Seducing the Beast (29 page)

Maddie turned her face away rather than choke on the thick scent, but his wife’s mouth was barely two inches from her ear.

“He tore off my gown and held me down on the bed, as Wickes did to you.”

Moving back, she was trapped against the bed post. The woman’s lips loomed closer again, her features contorted and suddenly ugly.

“His strength overpowered me. His weight on top of me, all hard muscle. He thrust his way into me. Again and again.” Her fingertip brushed Maddie’s cheek and slowly along her jaw. “And again.” Cruel breath scorched her face. “And again.”

She remembered how he’d once told her he was born of duty and hate. He was a Swafford, a stickler for tradition. Outraged by his brother’s marriage, he might change his mind about needing another heir. Duty always came first. And this woman was still his wife. His pregnant wife. He refused to discuss his wife and perhaps this was why, but if it happened, it was not the way she claimed. He would never have forced himself on her.

“How long does he plan to keep you here?” the Countess inquired, her tone nonchalant.

I’ll stay forever; I’ll never leave him.
Nothing came out.

“What is your name, girl?”

Again, nothing.

“Speak up, chit!” Her pupils shrank, her fat mouth quivered and tensed as the silence further baited her fury. “My husband clearly sets out to embarrass me by picking someone like you for his concubine, instead of any of those women he might have had from court. At least, if you were of a better class and educated, I might have had a conversation with you. Still, I don’t suppose he keeps you for conversation, does he? Your talents must lie elsewhere, and I see you’re easily kept content with various…” she surveyed the rose-embroidered stockings again, “…catchpennies.” Laughing quietly, she walked to the bed and retrieved her calfskin gloves. “Ridiculous creature, you are too stupid to live. If I were you I would say nothing of our visit.” Her deadened eyes skimmed the rumpled bed, her lips bending stiffly. “My husband would not like to know his little whore spent the afternoon servicing his valet, but I could give a very entertaining description of how I walked in on the two of you.” She paused, slapping the gloves against her open palm. “Not to mention what you’ve been up to with that rough-necked gardener, behind my husband’s back. You don’t want to get him dismissed do you?”

Having thoroughly insulted and belittled Madolyn, she now added jauntily, “I’ll return shortly and I’ll want my chamber back. Perhaps Gregory can find you a room with the other servants--if you’re still here by then.”

She was gone, leaving a thick cloud of her disgusting scent behind.

Madolyn bolted her door and sat on the bed to collect her thoughts. The terrifying memory of Wickes’s attack made her blood seethe and her skin crawl, yet the words burned into her mind by the countess were far more deadly. They wanted her hurt and crushed, but she would not be. At least, she wouldn’t show it. The countess had come to warn her husband’s mistress of her lowly place, she understood that. But she was willing to share her husband? It was incredible. Of course, she reminded herself angrily, these were people from another world; the nobility lived by their own rules and had no real feelings. It was possible his wife wouldn’t care if he shared his bed with another woman. Madolyn would care, that was the difference. She could never belong in his world.

Ridiculous creature, you are too stupid to live.

If she told Griff what had happened, he would kill Wickes, she had no doubt of it, but would he blame her too? He was such a distrusting beast and thought ill of her most of the time, even when she was completely innocent. If it was her word against Wickes and the countess, who would he believe? He’d laughed at her before when she’d expressed her suspicions. Wickes and the countess could make up any evil lie and have Luke dismissed.

And Griff’s wife was with child.

Her stomach writhed. She felt hot, clammy. The room spun.

She closed her eyes and somehow she breathed.

This was no time for Maddie the Merciless to lose courage. She needed it now more than ever.

Later, Jennet came up to find her. Apparently the men were still busy with the roan mare.

Using the excuse of a bad stomach ache, Madolyn asked for a tray of supper to be brought to her room. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts and couldn’t face him again, until she had it all straight and orderly in her head.

The next morning, he came to her chamber door, thumping on it with his armored knuckles until she let him in.

“I heard you were indisposed with belly ache and could not get out of bed?”

