Once in a Blue Moon (42 page)

So the milestones clicked by in silence as they drove through grass golden with celandines and dandelions, past farmers' fields squared and planted into a myriad of greens and yellows, like a piece of stamp work. The roads were dry at first, and they threw out a fog of dust that settled on the hedgerows, turning them white. But then it started to rain. He was aware of every breath she took, but she wouldn't look at him.

When she fell asleep, almost tumbling out of the high-perch phaeton, he stopped for a few hours' rest. He didn't dare leave her alone, so he sat in a chair beside the meager peat fire, while she lay fully clothed on top of the truckle bed. They were right above the taproom, and the floor shook with shouts and drunken laughter. She didn't sleep. She lay there, still and silent in the dark, and he could feel her big, haunted gray eyes watching him.

When at last they got to Gretna Green, he paid the witness well to ignore a negative response to the all-important question of whether she was there of her own free will. But it hadn't been necessary. The single word hadn't been loud, but it had been an unmistakable "yes." Too late he realized he had only his signet ring to place on her left hand. Once it was on, she had to curl her fingers to keep it from falling off.

"What God has joins t'gether," the witness had finally said, "let no man puts asunder." And she was his.

He could have wished for a more elegant bridal chamber. The room was furnished with a tester bed with faded green hangings, a small clothespress, and a muted Turkey carpet. The pink grogram curtains at the window contributed the only note of cheeriness to the room.

She went immediately to the window as soon as they had crossed the threshold, keeping her back to him. He doubted she had much to look at. It was a dark, weeping day. Aside from being the place for clandestine marriages, Gretna Green wasn't known for its points of scenic interest. A few stone cottages, a small grove of firs, a little wooden bridge over the river.

He coaxed a reluctant blaze from the smoking fire, then used a paper spill to light the candles in the iron sconces. A pair of plaster figurines, a shepherd and his shepherdess, sat atop the mantel, and he stared at them for a long time, as if they could speak and tell him how he was going to get his wife into his bed if she didn't want to be there.

He joined her at the window, standing at her back, close enough to touch her, though he did not do so. He stared at the top of her bent head. He wanted to press his lips to the center part, looking white and vulnerable in the fire of her hair, but he didn't do that either. Instead he tried several sentences out in his mind before he settled on the most direct one. But when he went to speak, he discovered that his lungs must have forgotten how to work.

He sucked in a deep, hitching breath. "Jessalyn... I would very much like to make love to you."

She fingered the lace trim on the curtain. "I didn't think it necessary for a husband to ask permission before he takes his wife."

"I don't want to
take
you...
I
want you willing."

"Willing!" She spun around so fast he took a step back. "And so you abducted me from the altar just as I was about to be married to another man? You wanted me, and you took me without even bothering to ask how
I
felt about it." She slammed a fist at her chest so hard the white floral wreath slipped over her forehead. She pulled it off, staring at it with those haunted gray eyes, and he thought surely that he was damned. She shuddered as she drew in a great, sobbing breath. "Oh, blast you, McCady, you don't know what you have
done."

Her face was the white of a fresh snowfall, dusted with gold flakes. Her hair, dark with damp, was like the last leaves of autumn. He saw himself reflected in the clear tidal pools of her eyes. Her beauty made him ache. He was going to start begging soon. He was going to be down on his knees soon and begging her to let him lay his head on her breasts, to lie between her legs, to taste of her mouth.

"I couldn't let him have you, Jessalyn," he said, his throat raw. "I know that I am worthless, a degenerate Trelawny buried in debts. But you're all I've ever wanted out of this life, the only thing I will ever need. Without you I have no reason to live." He held his hands up to her, spreading them in supplication, and they shook as if he had an ague. "I have no pride left. You have it all."

Her head cocked to one side, and her wide mouth trembled. But her voice was thick with feeling, and her words lit up his dark soul. "You silly goose," she said.

And she went into his arms.

He smelled the rain in her hair, and then he was tasting the rain on her lips. And then he was smothering her mouth in a delicious tongue-sucking kiss.

