Obsession (4 page)

He turned and looked at me.

I tossed him the key. “Lock the door from the outside.”

“Lock it…Your Grace?” His brow creased.

“Aye.”

His pink, big-knuckled fingers curled around it and he gave a reluctant bob of his head.

I watched the door slowly close, heard it click shut, and waited a long moment before I heard the scrape of the key in the lock and the shift of the bolt into place.

I listened to myself breathe.

I was not, nor ever had been, a particularly brave man. Not like my brother. Twice—only twice—had I ever rallied a stiff enough backbone to do something remotely courageous: once when I saved Clayton from drowning, the other when I told my grandmother to go to hell and rode off into the dark to find Maria.

With my shirtsleeves rolled partially to my elbows, I moved a basin of hot water to the bed, along with the ball of soap with its faint scent of peach blossom, and a cloth.

I recalled her bathing me once, sinking her body onto mine as water and bubbles surged over her pretty breasts. By the time we had finished, we had rocked most of the water from the tub. She had stood mid-room with great fluffs of bubbles on the smooth slopes of her buttocks, froth pearls beaded upon the tips of her pink nipples, and her skin rosy from the water’s heat and the flush of surcease.

I had fallen in love with her in that moment.

Unequivocally.

Squeezing water from the cloth, I eased down on the bed beside her, took up her hand and lay it, palm down, upon my own. She didn’t notice. She was apparently still…disassociated?

Her face was turned toward the window; she stared into the sunlight unblinking, as if she were asleep with her eyes open.

With one fingertip I traced the curve of her cheekbone, down into the gaunt hollow of her cheek, to the tip of her lips, along the line of her jaw to her earlobe. I smiled; she had incredible ears—delicate and shapely as shells. I once traced the little folds in her ear with my tongue, making her shiver. And giggle. And groan.

Down, lightly, barely touching, along the length of her neck—transparent as china—tracing the dark blue veins I could see beneath her thin skin, to the fluttering pulse, where I hesitated.

Each distinct throb of her heart beat inside my head.

Maria.

In that moment I felt as voiceless as I had been when she first came to Thorn Rose. As desperate, with fear, with anger. I closed my eyes and fought against the collision of emotions…and memories.

She had appeared to me draped in soft, flowing white cotton, a guttering candle held aloft in one pale hand. She’d floated toward me like a vision, moonlit hair shimmering in the candlelight. I had felt dizzy and desperate, but when the fierce anger roused inside me, something about her child-like look had captured me, and I had lain still, barely breathing, like one in the company of a fawn. If I had so much as blinked, she might have flown.

Ah, Maria. Sweet Maria. Could I but turn back the hours, the days, the years, I would happily trade my own sanity—aye, my own life—for the restoration of her dear soul.

As my shock and numbness began to melt away beneath the sunbeams stroking our flesh, my hand still wrapped possessively around hers, my anger mounted. I looked down on her profile, her cheek nestled into the down-stuffed pillow, and felt a fresh sense of desperation.

I had once hunted her like one possessed of the madness that gripped her now. Later, I had hated her with the viciousness of a mad dog.

Covering my eyes with my soap-slick fingers, I felt sickened with guilt. For all that my grandmother had done to her—to us—and for all that I had cursed upon her undeserving soul when hearing she had married another.

What little trust and faith I had harbored in my heart. Falling in love with her had become a raging wound that festered until disillusionment and hate had devoured me.

She could be dangerous.

There was nothing dangerous about her arms as I drew the damp, warm cloth down the soft, pale skin from her elbow to her wrist.

Nothing dangerous about her shoulders, thin and slightly sloping, white as the sheets upon which she rested, her gaze still locked upon the window and her face gilded by sunlight.

Nor about her breasts. Soft globes that had once tasted as sweet as marzipan—I ached to touch them even now, to cup them into my palms and lift each delicate dusty-rose tip to my waiting lips.

There came a light tapping at the door.

I slid the sheet up over Maria’s breasts, then moved to the door as it opened.

Herbert stood there, still coatless and droopy-eyed, his expression rattled.

“ ’Tis the woman,” he declared in the monotone he used to announce Edwina.

