The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (17 page)

Jared came up behind her and tried to turn her away. "Come on, imp, before the ghosties get you." His words were teasing, but his grip on her arm was just a bit too tight for comfort.

She turned to face him and lifted a hand to his cheek. "I'm not afraid of ghosts, Jared. My only fear is that you'll allow those ghosts to color our future. I know about your parents... about your childhood. Your aunt told me everything."

He cast her hand away sharply. "That's Aggie. Talks forever and says everything save the one simple thing she's supposed to say. You know nothing, Amanda, no matter what she may have told you. because Aggie knows nothing. My aunt wasn't here when my mother died, and she wasn't here when my miserable father told me
how
she died."

Amanda wasn't about to give up so easily, even though she had never been so frightened in her young life, frightened of the vehemence in her husband's tone, the dark look that had come down to shutter his face, making him a near stranger to her, which, she suddenly realized, he was.

He had married her, taken her to his bed, filled her heart in ways she still didn't quite understand or trust. Had she been alone for so long, unloved for so long, that she had grabbed at whatever it was Jared made her feel, and convinced herself it was love? And did any of that matter? She had made her bed, as Nanny would have told her, and now she had to lie in it.

"Aunt Agatha told me enough. Your mother died in childbirth. Now you're concerned that the same thing could happen to me. That's very sweet, I suppose, but rather silly. My mother bore me with no harmful effects, just as the majority of women in England have given birth." She put her hands on his arm, squeezing it tightly. "I may never be lucky enough to bear your child, Jared, but don't deny me the chance. I can't understand how such an intelligent man as yourself could think the way you do."

"Oh, you can't, can you? Very well then, Amanda. Try imagining growing up with
this
as your heritage!" Jared grabbed her hand and dragged her over to the largest stone, one topped by an angel with widespread wings.

Amanda gasped as she read the inscription Carlton Delaney had ordered placed on his wife's stone: "'Here lies a sainted woman,'" she began, then hesitated, looking up at Jared before finishing the inscription in a small voice: "'murdered by the devil child of her husband's lust.'" She closed her eyes. "Oh, my sweet Lord," she whispered. "What a vile thing to do. How could he blame himself, blame either of you, for her death?"

Although Jared was standing right beside her, his voice seemed to be coming to her from a great distance; a distance of years, decades. "Ah, imp, don't worry about Carlton. He only blamed himself for a little while. He soon transferred all the guilt to the devil child. He died telling me what he told me every day since my fifth birthday—that I had killed my own mother."

"Wh-where is he buried?" Amanda asked quietly.

Jared's chuckle was sad, hollow. "If memory serves, I believe you're standing on the bastard. My one revenge, my dear, paltry as it is. Either that or I couldn't think up an inscription worse than the one you just read. Come away now, I think we've spent enough time with my ghosts."

"But he's dead now, Jared, and his hate died with him. He can't touch you now unless you allow it. What happened to your mother could have happened to anyone. You didn't kill her."

Jared's eyes were glazed with remembered pain. "You don't know what you're talking about, Amanda. But I do. He told me all about it, you see, down to the last detail. Over and over I heard the story of my mother's death. I used to climb up to the attics and look at her portrait. I'd try to imagine her laughing face all twisted up in agony, her body soaked in her own blood. My mother, and that's all I knew of her, all I was taught, all I'll ever know. How she died, how I'd killed her. That's my legacy, Amanda, that's the hell my father kept me in all those years. I don't know why I brought you here. I should have burned Storm Haven to the ground, years ago."

He looked at Amanda for long moments, and then touched a hand to her cheek. "Only now can I begin to understand Carlton's hatred, imagine his pain. And I'll be damned to that hell all over again before any child of mine takes you away from me."

Could this be her husband? Where was the maddening, carefree man who had ridden with her across England? What had happened to the lighthearted companion who teased her and laughed with her—and who had only last night made her his wife in every sense of the word? She didn't know this man, and desperately missed the man she'd stupidly thought she knew. "Obviously Aunt Agatha doesn't understand. Tell me about it, Jared, please. Tell me it all, so that I can understand," she begged softly.