He had wanted to make love to her slowly, to savor her like fine aged wine. But his need was too great. She owned him, did this scrawny carrottop with her rusty laugh and her wide, wet mouth; she owned him body and soul. And he wanted something back from her, even if it was only the hot, exploding pleasure of spilling his seed inside her, long and deep.

He thrust her away from him. "Get undressed," he said, his voice rough because he wanted her so damn badly. "Now."

She stared at him for several heartbeats, her eyes solemn with that deep emotion that he could never plumb and that had always frightened him. Then she turned and lifted her hair off her neck so that he could unhook her bodice. She lowered her head, and his gaze was caught by the white nape of her neck. He kissed the small, protruding bone and felt her silken skin ripple beneath his lips.

His fingers worked at the hooks. "I hate this dress," he said, his breath rustling the tiny wisps of hair that fanned her neck. "You wore it for him."

"No." The word was soft as a sigh. "Not for him, McCady. I simply wore it, that is all."

The dress pooled around her feet in a whisper of gray silk. His hands clasped her slender waist, and he turned her to face him. She wouldn't look at him. Her fingers became entangled in the ribbons of her shift. It was all tucks and frills and lace, and she had put it on for Tiltwell, not for him, so he hated it as well. He shoved her hands roughly aside, and hooking his fingers into the lacy yoke neck, he ripped it down the middle.

Her breasts spilled free, and he caught them in his hands. A harsh groan tore from her throat. She shuddered violently and fell against him, and he gathered her into his arms and carried her to the bed.

He fell with her across it, rolling her onto her back, pinning her down with his weight. Her eyes stared up at him, two molten silver pools, and he saw within them his surrender. And his triumph.

"You are mine," he said. "My wife."

Her hair spilled over the pillow like a pool of canary wine. He buried his face in it, and her scent filled him, made him sigh. "Primroses," he said. "You always smell of primroses."

He shifted his hips, trying to ease the agony between his legs. He had never felt so enormous, so hard. He was going to have to take her now. He couldn't bear it. Later there would be time to taste the silken skin on the backs of her knees, to run his tongue along the underside of her breast and take her nipple between her teeth, to trace the smooth curve of her bottom with his lips. Later.

His fingers struggled with the drawstring of her drawers. "Damn this thing."

"Don't rip it, McCady."

"No... Hell! No, I've got it." He tugged, and she lifted her hips so that he could get rid of the offending garment. He left her stockings on because he thought she looked deliciously wanton that way—gloriously naked except for those thin bits of silk covering her coltish legs and the frilly white garters tied around her slender thighs. He spread her legs wide with his knees and then knelt between them.

He looked down at her, and with reverence and a strange sense of possession, he cupped her fiery mound. He slid a finger inside her, and God, but she was so hot and dripping wet. For him, she was hot and wet for him. Something squeezed his chest and brought the sting of tears to his eyes. It wasn't lust, or only lust. But he didn't want to understand it, so he thrust the thought of it away.

He straightened enough to unbutton his breeches and pushed them down over his hips. His sex sprang free, but he felt no relief. He was hard and aching, and when her hand closed around his thick length, he nearly shouted. She squeezed and pulled, forcing him to grow harder, thicker, and his breath hissed out his tight throat in a shattering groan.

He stilled her hand. "Do you want it now, Jessalyn?"

"Yessss." Her eyes were almost black. Her full mouth wet and parted.

"That's good, that's good. 'Cause now is when you're going to get it."

He braced himself on his outstretched arms so that he could watch her face as he took her. He rubbed the smooth, round tip of himself between the hot, slick lips of her sex, relishing the tiny whimpering noises she was making in the back of her arched throat and the way the white skin of her inner thighs rippled like a wind-licked lake.

He eased into her, stretching her, filling her. Her silk-clad legs wrapped around his hips, sucking him deep, and his breath left him on a keening moan. She throbbed around him, gripping him with the wet, hot mouth of her sex. He lifted his buttocks, almost pulling out of her, then drove into her again and again, stroking her clenching tightness. Again and again, until he was plunging wildly and she was bucking her hips so that with each frenzied thrust he seemed to spear her deeper. A powerful explosion was building within him, like a steam boiler stoked to bursting, and when it came, he knew it was going to kill him, to shatter him into so many pieces he would never be able to put himself back together again.
Not yet, please... oh, God, not yet. Not yet, not yet, not yet...

