“‘But the sea acted as a strong emetic,’” he gravely finished the stanza. Then she let herself look up, but his gaze slipped away in the same instant and the expression on his harshly handsome face was inscrutable.
“I can’t believe you bought it and never read it,” she said. “You had no idea what you were missing, did you?”
“I’m sure it was more amusing hearing it read in a ladylike voice,” he said. “Certainly it’s less work.”
“Then I’ll read to you regularly,” she said. “I shall make a romantic of you yet.”
He drew back, and his inert hand slid to the sofa. “You call thatromantic?Byron’s a complete cynic.”
“In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”
“Adjustments?” he echoed, stiffening. “Adjustme?”
“Certainly.” She patted the hand lying beside her. “Marriage requires adjustments, on both sides.”
“Not this marriage, madam. I paid—and through the nose—for blind obedience, and that is precisely—”
“Naturally, you are master of your own household,” she said. “I have never met a man more adept at managing everything and everybody. But even you can’t think of everything, or look for what you’ve never experienced. I daresay there are benefits you’ve never imagined to having a wife.”
“There’s only one,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “and I assure you, my lady, I’ve thought of it. Often. Because it’s the only damned thing—”
“I devised a remedy for your indisposition this morning,” she said, stifling a surge of irritation…and anxiety. “You thought there was no cure. You have just discovered Byron, thanks to me. And that put you into a better humor.”
He kicked the footstool away. “I see. So that’s what you’ve been about—humoring me. Softening me up—or trying to.”
Jessica closed the book and set it aside.
She had resolved to be patient, to do her duty by him, to look after him because he badly needed it, whether he realized it or not. Now she wondered why she bothered. After last night—after this morning—after exiling her to the foot of a mile-long dining table—the blockhead had the effrontery to reduce her superhuman efforts tomanipulation. Her patience snapped.
“Trying…to…soften…you.” She dragged the words out, and they slammed inside her, making her heart pump with outrage. “You cocksure, clodpatedingrate.”
“I’m not blind,” he said. “I know what you’re about, and if you think—”
“If you think that I could not do it,” she said tightly, “that I could not make you eat out of my hand, if that’s what I wanted, I recommend you think again, Beelzebub.”
There was a short, thundering silence.
“Out of your hand,” he repeated very, very quietly.
She recognized the quiet tone and what it boded, and a part of her brain screamed,Run!But the rest of her mind was a red mass of anger. Slowly, deliberately, she laid her left hand, palm up, upon her knee. With her right index finger she traced a small circle in the center.
“There,” she said, her own voice just as quiet as his, her own mouth curved in a taunting smile. “Like that, Dain. In the palm of my hand. And then,” she went on, still stroking the center of her palm, “I would make you crawl. Andbeg.”
Another silence thundered through the room and made her wonder why the books didn’t topple from their shelves.
Then it came, velvet-soft, the one answer she hadn’t expected, and the one, she knew in an instant, she should have predicted.
“I should like to see you try,” he said.
His brain was trying to tell him something, but Dain couldn’t hear it past the clanging in his ears:crawl…and beg. He couldn’t think past the mockery he heard in her soft tones and the fury twisting his gut.
And so he locked himself in frigid rage, knowing he was safe there, impervious to hurt. He had not crawled and begged when his eight-year-old world shattered to pieces, when the only thing like love he’d ever known had fled from him and his father had thrust him away. The world had thrust him into privies, taunted and mocked and beat him. The world had recoiled from him and made him pay for every pretty deceit that passed for happiness. The world had tried to beat him down into submission, but he would not submit, and the world had had to learn to live with him on his terms.
As she must. And he would endure whatever he must, to teach her so.
He thought of the great rocks he’d pointed out to her hours ago, which centuries of drumming rain and beating wind and bitter cold could not wear down or break down. He made himself a mass of stone like them, and, as he felt her move beside him, he told himself she would never find a foothold; she could no more scale him than she could melt him or wear him down.
She came onto her knees beside him, and he waited through the long moment she remained motionless. She was hesitating, he knew, because she wasn’t blind. She knew stone when she saw it, and maybe, already, she saw her mistake…and very soon, she’d give it up.
