Silent Surrender (5 page)

With the sponge from the washstand, Esau cleaned them both off, then helped her into bed, drawing the covers over her. She caught his wrist and tugged him down, and he looked torn for a moment. She knew he had a room upstairs, in the attic with the other servants. Would he seek his own bed tonight and forsake hers?

“Stay,” she pleaded. He didn’t flinch from her ugly voice and she could have kissed him for it. But that seemed an intimacy too far for their agreement. She would have him in her body and sleep with him in her bed, but to kiss him when they weren’t in intimate congress would be a dangerous thing.

He lay beside her and pushed the duvet off him. The heat of his body and the sweat from his exertion still stood out on his skin, but she’d just had his warm body covering her and now she shivered without him. She nestled against his side and closed her eyes, inching her fingers through the coarse hair on his chest.

She kept her eyes closed. Behind their lids, she could be truly alone. She could pretend not to hear if someone spoke, though the slow rise of his chest told her he likely slept already. Her own body, completely satiated, pulled her toward sleep as well, but she fought against it. She had only a little freedom left before her ship sailed for France. She didn’t want to waste too much of it in sleep.

Her frown moved her lips against his skin. There was danger here too, in lying beside him. Was it her feelings for Jude, those tricky, unresolved things, that made her want to be as close as possible to Esau, to want to climb inside him, were it possible, and become a part of him? They had to be responsible, for it made no sense otherwise. She’d chosen Esau for his differences to Jude, and in the end it had not mattered.

Or perhaps it was just the loneliness she’d felt since that first rejection, when Jude had refused her a kiss on her birthday four long years ago. She had been so certain that he wanted her. She had seen her mother warning Father, before they’d realized her talent for reading speech, that Jude looked too long at their daughter, that he watched her when she was unaware. “No impropriety,” Mother had said, her expression a mingle of hope and parental wariness. She did not want Jude to take advantage, did not want her daughter dishonored.

And from that moment, that was all Honoria had desired. She’d dreamed that Jude would push her down on the grass and kiss her, touch her, do whatever it was that men and women did when they were alone together. She had not known then, and learning later had only enflamed her further. But that innocent request for a kiss all those years ago, and his denial, still humiliated her to think on them. Jude did not want her. He would probably be glad to be rid of his responsibility to her once she was packed off to France.

Had she pinned those romantic hopes on Esau against her own will? She had only known him a day. Could physical intimacy force such a connection? She prayed it had not. Saying goodbye to Jude would be difficult enough. If it hurt her the same when she saw Esau go… Well, two heartbreaks might be too much for a single heart.

Chapter Three

There were angry red welts around Honoria’s wrists and ghastly purple bruises at her throat.

Jude silently buttered his bread, his gaze moving from Honoria to the bastard and back again. The bastard looked cheerful, and why shouldn’t he be? He’d spent the night torturing an innocent young woman. Apparently that was to his tastes. And he hadn’t done as Jude had asked. Honoria had howled and screamed for much of the night, until Jude had wondered if he should bring the constables. Now, seeing the marks on her, he wished he had.

Worse than the marks themselves was her seemingly blithe acceptance of them. She looked up from her plate and smiled shyly at Esau, as if conferring over a shared secret. When she looked to Jude, he quickly composed his expression. He’d been doing that for years, staring at her with his emotions practically written on his face, then hiding them at the last moment. She had never caught him. Esau, however…the man’s stare was bullish enough to gore Jude.

Daintily setting down her knife and fork, Honoria lifted her hands, red scored lines about her wrists and all, and signed, “Today, I think I go to park. Yes?”

“By all means,” he said aloud, but signed to her, “With him?”

She looked to Esau, but Jude would not. He didn’t want to see the smug understanding on the man’s face. For a dock worker, he was too damnably observant. When she looked back, she shrugged inelegantly. “I not embarrass people see me with him. His clothes better.”

“I not concern his clothes,” he signed back. “He hurt you.”

