Shadows of the Night Page 7

  “I don’t know what you want from me!” The exclamation came from the pit of Fern’s frustration, blasting past all her contrary impulses and desires.

  “Neither do I,” he murmured, “but I am sure that we can find out together.” He freed his hands and reached for her bodice again. Fern braced to fight him, but this time he began buttoning it up. “What I want would be close to impossible in a crinoline in a coach,” he said simply. “We will stop for the night soon enough, and you and I will have ample privacy and space.” His gaze flicked up coldly to meet hers. “And believe me, this time, you shall want anything that we do at least as much as I.”

  Fern could think of nothing to say that would not end in a round of fruitless argument, so she sat mutely as he finished with her last button and sat back against the cushions—next to her this time, instead of across from her. He flicked aside the curtain and stared mutely at the passing countryside. After watching him for several minutes, Fern did likewise.

  Chapter Seven

  Fern opened her eyes, realizing as she did so that she had fallen, however improbably, asleep. The coach had stopped moving. She blinked at Colin, but he was already reaching for the door. He swung it open, and Fern saw that dusk had arrived.

  She followed him unsteadily down the iron steps. “Where are we?” she asked. They stood in the courtyard of a livery stable and a public house, which were also the only buildings visible along the rough track. The buildings were solid and stark in the fading light.

  “Rotherham,” he said. “If we were continuing on, this would be our fourth change of horses.”

  “But we are not?”

  “I have decided to stop here for the night,” he said. “We will not be able to change horses so often after this point, so our rate will slow somewhat. There is no need to press on through the night.”

  “It sounds like we are going to a very remote place,” Fern said, her stomach fluttering with apprehension.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Colin said, sounding bored. “I have never been there. But I suppose it is remote enough.”

  He began to walk as Fern digested that declaration. The publican met them at the door, and Colin made arrangements for taking two of the four bedchambers above the public room for them, the valet, and their driver. Then he handed two sealed letters over to the publican. At Fern’s inquiring glance, he gave her a dry smile. “It is not good for an heir to a viscountcy to disappear. My brothers might get the idea that one of them shall be the next viscount.”

  “Oh,” said Fern, uncertain as to how much he was joking and even less certain as to the appropriate reply.

  Colin gave the publican a final order to have supper brought up and guided Fern to the stairs with a firm hand on her back, mounting them behind her with the key securely in his palm.

  He unlocked their room and Fern entered, followed by the valet and driver bearing their trunks. The servants stacked their baggage in the corner, Colin’s on top of Fern’s, where they took up nearly half the open floor space.

  As the servants left for the final time, Fern looked around the little room. There was no fireplace—there was no room for a fireplace—but even though the suffocating heat had lessened, it was still too warm for her to feel its lack. A bed and a chair comprised the total furnishings, and Fern examined the threadbare counterpane with a muted sense of trepidation. Colin pushed past her, setting her skirts to swaying, and jerked down the blankets. His body blocked her view of the bed, but she saw him nod in satisfaction.

  “Clean,” he said briefly.

  Fern eyed the bed distrustfully—her concern about vermin had been only distantly secondary to her fear of her husband and what they might do there that night. “You seem experienced in such determinations.”

  The corner of Colin’s mouth quirked up, but his gaze stayed flat. “Indeed,” he said without elaborating.

  Fern looked at the trunks, piled one atop the other in the space opposite the chair. Hers was on the bottom, and there was no place for them to be set next to each other for her to reach her clothing. Only her hand luggage, with the supplies for her personal toilette, was free. Colin followed her gaze.

  “I will have Davies move the trunks tomorrow so that you may dress,” he said. “You can do without for the night.”

  “I don’t care to do without,” Fern found herself saying. She blushed, but she was too tired, cross, and irritated to apologize for her words. “I haven’t changed or refreshed myself since this morning.”

  “The second can be taken care of easily enough,” Colin said, ignoring her protest and her tone. “The publican will bring up wash water with dinner.”

