The Escape (Survivor's Club) (21 page)

“He had a
mistress
,” she said abruptly, and then she gazed at him in some surprise. What on earth had prompted her to say that? She set down her knife and fork, rested her forearms on the table, and leaned toward him. “They already had one child when he met and married me. Another was conceived during the first months of our marriage. I took that to mean that he did not care much for me at all and that I was not much good in the marriage bed.”

She gazed at him, appalled. And she looked around furtively to make sure they were not within earshot of any other diners.

He looked from his knife to his fork and back again before setting them down across his plate and copying her posture. Their faces were not very far apart.

“I suppose,” he said, “you have spent longer than six years imagining that you are sexually inadequate.”

She half expected to see flames flaring up from her cheeks.

“No,” she said. “Why should I allow my spirit to be crushed by someone I did not respect? I lost respect for my husband four months into our marriage. That is a terrible admission to make, is it not, to a virtual stranger?”

“I am hardly a stranger,” he said. “And I am about to become even less of one. We are to spend the night teetering off the opposite edges of the same bed, are we not?”

“Have you ever had a mistress?” she asked him.

“Of long standing?” he said. “No. And never any children. And even if I had a mistress, I would dismiss her before marrying someone else. And no one would replace her. Ever.”

“Was the colonel’s niece very beautiful?” she asked.

He considered. “She was pretty. She was small and dainty, all smiles and dimples and blond curls and ringlets and big blue eyes.”

“Such a woman would surely have been unwilling to follow the drum with you.”

“But she was already doing so with her uncle,” he told her. “She looked like a porcelain doll. In reality she was as tough as nails.”

“Did you mourn her loss?”

“I cannot say I spared her more than a passing thought for at least two years,” he said. “By then I was very thankful we had not married.”

“I daresay she has grown plump,” she said. “Small, pretty blonds often do.”

His eyes laughed at her, and he reached across the table and took one of her hands in both of his.

“I believe, Sammy,” he said, “you are jealous.”

“Jealous?” She tried to withdraw her hand, but he tightened his hold on it. “How perfectly ridiculous. And how dare you call me that name when I have specifically asked you not to?”

“I think you want me,” he said.

“Nonsense.”

His eyes were laughing, but her stomach was clenched into knots. It was not true. Oh, of course it was true. He did not believe what he was saying, though. He was just teasing her. He was deliberately trying to make her cross—and was succeeding.

“I believe,” he said, “you want to prove that you
are
good in bed after all.”

“Oh!” She gaped inelegantly and jerked her hand from between his as she got abruptly to her feet. “How dare you. Oh, Ben, how dare you?”

Somehow she remembered to keep her voice down.

“You may have lost respect for your late husband,” he said, “and you may have refused to allow his infidelity
to break your spirit, but he hurt you more than you realize, Samantha. He was a fool. And one day you will be given proof of your desirability. But not tonight. You are quite safe from me, I promise, despite the situation in which we find ourselves. I will not take advantage of you.”

She was almost disappointed.

“Go on up to our room now,” he said, “since you appear to have finished eating. I will stay down here for a while.”

She went without a word of protest, even though it could be said that he had issued a command.

He was a fool
.

You will be given proof of your desirability
.

I believe you want to prove that you are good in bed after all
.

I think you want me
.

And they were to spend the night together.

N
ot only ought he to have written to Hugo, Ben thought as he drank his port, but he ought also to have written to Calvin at Kenelston. And probably to Beatrice. No doubt she would soon learn that Samantha had disappeared from Bramble Hall and that he had left Robland very early on the same day. He wondered if she would make the connection. But if she did, he did not believe she would share her suspicions with anyone.

Would anyone else make the connection? He doubted it, since he had taken care not to be seen with Samantha. No one would know that he had had more than a passing acquaintance with her, and it
was
known that he was about to leave Robland anyway.

He could still write the letters, of course. He could call for paper and pen and ink and write them now before
he went upstairs. But he was reluctant to do so. There was something rather seductive about the idea of simply disappearing without a trace for as long as he chose. He could go where he wanted and do what he wanted without having to account to anyone. That was always the case, of course, but … Well, he wanted to be quite free to allow this adventure to develop as it would. He did not want friends and relatives murmuring in the background with either encouragement or disapproval.

Samantha was still up when he returned to their room, though he had lingered in the dining room long enough to give her the chance to be under the bedcovers and at least pretending to be asleep if she so chose. He had been hoping she would take that option.

She was sitting on the bed in her nightgown, her legs tucked to one side, only her bare feet visible beneath its hem, her arms raised to remove the pins from her hair. It was not a deliberately seductive pose. Nevertheless it did something uncomfortable to his breathing.

“I thought you would be asleep,” he told her.

“Or feigning sleep, I suppose,” she said, “curled up in a ball, breathing deeply and evenly, so that you could crawl by me and ease yourself in on the other side and do likewise?”

He shut and locked the door.

“I did consider it,” she confessed, “but you would have known I was not really asleep, and then I would have known that
you
were not and we would have lain awake all night, each of us hoping that we were doing a better job of faking it than the other.”

He laughed.

“Let me help you do that,” he said, moving closer and propping his canes against the foot of the bed before sitting beside her. “I might say you are making a bird’s nest of your hair, but I believe that would be insulting to the bird in question.”

“Well,” she said, lowering her arms, “you make me nervous, Ben, and I cannot for the life of me disentangle the last few pins. I believe they are lost in there forever.”

He found and removed them, and her hair fell about her shoulders and down her back, heavy, shining, almost black Gypsy hair.

“I intended,” she said, “to have it neatly braided before you came up. Could you not have stayed to drink the inn dry of brandy or port or whatever it is you drink after dinner?”

