Читать книгу The Complete Regency Season Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 81

Chapter Twenty

I will not faint, Julia thought grimly and spun round to the door. Jonathan reached her before she could lift the latch, his strong hands turning her, dragging her up against him. He smelled as she remembered, of lime cologne and the Spanish snuff he favoured and the oil he used on his hair. It was a scent that had once made her head spin with desire.

‘You are alive.’ It was foolishly obvious, but it was hard to believe that this was a flesh-and-blood man. Not so hard to believe was the remembered pain of his grip on her wrist. So close she could see that the line of his jaw had softened, that there were pouches under his eyes. He looked more than three years older, more dissipated. If he had approached her now, she would have seen him for what he was.

‘Alive, but no thanks to you, my dear.’ His smile was feral, bitter with all semblance of charm vanished. Once she had thought herself in love with this man. She must have been desperate indeed.

How had he survived that blow to the head? There had been all that blood. But she did not believe in ghosts—her wrist hurt with an exquisite pain that told her she was not dreaming, so it must be true. ‘Then let me go. You’ll have no money for blackmail now, Jonathan. My husband knows I was no virgin when I came to him, he’ll give you not a penny for whatever feeble scandal you think you can stir up.’

‘So I will have to get my recompense for this some other way, Julia my dear.’ He pushed back the hair from his forehead and she saw the scar, a red, puckered dent two inches long. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? And the headaches are not pretty either.’

‘It is your fault, Jonathan Dalfield,’ Julia threw at him. She felt giddy with relief that she had not killed him, but she could feel no regrets now for having hurt him—the man was even worse than she had thought. ‘You deceived me, ravished me, tried to rape me. Do you believe I had no right to fight back?’

‘Women don’t fight back, they do as they’re told,’ he said and smiled as cold ice trickled down her spine. Her anger was congealing into fear and she struggled not to let that show on her face. Bullies fed on fear, she knew that. ‘I didn’t get much fun for my pains last time. Now, I can only hope you’ve learned a trick or two from your baron.’

Julia saw it in his eyes, the truth that he was more than capable of dragging her into that bedchamber and ravishing her all over again. No one who cared for her knew she was there, Will thought she was dead, she had walked into this trap of her own volition. No one was going to get her out of it if she could not.

Julia curled her free fingers into talons and lashed out even as she realised that Jonathan had been expecting just that. He caught her arm and pulled her in close, so tight she could hardly struggle, then freed his grip on her wrist so he could hold her with one arm while he forced her chin up. She bared her teeth at him.

‘You’ll smile for me nicely, my dear, unless you want gaps in those pretty teeth,’ he said. ‘And if you bite, I can promise you a whipping.’

He bent his head and took her mouth with his, the same mouth she had sought to place shy, loving kisses on when they were courting. Julia tightened her lips, resisted the thrust of his tongue. She was going to survive this and she would see him brought to justice for what he had done. Now she could only endure.

At her back the door slammed open like the crack of doom. ‘Jonathan Dalfield, I presume? Take your hands off my wife or I will break your neck,’ said a voice she scarcely recognised.

Jonathan freed her with a shove that sent her reeling across the room hard against Will’s chest. She grasped his forearms, looked up into burning amber eyes and saw nothing but murder there. ‘Will, thank God—’

Will glanced down at her, one searching, scorching stare. ‘Thank God I’ve found you. I did not expect to find you here.’ He touched one finger to her cheek. ‘He had his hands on you. His mouth.’ Then he pushed her gently into the arms of the man who had followed him into the room and took a step forward.

‘Will!’

‘Never fear, Lady Dereham, you are safe now,’ the man holding her said. He tried to bundle her out of the door but she stuck in her heels.

‘Major Frazer?’ How on earth had he got here? ‘No, please stop pushing me, I must stay with Will.’

‘There will be violence, ma’am,’ the major said pedantically. ‘It is no fit place for a lady.’

She simply ignored him. The Priors were standing together close to the bedchamber door, their faces white. Jonathan had backed up as far as the table and stood at bay, his hand at his side as though trying to grip the sword that was not there.

‘You think that even if we had weapons I would duel with you as though you were a gentleman, a man of honour?’ Will’s voice dripped contempt.

