“Fools,” he said.
“Virtuous churchgoers, in fact. It was Mrs. Porter, along with Mrs. Dale, who conspired to have Mama expelled from the congregation. She had no proof of her christening—that was how they got her.”
Christ. That was unspeakably petty and cruel—and also the quickest, most effective way to isolate someone in a community as small as this. He turned his hand in hers, tightening his grip.
But she snorted and pulled free. “I was glad of it. The vicar gave the most tedious sermons!”
He forced Olivia to a stop twenty paces from the cluster of staring women. He remembered his own words to her in the coach: Did you leave no friends behind?
Once upon a time, he had never been so carelessly cruel.
“I was lonely, too,” he said. “As a boy. My parents were judged, mocked, ostracized. That should not have been my burden to bear. And this is not yours.”
Something naked and vulnerable came into her face then, which he never wanted to see again. It was in his power, surely, to make certain she never looked so. Otherwise, what was the use of power?
“Not everyone was so awful,” she said softly. “The vicar told her it didn’t matter. But she never went back to church. In fact, she rarely went out at all after that.”
Something clicked inside him. He took a sharp breath. “She wouldn’t leave the house.”
Gently she said, “You thought you were the first to discover that solution?”
He felt stunned, as though he’d been slammed into a wall. “But you never hid.” Was that bitterness in his voice? Or mere, raw wonder?
“They were never worth hiding from.” She looked over his shoulder. “And there is the milliner,” she said. “Bertram had to bring hats from London. Mr. Ardell would not sell to her. His wife forbade it.”
“I’ll buy you every damned hat in the place.”
She wrinkled her nose and locked eyes, over his shoulder, with the women at the end of the boardwalk. “I shouldn’t want any,” she said, loud and distinct. “They’re all quite dreadful.”
He turned to join her in staring. Two of the women were near to Mrs. Hotchkiss’s age, but the third was young enough to be Olivia’s peer, though her expression looked so sour that it aged her. “It is unfortunate,” he said, “how these little towns tend to collect all the rubbish.”
The elder two women whirled away and thudded down the stairs to the road. After a moment, the sour-faced girl snatched up her skirts and followed.
“Oh,” Olivia whispered. “That did feel pleasant.”
The coach had drawn up beside them, the horses stamping. “You’ve run the gauntlet, then,” he said. “Let’s leave this pit.”
Olivia allowed him to help her into the coach. But when the door closed, she said immediately, “It was no gauntlet. A gauntlet hurts those who run it. But I never cared for their good opinion.”
“Of course not.”
“Really. I didn’t.” She gave him a strange little smile. “Don’t imagine I wanted them to apologize for the past. I only wanted to walk in my mother’s footsteps for a minute—now that I’m fully qualified to do so. But as it turns out, I can’t. For she always did care what they thought. And when I was young, I decided that nobody would ever be able to ruin me but myself. Only today I know that I’ve kept that vow. Their stares made no difference to me.”
He gauged her in silence. She meant it. This was not a show, a brave face.
“But I do wish,” she added, “you would not call me shameless. For I do value your opinion.” She wrinkled her nose. “Though perhaps I shouldn’t.”
“It was not an insult.” God help him if he ever used it as an insult again. “I invite you to be as shameless as you like.”
She tilted her head, giving him a look of smiling puzzlement. “Indeed? But I did seem to scandalize you on the train. And I should not like to trample your tender sensibilities—”
He took her by the waist and pulled her across the carriage onto his lap.
She was soft, startled, laughing, a wriggling hot bundle in his arms. “Oh, dear,” she said, and whooped as she lost her balance; he steadied her by the waist, and she looped her arms around his neck with a broad smile. “You seem to prefer me brazen,” she said.
He put his face in her hair, dragging her into his lungs, hard, deep breaths full of her. Let her settle in his lungs. Let her penetrate every pore. She smelled like roses, but he knew now that it could not be a trick of perfume; the soap at the flat had been castor and lye. This scent was not the essence of flower water, but the essence of her, some alchemical design of her strange nature. Her miraculous nature. Rose-scented mettle, indifferent to convention.
