Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed (39 page)

“No.”

He sounded harsh. When he’d caught her in his arms, she’d fleetingly imagined he sounded like the man who whispered endearments as he took her to the stars.

She’d never hear that man again.

Her heart raced with fear and distress. “Please, Jonas, I can walk.”

“All right.”

Abruptly he stopped and set her on her feet. Immediately her head began to swim. She sucked in a jagged breath to curb the roiling in her belly. She couldn’t be sick. Not now. Not in front of Jonas. That would be too mortifying. Anyway she’d need food in her stomach to be sick. Bile flooded her mouth. She started to tumble headlong down a black tunnel.

From far away, she heard Jonas swear as he swung her into his arms again. She tried to stiffen in protest, but her muscles remained as floppy as wet muslin. In her heart, she was still strong and determined, but her body let her down. She waited for him to say something snide but he kept silent. This time, she didn’t fool herself she was anything other than an inconvenience.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, once she gained temporary control over her unruly digestion.

“To my carriage,” he said shortly.

She told herself it didn’t matter that he hated her. Only building a secure future mattered. Over the last months,
that grim thought alone had kept her trudging ahead. It lost its comforting power when Jonas clasped her tight in a cruel travesty of how he’d once held her.

“Are you taking me home?”

“No.”

Without the strain of staying upright, she began to feel marginally more like the old Sidonie Forsythe. The Sidonie she’d been before her life disintegrated. She hoped so. She had a sinking feeling this meeting was about to become very uncomfortable indeed.

Her mind worked frantically. Jonas said he’d spoken to Roberta. She could imagine what her sister had said. Especially as he’d then set out to find Sidonie. After all, he could have looked for her any time in the last three months and the silence had been telling. Even when he’d offered her an allowance, the correspondence came from his secretary. Refusing the generous payment had sparked fleeting satisfaction. Until she’d realized her response had probably never progressed beyond some industrious underling’s desk.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“We need to talk about that.” He waited while a footman opened the door to a large town coach. “Among other things.”

“Jonas, I… I don’t want to go with you,” she said, suddenly afraid. This smacked too much of abduction. She wriggled without effect. “I’d rather walk home on my own.”

“Too bad,” he said uncompromisingly. But his touch was gentle as he placed her inside the carriage. He climbed in after her and the footman closed the door with a click that to Sidonie’s oversensitive ears sounded like
prison doors slamming shut. The scents of leather, Jonas, and confined space flooded her senses, but her troublesome stomach remained quiet, thank goodness.

“You have no right to bundle me in here like a parcel,” she said mutinously, then fell mute as Jonas wrapped a rug around her so carefully, it was as if he protected a crystal vase from breaking.

Instead what he broke was her heart.

Except her heart had broken months ago. No wonder she remained so lifeless despite all her bracing little lectures to herself to look to her future. Nobody could live without their heart.

“Stow it, Sidonie. And don’t even think of running. In your current state, you couldn’t walk across the road. I’d just have to pick you up again.” He slid onto the bench beside her and turned to lift a bottle of brandy and a glass from a leather pannier on the door.

“I’ll be sick if I drink that,” she said with a spurt of resentment as the coach rolled forward.

He shot her an unreadable look. “It’s for me.”

“Am I so terrifying that you need Dutch courage?” she asked with false sweetness.

He didn’t smile. “Definitely.”

He splashed golden liquor into the glass and downed it. Then he returned the bottle and glass to the pannier with a deliberate slowness that played on her nerves. As she was sure he meant it to. When the silence extended, Sidonie could bear it no longer. “Roberta told you, didn’t she?”

Another of those unreadable glances. “When we were together, you made me a promise.”

“Then you told me to get out of your sight.” Those words had rankled for months.

“It didn’t alter your commitment.” The inscrutable mask cracked and briefly she glimpsed his real emotions. He was angry. She’d known that from the first. He’d tried to hide it, but the muscle flickering in his cheek betrayed him. Worse than that, he was hurt. Hurt beyond bearing. Her belly twisted with remorse and regret and useless, agonizing love.

Shame kept her quiet, although there was little point concealing the truth. When he mentioned her promise, she knew the game was up. Blast Roberta for an interfering witch.

