He had not forced himself on her. Jessica had invited him.
He had crashed into her like a battering ram and been incapable of exercising much restraint thereafter, yet she hadn’t screamed or wept. On the contrary, she had seemed to get right into the spirit of the thing.
He looked at her. Her hair had fallen over her eyes. Turning toward her, he brushed it away. “I collect you’ve survived,” he said gruffly.
She made an odd sound—a cough or a hiccup, he couldn’t tell. Then she flung herself against him and, “Oh, Dain,” she choked out.
The next he knew, her face was pressed against his chest and she was sobbing.
“Per carita.” He wrapped himself about her and stroked her back. “For God’s sake, Jess, don’t…This is very…troublesome.” He buried his face in her hair. “Oh, very well. Cry if you must.”
She would not weep forever, he told himself. And upsetting as it was to hear it and feel the tears trickling over his skin, he knew matters might have been worse. At least she had turned to him, not away. Besides, she was entitled to cry, he supposed. He had been rather unreasonable these last few days.
Very well, more than that. He’d been a beast.
Here she was, a new bride in this mammoth house with its grand army of servants, and he had not helped her. He had not tried to make the way easy…just as she’d said about his father.
He’d been acting like hisfather. Cold and hostile and rejecting every effort to please.
For Jessica had been trying to please, hadn’t she? She had read to him and tried to talk to him and she’d probably thought the portrait of his mother would be a lovely surprise for him. She had wanted him to stay, when any other woman would have been in raptures to be rid of him. She had offered herself to him, when any other woman would have swooned with relief to escape his attentions. And she’d given herself willingly and passionately.
He was the one who ought to be weeping, with gratitude.
The cloudburst ended as abruptly as it had begun. Jessica squirmed away, rubbed her face, and sat up. “Lud, how emotional one becomes,” she said shakily. “Is my nose red?”
“Yes,” he said, though the light was failing and he could scarcely see straight anyhow.
“I had better wash my face,” she said. She climbed off the bed, picked up her dressing gown, and put it on.
“You can use my bath. I’ll show you the way.” He started to get out of bed, but she waved him back.
“I know where it is, ” she said. “Mrs. Ingleby explained the layout.” She headed unerringly across the room, opened the correct door, and hurried through.
While she was gone, Dain quickly examined the bedclothes and cleaned himself off with a piece of his shirt, which he threw in the fire.
Whatever the cause of her weeping fit, it hadn’t been a reaction to serious physical injury, he comforted himself. He’d found a spot of blood on one of the coverlet’s gold dragons and there had been a bit on him, but it was nothing like the carnage his overwrought imagination had pictured these last three days.
He could not believe his mind had been so disordered. In the first place, any cretin might have understood that if the female body could adapt to dropping brats, it must certainly be able to adapt to the breeding instrument—unless the man was an elephant, which he wasn’t, quite. In the second place, any imbecile might have recollected that this woman had never, since the time under the lamppost in Paris, recoiled from his advances. She had even spoken plainly enough—more than once, without a blink—about his breeding rights.
Where in the name of heaven had he obtained the idea she was fragile or missish? This was the woman who’dshot him!
It was the strain, Dain decided. The trauma of finding himself married, combined with crazed lust for his bride, had been more than his mind could cope with. The portrait of his mother had finished him off. With that, his brain had shut down altogether.
By the time Jessica returned, Dain had himself and everything else in proper order. Andrews had carried away the heaps of discarded traveling clothes, the valise was put away, the lamps had been lit, a footman was on his way to Chudleigh, and dinner was being prepared.
“It seems you’ve been busy,” she said, glancing about as she came up to him. “How tidy the room is.”
“You were gone rather a while,” he said.
“I had a bath,” she said. “I was agitated, as you saw.” She studied the knot of his sash, her brow furrowed. “I think I was hysterical. I wish I hadn’t cried, but I couldn’t help it. It was a…deeply moving experience. I daresay you’re used to it, but I am not. I was much affected. I had not expected…Well, frankly, I was expecting the worst. When it came to the point, I mean. But you did not seem to experience any difficulty, and you did not seem inhibited by my inexperience or annoyed, and, except for a moment, it did not feel like the first time at all. At least, not what I’d imagined the first time to be like. And what with having my anxieties relieved and the extraordinary sensations…The long and the short of it is, I could not contain my feelings.”
He had read the signs more or less correctly, then, for once, finally. The world was in order. All he needed to do was step carefully, to keep it that way.
“My temper has not been altogether even, either,” he said. “I’m not used to having a female about. It’s…distracting.”
“I know, and I’ve taken that into account,” she said. “Nonetheless, Dain, you cannot expect me to go through this again.”
He stared at the top of her head and watched his neatly ordered world tumble back into chaos. In an instant, his previously light heart became a lead casket, bearing the corpse of a fragile infant hope. He should have known better than to hope. He should have realized he’d make everything go wrong. But he didn’t understand now, any more than he ever had, how he had turned everything so very wrong. He didn’t understand why she’d been sent into his life, to give him hope, and kill it in the first moment he dared to believe it.