‘Julia ran back to me of her own free will,’ Jonathan said. ‘Why do you think she is here? Your quarrel is with her.’

‘You seem to have a death wish,’ Will observed. He pulled off his gloves, finger by finger, tossed them on to a chair, shrugged out of his greatcoat, laid that on top and added his hat, for all the world as though he was settling down for a comfortable chat. But Julia could read him now and what she saw was cold, focused fury.

‘Don’t kill him,’ she gasped.

‘You see?’ Jonathan’s sneering voice was at odds with his white face. There was a nerve twitching in his cheek and he did not seem to know what to do with his hands. ‘She would protect me.’

‘Lady Dereham appears to think that you are not worth hanging for. She is probably correct.’ Will took a step forwards. ‘So I will just have to deal with you some other way. Frazer, get her out of here.’

‘No!’

‘I am very sorry, Lady Dereham.’ Major Frazer picked Julia up bodily and marched out of the door, pushed it shut with his shoulder, then leaned against it when she lunged for the door handle. ‘I apologise for the liberty, but that is no place for a lady.’

‘There are three of them in there and Jonathan Dalfield will not fight fairly,’ she panted, trying to reach the door handle, but the major was almost as solid as Will. There was a crash from inside the room.

‘Will won’t be fighting fairly either,’ Major Frazer said with a grin that faded as he took in her distress. ‘You forget I knew him in his army days. He duels like a gentleman, but he fights scum like a gutter rat. There is no cause for alarm, I promise you. Ah, landlord.’

Julia turned as the man came running up the stairs. ‘What is going on, sir? I’ll not stand for fighting and my rooms being smashed up! I’ll call the constables, I warn you.’

‘Excellent idea,’ the major said. ‘Send for them at once. Your guests have set on this lady’s husband in an unprovoked manner—I can only hope they have sufficient money to pay for the damages.’

‘But if the constables come they might arrest Will,’ Julia protested, as the man turned and ran downstairs, shouting for the pot boy. The door at the major’s back was hit with a massive crash that had him rocking on his feet.

‘When they come, if we are still here, they will be met by me, in my capacity as a London magistrate, investigating a case of extortion and the forcible imprisonment of a lady. With any luck, we’ll be away before it comes to that.’

‘You are a magistrate?’

He nodded, his head half-turned as though listening. It had gone very quiet. ‘Will knew I was at my town house. Ah, here we are.’

He stepped away from the door and Will came out. One eye was half-closed, there was a cut on his right cheekbone and his lip was split. ‘Right, come on.’ He clapped his hat on his head, shrugged into his greatcoat and took Julia’s arm. ‘My thanks to you for your support, Frazer. I owe you a good dinner, but you’ll forgive me if we leave at once.’

‘Will, your face—’

‘Not here.’ He took her arm and went briskly down the stairs and out onto the forecourt.

The major tipped his hat to Julia. ‘Obedient servant, ma’am. Dereham.’

Will hailed a passing cab, bundled Julia into it without ceremony and called up, ‘Grillon’s Hotel’, before climbing in beside her.

The vehicle rattled away down Ludgate Hill and Julia, speechless, simply stared at her husband. He was here, she was safe. She had killed no one. Julia dug her handkerchief out of her reticule and sat with it clenched in her hand, waiting for the tears of sheer relief to come. Strangely, they did not, nor did the rush of relief she experienced when she dreamed that everything was all right.

Will tossed his hat on to the seat beside him and took the handkerchief when she held it out to him. He dabbed at his cheek with some caution. ‘Are you all right, Julia?’

‘Am I all right!’ She found her voice in a flood of anger that encompassed fear, anguish, anxiety and shocked relief all in one muddle of feeling. ‘Yes, of course I am. Will, you might have been seriously injured, even killed.’

He raised one eyebrow, gave a wince at the unwary gesture and grinned, somewhat lopsidedly. ‘That is not very flattering, my dear. Your Mr Dalfield is licking his wounds and contemplating the warning I gave him and your cousins: go back to where they came from and never speak of this or approach you in any manner. If they do not comply, they will have a respected magistrate to vouch for their attempts at extortion.’

