Miracle (34 page)

Looking into her radiant face, Clayton tried to swallow. "Yes," he answered as softly, though even as he said it, he inwardly cursed himself for the absurdity of even thinking it—of admitting it to her and to himself. "Yes," he repeated. "I would like nothing better than to see you with child.
My
child."

She smiled and her eyes twinkled. In a flash she was suddenly on her feet, tiptoeing like a dancer, exposing her ankles and
slippered
feet, toward the
cheval
mirror, doing her best to pooch out her concave stomach. When that didn't work, she grabbed up a pillow, and before Clayton's bemused eyes, shoved the pillow up under her skirt.

Offering her profile to the mirror, she regarded it first one way, then the other. "Would you think me still comely?" she asked, chewing on one finger. "Would you still make love to me? What, do you think, would you like to name him? Your Grace?"

Like a breath, she was back beside him, her nearness warming him, her scent, like fresh roses, surrounding him, filling up his senses so he felt dizzy. His eyes closed, he lay his head back against the tub, shivering as she ran her fingertips over his face and through his hair. "Your Grace," she murmured, "why do you look so sad? Mayhap the idea of my having your child isn't as pleasant as you would have me believe."

With a low growl, he took her in his arms, forgetting the pillow, and pulled her atop him, into the water, and she did little more than gasp and giggle, then settle onto him, her skirt floating in the water around her thighs. The passion rose inside him. Made him hard. Made his heart pound in his chest, only this time the fierce, erratic beating felt like a knife twisting.

Burying his dripping hands in her hair, he kissed her open mouth, ravaged it with his lips and tongue until she melted against him, arms clinging to his slick shoulders, while he grew bigger and harder between her legs, until she parted her thighs and he pushed his body into hers so fiercely she whimpered in her throat, and struggled, and dug her little nails into the skin of his back.

She wanted pleasure. Instead, he took pleasure. He found it on her wet breasts confined in her blouse. In the tiny, sensitive nub between her legs. He thrust wildly, until the water and pillow feathers roiled onto the floor, until she was clinging to the tub and gritting her teeth, her eyes clamped shut and her fiery hair streaming over her face in limp silken cords.

He climaxed with an intensity that made him cry out, as much with anger as with relief. When he fell back against the tub, spent and winded, Miracle lay upon his chest, her head nestled under his chin, her arms and legs wrapped around him, her wet skirt twisted around her waist. A scattering of tiny white feathers clung to her bare pink buttocks. Only then did he realize the water had grown cold—what little water there was remaining in the tub.

"Does that answer your question?" he asked, finding his throat dry as dust.

Raising her head, she regarded him with her big, blue- green eyes before struggling from the tub and walking gracefully from the room, leaving a trail of water and soaked goose feathers behind her.

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Chapter Thirteen

"Men are odd. Most confusing. They sniff about a woman's skirts with the appetite of a famished hound, and once assuaged grow lethargic with indifference. I wonder if they truly know what it's like to love. I mean, with the entire body and soul. Until it hurts. Do you think so, Chuck? Does he think of me when he's out there, alone, walking? He could have invited me, couldn't he, instead of sneaking away in the middle of the day?"

Chuck the boar wiggled his red snout and grunted for more corn. Miracle hardly noticed. She was too busy staring out over the rolling downs. "And such a beautiful day," she said softly. "A day for picnics. A day for picking flowers. A day for strolling hand in hand with a lover . . ."

Daft girl. She had never been one to dwell on such things. There were candles to be dipped. Soap to be skimmed. Rugs to be beaten. Eggs to be gathered. Where was Agatha?

Such pathetic mooning. Such silly daydreaming. She was acting like a child.

"Mira."

She spilled her bucket of corn to the ground. Chuck pounced on it, tail wringing and hoofed feet scrambling. With a frown, Miracle snatched up the pail and started down the path toward the henhouse.

"Mira,"
John called after her.

Miracle walked faster, her skirt brushing aside flowers that released a spray of perfume into the air.

"You'll have to speak to me eventually," John called, limping after her. "We live in the same house,
ya
know."

"Don't be reminding me, Mr. Hoyt."

Flinging open the henhouse door, Miracle stepped into the coop with so little warning that a half dozen birds exploded into the air, sending a shower of feathers raining over her shoulders. She waved them away and did her best to focus on the line of straw-stuffed crates. Only when the birds had settled down did he call to her softly again.

"If you were aware I was
writin
' the
bleedin
' letters, why didn't
y
a say aught?"

