Wedding Night Revenge (22 page)

'I spoke to your mother. She is just as I remember, so very kind and nice.

Your stepfather, Sir Joshua, I didn't think looked so well.'

'He's not so well. He's suffered seizures lately. The doctor thinks it might have affected his memory.'

'Oh, I'm sorry...'

'What did my mother say to you?'

Again Rachel considered telling him it was none of his concern. She took a deep breath. This was surely safe ground. Better to loiter upon it than venture to other unknown paths. 'She told me your father was an Irish chieftain's son, and how he brought about their marriage by abducting her to end a centuries-old feud. She also said you're very like him.'

Connor laughed, picked up his tumbler of whiskey and drank deeply from it.

It was some moments after it was replaced that he murmured, 'Did she, now?'

'Yes. She said you were wild and that your grandfather would despair of you.'

He watched a finger trace the rim of his glass. 'Yes, he would,' he said softly.

'Why? What did you do?'

The things wild young men do that their elders and betters despair of: spend too much money, gamble, whore, fight...'

Rachel hadn't expected him to be quite so honest. 'Oh. I didn't know...'

'No, you didn't know, Rachel. I took great pains at that time to make sure you didn't know. I was quite the gallant young major, wasn't I now? For what good it did...'

She understood the thread of bitterness and self- mockery. Quickly she said,

'Your poor grandfather. I expect he must have desired a different heir. I never knew of that either. You never said you would one day be an Earl.'

'I would have told you if I sincerely thought I had a chance of becoming an aristocrat. I might have boasted of it, for you seemed impressed then by status. Six years ago I was fourth in line to succeed and had my mother's two brothers and one of their sons in good health. It didn't seem possible all would die before me within twenty months of one another. That's why I made a career in the army.' He smiled, tossed off the remainder of his drink.

'That and the fact that my grandfather had a gun pointing at my head when he told me. he'd bought me a commission in the Life Guards and to get packed and ready to go.'

Rachel walked closer to him, intrigued. 4 Your grandfather threatened to kill you?'

'More bluster than anything. I don't think he'd have pulled the trigger. He was at the end of his tether. I had put him in an awkward position by indulging in one sin too many. He took it personally, for it deeply offended his ethics and sensibilities. He was a good man. An honourable man...'

'What did you do?'

He upended the decanter. A stream of amber flowed into crystal. 'I took a married woman as my mistress. I cuckolded an old and esteemed friend of my grandfather's. He wasn't amused.'

Rachel stared at him in silence, then murmured primly, 'No, I imagine he would not have been.' She cleared her throat, added briskly, 'Well, you must have been young, I suppose. I take it the adulteress was much older than you.

Certainly old enough to know better. Perhaps she led you astray.'

'Well, thank you for those kind words, Rachel,' he drawled. Indolent amusement was levelled at her over the rim of his glass. 'Actually she was your age at the time, twenty-five, and I might have been a tender eighteen, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I've kept a mistress since I was fifteen.'

Abruptly he swallowed some whiskey.

Rachel looked at him, moistened her lips. 'Oh, I see...' was all she could think to say to that news. And then she did think of something to say. 'You had a mistress when we were engaged?' she demanded, icily polite.

He placed his drink down, turned to face her. 'Well, what would you have done if you'd known, Rachel? Jilted me...?'

She felt the blood suffuse beneath her skin at his sarcasm. 'Well, I'm glad I do know, at last. I don't feel quite so...'

'Guilty?' he supplied quietly as she failed to finish the sentence. 'Feel as guilty as you can. You were the only woman in my life at that time.'

Rachel ceased fiddling with quill feathers and moved towards the door. 'It's time I left. Paul and Lucinda will be ready to go—I know Lucinda is quite tired...'

'Why won't you ask me what I need to give you back Windrush?'

Rachel remained silent, simply stared at the raw- boned beast on the wall. It looked real enough to leap out at her.

'You want that estate more than anything, don't you?'

Almost imperceptibly she nodded.

