?” asked Thomas softly, watching her gaze listlessly out the shuttered window of the summerhouse.

“Fourteen,” she replied, biting her lip. “In the middle of the night he came scratching and pounding at my door, begging me to open it. ’Bella, I need you’ he said, and he was crying. He kept pleading for my mother, sobbing that she always turned away from him… and then he started asking me why
I
didn’t love him. It frightened me that he seemed to confuse my mother with me, and he kept pounding and pounding on my door!”

She began to weep.

“You let him in, didn’t you?” Thomas said sympathetically. “You let him in because you felt such pity for the man.”

Arabella turned to face Thomas, tears bathing her cheeks.

“My father’s hands were shaking so much, he dropped the candlestick he’d been holding. His breath reeked of gin when he kissed me and it made me feel sick.” She swallowed hard. “His hands… his
hands
, Thomas… they were so
strong.
And then he pushed me onto my bed and—” Arabella’s beautiful features crumpled into a child’s face, and her lips quivered with unchecked sobs. “I screamed, which roused the household, but Father stopped Mehitabel at the door, saying I’d just had a nightmare.”

“Did he do it again?” Thomas asked, disgust for the long-dead Seamus O’Brien tinging his voice.

“In the ten months it took him to drink himself to death, he never came near my bedchamber again, and everyone here behaved as if nothing had happened. But Mehitabel knows…”

“You were frightened until the day you put him in the ground, weren’t you, hinny?” Thomas probed gently.

He spoke to her from the short distance separating them. She shook her head affirmatively, but was unable to speak. In the past, she had tried to assuage the pain of that terrible night of betrayal by using men—before they could use her. She’d actually seduced the Irish stableboy… and then there’d been a series of Beven’s cronies—young and old—each behaving like more of a bastard than the one before. What had prompted her hasty marriage to Colonel Boyd last year had, strangely enough, forced old Hugh Delaney to marry her as well: in 1763, she’d become pregnant at age sixteen, and had lost that child, too, in her third month.

Arabella gazed dejectedly at the lean, handsome man whose russet hair made her think of precious rubies. She wondered, now, if he, like all the others, had somehow sensed her guilt, her shame, all along? All the men who wished to bed her had claimed they
cared
about her—just like her father—but the cads had treated her like a whore, and the kind ones never stayed. They always moved on, or married the good, unsullied girls—and God knows, she was far from that.

Thomas started to speak.

“Don’t
say
anything!” she cried. “Just don’t say a
thing
!”

He drew her unyielding body toward him, enfolding her in his arms still deeply scarred from the wounds she had tended so carefully a decade earlier.

“I won’t say another word,” he whispered, gently kissing her forehead, “except to tell you ’twas cruel of me to show you anger that’s owing partly to others.”

Some of the tension in her body eased, but her voice remained harsh.

“You’ll always be angry with me for what I did,” Arabella said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Perhaps I will,” he agreed, taking her chin between his fingers and tilting her head until she was forced to look at him. “But my ill fortune is also due to fate—and other forces—and not merely to you and your willful ways, my dear Arabella…” He kissed her again softly on the lips. “And I would suspect that ’tis much the same for what happened between you and your da. ’Tis time for both of us to try to put such sadness behind us.”

Gently, he led her back to the daybed and pulled her down along the length of his body, lightly brushing his lips against each eyelid in turn.

“Poor us,” he murmured into her ear, inhaling the scent of her moist and fragrant skin. “We’ve had quite a time of it, haven’t we, pet?”

He continued to stroke her hair, until slowly she relaxed against him.

“No one should ever hurt a child as you’ve been hurt,” he whispered. “Whatever happened between you and your da so long ago… ’twas not in the least
your
doing, dearheart.”

She closed her eyes and shuddered slightly, and then began to breathe evenly. Her features assumed a look of composure that rendered her more beautiful than he had ever seen her, for all her flashing eyes and fiery temper. In a twinkling, she fell fast asleep.

Thomas carefully eased himself off the bed and gingerly draped Arabella’s dimity petticoat over her slumbering form. When he returned to his room in the mansion, he quickly donned his uniform. He descended the broad staircase and strode across the parquet foyer into the morning room. He sat down at Arabella’s desk, glancing briefly at the drawers where he had once discovered the unposted letter to Jane. Hastily, he reached for his hostess’s quill pen.

To the Mistress of Antrim Hall:

I know you’ve never met a man you could “depend on in a pinch,” but, should fate and fortune allow… ’Tis my hope we shall soon meet again.

T. F.

Twenty-One