Taming the Beast (15 page)

“What?” Harliss screeched. “You can't—”

“I can, and I will, and consider it already done. Tornfield is Cherbon's and therefore fulfilling of your charter. You may live out the rest of your wretched days there, or be off Cherbon's lands forever. Your decision.” He shrugged and then leaned against the stone wall, to give his leg some relief, Michaela suspected, and she wondered oddly if it pained his injured arm to press against the cold stones so. “But know that if you decide to take your leave of Tornfield, you will be breaking the charter, and I will be under no obligation to preserve your position—or your life.”

“Your father was right—you are a vile, loathsome, spineless worm!”

Roderick shrugged again, the motion awkward against the stones. “Then you should be glad to be quit of me. You have a quarter of an hour. Lady Michaela and I shall meet you in the hall then, and see you gone.”

Michaela started and her eyes widened, but she nodded once sagely, as if she had been in on the scheme all along.

“You will regret this,” Harliss hissed, pointing a bony, gray, trembling finger at Roderick. In an instant, that cadaverlike appendage was aimed at Michaela. “You, as well, Misfortune!”

“I may regret many things, Harliss,” Michaela said calmly, “but your departure from Cherbon will never be one of them.”

“We shall just see!” And with that, the gray old woman spun on her bony heel and scurried into the blackness.

Michaela's heart beat one hundred times before Roderick Cherbon spoke. “Shall we carry on to the hall, Lady Michaela?” he asked courteously, if in a growling voice full of forced patience. “I would not miss Harliss's leave, and I have come to agree with your idea that the two of us should speak.”

Michaela swallowed. “You have?” She hadn't meant for the words to come out in a squeak, but there they were.

He nodded, straightened his posture, and then seemed to pause. Whatever had given him a second thought was obviously of no import, for he held out an arm for her to proceed him.

“After you.”

Michaela nodded swiftly and set her mouth in a grim line as she started off down the corridor, Lord Cherbon's stumping footfalls chasing her.

She prayed that she would not trip in front of him. If the enormous man fell on her, they would both have need of a cane.

“So you plan on seeing this through to the end, do you?” Roderick had not wanted the words to come out as an accusation, but he was unpracticed with speaking to a woman—indeed, he was unpracticed in speaking to any other, save Hugh or Leo—and so he let the words hang without apology.

Lady Michaela's forehead creased. “Well, yes, of course. Why else would I still be here?”

Roderick merely nodded and grunted. He realized that his hood was still thrown back onto his shoulders, and his hands clenched against the reflex to reach up and jerk the heavy black wool over his head. What did it matter now? She had seen him in the hall at midday, and just now in the candlelight of the corridor. The damage was done.

Still, Roderick felt painfully exposed.

“I saw you with Leo—unlike Alan Tornfield, I do not expect you to take the position of nurse at Cherbon.”

“I understand that. I enjoy being with Leo, though. He seems to benefit from a woman's company, do you not agree? With…ah, with his mother…” Michaela let the sentence dangle unfinished and her cheeks flushed, obviously curious yet uncomfortable with the subject of Leo's mother.

“Yes, I do think time spent with you will benefit him.” Roderick was not even remotely interested in broaching Aurelia with this strange young woman yet. “You have my blessing to keep his company as much as it pleases you. When you tire of him, send him to Hugh.”

Michaela's frown returned, this time intensified, as if she was not at all pleased with Roderick's generosity with the boy. Then her eyes narrowed for an instant before her mouth turned upward in a sunny smile.

“Perhaps you would care to join us in the afternoons, my lord? Leo speaks of you ceaselessly and I know he would be delighted with your company. Our habit has been to walk about the bailey, but we could go anywhere—”

“Are you slow, Lady Michaela?” Roderick growled, his strained decorum creaking and splintering at her outrageous suggestion. She wanted him to walk with them?
Walk?
In the
bloody afternoon?
Surely she was not so dimwitted as to have missed his staggering, lurching, humping gait, his twisted leg, his walking stick, his destroyed face, his weaker arm. Was she deliberately goading him into admitting his failures of person?

“Am I slow? Well, yes, I suppose, I am.” Michaela looked nonplussed and seemed to think for a moment. “Certainly, I can't go very fast because Leo's legs are so much shorter than mine, but ofttimes he does run, and then I daresay I am a bit quicker.”

Roderick stared at the naïve look of hope on her face for a long moment, and then laughter burst from him before he had chance to squelch it.