Honoria’s smooth brow crumpled. Her mouth fell open as understanding dawned, and she rubbed a hand over one wrist.

Damnably observant Esau had grasped what they spoke of, and interjected. “Oh, those? She’s fine. Just tied her up a bit is all.”

It took Jude a moment to find his voice as he struggled against the urge to jump to his feet and smash in the man’s face. It was a lucky thing for Esau that the table was so long. A lucky thing for Jude too. He watched the man’s huge, square fists as they wielded knife and fork like hammer and chisel and made up his mind to never make an acquaintance with the brute in a fight. “Tied her up, you say?”

Honoria’s face flushed red as she looked to Esau. In a halting voice, she scolded, “Why did you tell him?”

“He thought I beat you.” He nodded toward Jude. “Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think you…” Jude shook his head. “This is not proper conversation in present company.”

He couldn’t stay with them for another moment. Tossing his napkin on his plate, he left the dining room without any further comment. The nerve of the man, to come into this house and lay his hands on her, to leave marks with his rough hands and then sit there pleasantly as though it were perfectly acceptable to have done so.

Jude didn’t want to think of Honoria in that way. The girl who had grown into a beautiful young woman before his eyes, that was the image of her he wanted to keep. Not of some hoyden who enjoyed being abused by a man. Not of a woman who would take a lover so blatantly, so shamelessly.

Unless that lover was himself.

He’d thought of it often enough through the years, what it would be like to have her beneath him, panting and whimpering, twining her legs about his waist and rising to meet him. The picture in his mind was so much different from the unbridled hedonism she had apparently enjoyed the night before with Esau, and every time Jude closed his eyes now, he only saw that man’s rough hands on her, lacking all tenderness.

Jude had nearly gained the library when Honoria caught up to him, grabbing his arm and pulling him to a stop. She did not wait for him to face her, stepping in front of him to impede any further progress. “Why you leave?”

“Him.” He pushed past her, threw open the doors to the small library and strode inside. He didn’t know what he meant to do once he was inside, but that he needed to be away from her, to be where he couldn’t see the dark bruise on her throat. He turned anyway, too angry to keep it to himself any longer. “You let him hurt you? You like it?”

Her cheeks flushed pink, with anger more than embarrassment, if he knew her at all. “Yes! I like it. You know our agreement. You promise—”

“I promise I not interfere,” he signed furiously, then raked a hand through his hair. How he regretted that promise now. “He treat you bad. He choke you, tie you? I not believe you like.”

Honoria shook her head and held up a finger before going to close the library doors. When she came to his side and took his hand, he hated himself for the tightness of hope in his chest. It would not be right, even if she begged him now to take her, to throw her down on the rug and ravage her before the cold hearth. She was still his ward, in a manner of speaking. Her parents had left no one else to look after her, and he would not take advantage of his position. Especially not when he would still have to let her go once she arrived in France.

She walked him backward to the chair before the dark fireplace and commanded him to sit with an abrupt sign. Once he did, she reached for his arm. Before he could protest, she unbuttoned his shirt cuff and rolled it and his coat back to expose his skin. Daintily, like some kind of leech in women’s clothing, she pressed her mouth to his arm and sucked, hard.

Caught between the sudden awakening of the sexual beast within him that had been roaring for years to be loosed and his utter confusion at her actions, he slouched in the chair and braced his feet against the floor. Her mouth was hot and soft against his skin, the tip of her wet tongue traced a maddening pattern over him and it was all he could do not to writhe in the chair. When she released him with a wet pop, he could only stare at her until she pointed insistently at his arm. When he looked down, a reddish-brown bruise speckled his skin, not unlike the ones on her neck.

So the brute hadn’t squeezed her throat with his hands. Knowing the truth made it somehow worse. Knowing that he looked foolish and inexperienced made it all the more terrible.

“Esau good man,” she signed before turning for the door. Before she left, she halted and stamped her foot, drawing his attention up from the still-wet brand on his forearm. “You come with, park?”

