Love's Reward Page 12

  “I did not sit still enough?” He rubbed his fingers over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  Joanna caught again at his sleeve, confused by her own shame and embarrassment and anger.

  “No! This is how I want you to sit, but bright, unclouded, as you were this morning, not stiff with weariness. Relax, for once! Can’t you take off your cravat?”

  Impulsively she reached for it and pulled out the knots, wrenching away the strip of linen.

  He sat arrested, his collar open to reveal his strong throat, and gazed up at her, his clear incredulity edged with dark humor.

  The man she had momentarily exposed in her drawing disappeared.

  “Do you want me, Lady Joanna?” he asked, and laughed.

  She barely heard him, caught up in her vision of how his portrait must be and her distress at what she had done instead.

  “I want to paint you perfectly. So that Lady Mary will be made happy and lighthearted to look at it. I used to rub my brother Harry’s neck and shoulders, whenever he’d been practicing his marksmanship too hard and the muscles were tight. Father would goad him until you’d think he’d break like a brittle piece of glass, yet I could ease it for him. Let me help you, for heaven’s sake!”

  “By rubbing my shoulders?”

  “Why not? What on earth do you do all day that leaves you looking as if you had just swum the Atlantic?” She tossed aside the cravat. “Exhaust yourself in a bawdy house?”

  Fitzroy sprawled in the chair as hilarity began to transform his features. Joanna saw it with triumph.

  “And what the devil do you know about bawdy houses, Joanna?”

  She was still swept away by her idea of the portrait she could do of him. She could hardly think of anything else. He was already partway there, moving into laughter, burying that terrible desolation.

  Joanna perched on a low crate and tugged him from the chair.

  “Not much, I admit. Sit down here. Lean back against my knee. Yes, like that. Now, think of nothing but warmth and relaxation, while I work out all this damned tension.”

  It was the most extraordinary thing he had ever done. But Fitzroy obeyed her, slipping from the chair to sink onto the hard floor at her feet. She hadn’t thought about the discomfort of that surface, had she?

  A small gurgle of genuine mirth moved somewhere deep in his chest.

  Yet he leaned his head back onto her smock, his cheek resting against the oil and pigment and some other higher, wilder scent that was Joanna’s alone. The scent he had inhaled when he had kissed her at the Swan Inn, and that drifted about her on their wedding day—as if she walked always amid the wildflowers of a high moor.

  “So you can still laugh,” Joanna said dryly. “Just drop your head forward and relax.”

  He crossed his arms on his upraised knees and laid his forehead on them.

  She folded down his shirt collar.

  Fitzroy felt the touch of her hands on his neck, then had to bite back his reaction as she pushed closer so that she had one knee on each side of his body. Her strong fingers began to massage the tight muscles at the base of his neck.

  It felt wonderful.

  He allowed himself to drift on the sensation as she rubbed and probed, forcing the knots to dissolve, one after another, the tension sometimes exploding in an exquisite burst of pleasure, sometimes merely diminishing gradually until it faded away.

  What an extraordinary creature! His wife. Her thighs felt soft against his body. He knew her breasts moved, round and inviting, just above his head as her hands thrust and kneaded.

  Dear God, what an enormous, appalling innocence lay beneath her offer to do this!

  She had no idea of the effect her ministrations would have on a man. She thought of him as a brother, for pity’s sake, rather than Fitzroy Monteith Mountfitchet, reputedly the most dissolute rake in town.

  Desire surged, in an urgent, compelling torrent.

  Fitzroy recognized it with pain, for he knew he must suppress it. The next night he might find out if Lady Reed expected him in her bed in trade for the secrets that would save Wellington’s life.

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture Lady Reed. She was beautiful, worldly, and experienced. He had no doubt that it would be delightful to bed her.

  Yet all he wanted was Joanna, his innocent wife, and under the circumstances it would be the act of a blackguard to touch her. The irony of it left him breathless.

  Ruthlessly, Fitzroy forced himself to concentrate on his quest for Lord Grantley, crushing this strange awakening before he should disgrace himself.

