Dangerous to Love (19 page)

She frowned in concentration. When she looked up her eyes were fear-bright. Her voice came out a shaken whisper. “It’s no use. I can’t remember.”

Julian glowered meaningfully at the doctor, then gathered his wife’s trembling form in his arms. “It will all come back to you,” he said. “Don’t think about it now.”

“Your husband is right.” Dr. Ames smiled his professional, reassuring smile. “I have every confidence that your faculties will return in a matter of, oh, days if not hours. Don’t concern yourself with either the past or future. Think only of the present moment. Enjoy this beautiful house and its tranquil setting. Do a little gardening. Go for long walks. Everything will come back to you in time.”

And things did come back to her, in dribs and drabs. Her first recollection came on the following morning, when she was allowed out of bed for the first time. Julian was showing her over the house. It was built in the Palladian
style, all marble and intricate plasterwork, and Ionic columns in the great entrance hall. Her steps slowed when her eyes fell on those columns.

“This reminds me of your gaming house,” she said, then her eyes went wide. “Of course, you are a gamester, and a very successful one!”

Julian seemed to have taken root on the spot. “So, it’s coming back to you?”

She was too enthralled with her power of recall to notice that anything was amiss. Her bright eyes were darting all over the place, taking in the paintings on the walls, all of them of pastoral settings. “I’ve been there, haven’t I? At your gaming house, I mean? I distinctly remember murals of nymphs and satyrs. Very naughty nymphs and satyrs, I should say,” and she turned her mischievous eyes upon him.

“And all of them depicting scenes from mythology,” he was quick to point out.

She pulled a face. “I suppose you are going to tell me that gentlemen patronize your establishment to improve the tone of their minds?”

It was just the sort of remark that Serena might have made. His mouth drew down slightly, then he noticed the laughter lurking in her eyes, and his lips turned up. Something inside him seemed to unclench. She was going to be all right. The fear and uncertainty no longer shadowed her eyes. The bruise on her cheek had faded, as had the swelling on her temple. Even her memory was returning, and though it boded no good for him, for her sake he wanted her to become Serena again.

Interrupting his train of thought, she said gaily, “Oh, don’t worry, Julian! I’m well aware that you would have no patrons if gaming was as demure as taking tea in my dainty little parlor.” Her brows pulled together. “Now where did I hear that before?”

“Don’t press yourself,” he advised gently. “You heard the doctor. Everything will come back to you in time.”

He was to repeat those words to her several times during the course of the day. He was amazed at her forbearance. If he had been the one to lose his memory, he knew he would have been beside himself with frustration, and the Serena he knew would have been in no better shape. But this was Victoria, a charming, vivacious creature who was determined to be pleased with her new husband and everything about him—his house, his servants, the way he earned his living—and she refused to allow a mere temporary loss of memory to spoil things for them.

It gave him food for thought. Mistrust and hostility had dogged their acquaintance almost from its inception. Is this how it might have been between them if they had met under different circumstances? Was Victoria merely a side of Serena that he had never been privileged to meet? His next thought followed naturally from that. If he could have one or the other, Serena or Victoria, which one would it be?

He was still humorously debating the question later that evening. They were in Julian’s bookroom, lingering over coffee, having enjoyed an excellent dinner prepared by his housekeeper and her husband. The Forrests were really caretakers, and the only servants on the premises. On the grounds of the house, which had come to Julian by way of a gaming debt, there were many more servants, guards in fact, posing as gardeners and gamekeepers, to ensure that no one either entered or left his domain without his consent. It was for Serena that he’d taken these precautions. They were hardly necessary for Victoria.

“Tell me how we met,” she invited as she replenished his coffee cup.

“You heard Dr. Ames,” he temporized. “It’s best not to force memories on you. All in good time, Victoria.”

There was a flash in her eyes that reminded him of the old Serena, and he felt himself rising to the challenge. Then she was all sweetness and light again, and he was oddly disappointed.

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Then tell me about yourself. How did you become a gambler? Surely there can be no objection to telling me that?”

He never talked about himself if he could help it. He was on the verge of changing the subject when he checked himself. The time would come when he would have to explain his actions toward her father. She might not accept those actions, but at the very least he wanted her to understand that right was on his side. The trouble was, Serena would never give him a hearing. This was a chance that might never come again.

“It was either gaming or a life of prostitution,” he told her flatly. “Oh yes, Victoria, prostitution. Didn’t you know that young boys are much in demand as prostitutes?”

She didn’t know, as he could tell from her shocked expression. When the shock of his words Had faded he said more gently, “It’s not a pretty story. Are you sure you want me to go on?”

“I want to know everything about you,” she said.

“Even if it gives you a thorough disgust of me?”

She smiled at this. “Nothing could ever give me a disgust of you.”

If only she were Serena and not Victoria, those words would have counted for something. Smiling cynically, he began by relating the circumstances of his early years.

“Then, when I was thirteen,” he said at one point, “I was sent to the parish workhouse with my family.”

He told her nothing that could possibly connect him to her father, nothing about the vendetta which had brought his family to ruin. That could wait until later, after their
marriage had become an incontrovertible fact, and not before retribution had finally caught up with Sir Robert. Time would work in his favor.

As his story progressed, his voice became less confident. Sometimes he hesitated before going on. There were several long stretches of silence when he had to search for words to explain himself. At last, the story was told. He stopped suddenly and stared at her with something like mockery in his expression.