“So you still won’t tell me,” he said grimly. “What must I do to make you confess? Get out the thumbscrews?”

What use putting off the evil moment? She met his eyes, iron gray in the shadowy coach, and spoke with a defiance she hadn’t felt since she’d left him. “I’m pregnant.”

“I know.”

“I ask nothing of you.”

“That’s hardly the point. No child of mine will be born a bastard.”

“You don’t want to marry me.”

She wondered if he’d deny that. She almost wished he’d lie.

But of course, he didn’t lie. His jaw set in unforgiving lines. “No.”

She struggled to maintain an argument. It was difficult when she felt so weary and sick and this meeting with Jonas reminded her of everything she’d lost. Shortly after their last acrimonious encounter, she’d discovered she carried his child. Most of the time since, she’d felt sick. Morning sickness seemed to be a twenty-four hour-a-day
affair. At least nausea stopped her stewing on how she’d botched her life. “I told you I’d never marry.”

“And you said if you conceived my child, you’d become my wife.”

She hadn’t. Not in so many words. But her actions had given tacit consent to his ultimatum. She couldn’t pretend he accosted her today under false pretenses.

“You can’t force me to marry you.” Her voice shook because right now the easiest decision seemed to be leaving all decisions to him. Then a nasty thought struck—her statement wasn’t entirely true. “You wouldn’t cut off Roberta’s allowance and the boys’ school fees, would you?”

Reading his mind in this if nothing else, she watched him consider claiming such intentions. Then he shook his head. “No, this is between us.” He paused. “Or rather between you and your honor. You more than anyone know the miseries of my childhood. Surely you won’t visit that torment on your son or daughter.”

“People needn’t find out I’m not married,” she mumbled, tugging the rug up to shield her against his remarks and the conscience that until now self-pity had silenced.

“People always find out,” he said uncompromisingly.

She had an unwelcome inkling he was right. One hand cradled her belly. She hardly showed yet, but in a few weeks, her secret would be a secret no more. By then she needed to be away from London, settled where nobody knew her. She needed to be able to travel more than a mile without casting up her accounts, too. The journey from Wiltshire to London had been bad enough. Right now, her stomach behaved, but of course, Jonas’s carriage was the first stare of comfort and hardly jolted at all.

Decisions she’d been too miserable and frightened
to make screamed for attention. It was all very well to plan an incognito future as a widow with a child in some northern hamlet, but the prospect of living a lie until the day she died made her shudder. The pathetic loneliness of doing everything alone without the man she loved was too cruel to contemplate. When Jonas mentioned his boyhood sufferings, he cut straight to her dilemma. She didn’t want her baby to be a fatherless waif. She wanted her child to grow up with two loving parents.

Once she’d almost accepted Jonas’s proposal. Then she’d trusted his regard. Could she bear to marry him knowing he was furious with her? Perhaps one day, he might forgive her for sacrificing him in favor of Roberta. Nor did she mistake that he viewed the secrecy about her pregnancy as another betrayal.

Because they both knew it was a betrayal.

The very air vibrated with his repressed emotion. How she wished she’d kept her head in the park. She’d rather conduct this conversation in the open. The carriage, for all its luxury, seemed suffocatingly cramped when so much lay unspoken between its occupants.

“Sidonie, we have to marry.” He sounded sad but determined.

She blinked back tears. This was a million miles from the proposal she wanted. Of course there was that sweet moment at Castle Craven when he’d asked her to be his wife, but later memories tainted that recollection.

“You’re such a bully,” she burst out as the jaws of her fate snapped shut. Her hands fisted in the rug.

His sigh was unutterably weary. “Think what you wish. No child of mine will suffer abuse because of our sins. Get used to it.”

“I don’t have to like it.” She winced at how childish she sounded.

To her surprise, he gave her a cold smile. Until she realized she’d conceded victory. “Good.”

Jonas leaned back in the corner, stretching his long legs into the well between the seats. He seemed to occupy all available space. Sidonie shrank into her blanket and told herself without conviction that what she did was for the best. She was far from sure. Life with Jonas when he didn’t love her promised disaster, whatever legitimacy it gave their baby.

