Games of Pleasure (20 page)

“That never occurred to me. I found Jack standing alone, his back toward me, gazing at my mother's roses. I tried to break his jaw with my fist. It was the most dishonorable thing I've ever done in my life, to strike at another man—my own brother—without warning. Yet Jack had learned more than just eroticism in the East. Before my knuckles connected with his face, he whirled and kicked out like a demon. He knocked me out.”

Miracle stared at the heavy church door, every nail bleeding its small trail of rust stains. She wanted only to escape. Why did this story make her feel so frantic? Did he think that a harlot's experiences hardened her for anything? That nothing would shock her? Perhaps he was right. She swallowed the panic and walked back to face him.

“Yet you've forgiven him now?”

“I forgave him almost immediately.” He gave her a wry smile. “It was far more difficult to forgive myself.”

“Why?”

“Because I'd misjudged him so profoundly. That error was a terrible failure of faith, and of love, I suppose.” He leaned his shoulders against the pillar and gazed up into the shadows. “Jack worships Anne as the stream worships the riverbed. She is deeply and forever in love with him. She always was, even when my cousin and I surprised them at the fountain, and so—though he didn't quite know it then—was Jack. My brother didn't hesitate to defy all of us to marry her. So the only real sin was mine: the sin of doubt.”

Miracle shivered. Her pulse wavered as if its rhythms had been permanently distorted by the storm. “I don't know why you told me this. It's such an intimate story to tell to a stranger.”

He didn't move, only pinned her with his dark gaze. “Our relationship seemed intimate enough at the Merry Monarch.”

She glanced away toward the windows, the little panes blurred with rain, hating the storm that had trapped them both here.

“You're such an innocent in the ways of the world, my lord, in spite of all that glory of power and position. No wonder your brother met your outrage with defiance! He knew you could never understand him. You still don't, do you?”

Angry color washed into his cheeks. “What do you mean?”

“You said he'd indulged in every possible erotic exploit as he'd traveled through the East. Your brother knows in his bones that sex with a professional has nothing to do with intimacy. Yet you can't tell the difference. You thought only that he'd become dissolute.”

“He did nothing to disabuse me of that impression.”

“Why should he? Unlike a woman, a young man who makes such choices isn't a harlot, he's a hero. Yet you could judge him only through your Galahad eyes, and so you blinked at the sight of two lovers between the shutters of all your respectable English uprightness. And thus you can only comprehend what happened at the Merry Monarch through the lens of a fairy tale.”

His mouth set, as stubborn as a wayward child's. “I only know what I experienced.”

Miracle walked up to him. “You experienced good sex with a courtesan, that's all. And now you stand there in all your shining armor, prating your ideals of chivalry, and try to demand intimacy?”

He spun about and strode away, his boots echoing harshly. “I doubt that intimacy is something one can demand, but if you deny that any semblance of it exists or ever existed between us, then how the devil is it won?”

Distress beat at her heart. “I don't know! Intimacy isn't something I pursue. I know only how to charm a man into parting with money and jewels and the provision of a roof over my head and food on my table. I do it by satisfying his desires, by fulfilling his fantasies, by sweetening his bad tempers, by making him feel more powerful and alive and infinitely more potent than his friends.”

He strode off down the nave, speaking over his shoulder. “You asked for the truth and I gave it.”

“Then I didn't know what I was asking.”

“And it would seem,” he said, spinning about to face her, “that your judgments are just as rash as any of those of which you would accuse me.”

“Perhaps they are! I owe you my life, but I don't owe you any particular accuracy of judgment.”

“Accuracy? No, I don't expect that. But I think I might lay claim to a little more generosity.”

The temptation to simply trap him into becoming her lover again was almost overwhelming. Miracle clenched her fists and fought against the longing. Had any saint ever fought harder to drive away a treasure in order to avoid mortal sin?

“I am being generous. I don't forget what I owe you. But it's no kindness to pretend to offer more than one can give. Yet why did your memory of this scene with your brother intrude into your thoughts so forcefully when you carried me down from the loft? What the devil did it have to do with me?”

The large cross framed him, the altar standing cold and hard at his back. “I've no idea.”

“Because you understand nothing of your own carnal desires, do you? Yes, you were shocked when you saw your brother and his wife-to-be making love at that fountain, but you were also aroused by it, weren't you?”

“For God's sake!” Beauty threw up her head as her master's voice echoed through the cavernous spaces.

Miracle crouched down at the base of the font. She wrapped both arms about her knees and stared up at the soaring arches, the pure lines of an architecture of devotion: quiet and awe-inspiring and filled with an ancient awareness of the transcendent.

“Why deny it? I don't mean this harshly, Ryder, and no doubt your feelings were overlain very bitterly by your sense of betrayal, by your gallant concern for Anne, by your disillusionment in your brother. But have you ever tossed up a woman's skirts in a garden? Have you ever made frantic love on the edge of a fountain—simply from the urgency of that overwhelming need—while water cascaded unregarded over your head? Or has Galahad only given way to impulsive lust just one time in his life: when a professional seduced him into a haze of forgetfulness, and let him think for a moment that he'd fallen in love?”

“Do you want to make me regret telling you?” His boots rang as he strode back down the aisle toward her.

“No, I want us to be honest.”

“I'm not Galahad. But if I did think for one moment that I might have fallen in love with you, devil take it, then you've just disabused me of any such absurdity.”