  His flesh felt extraordinary under her fingers, smooth and fine, yet hard with muscle. Joanna concentrated on finding the knots and easing them. She worked in silence, still in a fury of concentration, but slowly, inexorably, a different, deeper emotion began to replace her concern about the portrait. It was as if a slow flush spread from his neck and shoulders up through her hands and arms to set a fire in her blood. She tried to ignore it.

  “Now let your head fall back,” she said. “So I can work around the sides.”

  He dropped his head back into her lap, the weight partly supported by her skirts, his eyes closed, without saying a word. His head was a little turned, one cheek lying against the softness of her inner thigh. Joanna had no idea what he might be thinking, but the taught lines were softening on his face and the hint of a smile played at the corners of his lips—not that bitter, sarcastic grin, but a smile of real pleasure.

  Joanna reached to the muscles on each side of his neck and rubbed her fingers along them in long, sure strokes.

  Yet this man wasn’t her brother Harry.

  This man was the monster that had ravished her mouth at the Swan, mocked and insulted her, then sworn to ignore her for the rest of her life.

  How could he also be the man she had seen that morning at his sister’s, quick wit soaring, released by laughter?

  For her portrait had revealed her husband to be suffering, vulnerable, a man she didn’t want to acknowledge.

  His head felt strange in her lap, almost as if he belonged there. Yet it created an echoing weight somewhere deep inside, a heat and heaviness. The supple strength of his body against her knees disturbed her. Why should she tolerate that? Joanna didn’t understand it, and it wasn’t altogether comfortable.

  She stopped rubbing, meaning to push him away, and discovered why he was lying so still against her legs, his breathing even and deep.

  Fitzroy Mountfitchet, the fearsome Lord Tarrant, had fallen asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Joanna felt frantic for a moment. What on earth should she do? Leap up and let him fall to the floor? Shake him awake? Or study him, study him for the portrait that she had agreed to do for his dying sister?

  He shifted a little and sighed.

  Tentatively she touched his hair. He didn’t move. She ran her hand lightly over the rich waves, sensing every fiber as it moved beneath her fingers.

  He has lovely hair.

  What an odd thing to think about a man!

  She examined his face, the eyelids closed over those dark eyes, the stress and tension smoothed away by sleep. It would be appalling to wake him, a clear act of barbarism. Why invite him to don that sarcasm and defensiveness once again, when just for a moment he had found respite from the tragic weariness that seemed to contaminate his every waking moment?

  Softly she moved her forefinger to his jawbone and down the sideburn that outlined his cheek. The skin of his jaw was a little rough, prickly under her questing fingertip, alluring in its very masculinity. The small dark shape at the corner of his mouth, where a dimple might well appear, was a mole.

  More boldly, she traced his eyebrow and the inviting line of his nose. Fitzroy slept on, in the dead sleep of real exhaustion. His shirt had fallen wide open at the neck, revealing the beginning of the soft hair on his chest.

  How I long to touch it! Joanna thought. Oh, dear heavens, I am shameless!

  In a strange agony she sat o
n the crate and let him sleep, while her legs pricked with pins and needles, and the hard edge of the wood bit into her flesh. Her hands lay gently on his shoulders, passively feeling the rise and fall of his breathing, while her own heart fluttered unevenly in her breast, making her limbs languid and her blood fiery.

  Joanna had no idea what drove the demonic man that she had unwillingly married, but she knew that it rode him hard and without mercy. Surely the least she could do was let him find rest for a moment, without demands from her?

  She let her mind drift, barely aware of the shadowed room with her easels and supplies, remembering the times he had seemed to be something different for a moment—something deeply compelling and attractive, even potentially kind.

  The images shifted against her half-closed eyelids.

  One of the candles guttered and went out.

  Fitzroy moved a little, then murmured. “Ah, sweetheart.”

  He rubbed his cheek on her skirt, then turned to bury his face against her thigh. His arms slid around her and he ran both hands up her legs and over her hips, pulling her into his embrace.

