Lord of Regrets (16 page)

She ground herself on him, but it wasn’t enough. Holding her tight, urging her legs around his waist, he struggled to his feet and captured her between the wall and his body.

The first thrust back in, his vision darkened around the edges. He found her neck with his mouth, enjoying the scent of her skin, bergamot, whisky, and sweat. He wanted to devour her and yet, at the same time, with her tight, slick, and pulsing around him, he felt that he was the one being devoured.

Her thighs were wrapped around him, her muscles squeezing, drawing him in closer. He traced his tongue across the thin, sensitive skin of her neck, just as she had done to him minutes before.

She was frantic in his arms, pulling away, turning toward him, her hips thrusting back. He knew how she felt, wanting everything, yet the sensation, so overpowering, was almost too much.

And the wall didn’t offer enough support, didn’t let him get as deep as he wanted.

He slid her down the wall till he was on his knees, turned and gently lay her upon the carpet. For a moment, she was arched over his arm, still joined to him, using her thighs to hold him tight, and he stared at the pale curve of her body, gleaming in the candlelight.

He slipped his arm out and grabbed her hips. Slid out and slid back in, deeper, harder, and this time when she arched up it was of her own accord, crying out with her climax.

He sank down on top of her, found his rhythm, and with grateful oblivion, sought his own release.

…

A heavy thudding swelled inside her head. She opened her eyes, squinting, and darkness, the false night offered by heavy brocade draperies, pressed against her.

She was in their bed. Aching. Sore. Her body hurt all over. Hurt deliciously with the languor of one who had slept well and been loved well.

Fucked
well.

She remembered how it had been, when she’d first heard that word, fuck, and how she had reveled in the illicitness of its vulgarity. Such a foreign word. She still didn’t know its counterpart in French or Russian.

She was damp, sticky between her legs, and those limbs were entangled with his heavy ones. When she started to extricate herself, she found him watching her with a sleepy, satisfied gaze.

He
loved
her.

Anger washed all that deliciousness away.

“What, so you’ve proven I’m a whore?” She threw the words at him as she rolled away and scrambled off the bed. She remembered last night. She couldn’t let him think that he had won, that she would fall meekly over and be the perfect little wife, overflowing with gratitude and love now that he’d had her body one more time.

Natasha threw open the curtains and light flooded the room. She made the mistake of glancing back. He looked confused and then incredulous.

“You’re my wife.”

His wife. It was his answer to everything, as if that label excused his actions, excused his brutish behavior.

She found her nightgown and her robe––the new, expensive garments were wadded up together on the floor by the commode. She picked up the sleeve of the robe and shook it out from the rest.

“Tasha.” As she slid into the thick winter garment, she heard the creaking of the bed’s wood frame, the
thud
of his feet touching the ground.

“What?” she demanded, turning to face him.

Naked. Glorious. With the winter-muted sun coating his long, lean, muscular body in its white light, Marcus looked like a dark angel. Even his sex, soft and hanging before its nest of curls, looked like the inspiration for a sculptor, for Michelangelo perhaps, if the artist’s
David
was really as handsome as everyone said.

She clenched her jaw tight, feeling her teeth snap together. It didn’t matter because he didn’t seem to notice that she’d been ogling his naked body with deep appreciation.

“Can we not simply start anew?”

Sickness twisted her inside. Hadn’t she wondered that? The morning after he’d first told her he wanted to marry her, had she not thought,
what if
? Now she was trapped in this maddening conflict.

It didn’t matter that he loved her. It didn’t matter that she wanted to forget, that she wanted to throw herself into his arms and pretend everything would be fine.

“The past does not go away. Even if my memory were erased, it would still exist, would still stain your hands, my hands, our souls. The best we can have is a half-life. Purity is gone. Hope is gone.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?” she asked softly, her tone belying the dangerous, wild ribbons of rage rising within her. She couldn’t see the way out of it, see a future different from that she had laid out. She wondered if somehow, from somewhere, he’d pull the right words and drive away the darkness. But what would those words be?
She
didn’t even know.

