Chapter Thirteen

Lit torches had been jammed into the ground in a circle around a makeshift but nevertheless surprisingly smooth oval track

outlined by posts and a rope rail. Overhead, glowing lamps were strung from trees. The cheerfully jostling crowd could have

been comprised of dangerous ruffians or the entire House of Lords (although some would claim the difference between those

two groups was modest, at best); thanks to the flickering torchlight, everyone seemed made of amber light and shadows and

flashing teeth and the whites of eyes. And it seemed indeed it would have been the ideal fertile ground for pickpockets and

other scoundrels, except from the fact that everyone looked and sounded so happy . Not a sinister expression in the bunch. Laughter, back slaps, and good-natured insults rang in the misty air.

Mr. Delacorte had led them through the park from a secluded entrance, exchanging greetings with other shadowy people whose silhouettes he apparently recognized on the way: "Ho there, Lumpy! Funny seeing you here! Ha ha!" "Greasy Joe, my good man!" and "Nice night to lose your shirt, eh, Frederick? Ha ha! My money's on Brightwall!"

Finally he brought them to a spot near what he said would be the starting line, and he and Magnus flanked Dot and Alexandra,

who were both jouncing on their toes with excitement.

"Ohhh, here come the donkeys!" Dot breathed.

Alexandra felt an absurd thrill akin to the first time she'd seen Princess Charlotte from a distance.

Shillelagh pranced to the starting line, tossed her pretty head, and defecated.

"Look! Now she's lighter! Maybe she'll go faster," Dot said.

"I'm not certain that's how it works, Dot." But now Mr. Delacorte looked a little worried.

Everyone except Magnus had placed a wager—two pence for Dot on Shillelagh, half a crown on Shillelagh for Alexandra, and Delacorte,

who was socially exuberant but always fiscally thrifty, a crown on Brightwall.

Suddenly a gasp soughed through the crowd.

"Oh look! There he is! Here he comes!" Dot breathed.

Brightwall the donkey was a handsome, chestnut-colored barrel of a beast. He bared his gigantic square teeth at the crowd

and stomped hooves like small anvils. His tail lashed the air, and he threw his mighty little head back and brayed, to the

cheer of bystanders.

"What did I tell you?" Delacorte said proudly.

"That animal looks like a small, vicious cannon," Magnus marveled.

"Your mother looks like a small, vicious cannon," the jockey called to Magnus.

"She probably did," Magnus rejoindered.

"Oy, sorry mate!" The jockey touched his cap.

Magnus touched his hat.

Alexandra laughed, exhilarated. A little more wildness suffused her with every lungful of chill, misty, smoky night air, every

second amplifying her awareness of the huge man who hovered near her, a man who had once wanted her in his bed more than he'd

wanted his next breath. During the carriage ride, while Mr. Delacorte had regaled them with tales of donkey races past, Alexandra

almost felt as though she could hold up her hand and feel the rays of darkly absorbed intensity shimmering off Magnus, all

of it directed at her.

She had indeed tested her power over him tonight by suggesting she would go to a donkey race with or without him. He seemed

to have ceded her a win. She was beginning to wonder if there would be a cost.

She didn't know why the notion of a cost would fill her with sizzling anticipation.

The donkeys' long ears fluttered and pivoted this way and that in response to the excited crowd, and they tossed their heads

and stomped and danced on their little hooves and switched their tails and shook their round little rumps, showing off. They

seemed to love the excitement.

All the while their jockeys, slight young men wearing rolled trousers and rolled shirtsleeves with caps jammed on their heads, were cheerfully insulting each other.

"Brightwall's a bastard! Brightwall's a bastard!" Someone in the crowd started a chant, pumping his fist in the air.

Delacorte shot Magnus an uneasy look.

"Not the first time I've heard that," Magnus reassured.

Brightwall the donkey stomped his feet. "HEEE H AWWW !" he bellowed.

"Brightwall only loves it! He feeds on it! Say it louder!" his jockey jeered.

The crowd obeyed with enthusiasm.

"brIGHTWALL'S A BASTARD! brIGHTWALL'S A BASTARD! brIGHTWALL'S A BASTARD!"

A panicked Mr. Delacorte attempted to clamp his hands over Dot's ears.

It was one of the funniest things Alexandra had ever seen or heard.

"brIGHTWALL'S A BASTARD! brIGHTWALL'S A BASTARD!" She joined with reckless glee.

She intercepted her husband's askance look with one of unapologetic mischief.

"They make it sound like a compliment," she explained.

His smile was fleetingly brilliant against the dark. He glanced down.

Which is when Alexandra realized she'd reflexively gripped his arm in excitement, and his tensed bicep felt like a boulder beneath her fingers. A thrill shot through her: he was more powerful than her in every way. She didn't un derstand why it felt wildly unjust and infuriating and erotic all at once.

He'd gone utterly still, as if he was loath to frighten off a wild creature. She could feel the tension humming in his body

beneath her hand.

And she let her hand linger longer than seemed wise, simply to revel in his stillness, his fixed expression, the proof of

her power to move him.