  “Let me love you.” It was an undertone, said on a breath like a sigh.

  Joanna fell against his chest without resistance, her legs long gone to sleep and her back stiff. Fitzroy cradled her in his arms with a tenderness that belied every notion she had ever held about rakes.

  His head rested on her shoulder as his fingers gently touched the side of her neck. Slowly they moved to her chin, trailing heat, touching the corner of her mouth with his thumb in a delicious firing of her senses. She melted against him, wanting more, longing for this exploration to go further, lost in the strange half dream of the moment.

  “Do with me what you will,” she whispered, barely aware that she had spoken. “I’m your wife.”

  He opened his eyes.

  They widened in shock. In the next moment he had pushed her away and leaped to his feet.

  “Bloody hell!”

  As if her presence burned him, he spun away, dropped into his chair, and ran his hands back over his hair. He shook as if buffeted by a gale.

  “It’s all right,” Joanna said, sitting up. She felt awkward and lost, and immeasurably defenseless. “You fell asleep, that’s all.”

  “For God’s sake,” he said brutally. “It’s not all right. I thought you were someone else, obviously. Pray accept my apologies.”

  Once again there was no way to cover her vulnerability and humiliation except with anger.

  “Someone else? Who? Your first wife, Juanita? Or one of the millions of women who’ve suffered because of you since she died?”

  “Millions?”

  It was said with a sharp upward inflection, a hint of savage humor that belied his expression.

  Joanna struggled to her feet.

  “Hundreds, then, or tens. What does it matter? Do you take pride in punishing females because Juanita betrayed your love by dying?”

  He looked up at her with nothing but distaste, the humor warped into mockery.

  “What the devil do you think you can know about my marriage to Juanita? Betrayed your love! Where did you learn that phrase? From some gothic novel? Pray, spare me your schoolgirl interpretations of things you know nothing about. Good night.”

  Without giving her a chance to reply, Fitzroy thrust the chair away and stalked from the room. The door slammed behind him.

  Joanna sat on the edge of the crate and wondered why her eyes burned, yet tears refused to come. Dry-eyed she went to her easel and tore down the drawing, ripping the paper to shreds.

  Why on earth should she care, when Richard believed that, because of some appalling transgression of honor, her husband barely deserved to live?

  * * *

  In the morning she woke early. She had several hours before Lady Mary would expect her, but she could not paint. The studio she had longed for seemed barren, so Joanna took her sketch paper and went outside.

  The garden was laid out neatly, with a walled space for vegetables and fruit, and a small sweep of lawn running into a little copse of trees on the opposite side of the house from the stables. The garden had no more personality than the house.

  Joanna wandered along a path through the trees, noticing the light and shade, listening to the rustle of the leaves.

  An odd warble of sound rumbled in the background, low and sweet, beckoning her.

  She recognized it before she reached the neat little shed with the small arched openings and the doweled perches: the cooing of pigeons.

  A man with brown curls was leaning against the trunk of a nearby tree, watching the birds ruffling their feathers and pecking at grain.

  As Joanna walked up, he turned and grinned at her. A pigeon nestled in his hands.

  “The dove of peace?” Quentin gently stroked the bird’s feathers. “Fitzroy likes paradox.”

  “Really?” Joanna replied. “Are these his birds?”

  It seemed incredible. Her husband kept pigeons at the bottom of his garden?

  “It’s a hobby we shared as boys at Evenham Abbey.” Quentin opened his hands and the pigeon flew away. “But Fitzroy takes it very seriously now. That’s why he lives out here, instead of taking a townhouse in Mayfair.”

  Joanna watched the bird soar up into the blue sky. “Oh! Won’t it leave and be lost?”

  “No. It will come back. This is its home loft, where it was born. It would come back here even if it began the journey in Scotland. Would you like to hold one?”

  He strode up to the pigeon loft and opened a cage. The pigeon inside waited tamely as Quentin slipped his hands around it and handed it to Joanna.