He sighed, ran a hand through the waves of his hair, and the muscles of his chest rippled with the movement.

“I need to bathe,” she said. She pulled the bed rope for the maid and stalked out of the room. She shut the door, shut him out. Shut her thoughts.

Chapter Twenty

Several hours later, his thigh pressed deliciously against that of his lady, Marcus guided the curricle up Pall Mall. This early in March, a good few weeks before the Easter holiday, it was not particularly crowded. Natasha’s well-cloaked limb radiated a heat that he welcomed on this otherwise gloomy, sleet-driven day.

Marcus was confused. But he was patient as well. At the core of his wife’s emotional fluctuations was the truth that she continued to yield, to lean toward him. Someday, she would stop fighting what was clear and inevitable.

But despite his faith, he could not hold back the low spirits that clung to him. Only one month reunited. Less than a fortnight married. His world had become an intense microcosm.

The one clear, unexpected joy was Leona. What had once been an abstraction was now a flesh-and-blood child, a miniature human with thoughts and ideas of her own. He had never imagined his first need of a morning, before a ride in the park, before breakfast, would be to see the girl. His own father had been completely absent. His mother as well had been indifferent. And Marcus had thought that was the way it was, the way it would be for him and his children as well.

But there he had been that morning, perched in one of the new miniature chairs that had been specially bought to outfit the “schoolroom.” His mother had asked Leona what color she preferred for the curtains, and as Leona had answered yellow. Thus the curtains were a cheery, dotted poplin layered over a wispy white gauze. The new nanny, Mrs. Burnham, had sat in the also-new rocking chair and worked on some inconclusive woolen project with her knitting needles. From what he understood, the governess would begin the following week. This morning, however, Marcus had attempted to explain to his daughter––the word warm and soft in his mind––about fractions. He had butted up against the girl’s very literal mind when he tore a piece of foolscap to describe the idea of half, and she exclaimed that the two pieces were clearly uneven and not the same.

Just as even now he was coming up against her mother’s insistence that the stain of the past would never fade. With his daughter, after a moment of bafflement, Marcus had much more carefully torn another piece in two. And this afternoon, Natasha was by his side because he had insisted over her initial protest that she would gain more joy from the British Gallery than she would from foreswearing his company. She had been silent for the majority of the ride, but if this was a half-life, it was still more a life than he’d had the last five years.

…

“Here we are then,” Marcus announced unnecessarily as he pulled the carriage up to the modest edifice. Natasha watched him hand the reins to their footman, Harry. Marcus jumped from his seat, rounded the vehicle, and offered her his arm. She laid hers over his, briefly met his gaze, and flinched away from his expression. Did the man need to look that way at her?

“I have been here before, you know,” she murmured in a dampening tone once her feet were on the ground and the only part of her that touched him remotely was her arm. The air was heavy with moisture but no actual rain.

“Ah, but that must have been years ago.”

She didn’t bother to acknowledge the truth of his statement and instead returned to the silence she had kept most of the morning. She felt clearly that she had lost something in last night’s exchange, had lost some integrity, some final point she needed him to understand. If she gave into him now, no matter how much she wanted to, her true happiness would be lost forever.

They passed through the galleries, the collection sparser and more elegantly laid out than some other galleries and museums in London. Daylight poured through high windows and illuminated the works: Gainsborough’s exquisite portraits, Hogarth’s wittier pieces, and Wilson’s picturesque landscapes. They stopped at a collection of antique stained glass as well, curated carefully from around England and from as far off as Holland.

But Natasha could hardly focus on the art, on anything other than Marcus’s proximity, Marcus’s heat. He was everything there was in her world and impatiently, she went from painting to painting, past the occasional artist with his easel and brushes, her shoes clicking against the wooden floor.

She saw them halfway across the room, standing by a large portrait of a woman in what must have been rose silk. Count Nagy, his sister, Anna Boros, and Marta Antal, all Hungarian expatriates––friends of her parents, of an age with them as well. They were staring at her.

She raised a hand to wave, her lips tilting up in a smile. She took a step toward them, her other hand slipping from Marcus’s arm.