She lifted her head, and gazed at him reflectively. He had spoken with a deep, moving bitterness, far different from anything she had ever heard in him before. Memories were skirting the edges of her mind, and though they did not materialize into anything substantial, she knew that he had never before confided so much to her. Judging, correctly, that though he had confided in her, he would scorn her pity, she said simply, “I told you that nothing could ever give me a disgust of you.”

The cynical mockery in his expression faded, and his eyes bored into hers. She had a flash of recall; strong masculine hands were molding her soft curves to the hard planes of his body. Pleasure hovered as he locked her to him in an unyielding embrace. He was remembering it too. She could see it in his eyes. Then he was turning away, reaching for his cup, asking her in a matter-of-fact voice to refill it for him. With shaking fingers, she hastened to obey.

As time passed, Julian had less and less to say for himself. He had opened a door better left closed, not because he regretted her knowing about the life he had led, but because
it
wrapped the two of them in a warm cocoon of intimacy, making them susceptible to each other. She was Victoria, not Serena, and that made her the wrong woman.

His body did not know the difference. It had carnal
knowledge of her body, and would not let him forget it. He knew that his chest was rising and falling, and that his breath was coming more rapidly. He felt the fierce stir of his senses, his blood growing hot, his heart pounding. He was possessed by lust and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, not when he knew that he was having an effect on her too.

Those blue eyes that could sizzle with temper were meltingly soft, drawing him in. Her lips were slightly parted, and against the flimsy material of her bodice, the outline of her nipples was clearly evident. She was Victoria, and if he laid a finger on her, Serena would exact a terrible price for taking an unfair advantage.

But Serena was not here.

Losing patience with himself, he set down his cup and saucer and rose to his feet. “Go to bed,” he told her harshly. “I have things to do. Don’t wait up for me. I may not turn in for some hours.”

In the hall, he grabbed his cloak and went out into the dark windswept night.

J
ulian awakened to the rattle of glass or china and the tread of feet padding about in the adjoining chamber, Serena’s chamber. Every muscle in his body was tense. The short, narrow trundle bed which he occupied in the little dressing room was definitely not up to his usual standard. He shifted to his side and noted that it was still as black as pitch outside the window. Turning his head on the pillow, he glanced in the direction of the door. A crack of light from Serena’s chamber spilled under it. Reaching for his robe to cover his nakedness, he went to investigate.

She was perched on the edge of the bed, drinking a glass of milk. Beneath the thin fabric of her nightshift, he could clearly distinguish the outline of her full breasts. His throat tightened as desire swept through him.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked.

She looked at him carefully, searchingly, then patted the bed, inviting him to sit close to her. “I wakened and could not get back to sleep,” she said, “so I went down to the kitchen and fetched a biscuit and a glass of milk.”

When he sat beside her, he was careful to leave a small space between them. In the silence, he heard his own breathing and odd little sounds of the house settling and what might have been rain outside the window. Not since he had taken his first woman had he felt so inept and ill at ease or, conversely, so dangerously close to disgracing himself. When she set aside the glass from which she had been drinking, his heart began to pound against his ribs.

For a moment, she seemed uncertain. Her eyes slipped
away from his. When she looked up, her stare was direct and steady. “I’ve remembered something,” she said.

“What?” His voice was hoarse. Somehow or other, she had dispensed with the careful distance he had set between them. Her knee was grazing his.

“We were lovers before we came here.” The pupils of her eyes grew large as she subjected him to another searching look. “I’ve been thinking about it since I wakened. That’s why I can’t sleep. It was good between us. I know it was good between us. But now it seems you don’t want me. I wish you would tell me what I have done to displease you. Or better yet—tell me how to please you.”

The silence was charged. He could sense her arousal. Like a summer heat haze, it clung to him, filling his mouth, his nostrils, entering his pores, his bloodstream. He was steeped in her arousal.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he got out hoarsely. He could scarcely think coherently for the battle that was raging inside him. She was willing. He was eager. What was there to stop him?

It was dishonest. She would despise him. If only she were Serena.

She touched her fingers to the furrow on her brow, smoothing it away in a gesture he remembered, a Serena gesture. “I was so sure. I can’t be imagining it. It’s so real to me.”

“What is it you think you remember?”

Another long, searching look. Whatever she thought she saw in his expression emboldened her. She pressed a hand to her abdomen. “Longing so intense, I think I shall die from it. I ache for want of you. You, me, and—” She broke off as horror welled in her. “Don’t say it wasn’t you!”

Ah
.  .  .
damn!
He bent his head and brushed his lips against hers. “Of course it was me.”

He kissed her with all the pent-up passion of a man who had been celibate too long. It was more than a kiss. He made love to her mouth, fusing their lips together, filling her with the thrust of his tongue the way he wanted to fill her with the thrust of his body. When she drooped against him, he groaned.

Just one kiss, he promised himself. One kiss, then he would remind himself of all the excellent reasons why this must go no further. But as the kiss lingered, mouth devouring mouth, rational thought deserted him. His body was aching with awareness of her body. He wanted his hands on her. His hunger was uncontrollable, responding to the hunger he felt in her.

She moved and he found himself lying alongside her, pushing her back into the pillows. When they pulled apart, they were both gulping for air.

This time, he wasn’t going to take her with all the finesse of a rutting stag. This time, there would be cherishing-and pleasuring. This time he would make sure that he brought her to completion.