‘Then it is really all over.’ It did not seem possible that the nightmare that had haunted her waking and sleeping for over three years had simply dissolved into thin air.

Will nodded. ‘I am hoping this is the last of your deep dark secrets, my love.’ His face was serious, but his eyes smiled at her.

‘I promise.’ Had he really said my love? Most likely it was a careless endearment, or wishful thinking on her part. She was certainly feeling very strange. Light-headed, in fact, although with that came a certain clarity of thought. ‘You were not surprised when you came into the room just now, were you? You said Jonathan’s name without even having to think about it. How did you know?’

‘I realised he was not dead in the early hours of this morning.’ Will got up and changed seats so he could put his arm around her. Julia tried not to lean into him, anxious about cracked ribs, but the warmth of his body was like a balm to her own aching one.

‘It was all about surprise, that was what had been niggling at the back of my mind ever since your cousins came to Grillon’s. Their purpose was to blackmail us, of course. But all they threatened us with at first was scandal about your elopement and the fact that you had struck Dalfield. Violence, they said. Not murder, not killing. No one said anything about death or murder until you blurted out your confession. They mentioned Jonathan’s poor head, not his dead body.

‘They had come all prepared with a shocking tale of a woman who had lost her virtue and assaulted, and probably scarred, a man. They threatened to paint you as a woman who had run away from home, one whom society would be appalled to find as a baroness. They expected me to pay up simply to preserve our good name from unpleasant slurs.

‘And then you said what you did. I was stunned. But so were they and that must have registered with me without my grasping the significance, fool that I am.’

‘You could hardly be expected to notice nuances when you had just been told your wife had killed a man,’ Julia said.

‘I suppose not,’ Will agreed. ‘But Mrs Prior gasped and Prior was struck silent. It only took him a moment to recover his wits and for her to at least regain some composure, but it obviously registered somewhere in my brain.’

‘I was not looking at them,’ Julia murmured, and turned so she could see his profile. Will was miles away, looking back on that appalling scene, she could tell. ‘I heard them but I was watching you.’ Only you, while my heart broke.

‘They had thought I would pay them a few hundred pounds to shut their mouths and go away, I’ll wager that was the sum of their ambition. And then they found that you believed you had killed your lover. I have to give Arthur Prior credit, the man can think on his feet. With a brain like that he should be a lawyer. It was a gift to him and he knew what to do with it at once: tell the big lie, ask enough money, and it all becomes that much more convincing. And you, my darling, could not but help them because you believed it and I, knowing you were still hiding a secret, had believed the very worst of you.’

‘How could I have been so mistaken?’ Julia felt her mind clearing, her strength returning. Perhaps, like Will, she was having to come to terms with the fact that she had a future. The certainty she had lived with so long like a leech on her conscience had been disproved. It was hard to believe she was free. ‘Jonathan looked so...dead.’

‘All head wounds bleed dreadfully. You saw an unconscious man lying face down, his head laid open by an iron poker. He must have sprawled as still as death amidst scattered fire irons on the hearth. There was blood everywhere. You had experienced betrayal, fear, violence, all within minutes and you had done something utterly alien to you—struck another person. The room was suddenly full of cries of Murder! from an ignorant, excited crowd. I can see it as plainly as if I had been there.’

‘If I had not assumed the worst and fled—’

‘You might have been taken up for assault, for it would have been his word against yours and he was the one with the cut head. And besides, I would never have met you,’ Will said as the carriage came to a halt. ‘Of course, you may well say that all these years of anxiety and guilt were not worth it, but selfishly I hope you will come to think they were.’

Julia looked at him sharply, but Will was already on the pavement handing up money to the driver. ‘Now, to get ourselves back up to our room without setting the entire place on its ear. If the manager gets sight of me, we will find ourselves and our bags out on the pavement, I have no doubt!’ he added as he tried to cover the worst damage on his face with the linen square.

‘I do not think I look much better,’ Julia confessed as a page, trying hard not to stare, came to take her small valise. Mercifully, although there were hotel staff a-plenty to negotiate, they did not encounter the manager or any guests on their way up to the room.