They turned their backs on her, whispering.

Natasha lowered her hand, her gloved fingers clutching at her pelisse.

“Who are they?” She heard Marcus’s question, felt the warmth of his hand on her back, folding her toward him, away from them.

“No one.” She refused to ask Marcus for shelter. But the count and his sister were not “no one,” at least not among the society her parents kept. She hadn’t thought about what they would have told their friends when their daughter ran off to be a man’s mistress. Or what they would tell their friends now that she had returned. Her mother’s words from the week before came crashing back. Suddenly the impatience with which she had stalked through the galleries bloomed into overwhelming emotion.

“Let us leave, shall we?” she asked, but didn’t wait for him to respond.

They were on the street within minutes, the wet, chill air reminding her of the windswept days on the Norfolk coast, only it wasn’t cold enough, raw enough. She could still
feel
.

“Well then,” Marcus said, staring around them. She stared, too. At the people who passed by, the carriages, the horses, the muddy street. “Perhaps you would prefer to stand inside while we wait for the carriage?”

“No,” she said vehemently. She couldn’t be inside. She wanted to be out here where the present was the present, and the future nothing to think of.

“Templeton!” She turned to see a face that she could not quite place. Marcus stiffened, his body tensing next to hers, and she wondered at that, grasping at something other than her own tortured emotions.

“Morning, Underwood.”

She knew him. John Underwood. He had been one of Marcus’s friends years ago. They had supped together at Vauxhall, attended one of the masquerades at the opera. She had danced with the man even.

“Miss Polinoff,” Underwood exclaimed, and Natasha flinched at the name that was no longer hers said so loudly on the street. Where the count and his sister could come out at any moment. Where anyone else of Marcus’s acquaintance could hear them. And then she realized this
was
Marcus’s acquaintance. This one man who recognized her, who knew her for what she had been.

“But this is a surprise.” Underwood’s voice lowered, an aside to Marcus that Natasha could still hear. “I thought you newly married?”

“I am.” Marcus voice was cold as ice. She’d never heard him sound that way, and for a moment, she was both thrilled and scared. “Natasha has made me the happiest of men.”

Underwood’s expression changed to one of confusion, then shock, then embarrassment.

“Oh, do forgive me,” he said, almost stuttering. Then he laughed. “But no harm done, is there? Best of both worlds you’ve gotten yourself, haven’t you?” He winked broadly.

She couldn’t feel anymore, so stunned was she by horror, by sudden revelation. Life would be this way. People would know her past, would either cut her or humiliate her. She was a bawdy joke, a tragedy.

She hardly knew that she moved, backing up until she turned to run. Marcus’s hand on her arm stopped her, pulling her toward the carriage that awaited them. She glanced at Underwood, and the man stared at her as if she were an elephant descended upon Pall Mall. There were other passersby staring as well, and she realized what she must have looked like, poised to run.

Marcus near pushed her into the carriage, grabbing the reins from the tiger. She hadn’t noticed she was damp from the misty air until she was sheltered by the roof of the carriage. She shook with tension, with the fear and shame that she would never escape.

“It was uncomfortable, I know, Tasha, but you’ll have to learn.” The calm of his voice angered her. He was the one who had torn her from her life, twice now. But no one would ridicule
him
, censure
him
for his actions. All at once the knot within her burst apart.

“What do you expect? That I’ll play the perfect little wife for you? ‘The wife who was his mistress.’ A man’s dream,” she said scornfully.

“No, of course, I know––”

…

She didn’t wait for him to explain, to apologize the way it seemed he was always apologizing.

“You were the one who ruined everything!”

The past would be the past if she just let it. But Natasha refused to, and there was a note to her voice, a shrillness he had never heard before. The reins were stiff beneath his fingers. He pulled too hard and the carriage swerved, the sensitive horses reacting to his slightest move.

Marcus could hear the Tiger’s harsh intake of breath. Of course the groom could hear their conversation. Probably every occupant of every carriage within fifty yards could hear.

“You ruined me. You! You’re the one who tried to kill our child. You broke into my house. You ruined my reputation.”

