Dark Fires (9 page)

15

Jane was humiliated.

The earl had hauled her down from the horse with Thomas watching from the front steps, and then he’d hauled her inside and down the hall and into the library. He kicked the door closed behind them, and its reverberations boomed loudly through the manor.

The Earl of Dragmore was furious.

“I was only fishing.” Jane gasped. The sound was strangled. He was actually red in the face.

“Fishing.” He said the word as if she’d told him she’d been on her back, skirts up, the way Amelia had been. Jane skittered away from him as he took a step toward her, then his hands caught her, hauling her
again
to him, and turning her so her back was to his chest. He propelled her forward, and Jane found herself facing a huge mirror over a Louis XIV table. “What do you see?” he demanded.

Jane saw the earl’s face above her, with its rigid angry lines. Their gazes met.

“Not me,” he said through gritted teeth. He shook her once. “Look at yourself, Jane.”

She obeyed, afraid not to.

Her face was white. Her eyes were wild-looking. Her hair was a wind-whipped mass, a third of it having escaped her braid. Then she noticed her blouse, and two pink spots bloomed on her cheeks.

Mostly she noticed her breasts.

They stood out like plump melons in the wet, clinging shirt. Her nipples were hard little points. She looked into the earl’s reflection and saw that he had been remarking what she’d been remarking. His grip on her arms was so very tight. Her blush deepened. He released her and spun away.

“Have you no sense of propriety?” he grated.

She opened her mouth to reply—and shut it.

“Do you think you’re twelve? Did you see the way that redhead was looking at you? Were you encouraging him? Another few minutes and he’d have had you flat on your back—your skirt to your ears!” the earl roared, grabbing her again.

“Propriety?” Jane gasped as he hauled her one more time up against him. Indignation rose full steam. “You berate me about propriety?”

“Did you hear me?” the earl cried, shaking her.

“Did you hear me!” she cried back. “Of course I wasn’t encouraging him, we were only fishing!”

They glared. “Your behavior is in question here, not mine.”

“But yours should be,” Jane cried recklessly. “You’re the one who tracks mud everywhere, you’re the one who keeps a mistress publicly, you’re the one—” She stopped, knowing she had gone too far.

The earl’s hands shook. “What? Pray continue, Jane.” His voice was soft and dangerous.

“I’m sorry.” She gasped, flushing.

“I’m the one who killed my wife?” It was a purr.

Jane started. “No! I mean, I wasn’t even thinking that!”

“No? You would find fault with all of my behavior except the most critical?”

She bit her lip, desperately sorry for fighting back and, apparently, hitting the earl where it hurt.

He smiled, with no mirth, and released her. “As an adult, I can damn well do what I want, when I want, and frankly, my dear, I’ve long since ceased to give a damn about propriety.” His tone went hard. “But you are another matter. Do you understand that, Jane?”

“That’s not fair,” she began.

“Don’t you dare speak back to me.”

“But you treat me like a child!”

“You are not a child, God damn it, didn’t you look in the mirror?” he shouted.

Jane blinked.

He paced away, pouring himself a stiff drink. Jane felt a surging of excitement. “No, I am not a child,” she said softly to his back. “I am seventeen, and a woman.”

He made a sound, not a polite one. “You are not quite a woman—just close enough!”

Joy vanished. “I am not a child! When will you realize that!”

“When you stop acting like one,” he said cruelly.

She felt the heat of tears. Jane folded her arms, upset, hurt. Then she saw where his gaze was, upon her breasts again. He turned away quickly. But not quickly enough. Jane stood very still, thinking. He says one thing, she thought, but does another. He has noticed that I am not a child. Maybe he does not know how to be anything other than insulting. He is aware that I am a woman. He was looking at me. He was looking at me the way that silly redhead was looking at me.

She trembled.
He knows—he just won’t admit it

He turned to her. “I want you to understand. As a young woman”—he stressed the adjective—“you cannot roam around the woods unescorted. There are unemployed riffraff everywhere these days. It is not safe.”

She nodded, her eyes glued to his face.
He has finally seen that I am not a child!

