The Next Best Bride (24 page)

"Pleasure does not make you a devil." Was there any possibility that her twenty three years of civilized upbringing could be breached by his sensible yet unromantic words tonight?

Her pain and anger scalded over him, then. "What will it make of me, then, my lord? When I can take and give pleasure with any man. But not love." With one hand she pushed aside the silk and paintbrushes. He heard them clatter to the ground as she clenched tight around him and drove his hips into an ageless rhythm his body would not deny.

He groaned, knowing that soon it would be too late to convince her this was not the way it had to be. "Helena. If I could love anyone, it would be you." It was the truth, and he hoped it would ease her anger.

His words had the opposite effect of his intentions. Angry and clear-eyed, she moved against him. Her breath came hot and fast, but not from arousal. From anger. "And if I could hate anyone, it would be you, my lord."

And if I could hate anyone
…. He struggled once again against the cords that held him. He wanted to embrace her, comfort her. To reassure her that life was not as dark as she thought it. At that moment, however, his body betrayed him, his hips pumping up against hers again and again until his orgasm shook him and he cried out hoarsely.

She stared down upon him coldly. Though she was slightly out of breath from her exertions, he saw no sign of passion or arousal. "I think I have mastered the lesson of pleasing you, my lord. Would you agree?"

He shook his head, unable to speak for a moment. When he regained his breath again, he tried to explain. "You should have untied me. I could have pleased you. What we had in the bower, we could have had again."

She stared down coldly at him from her great height. "No. We could not. This afternoon, I thought I loved you. Tonight I have accepted that I must see you only as my stud."

He could not help the fleeting thought that she might have spent her anger in an orgasm if only he had found the way to show her such pleasure was strength, not weakness. "Helena —"

She waved away his explanations. "Your grandfather told me on our wedding day that you could not love me. I should have believed him."

Rand, his emotions still raw from the climax she had so dispassionately wrung from him, felt a punch of anger burn in his gut. "It is not wise to believe everything the old goat tells you."

Her eyes lit with an unholy light to have made him angry. "I hope you do not intend for me to be as disrespectful of the marquess as you are."

"No." He didn't bother to hide his contempt. "I expect you will treat him as if he were your own grandfather."

"Why do you make that sound as if it is a crime? He is an old man. Frail. And he is aware of it, see how often he speaks of his own mortality." Her anger made her tense around him, bringing the blood rushing back to his cock. He saw her mouth open in surprise as he leapt back to life inside her.

Rand goaded her. "He’s too stubborn and mean to do me the favor of passing on." He twitched his hips beneath her. Maybe her anger would override her caution and this time she would find release with him.

Her nostrils flared in anger and she clenched around him again. "How can you speak like that. He took you in when your parents died and played the part of mother and father to you. It is not his fault that you spurned his efforts to make a decent man out of you."

Decent man
. Her words rubbed his already raw emotions bloody. "No? Who should I blame?" He twisted up against her when she would have moved away from him, capturing her hips with his knees and holding her to him. "Never mind. No doubt you believe it is my flaw that prevents me from being a ‘decent’ man. May I remind you that no decent woman binds a man and then straddles him like a fishwife. Or would that wound your ladylike sensibilities?"

"How dare you speak to me of decency. Do you deny that if you had your way, I would be the one bound to this bed and you would have been deaf to my pleas?"

"If I were in your place, you and I both would be too sated from pleasure to be arguing." He emphasized his words with several more thrusts of his hips, lifting her into the air with him.

She struggled to escape the grip of his knees as if she didn't realize that her movements would bring him to release again. "If you don’t like my terms, take yourself to London."

He recognized defeat as another, much less satisfactory climax coursed through him. Angry that she could affect him while remaining untouched herself, he released his grip on her hips and let his legs fall slackly away. "I will, as soon as you cooperate and begin breeding,
my love
." It was too far. He should not have said it.

