The Sometime Bride (46 page)

She wrapped her legs and arms around him and held on tight. It was not a time for talk. The night would not end well, that she knew, but for now there was only love. The sheer joy of feeling his heart pound against her flesh. Of knowing she had power she had never fully examined. Power she had only begun to explore. Power she would never fully discover in this one night they had left of their love.

Cat held him tight, and waited. The next time, the initiative must be his. Her lips twitched in a secret little smile. Now they had satisfied pure animal lust, she never doubted his ability to love her as a woman should be loved.

Blas shook himself, clearing the lingering miasma of frenzy. With a long, shuddering sigh he rolled off her. She was cold. Bereft.

Without warning, Cat found herself flat on her stomach, Blas’s hands riffling through her hair, caressing the golden red strands shining in the candle’s flickering light. He smoothed his fingers over her shoulders, added pressure, found the tightness of her, the tension of desire that quivered beneath his touch. He kneaded and soothed, following his hands with featherlight kisses to her neck and back, to that small exquisitely sensitive place at the base of her spine. He skimmed the smoothness of her buttocks, trailed down across the backs of her legs, kneecaps, ankles, the inner arch of her small feet.

It was Cat’s turn to die. From torture most perfect. She was boneless, mindless, long before he turned her over and proceeded to apply the same slow exquisite torture to her ears, cheeks, lips, and every inch he had not yet caressed with his hands and lips and tongue. Long before he reached the most private part of her, Cat was begging him to stop, to get on with it, else she would not live long enough to enjoy it.

He laughed and continued what he was doing. Until he was satisfied she had experienced enough little deaths to make up for his earlier loss of control. With a sigh of blissful satisfaction he drove himself inside her at last. This time he had earned the right to lose himself in her, to forget everything but the moment. There was no world but theirs. He moved slowly until he felt her breathing quicken yet again, then gave himself up completely to sensation, movement, color, light. When Blas felt her shudder beneath him, he gave up his tight grip on control and plunged over the edge into dazzling mists of delight far greater than he had ever known before.

Cat thought she knew the power of the act of love. She was wrong. It had never been quite like this before. Was it the long abstinence? Or that she did not have to share him with a war or a mistress? Perhaps it was simply a rare and beautiful moment sometimes granted to lovers. Though not, surely, a rapture which could be repeated.

Exhaustion swept them both away. In the pre-dawn light Blas woke to the touch of hands applying every erotic skill he had blithely, shamelessly, taught his young and innocent wife. He lay there, a series of smug, satisfied smiles playing over his face, as she did to him what he had done to her hours earlier. Still drugged by sleep and sexual satiation, he was more amused than aroused until her fingers found his semi-limp manhood and began to move in a slow, insistent rhythm. Bloody hell. The little witch! Within moments he was once again stiff with desire. She took him into her mouth and teased him. Hell and damnation! It was wrong. All wrong. No woman should have the power to turn a man into a mindless idiot.

The first time, years earlier, when she had been on top, he had had to coax her, tease her to try it. Now there was no need. Cat shifted her weight over him, took him in. His hands came up to knead her breasts. She gasped, reveling in the thrill of it, the control that was now all hers. Dawn was nearly upon them. This would be the last time. Ever. The end of the life that had been hers for so long.

She would make it a fitting climax for them both.

Together, as one, they drove past heights thought unsurpassable, to a pinnacle where they spun out of control, so consumed there was no sensation left unexperienced, the world lost as they plunged into a timeless void.
La petite mort.
The little death.

The return to the land of the living was slow. The sun was sparkling off the icicles outside the window when Blas stirred, prying open his eyes to find his wife staring at him with wide, solemn eyes.

Time had run out.

An hour later, Blas, stunned by his wife’s insanity, rode back toward the inn at Walmsley Oaks. It wasn’t possible. She could not have sent him away.

She would change her mind. He’d change it for her.

Something else might change it for her.

Surely from a night such as this there was the possibility of new life. Not that he wanted her to come to him for that reason . . . Then again, he would settle for any reason at all. Blas’s hands tightened on the reins; the startled horse slithered to an abrupt stop. Fantasy. Pure fantasy. He himself had given Cat the knowledge to deny him even that hope. A faint chuckle of laughter from the old witch in the Alfama seemed to whisper through the cool morning air.

Blas dug in his heels, the horse moved forward. To the rhythm of the soft squish of his horse’s hooves through the snow and the mud, the last verse of the old ballad echoed through his mind. A mockery of his hopes and dreams.

Chapter Twenty-four

Blas slumped in the saddle, allowing the horse to find its own pace. Thin clouds obscured the sun, its pale sickly glow doing nothing to dispel the damp chill of the night. Mist drifted up from the snow, dulling the landscape. Except for the tight knot in his stomach—compounded of despair, guilt, and burgeoning anger—he might as well have been back in the mountains of Spain. Exhaustion, cold, and hunger were old, familiar problems, easily lost in strange new sensations of shock, fury, sickness of heart. He was Alexander Trowbridge. Marquess of Harborough.
No one
treated him like this. Most certainly, not his wife.

Bloody nonsense!

Then again, she had a right to be angry. He should have told her the whole when they were married. Well and truly married by the Anglican chaplain. At fifteen, Catarina Audley had been a woman grown. Strong. Intelligent. Capable. She would have hugged his secret to her, kept it from Thomas himself. But he had had to be the consummate Englishman. An arrogant, secretive bastard who could lust after her and still insist she was only a child. A child to be protected. A child whose decisions should be made by others.