“And as for this afternoon, Jimmy’s cousin may be younger than you but he is nearly a man, bigger than you, and nothing more than a farmer. When faced with temptation such as you offered, his needs will be more enthusiastic than his common sense. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She understood—she understood that now she had a chance.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He kept his regard carefully trained above her collar. “Supper is at eight.”

Jane started. He was expecting her to dine with him. This was a far cry from his attitude when she had first arrived. Everything was a far cry from her arrival a few days past. She hid a smile. Maybe he didn’t just expect her presence at his table, maybe he actually wanted it. There was one problem, and gracelessly she blurted, “What about Amelia?”

“Amelia is gone.”

Their glances met, hers wide and elated, his hooded and unreadable.

Jane nearly skipped from the room.

The earl made a dashing figure in black trousers and silver waistcoat. He had not bothered to don a jacket, but Jane admired him just the same. He paused in the midst of a mouthful to meet her bold stare. Jane smiled. “You look very handsome tonight.”

He choked.

Alarmed, Jane jumped up and began pounding his back. Outside, the hounds were baying. The earl reached for his water glass, Jane kept hitting him. The water spilled over his wrist. “Ooh!” Jane cried, ceasing to pound him. But her hand lingered upon his back, and she was standing so close to him her dress touched his left thigh. That was how the Earl of Raversford found them.

“Hullo, Shelton,” he said cheerfully, walking in unannounced. He froze, taking in the scenario. “Well, what have we here?” He grinned.

Jane realized the impropriety of the moment and returned to her chair, her cheeks burning. The dark blond was regarding her openly, his handsome face admiring. “Aren’t you going to introduce me, Shelton?” He grinned again.

The earl rose. “Damn it, Lindley, I forgot you were coming.”

“I can see why.” Jonathon Lindley’s brown eyes were dancing. “I’d forget my own last name if I had her.”

Annoyance flickered on the earl’s face. “This is my ward. The Duke of Clarendon’s granddaughter.”

Jane stood to curtsy.

“I didn’t know old Weston had any heirs other than Chad,” Lindley exclaimed. The earl made no comment. “Hullo.” He took Jane’s hand, bowing over it and kissing it. His mouth wasn’t supposed to touch her skin—but it did.

She yanked her hand back as if it’d been burned.

Lindley smiled, but the earl’s face grew tight. “Cut it out, Lindley,” he warned. “She’s seventeen.”

“And private property?” Lindley turned to see the earl’s black expression. He held up a hand. “Just kidding,” he said somberly. His eyes were quizzical.

“You did not see what you think you saw,” Nick explained stiffly. “I was—er—choking.”

Lindley raised a brow.

“I was pounding his back,” Jane admitted.

“Of course,” Lindley said. He seemed to doubt them.

Thomas was setting another place. Lindley grinned affably at the earl. “Does this mean you have also forgotten the race this weekend?”

Nick scowled. He hadn’t forgotten that he had intended to race his stallion No Regrets this Sunday. He had just put off the decision he was now making. “No. Damn it, Lindley, I meant to send you a message. Somehow it escaped me. I can’t get away this weekend.”

Lindley chuckled. “Of course not. I wouldn’t budge either, if I were you.”

“What in hell does that mean!”

“Easy, old man, don’t take offense. Why don’t we sit? Something smells awfully good.” He smiled at Jane. “It seems I’m in the nick of time.” His smile widened as he glanced at the earl.

Nick caught his meaning and shot his friend a warning look, which did not seem to affect Lindley at all. After they were all seated and Lindley served, the handsome peer turned to Jane. “So tell me,” he said amiably. “However did you arrive here?”

The earl leaned back on the big, maroon sofa in the drawing room, legs sprawled indolently in front of him. He looked from Jane to his best and only friend, Lindley.

Jane sat at the piano, playing beautifully, singing with the voice of an angel. It had been Lindley’s suggestion, damn him. He was staring at her, admiration in his eyes and on his face. It was obvious he found her very attractive. Damn him.

Nick had never been unhappy to see Lindley before.