'All I want is a fair exchange. I want something I once desired more than anything. Do you know what I did on my wedding night?'

She felt unable to jeer that she couldn't give a damn. Her eyes, her voice seemed to be trapped by his. Slowly she shook her head.

He smiled a savage smile that just took his lips back against even teeth.

'Neither do I. I haven't the vaguest idea where I went or how I got so drunk.

Suffice to say that when Jason found me unconscious on Clapham Common a day or so later he thought I'd killed myself. Another night there, comatose, and perhaps I would have died. It was two days after he got me home before I came to—a week after that when the fever abated. The first coherent thought I had was quite uncharitable; I wanted to kill him for not leaving me there.

'For six years on and off I've fantasised about my wedding night. At first it was an obsession...wanting those blasted lost dark hours back; to have them as I was entitled to have them, in passion and pleasure. Later it mellowed into a nagging curiosity about you...about what I'd missed. But it's never gone away. It's always been there, an irritating scar on my mind. I want my wedding night, Rachel. You owe me my wedding night.'

She hadn't realised he'd got so close. He raised a hand. She flicked it off. He raised it again, then again and persevered until she simply stood still, lulled by fingers that circled with tantalising light strokes on the satiny skin of her arm.

What he was suggesting was horrendous, outrageous. She supposed she should swoon in shock. But she wouldn't. It wasn't a shock, or even a surprise. A remote part of her mind had realised as long ago as their tense reunion on that hot apple-scented afternoon, that he would aim to lock her into this ultimate revenge.

'A wedding night, by definition, follows a marriage,' she mentioned with cool logic. The ceremony never took place. I told you on the terrace, you're not my husband.'

'I came close enough with just twelve hours to go. Give me my wedding night, Rachel, and set us both free. It started with me wanting you, it'll finish there too. And if you get nothing else out of it, you'll get back your inheritance and the sure knowledge that when your father finds out, he'll want to shoot me down dead.'

That's what I must do or you'll auction Windrush?' her faint voice asked.

'I don't want a house in Hertfordshire. I'm going home to Ireland. You give me my wedding night and I'll give you your deeds. You'll get the property sooner than you thought. If you agree—and I want your full agreement, Rachel; I want you willing—Windrush is yours, not your father's.'

'And do you think I could do that? Do you think I could keep the estate myself and return home with those papers and boast to my family how willingly I whored to get them? Do you expect me to do that?'

'Return the title to your father, then. Tell him I seduced you. Deal with it as you see fit. Either way he'll hate me. It's what you want, isn't it? For your father to wish me dead?'

'Yes,' she whispered in a hoarse croak. 'And he ought to wish that already.'

She viciously slapped away his hand from where it still soothed her. 'How satisfying was it for you to steal a drunken man's house? How proud.. .how clever did it make you feel gambling with a man who had lost his wits to alcohol? God in heaven, it would have been better sport for you taking candy from a baby. And wouldn't a gentleman have at least given him a chance to win back such a valuable stake?'

'I did offer him the chance.'

'Are you telling me he lost to you twice?'

'No, I'm telling you he passed out before the cards were dealt again. He couldn't stand up or see straight Rachel, let alone tell a diamond from a spade.'

'He couldn't see the knave in the pack either, could he? Even when sober he couldn't see that,' she jeered in raw rancour.

Connor laughed, shrugged negligently. 'Don't worry;, he'll see him now.

And he isn't going to like it that I've stood his scheme on its head.'

'His
scheme?'

'He might have been under the influence, but he was sober enough not to want to risk a second game. He didn't want Benjamin Harley to get Windrush. He intended I should have the estate. He didn't stake it until I sat down at the table and once I had it he didn't want it back. So I obliged him and took your birthright, fair and legitimate. But the only way I'll take you is the way I've just described. That's as far as I'm prepared to fall in with his plan to resurrect our relationship.'

Rachel felt the blood drain from her face. 'What are you saying?' she whispered, horrified.