His head fell back, his lips pulling away from his clenched teeth in a rictus of pleasure and pain. She was turning him inside out, utterly destroying him, and he didn't care. She was heaven and hell and everything in between.

And she was his.

The sun beat down on her straw-bonneted head, and what little breeze there was smelled tartly of brine and seaweed.

Jessalyn Trelawny walked along a beach of sand that was soft and dry, like crushed sugar. She paused to turn over a piece of driftwood with her foot. Stringy seaweed had caught on one end of it, looking like a hank of witch's hair. She started to bend over, to pick it up, but then she let it be.

She'd seen a man on top of the bluff. His tall figure stood silhouetted a moment against a mist-washed horizon the color of fresh cream. He began the climb down the cliff path, and she smiled.
Walk with me on the beach this morning,
he'd said, and she had seen his intent in the heavy, slightly drowsy look that stole into his eyes and the tautness of his face. They had almost wound up doing it then and there, on the table among the coffee cups and toast racks.

Always there was this wanting between them. Dear life, such wanting. They wanted with a hunger as fierce and devastating as a Cornish gale. The kind of gale that blows roofs off cottages and tears up the hedges. The kind of gale that whips through a place and changes forever the lives of those caught in its path. They were helpless before the storm that gripped them.

She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun. He had reached the bottom of the path and was pausing to remove his hat and wipe his brow. Sunlight glinted off golden hair. Jessalyn's breath caught in her throat.

An oyster catcher swooped over her head with a loud cry, before banking toward the cliff in a flash of black wings. Clarence Tiltwell stopped before her, and she was shocked at what she saw. Shadows lay like soot smudges beneath his eyes, and his mouth looked bleak. A fading bruise discolored his jaw. For a moment she pitied him, the boy that he was, the friend that he had once been.

His gaze searched her face, and she had to turn away from the raw pain that glittered in his eyes. "Jessalyn, has he hurt you?"

She shook her head. "No. No, of course not. Clarence, why did you come? Can't you please just leave us alone?"

His head rocked back a little as if she had struck him. "I can't. I love you too much. I never wanted to hurt you or anger you. I only wanted to make you my wife."

"Oh, Clarence..." It was odd, but in spite of what he had tried to do to her, of what he was doing to McCady, she still ached for him. "It's too late."

"It is
not
too late. I can arrange for an annulment. You can say he forced you. All London saw him carry you off."

McCady was coming toward them down the beach, his hitching stride leaving marks in the sand. Her heart swelled with love for him. Her whole body tightened at the memory of his touch. "He would never let me go," Jessalyn said. "I don't want to go. I love him."

Clarence had seen the change come over her face, and his back stiffened. But he didn't turn around. "He will only bring you misery. He's going to prison, Jessalyn. I can make sure of it. What will you do when—"

"I will take rooms near Fleet Street and visit him every day," she said. She knew that McCady could hear her now. She wanted him to hear her. "I will take in piecework; I will paste cigar boxes together; I will sell watercress bunches in Covent Garden. I will do whatever is necessary to live until we can be together again."

Clarence took a step toward her, a baffled, panicky look in his eyes. He gripped her arm as if he would drag her away. "Jessalyn—"

"She is Lady Caerhays to you, Tiltwell. And you will take your hand off her." McCady slipped a possessive arm around her waist and drew her against him. Fear for him, for what would happen made Jessalyn dizzy. She thought she could actually feel her heart slamming in slow, painful strokes against her breast. She cast an imploring look at Clarence, but his gaze was riveted on McCady, and it was black with rage and hate.

"You bastard," he said.

A slow smile curled the earl's mouth. "Actually, I'm not.
My
parents were married... cousin."

Faint tremors shook Clarence's lanky frame. His face had blanched a sickly gray, the color of old wax. "You once made me swear to be good to her, yet you were the one who carried her off and married her over an anvil in a hovel."