“Now will you take me home?” she asked with resurgent strength, although it was too late to do any good. She was trapped like a fly in a spider’s web.

“No.”

She tensed with resentment—and a healthy dose of dread. “Just where are you taking me?”

When she felt the coach slow, she realized she was about to find out. The curve of Jonas’s lips indicated triumph but no pleasure. “To St. Marylebone. To pledge your troth, my faithless love.”

She winced. The insult hurt like a razor drawn across her skin. “I only just—” She straightened. “I haven’t agreed to marry you.”

The coach drew to a stop and Jonas seized her hand in a grip that brooked no resistance. “Close enough. I won’t countenance any scenes at the altar either. It’s all set, Sidonie. You must have known it would be, once I learned you carried my baby. After Roberta told me, I bought a special license. You and I are about to be united in holy wedlock,
amore mio
.”

Appalled, Sidonie stared at him through the dim interior. Stupidly, although it was hardly the most significant
objection, she couldn’t help thinking she wasn’t dressed for a wedding in her secondhand blue gown and faded cloak. “N-now?”

That daunting smile lingered. “No time like the present.” His voice hardened. “If I let you go, I have a disagreeable feeling you’ll disappear again.”

Shame and regret formed a rancid mixture in her belly. “You still don’t trust me.”

“Not an inch.”

The footman opened the door and Jonas stepped out, clutching her hand as if afraid she’d bolt. But she was too heartsore to delay her fate.

Jonas had won.

She welcomed the return of familiar numbness. Jonas was strong. Jonas was certain. He’d make sure her child was safe. For herself, she cared nothing.

“Come, Sidonie.” Through her wretchedness, she heard a hint of kindness.

Kindness was more dangerous than bullying. If he was kind, she might start believing he’d care for her again. “Very well,” she said in a clipped voice that concealed dizzying turmoil.

As she stood outside the church and stared at the door through which she’d enter a spinster and leave a bride, she faltered. It was all too much. She turned toward the street, ready to run.

Jonas’s hand tightened. “Courage, Sidonie.” Briefly she heard the voice of the man she’d fallen in love with.

She inhaled on a sob. Her destiny was set. She married Jonas, for good or ill. Staring at the pavement, she battled the nausea curdling her stomach. She wanted to suggest they went somewhere to eat first. Through the buzzing
in her ears, she heard Jonas click his fingers, a few soft words then the clink of coins.

When she looked up, Jonas stared at her, his eyes opaque. His mouth was unsmiling and a muscle twitched in his scarred cheek. He extended a bunch of daffodils toward her and she realized an old lady in ragged clothing sat on the church steps, selling flowers.

“Sidonie?” he prompted when she didn’t accept the humble bouquet.

“Oh.” Without thinking, her fingers curled around the flowers. Their bright, joyful yellow was a piercing reminder of everything she’d never have.

Courage, Sidonie.

Enough of this. For heaven’s sake, she refused to shuffle into her wedding like a beggar. She’d march in on two feet and face whatever fortune tossed her way. She blinked away tears and stiffened her spine.

She could do this. God help her. And Jonas. And their unborn child.

As if recognizing her reviving spirit, Jonas released her. He extended his arm with a courtly gesture. After a slight hesitation, she hooked her trembling hand around his elbow. He glanced down at her and she caught a flash of something in his steely eyes that might be torment rivaling hers. Then his stony expression descended and she realized she was mistaken. Her fingers clenched around the daffodils.

“Our wedding awaits, Miss Forsythe.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

As they mounted the steps, the flower seller called out behind them with a cheerfulness that made Sidonie want to scream. “Heaven bless the bride and groom!”

Sidonie remained quiet as Jonas escorted her inside Merrick House. She knew the place well. Roberta and William had spent more of their married life in the London residence than at Barstowe Hall. Still she paused, surprised, when she entered what was once a dreary, dark hall to find light-filled space.

Jonas didn’t give her time to admire the changes in the house’s fussy décor. Instead, after a footman took their outer wear, he entered the library, little used by either her sister or William in the past but now clearly the center of operations.