Once and Always (43 page)

“I don’t care!” Victoria said with great determination as a groom ran out and helped her alight. She was resolved to endure anything to make Jason happy and restore their former closeness. According to Captain Farrell, all she had to do now was hint to Jason that she wanted to share her bed with him.

She went into the house. “Is Lord Fielding at home?” she asked Northrup.

“Yes, my lady,” he said, bowing. “He is in his study.”

“Is he alone?”

“Yes, my lady.” Northrup bowed again.

Victoria thanked him and went down the hall. She opened the door to the study and quietly slipped inside. Jason was seated at his desk at the opposite end of the long room, his profile turned to her, a sheaf of papers at his elbow, another in his hand. Victoria looked at him, at the little boy who had risen from his squalid childhood and grown into a handsome, wealthy, powerful man. He had amassed a fortune and bought estates, forgiven his father, and housed an orphan from America. And he was still alone. Still working, still trying.

“
I love you,”
she thought, and the unbidden thought nearly sent her to her knees. She had loved Andrew forever. But if that was true, why hadn’t she ever felt this driving desperation to make Andrew happy? She loved Jason, despite her father’s warning, despite Jason’s own warning that he didn’t want her love, only her body. How odd that Jason should have the very thing he didn’t want, and not what he did. How determined she was to make him want both.

She crossed the room, her footsteps silenced by the thick Aubusson carpet, and went to stand behind his chair. “Why do you work so hard?” she asked softly.

He jumped at the sound of her voice but did not turn around. “I enjoy working,” he said shortly. “Is there something you want? I’m very busy.”

It was not an encouraging beginning, and for a split second Victoria actually considered saying, very bluntly, that she wanted him to take her to bed. But the truth was that she was not that bold, and not that eager to actually go upstairs either—particularly when he was in a mood that was even colder than the mood he’d been in on their wedding day. Hoping to improve his spirits, she said softly, “You must get horrid backaches, sitting all day like this.” She summoned all her courage and put her hands on his wide shoulders, intending to knead them with her fingers.

Jason’s whole body stiffened the instant she touched him. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I thought I would rub your shoulders.”

“My shoulders are not in need of your tender ministrations, Victoria.”

“Why are you snapping at me?” she asked, and went around to the front of his desk, watching his hand as it moved swiftly across the page, his handwriting bold and firm. When he ignored her, she perched on the side of his desk.

Jason threw down his quill in disgust and leaned back in his chair, studying her. Her leg was beside his hand, swinging slightly as she read what he had been writing. Against his volition, his eyes moved upward over her breasts, riveting on the inviting curve of her lips. She had a mouth that begged to be kissed, and her eyelashes were so long they cast shadows on her cheeks. “Get off my desk and get out of here,” he snapped.

“As you wish,” his wife said cheerfully, and stood up. “I just came in to say good-day. What would you like for dinner?”

You
, he thought. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“In that case, is there anything special you’d like for dessert?”

The same thing I’d like for dinner,
he thought. “No,” he said, fighting down the instantaneous, clamoring demands of his body.

“You’re awfully easy to please,” she said teasingly, and reached out to trace the line of his straight eyebrows.

Jason seized her hand in midair and held it away, his grip like iron. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he bit out.

Victoria quailed inwardly, but she managed a light shrug. “There are always doors between us. I thought I’d open your study door and see what you were doing.”

“There is more separating us than doors,” he retorted, dropping her hand.

“I know,” she agreed sadly, looking down at him with melting blue eyes.

Jason jerked his gaze from hers. “I am very busy,” he said curtly, and picked up his papers.

“I can see that,” she said with an odd softness in her voice. “Much too busy for me right now.” She left quietly.

At suppertime she walked into the drawing room wearing a peach chiffon gown that clung to every curve and hollow of her voluptuous body and was nearly transparent. Jason’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Did I pay for that?”

Victoria saw his gaze rivet on the daringly low vee of the chiffon bodice, and smiled. “Of course you did. I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t wear it out of the house. It’s indecent.”

