Love's Reward Page 17

  “But it does, because you married me and there is no one else.”

  “You should take a lover,” he said, but the words seemed to choke in his throat. Suddenly he laughed, with that wild, bitter self-derision, yet his eyes remained locked on her face. “Though if you did, I would want to kill him.”

  She didn’t know if she believed him, but the words fired a fierce joy in her. Not one of them has been my mistress. Joanna stared back up at him. How could he mean it?

  “I shall never take a lover,” she said. “You are my husband. Shall I go to my grave a virgin?”

  His grip changed on her wrist, softening, fervent.

  “You don’t know what you ask, Joanna, what it would mean. There’d be no turning back. Dear God, I didn’t expect it to happen.” His fingers moved up her arm, over the fabric of her dress to the bare skin of her neck. “My feelings don’t matter, they have never mattered, yet I had no idea that you were being hurt by my inattention.”

  She knew what she risked. So let that one kiss be the first and last expression of lust between us. Even if you invite me, madam, it will never happen again. Yet she couldn’t help herself.

  “And you think that’s all it is? A little wounded pride and vanity? Why did you say you would never touch me again? What else can it be, except that I alone am hideous to you?”

  The candlelight flickered over his face as he studied her features, his gaze fathomless, his tension palpable. Words seemed dragged from him, as if it pained him to speak, yet his voice pulsed with intensity.

  “Ah, no, dear heart, you are infinitely lovely to me.” An odd half-smile lit his face as he gently rubbed his thumb over her jaw. “When I said that, I was angry with my father, and distracted by other claims. But love is a far higher, sweeter thing than lust.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His hand slipped down, his knuckles caressing her throat. Her pulse hammered in response.

  “I saw at the Swan that you are beautiful and brave, but I didn’t think I would be so vulnerable to you. Dear wife, I desire you passionately, with a man’s hunger for a woman’s beauty and with all the ardor of my soul. Thoughts of you taunt me day and night. You’ve fired a longing in my blood that I can’t quench. I find you enchanting. Oh, God, what a dearth of words is in the language! I burn for you. But I cannot act on it.”

  “Why not?” It was a whisper.

  He hesitated, as if searching for the words.

  “Richard told you the kind of work I did in Spain. It’s not over just because we’re no longer openly at war. I am caught up in something degrading and vicious that I don’t understand, and I cannot tell what may be required next. I can see no way out of it, but I fear the planned end is my death. At first it didn’t matter that much. But it matters now. I love you, Joanna, and I know what we risk. Which makes it all impossible.”

  All her concentration centered on the sensations he was creating on her skin. The rest barely registered: The planned end is my death. I love you. They seemed only words to Joanna, the melodramatic claims of a rake. To how many women had he professed love? She didn’t care. Tears ran openly down her cheeks. I burn for you.

  “So you do dangerous work. I have guessed as much. No man would come from a mistress looking as you do. But we all risk dying, every day. It’s an overwhelming reason to live in the meantime. You said as much yourself about your sister. Your restraint is empty, Fitzroy. I’m your wife. If you love me, then prove it, damn you!”

  “How the devil?” Fitzroy asked quietly, his voice dry and throaty. “When it is my own heart’s desire? How the devil do you expect me to refuse you now?”

  Slipping his hands to her waist, Fitzroy pulled her against his body. Joanna closed her eyes as his lips met hers. She would be burned. Surely, surely, the incandescent flame would sear her, scald her to the soul? She held back nothing of her confusion and her desire, letting her mouth move under his searching lips and tongue, trembling, hot, beautiful.

  They slipped together to the floor, Fitzroy supporting her easily with a hand at her waist, pressed together, devouring each other. He rolled her onto her back as he kissed her eyelids and hairline and throat. With her hands held above her head in one of his, he ran his fingertips over her hair with a tenderness that reached deep into her heart. She would be consumed!

  Yet she wanted to explore him, too, as if her fingers on his jaw and neck would help her find out who he really was.