“Then don't try to claim that what we shared was true intimacy. I used you. I paid with my body for a horse and a saddle. That's what I do. It's how I survive. And I'm very skilled at it.”

Beauty shied as another drumbeat of thunder rolled across the church roof.

Ice had invaded her bones, freezing the marrow. She must strip him of his romance and his quixotic ideals, and, if she could, she must send him away as soon as possible, for his own sake as well as hers. Yet he stopped in front of her, his boots splattered with mud, his thighs powerful and lean, and his energy hit her with the force of a wave.

“That may be true, yet perhaps I felt that you ought to know that—while I may have misjudged my brother—I won't judge you, whatever you've done. I'm capable of impulsive action in the face of extreme provocation, but I still try to do what's right. I pulled you from the sea with the signs of a beating fresh on your skin. Those bruises still mark your face. Whenever I look at you, they fill me with fresh rage at your attacker. Whether we share intimacy or not, honor makes its own demands.”

She glanced up at all that arrogance and power. Though his force was now blunted by distress, she thought that if she held up her palms, the passion of his soul could warm them.

“And so you felt you must offer me something painful of your own, before you could demand that I tell you what really happened in Dorset? You're more generous than I am, Ryder.”

“Am I? If there's any truth to that at all, perhaps it's only because life has been more generous to me. I have less at risk. Yet there's no kindness in forcing your confidences in exchange for mine. When you wish to tell me the truth, then do so.”

“Don't you see, my lord, that I wish you were not such a good man? For however I might shrink from telling you the truth, now I very definitely owe it. But why do you really want to know?”

“Perhaps you're just a mystery to which I want answers.”

“Mystery? What mystery?”

His ocean-green eyes betrayed only anguish, intense and passionate. His mouth, made for kisses and laughter, was pressed into taut lines of concern. “For God's sake, Miracle! You don't need to be afraid.”

She laughed in open defiance of her own feelings, then picked up the remains of her bread and walked away to give it to the horses. “Why shouldn't I be afraid? I'm trapped between two mad lords and the hangman!”

Jim gulped the crusts from her palm. Beauty took hers with delicate velvet lips, while watching her master from a liquid brown eye.

Ryder strode up to stand behind Miracle. He draped the cloak about her shoulders, holding the fabric close on each side of her chin.

“Hanley isn't mad. Far from it. He calculates everything he does.”

She turned to look up at him. “And you? The perfect knight, hiding his seething passions beneath a frigid coat of shining armor?”

“It doesn't matter what I am.” He gazed down at her as if he looked into the depths of a well. “What matters is what Hanley is. Yes, he'll be remorseless in his quest for revenge over the death of his friend. Yet, though he wouldn't shrink from personal violence if it suited him, at heart the earl's a cold fish.”

Miracle studied his face. “You know him that well?”

“He and I went to the same school.”

“But surely he's some years older than you?”

The chill light cast blue shadows beneath his jaw, glimmered coldly over his cheekbones. “Three, to be precise. Yet we have reason to despise each other. Whenever social occasions force us together now, it's very much the way one cat might acknowledge another.”

“With a certain chilly disdain?”

He turned and walked away. “It's a little deeper than that: more of an intense animosity.”

A bright spark of rage and fear flared beneath her ribs, radiating pain. “You and Lord Hanley are
enemies
?”

“In some sense, yes, I suppose so.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?” She grasped a handful of Jim's mane to steady herself. “God save me from white-clad knights!”

“What difference does it make?”

“Oh, only a little! Of course, you were bound to know him. The peerage consists of a limited number of great families, after all. Yet this particular peer is a personal enemy of yours, though you simply forgot to mention that before.”

“I didn't think it was important.”

“Not important? When you've given Lord Hanley yet another reason to hunt me down: not only to take revenge on the mistress who murdered his best friend, but also to have it out with an old antagonist—yourself!”

He strode back, holding out both hands. “Hanley doesn't know that we're together. Even if he finds out, it would only be to discover that the quarry is now more dangerous than the huntsman.”

“Why? Because you outrank him?”

“No, because he has reason to appreciate that I'm not so easy to intimidate.”

“And this is meant to reassure me?” She hefted her saddle onto Jim's back. “God, I thought you so upright and honest. Now I learn that you've been keeping secrets from me all along.”

“I just told you something that I've never told another living soul.”

“Yes, yes, and it breaks my heart as your brother broke yours. Yet you also neglected to reveal that you're not a disinterested party in all this. It simply slipped your mind to inform me that you've a feud with Lord Hanley. Which—whether you like it or not—makes for a damned dangerous game for the pawns, caught openly on the board as a duke's son masses his snow-white knights against the red men of an earl. It would seem that every man I ever met only wishes to play me for a fool—even Sir Galahad!”

“That's not true!”

She tugged the pony forward and opened the door. The bright scent of wet grass and damp earth poured into the church. The head-stones sparkled as if sprinkled with silver. Miracle scrambled into the saddle and turned the pony's head to the north.

Beauty neighed and tossed her red mane. Ryder set his saddle on her back and buckled the girth. The mare's hooves rang as he led her out of the church.

“That's not true!”
he insisted.

“Then what is true, my lord?” Miracle asked. “That you fell in love with a mirage just before midnight, and will try every scullery maid in the kingdom to find the one female whose foot fits your imaginary glass slipper?”