Retribution (33 page)

I turned my back on his gloating face.
Dominic reached for my shoulder and I brushed his hand off, but the
hand was back, pulling me around to face him before I could do it
again. He controlled his laughter with difficulty but the smile was
as broad as ever. “Amalie, my love, how can you have such
ridiculous thoughts?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’m just
sensitive. ‘Oh, Lady Melanie.’ ” I tried to imitate Dominic’s
resonant baritone. “ ‘I see the years have done you no harm.’ ” My
lips trembled with the pain of repeating the tormenting words. “
‘And such a worthy son.’ ”

Dominic wasn’t smiling anymore. “Is that what
all this is about?” he asked, seeing the answer in my voice and my
face and feeling it in the communion. “Oh, Amalie, all this time,
you’ve been carrying that hurt around inside you?”

I nodded, beginning to feel somehow childish.
“She called me a housewife.”

“But you are,” Dominic said, confused at this
last complaint. “You’re my wife, the mistress of my house.” He
thought more deeply. “That’s the point. You’re my wife. I married
you, not her.”

“You couldn’t marry her.” That argument was
easy to refute. “She’ll inherit her own title, become ‘Gravina of
her own Realm in time. She’s too important to marry another ‘Graven
lord and be his housewife. So you married me instead when I got
pregnant with Jana. But when you saw her again, and Struan, after
all these years, you regretted the chance you missed.”

“Stop it, Amalie,” Dominic said. “You’re not
a storyteller, entertaining a roomful of servants with a
preposterous fairy tale. You can’t go around saying that crap as if
you believed it.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or
not,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

Dominic was shaking with rage. It seemed I
had hit a nerve. “This is the truth,” he said, “and you will listen
to it instead of dreaming up any more of your drink-addled
bullshit.”

My mouth opened and shut in shock.

“This is the truth,” Dominic repeated more
gently. “Lady Melanie was kind to me. Her brother was my companion,
as you know, and the resemblance intrigued me. And unlike a great
many women, she didn’t laugh at me or reject me because of it. She
was kind enough to become my mistress and generous enough to bear
me a son, a boy who would be unable to inherit her own realm, who
would have no future but what I could give him. I acknowledged him
and made him my heir.” He paused, reliving it in his thoughts. “It
was the only thing I could offer her, and it was a painful kind of
gift, because it meant I would have to take the child from her when
he was still young and would find the separation difficult, to rear
him for Aranyi.”

I could keep quiet no longer. “You loved her.
You love her still.”

Dominic didn’t seem to mind the interruption
or to hear the sorrow in my voice. “Yes, I loved her, in a way. We
shared a communion or I would not have wanted her. It was the first
time in my entire life that I can honestly say I had an emotional
response to a woman. We’re from the same class; we could laugh over
a great many similar experiences from our upbringing. She was like
a friend, a boyhood friend, grown up and become a sexual
being.”

I sat, humbled and speechless, tears forming.
Dominic seemed oblivious, lost in his reverie of perfect love.
There was nothing to say, no use in thinking up another barbed
comment. Dominic had said everything I might have, only he had said
it in earnest, whereas I would have said it to provoke an indignant
denial.

Dominic’s affair with Lady Melanie had ended
two years before I arrived on Eclipsis. What had happened in those
two years to attract Dominic to me? Probably, I thought, he had
discovered that he was bisexual and that, like most Eclipsian men
and like any responsible ‘Graven lord, he wanted a wife. With Lady
Melanie unavailable he had latched onto me, a foreigner in all the
best ways—unfamiliar with his disturbing family history, unlikely
to care about things that would matter most to a real ‘Gravina,
things like inheritance or having my own son to ensure that my line
continued in the future Margrave Aranyi. And it had all worked out
until I surprised him by producing a second child—a son—to rob
Struan of his only chance in life and spoil the beautiful memory of
true love with Lady Melanie.