‘Oh, my lady! My lord. I was that worried, I didn’t know what to do!’ Nancy, started to her feet as they entered their sitting room. She had a basket of mending at her feet, but it did not seem she had been doing much to it.

Julia did her best to calm her down, although for the life of her she could not think of a convincing explanation to offer the maid other than a rather garbled story of family emergency and footpads.

Her head spun with suppositions and hopes and fears, but she allowed Nancy to lead her away to bathe and to change, leaving Will to deal with his own toilette in the minuscule dressing room. She suspected they both needed time before the full meaning of these revelations could be faced and she sensed that her husband did not want wifely fussing over what he was trying to dismiss as minor injuries.

* * *

‘You are a pearl amongst wives,’ Will said. He laid down his knife and fork after what she supposed was a cross between breakfast and luncheon and lifted his wine glass in a silent toast to her.

‘I am?’

‘You do not prattle and cling when the sensible thing to do is wash and change and eat.’

‘Now I may do more than prattle,’ Julia said. ‘I do not know where to start.’

‘At the beginning,’ Will suggested. ‘We have our lives back, both of us. Do you want to live the remainder of yours with me?’

‘Of course.’ That was the last question she had expected him to ask. ‘I love you—do you not believe me?’

‘I was just getting used to the idea when you ran away from me.’ But he was teasing her, she could see. All the darkness was gone from his eyes and his mouth curved in a smile despite its bruising.

‘I could not let you suffer for what I thought was my crime,’ she said.

‘I know. I am not sure what I have done to deserve that you should put me first, before your own safety, your own life.’

How do I explain to a man why I love him when I cannot even analyse it myself? ‘Will, you do not even seem angry with me after all I have put you through.’

Will stood up, took her hand and led her through to the bedchamber. ‘That must be because I am in love with you,’ he remarked as he closed the door.

‘What?’ Julia spun round so fast she lost her balance and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Did you say—’

‘I said I was in love with you.’ Will sounded thoughtful. ‘Actually, I should have said I love you because I believe there is a difference. I have never felt like this for any other woman. Nor will I,’ he added. ‘I suspect I have been lamentably slow in realising it, my love.’

‘When did you? Realise it, I mean.’ After he realised I was innocent—or before?

Will turned the key in the lock. ‘The sooner we are back in our own home and our own bed, the better,’ he grumbled as he began to undress. ‘When did I realise? I will tell you in a minute, but let me try to recount this as it happened. None of it was a blinding revelation, more a piecing together of pieces. After I had left you in this room, after I had said those things to you that I hope you have it in you to forgive, I sat and drank brandy and realised that you could never have killed a man in cold blood, or even intended to kill him in hot blood either. I realised that it must have been an accident and once I saw that I could understand how it all followed on—your flight, why you had kept it a secret.’

He trusted her. He had trusted her even when he believed she could bring his world crashing down around his ears. How could she not love him?

‘When I found that note I believed it, at first. You frightened me half to death with that tarradidle about suicide and the Thames.’ He heeled his boots off with scant regard for scratches on their glossy finish and tossed them across the room. ‘Hell, woman, I was on Blackfriars bridge before I started to think straight and remembered what you said about throwing yourself in the lake when we first met. And then I looked at the letter and saw it was so very carefully constructed not to tell any lies.

‘I did not think you would risk trying to hide in London, so the next thing was to see if you had taken a stagecoach out of town. I had men checking every ticket office. They drew a blank so I knew you must still be in town, but I didn’t understand why.’ Will sat on the bed beside her to roll down his stockings.

‘I knew then that if I lost you nothing would ever matter again. Not my own life, not an estate, however much I loved it. Even a block-headed male can put two and two together faced with that realisation. I went to sleep despite the shock of realising that I loved my own wife and woke to the realisation that the Priors knew Dalfield was alive.’

He rubbed one big hand over his face, betraying in that gesture the hours of anxiety, the lack of rest. ‘I still had no idea where you were, but I thought I had best deal with the Priors first, so I told Neil Frazer all about it and enlisted his help as a magistrate in case I needed more than brute force. And there, thank God, you were.’

