My Naughty Minette (21 page)

“On the contrary, I think you’re not listening to me.” He righted her and set her before him, grasping her wrist when she tried to pull away.

“I meant to help! I was p-proud of you!” She forced the words out between sobs and tears. “I love you and I’ll keep doing whatever my love prompts me to do. I don’t care if you spank me a million times for it. I don’t care if all you do is spank me for the rest of our lives. If that’s all you’ll give me, then that’s what our marriage shall be. I shall do what I think is best and you can spank me forever if it suits you. I don’t care!”

“I’m not going to spank you forever,” he said, giving her a shake. “At some point I’m going to take you back to Oxfordshire and leave you there.”

She slapped him. Hard. She hadn’t meant to. In fact, she’d never slapped a man in her life, but she slapped August with tremendous force across his cheek and shouted, “Why won’t you love me?”

He let her go, and she backed away from him, shocked by her own behavior. He scowled at her, holding a hand to his face. She felt as if she were falling to pieces. Tears flowed from her eyes, tears of endless angst and frustration. “Don’t look at me like that,” she shouted. “I’ve tried and tried, but no matter what I do, you look at me in that awful, damning way. It is very hard not to be accepted and loved for who you are. I’m your wife, and you won’t touch me. Your mother won’t call me by my name. You friends think I am ridiculous, a mere girl whom you were foolish to marry. I suppose you wish you had married perfect Lady Priscilla, but I cannot wish the same. I don’t care if you hate me.
I still want you.
” Her voice broke as he glared at her. She could see the red marks of her fingers on his cheek. “I will always want you. I suppose that is the most depressing thing of all.”

“Why will you not understand?” he yelled back. “I don’t hate you. I’m trying to protect you.”

“From who?”

“From yourself! From your misguided efforts to court my affections. You don’t know the sort of man I am, not really. You see me as this figure of fantasy, this hero who doesn’t exist. You don’t know my darkness, my failures. You don’t know the things I want to do to your body, the ways I want to possess you. You don’t want me, Minette, I promise.”

“Yes, I do.”

He turned from her and strode toward the door.

“Don’t leave me.” Her anguished plea echoed off the walls. Minette could talk to anyone about anything, but she couldn’t think what to say to make him stay with her. There were no polite and cheerful words to heal this agonizing rift.

“Please stay,” she cried. “Please kiss me. Please hurt me. Spank me if you must, but don’t make me live this way, cold and alone, when I am married to the man I love most on earth. And I do love you, Method Randolph. Do not dare say that I am childish and young, and that I don’t know, and that I don’t understand. I understand everything.”

He turned from the door. “You understand nothing.” He stalked to her and took her head roughly between his fingers. “I dream of you every night, and God, how I suffer for it. I dream of fucking you, holding you down and grasping your delicate little neck.” As he said this, he gripped her throat hard enough to make her gasp. “I dream of riding you so hard that you plead with me and cry out for mercy, and it fills me with such pleasure, to imagine how desperate you would sound. I dream of tying you to my bed and invading every inch of your body as you struggle to get away.”

She thought a moment, really thought about these fantasies and how she felt about them. She stared into his stormy hazel eyes and said, “I would never try to get away from you.”

He ground his teeth. “Damn you, Minette.”

“I wouldn’t,” she insisted. “Nothing you say is frightening to me. You can tie me up if you like, but I wouldn’t try to get away from you. I want your passion and your torment. I already know what you’re like, August. Why do you think I’ve loved you all these years?”

He pressed his forehead to hers and let out a long, haggard breath. “You’re so foolish, so reckless. You don’t know.”

“If you keep saying that, I’m going to kick you.”

He turned from her and went to the fire, and leaned against the mantel. He ran a hand through his hair so it stood on end, which gave him the look of a madman. Was she driving him crazy?

“The spankings are nothing,” he said. “The intimacies I want are so much worse.”

“Would you have done such things to Priscilla?”

“No. I wouldn’t have wanted them with Priscilla. I want them with you.” He passed a hand over his face. “But I shouldn’t. I don’t want to.”