He shook his head. “Go.”

She hesitated only a moment, then left, closing the door behind her. No doubt they would have a better time without him.

How had that happened? He rubbed his arm, trying to erase the feeling of her lips on his skin. In the past, she’d wanted nothing more than to be at his side. She’d revered him, idolized him…when had that changed?

He could only blame himself. After her parents died, he’d protected her, and fiercely. From the well-meaning distant relations who’d wanted to see her put away in an asylum. From the less well-meaning distant relations who’d wanted the same result in an effort to lay their hands on her small inheritance. Perhaps he had not realized at the time that in assuming her parents’ duties, he might become her parent by accident.

That was a role he did not wish to play. He didn’t want her as his ward. He didn’t really want her as his student. He wanted her, and he wanted things to be as they used to be, when he’d been her friend as well as her tutor. She no longer appeared to want that.

The worst of it was, he still loved her. Even when it became clear that she would not consider him in her search for a lover. Even when he’d lain awake in the night, imagining that man with her. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t see how inappropriate the ape was. She was a young woman in need of guidance, and Jude had been too damned cowardly to take her into his arms and have her, to overcome her reluctance and remind her of the way she used to feel about him, before he could act on his feelings in good conscience.

He traced the edges of the bruise on his arm, remembering her lips there. It took only a brush of her fingers as he helped her out of a coach, or the sight of a spoon lingering at her perfect mouth, to arouse him to the point of pain. He’d been shamefully attracted to her when he’d first met her. In the years since, when propriety and decency had no longer been definite impediments, his feelings for her had only grown. He had waited too long and protested too vehemently when she’d tried to steal kisses or tease him. Somehow he’d become her enemy, a thorn in her side standing in the way of whatever happiness she expected to find with a lowly dock worker.

In the end though, she would dismiss the man and travel to France, ever the dutiful daughter. No matter what Jude said, no matter what he’d begged of her, she would not reconsider. She would not reject her father’s last wishes for his daughter.

Worse, Jude knew he could not reject those wishes either. As much as he wished they could stay together, they could not. She no longer wanted him, that was plain enough, and as long as he served as her tutor and interpreter he would not be able to make a living to support them. The thought of Honoria confined to spinsterhood in some French school was not as horrible as the thought of Honoria living as his wife in a single room overrun by screaming, naked children they could not afford to feed.

He would let her go, for the good of both of them. Maybe he would get on a ship and sail for a while, see the world before he returned to America. Then he could settle down and marry some girl who was plump and fair. Someone who was nothing like Honoria, for anyone similar would pale in comparison.

* * * * *

Esau was not used to the idea of walking without any particular place to be at the end. He looked across the meandering paths of the park and the meandering fools upon them, and decided that too many people in Plymouth had far too little work to do, if they resorted to treading endless circles to pass their time. Honoria walked gracefully at his side, her arm tucked into his elbow, her heart-shaped face turned to the sunlight. She carried a parasol with her, but unlike the other ladies shielding themselves from the sun, Honoria’s was folded at her side as she relished the warmth on her face.

As they passed another couple treading in the opposite direction, the man nodded and touched the brim of his tall hat in greeting. Esau tried to imitate the movement and nearly knocked his own hat off. He grinned broadly and said, “These things happen, eh?” and the man and his woman picked up their pace.

What was he doing, parading around like a peacock in rented feathers? The clothes Honoria had selected for him were finer than any he’d ever worn, but men built like him didn’t wear waistcoats.

As conversation wasn’t possible, he made a game of picking out which of the other men in the park he could take in a fight. The game quickly grew boring as he realized the entire population of males strolling on the paths and lounging on the grass were limp-armed dandies who’d probably never lifted anything heavier than a pen.

The creeping sensation of being watched alerted him to Honoria’s gaze. She gave him a closed-lip smile when he caught her eye, but she didn’t look away, as fine ladies did when he caught them staring down at the dock. Remembering not to shout, because it would do no good, he asked, “Why do you do this?”