  “Where shall we eat?” Fern asked helplessly. There was scarcely enough space for them both to stand in the tiny room.

  “Remove your crinoline,” Colin said without inflection.

  “What?” Fern bit the inside of her cheek when the word came out shrill.

  “Remove your crinoline.” Still not a trace of emotion flickered across his face.

  “I should dress for dinner, not undress,” Fern said, grasping at a normality that seemed to be swiftly fleeing. “It is a nasty, vulgar thing to not wear a crinoline to dinner.” That was a narrow-minded, almost childish assertion, but uncertainty made her cling to the familiar. She might not know why she was here, or where she was going, or even who her husband was, but she was certain of proper dinner attire, and a walking dress without her hoops was certainly not it.

  “Remove it, or I will remove it for you,” Colin replied evenly, as if she had not spoken.

  “You wouldn’t!” Fern said, though she was nowhere near as sure as her words.

  Colin’s eyes narrowed, not the squint of anger that other men might have given a defiant wife but a half-lidded expression of ennui. He reached out, and Fern jerked away, but she had nowhere to go, for the door was a mere step behind her. Colin caught her bruised arm, and she winced, but he spun her away from him without reacting. He let go of her, and she stood stiffly as he unhooked her wide velvet belt and tossed it on top of the trunks, seething inside but not daring to voice a further protest as her traitorous body reacted to the nearness of his hands. He loosened her waistband and unceremoniously pulled her bodice from it to expose the tapes of her petticoats. Methodically, he untied them until he reached her crinoline, which he freed and pulled from her hips with a jerk as her entire being reverberated in reaction to his touch. The contraption clattered to the floor.

  “There,” he said. “Sit now. There is plenty of room.”

  Stiffly, Fern edged past him to take the single chair, stepping over her deflated hoops. Colin kicked them under the bed just as there was a knock upon the door. Fern froze in the act of refastening her disarrayed skirts, quickly moving her hands to her lap. Colin gave her an expression that was almost a smirk and opened the door.

  “Wash water and dinner, sir,” said the slatternly maid who stood in the narrow hall, thrusting a tray toward Colin. He took it and set it on the trunks, crushing Fern’s belt. He started to close the door, and then he paused.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Pegoty, sir,” the girl muttered.

  “Pegoty,” he repeated. “This is my wife, Mrs. Radcliffe.”

  Fern just stared at him, baffled as to why he would make the pretense of introducing a village servant girl into her acquaintance.

  “She is quite a proper lady,” he continued, “and she is deeply offended that your establishment affords her no opportunity to dress for dinner. But she is not nearly offended by that as she will soon be by this.” And with that, Colin bent down over Fern, pressing her back into the chair, and forcibly tilting her head up with both hands, he kissed her fully upon the mouth.

  For an instant, Fern was frozen with shock. Then she hit him, hard, with her clenched fists against his chest, tried to kick his shins and bite his mouth. But she could not move him, and so she did the last thing she could think of, grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking w
ith all her might.

  Only then did Colin pull away, and he was smiling ferally, his green eyes flaring dark under his black brows. He looked up at the gaping maid. “Thank you, Pegoty,” he said, and with one hand, he swung the door closed in her face.

  “Are you intent upon humiliating me?” Fern burst out.

  “Let that be a warning to you: Whenever you embarrass me in public, I will serve you the same,” Colin said evenly. “And believe me, as a woman, you will always suffer more.”

  Fern just shook her head. She could have sworn that her behavior, exceptionable or otherwise, had no part in that display. Colin took a plate from the tray, placed the silverware upon it, and thrust it at her. It was cold tongue. Fern hated cold tongue, but the strain of the day had made her ravenous, so she cut into it anyway, trying not to taste the rubbery flesh as she chewed and swallowed.

  Colin watched his wife as she ate, the strange tumult within him still seething just below his skin. The instant that Fern had struck him in that closed carriage, something in him had come alive. No one in his memory had ever struck him before. Not a lover, not his brothers, not his nurse or teachers, certainly not his father—not even his fellow students at Eton.

