Patricia Rice (8 page)

“Why are we in such a hurry?” Christina asked as Harry tugged her hand to lead her from the kitchens after their meager meal.

He nearly dragged her up the circular front stairs and down a corridor covered in plaster dust. After that kiss in the pantry, Harry had watched her over their meal as if she were a luscious fruit ripe for picking, so she had a fairly good idea why he was in such a rush.

Considering that her mouth practically watered while returning his heated gaze, she thought Harry might be quite correct about the “ripe” part. She could easily be a juicy plum ready to burst. But she resisted his tug and dawdled in order to look around. Or to delay the inevitable.

Judging by the amount of dust on the mourning cloths over the statuary in the hall, they hadn’t been swept free of cobwebs since the death of the Prince of Wales some years back. She sneezed and ran to keep up.

“I want to see what kind of disaster we must live in,” Harry said. “The next inn is miles away, and I don’t want to have to go out in the storm.” He flung open several doors. “This is the new wing my mother had built. I’m hoping one of the bedchambers has been finished.”

Peering over Harry’s shoulder, seeing only small salons without carpet, walls without plaster, and linen-draped furniture stacked erratically, Christina didn’t comment on their decidedly unfinished state. Harry slammed the doors and stalked onward.

“Is this still the new wing?” she asked as they seemed to traverse a mile of corridor, past a gallery of framed ancestors and a wall of windows overlooking… Christina glanced down. A dirt pit?

“The last I was here, the new wing housed the public rooms. Mother wanted a modern salon and dining parlor on the main floor, with the ballroom on the top floor. My parents designed suites in between the two floors, but as you see, they weren’t completed after my mother died. We continued using the bedchambers in the old manor.”

“Oh, the pretty brick part with all the chimneys!” Delighted that they’d be using the older part of the house where ghosts were more likely to linger, Christina decided to ignore the black spikes in Harry’s aura. Maybe mourning for the loss of his family was causing them.

“The rooms have fireplaces, at least, although I can’t promise there aren’t bird nests in them,” he said gloomily, flinging open a set of double doors. “We should have traveled with the coach, so your maid would be here to air out the linens.”

He stood back so Christina could enter first. Thinking it might have been nice if Harry had made some romantic gesture of carrying her over the threshold, but willing to give him credit for thinking of linens, she entered what appeared to be a study.

An aging secretary desk spilled over with dusty books and papers. A stack of cracked leather trunks teetered in a corner beside heavy blue draperies. Her quick inventory included a cricket bat, a net with a long handle, a box of crumbling stones, a globe of the world, and a wing chair buried beneath more books.

“It appears all is as you left it, Harry,” she said drily. “I trust your favorite hound isn’t mummified beneath that monument by the window.” She studied the gray hunk of stone with odd characters carved into it.

“No, we buried him by the Roman villa,” he said, apparently as taken aback by the room’s condition as she. “I found the ‘monument’ in the dirt dredged up from my father’s tunnel.”

“Tunnel?”

He ignored the question to cross the moth-eaten carpet, apparently inspecting the premises for falling ceilings or rotten floors. She’d seen her brother-in-law examine a crumbling castle in just such a manner. She didn’t think Harry knew a great deal about construction, but if there were any rodents hiding in the heaps of dirty clothes, she’d prefer that he find them first.

She admired his courage in the face of… What did one call it? Devastation? He’d obviously left the room like this when he was but a boy, so that wasn’t quite the word. Negligence? This went well beyond mere negligence. The placed looked as if had been torn apart and not put back together again.

“How old were you when you last lived here?”

“I left for Oxford at sixteen.” Kicking aside a battered saddle, he opened a connecting door. “I came back for holidays, though. The maids always kept the place dusted and didn’t disturb my personal possessions. The last few times I was here, I stayed in a guest room because the housekeeper said the family rooms needed repair.”

