Gabriel: Lord of Regrets (19 page)

He said nothing, because Marjorie had
again
put her delicate finger on an obvious, if uncomfortable truth.

“And I’ve never understood
why
, Aaron.” She looked at their joined hands, misery in her eyes, her voice, and her hunched posture. “I realize I’m not dainty, or sophisticated, or well traveled. I realize I wasn’t your choice, and you might not find me particularly inspiring as a… woman, but I’m not… I’m not awful.”

“Margie, stop.” He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. “Just stop. You’re lovely, you’re desirable, and sometimes, when we’re out riding on a pretty day, it’s all I can do not to tackle you in the deep grass of the far pastures and consummate this marriage once and for all. The difficulty lies not in my desire for you, of which I think I just assured us both, but in your lack of desire for me.”

***

“You’re being particularly biddable,” Polly observed. She sketched Gabriel as he sat on his grand bed, glasses perched on his Iberian beak, correspondence spread all over the comforter.

“I’m practicing for your next enslavement of me.” He glanced at her over his glasses, looking professorially stern. “What are you scribbling over there, Polonaise? Have you given me horns and a tail?”

“Hold still.” She moved her pencil faster, trying not to smile at him. He went back to his documents, muttering about stubborn wenches watching him sit on his backside and disrespecting him in broad daylight when he was being so docile and meek.

“Here.” Polly settled at his side, careful not to move the mattress suddenly, because even now, three days into his convalescence, his back might be tender. “This is you.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ.” He took the sketch pad, scowling mightily. “You can always take up a career as a satirist, once your disrespect has cost you all your portrait commissions.”

“You don’t like the wings?”

“I thought those were the bed hangings.” Gabriel studied the drawing, as if he’d glower the image right off the page. “They’re supposed to be the bed hangings.”

Polly leaned close enough to catch a warm whiff of cedar. “They looked like a suggestion of wings to me. I’m an artist, and when inspiration strikes, I don’t question it.” Even when she should.

“Strikes.” Gabriel took his glasses off. “Is that why you’re off to choose a riding crop with Marjorie? You’ve decided to indulge me tonight after all?”

Polly closed her sketch pad, lest he start turning its pages. “I can’t tell if you’re serious. Sorry to disappoint. I’m not choosing a toy for your enjoyment. I’m choosing a prop for Marjorie to hold in her painting.”

“I thought you said you were quick, Polonaise.” Gabriel tidied up the documents spread across the covers. “I don’t see this portrait progressing much.”

“We need the light, and the weather hasn’t cooperated. Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Maybe I’m tired of waiting for you to enslave me.” Gabriel set the stack aside then patted the mattress. “Come here.”

She went, because they were alone and she’d not been close to him since the night they’d spent in her bed, which seemed an unholy age ago.

“Cuddle up.” He delivered his order with a pat to her bottom, so she straddled his lap and curled up obligingly. “Now listen to me, Polonaise, all teasing aside. I have never found it titillating to strike a woman, nor do I find it enhances my ardor to be struck.” He stroked his hands down her back in a caress that had become wonderfully familiar to her in a short time.

“You’re serious?”

“Absolutely serious,” he said, kissing the side of her neck. “It has always seemed to me as if those antics are for people who lack imagination and must inundate the body with gross sensations simply to recall where the damned thing is. You do not lack imagination. Now if you want to strike me, I will, of course, enjoy granting your every intimate wish.”

Polly buried her face against his neck, where the scent of cedar blended with his shaving soap to create a fragrance unique to him. “I couldn’t hit you.”

“Not even on my handsomely muscled and adorably scarred derriere?”

“Especially not there.”

“So, my love, why not tell me you find the topic insipid and put me in my place?”

Cedar symbolized strength, of which she had none where he was concerned. “One doesn’t want to appear ignorant.”

“Pride.” He kissed her temple. “Your besetting sin, Polonaise.”

“Or yours. Along with arrogance and a questionable sense of humor.”

“At least I have an adorable derriere. You didn’t argue with me over that.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Polly burrowed closer and said something else. Her besetting sin was an inability to keep her mouth shut when Gabriel scolded her.