  “Let me touch you, Fitzroy!”

  “Here,” he said, opening his fingers and kissing the corner of her mouth. “I release you, wife, to have your wicked way with me.”

  Joanna touched his face, the slight roughness of his shaved jaw, the smooth column of his throat moving under her fingers. She had so longed to do this. A deep spring of joy washed away her anger.

  Tentatively she stroked his upper lip. He caught her fingertip in his mouth, soft and warm, and caressed it with his tongue. She moved her other hand to his back, feeling the firmness and the strange strength of him.

  Boldly she pulled the shirt out of his waistband and ran her fingers up his naked spine.

  “Like that?” she asked, breathless, ravished by the flex of his muscles under her hand.

  He smiled down at her, infinitely desirable, his eyes as dark and wide as a night sky as his fingers moved over her skin.

  “Or like this?”

  Joanna gasped, her eyes closed, lost to anything else as the sensations he created flooded through her veins.

  “Yes! Oh, yes, Fitzroy!”

  They rolled over together, her smock soon discarded, her dress unbuttoned, his hands on her skin a revelation of delight.

  She longed to do the same wonderful things for him.

  Blushing furiously, she whispered, “I want you out of this shirt.”

  He pulled away, the dark hair falling over his forehead, his eyes dilated into blackness.

  “Oh, damnation!” he said and laughed—a carefree, wild laugh, filled with gaiety.

  “What?” Joanna sat up, her hair tumbling down around her shoulders. “What is it?”

  Fitzroy rocked back on his heels and held up his hands.

  “Paint! We’re getting covered in paint. Look!”

  They had crushed her abandoned palette beneath them. Pigments rioted, wild streaks of color running across the floorboards—and on their hands and faces and clothes.

  “Oh, no!” Joanna looked at her palms. “Burnt sienna and cadmium red.”

  He brushed his thumb across her cheek. “Prussian blue. It looks like woad, my pagan princess.”

  She ran one finger through a wash of paint and giggled. “We’re tattooed, like savages.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her gently, his lips barely touching hers then parting again softly.

  “Let me take you to bed, dear heart, or tell me to go to hell forever. I am mad, perhaps. No, I know I am mad to do this. Stop me, for God’s sake, for I don’t believe I can stop myself.”

  “I want it,” Joanna whispered, trembling in his arms. “I want you. Don’t abandon me now. Devil take tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow! We’re married, aren’t we?”

  Married.

  Once before he had taken a lady to her bridal bed, wanting it to be the most memorable night of her life. He had felt an exquisite tenderness for Juanita, and a fierce, burning passion. Now he felt it again, even more brightly, blazing with a purer flame, and had a second chance, perhaps.

  Fitzroy knew he ought to walk away, that he was breaking the bargain he had made with himself. Joanna had no idea how absolute this was. Yet there was already no going back. He had trapped them both.

  However unwise it might be, he felt helpless in the face of his all-consuming desire.

  And Joanna was his wife. He wanted to make her a gift.

  But more than that. More than that! If he refused her now, he would instead give her a wound that might never heal.

  Fitzroy picked her up off the floor and carried her out into the co
rridor, kicking the doors open and closed behind him. He carried her into the great master bedroom and set her down on the bed.

  “Now,” he said. “I am about to make love to you in earnest, Joanna. I give you my soul to dance upon, if you like. Make merry with my heart, wife. It is yours. I want to touch you until you melt away, but I shall be melting with you.”

  “Yes,” she said, gazing up at him.

  He smoothed the tangled hair away from her face. Then he took one of her hands and laid it palm to palm with his. Their joined pulse throbbed, hot and wild.

  “This is the meaning of desire, sweetheart. To be carried together on the flood tide. Never doubt, whatever happens later, that everything you feel tonight is real, that I love you, that I am feverish with my passion for you. But tell me to stop if you want. For I can’t promise anything else. I can’t promise to be with you, or to be a good husband, or even that we can ever do this again. ‘The world is too much with us.’ Yet dear God, I hope you won’t send me away now!”