I briefly closed my eyes. “I suppose it was inevitable.”

“Would you like me to fetch you a drink, Your Grace? You’re going to need it. She’s in a right mood, I assure you.”

“How bad is it?”

He scratched his tuft of gray hair. “The claws are sharpened and I detected a gnashing of teeth.”

“Ah, so she’s in a relatively
good
mood, then.”

We exchanged dry smiles.

4

“B
ASTARD
! T
HERE HAS NEVER BEEN A CHARITABLE,
kind, or concerned bone in your body. Your reputation and name personify hedonism. Yet you walk away from your commitment to me for some mousey little nurse—”

“There was nothing remotely mousey about Maria. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.”

With a flurry of her skirts, Edwina marched to the door of the drawing room and glared up the stairs toward the second floor.

“You assured me that you were over what feelings you once felt for her.”

She turned and focused her blue eyes hard on mine. “Now what am I supposed to do? I blame you for my predicament.”

I drank deeply of my port and set aside the empty glass, preparing myself for the inevitable tantrum. I was beginning to feel numb—not just from inebriation, but from a weariness that made my bones ache.

Had it only been three days since I had stood on an altar prepared to marry the little she-bitch? Only days since the course of my very existence had shifted, since long-dead hope had ignited to fan dreams I had once imagined were only for men like my brother?

“I had nothing to do with your predicament, Edwina. Had you practiced abstinence occasionally—”

“Had you not volunteered marriage, I might have flushed this unfortunate situation from my life. Now it’s too late. Dear God, what am I supposed to do with a child on my own?”

“You have money. Buy it a nanny and chuck it under the chin occasionally. Send him off to school as soon as possible, and you needn’t worry about him but for the occasional holiday.”

“My God, can you imagine what it all will do to my breasts? The idea of something tugging my nipple makes my blood run cold.”

“Since when?” I smirked.

She narrowed her eyes. “Tell me, darling. Is this rush to rescue your little nurse simply a way to once again spit in your grandmother’s eye?”

“What do you think, Edwina?”

“Hmm. By the looks of you, I could almost believe you’re sincere.”

“I was very forthright regarding my feelings for Maria.”

“Yes, I do seem to recall your moping over her…when you weren’t ranting about killing her. I think I’m jealous.”

“I think not.”

“How much will it take to change your mind?”

“Are you attempting to bribe me?”

“It worked before.”

She approached me where I sat, sprawled in a deeply cushioned high-back chair near a window. She had the look of a feline in heat, and I knew what was coming.

Edwina used sex to manipulate those whose minds functioned on one level—between their legs. She had the ability to sniff out such weaknesses as adeptly as a hound on a wounded fox. Hounds, however, went for the quick kill, a gnashing of their teeth in the terrified animal’s throat. Edwina, on the other hand, enjoyed the game—toying with the emotionally sick and enfeebled, driving them to madness.

I understood that, and for that she both respected and feared me. I was a challenge, and she had been more than willing to pay for it. Dearly.

As she eased to her knees between my legs, the skirt of her pale green gown rose up like sea froth beneath her magnificent breasts, revealed by the low-cut décolleté frock fitting snugly beneath her bosom.

Her breasts were like soft white pillows into which I enjoyed burying my face. She always smelled like rose petals—drenched in dizzying fragrance. Even now her aroused nipples thrust through the thin material—twin peaks of deliciousness that, despite my inebriation—because of it—made me grow hard.

I
was
a man, after all.

Once, I would have taken the filmy material covering those breasts and roughly torn it asunder. Roughness excited her, made her pant and squirm and beg for more. The rougher the better.

Once.

A month ago. A week ago. Hours ago.

Once.

Her hands slid up my inner thighs, and she shoved my legs wider, until the rapidly growing bulge in my trousers ached with the bite of the material cupping me.

Her fingers lightly traced the ridge as her eyes regarded me from behind her drowsy lashes, her cherry-red mouth curving, her face shimmering with moist heat as her excitement mounted.

Her long, slender fingers manipulated my trouser closing, opening it little by little as she lowered her head to my crotch and breathed against it—moist heat that made a groan crawl inside my throat.