Dominic shook me so hard my teeth rattled. My
head flopped around like Jana’s doll until Dominic realized he was
not handling me as gently as he ought and crushed me to his chest
instead so that I could barely breathe. When my face was no doubt
as blue as the eyes on Jana’s doll he slackened his grip and
cradled me in his arms. “Don’t you ever,” he said through clenched
teeth, “ever, let me catch you thinking such destructive thoughts
again. Do you hear me?” He was going to shake me again.

“Yes, Dominic,” I said.

He rocked me back and forth in his arms. “You
are my wife, my dearest love, my second self. Do you have any idea
what that means?

“I want you to tell me,” I said.

“It means you are part of me. If I am not
with you, if you are not with me, physically and in spirit, I am
diminished. And do you know why this is?”

“Because you married me,” I said. “You chose
me.”

“Wrong,” Dominic said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
He kissed me on the corner of the mouth, a lingering, seductive
kiss. “For so intelligent a woman, you haven’t understood the
simplest thing.”

“Well? What’s the right answer then?”

Dominic kissed me again. “Because I didn’t
choose you, nor you me. Because this is what we are to each other,
the completion of the whole. I married you because I had no choice.
I love you because I have no choice. You are my second self
because—”

“I get it,” I said. “I’m ‘Gravina Aranyi
because you had no choice. But if you had a choice, you’d choose
Lady Mela—”

Dominic dropped me on the mattress where I
bounced a couple of times and lay still. “Did all this start when
we were at Stefan’s house?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “When I saw how delighted you
were with your little family reunion. And it really got going when
you spent a night with your ‘friend’.”

“What do you mean?” Dominic asked. “When?
Who?”

I sat up to face him down. “Don’t act so
innocent,” I said. “I won’t go on about it for the rest of our
lives. I know how men are, especially ‘Graven lords who have the
Right of the Realm. I know marriage doesn’t mean fidelity, not for
the man. But yes, since you ask—yes, since the night before you and
Niall left for Eclipsia City, when you weren’t with him and the
gods know you weren’t with me. That’s when I knew I couldn’t spend
another day in that fucking house with her looking at me like that,
calling me housewife.”

Dominic groaned, held me in his arms again.
“My love. That’s why you were on that trail, all alone. That’s why
you disobeyed me. I could never understand, all this time, how you
came to be there, to be captured.”

Yes
, I thought, hating myself,
heartbroken at all that had followed. I had learned my lesson. I
had disobeyed my husband and I had seen what comes of that. A woman
can’t get away with that, not on Eclipsis.

“And for nothing,” Dominic said. “All for
nothing.”

“Not to me,” I said. “It wasn’t nothing to
me.” I tried to smile. “But I promise, I won’t ever disobey you
again.”

“Listen to me!” Dominic spoke in his Guards
officer voice. “Don’t you ever use that submissive, humble voice
with me. You are Amalie, ‘Gravina Aranyi, and I married you because
I love you more than any woman in the world, because you are the
only woman I have ever wanted to marry, and you have never obeyed
me in your life.”

He exaggerated a little, but I knew what he
meant. I had never “obeyed” Dominic, in the sense of doing
something against my will to please him, or because I felt bound by
an unbreakable marriage vow. I had chosen everything I did, had
done only those things I had wanted to do, and most of them had
been what Dominic had wanted as well. “All right, Dominic,” I said.
I rested my head on his shoulder. “I’ll never do anything you ask
me to, and if I can figure out what you want I’ll make sure to do
the opposite.”

Dominic stroked my tangled hair. “That’s
better,” he said.

The true communion formed around us, a soft,
dense fog buffering us from everything except us two in our little
world.
Don’t you know,
the thought came, strong and true,
from Dominic’s innermost mind
, that if I had a choice, if I were
free to choose a wife all over again, I would choose you? Whatever
I might once have thought I wanted, now that I have known you and
shared this perfect communion, what else would I choose but my
bad-tempered, foul-mouthed, beautiful little Amalie? No other woman
has given me half the pleasure of being with you.
His love
enveloped me, filled me.
You can’t seriously doubt the force of
my love for you.