Slow! Oh, bloody hell!

“I don't see what's humorous about that,” the woman sniffed. “But I'm glad I amuse you, my lord.”

Roderick swallowed down the foreign sensation of chuckles, even though her prickliness did make him want to laugh all the harder. What kind of woman was this?

“You do amuse me, Lady Michaela,” he said, his words once more acceptably gruff. “Which is the only reason you still remain at Cherbon. Alas, I fear the running of the demesne leaves me little time to play about the bailey with a woman and a child, but, please, do so yourselves as often as you wish.”

The woman's head drew back slightly. “Very well. Then should we meet in the hall?”

“What? When?”

“On the morrow? At the noon meal? The day after?” She held her palms toward him, as if offering him a compromise. “Or we could talk in your chamber, or mine, or—”

“About what?”

“
About what?
About…well, about everything.”

“Aren't we doing that now?”

“Well, yes, but the everythings do vary day by day, do they not?”

“You want us to speak on a daily basis?”

The woman frowned at him and folded her arms across her bosom. “Don't you?”

“No!”

Her mouth dropped open. “Well, that is simply not acceptable,” Michaela Fortune said, and then set her lips to match the tone of her words.

Roderick couldn't help but laugh again. The things that came from this woman's mouth!

“I am sorry if you find it thusly, Lady Michaela, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to converse about matters that have no bearing on my duties.”

“No bearing on your—” Now her fists went to her hips. “Your
son
has no bearing? The woman who is to be your—have you forgotten that we are to be married, my lord?”

“I have not, no.” How could he forget, especially now, facing her with her color high, her oddly colored hair shining in the candlelit murkiness of the empty hall? She was innocently sensual in her anger, and it only served to remind Roderick of his failings. He wondered suddenly if Alan Tornfield had enjoyed her in his bed. Obviously he had, to have come so boldly for her.

Who would not covet a face and body such as hers?

She stared at him for a long moment, and then her anger seemed to fall away. “Lord Cherbon, certainly we would not pretend that either one of us are in this situation out of tender feelings for the other. I answered your announcement out of a need to save my family from poverty—from Cherbon's own fines, ironically—and, yes, a petty part of me wants to be certain that Alan Tornfield does not inherit the demesne. Your goal is to see your home secured to your name.”

“I had nearly forgotten. Thank you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I would make a point. Even though we have been brought together for dire reasons unique to each of us, I will not sentence myself to a lifetime of estrangement from the man who is to be my husband and the father of my stepson, who I am very quickly coming to adore. I will not do it.”

Roderick was confused. “What are you saying, Lady Michaela?”

“I am saying that if you can not bring yourself to give me the modicum of respect that your family deserves on a daily basis”—she took a deep breath—“then I, too, shall take my leave with Harliss.”

“Surely you jest.”

“No. I do not. Lord Cherbon, although this is initially a marriage of convenience for both of us, it would still be a marriage, and I see no reason why we should not foster at least a partnership between us.”

She had him by the bollocks now, and Roderick wasn't sure when it had happened. In all of his meetings with Michaela Fortune, it had been
him
in control,
his
holding the prize of Cherbon's riches, which she so desperately needed, over
her
head. How arrogant was he to not have thought her to turn the tables on him and realize his needs were just as desperate—if not more so.

He needed Michaela Fortune, and in truth, he was intrigued by her. He wanted her to stay. He wanted to see her with Leo—even if from a distance; wanted her to continue working her magic on the cold, dark keep, its grandeur long-ago forgotten in place of misery and tragedy and sadness. But her challenge also transported Roderick back in time more than four years, when his father had given him his own ultimatum.

You will go to the Holy Land, make something of yourself, or you will be set from Cherbon. I'll not have you useless here—battle will strengthen you or kill you. I care not which, but one would be preferable over the other. Coddled, spoiled, weak as you are—you deserve not one stone of Cherbon.

The memory of those stabbing words, which after a lifetime of scorn should have not so much as pinched, wounded him again, angered him, brought back the resentment.

Roderick noticed he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and the longer Michaela Fortune stood there with her chin tilted at him, her gaze resolute, the more her image blurred and melted with the memory of Magnus, standing in nearly the same spot. And instead of hearing Lady Michaela's reasoning, he heard his father's damnation.

