Laura Kinsale (51 page)

Zenia began to tremble. “That is superstitious nonsense.”

“Did you really think you could marry Jocelyn and live your paltry life in Bentinck Street? Did you think I wouldn’t haunt you and maul you to the death if you did it? I would not let you slip out of my claws. Look where you are at this moment.”

“Enough talk of demons! It’s Elizabeth you want, not me!”

“Elizabeth is made of you and me. And you’ve been mine since I dragged you up in the dark outside Dar Joon, crying that you saw a djinni.”

She remembered the night and the demon coming for her; the sound of hooves and then his voice. Her whole body was shaking.
It is the cold,
she thought, but his heat radiated into her.

“All my life has been a hunt,” he murmured into her shoulder and throat. “I’ve hunted for you over half the earth, and hell too. Bentinck Street is not nearly far enough to run.”

She gasped, “I’m afraid of you.”

He gripped her closer, his arm about her neck. “I tried to be a civilized creature. I tried to live your safe little life, and you ran to Mr. Jocelyn when I couldn’t be what you want. Now I’m what I am, and I’ll make you what you are.
 
I don’t plan to be merciful.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The snow was flying so thick that she could only see the cottage as a glowing window in a black shape below them. It sat under the lee of a hill, a sudden lull in the wind, so that the flakes fluttered down gently instead of driving past as he guided the mare down the slope.

A few black-faced sheep huddled in the wind-shadow of the house, rising quickly to their feet and staring. He halted before the door, loosening his hold on her, his cloak crackling with icy stiffness. She gave a sharp whimper as her numbed toes struck the ground.

‘There’ll be a fire inside,” he said briefly. “I’ll put the mare in the lean-to.”

Zenia could hardly make her fingers close as she pulled back the latch. But there was a startling transformation inside the thick stone wall—outside was desolation: hurtling snow and near darkness; inside was an orange glow and the smell of warm bread, the fire leaping in the huge brick hearth as if it had only recently been fueled.

Its light showed the whitewashed walls of one room: clean but haphazardly furnished with scarred chairs of ornate design, mended and re-mended, their gilt worn away except in the deepest cracks. A four-poster bed with three thick, heavily carved bedposts and one plain spar was hung with mismatched curtains, some of watered sky-blue silk and some a faded brown check. A thick Turkish carpet laid over the flagstone floor showed the same hand-me-down history, apparently perfect except for one large corner that the bed could not quite conceal, burned away to an uneven, blackened edge.

Sweet-smelling loaves of bread lay on the table in a floury pile. As Zenia stood with her cloak and bonnet drooping and thawing, her hands and feet in agony with the return of warmth, a white cat stared at her from the red damask seat of one of the armchairs. It stood up, revealing a cat-shaped depression in the upholstery. Zenia gazed back at it, dazed with exhaustion and cold and hunger, hardly able to think what to do first.

Hinges squealed as Lord Winter pushed aside a long curtain and came in through the door beyond the hearth, a strange figure, snow-crusted, alien to this English setting in his colored desert robes and kuffiyah bound about his head by a gold-and-black cord. He dumped a load of wood by the fire, loud clunks that made the cat leap up onto a window-sill. Ice fell from his cloak in small rushes onto the hearth.

Layers of wool and silk could be warm enough, even in the sharp frozen nights of the northern deserts, but they did not keep out the wetness. His black hair was damp, clinging in curls to the back of his neck as he pulled off the headscarf.

“You may stand there dripping if you like,” he said, facing the fire, “but I am going to strip down to a dry layer.”

Zenia looked about, already aware that there was no privacy here, short of joining the horse in the lean-to. She watched, shivering, as he pulled the robes over his head, down to an English shirt and breeches under it all. As he emerged from the last long white desert gown, he looked over his shoulder at her.

“I told you I wasn’t feeling merciful,” he said. “Shall I undress you before you catch your death, or will you do it yourself?”

Zenia pulled the bedraggled ribbon on her bonnet free. “I suppose it does not occur to abductors to provide dry clothes for their victims.”

He waved at the bed. “You may have all the quilts you like.”

With a surge of irritation, Zenia hung her bonnet and cloak on the hook beside the door and sat down, unlacing her boots to free her aching feet. He knew her, after all—quite every inch of her. What point was there in privacy? She worked to reach her buttons, but what was difficult in any case proved impossible with numb and clumsy fingers. She made a sound of frustration, turning away toward the bed.

“You must undo them,” she snapped.

He came up behind her and released the buttons and hooks. Zenia stared at the bed, her chin lifted, ready at any moment to step away if he attempted to make love to her.

He did not. He only said, untying her corset, “I don’t know how you can bear this rig.”

It was far from her favorite item of Frankish clothing, but she said nothing. When it was all loose, she leaned over, dragging the dress over her head. She spread it carefully over a chair to dry and laid the corset across another.

She could feel him watching her. She still had more clothing on than she had ever worn with him in
the desert, layers of petticoats and two shifts, one of thick linsey-woolsey, but there was something about the way that he stood still, an artificial stiff casualness in his stance, that made her well aware that she was offering a provocative picture.

So, she thought angrily, let him be provoked. As for his great worldwide search for Zenia—he had not even recognized her for a female the first three months she had known him. And she was too tired and shaken to spend energy on bashfulness. After such cold, the warmth seemed to wrap about her, seeping into her brain. She did not care if it was immodest; she only wanted to dry before the fire.

