The Clergyman's Daughter (20 page)

He gaped at her, wondering how she could be so blind. With a tremendous effort he kept his voice steady as he reassured, “No one is trying to get rid of you, Jess, or force you into anything against your will. We only want you to be happy. Although I wish most sincerely that you and my future wife could deal together more amicably, I am not so unobservant or insensitive that I don’t realize that—”

“Happy!”
Jessica retorted, answering the one word that had penetrated her shocked mind. Suddenly she jumped to her feet and found herself so close to Raeburn that she had to arch backward to keep from colliding with the hard wall of his body. “You think I would be
happy
with a man who—who….”

Raeburn chuckled uncomfortably, trying to swallow his distaste at the very idea of the middle-aged artist living with Jessica, maintaining rights over her person…. Dammit, he thought angrily, he was acting the dog in the manger with a vengeance, an attitude he had always detested. No matter what his personal opinion was, he must remain neutral, try not to influence her, lest he prevent her from finding future joy elsewhere. He said stiffly, “The decision is yours alone, Jess, but on reflection you might discover that you could live in surprising harmony with Mason, despite the difference in your ages. After all, the two of you share a—a mutual interest in art….”

In her paper-white face, Jessica’s slanting eyes widened until they threatened to fill the universe. “A…a mutual…interest in…in art.” She gasped at the unconscious irony of that remark as a giggle tickled the back of her mouth. “With…with
John Mason!”
She felt herself begin to shake with tension, and tendrils of her black hair slipped loose from the restraining hairpins and dangled tremulously over her temples, brushing her distended cheeks. “M-mutual interests,” she repeated again wildly, aware that she was on the verge of hysteria. “Oh, Graham, if you…only…knew!” Painfully the words forced their way through her constricted throat, each breath more difficult than the last—and then there were no words as the laughter overwhelmed her.

Raeburn watched in dismay, baffled by her reaction that seemed all out of proportion to the remark that had triggered it. “Jess, for God’s sake, what’s wrong?” he demanded, self-control flooding back into him as Jessica’s so obviously ebbed. Her face only inches from his, she blinked up at him owlishly, and her mouth moved as if she were trying to shape words, but the only sound issuing from between her lips was a series of harsh, mirthless guffaws that chilled him like the scrape of fingernails on slate.

Suddenly he remembered the mysterious correspondence she maintained with someone in Clerkenwell, the convict or whoever. In the face of Jessica’s obstinate refusal to explain herself to him, Raeburn had been forced to draw his own conclusions about those letters and packages, and he had at last decided, with undoubtedly more than a soupçon of wishful thinking, that they were part of some charitable endeavor on her part, another of those unfathomable caprices that drove her to succor lame ducks like Willa Brown.

But now he wondered sickeningly if his first suspicion had been right after all, that there had been some unknown man keeping her during that shadowy period in Brighton, some man to whom, out of a sense of obligation, she continued to write clandestinely. Since returning to Renard Chase, Jessica had never once even implied the existence of such a person, yet, knowing the desperation she must have suffered during that year…. Raeburn felt himself grow chilled with a cold that had nothing to do with the snow on the ground beneath his window. Good Lord, she couldn’t be secretly
married,
could she? He shook himself mentally. No, of course not; such an idea was worthy of one of Claire’s Minerva novels! Yet, could it be that Mason’s proposal had aroused in her such violence because she had already given if not her hand, then her heart elsewhere?

Still Jessica laughed. Raeburn caught her thin shoulders in his large hands and shook her lightly. “Compose yourself, Jess,” he ordered in quelling tones; “tell me what’s the matter! I only want to help you. Why won’t you trust me?” Her eyes were glazed, and she hardly seemed to hear him. Unwilling to resort to slapping, the traditional specific for hysterics, he shook her more vigorously, and his strength made her head snap back hard on her slender neck, loosening her chignon. The motion seemed to jerk her back into awareness. She winced with pain, and the shock of it altered her laughter to racking coughs that subsided with difficulty, until all that remained of her hysteria was her stertorous wheezing.