Jared walked a few steps away from her before turning to face her once more. He was silent for a long time, staring into her frightened eyes. And then, as if the words were torn from him, he began to speak. "I know my aunt told you everything she knows about my mother's death, but she was in India when it happened. She wasn't there when I was born, but my father was. Oh, God, my father was..."

He wiped a hand across his eyes, and then began speaking in a monotone, as if reciting something learned by rote. Amanda shuddered as she realized he probably had, and she was hearing the story now from his father. "She never had been very robust, and carrying the child had robbed her of a lot of her strength. When her time came, she labored for three days and nights, and each day she grew weaker. I was frantic, nearly out of my mind. I cursed myself a thousand times over for ever allowing her to become pregnant again, pleaded with God to take my life in exchange, if only my dearest Lavinia could live.

"Toward dawn of the last day, she woke from an exhausted nap and grabbed my hand. She was exhausted—past exhaustion. We both were. 'I love you, Carlton,' she told me, trying so hard to smile, to ease my concern. But before I could answer her, she grabbed at her swollen belly and began to scream. She screamed, and she screamed, and she screamed."

Amanda wished she could somehow stop the flow of words, but sensed that Jared had to say them, say them all this one last time, if there was to be any chance he could then bury them forever. She reached out to lay a comforting hand on his chest, but it was as if he couldn't see her, couldn't feel her. He was gone from her, lost in his memories, lost in the horror of them.

Jared took a long breath and continued his recitation. "The bedding beneath her turned a bright red and I called for the doctor to come upstairs immediately. I demanded he do something. The fool tried to make me leave the room, but I stood my ground.
I stood my ground.
After a long while, her screams stopped and she closed her eyes. She closed them, never to open them again. Never to smile at me again. Never to live again.

"The doctor threw back the covers and lifted a knife to Lavinia's body, to slice the child from her. I saw. I knew what he planned to do. But I couldn't move, couldn't move. And then the child was there...big and blue...with the doctor saying the child had been too large for Lavinia to ever have delivered it safely. You, devil child, you'd killed her. I picked up the knife..."

Jared shook his head, as if trying to clear it, and looked at Amanda, his features softening into a rueful, crooked smile. "Obviously, that fool of a doctor managed to save me, and I was given to a servant to take home and wet-nurse. It wasn't until one day nearly five years later, when my father was out riding and chanced to see me that I was brought back to Storm Haven. And then it began…"

Amanda tried to stop Jared from saying any more, but he shook his head and continued. "Carlton would see me in the halls, or I would deliberately try to get his attention—foolish child that I was, I wanted to know my father—and he'd lock himself in his study and drink himself into a rage. Then he'd call for me and tell me the story of my mother's death, just the way I've recited it for you. Over and over and over again. The only respite was my time spent with the village curate who gave me my lessons. As I grew older, the mere telling of the story wasn't enough for Carlton any more, and he began to punctuate the story you just heard with his fists."

Amanda pressed her trembling hands to her mouth to stifle a sob. She didn't want to hear any more, she didn't think she could bear it. She'd lost her parents, yes, but she'd always known that they'd loved her. Jared had grown up knowing only hate. "No more, Jared, please. I've heard enough."

But Jared wasn't finished. "Strangely, I never raised a hand to him, not even when I was older, and grown stronger than he. I don't know why I didn't; I still don't know why. There was something in his eyes, some torture that kept me from it. I don't know why I didn't run away. Other than my first five years, Storm Haven was the only life I had known, and maybe I just accepted what was happening to me as normal, something I deserved. After all, I was guilty. Didn't my own father say so?

"Anyway, imp, as I grew older I began to notice some of the prettier servant girls, and they began to notice me. To be frank about the thing, there came a day I decided to take one of them up on her offer to teach me about life. Carlton found us out behind the stables, and something inside of him must have snapped. He snatched up a horsewhip and started to beat me, shouting all the while that I wasn't to kill anymore. Hadn't I learned anything? Wasn't it enough that I had murdered Lavinia? Any child of mine would do as I had done, kill its own mother."

