The Misbehaving Marquess (4 page)

They must settle this thing between them once and for all.

Cat marched across her room and rapped her knuckles on the door.

“Enter.” She couldn’t tell if Jamie sounded surprised. Could wood absorb such a thing?

She opened the door and stepped into her husband’s bedchamber.

Jamie was relaxed back on his bed dressed in nothing but loose trousers. Her gaze immediately landed on the tanned skin of his chest. Elegant, thick muscles rounded and corded across his shoulders and abdomen.

My goodness.

She couldn’t recall for a startling moment why she’d entered his room. Her eyes trailed downward, over his sculpted abdomen to the top of his trousers.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Good evening, Cat.”

She blinked, trying to clear the hard, lean sight of him from her mind. But she tumbled through memories. The hot silk of his skin. The tang of salt as she pressed her tongue to his muscle. The way he filled her, rode her, pleasured her.

Jamie’s chest expanded on a long inhalation. Cat’s body followed.

She dragged her gaze up all that hard beauty into his eyes. “What are you planning to do, Jamie?”

He lifted his brows. “Planning to do?”

“Are you going to visit my rooms?”

His mouth curved up at the edges. “I’d
thought to give you some time. But i
f you are ready now—”

She stepped back. “And what then? Will you stay here at Forster Abbey, or will you leave again?” She did not like the nervousness in her voice.

The bed creaked as he pushed himself up and onto to his feet. His trousers fell low across his abdomen, revealing curious dips and hollows. “This could not wait for morning?”

“No.” No, this could not wait for morning.
She
could not wait.

Jamie scrubbed his hand through his dark hair, leaving it standing on end. “The answer is yes, I plan to stay at Forster Abbey.”

Cat dipped her chin in a sharp nod. The creation of a child did not require love. It did not even require forgiveness. But a marriage did. And she did not want to bring an innocent baby into an unhappy family.

The ultimate question remained. Would he ever forgive her?

She looked up and met his eyes. Her palms began to sweat. “We need to talk about what happened.”

He scrubbed his hand through his hair again. “To what do you refer, exactly?”

“The affair. Or the non-affair, as it were. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Yes, I believe you. I always did.”

Cat felt her shoulders drop. Thank God he understood. As well he should have. He had known for weeks that Simpson was trying to seduce Lady Allysandra, not her. Indeed, Simpson was a notorious rake known for his conquests of tall brunettes. Cat was neither tall nor a brunette. She took a few tentative steps toward Jamie. “It was terrible luck that
I
was discovered with Sim—”

“It was not an act of luck, Cat.” Jamie leaned one shoulder against his bedpost and crossed his arms.

She stopped her approach, rooted by his frustrated tone and the hard expression on his face. He was still angry, even these five years later.

Tight lines bracketed his mouth. “You went out onto the balcony willingly and on purpose.”

Yes, to warn her friend, stubborn man. “She was engaged to a
duke
.”

“She was a bloody fool.”
And so were you.
He did not say the words, but they hung in the air regardless.

“Everything happened so quickly.” What a nightmare that evening had been. Cat had never intended for people to believe
she
was the one having the affair. “I was just trying to protect Ally. She would have been absolutely ruined.”

“And what about me, dear wife?” Jamie’s voice was quiet and barely stirred the air in the room. “Were you so worried what others would think of me?”

Truthfully, she hadn’t been thinking of him. She’d been thinking of her exciting friendship with a soon-to-be-duchess. She’d been thinking of flirtations and intrigues and the entertainment of her first London Season. Not her new husband. She looked down at the floor.

He sighed. “Are we really going to argue about this now? I am ready for bed.”

“I hadn’t thought to argue.” Tightness banded her chest. “I thought perhaps if we talked about it…”

She had hoped that he might come to forgive her. That they might press on into the future together.

It was a silly hope, she knew this. She had known this for years. She straightened her shoulders against the sadness that wanted to curl inward. She would move on without him. She already had.

“You must understand that your actions had simple consequences.” His blue eyes were fierce on her, unrelenting. “I could not stay in London and be thought a cuckold.”

“Could not or would not?”

“I was angry with you. I’d warned you against your friendship with Lady Allysandra. You would not listen to me.”

“You lectured me. As you always did.” The old impatience colored her voice. Even as Jamie had courted her those many years ago, even as they had flirted and played and fallen in love, he had treated her like a younger neighbor. She’d been the innocent girl in need of guidance, and he the worldly man who would provide it.

His shook his head, as if denying her memories. “I allowed you to be free with your actions, Cat. You wanted a Season and I humored you. I watched you dance and flirt with other men, even after we were wed.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Shame, anger, embarrassment, she could not tell what she felt. Did not care to examine it. She inhaled sharply. “You talk as if I was loose—”

“I just wanted you for myself! Good Lord, Cat, I waited for two years to marry you. I know it was not your doing, with your father putting off your first Season, then your aunt falling ill. But I waited, and—” He looked down at his hand, flexed and unflexed his fingers in a tight fist. When he looked up again, his eyes were sad. “Honestly, Cat, I gave you everything. I don’t know what more you could want from me.”

“I am sorry, Jamie. I am a thousand times sorry for my actions that night. But I cannot undo the past.” She could not look at him, her handsome, half-dressed husband. The man she had won and lost. She scanned the room and her gaze landed upon the new objects on his bookshelf. Some kind of mask and an odd statue. “You have been all over the world while I’ve been here, atoning for my mistake. Still, it is not enough.”