“Beg pardon?” His hand did not beg her pardon but went questing over the curve of her adorable parts.

“I’ve missed you.”

“Polonaise?”

“No more lectures, please. I find them insipid.”

“Feel this?” He arched up against her sex, and through the covers and the clothes, Polly felt the magnificent, engorged length of him.

“I feel it.”

“Do you know what I’d like to be doing with it right now?” He kissed the spot where her shoulder met her neck, the place that made her reason depart with all haste, and Polly let out a sigh as Gabriel murmured softly against her neck.

“I want to bury myself, bury my whole being and my passion inside your body, and pleasure you and pleasure you and pleasure you until you’re screaming out your satisfaction to the heavens and calling forth my own from the depths of my soul. I want to possess every particle, thought, and sense you own, and give it back to you, drunk with pleasure from our shared bodies. I want to have you until you own me, heart, mind, body, and soul. And then I want you again and again and again.”

Men spoke like this to the women they’d never marry. This was the language of dalliance, and Gabriel was exceedingly fluent. “That all sounds very naughty.”

Gabriel lifted his face from her neck. “My heritage is Portuguese, in part. The Iberian temperament is not tepid. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”

Marjorie’s voice sounded in the corridor, directing a footman to fetch Aaron because Miss Hunt needed relief from her visit to the indisposed.

Polly scooted off the bed and picked up her sketch pad. She hovered until Marjorie appeared, and then they both hovered until Aaron came in, still dressed in riding attire, slapping a crop against his boot.

Polly took one look at the crop, started laughing, and pulled Marjorie from the room.

***

“What on earth have you said to our dear Miss Hunt?” Aaron sat on the edge of the bed and craned his neck to look at the letters Gabriel had written. “And how is it you are more productive when supposedly ill than I am when hale?”

“I didn’t put pen to paper for days at a time when I was stewarding,” Gabriel said. “It’s appalling what a man can miss when it’s denied him.” Whom he could miss.

“George has been very worried for you,” Aaron replied. “They’re praying for your recovery below stairs.”

“I don’t think this is going to work, Aaron.” Gabriel waited until Aaron closed the door to the sitting room to swing his legs off the bed. Now that Polly had gone giggling on her way, restlessness plagued him.

“How long will you give this strategem?” Aaron went to a window and stood gazing out at something below. Gabriel shifted to stand beside him.

“Thick as thieves, those two.” Across the gardens, Polly and Marjorie disappeared into the stables, arm in arm, two muscular footmen trailing them. “We’d best make use of their absence while we have it.”

Aaron did not take his gaze from the direction of his wife’s departure. “How much longer will I be sleeping in that sitting room?”

“Good question.” Particularly for a man who might be campaigning for a place in his wife’s bed. “What is my supposed condition?”

“You’re very weak, you need assistance with everything, and can barely manage beef tea. You refuse to see the doctors but think this is some fever you picked up in Spain, one that’s often fatal. We despair of your recovery.”

“And I’ve been in this condition how long?”

“This is your fourth agonizing day, but you’re tough, and we put our faith in God.”

“Keep the Deity out of this, if you please. You’re tired of your cot?”

“It’s not that.” Aaron cleared his throat, glanced away, and Gabriel set himself to hear a spate of babbling, for Aaron—bless the boy—babbled when he was nervous.

Aaron cleared his throat again.

“Aaron? If you need a night’s sleep, just say so. I can steal off to a guest room, and no one will be the wiser.” One guest room in particular held significant appeal.

“Marjorie may be amenable to having a child,” Aaron said, letting out a pent-up breath. “I say may be, because we’re in negotiations and it’s delicate and difficult, and every damned thing I say seems to annoy her, and I can’t read her bloody, infernal silences, and when she says something, I can’t even comprehend
that
, and suffice it to say… well, we might make more progress were I actually sleeping, that is to say…”

Babbling at a great rate, indeed. “Cease saying, if you please. If Marjorie did not expect to bear your heirs, why marry her?”

“Because her mama insisted rather pointedly, legally, and expensively?”

The entire family’s miseries all seem to lead back to Lady Hartle. “Marjorie’s dam has much to answer for,” Gabriel retorted. “If you’re asking me for fraternal advice, I’d say don’t, for God’s sake, have a child out of duty.”