Amanda's grief flashed into hot anger. "That's ridiculous! How could he say such a thing, believe such a thing?"

"Ridiculous, Amanda?" Jared asked, placing his hands on her narrow hips. "I knew the story, remember? One way or another it had been beaten into me nearly every day of my life. If it hadn't been for my unusual size, my mother would have come through the birth unhurt. Any child of my body could be like me. The thought stunned me, so that I just let Carlton have at me, until suddenly he dropped the whip and started clawing at his throat. He collapsed on top of me, dead."

"Oh, Jared—and you never told Aunt Agatha any of this? Never told anyone?"

"Until today, no. But this is my heritage, Amanda; that stone you just saw, that damned house I so stupidly brought you to, the story you've just heard. And this—" He opened his shirt and turned his back, showing her the scars from his last violent beating.

What could she say? How could she comfort him? She was horrified by what he'd told her, what she'd just seen. To think that he had endured all those years of pain and anguish, and still come away from it without his mind being completely twisted or destroyed, showed the true measure of this man she had married.

She understood now his reckless approach to life, his constant joking and naughty pranks, his lighthearted references to himself as a cad, a rakehell, a bounder. That was his escape from the nightmare of his youth. In her own youth, her innocence, Amanda vowed she would devote the rest of her life to making Jared happy, erasing all the shadows of his past and filling his world with love and light.

"We'll never speak of this again. Just hold me, Jared, hold me and everything will be all right, I promise." She held out her arms to him. "Please."

Jared let out a low curse, but then turned about and pulled her toward him, gathering her into a desperate embrace. They clung to each other for endless minutes, and then Amanda, in her need to comfort him, raised her mouth to his.

They were both so full of tension, both looking for the comforting cessation of all thought. The reaction of their clinging lips was explosive and they hung together frantically, trying to ease their pain. Passion exploded between them, a passion born of this same tension, and their clothes melted away as Jared laid Amanda back on the soft grass, his teeth nipping at her, his hands everywhere, holding her, stroking her—his need at first frightening her, then exciting her. She opened her heart to him, opened her body to him, and allowed him to bury his ghosts inside her, tightly holding him to her when he attempted to move away, forcing him to spill his seed where it might take root.

It was over almost as soon as it had begun, and Jared roughly thrust her away from him. "Why did you do that, Amanda? Why? To prove that Carlton was right?"

"No, Jared. To prove him
wrong
. He was a sad and twisted man, but he's gone. You and I are here."

He jammed his arms into his shirt sleeves, glaring at her. "You stupid, stupid child—and me worse than you, because I know better."

They didn't speak again until they were again crossing the grass to the house. Jared at last broke the tension between them, saying, "We could have had a good life together, Amanda, a happy life. I hadn't expected as much, had never hoped for it—but I do care for you, you know. You're ... you're very nearly irresistible, it seems. God knows you've proved that, if nothing else. You won't reconsider?"

Amanda searched his face for some sign that he understood her reasons for refusing him, but she found nothing in his features but pain. "I can't," she whispered quietly. "I want your child, your children. Not your ghosts."

His voice was hard, distant, as he said, "I see. Do you like it here at Storm Haven?" he asked suddenly.

What was he talking about? "Yes. Yes, of course I do."

"Very well then," he said, turning on his heel, leaving her alone in front of the closed door to Storm Haven. "I wish you joy of it then, madam. For myself, I return to London tonight."

The three friends joined arms as they staggered down the steps of the low dive they'd been drinking in and headed for the street. As they weaved their way toward the corner two of the men burst into song:

"When I get you Nell-ee,
I'll get you in the bell-ee;
You do me, oh, so well-ee,
I want to take you home..."

"God in Heaven, stop your caterwauling! Do you find pair of drunkards want to be picked up by the Watch?"

Kevin Rawlings disengaged his arm from Bo Chevington's waist and swept into an elaborate if somewhat unsteady bow. "I beg your pardon, my lord, but are you in-insinuating my friend Bo and I are—such a distasteful word—
inebriated
?"