No, Dominic
.
I don’t doubt your
love
. I remembered his look at Lady Melanie, the words that
would cause me pain for the rest of my life. Dominic was a man, and
‘Graven. He could not help evoking the love he had felt for Lady
Melanie when he saw her again, and he had never learned to conceal
his reactions, to pretend; that lesson did not apply to men like
him. So long as he didn’t regret his choice I could accept his
offering in the spirit it was given.

Beloved.
Dominic’s inner voice was
contrite yet tinged with skepticism, an unraveling of doubt along
the edge.
I thought our connection so solid that such a little
thing could not hurt you. Surely it is the same for you? You must
feel it, the strength of our communion? Nothing like this should
threaten it.

I was incapable of disguising the intensity
of my response to him, did not attempt it now. I simply let the
currents of emotion flow around and between us, binding up the
loosening threads all tight again in love.
My
Dominic-Leandro,
y
ou know what I feel for you…

His arms held me in the communion, his lips
brushed my cheek.
Anger or love, jealousy or desire,
his
response was a kind of prayer,
whatever you feel for me, may it
always be as passionate as it is now, never indifferent.

Indifferent?
I was drained by the
expenditure of all the sentiments he had named, yet content in the
aftermath of rage, of doubt and of love renewed.
So long as I
live, there is little chance of that.

Dominic, grateful for the hard-won peace,
withdrew into partial communion. “But I do have a confession to
make,” he said.

“I don’t think my heart can take it,” I
said.

“No, my love,” Dominic said. “It is
necessary, and not what you think. That night, when I abandoned my
conjugal beds, it was not to be with Lady Melanie.” I could see he
was telling the truth, guessed his next words. “Yes, all this
agony, all because I spent a last night with Stefan. It was
difficult for me, being in his house those many days, seeing him
husband and proud father, master of his little realm, coping so
manfully with his responsibilities. It made me want him so much.”
Dominic ruminated on the ways of desire, how it waxes and wanes to
its own rhythm in each of us, so often out of sync with the
other.

“And Stefan, too, was kind to me,” Dominic
said with a self-deprecating grimace. “He took me into his bed
while Drusilla slept in the next room with their baby. And all the
while he was thinking about them, his young bride and their child,
until I saw the mistake I had made. But by then it was almost
morning. We slept, and parted friends. At least I hope we did.”

“Niall guessed it,” I said. That last
conversation with him had been a wonderland of discoveries, some
more welcome than others. “Niall’s as jealous of Stefan as I am–
was– of Lady Melanie.”

“Shit!” Dominic’s curse hit my brain like a
fist in the side of my head. “Shit fuck! One stupid night and I
jeopardize the love of the two people who matter most.” He brooded
on the hazards of sociability and reached a faulty conclusion. “I
will never, so help me all the gods, visit another house, as long
as I live.”

“Except Galloway.” I tried to be optimistic.
“You don’t know, Niall may forgive you. He might not be as stubborn
as me.”

“No,” Dominic said. “That would be quite an
accomplishment. But he has more reason to be jealous.” In the
silence I couldn’t avoid Dominic’s thoughts that mirrored my own
depression of not so long ago.
I’ve ruined everything because of
selfishness, wanting a last night with Stefan when I had Niall,
expecting Amalie to be content with one child
.

There had been some truth in my accusations
after all. But not the worst, only the minor sins, things that
could be worked out. I rested my hand on Dominic’s arm in
sympathetic communion. “I should have told you I was pregnant with
Val,” I said, although we both knew what Dominic’s reaction would
have been. I had waited to tell him until it was too late to do
anything about it safely.

“I was selfish and stupid,” Dominic said. “I
assumed, because you were from Terra, that you would be unlike
every other woman I’ve known. Of course you would want another
child. I had no right to expect you to go on aborting them
all.”

“You weren’t so wrong in your assumptions,” I
said. “I never thought I’d want more than one child. But Jana is so
wonderful, such a pleasure, I couldn’t help wanting another. And I
was curious to see what our son would be like.” I didn’t mention
how much easier it was to have children here, with servants and
while “working” at home, than it would have been on Terra. Dominic
might see such a reason as trivial. There are some things men can
accept, and others that are better discussed with women, if at
all.