Page 64 of So Wild A Heart

“Uh, my lord…Lady Ravenscar sent me to find you,” the footman said tentatively, never having seen the elegant Earl in such a state before. He had seen him tipsy, of course, buttons done up wrong or not at all, cravat rumpled and all askew. But as he had only been here five years now, he had never seen him with a smear of brown across the back of his hand and another of gray on his cheek—nor with that odd, distant look in his eyes, so that he stared at a man without really seeing him.

“What?” The earl frowned. “Miranda?”

“No, my lord. The dowager Lady Ravenscar.”

“Oh. Why?”

“It is past time for supper, sir. The others are ready to sit down.”

“Oh. Tell them to go ahead. Bring my supper up to me on a tray. I’m busy. And bring me more lamps. The light’s damn poor in here.”

The footman saw little sense in pointing out that it was nighttime and there was little likelihood of good light. He had long ago decided that the aristocracy were all mad, and this latest glimpse of the Earl of Ravenscar only confirmed that opinion.

When the footman relayed the news to the elder Lady Ravenscar, she frosted up. “We shan’t wait on him. At least—” she turned to Miranda, acknowledging that she was now the lady of the house “—that is what I would advise, Miranda.”

“Yes, I imagine you are right.” But Miranda, unlike her mother-in-law, smiled when she said it, and the look she exchanged with Rachel was one of triumphant delight.

Devin painted through much of the night, finally going off to bed exhausted and disgusted by the rustiness of his skills. He would never recapture the ability he once had, he thought, though he knew he would try again.

The next morning, when he woke up, he was feeling less despairing and, given a fresh look at what he had done in the light of day, he thought that, while it was not worth keeping, it was not, at least, quite as horrible as it had seemed the night before.

He went down to the library, where he found Miranda in a discussion of numbers with Hiram Baldwin. He was growing more and more exasperated with his inability to get her face just right, and he reminded her that she had promised to pose. Miranda rose, smiling, and went with him without a murmur of dissent, leaving Hiram to sigh and return alone to the problem that had been vexing him.

Over the course of the next few weeks Devin was locked in his studio much of each day. Miranda sat for him two hours a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, all that she could stand of sitting still, she told him. The rest of the time he experimented with sketches and colors and still lifes or landscapes—whatever took his fancy. He was seized with a hunger, not quite the obsessive, unrelenting fevers that had often gripped him when he was younger, but still a need to create that made all other things recede.

How had Miranda known that this need still lived inside him? He had not even known it himself.

Had he thought about it, he would have been a trifle surprised to realize how little he missed the activity of London and the pursuits he had indulged in for years. Consumed in the excitement of painting, the need to do it, he rarely even thought of gambling or going out carousing for an evening. Even his drinking diminished as his boredom did, and he was surprised to discover the pleasantness of waking up of a morning without a heavy head and befogged mind. When he did want entertainment or fun, his thoughts turned naturally to Miranda. A few months ago he would have laughed at the thought that an evening playing cards with his wife and her sister, or even just sitting talking to her, would have more appeal than a night of frolic and liquor, but that was the truth of the matter now.

One thing he discovered, however, was that the sudden hunger in him to paint did not diminish the ever-burgeoning hunger in him for Miranda. He would not have thought he could be doubly obsessed in this way, but it seemed, strangely, as if the two desires fed on one another. He painted Miranda’s face and form on canvas, trying to satisfy the need inside him, trying to wear out the fascination of her face, but in doing so, he wound up looking at her—the image and the reality—most of his waking day. At night, tired though he might be, he could not stop thinking about her. She was right next door, soft and warm, waiting for him.

Ever since that night in the library, he had known that she would allow him into her bed. She had made no pretence of disinterest, no calm statement that it was wiser to go their separate ways. All she had asked was his fidelity. If he gave her that, he knew she would be his.

It would be easy to say the words, he knew. It wasn’t as if he had not lied a thousand times, as if he had not told countless women that he loved them, when in fact he barely cared about them. But somehow, with Miranda, he could not lie. He could not look into those clear, penetrating gray eyes and tell her something that he knew was not the truth. At the moment all he wanted was her. But he did not know if that would continue. Once he had slept with her, he might grow tired of her, as he had of every other woman he had ever known, except Leona.