You…you…you…
He heard the words, the accusations, each one like a new blow. Yes, it was him. Gathering the reins in one hand, he held up his other hand, his palm. Peace, a moment of silence so he could make amends, somehow make amends.

Her face was tight, angry…ugly. And he’d never seen such an expression on her before.

“You’re the one who threatened to take that child away from me! You forced me to marry you. You!” She pointed at him. “So don’t you dare complain about my behavior. It’s all
you
!”

The last “you” snapped his patience. He knew he was urging the horses faster, more than was wise on a London street at any time of year, any time of day, but he couldn’t stop the words that poured out of him.

“I’ve apologized again and again. I can’t do any more than that, Natasha. I can’t change the past. I can’t change who I am. We’re here now.”

“I hate you! Bastard!” she screamed.

His frustration stilled. His gut dropped, pulled out of him. The rollicking of the carriage over the muddy streets vibrated through his body. Blood pounded at his ears, blocking out everything but the hiss of her last words, while darkness swirled up around him, crowding his vision.

He focused on the small bit of street he could still see, swerving away from an oncoming carriage.

“Don’t do this,” he pleaded, hating the sound of his voice, hating the burning sting behind his eyes. “Stop, please, can’t you see?”

“I hate you, I hate you!” she cried again.

There was the house, their house in front of him, faster than he had expected.

He’d been an idiot. A dreamer, all this time. The past was the past and he could not change it, could not make amends. Natasha would never love him.

He focused on the horses, on something solid, something clear, on pulling the carriage to a stop. There was something else, just outside his grasp, beyond his understanding. It was dark and haunted and too far from words. He pulled away from it.

He stumbled from the carriage, throwing the reins at his tiger. When he rounded the carriage this time, Natasha had already gotten herself to the ground, and he was grateful for not having to touch her, to be touched by her. He followed her up the stairs to the open door.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said, his voice thick, strange, even to his ears. As soon as they were inside, he passed her, stumbled down the hall to the study in the rear, and swung the door open. The room was silent, private. He closed the door softly and rested his forehead against the cool, smooth wood.

He was torturing himself. Natasha hated him. Truly hated him. She would never forgive him.

He could not stay here anymore. He would not. He would give Natasha her freedom, as much as he could after having bound her to him by law.

Then he remembered Leona. With a resigned sigh, he admitted that matter was of little consequence. She had lived most of her life without him, and at least now he knew that they would be provided for. Leona needed her mother, but neither of them needed him.

A much-calmer Marcus left the house a half an hour later. All his ravaged thoughts had settled into one idea of clarity: he could not stay here in London. Not with Natasha, not now.

And as he crossed the city, he turned his thoughts to business, to investments and manufacturing, so that the pain of his wife’s words was carefully locked away.

As Marcus’s carriage passed through his grandfather’s gate, another carriage left. It had no crest on it, but through the curtain of rain and the nearly frosted window, he could still see a man he recognized. Was there anyone with whom his grandfather did not treat?

“That was Wilberforce, was it not?” Marcus asked as he entered, taking a seat without waiting for the niceties. “I didn’t know you consorted with any of the ‘saints.’”

His grandfather’s thin, hoarse laughter made Marcus feel foolish before the man even spoke. Of course the man had dealings with everyone. In his two arthritic hands, the strings of the world gathered, or at least so his grandfather imagined.

“How little you understand, Marcus.”

Yes, he was inclined to agree. This day especially, as his soul was ash, his mind acute with grief. But what Marcus did understand was that the same opaque desires that motivated his grandfather could take him away from here, from London, from his thoughts of her.

“Castlereagh’s intentions have glaringly left mention of the slave trade untouched. That business, such as it is,” his grandfather continued mildly, “is an unstable economy, and as Mr. Wilberforce rightly points out, an immoral one.”

“So you have taken up his cause? Complete abolition?”

His grandfather templed his hands, set his gaze upon Marcus. Even milky with age, the blue eyes were shrewd. “The dealings of peace are more complicated than the man understands. From what I see, he acts from emotion. From passion.”