Regency Society Collection Part 1. Sarah Mallory

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       Chapter Twelve

      She was sick into the china basin kept beneath her bed and then sick again as Taris stirred.

      Swallowing, she could hardly hide her embarrassment. Such a far cry from last night’s loving and the first rays of dawn slanting through the gap in the curtains at her window.

      Her stomach heaved again and she held back her hair, the sweat of exertion marking her skin with a glistening dew. She noticed that the grazes on her arms this morning had crusted, the first scabs of healing formed across open wounds.

      Breathing heavily, she shut her eyes, shut everything out whilst she tried to find an equilibrium, the nausea receding as quickly as it had come and leaving a tiredness that was all encompassing.

      ‘Has this happened before?’ he asked when she turned towards him.

      ‘It has,’ she replied, wishing that she could have hidden it. Perhaps she was dying? Perhaps this was a sickness that had no cure, the exhaustion that accompanied the early-morning routine just another symptom of its severity. Frankwell had vomited often in the mornings in the last months of his life.

      Taris didn’t look happy at all. ‘Hell,’ he said, pulling the length of his hair back off his face. Naked, the muscles of his chest stood out along the contours of his hard brownness. ‘Hell,’ he repeated when she did not say a thing.

      Rallying, she tried to make light of her suppositions. ‘I am certain it must be something I am eating and—’

      He interrupted her. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’

      ‘Seventeen.’

      ‘And you were close?’

      Bea didn’t understand the meaning of such a topic change. ‘Very.’

      His silence unnerved her.

      ‘Well, perhaps not as close as we had been when I was younger, but—’

      ‘I want you to come with me to Falder. I am repairing there today and Emerald and Asher will arrive later in the afternoon.’

      ‘I don’t understand?’

      ‘You need to be away from London.’

      ‘Because you feel that I might have another accident?’

      His laugh was unexpected. ‘There are other reasons I have for asking this of you, but I would rather not discuss them here and now.’

      Beatrice could not guess at what the ‘other reasons’ might be, but the fright yesterday had made her wary of being in the vicinity of a lot of people, and Falder with its isolated safeness appealed.

      ‘I should not wish to be a nuisance.’

      ‘The castle has one hundred and twenty-seven rooms! You would hardly be in the way and with Emerald and my mother as chaperons there could be no whisper of a scandal.’

      Correct and careful! She wished he might have said that he wanted her to come, that he wanted to protect her, that the night they had just spent together had been the most wonderful in his life and that now he desired something more lasting…

      But when she turned again he was pulling on his clothes with a haste that said he wanted to be gone.

      ‘Bates will return with the carriage in the midmorning and men will be sent to help with the lifting of any luggage. I am presuming that you will bring your maid with you.’

      ‘I am hardly an invalid and my luggage will not be heavy.’

      ‘No.’ He said this so angrily that she looked up at him in surprise. ‘You are not to lift anything, you understand? And do not go outside for any reason at all.’

       Orders. Rules. Directives. Control.

      Drawing in a breath, Bea turned away, the image of her late husband’s bluster and tyranny coming to mind.

      Perhaps that was what happened with men. They took your body and wanted your mind as well. To own and СКАЧАТЬ