He said nothing.

“I cannot continue like this, Jamie.” Her words sounded hollow, empty. Fitting, for that was how she felt.

“What are you saying?”

Cat adjusted the sash on her dressing robe. Pulled herself together. She would once and for all close the door on this man who had broken her heart. “I’m saying I cannot give you an heir, not with such animosity between us. In fact, I think we should apply for an annulment.”

***

“What?” Jamie stiffened
. Certainly he’d misheard.

“I think we should apply for an annulment,” his wife repeated. “You would be free to marry and beget your heir with someone else.”

She was mad. Madness dressed in provocative green silk.

“We cannot get an annulment, Cat. I am not impotent. You are not a virgin.” The words tasted like ash in his mouth.

“I might as well be.” She had fire to her now. She dropped her arms and lifted her chin. “I’ve hardly experienced the marital bed. And that was years ago.”

“They would have to examine me.” Jamie tried to loosen his jaw. “I would have to prove that I cannot raise my victory flag.”

She arched an impertinent brow. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

“Oh, it gets hard, all right. You, of all people, should know.”

“Should I?”

“You talk as if you’ve forgotten.”

“What was there to forget? A few nights, that was all.”

He launched two steps toward her. “I don’t believe you.”

She straightened at his approach, all haughty pride. “Don’t believe what? That you could be so easy to forget?”

He closed the rest of the distance between them, his blood a fire of anger and desire. And possession. He would never give her up. “You are my wife.”

“Barely. I am not the same woman you once knew. And you are not the same man.”

“I am not so different, Cat.” He was shockingly the same, in fact. His travels had changed him around the edges, but the core of him had solidified. Like he had stepped completely into his own skin.

“I do not know, Forster. I find I do not know you at all.” Her eyes trailed over his chest, then flicked away. There was desire in her gaze. She could not hide it.

“You’ve known me practically my entire life.”

She wouldn’t look at him. He took her shoulders and turned her around so she faced the large mirror on his bedroom wall. He swept her hair to the side and stood close behind her. She was lightness to his darkness. Delicacy to his heft and bone. She was perfect.

“See there? That is us. You and me. Cat and Jamie.”

She shook her head and tried to struggle out of his arms. “You do not even know me—”

He held onto her. “I have not forgotten anything about you.”

Her gaze snapped to his in the mirror. The wildness in her blue eyes slammed into him. His Cat. His wife. His lover.

Everything pulsed through him, hard. The ache and the fire and the madness he had carried for years. It pulsed through his blood and became a buzzing in his ears.

He dipped his head and nuzzled the sensitive skin at the back of her neck. Her spine arched helplessly against his mouth as he knew it would.

She smelled of roses, and warm skin, and woman. And she felt so damn good in his arms.

“You have not forgotten me, either.” Her skin was hot beneath his mouth. She shivered as he trailed kisses beneath her ear, then caught the sensitive lobe between his teeth.

God, he had missed her. He was a fool to have stayed away so long.

He lowered both his hands to cup her breasts and brushed his thumbs across her nipples. She dropped her head back against his shoulder, the sound of her breath heavy in the room.

She wanted him. He would not let her pretend that she didn’t.

He molded and shaped the heavy weight of her breasts until he felt her legs threaten to give way beneath her.

He caught her nipples and gently squeezed as he kissed the soft skin of her throat.

“Jamie,” she cried out, pressing back against him, seeking more contact.

Blood roared in his ears. He had loved this woman, had given her everything—his heart, his name, his future—and she’d made him look a fool.

Not just look a fool, but also feel a fool.

Yet he did not want to let her go.

“You’ll not get me to sign an annulment.” He turned her in his arms and claimed her mouth. Their first kiss in five years. She was soft and open and tasted of home. Of the very texture of his soul.

She was everywhere. In his breath. In his blood. She always had been and always would be.

Cat pressed her belly against the hard length of his cock. His hands found the hem of her robe and night rail, then the moist, wanting place between her legs. She shuddered in his arms, ready for him. Ready for more.

He backed her toward the bed. He would take her once, fierce. It could not be helped. Then he would pleasure her. He would remember every inch of her skin.

She froze in his arms. “No.”

A growl rose in his throat.

“I do not want this.” She panted for breath.

He clenched his jaw before speaking again. “You have about three seconds to get back into your room and lock the door before I’m coming after you.”

Her eyes widened as if she recognized the truth in his words. Her robe billowed out behind her as she fled.

Jamie dug his shovel
deep in the earth and heaved a heavy clump of mud to the side. The strain on his muscles felt wonderful after the frustration of the night before.

Pent up as a rutting bull in a pen, that was he.

With a great shove, he buried the blade again. The mud made a sucking sound as he hauled out another load. The earth didn’t want to give up. Jamie knew how that felt, the stubbornness of clinging to muck and mire. He had let himself remain angry at Cat for five years now.

Holding a grudge was exhausting work. Maybe Cat was right, maybe it was past time he let it go.

With a sigh, he dredged out another clump of muck and threw it onto the growing pile.

He’d spent so many years reviewing the reasons he had to be angry with his wife—and they were good reasons—that he’d not even considered the possibility of forgiveness. He was like a ship sailing on one course for so long, he’d forgotten how to tack. An entire world waited on the other side of the horizon if he just dared to move the rudder.