"It was a taproom actually."

"Don't you care what you have done to her? You have utterly and completely ruined her."

"The act of a blackguard, I agree. But then I've never claimed to be otherwise. And she is not complaining." He looked at her with drowsy, heavy-lidded eyes, but his arm was squeezing her so tightly the breath was pushed from her lungs. "Are you, Jessa?"

"McCady, don't taunt him, please. It isn't right—"

"She's afraid," Clarence said, and he forced a high-pitched laugh. "Aren't you, my dear? You're afraid I'll tell him about our little agreement."

"Clarence, don't—"

McCady's voice cut across hers. "What agreement?"

"I was to give her your promissory notes on our wedding night. But there wasn't a wedding night, so I still have them. And you have ten days to come up with ten thousand pounds, because after that I'm sticking the bailiffs on you." His hands fisted, and he spoke between tightly held lips. "You have her now, Caerhays, but I shall have her in the end. It is only a matter of time." He spun around on his heel and strode away from them so fast the tails of his coat slapped at his leg and his boots kicked up tiny sprays of sand.

McCady's furious gaze slammed into her like a blow to her chest. "Was he telling the truth?"

"McCady..."

His rough hands wrapped around her arms, and he shook her, hard.
"Was he?"

"I will do anything for you."

He let her go so abruptly she stumbled in the thick sand. "So I see," he said, and there was that sneer in his voice that could be so cruel and cutting. "Including
selling
yourself like some Covent Garden doxy."

"Yes!" She spit the word at him, going up on her toes and leaning into him. "If that is what it took to save you from prison. Is that so terrible?"

"Yes, dammit!" he spit back at her. The sunbursts in his eyes flared with fury and frustration, and something else: a shocking bewilderment, as if she, not he, were the mystery.

She stretched up farther on her toes, going nose to nose with him. "I love you!" she shouted. "I would do anything for you. Why in bloody hell does that make you so angry?"

"I don't know!" he shouted back at her.

He swung away from her and starting walking.

"Where are you going?" she cried after him.

He didn't stop; he didn't even pause. She picked up her skirts and ran after him, wobbling in the heavy sand. "Damn you, McCady, you aren't walking away from me!" She slammed hard into his back, driving him to his knees and knocking her hat off her head. Its wide satin ribbon pulled tight against her throat. She wrenched it off and sent it soaring and tumbling into the marram grass and rocks.

He rolled, pulling her over on top of him. "What the hell—"

"I'll not let you leave!" She thumped his chest with her balled-up fist. "You aren't leaving me again, do you hear me, McCady?" She gripped his hair and slammed her mouth down on his, and it was like setting a torch to black powder. Their mouths clung, possessed, devoured, and when it ended, it was as if a fierce and violent storm had passed through them, leaving them shaken.

Her breath blew against the skin of his neck in harsh gasps. "Never again," she said. She could feel his heart pounding against her chest. "You're not leaving me ever again."

He sucked in a big breath and expelled it in a bigger sigh. "I'm not leaving you, woman. I'm going to Penzance. I was going tomorrow anyway to put the finishing touches on the locomotive. The bloody trials will still happen whether I'm in prison or... or not... dammit!" His sex stirred against her belly. It was thick and hard, and she thought she could feel the heat of it through her clothes and his. She rubbed against him in bold, sensuous circles, and heard his breath catch. "Ah,
God.
Even angry with you, there is this craven, aching need in me—" He cut himself off, and his hands closed around her shoulders to push her off him.

She pressed down hard against him, as if she could fuse their two bodies into one. She ran her tongue across his sullen lower lip. "I will do anything for you, McCady," she said into his open mouth. "Anything. Except stop loving you."

His fingers speared through her hair, pulling her head down for the breath space needed for their lips to connect. His kiss, which began rough and punishing, turned soft and seducing. His mouth moved over hers, parting her lips and inviting himself in. He moaned into her open mouth...