And how could he tell her that he would be faithful to her, when Leona waited for him? Leona was, after all, the love of his life. He had known it at eighteen, and it had remained so for fourteen years. The strange disinterest he felt in Leona now was temporary, he was sure. It was something engendered by his irritation with her for wanting him to marry another and enlarged by his current dual obsessions with Miranda and his art. Guilt nibbled at him for the disinterest, no matter how much he told himself it was temporary. He could not honestly agree to giving her up in order to have Miranda. It would be an insult to Leona, even though she would never know it. And it would be an insult to Miranda, too, sleeping with her out of lust, knowing that he could not give her his heart.

Miranda deserved far better than that. Deserved far better than him, really. She had somehow returned to him his love for painting. She had comforted him, given him strength. With all her strange, irritating ways, she had wormed her way into his affections. He could not allow himself to be less than the man she thought he was.

Devin found it distinctly irritating that his noble intentions were not easier to carry out. It was, in fact, hellaciously hard to lie in bed each night, knowing Miranda was next door and that only his newly acquired sense of honor kept him from enjoying the pleasure of her body. It would seem only fair, he thought, that denying himself the pleasure would be somehow made more endurable by the knowledge that he was doing what was right.

Instead, each night he lay awake, remembering the taste of Miranda’s lips, the soft give of her body in his arms, the shudder of response in her when he stroked her skin, and growing hotter and harder and more unable to sleep with each breath he took. He imagined undressing her, kissing her, caressing her—and he was cursed with a sensually vivid artist’s imagination, so that each thought was almost unbearably real, except that there was no satisfaction.

During the day, as he looked at her, posing for her picture, the same thoughts intruded, winding through their innocuous conversation, tingeing his artwork with a undeniable atmosphere of sexuality. His breath came harder and faster; his skin warmed; his pulse quickened. He wanted her, but he knew he could not let himself have her, and the combination was slowly driving him mad.

The worst evening was at a party given by the local squire, a thin ascetic sort named Breakthorpe, whose wife was just the opposite of him, a jolly, plump, vocal woman. The party was small, containing once again the doctor and the vicar and his wife, as well as the Breakthorpe family and all those staying at Darkwater. However, after supper, when one of the Breakthorpe daughters began playing the piano, Mrs. Breakthorpe decided, after great wheedling by the Breakthorpe girls, to allow dancing while Catherine, the youngest and the quietest of the Breakthorpes, played the piano.

Devin had had no suspicion that the evening would be anything but dull. Instead he had spent the last hour of it dancing almost exclusively with his wife, and it had been the purest form of heaven and hell combined that he had ever experienced. He smelled the rose scent that she dabbed at her temples and between her breasts; he gazed down at the creamy, trembling tops of her breasts; he held her body in his arms, felt her skin against his. And desire pulsed dangerously in him.

Because of the size of their party, they had brought two carriages. Miranda’s stepmother went home early, pleading a headache, with Joseph accompanying her, but this had left the rest of their party to crowd into the other carriage when they left the manor house. The result was that Miranda wound up sitting on her husband’s lap, a satisfactory solution in everyone else’s mind. Devin certainly would not deny that he enjoyed the ride, but by the end of it, after almost forty minutes of the rumbling vibration of the carriage, the constant fractional shifting of Miranda’s buttocks against his body, the feel and smell of her so close to him, he was on fire and desperate for satisfaction.

He ached. His mind could fix on nothing except images of Miranda naked and writhing in his bed. His fingers itched to slide over her bare skin. He gazed out the window into the dark night, trapped in his own private pleasurable hell, the voices of the others swirling around him unintelligibly.

After they got home, he went straight to his study, where he downed two quick brandies. That seemed to help very little, so he made his way upstairs, passing Miranda’s maid on her way down the stairs. That meant Miranda was undressed and in her nightgown, her hair taken down from its pins and falling free down her back.

Devin thought about the night she had come into his bedroom when he had had the nightmare; her hair had been unbound, tumbling down around her shoulders and onto her breasts and back, luxurious and thick. Just the memory made his loins tighten. He wondered if the maid had brushed out her hair, too, or if Miranda was even now sitting before her dressing table in her nightgown, brushing her hair out in long silken strands, burnished in the soft glow of the candlelight. He swallowed a low groan at the thought. It was too much to bear.

He went into his room, though his hand itched to knock at Miranda’s door. He shrugged out of his coat, handing it over to his valet, then sent the man on his way, saying he would do the rest himself. He did not think he could stand another moment of anyone else’s company. Ripping off his cravat in a way he knew would make his valet shudder, he tossed it over the back of a chair. He took off his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves, then unbuttoned his shirt, hoping to alleviate the stifling heat. It was not enough.