I swallowed it, allowed her a faint smile as she raised her head and looked at me, lips parted, her breath coming in short, audible little pants. Her tongue flitted over her lower lip, then her upper lip, moistening them so they glistened slightly in the failing sunlight spilling through the window.

Then she went down.

I closed my eyes. And reached for her. Buried both hands in her luxurious red hair like silk entwined around my fingers.

And drew back her head. Too roughly.

Her small chin thrust upward and her eyes, wide and shocked and confused, focused on mine.

“No,” I said.

Surprise froze her features.

“No,” I repeated.

“You don’t want me.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m sorry.”

“Liar.” She struggled, growing frantic. “Liar. You bastard liar.”

My hands gripped her tighter.

“You need me.”

“I needed your money. Not you, Edwina. You know that.”

She struggled again, her small hands in fists that buried into my thighs. Her eyes filled with tears and an unfamiliar desperation carved deep grooves in her brow and around her mouth.

For a moment—as asinine as it was—I almost believed that the emotion contorting her face into distress might have been love. But I didn’t care to consider such a possibility. It would only complicate matters even more.

Besides, Edwina was incapable of truly loving anyone. She’d said so herself.

“What do you hope to accomplish by this idiocy?” she demanded. “Do you imagine somehow salvaging your ragamuffin’s sanity?”

“Yes. I do. I hope to.”

“And for what? So you can spend the rest of your life as a pauper? Need I remind you that you’ve squandered your inheritance, not to mention the Salterdon name, in your attempts to humiliate your grandmother? Do you intend to get by on the charity of your brother?”

I shoved her away angrily and adjusted my trousers. “Careful, Edwina. My tolerance has its limits.” Struggling to her feet, her anger mounting, her hair a wild blazing flood of color spilling over her breasts, she faced me like a snorting, bloodied bull as I rose from the chair, anticipating the fight.

She swept like a cyclone round the room, her gaze flying from breakable object to breakable object. “You pay what little help you have with silver candlesticks. The clubs in London have cut you off. It’s only a matter of time before they come after Thorn Rose—or what’s left of it, that isn’t falling in with neglect.

“You’re a laughingstock, Salterdon. Your friends—what’s left of them—wager when you and this place will crumble to dust in complete disgrace. What will this heroism for a lunatic get you? Will you content yourself with spending the remainder of your miserably failed life peddling pigs and potatoes at market in order to feed yourself?”

“Preferable to submitting myself to a whoring shrew, certainly.”

A china figurine sailed toward my head. I ducked and it shattered against the wall. She followed with a decanter of port. I attempted to catch it mid-air, but too late. To my despair I watched as it careened through the open window and crashed on the cobblestone path, drenching a clump of peonies.

“Damn,” I said through my teeth. “You’ve gone too far, Edwina. That was my finest port.”

Suddenly the fury left her. Silence—like that after a storm has passed—filled up the room.

She took a ragged breath, and it occurred to me with a jolting intensity that I had never seen her cry. Rant, yes. Shrill, definitely. Our emotional and physical parries had been as turbulent as war. But the tears streaming down her face were new and disconcerting.

“I’ll buy you more port, Trey. A lifetime’s worth. The finest. Just…marry me.”

“Edwina—”

“I’ll employ nurses for her. Physicians. She’ll want for nothing.”

“Don’t do this.”

I looked out the window, discomfited by the raw desperation I saw on her face. Not
just
desperation, but also that other emotion I had, moments ago, toyed upon. Not possible. She did not love me. She could not.

“I love you, Salterdon,” came her voice, and I stiffened as if from a blow.

I focused hard on the darkening panorama—trees becoming silhouettes against the horizon, the clumps of peonies dissolving beneath the lengthening night shadows. The thousands of tiny roses growing wildly upon the stone fence walls stared back at me like ghostly white faces.

She came beside me, and together we watched the first sprinkling of stars emerge. Her scent of roses teased me—once, it would have been enough to rouse me. I would have eased up her skirts with little pretense and thrust my body hard into hers. We would have rutted like dogs and I would have reveled in the momentary oblivion—it had been my only escape from the memories of Maria.