“I knew you’d like it!” she said with a chuckle, sensing instinctively that he liked it very much or his eyes wouldn’t have flared like that.

Jason looked at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears, then turned to the crystal decanters on the table. “Would you like some sherry?”

“Lord, no!” she said and laughed. “As you must already have guessed, wine does not agree with me. It makes me ill. It always has. Look what happened when I drank it on our wedding day.” Unaware of the importance of what she had just said, Victoria turned to examine a priceless Ming Dynasty vase reposing on a gilt table inlaid with marble, her mind turning over an idea. She decided to do it. “I’d like to go to London tomorrow,” she said, walking toward him.

“Why?”

She perched on the arm of the chair he had just sat in. “To spend your money, of course.”

“I wasn’t aware I’d given you any,” he murmured, distracted by the sight of her thigh beside his chest. In the romantic candlelight, the sheer chiffon appeared to be translucent and flesh-colored.

“I still have most of the money you’ve been giving me as an allowance all these weeks. Will you go to London with me? After I shop, we could see a play and stay at the townhouse.”

“I have a meeting here, the morning after next.”

“That’s even better,” she said without thinking. Alone for several hours in the coach, there would be ample time for lazy conversation. “We’ll come home together tomorrow night.”

“I can’t spare the time,” he said shortly.

“Jason—” she said softly, reaching out to touch his crisp dark hair.

He shot up out of the chair, looming over her, his voice ringing with contempt. “If you need money to use in London, say so! But stop acting like a cheap strumpet or I’ll treat you like one, and you’ll end up on that sofa with your skirts tossed over your head.”

Victoria stared at him in humiliated fury. “For your information I would rather be a cheap strumpet than a complete, blind fool like you, who mistakes every gesture someone makes and leaps to all the wrong conclusions!”

Jason glared at her. “Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

Victoria almost stamped her foot in frustrated wrath. “You figure it out! You’re very good at figuring me out, except you’re always
wrong!
But I’ll tell you this—if I were a strumpet, I’d starve to death if things were left up to you! Furthermore, you can dine alone tonight and make the servants miserable instead of me. Tomorrow I am going to London without you.” With that, Victoria swept out of the room, leaving Jason staring after her, his brows drawn together in bafflement.

Victoria stormed up to her room, flung off the sheer chiffon dress, and put on a satin robe. She sat down at her dressing table and, as her ire cooled, a wry smile touched the generous curve of her lips. The look of amazement on Jason’s face when she told him she would starve to death if she was a strumpet and things were left up to him had been almost comical.

Victoria left for London very early the next morning and started back to Wakefield at dusk. Cradled lovingly in her hands was the object she’d seen in a shop when she first came to the city weeks ago. It had reminded her of Jason then, but it had looked terribly expensive, and besides, it wouldn’t have been proper to buy him a gift at that time. The memory of it had lingered in her mind all these weeks, nagging at her, until she was afraid to wait any longer and risk having it sold to someone else.

She had no idea when she would give it to him; certainly not now, when things were so hostile between them—but soon. She shuddered at the recollection of its price. Jason had given her an outrageously huge allowance, which she had scarcely touched, but the gift had cost every shilling of it, plus a good deal more, which the proprietor of the exclusive little shop was more than happy to put on the account that he eagerly opened in the name of the Marchioness of Wakefield.

“His lordship is in his study,” Northrup advised Victoria, as he opened the front door.

“Does he want to see me?” Victoria asked, puzzled by Northrup’s quick, unsolicited information on Jason’s whereabouts.

“I don’t know, my lady,” Northrup replied uncomfortably. “But he has ... er ... been inquiring whether you were home yet.”

Victoria looked at Northrup’s harassed expression and remembered Jason’s anxiety when she had disappeared for an afternoon to Captain Farrell’s. Since her trip to London had taken twice as long as it would have had she remembered the exact location of the shop, she assumed that Northrup had been called up on the firing line again by Jason.

“How many times has he inquired?” she asked.