“But you do.” Minette felt a warmth of joy spread through her body at the realization. “You want them with me.
You want them with me.
”

He gave her such a look then. A look of anger and shame, and restrained longing that burned to her very soul, burned even hotter than the fire dying in the grate.

“Minette—” His voice cut off as a crisp knock sounded at the door. “Not now,” he yelled.

“My lord, please.” The servant’s voice sounded desperate. “You are needed at once.”

“What it is?” He crossed to open the door.

The butler stood there, all color drained from his face. “I am so sorry, my lord. A thousand pardons for the interruption, but...it is Lord Barrymore.” He swallowed hard. “My lord, you must come. You must hurry, before it’s too late.”

Charles Ulysses Randolph, the eighth Marquess of Barrymore, took his last breath just after midnight. It was not a peaceful breath but a gasp choked with blood and vomit, as his father’s body convulsed in seizures which could no longer be controlled. Only August and the physician were there to witness these last throes of agony, as his mother had taken a numbing dose of laudanum and retired in the care of her lady’s maid. “Drape the house in black,” he said to the servants when he emerged from the death room. “We’ll make arrangements in the morning.”

Then he went to the ballroom, sat at the pianoforte, and began to play.

Strange how, no matter his anxiety or sadness, his fingers could always play. Music soothed him as nothing else could ever soothe him, except perhaps Minette, but he didn’t deserve her, not after he’d punished her tonight for the high crime of admiring his talent. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he behave as a proper, affectionate husband when he loved her so much? He could make excuses about their past, and the pressures related to his father’s illness, but now his father was gone. What was he to do?

For now, he would lose himself in music. He played for two hours without stopping, played dirges and dire, noisy, ugly things he’d written.
For you, father. Let me play you from this world with a bit of angry hate.
This instrument had been his first great love, the keys so soft and smooth, the vibrating sound of each note like an aural caress.

Minette was his second great love, and his most complicated one. He wanted her to stay the innocent Minette forever, at the same time he wanted to grasp and invade her, and fuck her to oblivion. She wouldn’t resist him if he did. That was the worst part. She desperately wanted him to take her.

He left off in the middle of a song and began a new composition, one as light and complex as his wife. He added some blonde curls to the melody, to go with the deep blue undertone of her eyes. Some chattering chords and a bright sally of conversation to make him smile. It was still so hard for him to smile. His face would never be used to it. He stopped and played a section again, trying to commit it to memory so he might write it down later. Or perhaps he’d write something entirely different. A song about Minette ought to be a little different every time.

To amuse himself, or perhaps punish himself, he made up an accompanying song for himself. An August song, or, now, a Barrymore song, stark and grim, lacking any sort of beauty. Banging chords.
Don’t touch my music, Minette, or you might manage to touch me.
He was mashing away at the keys like a peevish child when her voice came out of the shadows.

“August?”

He stopped and turned to find her in the darkness, looking light and pale as ever in a stark black dressing gown. In mourning already, was she? It seemed he had been in mourning his entire life.

“I don’t know if you want to be alone,” she said in a voice that was much more muted than her normal one.

He held out a hand to her. “Come.”

She flew to his side and embraced him, and erupted in tears. They wet his cheek, reminding him of her tears from earlier. How miserable he’d made her ever since they’d wed. “The servants told me,” she bawled. “They said your father has died. I’m so sorry.”

He held her against him, wondering how she could weep so hard for a man she barely knew, when all he could do was play angry songs.

“Are you awfully distraught?” she asked. “What can I do to help you?”

“You ought to be asleep.” He didn’t know why he said such a thing. He sounded cold and emotionless, like a man with no heart. “I mean, it’s very late. I’m not distraught, my love,” he reassured her, wiping away her tears.

“I wish there was something I could do. I hate that lives must end and people must die.” She bit her lip hard, as if trying to compose herself. “And the way you played…I was terribly afraid you were upset. I made this for you for Christmas but perhaps...well... I thought I would give it to you now.” She produced a folded silk handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. He looked down at the thing and spread it open, smoothing the fabric between his fingers. One corner had been painstakingly—if messily—embroidered with an
M
.