'I'm saying, my one-time love, that your father is labouring under the foolish hope that I'm still besotted with you. He thinks I'm the honourable fool I was six years ago. He thinks if he puts you in my way and in my debt enough, I just might marry you and provide the Merediths with a happy ending. That won't happen.'

'No, it's too late for that. Far too late for that.'

'I'm glad you agree.'

'I do,' Rachel breathed, sweetly courteous, as she came close to him again.

'The only way the Merediths would ever have been assured a happy ending was if your stupid grandfather had found the courage to pull that trigger when you were eighteen.'

Her hand flew up, cracked resoundingly against a lean dark cheek.

Immediately she flew backwards away from him. 'But that was quite satisfying,' she bit out before turning proudly for the door.

An arm curved about her tense body, jerking her off balance and back against him. Immediately she fought his hold, then swirled about in his arms. The pearls twined into her hair scattered on to the floor like glimmering hailstones as five dark fingers supported her scalp. Slowly, deliberately he kissed her, plundered the mutinous soft lines of her lips with ruthless seduction until she was whimpering with tense frustration. Just as she succumbed to the sweet torment, allowed his tongue to tease hers, he took his mouth away.

'That wasn't very satisfying,' he breathed against her quivering flesh. 'So let me know by midweek if you want to negotiate on my terms or the estate will be auctioned at the beginning of July.'

Her large, glistening eyes raised to his, seeking some compassion beneath the fringe of preposterously long lashes. There was nothing but a diamond-hard glitter.

'And that's an end to it? It's enough that you finally humiliate me in the most sordid and basic way? You won't then feel inclined to find other things you want?'

'I won't humiliate you and I won't renege on my word. There's nothing else I want but peace. I told you: it started in lust, it'll end there too.'

'And that won't humiliate me?'

'No.'

He caught her wrist this time before her hand made its mark.

Wrenching herself free, she backed off two paces, then swept with wordless dignity to the door to find her friends to take her home.

'There's a rider approaching,' Sylvie called over her shoulder to her mother.

Gloria Meredith joined her youngest girl at the morning-room window. She squinted off into the distance at a dark blurry shape moving at some speed towards the house. 'I must purchase some spectacles. My eyesight is not what it was...'

'It's William,' Sylvie advised with a laugh and turned to look at June, sitting, feet curled beneath her, with sewing in her lap.

It seemed a moment before June's dreamy expression registered that the stuff of hep reverie was, in body, in the vicinity. She started to her feet.

'William? Here? In Hertfordshire? Are you sure?'

'Well, come and look,' Sylvie ordered with a scowl for her dithering sister. In Sylvie's opinion, June didn't suit being in love. She wandered about like a witless idiot most of the time. Only yesterday she'd sat on a needle that June had forgotten she'd left idly poked into the arm of a chair. Of course, June had been so distraught at the sight of the small puncture mark on her little sister's thigh that she had sobbed and wept until Sylvie; in desperation, had apologised for bringing it to her attention, for she'd barely felt it, she'd insisted graciously.

June flew to the window and peered out. A smile of sheer rapture lit her face and in a swirl of pretty tiffany skirts she was gone from the room.

June encountered her father in the hallway in the process of shaking hands with her fiance. William had his attention immediately on the alluring sight of his betrothed as he pumped his prospective father-in-law's arm. Edgar Meredith, with a little smile for the young couple, made his excuses and ambled off to his study.

'I'd no idea you were coming to Hertfordshire before the wedding,' June breathed.

Her fiance managed a passably casual shrug. 'I found myself at a bit of a loose end in London. Philip Moncur and Barry Foster and some others have gone off to Brighton. They wanted me to accompany them, but I can't say I fancied it. I can't say I've fancied seeking my parents' company too much either these last few weeks...Father's well enough on his own...' A meaningful grimace followed the remark. 'So I thought a bit of country air was the thing; a constitutional before all the excitement starts in earnest. I've been staying for a few days at the King's Arms. It's a quaint place. Good food and ale. Decided today I'd just drop by on a visit...see how you all do...'