  “I don’t care.” Joanna reached up her paint-stained hand to stroke the enchanting line of his jaw. My husband. Slowly she trailed a line of yellow ochre along his chin. “Now is all that counts.”

  * * *

  Foolish words. Joanna woke in the morning to a disordered bed, the pillows streaked here and there with paint. Her smock and her old dress lay neatly folded on a chair.

  Fitzroy had gone.

  She touched a place on the sheet where the colors had smudged together, blue and ochre and crimson.

  Now I am married.

  Pushing back the covers, she looked at herself, her naked limbs dappled with pigment like a savage. How did she let it sink in? The meaning of it. To be carried together on the flood tide. Pretty words that had swirled into deeper and deeper layers as the night unfolded. Until she had cried out and buried her face in his shoulder, enfolded and pierced to the heart.

  I love you, Fitzroy. I love you. I love you.

  And demonstrated it to him again and again.

  What if he did not truly return it? She had ambushed him, hadn’t she? What if he had taken her to his bed out of pity, or duty, or masculine pride?

  Oh, dear Lord, that was the risk she had taken by inviting him. She would never know.

  And Fitzroy was gone. As she expected. He had gone back to that harried, tormented, mysterious life that he led, leaving her still closed out.

  She climbed out of the bed.

  And now she knew something else, too. She had discovered his scars, the long ridge on one thigh, the injury to his back, brutal reminders of his years fighting Napoleon. Her husband had been a warrior. It brought home with a dreadful finality the gulf in experience between them.

  What could she—in truth not much more than a schoolgirl—ever really offer him?

  A note lay on the dresser: Joanna. Remember. Whatever happens later, I love you.

  The words of a rake, whispered to myriad women, to soften them and make them pliable—as she had become? It hadn’t mattered so very much, until now.

  The note lay on a slim volume of Wordsworth’s poetry. Joanna idly turned to the page that was marked by a ribbon and skimmed over the familiar lines about Proteus and Triton, the poem he had begun to quote that evening in the folly at King’s Acton.

  “The world is too much with us . . . We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! . . . The sea . . . The winds . . . It moves us not . . . Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn . . .”

  She set down the book and heard Fitzroy’s voice as clearly as if he were there in the shadowed chamber.

  You are a pagan, Joanna, whether you know it or not.

  Last night he had proved it. For the sea had surged in her, the wind had moved. Fitzroy had taken her to that world where Nature’s gods dance beneath a wild moon, until nothing remained but the purity of creation. She would never be the same again.

  You don’t know what you ask, Joanna. There’ll be no turning back.

  She had thought herself in love with him because he was beautiful and mysterious and wild, but that had been only a pale shadow of the love she knew for him now.

  I give you my soul to dance upon, if you like.

  But what if he hadn’t meant it? When now she did.

  Features crazily marked with paint looked back at her from the mirror. Did it show? This transformation, this awakening?

  Joanna took a long bath. Though she scrubbed her face till it shone, a blue shadow still faintly marked her cheekbone.

  * * *

  She was dressed in her smock, ready to go to her studio, when she was instead summoned away by a servant. Her eldest brother was waiting in the drawing room.

  Richard’s smile died as she entered.

  “Joanna, dear child, is that a bruise? By God, if he has struck you—”

  She ran up to him and kissed his cheek.

  “Don’t be silly! It’s paint. Prussian blue, a slightly too permanent pigment. Do I look as if I’ve been beaten?”

  “No, you look luminous, as if you’ve— Are you happy, Jo?”

  “Of course, why shouldn’t I be? I have everything. Now, sit down, brother, and tell me about things.”

  They talked for some time about family news, then generalities, avoiding the one topic that lay like a monster between them.

  At last Richard stood and took up his cane, making ready to leave.