And tore his mouth from hers, pulling his head back. She stared, breathless, at the harsh beauty of his face, but the shadows had consumed the suns in his eyes. "Damn you," he said. "Damn you, for being able to do this to me." He pushed her off him and rolled in one swift, graceful movement to his feet.

And he was gone.

She lay on the sand until the throbbing in her lips subsided. A wide smile broke over her face, and she spread her arms, embracing the world.
He loves me,
she thought.
He
does
love me.
Only the silly goose didn't know how to say it yet.

She shielded her eyes from the harsh glare. The sun was hot; she'd be left with a hundred blasted freckles for McCady to try to lick off. She pushed to her feet, dusting the sand from her skirts.

Nearby a rock thrust out straight and flat from the sand like a shelf, and Jessalyn went to sit upon it. She unbuttoned her gray kid boots and tugged them off, then untied her garters and peeled down her stockings. She dug her bare feet into the wet sand. It flowed between her toes, cool and slick, stirring her like a lover's touch. His touch. She looked out to sea, at a sun-bleached sky where wisps of memories played, like shadow puppets on a wall.

She smiled again as she thought of that long-ago summer, when the morning breeze had touched her cheeks with fleecy softness, and the sea had seemed to pound against the rocks in time with the wild beating of her heart. When every day the sky had stretched above her head, wide and empty and of so intense a blue the soul could not bear it. When she had loved a man with all of her heart and asked for nothing.

The mouth of the blast furnace yawned open, filled with glowing coals that cast an eerie red light throughout the cavernous building. The locomotive sat on a strip of track nearby, the burning embers reflecting in its brightly polished copper box, so that it seemed it had a bellyful of fire.

With its steeply inclined cylinders, it looked crouched and waiting. It looked fast.

The earl of Caerhays leaned against a worktable, deep within the shadows cast by a huge pair of bellows. His booted feet were crossed at the ankles; a lock of mussed hair fell over his forehead. He was in shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing muscular arms that gleamed with sweat. He smelled of spent steam and grease.

His manservant, Duncan, had a splotch of green paint on his square chin, directly below the faint dimple. Both men nursed leather jacks filled with smuggled French brandy. They had been working, but now they were celebrating.

Duncan held a dripping paintbrush poised in the air, then drew a slashing cross through the big green
T
on the boiler. He leaned back on his heels and squinted one-eyed at his masterpiece.

"Comet.
'Tis a proper name, sir. Very fitting."

A muscle bunched in the earl's beard-shadowed cheek. "It was her ladyship's suggestion."

A dull ache settled over his chest. He missed her. She should be here with him, dammit. He had been going to bring her with him, but she had made him so bloody angry. And every time he thought about it, he got angry all over again, and the devil of it was he didn't know
why.
He only knew he wanted to lash out at something—her, Tiltwell, himself. But then the fury would pass and he'd be left feeling empty. And wanting her.

He thrust the thought of her from his head and took another walk around his locomotive. The boiler had been clothed with sheets of felt, covered by tightly stretched canvas that had been stitched by a Mousehole sailmaker and painted a primrose yellow. At Duncan's suggestion they had also painted the wheels a bright grass green. Every bolt and nut and rivet had been lovingly fashioned by hand. It was unlike anything the world had ever seen.

The special copper tubing, designed for a multitubular boiler, which he'd ordered from a manufacturer in Birmingham, had been installed. It was the innovation he'd first thought of six years ago, when he'd been trying to invent a horseless carriage, that day he'd been knocked senseless by a scrawny carrottop with a laughing mouth. The result was now here before him: a boiler much lighter and powerful, made for an engine that would carry passengers and freight on rails across the land.

He hooked his hip back on the edge of the worktable. Duncan joined him, pushing a pile of spanners and bolts aside, leaning back, laying his palms flat on the old scarred wood, and hefting his butt up so that he was sitting on the tabletop, legs dangling over the side. The two men drank in silent harmony for a while; then the earl said, "She is a beauty, is she not, Duncan?" He felt an odd sort of warmth in his chest that he supposed was pleasure at what he'd built. "Sleek and powerful and efficient. Pity I'll likely never know how she goes."