It was the excuse she’d used to avoid him that morning, but it was partially true. She still didn’t feel her usual brave self. Nauseous and tired, she’d lain awake most of the night, making calculations in her head, trying to count how long she’d been in Dorset, how many weeks it had been since her last courses.

He entered her room without invitation and prowled after her as she restlessly skipped out of his way and his clutches. “You look healthy enough to me,” he purred throatily, reaching for her. His chestnut hair was disheveled, his shirt laces opened. Evidently he’d never been to bed or even changed out of clothes from the night before. He smelled of horse, hay, blood and worse.

And damn him, he was still irresistible.

Disgusted by this weakness, she dodged aside and scurried back to the bed, grabbing a loose robe from the chair as she passed, pulling it on over her nightshift and clasping the ruffled lace collar around her neck in a chaste manner. The gesture struck her as humorous and much too late, but it suddenly felt necessary.

“I think you’d better dismiss Wickes,” she said. The new valet’s quiescent evil was another cause of her sickness and deflated spirits.

His brow wrinkled. “Because you don’t like the look of him?”

Clasping her ruffles tighter, she managed a tightly wound warning, “Because he means you harm.” She thought of poor Luke, his post now in jeopardy because of her. If she told Griff what had happened yesterday, the countess would ensure the gardener’s dismissal, or worse, if Griff believed the allegations she’d threatened. “I can’t tell you how I know. You’ll just have to believe…” She trailed off, realizing the futility.

Crawling away across the bed, overtaken by another surge of hapless nausea, she slid hastily under the coverlet.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, sounding annoyed.

“Oh I don’t know,” she sputtered. “What could possibly be wrong?” She hadn’t meant to say anything, but it came out, as did many things that shouldn’t. “It couldn’t be your fault, of course, could it?”

Abruptly he sat on the bed. “You haven’t had your….you know…”

“My what?”

“Your….you know…”

“
What
?”

“Your….since we first…?”

His awkward shyness was quite adorable. Pity he was an insufferable, arrogant ogre, who didn’t believe in love. Pity he had a wife. And his wife was with child.

“Don’t you know?” she muttered wryly. After all, they’d hardly spent a night apart.

But he still looked puzzled. Apparently no one bothered men like him with the squeamish details.

“There’s no need to worry. I have the familiar pains now,” she said grandly and mysteriously, fingers still gripping the lace collar to her throat.

“
That’s
what ails you this morning?” His voice shook, she assumed, with relief.

“Yes.” She faltered, feeling guilty for lying.

He stood again and began to pace, fingers splayed through his hair. “If we ever had a child--”

“
We
would not have one,” she replied flatly. “
I
would have a child. It would be mine.”

Staring down at her, he fidgeted with the filthy lace cuffs of his shirt. “You think you could keep it from me?”

“It?” Now she laughed churlishly.

He drew a sharp breath, before his words exploded on the exhale. “My child. My son.”

“Or daughter.”

“One like you?” When the angry creases fell away, he looked young, almost boyish. “God help me.”

“Precisely. Be thankful there is no child, despite your wanton recklessness.” Under duress today she was prim, determined to be mature and composed even if it killed her. Which it might.

His eyes narrowed as he contemplated her on the bed. This time he didn’t argue about who was at fault. “How do I know there is no child? You may try to keep it--the child--from me. I have a right.”

“What right?”

“As the father,” he blustered. “What would you know of raising a child?”

“I’m a woman.”

“You’re a child yourself. You have no discipline. You careen through life expecting everyone else to pick up the pieces.”

“And what do
you
know of raising children?”

“I’ve lived fourteen years longer than you.”

“That is entirely beside the point.”

“It always is with you. Anything you don’t agree with is beside the point.”

“And everything you don’t agree with is
wrong,
” she screamed. “I wish I’d never let you have your wicked way with me!” She threw herself down, face first, into the pillow, feeling self-pity, but too angry for tears.

His footsteps approached the bed, hesitated.

“Go away,” she bleated haplessly.

Resting one knee on the coverlet, he leaned toward her, like a tiger sniffing out its prey.

Raising her head just enough, she peered crossly at him through a tangle of black curls. “I’ll bite!”