He looked at Jane. She was a vision. He looked at Lindley. Lindley was a notorious rake. He had dozens of mistresses. He admired all women of passable charm. He was a born flirt. The earl had seen him admiring many women the way he was admiring Jane. She was too young for his attentions. He didn’t like it, not one goddamn bit.

But he lost interest in Lindley. Jane was mesmerizing him. He could not take his gaze from her. She was so graceful, more graceful than any seventeen-year-old—or any woman—had a right to be. He thought of her today, in the stream. He remembered the sight of her in her clinging clothes, remembered how she’d felt in his arms on his hunter. He remembered how she’d flirted with him in the dining room.

He wanted her.

Physically. Now. He was stiff and erect. He did not want Lindley to notice. He toyed with a small pillow. Lindley was too enraptured to even notice Nick’s strange behavior. Pillows, indeed.

When Jane had finished, Lindley applauded enthusiastically. Jane smiled briefly at him, then turned to look at the earl. Their gazes met, held. “Very nice,” he said thickly, ignoring the way Lindley was watching them. He lunged to his feet and left the room.

Nick poured himself a finger of whiskey in the library and listened to the hum of their voices. Jane’s soft and sweet, Lindley’s bold and flirtatious. Lindley then appeared, and Nick automatically poured him a brandy. Handing it to him, he said, “Don’t flirt with her. She’s only a child.”

“A child? Come on, old man, you don’t believe that, not for a minute. You can’t fool me.”

“She’s seventeen.”

“Seventeen and ripe for the plucking.”

The earl stared.

“I’m joking. What’s wrong with you?”

“You’d better be.”

“You can’t deny that she’s very beautiful.”

“No, I can’t,” the earl said. A silence followed.

Jane poked her head inside, cheeks pink enough to show she’d heard some, or all, of their conversation. “Excuse me, I’m off to bed.”

The earl nodded, his gaze on her. Lindley kissed her hand. “Good night, Jane. Will we ride tomorrow? At eleven?”

“I hope so,” she said, smiling. But she looked at Nick. “I think I need permission.”

Nick hated the thought of them riding together, but Lindley was his best friend and, despite what he’d said, he trusted him. “You have it.” He drained his glass.

“Thank you,” Jane said, and with another good night, she left.

“You are testy,” Lindley said. “Does this mean I’m intruding?”

“You are
not
intruding.”

“No? Good. You know, I thought Amelia would be here. I saw her in London Monday last, at the Crystal Palace. She led me to believe she was coming this way.”

“We’re finished,” the earl said.

Lindley was surprised. Then he laughed softly, looking at the door, where Jane had left. “Are you smitten, old man?”

“Of course not. She’s seventeen!”

“Seventeen and imminently marriagable.”

“Exactly,” the earl said. “And I intend to marry her off immediately. Do you have any suggestions?”

16

The earl pulled out his watch and looked at it for the sixth time.

He was sitting astride his big bay gelding in one of the south fields, where a gang of laborers was mowing hay. It was half-past eleven.

He rode up to the gang’s foreman and told him to give the men a fifteen-minute break. The day was unusually hot, with no clouds or drizzle. After voicing his approval for work well done, he turned his bay away. He decided to go to the north field to check the state of the stone wall begun earlier that week. He would ignore the fact that the stone wall was progressing just fine—he had seen it yesterday. He also ignored the fact that he would have to ride from one end of Drag-more to the other—in all likelihood passing Lindley and Jane on their morning ride.

“Are you smitten?” Lindley had asked.

Am I? he asked himself.

The question was disturbing. The earl had to shove it from his mind. His responsibility was to find Jane a husband. Every passing day made him more aware of this, and how urgent it was. He knew he could not leave her here while he went to London alone, as he had thought to do. No, he must get her married, the sooner the better. And this meant he must take her to London.

The earl hated London. Truthfully, he wasn’t fond of cities in general, for he was a man of the outdoors, a man who preferred physical labor to sitting behind a desk. But he was a strong man, a man of honor and duty. He had never shirked his duty before, he would not now. Most of the nobility had left London for their country estates, but in a month, in September, London would be a whirlwind of parties, balls, masks, and fetes as the Season began. They would have to arrive before then. In order to launch Jane, the earl would have to costume her properly. He would also have to figure out a way to reinstate himself in Society.