The silk cords prevented him from enfolding her in his arms. He could only watch the hurt consume her.

The words, he knew, could not be called back.

She slid away from him with boneless ease as he fought a wave of drowsiness.

He struggled against his own torpor. "Stay with me."

"I can't, Rand," she said softly. "For both our sakes, I can't stay with you."

He heard the click of the latch and the sound abruptly brought him alert, driving all desire to sleep from his exhausted body. "Helena." No answer. He was alone in his room. Even the comfort of sleep after sex had deserted him.

* * * * *

Knowing that he slept like the dead after a bout of lovemaking, Helena crept back in to untie his bonds in the dark. She did not light the lamp for fear of waking him. The fear of seeing the expression on his face haunted her as well. What had she done? What had she become to have been so angry. So vengeful. He had always made love to her, though he professed not to believe in the emotion. She had brought him his release in anger. Twice. Could he ever forgive her?

As she untied the first cord and laid his heavy arm gently beside him, he grasped for her clumsily. His voice was clear, alert. "Helena, I am sorry.…"

He was awake. With a squeak of alarm, she backed away and ran into her own room. She locked the door and stood, heart beating frantically against her ribs, listening with her ear pressed against the wood. And then she remembered that she had only untied one of his bonds. Dare she go back?

As she listened, though, she heard him groan. He cursed softly and she jumped, startled. She clamped a hand to her mouth to stifle any other sound she might make. Pressing her ear to the door again, she marked the sounds from the other room. Her name. Once. Twice. A sigh. The creak of the bed as he moved about. Of course, she realized. With one hand free, he could untie himself.

She closed her eyes against the tears of relief. She would not have to go back to face him, he had freed himself. The muffled thud as his feet hit the floor sent a shiver down her spine. The door latch rattled by her ear as he tried the connecting door. He cursed. Locked.

She sagged against the door. He would give up now.

Instead, her heart pounded at the sudden soft scratching noise which began by her ear. "Helena. Let me in." She didn't answer. She didn't dare. And then, blessedly, there was silence.

She jumped when his voice came again after several minutes of quiet. To her surprise, he sounded sad, not angry. "I know you are there, Helena. I can hear you breathing. Let me in." Had he forgiven her so quickly? Impossible.

She was tempted to speak, but dread held her silent. After all, what was there to say but that they had nothing to say to each other? He wanted passion without love and she could not seem to accept those terms gracefully.

"Helena..." This time his voice betrayed bitterness. Anger. The door thumped under her head. Had he hit it? With what?

For a moment she waited, expecting him to break it down. Or find the spare key, as he had done before.

Instead, after several more minutes of silence, he thumped the door again, much less forcefully than before. "I know you're there, Helena. I suppose I can't blame you for not wanting to see me."

He sighed. "Perhaps we both need time to think. We married so hastily...." The door latch jiggled again and Helena leapt away from the door in shock. After another silence in which she neither moved nor breathed, he said, "I will be back in a few weeks time. If you are not breeding then, we can try again. On your terms."

Surrender. He had surrendered to her terms. So why did she feel empty? Why did she feel like a bigger fool than she'd been to fall in love with him? But she would not be a fool again. After all, her terms, as he meant them, said nothing of love, only pleasure. "I hope I am breeding."

Her voice sounded too reedy, too sad to her ears. She said more harshly, in an urge to drive him as far as possible from her vulnerable heart, "For then I might not have to witness you destroy yourself to prove your grandfather right about you."

The door thumped again. His anger was there, too, just under the surface as she suspected. "I am done with this place for now. Focus your artist’s eye on something or someone else for a while. I am tired of how you see only what you wish instead of what exists."

She pressed her ear against the door and listened to the creak of the bed as he returned to it. The sounds of him turning restlessly, cursing softly. But he did not come back to the door. And she did not go to him.

Instead, she curled up against the door, her arms embracing her as if to give comfort where no comfort was possible. Unable to unlock the door, unable to return to her bed, she slept.