  Colin had found that sudden shock of pain … stimulating. Not in some simply crass and carnal reaction, though carnality certainly had something to do with it, but in a more fundamental way, as if his nerves were waking up for the first time. He had felt like a blind man who had suddenly woken up one day to clear sight and a glorious sunrise. And so he had seized upon that sensation hungrily, provoking Fern irrationally into hurting him again, and each time it was like a sizzling brand shooting across the darkness of his soul …

  It was wrong, terribly wrong of him, he knew, but whether the wrongness was in the sizzle or the darkness, he could not say. He wanted to feel it again, but he could not ask her to hurt him. He was incapable of it.

  Wrexmere. The idea of the place hung like a memory of a dream in his mind. There were other small estates he might have visited, hunting lodges unused this season and obscure cottages that had wandered into the family’s property but had never been properly used. But instead he had blurted out his intention to go to the one place that was plaguing him, that would not fit into his neat life any better than his wife and what was now between them did. Did he have a desire to redouble his doubts and tortures? Or was it an instinctual equivalence, pairing his marriage with the mysteries and difficulties of his family’s most ancient estate?

  He did not know. So he cut the cold tongue and ate it slowly, washing it and the potatoes down with the dark bitter ale and saying nothing as his mind turned the matter over and over.

  The clatter of flatware on crockery made Colin turn to his wife. She had finished her meal, and now she sat looking at him with a feverish light of realization in her eyes and the plate perched across her knees.

  “You like it when hurt I you.” The words had the cutting precision of a razor. “You enjoy it.”

  Colin started to reject her bald statement, but a quirk of Fern’s head cut him off.

  “Be careful of how you reply,” she said with a steadiness that he had never seen from her. “If you tell me that I am deluded, I will be very, very careful to never hurt you again.”

  Colin narrowed his eyes, nonplussed by this strange self-composure from his usually flustered bride. Where had she found her backbone—and why must she find it now, of all times? He folded his arms across his chest, glaring at her, and he was pleased to note that she blanched slightly. “Never?” he demanded, testing her.

  “Not ever,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. She cleared her throat quickly to cover her weakness, but her eyes dropped.

  “No matter what I do to you?” he pressed, driving home the advantage.

  “No matter,” she whispered.

  Despite her patent fear, Colin did not doubt that she meant what she said, as far as she was capable of upholding it. He waited a moment longer while she studied the empty plate in her lap before finally deigning to give a reply. “I do not enjoy it.”

  She looked up quickly, disbelief in her eyes.

  “I do not enjoy it,” he repeated with emphasis. “Not exactly. But I do want it. I almost feel like I need it,” he added, half to himself.

  “But why?” Fern asked helplessly.

  Colin chuckled without humor. “It changes me somehow.” For some reason, he felt compelled to share a piece of what he had been turning over in his mind. “I could not stay in Brighton anymore, among society, knowing that might change, that other people might see …”

  “See what?” Her expression was baffled.

  “That they might see me,” Colin finished nonsensically. “I want you to hurt me. Which is why I asked: Do you want to?”

  Fern’s eyes tightened, growing intense. “It makes me feel like I’m buzzing inside, like one of those traveling lectures on electricity.”

  “Then you will do it again,” Colin said with satisfaction.

  “I shouldn’t,” Fern said. “And I don’t want to do … that thing again. Between us.”

  “I believe what you mean is called making love among polite circles.”

  “I do not care what it is called,” she insisted. “There is nothing lovely about it.”

  “You do not mean that.”

  “Of course I do.” Her retort was swift—too swift.

  Colin stepped closer to her, and Fern leaned back, her eyes widening and her lips parting slightly. He plucked the empty plate from her lap and set it on his trunk’s flat lid. “You want it again. Your body tells me so. Even when I kissed you in front of the maid, your body told me that you wanted it.”

  “That is not true.” Her words were breathless.