She spoke again, less steadily: “I think I prefer me brazen, too.”
He had no reply. He was lost in the feel of her hair. He rubbed against it like a cat, letting it brush over his eyelids, his cheeks. He did not simply admire her. He coveted her, and his rapacity was not merely lustful. He had wanted once to steal her hope, but if he could have walked an hour in her skin, he would have done so, just to feel how such mettle might be worn so elegantly, encased in such soft, fragrant flesh.
He took her ear between his teeth and licked the rim, making her gasp. One could say this was only lust, of course. He meant to take her here, to push himself into her body and make her moan. But lust was only an itch, mechanically satisfied. Lust was like hunger, and a man’s appetite was as easily sated by plain bread as by foie gras.
This was not simply lust. It was not only his body that needed her. It was not only her body that he needed.
He tilted her in his arms, leaning her back, her head supported in his hand, to drag his mouth down her jaw. He tasted her throat, salt, cream, and felt her shiver. Her body moved at his bidding; he lifted her, turned her again so she sat against the seat. He cupped her breast, stroked it, and made her shudder again. Feeling her body answer to his seemed to unhinge something inside him, a floodgate, some crucial safeguard that kept him in check. A tide of need, raw and pulsing, blotted out his brain.
He let her feel his teeth—the scrape of them against her neck, and then the flick of his tongue. She whimpered. He would seduce her body, snare it, if he could not capture her mind, lure her to confess all its parts to him, to reveal her secrets willingly. He slid off the bench and coaxed her to lie down across it; she let him lower her, her body pliant, her wide eyes the shade of wild skies on the moors. Wildness could be tamed.
He sank to his knees on the rattling, cold floor and came over her, lowering his mouth to hers, sealing her mouth with his lips. Speak only to me. He felt cunning and calculating and ambitious and—suddenly—fiercely jealous of moments when she had spoken to others, all the words she had given away, the wit she had squandered on those who did not properly appreciate it, even the courage she had shown those village harpies, who were blind and would misrecognize it as depravity.
Her closed mouth suddenly seemed to deprive him of his right. He opened it with his lips. He kissed her tongue, her teeth, her inner cheeks; every inch of her mouth would be his now. He slid his palm down to the neckline of her gown, finding beneath it the smooth rise of her breast, the pebbling peak of her nipple, which he rasped lightly with his nail until she moaned.
“In a . . . carriage . . .” She sounded dreamily amazed. He was not sure, in truth, how it could be done. But a half hour remained before they reached the station. He would invent a way. Like a scientist, he would devise a way to take her apart. He would own her by the end. No one else would get the chance.
He inched down the bodice of her dress bit by bit, taking great care, because he would not allow her to be disgraced in public by a rip or tear; no one would look at her again as those women had (though she had never been touched by their scorn; it existed in a different universe from the one she assembled, by the force of her unyielding will). He coaxed her breasts from the obnoxious pressure of her stays, which, because God was kind, were leather, and spared him the ch
allenges of lacing and whalebone. And then he took her nipple in his mouth while he watched her face.
Her mouth fell open. She tried to cover her eyes with the back of her hand. He pulled her hand away and held it down, in a firm grip, beside her: she would not deny him the sight of her reaction to him.
Her groan was animal. Animal, yes, vivid and vigorous and free. She had the coloring of a fox, her hair a wild pelt, red and copper and russet and orange, sunlight and fire trapped and refracted. He suckled her as he lifted her skirts, and felt up her long, smooth limbs. When she tried to sit up, to assist him, he forced her back down with another, deeper kiss. He did not require assistance. Be still, he did not say, because he did not want her cooperation; it was her submission he craved, and it was his challenge to earn it. Give yourself to me.