Julia stroked her hand down his cheek, gently over the bruises, feeling the morning stubble prickling under her palm. He loves me and he would love me even if the worst had been true. She supposed it was possible to feel this happy and for it not to be a dream. ‘You found me. I think you would always find me.’

Will pulled off his shirt and stood to unfasten his breeches. Julia scrambled out of her own clothes, careless of pulled buttons, and looked up from unlacing her stays to find him naked, bruised all over his torso and flagrantly aroused. ‘Those bruises! Will, they must hurt so—’

‘Then take my mind off them and do not try to test your theory that I can always find you by running away again. It ruins my sleep,’ he added as he joined her on the wide bed.

Julia gave a little snort of laughter and kissed his collarbone, the nearest part of him she could reach. Ah, the smell of his skin...

‘That is good—I was wondering if I would ever hear you laugh again.’

‘I like this, having you naked and at a disadvantage,’ she murmured, pursuing the line of the bone to the point of his shoulder and biting gently. ‘Tired and battered, my poor love. I can have my wicked way with you.’

‘Disadvantage?’ He rolled her over with a mock growl and pounced, wrestling with the squirming, laughing, woman and the loose tapes of the corset. ‘It would take more than a few bruises and a disturbed night to weaken me.’

Julia lay back with a contented sigh of agreement as Will began to kiss his way down her body. He paused to twirl his tongue in her navel, which always made her giggle, then raised his head. ‘Talking of disturbed nights, do you feel any more comfortable with the idea of children?’ He spoke lightly, but she could sense his underlying hesitation in case he hurt her.

‘I feel very comfortable with that idea, my lord,’ she said. ‘In fact, I think we may have already begun the process. I am not certain, but I have hopes.’

Will moved so fast she hardly had time to blink. One moment she had been sprawled in sensual abandon, the next she was under the covers in Will’s arms and he was holding her as cautiously as he might a basket of eggs. ‘Will! I am not fragile.’ Julia twisted to try to caress him, show him that she wanted, above everything, to make love.

‘Are you sure you are all right?’ His forehead was furrowed with worry lines she had never seen before. ‘It must have been bad enough, these past days, but to have gone through all you have if you are carrying a child—’

‘I am fine,’ Julia said. ‘And I might not be expecting, we need to wait a day or two more in case it is simply stress disrupting my system. But I do not want to wait to make love to my husband.’

Will’s face relaxed. ‘I suppose we could. Just in the interests of securing the succession, you understand, now we cannot rely on Henry.’

The words You know? were on the tip of her tongue. Julia bit them back just in time, but Will smiled. ‘That was another thing that I thought about yesterday. It helped distract me when I was going insane worrying about you. I realised, when I was thinking with my heart, instead of...other parts of my anatomy, that I trusted you. I also thought about Henry dispassionately and not as simply my rather irritating heir and put two and two together. I may have made six, of course.’

‘No, you have not.’ Julia snuggled close against Will’s flank and inched her fingers across his flat stomach. ‘It will not be easy for him, but I have encouraged him to take chambers in London, where the presence of just one close servant would not be remarked upon. Are you shocked? I am sorry if you do not approve.’

‘I am not shocked, so much as anxious for him. But you have given him good advice. And now, having settled Henry’s love life to your satisfaction, might we resume our own?’

‘I thought I was,’ Julia murmured, closing her fingers around the evidence of her husband’s desire.

Will laughed and rolled on to his back, taking her with him. ‘Ravish me, then.’

His eyes were golden, laughing, clear of any shadow. She had never seen them like that, Julia realised as she knelt astride the slim hips and took him into her body with a sigh of pure happiness. ‘I cannot remember when I felt so content, so free of anxiety. So joyous. I love you very much, Will. I thought I would never be able to make love with you again.’

He pulled her down so he could raise his head to meet her lips and smiled up at her. At the look she melted, yielding and as boneless as a swathe of velvet. ‘We’ve been though hell to get here, my love. I think we are owed our little piece of paradise on earth. We will kiss and we will love and then we will sleep and then we will go home and be happy.’

‘For ever?’

‘I am prepared to devote the next eighty years to it,’ Will said. ‘We can review things after that.’

‘Very well, my lord,’ Julia agreed and sank into his arms and his kiss and delicious contentment.