“Three,” Northrup replied. “In the last hour.”

“I see,” Victoria said with an understanding smile, but she felt absurdly pleased to know Jason had thought about her.

After allowing Northrup to divest her of her pelisse, she went to Jason’s study. Unable to knock with the gift in her hands, she turned the handle and put her shoulder gently to the door. Instead of working at his desk where she expected him to be, Jason was standing at the window, his shoulder propped against the frame, his expression bleak as he gazed out across the terraced lawns at the side of the house. He glanced around at the first sound of her approach and instantly straightened.

“You’re back,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Didn’t you think I would be?” Victoria asked, scanning his features.

He shrugged wearily. “Frankly, I have no idea what you’re going to do from one moment to the next.”

Considering her actions of late, Victoria could understand why he must think her the most impulsive, unpredictable female alive. Yesterday alone she had treated him flirtatiously, tenderly, and then furiously walked out on him in the drawing room. And now she had an insane urge to put her arms around him and ask him to forgive her. Rather than do that and risk another cutting rejection like the last, she quelled the urge and instead reversed her earlier decision and decided to give him the gift now. “There was something I had to buy in London,” she said brightly, showing him the wrapped package in her hands. “I saw it weeks ago, only I didn’t have enough money.”

“You should have asked me for it,” he said, already heading toward his desk with the obvious intention of burying himself in work again.

Victoria shook her head. “I couldn’t very well ask you for money when the thing I wished to buy was for you. Here,” she said, holding out her hands. “It’s for you.”

Jason stopped in his tracks and looked at the oblong object wrapped in silver paper. “What?” he said blankly, as if she had spoken words he didn’t understand.

“The reason I went to London was to buy this for you,” Victoria explained, her smile quizzical as she held the heavy package closer to him.

He stared at the gift in confusion, his hands still in his pockets. With a sudden wrench of her heart, Victoria wondered if he had ever been given a gift before. Neither his first wife nor his mistresses were likely to have done so. And it was a foregone conclusion that the cruel woman who raised him hadn’t.

The compulsion to wrap her arms around him was almost uncontrollable as Jason finally pulled his hands from his pockets. He took the gift and turned it in his hands, looking at it as if uncertain what to do with it next. Hiding her throbbing tenderness behind a bright smile, Victoria perched on the edge of the desk and said, “Aren’t you going to open it?”

“What?” he said blankly. Recovering his composure, he said, “Do you want me to open it now?”

“What better time could there be?” Victoria asked gaily, and patted the spot on his desk beside her hip. “You can set it here while you open it, but be careful—it’s fragile.”

“It’s heavy,” he agreed, shooting her a quick, uncertain smile as he carefully untied the slender cord and removed the silver paper. He took the cover off the large leather box and reached into the velvet-lined interior.

“It reminded me of you,” Victoria said, smiling as he gingerly removed an exquisitely carved panther made of solid onyx, its eyes a pair of glittering emeralds. As if a living cat had been captured by magic while running, and then magically transformed into onyx, there was vibrant motion in every sleek line of its smooth body, power and grace in its flanks, danger and intelligence in its fathomless green eyes.

Jason, whose collection of paintings and rare artifacts was said to be one of the finest in Europe, examined the panther with a reverence that nearly brought tears to Victoria’s eyes as she watched him. It was a lovely piece, she knew, but he was treating it as if it were a priceless treasure.

“He’s very fine,” Jason said softly, running his thumb along the panther’s back. With infinite care, he put the animal down on his desk and turned to Victoria. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted with a lopsided grin.

Victoria looked up at his ruggedly chiseled face with its boyish smile and she thought he had never looked so endearingly handsome. Feeling incredibly lighthearted herself, she said, “You don’t have to say a thing—except ‘thank you,’ if you want to say that.”

“Thank you,” he said in an odd, hoarse voice.

Thank me with a kiss.
The thought leapt from nowhere into Victoria’s mind and the words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Thank me with a kiss,” she reminded him with a gay smile.