“The
M
is for Method,” she reminded him. He could barely make out the letter’s shape, but he didn’t care. She had made it, and so he would always treasure it.

For him, the
M
would always stand for Minette.

“This is my most favorite gift I’ve ever received,” he said, turning it over in his hand. “And it’s a perfect gift for a sad night like tonight. The stitching is very fine. It must have taken a great deal of work.”

“Not so very much.” She pulled nervously at her dressing gown. “I thought of you while I was embroidering it, and bound some hope into the stitches. I wished you greater happiness, because you’ve had such a bleak time of late.” Her voice trembled on the last words, and she began to cry again. “I’m so sorry for your loss. What can I do?”

Now that he had a handkerchief, he could more efficiently mop up her tears. He brushed at her cheeks thinking how pretty she was, even when she was tearful. “Will you sit with me while I play?” he asked. “And hold my new handkerchief so it doesn’t go missing?”

“Of course.” She accepted the dampened square of silk, pressing it to the corners of her eyes. “I’ll stay as long as you need me. I love to hear you play.”

He had always preferred to play alone, but now he was grateful for her solid warmth beside him. He didn’t want to be alone tonight. As he began another piece, the ballroom seemed filled with a thousand ghosts, all of them his father, shouting and striking and stalking around. For once, Minette didn’t chatter. He was the one who began to speak.

“I wrote this composition when I was very young.” He did an elegant glissade. “I suppose I began to write music as an escape.”

“An escape from what? All those sisters?”

“No.” August’s lips cracked in a smile. “My sisters were a trial, but nothing like my father. Barrymore had...rages.” For a moment he felt like an eight-year-old boy again, that fearful, wary boy just coming to understand that his father was never going to change. “He hated me from the day I was born.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Minette sounded horrified. “It was only his sickness.”

“This was before...before his sickness. He was very selfish and full of himself, a gruff and unpleasant fellow. He was never happy.” August punctuated this revelation with a series of minor chords. “I don’t suppose you can fathom such a thing. Warren raised you so expertly. You have always been a very happy girl. Woman. Excuse me,” he amended when she frowned. “Of course you are a woman now, but happy all the same.”

“I try to be happy.” She huddled closer and looked up at him. “Warren always said that was my gift to bring to the world.”

“It is a gift,” August agreed. “And not everyone has it. My father didn’t. His gift to the world was anger and violence.”

He didn’t know why he said such things to her, when it would only upset her. In some way it was a confession.
This is what I come from. This is why I can’t love you the way you’d like.

This is why I’m so afraid of hurting you.

“It must have been awful to grow up with such an unpleasant person,” said Minette, clutching her handkerchief tighter.

“Yes. Awful.” Did he sound nonchalant? It had never been an easy thing, living through his father’s rages. Music alone could mollify the bully. When August was at the pianoforte, Barrymore let him be.

“I remember the first time I saw him hit my mother,” said August, starting into a more contemplative piece. “He was spitting out oaths, battering her with punches and kicks even though she was so much smaller and weaker. He caught her by the hair and backhanded her so hard she fell to the floor. It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen, then or since, and I thought...” He gritted his teeth. “I thought I ought to have stopped him but I was too little. Too afraid.”

“Oh, August,” said Minette. “Of course you were afraid. Did he ever hit you too?”

“Sometimes. Better me than my mother, or my sisters.” He remembered fists, screaming, shouting, his mother’s tears, his sisters’ wide-eyed gazes peeking at him from behind nursery doors as his father punched and kicked him only for being his son. “It was easier to keep him angry at me. As I said, he already hated me. I was never good enough, never smart enough or tough enough for the Barrymore title. He told me so many times that he wished he had another son, one who wasn’t an utter and abysmal failure.”

“Oh, no. I can’t imagine,” said Minette, clutching his arm. “He was terribly wrong to do such things. You’re a wonderful person, a wonderful man.”