He was before her quicker than he would have thought his lameness would allow, so quickly that Michaela had no chance to flee. He grabbed her upper arms and pulled her to him, startled for an instant at how petite she was when just beneath his gaze. She tilted her face up, and although there was a flash of fear in her eyes, her stubborn jaw remained set, as if she was not going to let her intimidation of him show.

Roderick had to break her. He could not let her have the upper hand—it was too dangerous to his mind by far.

“You want to be my wife then, in truth. Is that it?”

She swallowed as if preparing to speak, but then simply nodded.

“You'd have me in your bed?” Roderick leaned his mouth near her cheek and the scent of her exploded around his head, making him dizzy. He could tell she was holding her breath, and he pushed his suit farther, leaning so close that his lips were only a whisper away. “A beast of a man, ruined, savage, who would tear you to pieces before a kind word fell from his lips?”

Her breath shivered out of her and to Roderick's surprise, her shaking voice sounded in his ear as loudly as bells from a Roman cathedral.

“Not a ruined man.
My husband
.”

He pushed her away as if she were afire, and Roderick's heart galloped like wild horse hooves. Michaela Fortune's chest heaved, and he could see the tiny, curling tendrils of her hair trembling where they had escaped around her face.

Not a ruined man. My husband.

“She's tried to abscond with the silver, Rick.” Hugh's voice cut in like a bucket of icy water on the coals of Roderick and Lady Michaela's confrontation, and they both turned to see Hugh Gilbert with a large woven sack in one hand and a struggling, cursing Harliss in his other. They were standing in the far doorway that led from the servants' rooms and Roderick wondered how long Hugh had been there.

Neither Roderick nor Michaela spoke, and so Harliss jerked free from Hugh's grasp and stormed toward the pair, a much smaller sack in her own clawlike fist. She said not one word as she swept by them and to the door, although her eyes shot flaming arrows at them both. She swung open the heavy oaken slab and vanished into the night.

She didn't bother closing the door.

Hugh ambled over, a curious look on his face as he took in the pair. “I gave her leave to take one of the old mares—hope you don't mind, Rick.”

“No,” Roderick answered. He could not meet Michaela Fortune's eyes, but he could not take his gaze from her, concentrating instead on the long rope of hair that swept over her shoulder, near her chin. “It's fine, Hugh.”

Hugh smiled his most dazzling and bowed low before Michaela. Roderick knew more than a pinch of jealousy as he was once more faced with the fact that his best friend was handsome, charming, and whole.

“Miss Fortune, I must relay Leo's appreciation of your time with him this day. He barely stopped chattering about Aid-ee Mike-lah and fowwers and such nonsense long enough for his eyes to close. So, for your generosity, you have my thanks, as well.”

“I enjoy spending time with Leo very much. There is no need to thank me as if I've performed some distasteful chore,” Michaela said, her nose held slightly in the air. Then, without warning, her gaze pinned Roderick, and the question in her eyes was unmistakable. “I imagine we shall be in each other's constant company if I become his stepmother.”

Roderick felt impotent here between these two beautiful, undamaged people in his home. Challenged, dared, pressed. Was he a fool? Perhaps.

“I shall see you tomorrow evening, Lady Michaela. After Leo is abed. In your chamber.”

Michaela nodded once, and a ghost of a smile flitted about the corners of her lips. “I look forward to it.”

Roderick wanted to flee as quickly as he could, and he cursed himself for leaving his chamber without his walking stick. As he limped past Hugh, his left arm swinging wildly to balance his lurch, he gave not so much as a good night to either of them. Hugh's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Roderick heard his father's triumphant laugh in his own head as he slinked from the hall.

 

Michaela fell into the nearest chair feeling as though she could vomit as Roderick stomped from the hall. She knew her demands had not pleased the man, and she was so, so very glad her ruse had worked.

What a stupid, stupid, foolish risk she had taken by issuing that rash ultimatum! And to have been brought face-to-face with—in the very clutches of—that large, powerful man with his sparkling green eyes, talking in that low, gravelly, mesmerizing voice about the bed they would share, and whether he would rip her to pieces within it…

She was completely surprised that she had not fainted.

She was also surprised when Sir Hugh Gilbert—whom she had forgotten about as soon as Roderick had left—scraped back a chair across from her at the table. The look on his face was an odd combination of interest and confusion and, of course, amusement.

“You think you have him figured, do you?” Hugh asked quietly, propping a high, sculpted cheekbone against his fist.