“Tell me what you want,” he ordered. “Tell me, Leah.”
“Yes . . . yes.” She clutched at his shoulders as intense tremors of pleasure rocked her body. The liquid fire bubbled up inside, flowing over and through her until she was consumed by the waves of bright ecstasy.
Brandon’s laughter pulled her back to earth as his arms encircled her. She opened her eyes and stared into his. He tugged her forward until his swollen member was completely sheathed. “Sweet wife,” he murmured.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened as he moved slowly. “Oh,” she sighed. She wrapped her legs around him, moaning softly as his powerful thrusts fanned the coiling flames within her. “Oh, Brandon,” she cried.
Again the excitement grew until she thought she could stand the tension no longer. Then he gave a hoarse cry, and she felt the release of his seed within her. A heartbeat later, she shared his joy as she reached another exhilarating climax even greater than the first.
She laid her head against his chest and held him to her, unwilling to break the bond that held them, unwilling to let the world intrude on their moment of utter contentment. She could hear his heartbeat, loud and strong as he drew in deep breaths.
“Woman . . .” he began, then gave a low, satisfied chuckle. “Leah.”
She raised her head and gazed into Brandon’s face, noting the light sheen of perspiration over his fair complexion, the glow in his eyes.
“I love you,” he whispered. Tenderly he withdrew and lifted her in his arms and kissed her. “I’ve missed you so much,” he admitted.
She moistened her lips and kissed him, trying to hold on to the safe feeling, trying desperately to keep her mind free of everything but the sweet rhythm still coursing through her veins.
He set her lightly on her feet and stepped back. “I fear we’ve made a mess of your gown.” He grinned boyishly and pushed down her crumpled petticoats and skirts. “It would be easier on us both if you’d let me back into your bed.” He pulled his breeches together and tied them at the back, then bent to retrieve her stocking from the floor. “Let me help you with this,” he offered.
Leah took a few steps and sank onto the bench, extending her legs. Her remaining stocking was wrinkled around her ankle. Brandon went down on one knee and adjusted the rumpled stocking. Then he replaced the other one and slipped her shoes onto her feet. As he wiggled the second shoe into place, they were disturbed by a sudden pounding on the door.
“Lord Brandon! M’lord! Come at once!”
Brandon swore softly and ran a hand through his hair. He picked up his coat from the floor and put it on. “I’m sorry, love,” he said, blowing her a kiss. “Duty.”
“Lord Brandon!”
The male voice was replaced by Lady Kathryn’s. “Brandon!” she wailed. “It’s Pookey.”
Brandon unlocked the door and pushed it open. His mother, a footman, two maids, and Charles peered into the room. “What is it, Mother?” Brandon asked, ignoring their pointed ogling of Leah’s disheveled appearance.
“It’s Pookey,” Lady Kathryn cried. “Something terrible has happened.”
Brandon accompanied her back to the dining table. Curious, Leah trailed after them. Lord and Lady Rondale, another footman, and another maid were gathered around the crumpled form of Lady Kathryn’s lapdog. Brandon knelt beside the animal and picked up his head. The eyes were glazed, and a trickle of clear matter dribbled from his mouth.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Brandon said. “He’s dead.” Brandon waved to the nearest footman. “Carry Pookey outside and call a gardener to bury the poor creature.”
Lady Kathryn was openly weeping. “A box,” she sobbed. “Poor Pookey must have a casket.” Lady Rondale made sympathetic sounds and put her arm around Lady Kathryn. “He was only a baby,” Lady Kathryn insisted. “Only four years old.”
Leah pushed past a stout maid and halted the footman with a raised palm. She leaned over the dog and sniffed his mouth, then pushed back the skin around his mouth to see the color of his gums.
Lady Kathryn uttered a gasp of outrage.
“The little dog was poisoned,” Leah said. “I dinna ken—”
“Ridiculous!” Lord Rondale declared. “No one would dare. What utter nonsense.”
Lady Kathryn began to weep louder.
Leah looked at Brandon. “’Tis true,” she said. “The dog wasna sick. I fed him at the table.”
“An apoplexy,” Lord Rondale said. “Happened to Squire Grizzwald last Michaelmas. Struck down by the hand of God. One moment the poor man was raising a mug of stout, the next he was knocking at the pearly gates.”
“What did you give him?” Lady Kathryn demanded. “What did you feed my baby?”