Aaron studied the empty stable yard below, dark brows knitted. “I’m your only heir, or, as Marjorie puts it, you have no heirs of your body.”

“And I might not ever,” Gabriel said, particularly if Polly were barren. He appropriated a dressing gown from the bedpost, because the window gave off a chill, as did the topic under discussion. “We’re wealthy, personally wealthy, Aaron. If the title lapses, it lapses, and we’re left with a paltry twenty-six thousand acres, and pots of money between us. I think we’ll muddle along somehow.”

“Twenty-six thousand seven hundred sixty-three. You honestly don’t care?”

Not the way he’d cared about Three Springs. Not the way he cared about Polonaise Hunt’s happiness and safety. “I honestly don’t care about the title one whit, compared to how I care about your domestic contentment. That you had to marry on my behalf bothers me exceedingly.”

“It didn’t bother Lady Hartle. Not at the time.”

Gabriel eyed his baby brother, wondering why the Wendover coloring looked so much more handsome on Aaron. “I’ve figured something out.”

“This sounds ominous.”

“What’s ominous is how badly I’ve misjudged my brother.” The ladies had apparently found something to occupy them in the stables, for the gardens below showed not a sign of life, and yet, Aaron lingered at the window. “I think I’ve figured out why you were so hasty in having me declared dead.”

“I wasn’t hasty. I was prudent. Papa was gone and matters were in an uproar, and nobody could sign anything, or move money, or even pay wages when your status was undetermined, and there was that awful fire, and some-damned-body needed to marry Marjorie rather summarily, and what?”

“You figured out,” Gabriel said slowly, lest he be interrupted by more babbling, “the safest place for me to be if someone wanted me dead was in the grave.”

The words lay there, very much alive, between them. Alive and squirming with innuendo, overtones, and implications—not all of them unflattering.

“There was a fire,” Aaron said again, his voice pitched low. “There was. And there was no body.”

“How did you learn that?” Gabriel’s tone was merely curious, which seemed to relieve his brother.

“I had the fellows make inquiry,” Aaron said. “The fighting was over, and they had little to do, so when I wrote about the circumstances of your death, they got to poking around.”

“A bunch of British officers poking around a Catholic convent.” Gabriel could not keep the irony from his tone, nor could he help but wonder what those two women were getting up to. “Surely no one would remark such activity?”

“They’re not stupid.” Aaron’s gaze was on the stables, where the ladies had disappeared a full five minutes earlier. “They got to drinking with the gardener, who of course digs the graves, and he made some comment about it being a damned big hole just for a few rose bushes, but the roses were there so nobody would disturb the plot.”

“I wondered about the roses. An excessive display of sentiment, considering the ladies buried patients regularly.”

“They were fond of you. Else why protect you like that?”

“Because they are fond of all God’s creatures. So did you know I was alive, or merely hope?” And how long would Aaron have waited to admit he’d been guarding Gabriel’s back for two years?

“Hope, only hope, and the silly notion I’d feel it if something happened to you, when all I felt was bewildered and resentful.”

Gabriel’s back felt better than it had in ages, but his knees had abruptly turned unreliable. “Two years is a long time to hope.”

“It is.”

Gabriel shifted away, toward the bed—the patient should not be seen malingering at the window—while Aaron resumed speaking.

“Then I got word last year there was an estate over on the Downs sporting a new steward. A big, quiet, dark-haired man who moved slowly but never stopped working. He was in a house full of women, though there was no hint of impropriety about him, and his horse was a nice specimen, if a little worn at the heels. I began to hope a little harder.”

“You knew I was at Three Springs?”

“I knew the steward there answered to your description, kept to himself, and was named Gabriel North. The coincidence was too great to ignore.”

“So you’ve been keeping secrets too, eh, little Brother?”

Aaron nodded, then his breath hitched. “I wanted you to be alive, but I knew what you had to be thinking, because there I was, sporting about with your title, your wealth, your woman. The implications were obvious, and I’d never done anything or been any sort of brother to make you think better of me than those implications suggested.”