Christina watched the powerful muscle over his square jaw tighten as he stared into the adjoining chamber, and her stomach did a little jig. In that moment, he was nearly a stranger to her—a mature man with pressing responsibilities, a dangerous look in his eyes, and a sexual attractiveness she had difficulty resisting. And he was looking into the bedchamber she suspected he meant for them to share.

“I don’t suppose I can expect your mother’s rooms to be kept as she left them?” she asked brightly.

He turned back to her, and the dangerous light in his eyes flared brighter. She gulped and held her ground. This was Harry. She refused to be afraid just because it looked as if he was struggling with invisible demons.

“My mother’s room has been bolted shut since her death.”

So much for that escape. She tried to think of a witty rejoinder to make him laugh, but all she could think about was the immense task of restoring this old house to a condition that would make Harry happy again.

She didn’t even know how often one changed linens or how meals appeared upon the table. She’d always expected to live in a household full of servants who knew these things.

She was woefully ignorant of the task ahead of her.

And not terribly interested in learning. She wanted to find the ghosts and hear the story of what had happened here.

Declaring his old room unfit for habitation, Harry stalked down the corridor in search of a better one. Lifting her skirt to follow her husband, Christina sought some means of defusing his growing temper. She wasn’t at all certain she approved of the more forceful Harry, but she couldn’t deny he excited her in new and dangerous ways. He was like a thundercloud racing through the musty corridor, sweeping it clean with his energy.

She glanced longingly at all the closed doors they passed in pursuit of better accommodations, but Harry evidently had a particular room in mind and didn’t indulge her curiosity. By now, she was so twisted and turned around, she figured it would take a week to find her way outside.

Harry hurried her down a staircase she hadn’t noticed earlier. “I should have inspected the premises before bringing you here.”

“And left me at home without you?” Not really paying attention to his protestations, Christina stopped on the landing to gaze out a pretty leaded glass window. To her puzzlement, it looked over a narrow shaft between this part of the building and the old castle. If she opened the window, she could reach out and touch the stone of the old walls.

“
That’s
why I didn’t inspect the place first,” he called back to her from further down the winding stairs.

“You thought I was better off here than in London?” Laughing at that, Christina raced after him, more excited than ever by her new home.

“I thought
I
would be better off with you here.” Harry rattled a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, felt around for a key along the frame, and apparently finding none, slammed the old latch with his boot heel.

Nearly bowled over by his admission as much as his action, Christina gaped for a full minute after the door sprang open.

“I’m tired of locked doors,” Harry said, as if that explained his behavior. Apparently unaware of her astonishment, he caught her hand and dragged her down still another gallery, this one with normal windows overlooking a perfectly normal pastoral scene of fields and trees.

In the fading afternoon light, shadows hollowed Harry’s jaw. His hair ribbon had loosened, and a strand of golden hair had escaped, giving him a disheveled appearance. After watching his display of strength on the door, Christina was prepared for him to wave a cutlass and order the mains’l set.

“Of course,” she murmured. “One does become so bored with the tedium of keys.”

He shot her innocent expression a disgruntled look but made no comment as they proceeded onward.

***

Nervously, Christina paced the bedchamber where Harry had finally left her. The pleasant room had the unused look of a showpiece, lacking the riot of life in Harry’s boyhood study. The bed seemed relatively new and the covers not moth-eaten. There weren’t any personal items strewn about. Harry had lit a fire in the grate and the room hadn’t filled with smoke. She could not object to the accommodations at all.

She
could
object to Harry’s evident intention of returning here to join her. She could hear him rattling doors up and down the hall in search of candles. She didn’t think he would linger long on the search.

She was the adventurous Malcolm, the one who was willing to jump in where angels feared to tread. Mating was a perfectly natural act, and nothing she should fear. She hated acting like a nervous maiden.

She could hardly condemn him to sleeping in the kitchen after all his solicitous efforts on her behalf.

He’d carried in her satchel with its seductive shifts and perfumed candles, and her usual decisiveness had fled at the sight of the contents. She’d certainly give him the wrong impression if she used them.