Her knees, once bared to the light, proved to be plump and curving, dimpled, an invitation to his mouth. He had not lingered over them that night in the library, a sin for which he had been suitably punished by her later betrayal—her deceit, in the heated retrospect of this moment, seemed almost too mild for the guilt of his omission, in ignoring her knees. When he nibbled at the inside of her thigh, she squeaked; and then, as the coach slowed, she clamped her legs shut. “Wait!” she gasped.
But the changing rhythm of the wheels showed that they had slowed only so the driver could transition onto the smoother course of the highway. Alastair licked the seam of her joined thighs, and then, when they proved stubborn, he ran his hand up to her quim, his thumb pressing firmly through the thin lawn, and said, “Give me this.”
Her legs fell apart.
He felt for the split in her drawers, and then probed softly, delicately, through her tender, damp folds, the gentleness of his touch a deceit of its own, masking the savage feeling growing in him, feeding like a ravening beast on the noises she made. He lifted her skirts and found her with his mouth again, God above, it seemed he had waited centuries to relive this possession—and he licked and sucked until she whispered, “Please,” and then licked into her until she said it again.
God, what he would not do to hear her beg! He made her say it once more; he made her choke it out, and felt her nails turn into his back, and still it was not enough. How to prolong it? He eased off when he felt her hips buck; he breathed lightly on her until her body retreated from climax, and then he laid his mouth on her and devoured her again. She was gasping, but was it enough? Villains tied women to train tracks; had she proved mute, had she resisted, he would have tied her to the train tracks until she cried for mercy, and then he would have fucked her on the rails, against a tree, on the grass, until she knew how to cry out for him, until she had learned her lesson fully. There was no goodness in him. But in the smell of her, in her groan, he saw a good use for his evil. He saw a way to accept it, to use it, if it would make her moan.
He sat up and lifted her on top of him; she bobbled, clutching his shoulders, breathless, flushed, her lips damp, open; he had a glimpse of her tongue and leaned forward to suck it into his mouth as he unfastened his trousers.
Her hand closed around him. He gasped. It was the first sound, perhaps, he had made. She guided him, her hips moving awkwardly; he grasped her waist and readjusted her, and then—ah, her quim opened for him, inch by inch as he pushed inside her. He felt her grow wetter yet, and hotter, as she closed around him. Her forehead fell to his shoulder; he cupped her skull, stay there, she was safe there, pinned, and with his other hand he directed her hips, showing her the way of it, until she moved against him as he moved into her.
Always. The word beat into his brain. He would stay in her always, her weight a grounding burden, what kept him in place as he kept her in place, his arm around her. He would take her body again and again, and God help anyone who tried to come between them, for their bodies belonged together, his in hers, she pinioned, penetrated, his. This alone he knew. Her hot wet depths posed a challenge that only his body would answer; he would teach her how to be greedy, he would use her and let the world go to hell. She would have no room to think of anything else; he would fill her so completely that thoughts would find no room to penetrate.
He reached between them, rubbing her, stroking, and she lifted her head and cried out. He gripped her, held her still, and forced her to take the pleasure, to follow it. She contracted around him, pulsing spasms gripping his cock, and he felt his own climax rush over him, the hot seed that would plant him inside her, make her truly his own, himself a part of her forever—
No.
He thrust her away from him, onto the bench. He would not betray her so. He put his head into the wall, and worked himself—two strokes was all it took. He spilled onto the ground.
When he turned back, breath ragged, he found her disheveled, skirts around her thighs, hair mussed, pins strewn across her lap. They stared at each other. He felt unable to hide what must be in his face. He did not know what to do. She deserved more; she deserved better. He could not offer her any of what she deserved.
He did not move, though the urge to gather her to him, to kiss her face and throat, was fiercely powerful: to deliver a final imprint, to warn her that she must not forget what he had just shown her. Her body was his. But what could he offer in return?