And he would not feel dread.

Nick had never been comfortable among the realm’s peers. Not even as a boy, when he had come to visit his grandfather three times and become acquainted with Dragmore and the life he would one day assume. Even then, at twelve, fourteen, and sixteen, he had felt dreadfully out of place, as awkward as a gangling Great Dane puppy in a china shop. The old earl had gently corrected his manners and deportment, but Nick had not been interested in learning. Even as a boy, he had no use for such airs—they seemed silly and a waste of time. He had been enthralled with Dragmore, however. It was a ranch just as his parents’ home was a ranch, only here the cattle were tame, not wild Texas longhorns.

Outdoors, riding across the 25,000-acre estate, inspecting the fields under cultivation, the herds of cattle, the dairy barns, the lambing pens, the blooded Thoroughbreds, here the earl was at home.

In a drawing room he was as likely to crush a china teacup merely by lifting it in his large hand or, worse, stumble when he tried to make a proper bow. Nick had long since foregone bows. He merely nodded his head.

As a boy he had suffered the usual teasing and taunting from the sons of the peers whom his grandfather introduced to him. They called him a barbarian to his face. When Nick efficiently dispatched one such name-caller by wielding a nine-inch knife, apparently from nowhere, to the youth’s throat, his grandfather confiscated the weapon and told him he must never carry one again. Nick had never gone without a blade before. He had purchased another, but learned its usage must be discreet. To this day, the earl carried a blade in his boot, strapped to his calf.

And so the boys had only called him names when his back was turned.

Patricia had had no such compunctions.

It was an arranged marriage. Nick had stayed with the Union army until the winter of ′65. He made one brief, last stop home, which was completely unsatisfying. There was a wall between him and his father now, due to his knowledge of his own tainted origins and his anger that Derek had lied. Yet Derek, always so open, had not mentioned the change in Nick’s attitude. Nick knew both his parents thought that the long war had changed him.

He arrived in England the following spring, and one year later married the Clarendon heiress. Nick had been smitten at first sight. Patricia had rich, dark-gold hair, almond-shaped green eyes, and a voluptuous figure a man would kill to possess. She was a stunning beauty—and she knew it.

They spent very little time together before their marriage. He was disappointed with her coolness toward him, but assumed she was merely acting “proper,” as the English were wont to do. He was afraid to kiss her—he who had been kissing women since he’d been fourteen. Yet he did, upon two occasions before their marriage. The first time she had let him, giving nothing back, her lips as cool and smooth as marble. The second time she had expressed her displeasure, reminding him that she was a lady and they were not married yet. She had said it so imperiously that Nick’s ears had burned from the set-down. He didn’t touch her again until after the wedding.

There were no fires to tap, at least, not for him.

Patricia submitted to him passively. It was a stunning disappointment.

Nick was not just virile, he liked sex. It was probably partly due to how he was raised. His parents were very open about their love for one another, and his father was very open about his love for his wife—and how much he liked having sex with her. Derek’s hands were constantly on Miranda, sometimes teasing, sometimes not. If he could, he’d drag her off to their bedroom or behind a haystack in broad daylight. The children, Nick, Rathe, and Storm, had heard Miranda cry on more than one occasion: “Derek! The children!”

Nick had foolishly thought that he and Patricia would have such a marriage.

When Patricia became pregnant, the truth came out. She denied Nick access to her bed, bluntly telling him she hated his touch. She even shuddered as she spoke. Nick was deeply hurt— but he refused to feel it. Without betraying his feelings, his face a mask, he had turned on his heel and left her, vowing never to touch her again.

But after Chad’s birth he had broken his vows. He loved her. He wanted her. She was his wife and it was her duty to obey him. He came to her, she submitted. He tried to break down the wall between them afterward, by talking to her. She only wanted him to leave her bed and her room so she could sleep.