Harry wasn’t waiting for impressions. If she didn’t don her lacy nightshift, he’d take her in her boy’s old shirt, without the enhancements of her mother’s charmed scents.

She
hated
dithering. Casting off the traveling gown she’d worn these last two days, she washed in the warm water Harry had carried all the way from the kitchen. She was having difficulty enough adjusting to the role of wife without picturing her laughing, charming Harry as a stern duke who shouldn’t have to haul water.

She’d donned a normal shift this morning instead of her boy’s attire, hoping to appear more like a duchess. The shift wasn’t a romantic confection of lace and ribbons but a sturdy linen meant for traveling. The room was too cool to dally long without a robe, but she didn’t have one with her.

She pulled the rose damask coverlet off the bed, shook it out, and sneezed from the dust. Wrapping its length around her, she sat on the bed to remove her ankle boots and stockings.

Harry returned, triumphant, having scavenged a handful of candles from other chambers. With his hair more mussed than ever and dirt smudging his usually immaculate jabot, he looked very manly. Christina bit back a sigh of appreciation when he loosed his jabot to reveal the strong column of his throat.

“I thought you’d be in bed by now.” After one quick glance at her, Harry systematically began setting candles in brackets and lamps.

Christina thought it best not to tell him she had a satchel full of the most expensive candles money could buy and could have saved him a search. Even her mother’s seductive scents might not prevent Harry from ripping off her head. And they both needed their heads firmly on their shoulders when she revealed what was on her mind.

She needed all the willpower she could summon to keep her from reaching for him. She could scarcely tear her gaze from his long, powerful legs concealed only by tight leather breeches as he poured water into the basin and scrubbed his face. What would it feel like to have his bare legs next to hers?

She shut down that thought and forced herself to say, “I’m not sleeping with you, Harry. The house is littered with beds, choose another.”

Grabbing a linen towel, Harry turned to look at her. “We slept together last night. What’s the difference?”

She could only glimpse the muscled chest beneath his untied shirt, and she really wanted to see all of it. The image of Harry half-naked rose in her mind, and she had to stare at her boot toe rather than reveal her longing. “You’re not thinking about sleep tonight,” she said. “That’s the difference.”

“How can you know what I’m thinking?”

She heard his annoyance, listened to him moving restlessly around the room, but she refused to change her mind. Harry had interrupted her before she’d removed her shoes. She could walk out if necessary. “I’m not ignorant, Harry. That kiss wasn’t one of courtship.”

“If you know that much, then you may as well learn the rest.”

Christina winced as Harry’s shirt landed on the floor not far from her feet. He was standing there half naked, and she didn’t dare look up.

“Once we get past this first time, you’ll have nothing to fear.”

He sat down beside her to pull off his boots, and Christina leaped up as if scalded, then fled across the room. “Just listen to yourself, Harry! ‘Get past the first time,’ indeed. Is that all this night means to you?”

He froze with his boot over his knee, his splendidly naked torso shadowed in the light of the candles. He had his arm across his chest in the act of removing his boot, so she could only admire the bulge of his shoulder, but that was enough to give her visions for a week.

“Christina, I have a lot of things on my mind right now. Love and romance come with time. They’ll come much faster if we share a bed.”

“It’s not the bed sharing I object to,” she pointed out. “Did you think your name and title bought my body? Did you listen to the vows we said yesterday?”

Dropping his foot back to the floor, Harry stood, and Christina could enjoy the full glory of his muscled chest. He was broad in the shoulders and narrow at the waist without an ounce of softness on him. A trickle of smooth dark hairs ran between the ridges of his upper chest into a narrow band that drew her gaze downward to his breeches.

She gulped at the bulge pressing at his breeches placket and hastily raised her gaze to his face. She liked it better when Harry was laughing at her. She didn’t know the cold duke walking toward her now.

“I meant those vows,” he said. “Didn’t you? You promised to be my wife. A wife shares her husband’s bed. Legally and morally, you have no right to deny me, Christina.”

He reached for her, and Christina backed against the wall.