Miracle shoved her hands into the egg pouch on her apron and stared fixedly at Agatha's empty nest. Her eyes burned. She wondered if it were because she was now forced to face the reality that those letters, few as there had been, had not really been from her mother, that Jonathan, her one and only friend, had duped her, or because the man who had, at last, won her heart, would suddenly avoid her like the plague.

"Go away," she croaked, then stomped her foot.

"Would
ya
not have hurt worse had there been
nothin
' at all for the last ten damn years? Why won't
ya
give it up, lass? Let her go."

She sniffed and blew a feather off her nose. "Agatha seems to be missing. Would you know anything about that, too?"

Silence, then some grumbling about a stray, perhaps a fox.

"You've bloody butchered her, haven't you?" she demanded. "Every time you get upset, one of my girls disappears. Agatha was—"

"A
bleedin
' pest. She come
peckin
' after me gonads anytime I come within five feet of her. But, hell, I didn't come here to discuss demented birds with a hate for men."

"Mayhap Agatha had the right idea," Miracle muttered, then stepped from the coop, out into the light and fresh air. John gazed at her with so forlorn an expression, she felt her anger cool. Another time and the grief might have consumed her, left her feeling totally abandoned and disconsolate.

"Tell me this," she said. "Were all of the letters written by you? The early ones, too?"

John opened and closed his mouth, saying nothing.

"Never mind." Stepping around him, she moved up the path, back to the house.

"Will
ya
be
takin
'
yer
ridin
' lesson on Napitov?" he asked.

"You may tell Ismail that I will not be riding Nap this morning."

The candles wouldn't dip. No matter how many crushed flower petals she added to the soap, it came out smelling like hog fat. She burned the bread. Discovered one of her pet rabbits had escaped its hutch and devoured the cabbage she had marked for supper.

She couldn't concentrate, but found herself staling off into space, her mind vacillating between Salterdon and her mother.

Would he turn out to be another lord Cavendish—a seducer of innocence who, with his caddish charm and good looks had corrupted a squire's daughter, then, forced to marry her because of a child, had deposited his naive wife off in some rambling old castle as far away from his family and peers as he could get? Oh, yes, she knew the story. Johnny had already confessed the entire fiasco, but that had been a mere few years ago, back when she still adored her deceased father's memory. She supposed Johnny had felt that her obsession with one ghost, meaning her mother, was enough to deal with. Well, at least he had been honest about that.

She wandered the castle, rooms she had not frequented in years. There was her mother's favorite, a cavernous chamber that had once been the great hall. The towering ceilings and stone walls had offered
Lorraina
the perfect setting for her music. For hours, Miracle would sit on a little pillow on the floor (
Lorraina
would allow no other furniture in the room) and listen to her mother play the pianoforte. The notes would reverberate hauntingly off the old stone and polished mahogany floor. With her beautiful white face uplifted toward the ceiling, her red hair spilling down her back, she was the most beautiful woman Miracle had ever seen; she prayed every night that she would grow up to become half as lovely, as kind, as forgiving . . .

The pianoforte, silent since her mother's disappearance, still stood in the center of the room, covered with a dusty cloth, and in the far corner near the window overlooking the sea was a child's pillow.

Miracle turned from the room, slamming the door behind her. She moved hurriedly down the corridor, past closed doors entombing childhood memories that she refused to liberate. Faster and faster she went, fleeing the silence and emptiness.

Odd how the silence and emptiness had not felt so looming and suffocating until the last few days—all because of him, because he had filled up a place in her days and nights, made himself necessary to her existence. She had not wanted to fall in love with him—oh, no!—because everyone she had ever loved had abandoned her. Love was an emptiness—a loneliness—a treasured possession that, once lost, left a wound in one's heart that never healed.
Never.

Ismail ran from his tent as she entered the courtyard. She ignored him, but walked fast to Napitov, who nickered softly upon seeing her. She mounted, dug her heels into his sides, and within minutes they were flying down the beach, his steel-silver mane whipping her face, his nostrils blowing, his breath roaring. They splashed through the waves; exploded through a gathering of gulls on the ground.

She searched everywhere for Salterdon, little caring that a scattering of village folk stopped to watch her in her maddened rush across the down. They thought her insane anyway, and it no longer mattered if they saw her horses, because Salterdon had already discovered them. Her secret was out.

At dusk, they arrived at Saint Catherine's Hill.

Salterdon stood far out on the rocks, his back to her, the water churning around the boulders beneath his feet. Her heart pounded with relief. It raced with anticipation.

She slid from her horse and ran the perilous distance, leaping from stone to stone, boulder to boulder, her dress hem becoming wet with sea spray. "Hello!" she called, but he didn't turn. Perhaps the wind had cast her voice asunder. "Hello!" she called more loudly, cupping her hands around her mouth.