He had been stupid in revealing the truth to her. One day, half drunk and aching for just a touch, or even a kind word, missing Texas, his parents, God damn it, missing his father—who wasn’t his father—missing their closeness, he’d gone to Patricia. She didn’t deny him, but as always, making love to her was as exciting as fucking a board. After, looking at the ceiling, eyes closed, feeling about to burst with despair, he started to tell her the story of Chavez. He only got as far as explaining he was one-quarter Indian. Patricia was repulsed.

She began weeping hysterically, accusing him of being a liar and a cheat. She wept over Chad, whom she had shown little interest in, moaning that she had given birth to a “breed.” She had tried to attack Nick with her hands clawed like talons, hatred in her eyes. Nick had restrained her physically, then left. Because of her horror and shame, she told no one of his heritage.

Eight months later she ran away with her lover, the Earl of Boltham.

If Nick had any feelings left for her, they died when she abandoned him and his son.

But she was his wife. She was, more important, Chad’s mother. He went after them. He found them easily enough, at a tavern in Dover, about to flee to France. Boltham he challenged to a duel. Although handsome, the man was so inept Nick could not kill him. He only shot off his kneecap and crippled him for life. “A reminder,” he told Boltham, “never touch what belongs to me.”

Patricia he dragged back to Dragmore, ignoring her hate-filled glances and her sullen refusal even to speak with him. She would not appear with him in Society, fine. He hated Society. They would stay at Dragmore. He would never touch her again, he promised. All he demanded from her was that she be a good mother to Chad. Patricia refused.

She hated their son as she hated him.

If Nick hadn’t hated her before, he hated her now.

But he did not kill her. Nor was he sorry she was dead.

She refused to leave her rooms. Nick did not care. Six months later there was the fire in the south wing. It was completely destroyed, except for the walls and the tower. Patricia’s body was found, charred beyond recognition. All the staff had been asleep in their own quarters near the stables, alerted to the inferno only when it was too late. Her screams would haunt them a lifetime. Nick had not been home that night.

The earl’s relationship with his wife was no secret. That she had left him, that he had crippled Boltham, that he had forced her to return to Dragmore, their savage fights, were all common gossip. Yet Nick never expected the local sheriff to arrest him for murder.

The trial rocked England to its very bones.

The small county courthouse was packed every day, like a circus. All of London’s finest came to see the most shocking trial of the century of one of their own peers. There were witnesses every day for the prosecution. All of the Earl’s “strange” habits were brought forth—and it soon became clear he was no Englishman, and never had been.

He drank immoderately. He smoked. He gambled. He cursed openly. He was an avowed, unrepentant atheist. He was a profligate rake—and had not been faithful to his wife.

Most of these charges were true, but in the face of this character assassination, Nick did not try to defend himself, not even on the question of his fidelity—for he had been faithful to Patricia before she had left him. He sensed uncannily that any defense would not matter. Society wanted to believe what they were hearing; they wanted his nonconforming blood.

His relations with his wife were aired publicly. Servants testified that she had hated him from the day of their wedding. That it had not been a marriage like any other. That he hated her, threatened her. That recently the countess had been confined, or locked up, in her rooms. Witnesses even said they’d heard he’d beaten her up. Of course these leading statements were overruled, but the damage was done.

He was violent. He had coldly, calculatingly crippled the Earl of Boltham in the duel. He carried a knife, and used it with the dispatch of an assassin. Even as a boy he had plied the knife in violence against another young boy, who, now grown, enthusiastically testified to that long-ago day when they had been fourteen. That his wife had been so appalled by him she had run away from him was noted. The prosecution’s observation that Patricia had run away in terror for her life was objected to by the defense and overruled.

In a society where morality, fidelity, temperance, and respectability were cherished, valued, and idealized, Nick was painted as a dark, drunken, womanizing, violent American brute. Yet in the end, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove he had actually set the fire that had burned Patricia to death. More important, in the end, he paid a famous London madam whom he frequented quite regularly to testify that he had been with her all night. And he was acquitted of all charges.

He was acquitted of the charges, but not of his new title, for now they called him the Lord of Darkness.

It was an epithet that would haunt him the rest of his life.