  “Then we will try again, and you can try to make me stop.” He leaned over her. “Bite me. Scratch me.”

  “I don’t want to do this.” She clutched the chair rigidly and licked her lips.

  Colin pulled her up with one hand, pushing the chair away from her with the other. She was stiff in his arms. He pushed her down onto the bed, making no pretext at being gentle.

  “No!” she said, the word coming out a yelp. But her hands gripped his arms rather than pushing him away, moving up to cling to his neck as her thighs gripped his hips.

  “If I believed you meant that, I would stop,” Colin said. “It only hurts the first time.”

  “I don’t care about the pain,” she said, the words coming out in a rush. “I might even want it, just a little, so that I could have the … the rest. I just don’t want to be stolen from!”

  “Then take back from me,” he growled. “Take more than I do. You know how to do it. It makes you sizzle. I can feel it. I’d wager that it makes you sizzle all the way down here.” He followed the line of her outer thigh up under her petticoats and down to the slit of her pantaloons, pushing the fabric aside until he met the smoothness of her thigh and the hot, damp opening at the jointure of her legs. Fern was panting, her body rigid and her eyes wide.

  “Stop me,” he ordered.

  Her face contorting, Fern shook her head. “I can’t,” she said, the words scarcely audible.

  He pushed two fingers into her roughly, and her body shuddered even as she opened to welcome him. “Stop me,” he repeated.

  Gasping, she shook her head again, and he began to move the fingers inside her. Her face twisted, her hands curling until her fingernails dug sharply into the back of his neck.

  Colin stilled as his body’s response shot through him, the information his senses were sending him suddenly immediate, insistent, the world opening up within him like a flower. The subtle gradations of pink and white of Fern’s skin seemed suddenly to glow with an intensity that was almost painful in its astonishing complexity, the fine tracery of lines in the creases of her brow as intricate and beautiful as the chase work on an Oriental bowl. He could smell the faint mustiness of the bedclothes under the sharp, insistent scent of Fern’s femininity and des
ire, each scent vibrating with a vigor he could hardly understand. And he could feel so much more, too—the stitches of the sheets under his palms; Fern’s body, hot and hungry, through their clothes; the sweet slickness of her secret places against his fingers; and most of all, himself. Every nerve in his body sang with life. What it sang was a need for her—not a general, vague urge for release but an immediate, pounding drive to consume the source of this new experience.

  Fern’s gray eyes were narrowed, catlike almonds. Her lips drew back slightly from her teeth, and she dragged her nails across the back of his neck. Colin could feel the scores that she was making in his skin, a latticework of fire that seemed to writhe deliciously over his body. Traceries of life.

  “You like that,” he told Fern hoarsely.

  “You like it more.” Her rasping whisper seemed to go through him.

  “You are not so powerless now,” he noted.

  She looked almost surprised, and she smiled slowly. “I suppose not.” She moved her hand almost tentatively to his earlobe. She squeezed it between her nails, experimenting. A new, fine jolt of heat went through him, and he kissed her impulsively.

  For the first time, she seemed to expect it and to know instantly what to do, without a lapse between thought and instinct. Her mouth was small and slick under his, her rosebud lips indecorously demanding. He drank her kiss even as she took back. He unbuckled his belt with a hand still slick from her, unbuttoning his fly and freeing his erection. She tangled her fingers in his hair.

  “I do want this now. But go slowly,” she said, half an order and half a plea. “More slowly than last time.”

  He said nothing, but instead of throwing up her skirts as he wanted to, he pushed them up gently until they mounded on her belly between them. He ran a hand softly up the outside of her thigh, and she made a small mewling sound as he circled to the softer bare inner flesh. He guided himself into her, savoring the tightness of her body as it clasped him and the pang as she tightened her grip in his hair. He buried himself inside her, and she shuddered, whimpering slightly against him as her hands tightened into fists in his hair, pulling taut against his scalp. He moved within her, the pain wakening his deadened nerves to pleasure, going faster and faster—