  Gathering her courage, Joanna forced herself to say it. Out loud. Now there was no turning back.

  “Richard. How did Juanita die? You do see that you must tell me, don’t you?”

  He spun about, the cane gripped hard in his right hand.

  “I’d rather not, Jo. It’s all in the past, irrelevant now.”

  Tension stretched between them.

  “No. He’s my husband, for better, for worse. I think I have the right to know.”

  She could see the struggle in him, the desire to leave it unsaid, but Richard sat down again, carefully laying aside his cane, and faced her.

  “You insist on this? Whatever it says about him?”

  “I do. I must, Richard. Please, tell me everything you know about Juanita.”

  “God, where to begin?” He sighed. “Life in the Peninsula wasn’t easy.”

  “Yes, I know that. I know it was hard.”

  “Most of the officers’ wives stayed safely behind in the towns. Yet Juanita came with us on every campaign. She was always charming, exquisite. She carried an aura of culture and brilliance with her, even in camp. Any of the officers would have done anything for her. There was a general envy of Tarrant, I’m afraid.”

  “Did he love her very much?” Joanna couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice.

  Richard steepled his fingers together and dropped his forehead onto them.

  “I believe anyone in the regiment would have said he was besotted. He shared everything with her. Yet she confided to me that he was unfaithful at every opportunity.”

  Joanna closed her eyes against the pain. “Go on, Richard. You can’t stop now. What happened at the end?”

  “We had made camp near Orthez. They had another argument. I was coming back from the horse lines when I heard the noise of it, though not the words. I assumed he’d been unfaithful again and Juanita had found out. She tore out of their tent and took a horse, riding away as if the hounds of hell were at her heels. The country was hardly safe, so I mounted and followed her.”

  “And?”

  He glanced up, his face drawn. “Tarrant caught up with me within a few miles. He begged me to go back, but we rode on together. He seemed frantic. I assumed he was afraid that harm would come to her. The French were camped pretty close by, after all.”

  It is only a story, Joanna told herself, about long ago and far away.

  “Then it was foolish for her to ride out alone like that. Was she often impulsive?”

  “Impulsive? No, I don’t think so. She had hinted before that he was cruel to her, but I always
had the impression that she was fiercely loyal to her ideals. She was Spanish and he was her husband. Something very exceptional must have made her run away like that.”

  “But you found her?”

  “Her horse was tied outside a ruined farm. Other horses whinnied from the barn, so she wasn’t alone. Tarrant reacted with that feral, derisive humor that he’d developed. It made me want to knock him down.”

  “That he laughed?” She gulped down a stab of pain.

  “Yes, of course. The French would have shown her no mercy, if they’d captured her.”

  “Perhaps he knew it wasn’t the French?”

  “How could he have known? Anyway, we left our horses in the woods, crept up to the farmhouse, and managed to look inside without being seen. A group of partisans were arguing in the local patois. Juanita was sitting on a chair near the door, very pale.”

  “Partisans? On our side, then. So why didn’t you identify yourselves and rescue her?”

  “Because a French patrol appeared at the end of the lane and opened fire. After that it was nothing but confusion. The partisans returned fire from the farmhouse. The French dismounted and took cover behind a stone wall. Tarrant and I took what slim shelter we could in the ruins of the porch. Meanwhile, more French arrived, and the partisans rushed out of the house to scatter among the ruins. It would have been madness for them to remain pinned inside. As Juanita ran out, Tarrant caught her and thrust her behind him. She cursed at him.”

  Richard stopped and looked down at his hands.

  “Go on,” Joanna said. “I have to hear this, Richard.”

  He looked ill, drawn and tired, the crease deep between his brows.

  “Juanita panicked, I think. She tried to break away to her horse, yelling something. Gunfire drowned her words, and one of the partisans took aim at her from the barn. He couldn’t have known that she was a British officer’s wife, and he was too far away to hear us, even if we had shouted.”