Marie found her there the next morning.

"Master's gone." The maid spoke cheerfully, as if of the passing of a bad storm and the dawn of blue skies and warm breezes.

* * * * *

Helena took a sip of her morning tea, and turned when she felt a chill at her neck. No one hovered in the doorway to her room, but she could have sworn…. She shook her head. She felt the eyes of Mrs. Robson upon her even when the woman herself was not to be seen. No doubt Marie had told her how she had found her mistress curled up asleep against the door to her husband's bedroom. The locked door.

In the three weeks since Rand had gone, the feeling that she was being spied upon was ever present. Did they feel pity for her? Or did they think she had made her bed and should lie in it with a little more grace?

She sighed. It was time to stop mooning about, wishing to see him ride up the pathway. He was not likely to be back for a few weeks, at least. If he returned at all. She needed to go about her business. Stop giving the servants reasons to gossip over her.

Perhaps she should return to her painting? She had not been in her fledgling studio since that night. When she had retrieved the paintbrushes. Even now the thought of what she had done made her body alternately hot and then cold. Had she truly tied him up and...? She had no words for it. Only images that flashed unbidden through her mind. How could she have done such things? Without even, as Rand had had, the excuse of strong drink?

She picked up her sketchbook and thumbed through her drawings, trying to interest herself in resuming work. She had attempted to sketch — scenes of her family from her memory. Of Ros.

But somehow Rand always appeared on the paper. Smiling at her. Holding out his hands to her. Whenever she realized what her pen was drawing she stopped immediately, turned to a fresh page and willed herself to find another subject.

More than once she had dropped the sketchbook and pen to the ground vowing never to draw again. But she always retrieved them within a few hours. That was how she knew Mrs. Robson kept a close eye on her. Several times she had found her sketchbook disturbed, the sketch showing not the one she had been working on.

Helena sighed. He has been gone three weeks, she told herself sternly, as she focused on the drawing she had just done: a tiny Rand down on one knee holding an even tinier flower like the one he had plucked from the grass. It was time to move on with her life.

Today she would clear out the studio at last. Begin to paint. Since she seemed to be obsessed with him, she would work on her husband's portrait. Perhaps when he returned — No. She would not look any further into the future than today.

She thought of what the painting could do, if he would only let it. Stubborn man. And then it occurred to her, that in his absence, she could present the painting to his grandfather without interference. He might complain, but he would never take it back after it had been given to the marquess.

The thought made her eager to resume her painting. After all, Rand was in the wrong, not she. It was perfectly proper for a wife to wish harmony in her family. She was not asking the moon of him, though he seemed to think it.

Why was he so set on thwarting his grandfather? The marquess had done his best by his grandson. If he was a bit on the imperious side, that was to be expected. Indeed, her husband had certainly inherited that aspect of his grandfather's personality.

She surprised Marie with the announcement that she would dress in her oldest gown today. "It is time for me to get the cobwebs out of my studio and get to work." Maybe work would clear the cobwebs that plagued her mind, as well.

Dibby fetched two men from the main house to carry the piano upstairs. Helena sorted through the other furniture to see what else should be stored in the attic. It was then she found the harp.

She had just moved aside several painted chairs, delicate and worth restoring for a quiet contemplation corner in her studio when she saw the dust cloth covered object.

"I'll take care of that, milady," Mrs. Robson said hastily, distracted from her supervision of the men carrying the piano.

But she spoke too late. Helena whisked away the dust cloth to discover a harp. All its strings cut in half. Cleanly. Deliberately. She let out a cry of dismay. "Whoever would have done this?"

Chapter Nineteen

Mrs. Robson turned back to the men moving the piano as if she had not heard the question. But Helena had seen the housekeeper's face whiten in panic.

"Mrs. Robson." Patiently, she asked her question again when the housekeeper had reluctantly glanced her way. "Who cut these harp strings?"