“Port,” he said. “Brush?” He held out one hand, and she took a brush off the small chest beside the bed and handed it to him. He made a swirling motion with one finger. “Turn.”

Her hair reached to her waist and almost touched the bed behind her. It smelled faintly of gardenia. Her nightgown was of white cotton and covered her as decently as her dresses did during the day. Except that it
was
a nightgown and she was obviously wearing no stays beneath it—or anything else, at a guess. And her feet were bare. And she was sitting on a bed.

He drew the brush through her hair. It slid downward from the roots to the tips.

“Two hundred strokes,” she said.

He felt an immediate tightening at his groin. Two hundred?

“Every night,” she added.

“Do you count them?”

“Yes. It was one way my mother taught me numbers.”

She had been quite unaware of the double meaning of her words.

He counted silently.

“I was eighteen,” she said when he was at thirty-nine strokes. “Barely. I had just had my birthday. I had been married a little less than four months.”

He did not prompt her. If she needed to tell the story she had begun downstairs, then he would listen. He had all night, after all, and he knew from his experiences at Penderris that it was important that people be allowed to tell their stories.

Forty-five. Forty-six.

“I was so deeply in love,” she said, “that I did not think the world was large enough to contain it all. Youth is a dangerous time of life.”

Yes, it could be.

Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three.

“I thought his love for me was just as all-consuming,” she said. “I thought we were living happily ever after. How foolish young people can be. Shall I tell you why he married me?”

“If you wish.” Fifty-nine. Sixty.

“He had always been the family rebel,” she said. “He hated them all, particularly his father. But his father could never leave him alone. He had been at him to marry someone suitable—suitable in the eyes of the earl, that was. He had even named a few possible candidates. Matthew was eleven years older than I, you know. He met me at an assembly, found me pretty and eager—and, oh, how right he was about the latter! I was pathetically eager. I wore my heart not just on my sleeve, but on my nose and my forehead and my cheeks and my bosom and … Well. Suffice it to say that I made no secret of my adoration. I was pathetic.”

“You were very young,” he said. Good Lord, she was only twenty-four now. “You were being courted by a handsome military officer.”

“Where was I?” she asked. He did not know where
he
was. He had lost count. Sixty-nine? Seventy? “He fancied himself in love with me, of course, or I daresay he would not have done what he did. But it also occurred to
him that it would be a splendid joke on his father if he married me. I was the daughter of a gentleman of no particular distinction. That would have been bad enough in his father’s eyes. He knew too, though, that I was the daughter of an actress and the granddaughter of some unknown Welshman and a Gypsy. And so he married me. He kept a decent silence about that part of his motive until I discovered the existence of his mistress, and then he told me about it—out of spite, I suppose, though he laughed as he told the tale and invited me to share the joke with him. It
was
funny, for it achieved everything he had hoped for. The Earl of Heathmoor was irate. When I refused to allow Matthew to touch me after I made my discovery and then he refused to take me to the Peninsula with his regiment and sent me to Leyland Abbey instead, again out of spite, I was made to feel that I was lower on the scale of significance than the lowliest servant. But because I was a daughter-in-law of the house, I must be subjected to a strict regimen of reeducation. I was not quite nineteen when I went there.”

He lowered the brush to the bed.

“I am
not
pleading for your pity,” she said. “Heaven forbid. My life is as it is. There are worse lives. I have never been hungry or literally homeless. No one has ever used physical violence on me worse than the occasional rap over the knuckles or smack on the bottom when I was a child. And now I have been offered the gift of freedom and a hovel of a cottage and a small competence with which to enjoy it. Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is for a woman, Ben? I can be a new person.”

She turned to face him on the bed and tucked her feet right out of sight.

“Then why the mournful look?” he asked.

“Do I look mournful?”

“I suppose,” he said, “it is because you have been forced to bring the old person with you.”

She grimaced. “Why
is
that? It is
such
a nuisance.”

“But how could you ever feel joy,” he asked her, “if you had not also known dreariness and suffering?”

“Is there ever joy?” Her dark eyes searched his face as though the answer was written there.

He opened his mouth to assure her that of course there was. But
was
there? When had he last felt it? When he arrived at Penderris Hall a few months ago for his annual stay there with his friends? That had been a happy moment, but had it been
joy
? He wished he had not used the word with her. It was a disturbing word.

And was that what his problem was? That wherever he went, he had to take himself with him? Was it in denial of that fact that he had decided to travel? The eternal quest to escape from himself, from the body that slowed him down, made him grotesque and ungainly, and stopped him from living the life he wanted to live?

“We have to believe there
is
joy,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to believe that our lives are worth living.”

She lifted one hand and set it against his cheek, her fingers pushing into his hair. Her hand was smooth and cool.

“It is ungrateful of me,” she said, “to have been given freedom and a new life and yet to feel a little depressed. You will find a meaning for your life.”

“I am going to be a world-famous travel writer.” He smiled.

“You will find what you are searching for, Ben,” she said. “You are a kind man.”

“And the good and kind are rewarded with fulfillment and happiness?”

He was surprised to see tears brighten her eyes, though they did not spill over onto her cheeks.

“They should be,” she said. “Life should work that way, though we know it does not always do so.”

He released his hold on the brush, caught her by the waist, drew her against him, and kissed her. She wrapped her arms about him and kissed him back.

Their lips clung. Their breath mingled. She was warm, soft, fragrant, very feminine. He was aware, even with his eyes closed, of her nightgown and bare feet, of her hair loose down her back, of the bed beneath them. There was an increase of heat, a tightening in his groin again.

She slid her feet free of her nightgown and he somehow got his legs right up on the bed, and his hands were on her breasts, heavy and firm beneath the cotton of her nightgown, and her hands were under his coat, inside his waistcoat, warm against the back of his shirt.