His hands still heavy on her shoulders, she regarded him accusingly. “You made my neck hurt,” she whimpered, too drained and exhausted by that storm of emotions to care that she sounded childish.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, one hand reaching up beneath the heavy curtain of hair slipping free from its pins to massage her nape. Long fingers moved caressingly along the back of her neck, rubbing and prodding, as he searched out the muscles knotted achingly under her silky skin. He could feel the tension in her like a living thing, a snake coiled and ready to strike. “Relax,” he urged soothingly, his free hand sliding down the smooth curve of her back to circle her waist and pull her closer. “Relax, Jess, and just trust me. I promise I won’t hurt you, ever again….”

As
she stared up at him, mesmerized by the husky balm of his deep voice, her tongue flicked over her dry, parted lips, moistening them, and when his arms tightened irresistibly around her, crushing her breasts against the hard wall of his chest, she watched without thought of protest as his mouth came down hungrily over hers.

She closed her eyes, for the moment mindful only of the feel of his lips and teeth and tongue, his arms, his body, the very size of him that somehow exhilarated at the same time as it overwhelmed. She could savor the brandy still hot in his mouth, smell the musky maleness of his skin as she had done that spring day by the roadside so long before, but she was no longer an innocent girl to be frightened by the intimacies of taste and odor. She was a woman now, one who had gone too long without a man, and she needed much, much more than his kisses.

“Oh, Graham.” She sighed with satisfaction when she broke away to catch her breath, leaning her dark head against his chest, her arms wound around him. Her body still tingled where he had stroked it, and even through successive layers of coat, two waistcoats, shirt, and singlet, she could hear his heart thud under her ear. His hands moved restlessly over her.

Suddenly groaning, “My God, what are we doing?” he caught her hands and disentangled them from around his waist. Gently he pushed her away from him. “Please, my dear,” he reproved, “we mustn’t. We’ll regret it later.” His voice sounded clouded, like that of a man who had been dragged too soon from a dream.

She was still too dragged by the beguiling pressure of his body against hers to understand. Bewildered, she stared up at him with bemused green eyes. “Graham, I—I don’t…what are you saying?”

He clenched his hands behind his back and retreated from her. “I’m going to marry Daphne,” he said stonily.

Jessica blinked and stammered. “D-Daphne? But…but what about…y-you and me? We—”

“There is no ‘we’!” he interjected sharply. “There is only…Daphne and me. I am committed to marrying her, and I cannot go back on my word. You’ll have to forgive me, Jess. I never should have kissed you, but you’re very beautiful, and I’ve always….” He squared his broad shoulders in a conscious gesture of denial. “I lost control—not that that is any excuse. You are my sister-in-law, and I owe more respect to you…and to my brother’s memory.”

She felt her cheeks flame at the insulting ease of his rejection. She was knowledgeable enough to recognize that only seconds before, he had been as aroused as she, but now, while she still ached with frustration, still struggled to control her ragged breathing, he could stand there so pompously and declare…. Adjusting the bodice of her dress, she snapped waspishly, “Wouldn’t it have been more to the point to call up Andrew’s spirit
before
you tried to seduce me?”

Raeburn’s eyes narrowed to slits of flint as his gaze moved slowly over her body, noting her high color, her black hair that tumbled about her face in a most abandoned fashion. He paused deliberately at her bosom, where even the stiff bombazine of her gown could not disguise the betraying tautness of her full breasts. “My dear Jessica,” he drawled with hateful emphasis, only a faint throatiness in his deep voice denying his apparent composure, “had I not chosen to call a halt to the proceedings, I think I would have found that precious little
seduction
was necessary….”

Jessica blanched. Gasping as if he had struck her, she watched the corners of Raeburn’s wide mouth curl upward into a smile of mirthless mockery at her discomfiture, and she knew that in a moment he was going to laugh. With a squeal of mortification, she turned on her heel and fled from his study, raven hair flying loose behind her—and as she ran out into the corridor and slammed the door behind her she cannoned directly into the arms of John Mason.

“My dear Mrs. Foxe!” the man exclaimed as his bony fingers steadied her. “What on earth has happened to you?” He spoke with the same oily deference he always used, but his yellow eyes were flicking with undeniable acuity between Jessica and the still-reverberating door to Raeburn’s study. He seemed to miss no detail of her dishevelment. When she did not speak, he murmured, “You appear…agitated. I trust nothing untoward has happened to…alarm you?”