  The small heart beat rapidly beneath the rust-and-ivory feathers. The pigeon nestled against her palms, closing its round black eyes.

  “Why does it have leather thongs on its legs?”

  “Because it was brought here from Belgium. Don’t let go, or it will fly home across the Channel.”

  She clutched the bird to her breast. “Did you want to see Fitzroy? He isn’t here.”

  “But he will be.” Quentin’s tone was casual, but he watched her closely. “I wondered if he was still enamored of Lady Carhill.”

  Joanna looked at him blankly, the pigeon quivering in her hands as it opened its eyes.

  “Lady Carhill?”

  “The lovely countess, Elizabeth. Her husband neglects her, an open invitation to a rake. While you and I were racketing north on your ill-conceived escape from Miss Able’s Academy, Fitzroy was being entertained in her private boudoir.” He winked. “I have it on the best authority. News of our flight must have interrupted their little rendezvous. No wonder he was so evil tempered at the Swan!”

  “Here!” Joanna held out the pigeon. “You had better put it back.”

  Quentin took the bird and released it into its cage.

  “So does he still pursue an interest there? It would be a trifle outré for brothers to share a mistress, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Joanna replied. “You must ask him.”

  The green eyes smiled at her. “You have no opinion of Fitzroy Mountfitchet, Lady Joanna? Good God! Everyone else seems to feel very passionately about my brother, one way or another.”

  “Do they? Because he likes to be impossible, I suppose. But all of this quivering emotion seems to be getting in the way of anyone seeing him clearly, doesn’t it?”

  She turned and marched away through the trees, brushing away a trace of angry tears.

  So Fitzroy had a mistress? It was what she expected, wasn’t it? Lady Joanna Acton had entered a marriage of convenience, as her mother had. Surely she could develop that same worldly, uncaring attitude?

  Yet why couldn’t she understand him any more clearly than all those others?

  Joanna closed her eyes. The artist had seen something that the lady couldn’t fathom. She was sure that it wasn’t pleasant dalliance with a mistress that occupied his days. He was doing something dangerous and exhausting
, something that was a burden to him—a burden he apparently didn’t share with anyone.

  There was no reason at all, of course, why he should share it with her.

  “The bays, George, right away! In the phaeton.”

  Joanna stopped dead.

  Fitzroy’s voice!

  She had walked blindly through the garden and was almost to the stable. Several loose boxes stood in rows around two sides of a cobbled yard. Horses peered out over their half doors. A cottage crowded up against the stables and the carriage house, obviously home to Fitzroy’s head ostler, George, and his family, for a woman peeked from the window at the sudden clatter of hooves.

  George ran to obey his master’s instructions, giving his own to a handful of stable lads.

  Sheltered by the trees Joanna watched Fitzroy swing from the back of a lathered gray. He looked harassed and tired, but he gave the horse a pat. As a lad took it by the reins and led it away, Fitzroy paced the cobbles, swinging his riding whip against his boot.

  The door of the cottage opened. The woman, large with child, smiled and spoke a soft greeting to him as she held out a tankard.

  To Joanna’s amazement Fitzroy grinned, took the tankard, and drank.

  As he began to hand it back to her, a small boy, still in short skirts, ran from behind his mother and launched himself at Fitzroy.

  “Well, now, Master Tom!” Fitzroy picked up the child and swung him high in the air. “And how do you do today?”

  “Horses!” the boy squealed, giggling. “I give ‘em an apple?”

  “Ah, you like my gray, then, Tom? But see, your papa is bringing out my team.”

  Fitzroy turned so the child could watch his father harness two magnificent bays to the phaeton. Tom confidently wrapped his plump arms around the viscount’s neck and giggled again.

  “Ready, my lord,” George said.

  “Here, Tom, go to your mama, for I must be away.”

  Fitzroy swung the boy into his mother’s arms. She blushed and curtsied.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Your lad’s a credit to you.”

  George gave his master a huge grin. “It’s very kind of your lordship to notice the youngster.”