He should have told her. Admitted that when he discovered he could not do it alone—could not run Thomas’s network, the Casa Audley, scout for Wellington, and whip
guerrilleros
into line all by himself. When he sent for his brother, he should have told her.

Tell a child of fifteen she had two false husbands?
Hell, no!

But later—when they were truly lovers . . . After a night of passion when she was soft and sleepy and satisfied. Too tired to fight. He should have told her.

But tonight, in his eagerness to be home, he had not thought about guilt, the possibility of anger. Nor had she. At least he had thought not. Their passion had been soul shattering, an affirmation of a new beginning. Of love which could burst to full bloom without secrecy or pain of separation. They had immersed themselves in a new, better world. Not an end.

Never an end. He would not accept it.

Blas forced himself to relive the pain of his last few minutes with his wife. She sat beside him in bed—prim as a nun, the covers pulled up to her chin—and told him to go.

Unconcerned, he murmured his lies with practiced ease. “No need to worry about the servants. I’m your husband’s cousin, stopped for the night on my way to London.”

“
You will leave now. And not come back.”

Still unalarmed, he had closed his eyes, settled his shoulders further into the soft feather mattress. “I’ve not forgotten my promise to Tomás, but we’ll manage. We always have. And I can’t leave without seeing the boy.”

Cat had had several agonizing weeks to plan this moment. Her arguments were ready. “You do not understand,” she explained patiently. “Whether you wish me to be your mistress or your wife, I am rejecting your suit. You will not share my bed again.”

Blas’s eyes popped open. He stared at her. A smile curved his lips. “Really?” he inquired sweetly.

“
Realmente.
”

“
You and what army are going to keep me out?”

“
Your promise to Thomas will keep you out. There is some honor left in you, I think.”

Abruptly, Blas sat up, eyes narrowed in disbelief. She could not possibly mean it. For a moment his agile mind went blank, words of protest dying unborn.

“
I shall love you all my life,” Cat declared with stoic calm, “but I cannot be with a man who would allow me to live with such a deception. Forgiveness is not possible. I shall find someone who will be kind, who will take Pierre and myself and demand only a good and faithful wife in return. If I do not find such a man, I shall return to Lisbon, to the life to which I was born. The child from the Casa Audley was never intended to be a duchess.”

“
If that’s what’s bothering you . . .”

“
No! That is the least of it,” Cat hissed. “You deceived me. Cruelly. And hurt your brother as well. His honor, and possibly his heart. You were thoughtless. Arrogant. Unkind. I can never trust you again. There is no way I can live with you.”

He refused to take her seriously. Cat’s fit of temper was his punishment. Well deserved. But he’d suffered enough. Time to end this nonsense. Blas drove his wife down hard, back into the pillows in a tangle of flying hair and arms. He crushed his mouth to hers, stopping her words, demanding she take them back. His body followed the rest of him, flattening her to the bed, ruthlessly pinning her beneath him. Cat bit his lip, startling herself almost as much as he. She tugged a hand out from under his elbow. Grabbing a handful of waving black curls, she yanked with the strength of weeks of pent-up fury. Blas’s head snapped back. His teeth opened on a snarl.

Her hands were suddenly above her head, painfully gripped by his. Eyes glittering, he rose above her like some ominous black cloud. “You can’t do this, Cat.”

“
I can. I will.” In that moment he saw the love in her blazing green eyes turn to hate. The line between the two was so thin, so frighteningly, horribly thin.

With an oath he rolled off her, rolled out of bed. Consumed by guilt at his primitive response to his wife’s intransigence and not above a good healthy rage at her idiocy, he hunted for his clothes with the stiff movements of a mechanical toy. Cat did not mean it. She would get over it. He would make sure she got over it. Thomas had said he could court her. Bloody hell! If that’s what she wanted, then he’d court her.

Court her?
After what they’d done tonight?

As Blas struggled to pull on his boots, visions—romantic, cynical visions—danced through his head. Flowers, bonbons, rides in the park, waltzing at Almack’s. Jesus, he might be sick. Blas slammed his foot hard into the second boot, glanced at the bed from under lowered lashes. Cat was buried under the covers. Even her flaming hair was invisible. Extinguished from his life.

So here he was on the bloody cold road to Walmsley Oak. Cast out of the house he had bought for her.

No wife. No reunion with a small waiting child who had already had a bitter lesson in abandonment.

When Blas left the inn later that morning, he gave a new direction to the coachman. He would go home. To Marchmont. To Sebastian and Melisande Trowbridge, Duke and Duchess of Marchmont. His parents. It was time.

“
You are mad,” said Blanca flatly. “A fool. A woman does not refuse to be a
marquesa
.”

“
How can you say so?” Cat cried. “You know how he used me. I have no choice. Honor demands it!”

Blanca gave a most unladylike snort of derision. “Me, I am practical. A woman of reason. A woman who will one day be a duchess
does not throw away her husband, his title, or his wealth. Nor does honor warm your bed.”

“
My husband is dead. I have an elegant piece of parchment suitably edged in black, signed with a flourish, and sealed with black wax, stating that Don Alexis Perez de Leon died nobly in the defense of his country on 3 August 1813 during the siege of San Sebastian. I am therefore free to live my life as I please.”

“
In the eyes of the law, perhaps,” said Blanca most awfully. “Not in the eyes of God.”

“
Then you are as much my father’s wife as I am the wife of Blas the Bastard.”