Jessica stared blankly at his gaunt face, her green eyes wild and unseeing, filled as they were with the lingering images of Raeburn’s scorn. “W-what?” she stammered.

Still holding her shoulders, the artist continued smoothly, “Or perhaps I am mistaken and it is something pleasant that excites you, some happy news? Has His Lordship told you of my offer? Could that be it, my dear…Jessica?”

She blinked hard, and her vision cleared. She became aware of Mason’s grip on her, the tremor that shook him as his hands begun to fondle her upper arms. “P-please, sir,” she said with unsteady formality, keeping her voice low lest Raeburn overhear as she tried to pull away. “I regret…. I hardly think—”

‘“Then don’t think!” he gritted, all traces of his affected amiability vanishing from his sallow features at the first sign of rejection. His voice softened to a hiss. “Don’t think about anything but accepting my proposal. There’s too much at stake here, and if you turn me down, I promise I shall tell your exalted lover all about you and your little secret, and then you shall learn what regret is all about…
Erinys!”

Jessica stared at him in amazement. That vile little man—and despite his physical stature, she did regard him as a little man, base and petty—was trying to
blackmail
her! He thought her so craven that she would submit to one such as he rather than risk the truth becoming known. The man must be mad! But as Jessica gaped incredulously at Mason, into her turbulent thoughts came two fragments of remembered dialogue—Lord Crowell mumbling sullenly into his wineglass, “Oh, Johnny sees everything,” and Mason himself bragging maliciously, “It never pays to underestimate me”—and she realized that she had stumbled upon the answer to a question that had puzzled her ever since the Templeton party arrived at Renard Chase; the reason why the young duke endured the insolent familiarity of a man he obviously detested, Jessica wondered curiously just what guilty secret Mason had ferreted out about Daphne’s brother. She wondered how many other members of the
ton
were paying for his silence….

Unaware of the thoughts buzzing through Jessica’s mind, Mason smiled triumphantly. “My dear Jessica,” he repeated, tasting the name. “Oh, yes, I know I am going to enjoy dealing with you….” As if to emphasize the impregnability of his position, he released one of her arms, and after pausing to brush a strand of his sandy hair back into place over his bald spot, he deliberately groped for her breast.

The flesh that had swelled in welcome at Raeburn’s touch recoiled instantly from Mason’s violation, and Jessica’s temper flared. Twisting and writhing, she spat, “Oh, God, I loathe you!” As she freed her other arm from his grasp. Fury giving her strength, she swung her hand in a wide arc and slapped him with a force that almost toppled him. As he staggered backward, cursing her, she made good her escape, galloping toward the marble stairs as if some demon pursued her, and she did not quit running until she had reached the serenity and security of the nursery on the third floor.

The great clock in the hall had just struck one—or one-thirty or possibly half-past midnight. Jessica had lost count, agitated as she was by the day’s events—when she heard the light, hushed sound of slippers on marble in the corridor just outside her sitting room. Looking up from the watercolor on which she had been working fitfully in a futile attempt to sooth her overwrought emotions, she listened with care. Only the family lived in this wing, and she wondered apprehensively if perhaps someone had taken ill and one of the maids had been dispatched for help; then she tensed as she became aware of the deliberate, almost furtive quality of those footsteps. Whoever was out there had no business being abroad in the middle of the night.

Because the culprit was obviously feminine, she felt no real sense of threat, and before she rose to investigate, she automatically went through the procedures she observed whenever she had to leave her work. Although her attention was still concentrated on the noise in the hallway, she swiftly rinsed her brush and dried it on a linen napkin and set lids on the tiny pots of paint that she had mixed; then, wiping her fingers, she pushed back her chair and stood up from the spindly escritoire. With a languorous stretch she slipped her hands under the heavy fall of hair at her nape and lifted it so that her inky tresses flowed unconfined down the back of her woolen night robe. After she had adjusted the robe, cinching the sash tighter about her slim waist, she picked up her candlestick and silently opened the sitting room door.