Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [90]
Chapter 14
"Hell and damnation," Dain muttered as he gingerly withdrew from her. "I'll never make it to Chudleigh in time for dinner now."
He rolled onto his back and focused intently upon the embroidered gold dragons above, to keep himself from leaping up and subjecting his wife to a thorough physical examination. Fortunately, with his lust appeased, for the moment, his intellect had resumed normal operation. And with the return of reason, he could sort out the simple facts.
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 his father. 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