Leah went to the far end of the table where she had sat and looked underneath. There were bread crumbs, a forgotten silver spoon, and a damp stain where Charles had spilled his turtle soup. “Bread, esteemed mother of my husband,” Leah replied. “I gave the dog bread and butter. It does not taste good, but I dinna think it killed him.”
Brandon turned to Lord Rondale. “M’lord, if you would escort the ladies to the—”
A woman’s shrieking cut the air. A second female voice chimed in. Footsteps clattered down the long gallery from the kitchen wing, and a red-faced boy in an oversized apron burst into the room.
“Lady Kathryn!” His voice broke, ending in a squeak, and the youth’s face turned even redder. “It’s . . . it’s . . .” Overcome by the illustrious audience staring at him, the boy swallowed hard and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Brandon stepped forward and grabbed the boy by his shoulder. “What is it? Is there a fire?”
The boy shook his head. “No, sir. It’s cook. Ye must come, sir. Cook’s hung himself in the buttery.”
Chapter 15
April 1721
C
harles stood motionless as his valet brushed a piece of lint off Charles’s new riding coat and adjusted the back curls on his wig. The servant scrutinized his master’s attire and nodded, clapping his hands for a maid to carry in a tray with Charles’s morning tea.
“Will that be all, sir?” the valet asked. He motioned the girl to set the tray down and poured tea into his master’s cup. He added three lumps of sugar and stirred, taking care not to spill any of the precious liquid.
“Send word to the stable. I’ll want the roan, and tell John to saddle the gray mare for Lady Brandon.” When the servants were gone, Charles took his cup of tea and went to the window. Below, walking in the garden, he saw his aunt and his cousin Brandon.
“Damn you both to hell,” he muttered. Nothing had gone right for him. The old earl clung to life with the tenacity of a fighting cock, and Brandon seemed to have his own guardian angel watching over him. Charles’s brilliant plan for poisoning Brandon had gone as awry as the fumbling highwaymen’s attempt on his life.
Charles took a long sip of the hot tea. The hatred he felt for Brandon gnawed at his insides and kept him from sleep at night. Idly, he ran a finger inside his lace stock and rubbed the scar on his neck. “I will have satisfaction,” he promised. He reached into an inside pocket of his coat, withdrew a silver locket, and snapped it open. Curled inside was a lock of blond hair. For a moment he fingered the memento and let the memories of a long-past summer fill his mind.
Cecily. He closed his eyes and summoned her laughing blue eyes, her dimpled face, her porcelain complexion and rose-tinted cheeks . . . Cecily, the parson’s daughter. He’d loved her with a passion he’d never felt for another living soul. She’d returned his pure love, love untainted by lust, until Brandon had come between them and murdered her.
Charles slipped the locket back into his pocket and drained the cup. His eyes grew thoughtful as he stared at the trace of tea leaves in the bottom. His cousin Brandon had been the bane of his life. Handsome, charming Brandon! Always surrounded by friends, sought after by women. Brandon could have any woman he wanted, but he had to have the only one Charles had ever cared for.
Scenes flashed behind his eyelids, and Charles gave an involuntary groan. The memory of that day in the barn was one he didn’t want to suffer again. He’d found them together—naked limbs wrapped around each other in grotesque lewdness as Brandon pumped his vile seed into her. He’d watched them, mesmerized by the awful reality of their coupling. Finally, when he could take it no longer, he’d thrown himself at Brandon and had nearly been killed in the ensuing struggle.
Charles sighed. He’d carry the scar from the pitchfork to his grave. Brandon had lied, of course. He’d tried to convince his parents that Charles had attacked him with the pitchfork. It hadn’t happened that way at all. Not at all . . .
He poured himself a second cup of tea and added sugar. There might have been a chance for him and Cecily if she hadn’t swelled with Brandon’s get . . . if she hadn’t died in giving birth to the little bastard. But she had. And beautiful Cecily, his ruined Cecily, had been laid to rest beside her stillborn brat.
Brandon had made a pretty show of his regret. He’d forced his way into the parson’s house and held Cecily’s hand as her life’s blood had drained away onto the sheets. He’d wept and begged forgiveness for his sin, but Charles knew it was all a farce.
Charles’s resentment and envy had turned to hate that day in the barn, and he’d known then he’d have revenge against Brandon if it took him the rest of his life.
