"You were the daughter that Jane really wanted," he said. "How do you think India could live with that?"
Isabella shook her head. "I cannot be held responsible for that, Stockhaven."
"You can be held responsible for all the insidious little ways in which you reminded Lady Jane of her preference for you," Marcus said sharply.
"I did no such thing. If India told you that, she was lying."
Marcus's hands tightened. "Why should she lie? You think that she was jealous? Of you?"
Isabella looked disdainful. Her face was very close to his and he could see the telltale beat of the pulse at her throat giving away her agitation, but on the surface she looked as though she could not care any the less.
"Why should she be jealous of me?" she said. "She was married to you."
"She married the man that you rejected," Marcus said sharply.
Isabella's lashes flickered down, veiling her expression. Her mouth was drawn tight; that luscious mouth that was always his undoing. He wanted to kiss her. The need rampaged through him. He wanted to kiss a woman he disliked intensely and it was very disturbing.
"I doubt that India was ever jealous of me," Isabella said, "but in truth I have no notion of what India thought about anything." Her eyes were dark, shadowed. "We did not confide. We were not close."
"Despite being of an age?"
Isabella had heard the reproach in his tone and the color flared in her cheeks. "Oh, do not try to lay that one at my door, Stockhaven! I wanted to be a friend to India but she did not seem to need me. She was—" Isabella hesitated. "A very self-contained person. Well, you knew her better than I." She moved away from him and he let her go. "So no, I told her nothing of my feelings for you either at the time or later, and even if I had—"
"She would have had no reason for jealousy, being the one that I had married," Marcus finished grimly.
"If she knew that you cared for her then she had nothing to envy," Isabella agreed. She was pale now, as though something was hurting her. She lifted her chin. "I know nothing of this, as I told you. For all I know, you could be making this entire matter up as another stick to beat me with."
Marcus made an abrupt movement. "I do not lie," he said through his teeth, "and neither did India."
"And neither do I!" Isabella's blue eyes, so like those of his late wife, flashed defiance. Marcus felt suddenly bitter. He had never doubted India's accusation because he had understood all too clearly how Lady Jane Southern might have felt. Isabella had fire and courage and spirit where India had meekness and timidity. For some mothers she would have been the ideal daughter, but not for Jane, who had had a restless spirit herself. She and India had been as dissimilar as chalk and cheese and they had never been able to live comfortably with their differences. Yet somehow it felt like a double betrayal of India for him to be able to enter into her mother's feelings and see how perfect a daughter Isabella would have been for her.
"Despite your denials, it is part of a pattern, is it not?" he said roughly, as though Isabella had not spoken. "You married Ernest Di Cassilis for his money and I am sure that the others, the men you had along the way, had to give you something you needed or be discarded." His possessive anger was fanned white hot at the thought as he continued. "You made sure that Jane Southern disinherited her daughter in favor of you. You married me to save yourself from ruin. And now you bargain to buy your freedom. There is little you will not do, little you will not stoop to, to ensure your own fortune."
Isabella had turned very white at his words. "That," she said, "is blatantly untrue."
"The facts speak for themselves."
"The facts are as I related them to you," Isabella said. "I married Ernest because at the time it was what I
thought was best to save my family. As for the others. . ."
She swallowed hard.
Marcus held himself tight with rage. "Yes?"
"There were not so many of them as you imply," Isabella said, "and all I wanted from them was affection." There was stark despair in her voice. "I know that you and others have branded me a whore on the strength of it but you know nothing. Nothing at all."
"So tell me."
Isabella looked at him and there was a faint smile in her eyes. "Oh no, Stockhaven. You did not ask that. I am not going to expose any more of my soul to you. All you wanted was the truth of what happened when I jilted you. That I have given you, whether you choose to believe it or not."
Marcus felt his frustration tighten further. "And the rest? The inheritance?"
"I have told you. I knew nothing of Lady Jane's plan to disinherit India and I deny that I encouraged her to do so. And I married you—" She paused.
"Yes?" Marcus said again.
Her eyelashes flickered, once again hiding her expression from him, but her tone was bleak. "Very well. I confess it. I married you to save myself from the debtors' prison. It was a bad mistake but I was—"
She broke off. and closed her lips tightly.
I was desperate.
He remembered her saying it when she had threatened to marry whichever of his fellow prisoners would have her.
He shrugged. The anger drove him on and it left no room for sympathy. "So. I have paid off your debts and you are safe. You have told me why you jilted me and now—" He paused. In the firelight she looked fragile and apprehensive. He wondered how on earth she could look like that when she was the most brass-faced creature on earth.
"And now," he said, deliberately, "I do believe it is our wedding night."
Isabella had her hand against his chest, warding him off. "I cannot give myself to a man who does not care for me, does not trust me and I dare say does not even like me very much."
Marcus laughed. There was a wildness inside him and it demanded recompense. He wanted to slake his anger and his bitterness in her body. He wondered how she thought that any man could look on her and not feel the same desire.
"You underestimate my feelings for you, my love," he said. "I admire you and I want you."
Isabella's clear blue eyes challenged him to examine those truths he wanted to ignore. "Yet you despise me," she said.
