Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ your understanding!” He could take her now, here, while the fire she’d roused in him still throbbed in his body. Despite her words, he knew she wanted him. It would be so easy to bury himself deep within her, to lose himself in the hot promise of her love.

      But instead he shoved her away while he still could, so roughly that she stumbled backward. Desperate for some sort of release, he lashed out furiously at the paneling over her head with his fist. “You parade about half-naked and rub yourself against me like a cat in heat, and then you want me to understand when you change your mind?”

      She winced at his crudeness, tugging her gown back over her bare breasts. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said softly. “There are so many reasons.”

      “Afraid you’ll lose your title, Countess?” he snarled, as angry with himself for what he’d nearly done to her as he was with her for denying them both. “Afraid that if your precious Frederick learned how eagerly you’d spread your legs for some poor American sailor like me, he’d toss you out on the street like the little whore you are?”

      Hot tears of shame ran down her cheeks. “It’s not like that at all!” she cried. “It’s just I—I cannot love you the way you deserve.”

      “You expect me to believe that?” Disgusted, he turned to leave.

      “It’s the truth!” she sobbed. “Damn you, Jeremiah, did I question you last night?”

      He froze, his hand on the latch, his face rigid.

      “I need you, Jeremiah,” she said haltingly through her tears. “I need you and care for you, and I believe you care for me, too. But for me, for now, that’s all it can be. I can’t love you the way you want. I can’t love anyone like that. It’s not you, and it’s not Frederick. It’s my fault. All mine.”

      She sank down to her knees on the deck, burying both her face and her tears in her hands. He would hate her now. How could he not? She deserved it for what she’d done to him. But, oh, how hard his hatred would be to bear!

       She could still hear her mother’s voice, raspy with consumption, as she and her friends had taught the little country virgin the cold, mercenary lessons in pleasing men so men in turn would value her. They’d told her things she’d thought impossible between men and women, then showed her themselves with their willing lovers if she’d dare doubt in their hearing. They had ridiculed her innocence and mocked her romantic ideas of love and happiness as readily as they had criticized her beauty. Such spiteful, jealous women, those friends of Merry Miriam Harris, their high-pitched laughter and their bright satin gowns making them seem like exotic, expensive tropical birds in the gray seaside mist of Portsmouth.

       Though she had tried so hard to do what her mother and her friends wanted, every cruel word had found its mark in her thirteen-year-old soul, and each night she had cried herself to sleep on the pile of quilts, rank with stale perfume and old sweat, that was her makeshift bed in the corner of her mother’s dressing room. Yet each night, too, she swore she wouldn’t be like them, and when Frederick had rescued her she thought she’d succeeded. She was cherished, she was loved, she was treated as well as a favorite daughter by a gentle man old enough to be her father who never in fifteen years had asked her to perform the specialities she’d been forced to learn.

       But now Caro knew she was no better than her mother and her friends. Only her price had been different. And God in heaven, how dearly it had cost her!

      For a long time Jeremiah stood watching her, crumpled there on the deck at his feet in the black sea of her tangled skirts. She was too lost in her sorrow to notice him, and as she wept softly to herself, he felt the blind anger that had so possessed him lessen and slip away. Overhead he heard Bertle shout an order, followed by the crewmen’s footsteps as they hurried to obey. Strange how he’d forgotten he was even at sea. Stranger still how his whole world seemed to have narrowed to this one tiny cabin and the weeping woman within it.

      Her hair had fallen forward to veil her face, leaving the nape of her neck and her back in the open gown touchingly exposed. He had never thought of her as vulnerable, yet as she was now he could think of nothing else, and he had done it.

      This was his fault, not hers. The scars he carried were there on his body, plain as day, but the ones that marked her ran deeper, and were no less painful for being hidden. He, of all people, should have listened when she’d begged for his understanding. He didn’t care now what had happened to make her believe she was so unworthy of the love she was born to give. What mattered most was that once again, one more time, he had failed another who had trusted him.

      With a weary sigh he crouched down beside her, taking her hands in his to gently raise her to her feet. She kept her face lowered, unwilling to let him see how she wept. Wordlessly he turned her like a doll toward the bunks and began to lace her gown the way she’d first asked. The black cord crossed and recrossed her skin until, with a deft twist of his wrist, he pulled the two sides tightly together. He tied a neat little bow at the neckline and tucked the ends inside the gown.

      And then, before she realized it, he was gone.

       Chapter Ten

      “That rocky island to the nor’ west is Sardinia,” said Jeremiah as he handed his spyglass to Caro, standing beside him on the Raleigh’s quarterdeck. “With any luck at all, we’ll make Naples by nightfall. For all that he’s an unpleasant rascal, Bertle’s done right well for us as a navigator.”

      “We’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Caro wistfully as she took the glass, careful not to let her fingers brush his. “So soon?”

      Jeremiah nodded, his hand tapping lightly on the rail as he gazed out across the bright blue Mediterranean. Even with a brisk breeze off the water, the morning was warm, and he’d left his coat in the cabin below and stood now in his waistcoat and rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wind billowing through the linen above his tanned forearms.

      “Oh, aye, Bertle’s made a first-rate passage for us. Couldn’t be better.” He glanced down at her from the shadow of his hat brim, his eyes very green in the light reflecting from the water. “I thought you’d be pleased, considering. The sooner we make Naples, the sooner you could have your husband back.”

      “I am pleased, thank you,” she answered evenly. “It is only that the journey’s been so easy that I wonder that we are there this soon.”

      These past weeks with him she had become accomplished at such demonstrations of polite good breeding. By now she could let her eyes meet his without her face growing hot, and smile serenely when he offered his arm to her on the deck. It was all passing genteel, most correct.

      She was sure he never guessed how she lay in the bunk above him each night and fought the fevered memory how his lips had felt on hers, the wildfire his touch had sent racing through her blood, and how shamelessly she had writhed in his arms as her body had begged for more. The vividness of the memory shocked her, returning whenever she was near him. She prayed he never noticed how many times she’d watched him covertly beneath her veiled hat and felt her pulse race as he climbed the rigging with an acrobat’s grace, working alongside the Raleigh’s crew to relieve the tedium of the voyage.

      Most of all, she wanted him to believe she was as happy and as carefree as he seemed to be himself. Why shouldn’t Jeremiah be? Because he wasn’t married, he’d done nothing wrong, СКАЧАТЬ