Charles gripped the fragile handle of the teacup tightly, and it snapped in his hand. Cursing, he dropped the broken cup onto the rug and wound a handkerchief around his bleeding hand. The cut was deep, and it stung. He poured water from a blue and white pitcher into a china basin and submerged his injured hand. The water in the bowl turned pink.
Charles stared at it. “Not so much blood,” he muttered under his breath. The messenger he’d killed last spring had bled so much more, enough to turn the stream red when Charles had pushed his limp body over the stone bridge and into the slow-moving water.
He’d hated having to do it, of course. The messenger was one of theirs. The weary rider had just arrived from Scotland with a list of rebel supporters. The letter had begged Charles and Miles Chester, among others, to actively seek financial support for a planned uprising in the summer. But the king’s men were too close and they were suspicious. They knew that someone at Westover was sending money and guns to the Jacobites. A gamekeeper had revealed information under torture, and the net was closing fast.
Charles removed his hand from the water and examined the gash. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle. He wrapped his hand in a clean napkin.
A pity about the messenger. Charles was as loyal to the Stuart cause as any man, but loyalty didn’t extend to offering his head as a decoration for London Bridge. The messenger had handed the papers to him personally—he could identify Charles—and thus, unfortunately, the courier had to die.
Charles chuckled softly. It had been a simple matter to point the finger of blame at Brandon. If that ridiculous matter with Lady Anne hadn’t come up at the same time, Brandon might have been one of those tried and executed for treason, and he, Charles, would be the only heir to the Kentington earldom. Not that the money mattered—he had inherited more of his own than he could ever spend. What mattered was destroying Brandon . . . utterly. Disgracing him—seeing him rotting in an unhallowed grave.
Charles picked up his gloves and walked back to the window. The garden was empty now. Brandon was probably on his way to Kentington’s bedchamber, where he spent most days plodding through business matters and neglecting his wife. “A pity,” Charles mused, “when bored women find so much mischief to occupy themselves.”
Leah was already mounted sidesaddle on the gray mare when Charles strolled leisurely out of the west wing. “Good day, Charles,” she called. He noted that her speech was losing much of the Scottish tang he’d found so distasteful when he’d first met her. He smiled and nodded a greeting. She really was quite a toothsome bit of pudding. Exotic looking, certainly, but rounded in all the right places and ripe for the picking.
“Sir Charles.” A groom led the roan hunter forward, and Charles swung up into the saddle. The groom turned to mount his own horse.
“That’s not necessary,” Charles said. “Lady Brandon and I will ride unattended this morning. We’ll be back early. You have that black mare to attend to—the one with the swollen knee. Take her down to the stream and let her stand in the cold water for an hour. If that doesn’t help, I want the swelling drained. She’s too good an animal to lose.”
“Aye, sir.” The man doffed his cap respectfully. “I’ll tend to it.”
As Charles and Leah walked their mounts out of the courtyard, Charles looked back at her. “If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be a horse fit to ride at Westover. The servants are a lazy lot. They’d rather swill gin and frolic with the local jades than tend to their duties.”
“Ye care for the animals verra much, don’t ye?” she replied with a smile.
“I do,” he agreed honestly. “Sometimes, I think, more than I care for people.”
By midmorning, the two had ridden several miles from the manor house to the top of a grass-covered hill. The April sun was warm on Leah’s face, and she enjoyed the rhythmic movement of the horse under her, even seated on this ridiculous woman’s sidesaddle. Since Brandon’s cousin had begun taking her on these daily rides, she was gaining confidence in her horsemanship, and she had come to appreciate Charles’s wry wit.
She looked forward to these excursions. Without them, she knew she would have been far more depressed than she already was. Homesick and desperately missing her little son, Leah now thought she had something even worse to worry about.
Brandon had returned to her bed the night that the crazy cook had tried to murder him and his cousin and then committed suicide. She and Brandon shared the passions of the flesh, even tenderness, but she had not forgotten or forgiven the wrong he had done her. She was no closer to returning to America then she had been when she first set foot in England. And now she had missed her women’s flow and feared she carried Brandon’s child.
The worry that she was pregnant had kept her awake most of the night before. There were so many questions in her mind, so many unknowns. What would Brandon think? Did he want a child with her? He had mentioned children. He’d said he wanted her to be the mother of his children, but that was before they came to England—before he saw how badly she fit in here among his people and customs. His parents would be furious. They resented her and her Shawnee blood. They missed no opportunity to show their opposition to her marriage to their son. No, they would never welcome a child of her body.