Marcus's gaze did not falter. "A part of me does, perhaps. We need not regard it." He touched a finger to her lips. If he did not have her soon, he thought he would burn up with the wanting.
"I need you very much," he continued, the rough undertone edging his voice. "You are not indifferent to me, either. Look me in the eye and tell me that you do not want me."
Isabella was biting her Up. She did not look up. "I want to be indifferent to you," she said.
"Ah." Marcus leaned forward and touched his lips lightly to the curve of her neck. "That is a vastly different matter, as even you will allow."
He felt a shudder run through her but then she moved from beneath his touch and deliberately put a distance between them. "You cannot have me," she said. She turned her shoulder. "Go! Go and find a harlot to satisfy your lust!"
There was a moment's stillness. Marcus did not move. He put one hand on her arm and felt the conflict in her. She was wound as tight as a spindle.
"You do not mean that," he said softly.
Isabella's shoulders slumped.
"I do not mean it," she admitted. "But you must go, Stockhaven. I told you the truth and you have chosen not to believe me. I cannot give myself, married or not, to a man who has no respect for me."
Marcus's expression was implacable.
"You can and you will. It is the bargain you made, my love."
"No," Isabella said. "I will not give myself to you when you think so little of me." She threw out a hand in desperate appeal. "You knew me before, Marcus! Was your own judgment of me so faulty then that you can believe this of me now?"
Marcus gritted his teeth. The ghosts of his love for her twisted and tormented him. "I was young," he said harshly. "Perhaps I was misled in my feelings for you."
"You loved me," Isabella said, ashen now. "Are you saying it was all based upon a lie?"
Her eyes were blazing. Before he could reply she added, "Why must you make yourself believe the very worst of me?"
It was not a question that Marcus wanted to answer. Not now, possibly not ever. At the moment he could not think beyond the shocking need to have her in his bed. He did not want to confront his demons or to acknowledge that there was a chink in his defenses. Perhaps India had lied to him. Perhaps she had been jealous of his love for Isabella. And he, out of his guilt and remorse, had tried to blame Isabella for everything rather than admit the pain.
Isabella's eyes were a deep, dark blue, smudged with desire. Her cheeks were pink with arousal and when he touched her, her skin felt heated beneath his fingertips.
"You cannot deny me." He was aching to take her, afraid that he would lose all control if she refused him. "I was your first lover. You know that you want me, too."
"You will regret this." She said it not as a threat but a simple statement of fact. "This feels wrong. It
is
wrong when there is so much unresolved between us."
Marcus understood what she meant but he tried to close his mind against the knowledge. Why make matters complicated when they could be simple? They could forget the past, the accusations and the recriminations, in the heat of the present. Afterward. . .but he did not want to think about afterward. Not until he had taken her and ravished her and reclaimed her, and laid all their ghosts to rest.
"I do not know what to think," he whispered.
He caught her to him and kissed her with all the pent-up passion and torment that plagued him. She did not resist but she did not respond either. A tremor shook him; he gentled the kiss, courting a response rather than demanding it. Somehow he had to make this right. She had to want him as much as he wanted her. He felt her lips tremble beneath his before they parted to his searching tongue and then her whole body went soft in his arms and the sweetness of her yielding broke something within him.
He swung her up in his arms and made for the door.
It was only when he reached the top of the stairs that Marcus realized that he had no idea where to find Isabella's bedroom. Under other circumstances he might have found it rather amusing to be striding off to take his wife to bed, only to realize that he did not know where her bed was. Now it merely frustrated him past endurance.
"Tell me where to go," he said, "or I swear I shall take you here on the stairs. I cannot help myself."
He saw the shock mirrored in her face. A part of him was as appalled as she that he was behaving with so little finesse as to treat her like a whore, but he was too far gone in lust now to care. He had gained a response from her but he had lost it again now with his anger and desperation. Her voice was dry when she replied.
"Your wooing lacks subtlety, Stockhaven," she said.
"You will not find me lacking when the time comes," Marcus said. "The room?"
There was an agonizing second while she appeared to consider the situation. To Marcus it felt like an hour.
"The third door on the left," she said.
The room was in darkness, the curtains drawn but with a rogue beam of moonlight slicing through to speckle the floor. Marcus had a brief impression of a bed with a high, carved back. He would not have cared had it been a broom cupboard. He put her gently on the bed and crossed to the door, taming the key with deliberation in the lock. The sound seemed to echo through the quiet house, signifying exactly what he was doing. He returned to her side, ripping off his neck cloth as he came toward her and discarding his shirt. He half expected her to scramble to her feet, to make some attempt to escape or to remonstrate with him. Instead she lay still, watching him, her skirts tumbled up above her thighs, her body still and open to him, wanton, abandoned. It was the most disturbing and inciting thing that he had ever seen.
He tore the gown from her shoulders in his haste, acting with an awkwardness that spoke of nerves as well as desire. He cursed his clumsiness even as she protested.
"My dress!" she exclaimed. "I cannot afford—"
Damn the dress. It was in the way.
"I will buy you another one." Marcus bent to kiss her, rough in his anxiety, his mouth claiming hers hungrily. He wanted a response from her again. He needed one. She had admitted that she wanted him. He was not taking an unwilling wife to his bed.