But he was, like her, not easily frightened off. Long and lithe, he stretched closer and she shrank against the bed post. “Kiss me, nameless wench.”

She mewled in protest, “Go away. You stink.”

Reaching for the sleeve of her shift, he trapped it in his dirty fingers. “Come see the foal. He’s a beauty. I’ve named him Limpet.”

“That’s a terrible name for a horse.”

For a long moment his wondering gaze searched her face.

“Stay with me?” he said. He asked this time, he didn’t instruct or command. Today he treated her as a being with a right to her own choices. When it was too late, naturally.

His eyes were rich and brown this morning, no gold dazzling her. Today he was an ordinary man with whom she happened to be dreadfully, helplessly in love. A man married to another woman.

“This is eighteen years too late,” she pointed out churlishly.

“Eighteen years ago…” he threw out his arms, “…you were three! Or is that beside the point now too?”

She grabbed a pillow, clutching it to her body. “What if I do have a child? What then?”

He sat on the bed, stern-faced. “I’ll raise him on the estate. Make sure he gets a good education, or an apprenticeship. Noblemen keep mistresses and often raise their bastards. ’Tis nothing unusual.”

“How easy for you. It won’t put
you
out any, will it?” Up on her knees, she cried, “I won’t have my child labeled a bastard and looked down on.”

“But…” he looked befuddled, “what else did you…”

“Oh yes, I forgot.” Now she was up on her feet. “I’m not supposed to expect you to have any feelings, am I?”

“
Feelings
?” he exploded.

“Well, hey ho!
I
…” she thrust a finger in her chest, “I have feelings. I’m young and alive. You’re a bitter old man with no heart--only a swinging brick!”

He stared at her dancing about on the bed, as if her feet were burning, and said calmly, “What good did feelings ever do anybody?”

When she threw her pillow at him, he ducked. That was when he saw the knife she kept there. They reached for it at the same time and he got there first. “Planning to stick it in my heart one night, eh?”

“For your information, Lord Doubtful, it’s for my protection and a very good thing I had it.” She scrambled off the bed. Mature composure forgotten, she could barely breathe. “What good would stabbing you in the heart do me? Can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

“Will you stop bouncing, no name wench? You’re giving me a headache.”

Too exasperated to argue any further, she ran out of the chamber, bare feet flying along the corridor, down the stairs and out of the house.

One sound pierced her scattered thoughts. Like a bell clapper, it knocked back and forth inside her head, until it became an authoritative man’s voice, deniable no further.

“Madolyn!”

Oh, no. Not this—not
now
. Not yet.

It was her father.

* * * *

“I thought I’d find you at the bottom of a chalk pit,” he exclaimed gruffly, laughing as she hugged him tight, squeezing the air out of him. “I hope you haven’t been a nuisance to these good folk. No doubt you’ve overstayed your welcome.”

That, she feared, was a severe understatement.

“Where is Grace?” she asked, deflecting the subject. “How is she? Papa, there was a man in London who--”

“Yes, she told me. Don’t worry, your sister is safe at home. I took her there before I came here for you.”

Suddenly she saw the earl tripping down the steps of his manor house, a sleeveless jerkin pulled on in haste over his dirty, loose shirt. Riding crop in one hand, he was already bellowing for his horse, but his eyes made a quick sweep of the gravel path and he stopped in his tracks. Another, slower sweep must have proved to his doubting eyes that it was indeed his mistress, with her arms around another man. Face dark with anger, riding crop swinging, boots crunching across the gravel, he made his approach.

“Oh,” she said weakly, “Here comes the earl, Papa.”

With the collision of her two worlds now inevitable, she thought herself about to die. However, it was not her heart that stopped, it was the earl. His eyes widened. “
Captain Carver
?”

“Griff?” Her father’s blue eyes were laughing. Crinkled up, the white lines around them vanished. “’Tis good to see you again lad. I hope this young wench hasn’t given you too much trouble. Is your master home?”

Griff?
Griff?
They knew one another?

There was a short pause. “This
is
the earl of Swafford,” she muttered. “I see he has fooled you too, as is his habit.”