“In my great-grandfather’s time, this was all forest,” Charles said. “The trees were cut for . . .”
Leah let his words drift away on the breeze. She swallowed against the discomfort in her throat and stomach. If she wasn’t with child, she was ill. She sighed and stroked the mare’s neck. Her sickness would vanish when snow fell again. Her breasts were swollen and achy, and she felt a heaviness in her lower back. Try as she might, she couldn’t deny the truth—she was pregnant.
Do I want Brandon’s baby? she wondered. Can I love it as I love Kitate, or will I take out my unhappiness on his child? Would Brandon let me carry it home with me, or will he expect me to leave it here in England when I go? If her husband were Indian, there would be no problem. Every human knew that a child belonged with its mother, but the English were as illogical about this as they were about everything else. Her pregnancy and the coming child would complicate her life immensely.
Charles dismounted and raised his hands to lift her down. “There’s an old stone cross nearby I’d like you to see. We can walk a little if you like. Your riding is coming along nicely. My aunt doesn’t sit nearly as well as you do, and she’s been following the hounds since she was a child.”
Leah murmured something in response and let him help her dismount. Charles knotted both animals’ reins together and secured the end with a rock.
“This way,” he said, taking her arm. “See, there’s a little path that leads over the ridge.”
Leah glanced at him suspiciously. Charles’s touch disturbed her. His hands were cold, and there was something about him that made her skin prickle. She tried to pull her arm free, but he held her tightly, surprising her with his strength.
“The footing here is treacherous,” he cautioned. “Brandon would have my head if you came to harm while under my protection.” He smiled, and Leah’s sense of danger intensified.
“No,” she said. “I do not wish to see this stone.” She set her boot heel into the loose dirt. “You are kind, Brandon’s cousin, but I think the sun be too hot. It is time we return to the house.”
Charles’s open-handed blow rocked her head and made her see flashes of light. Her plumed hat tumbled to the ground. “Enough games,” he snarled. “We both know why we’re here.” His fingers bit into her arm through the thickness of the riding coat as he dragged her down the hill after him.
In the shelter of the rise was a shepherd’s hut. Doorless and abandoned, the stone-walled structure reared out of the earth beneath their feet. Charles shoved Leah through the doorway into the tiny interior. The floor had been swept clean, and a straw pallet lay along one wall.
Leah’s ears were still ringing. She struggled for breath as fear made her light-headed. It was clear to her that she’d fallen into a carefully laid snare. Charles was dangerous and very smart. She must use extreme caution with him. “Why do you do this?” she asked quietly. “Do you mean to kill me?”
He unbuttoned his coat, folded it, and laid it on the floor. “There’s no need to pretend with me, slut,” he replied, ignoring her question. “Brandon told me all about you—how you lived openly in sin with him in your native village.” He untied his stock, folded it, and laid it over his coat. Next, he pulled his shirt from his breeches and began to shrug it over his head. “I’ve seen you watching me. You want it. You wouldn’t have come riding alone with me if you weren’t eager for it.”
“Nay! Ye be wrong, Charles. I ride with you for the sky and the grass, not for desire of your body.”
He laughed. “I hear you.”
“Brandon will kill you,” she warned, moving against the end wall. The crudely cut stones were rough and cold at her back, and the tiny room smelled of mouse nests and urine. She removed her own coat and threw it on the pallet. Charles would think she was taking off her clothes to submit to him, but it didn’t matter what he believed. She couldn’t move quickly enough wrapped in the heavy folds of these English garments, and she needed all her speed and agility to stay alive.
“He won’t kill me, because you won’t tell him. If you did, I’d say you seduced me . . . lured me into lechery. Who do you think he’d believe?” Charles’s naked chest was sprinkled with patches of bristling brown hair. The old scar on his neck ran down across his collarbone. His arms were thin but muscular; his chest was thick. “Besides,” he continued, “we’re blood kin. We share and share alike.”
“I be not a woman to betray my husband. Ye would be wise to stand aside and let me go,” she advised.
He shook his head. “You know that’s not going to happen, bitch.” His face hardened as his eyes took on a feral gleam. “You’ll like it,” he promised. “I’ve seen Brandon’s work. I’m better.”
Leah let her gaze slide down over his chest to linger on his pot belly. How pale his skin was—like the flesh of a chicken when the feathers were plucked. “This be a great wrong you do,” she said. “He trusts you . . . I trusted you.”