He did not move. For ownership was a lifetime’s proposition. No other measure of time made sense to him. And that was absurd. And he had nothing to offer. He did not trust himself enough to offer what he might.
“Well,” she said shakily, and licked her lips.
The sight stabbed through him, a sweet, hot pain. He could think of nothing to say. Words did not make sense with her. All the words that might frame her—bastard; liar; housekeeper; thief—were wrong. But there were no words to replace them. And no words that made sense, when linked to him. Not wife. Not mistress. And not stranger. Never again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Olivia remembered very little of her only visit to Shepwich, which had not lasted above an hour or two. She remembered a house, infinitely large and empty. An old woman who had tried to pull Olivia onto her lap—but Mama had snatched her back. And she remembered an argument, very angry, as Mama wept.
These were not details that provided much help in locating her mother’s childhood home. But Shepwich itself was smaller even than Allen’s End, no more than a dozen houses sparsely arranged around the bend in the sandy road, and the proprietor of the general store, who greeted her with curiosity, answered at once: “The Holladays? Aye, you’ll want the white house half a mile down the lane with the old stone barn in back. Can’t miss it. A relation, are you? You’ve the look of a Holladay, about your eyes and . . .” He gestured toward his nose.
“Yes,” Olivia said, “a relative,” and beat a hasty retreat to the coach, where Marwick was waiting—his presence, she’d felt, being somewhat too grand to induce easy admissions from a shopkeeper.
She gave instructions to the coachman, an easygoing young man who’d proved remarkably tolerant at devoting his day to haring about the countryside. Inside, Marwick was slouched against the wall, looking sullen. The effect of sexual congress obviously varied widely: it rather enlivened her, but he always behaved afterward as though he’d been hit hard on the head. “What do you think of my nose?” she asked him.
He pushed himself up from his slouch, and frowned at the item in question. “I never have, particularly.”
“Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. Her nose was straight enough, if a touch too large for true beauty. But she deemed it in no way remarkable. “Yet the man in that store said it marked me as a Holladay.”
She did not intend the remark to pose some revelation, but Marwick looked arrested. He leaned forward, considering her so narrowly that she felt, after a moment, somewhat flustered, and held her hand up to block her nose from his view. “It’s a very normal nose,” she said. “Don’t tell me otherwise.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “It’s a lovely nose, in fact.”
She
dropped her hand and ogled him. “A compliment! I change my mind: my nose must be the eighth wonder of the world!”
Expression darkening, he settled back against his bench. “I’ve complimented you before.”
“Have you?” She shrugged. “Very well.”
“I have.”
She saw no point in arguing. She looked out the window, aware suddenly of a certain nervous flutter in her stomach. This stretch of Kent, the last ribbon of fertile soil before the ground turned to salt and sand, was the land of her ancestors. Flat green fields stretched endlessly beneath the gray sky. If these people, the Holladays, tried to slam the door in her face, she would not weep. Had it not been for the . . . interlude . . . on this very bench, she would have been primed to rage at them. Instead, she decided she would task Marwick to coldly intimidate them.
“I’ve told you you’re beautiful,” he said.
She glanced at him, startled. “Oh, yes, of course. But that was during . . .” She felt herself blush. Peculiar how one could do things without shame, but not be able to speak of them.
His smile now was deliberately suggestive. “It counts,” he said. “But I’ll say it again, lest you feel skeptical: you are beautiful, Olivia.”
She frowned at him, puzzled by why he might say so. “I’m not, particularly.”
He frowned back at her. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”
What nonsense was this? “You and I both know what beauty looks like.” A waspish tone had crept into her voice. She did not like to be patronized. “Your late wife was beautiful. The very picture of beauty.”
It was a calculated decision, mentioning her. Olivia expected it to end the conversation. But he merely shrugged. “She was lovely to look at,” he said. “But not beautiful.”
She smiled despite herself. “That’s ridiculous. Do you mean to say that beauty lies in a lantern jaw?” She touched her chin. “A perfect square?”