As he sat down, chasing the cat from its red damask chair, Zenia bent to pull off her petticoats and the damp woolen shift. For an instant the air felt cool on her bared skin, sending an uncontrollable shiver down her back. She could feel her breasts fill the linen undershift as she leaned over and lifted its skirt, releasing her garter.

He stood up again, with a faint curse under his breath. Zenia stretched out her leg and rolled her wet stocking down it.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Extremely,” she said, without looking up as she sat down and worked the stocking from her toe.

After a moment, a cracked plate adorned by the familiar Belmaine arms hit the table beside her with a chunk. It had a piece of bread and dollop of butter on it. A glass of cider from a small keg arrived with the same brusque thump.

Zenia ate, wriggling her cold bare toes, wincing at the pain. She glanced up to find him gazing at her with a look that burned like the painful new warmth in her limbs.

“What is this place?” she asked, avoiding his eyes.

“I used to come here to shoot,” he said briefly. “Red grouse.”

“What do you intend to do with me?”

“Marry you, little wolf. Unless you drive me to worse.”

“And what is worse?” she inquired acidly. “Your contract in which I’m to go to the Continent, or else be prosecuted for fraud?”

He looked at her sharply. “You saw that?”

“Of course I saw it. Mr. Jocelyn explained everything about it to me. Everything.”

He swore softly. “You were not meant to see it. It was a mistake.” His eyes slid away from hers. “I mean for us to marry.”

“So that you may take Elizabeth if you please.”
 

“Damn you, I mean for us to marry,” he said angrily.
 

“Will you force me?”

“Yes.” He made a hard chuckle through his teeth. “Oh, yes.”

“You can’t,” she said. “It is not legal.”

He smiled coldly. “You’ve been listening to too many lawyers.” He sat back in the chair opposite, the soft high collar of his shirt falling open. With a slow look beneath his lashes at her, he said, “And you’re living dangerously, for a reluctant woman.”

Zenia turned away to the fire, watching the orange and yellow flames that cast shadows across his drying robes and her dress.

“But I think you like living dangerously,” he murmured. “I think you’re not quite the demure little lady Mr. Jocelyn believes.”

“I am a lady. I can be one.”

“A lady,” he said, “would not sit there in her shift with a man who isn’t her husband. A lady would have swooned aboard that train, not damned me while she threw herself in my arms. A lady,” he said with particular emphasis, “does not intentionally show her garters.”

“Did I ask you to stop a train?” she demanded vehemently. “Did I ask you to make a target of yourself for anyone who wants to shoot at you? Did I ask you to carry me for miles in a snowstorm, until I’m half-frozen and soaked to the skin? Did I ask you to steal my letter and send me on this preposterous journey?” She stood up, her voice rising sharply. “What choice do you ever give me in your madness?”

“Why, Miss Bruce, I had barely inaugurated the most decorous courtship, planned, scheduled and approved by A Lady of Quality and conducted entirely by the book—” He rose too, leaning across the table—”when what to my dismay I discover you asking another man to wed you, by God!” He slammed his fist on the table. “So
that
for your damned gentlemanly behavior! Perhaps it works with real ladies, but it’s a smashing disaster with you!”

“Because you are not meant to court me! Marry Lady Caroline! Marry someone who can go with you and be what you want!”

“I want you!”

“That’s a lie!
 
You want Elizabeth, and I can keep her from you!”

“Damn you!” he roared, moving around the table so aggressively that she backed up until she felt the fire behind her. “You’re just like your mother!”

“I’m
not!”
 

“Worse than your mother! At least she was honest about it. You want your stranglehold and a halo too!”

“I’m not worse than my mother!” she shouted, dragging her wet hair back as it fell across her face.

“Aren’t you? Listen to you! Your father told me that she screamed at him until he left! She drove him off; I’ll wager she rode him until he couldn’t bear it, all that fine talk about how she would ruin his prospects, that drivel about her pride; Christ, and she knew she was carrying his child—I’ll swear she drove him off the same way you’re doing to me, hot and cold until I can’t endure it! Because she had to be the master, she couldn’t bear to let anyone else have a hold on her, she had to be the one in control of everyone and everything, and if she couldn’t control it, she broke it or killed it or fought it till she died.” His blue eyes glittered, his lashes still holding tiny beads of melted ice. “The way you fight me. The way you come when I’m too weak and out of my senses to talk, and then go off when I’m able—go off and marry Jocelyn!
Jocelyn!”
he yelled. “When were you going to tell me? When it was too late? For God’s sake, Zenia! For God’s sake.” He shook his head, sitting down and leaning on his hands. “I would have put a bullet through my brain.”

She stared at him. “It’s Elizabeth you want.”
 

He gave a hoarse laugh, not lifting his head. “Of course I want her. Of course. I want to see her grow up, I want to know her. Why does that make me the greatest fiend in nature?”

“Because,” she whispered, “you will take her away and leave me alone.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know how to make you trust me.”

“I wanted to.” Her lips quivered. “I wanted to. I was trying,” she said. “But then I saw you with Lady Caroline. I saw the way you looked at her when she talked of being free. And I know I don’t dare!”

He lifted his head. “How did I look?”

“As if—she were a goddess.”

“A goddess.” He rose, the firelight casting soft shadows over his tall figure. “Oh, a goddess,” he said casually. “Of the philosophical variety, do you mean? The Greco-Roman sort, that dress in damped muslin and hold up torches for liberty, and make rather imposing statues? Is this how I looked at her? Rather pious as I worshipped freedom at her feet?”