She uncurled her fingers slowly, and looped her arm through Dot's. Her heart was hammering with a different sort of portent

now.

"Shillelagh's not a lady! Shillelagh's not a lady!" someone else tried.

This chant was less successful, as a good portion of the crowd was already drunk and all those syllables tripped everybody

up. It eventually devolved into jeers.

Shillelagh lunged to try to snap the hand of someone reaching out to pet her.

"Oy! Keep yer 'ands to yerself!" her jockey warned. "She eats 'ands fer breakfast."

Another compact, nimble young man leaped into the middle of the track. The crowd surged to the railing. His job, it seemed,

was to start the race.

"On your marks... get set... GO GO GO!"

And Brightwall and Shillelagh were off.

The crowd roared.

The little donkeys were nearly blurs, their churning hooves kicking up clods of earth and dust, their ears thrown back, their teeth bared. Their jockeys clung to them manfully. Soon Alexandra's view was four little rumps—two human, two donkey—bobbing along, nearly airborne. They were neck and neck as they rounded the first curve of the track.

Alexandra and Dot screamed, "GO SHILLELAGH! GO!"

While Brightwall and Delacorte bellowed, "GO brIGHTWALL!"

After long suspenseful seconds, Shillelagh was ahead by the tip of her silvery nose. It was absurdly unbearably exciting.

And then the donkeys rounded the bend and a cluster of people pushed in front of her and Alexandra could no longer see them

at all.

"I can't see!" she shouted. "Aaaahhhh I can't see! Down in front! I—"

She was suddenly airborne, seized by the waist and launched up like a bird taking flight, hoisted effortlessly by her huge

husband.

She gasped in delight and laughed joyously. "Go go go, SHILLELAGH! GO!"

Everyone behind her shouted, "DOWN IN FRONT!"

"Make me!" she shouted, a little too caught up in the spirit of things and feeling rather powerful, now that she was tall.

Magnus plunked her to the ground again.

"Are you trying to start a riot?" He laughed.

His hands remained on her waist.

They both seemed to realize this at once.

Then he dropped them and she staggered backward. "You would just toss them all aside like cordwood."

His laugh was marvelous and rich, the very essence of primal male satisfaction. Torch flames were reflected in his pupils.

It was as though he knew the heat left behind by his hands on her waist had traveled to the nether regions of her body.

She no longer had breath to shout for Shillelagh.

But Dot did.

And Dot did.

"SHE'S WINNING! OH MY GOOD HEAVENS! SHE'S AHEAD!! GO SHILLELAGH! IT'S FATE I KNEW IT WAS FATE!"

"GO brIGHTWALL! YOU CAN DO IT, YOU BEAUTIFUL BEAST!" Delacorte bellowed.

The crowd swarmed the rope rail.

And a roar of exultation exploded from the crowd as Shillelagh, by the tip of her silvery nose, won the race.

Alexandra, in a reflex of exultation, turned and leaped into Brightwall's arms.

She felt iron bands latch around her. Briefly she was pressed against the hot wall of his body. Then he released her and they

backed away from each other as if she was a grenade in danger of detonating.

Alexandra spun away from him, her heart racing.

When she dared to glance back, it was to discover that Brightwall was utterly motionless. As if stunned.

Mr. Delacorte was cheerfully philosophical on their walk back to the carriage. "Ah, he'll win the next race. He must have known the ladies were betting on Shillelagh tonight, and wanted to be a gentleman."

Alexandra laughed.

Magnus still hadn't said a word.

"Oh, look! Is that Mr. Pike?" Delacorte waved at someone in the crowd filing away from the track. "I didn't know he liked

donkey races! I wonder if he brought his sweetheart with him."

Dot stumbled.

Magnus caught her by the elbow. "Careful now, Dot. It's easy to lose our footing in the dark," he said.

Mr. Pike heard his name and obviously recognized the voice.

His hand shot up and his smile was briefly bright in the darkness. And then he was lost to the crowd.

They all filed into The Grand Palace on the Thames before the eleven o'clock curfew, and found Mr. Pike already home, up on

a ladder in the foyer preparing to douse the chandelier lights for the night.

He paused to stare in astonishment when Colonel Brightwall and Delacorte entered with two ladies in brown hoods.

"Pike! Did you have money on Brightwall?" Delacorte asked him.

"Shillelagh tonight—I won ten pence!" Pike told him cheerfully.

When Dot and Alexandra shook off the hoods of their borrowed cloaks, Pike nearly fell off the ladder.

"Dot... you went to the donkey race?" he asked.

But Dot walked right past him and up the stairs as if she had neither seen nor heard him.

Given that it was Dot, it was entirely possible both were true, since her own thoughts were often as vivid as what was in

front of her eyes.

Magnus had been silent in the carriage on the way back.

He didn't say a word on their journey through the black-and-white checked foyer, beneath the rather fine chandelier, through

the passage to the annex, and up to their suite.

In fact, she realized, he hadn't said a word directly to her since she'd thrown herself briefly into his arms. Paradoxically,

the quality of his silence was saying a lot of things rather loudly, and all of them were making Alexandra's heart stutter

like a stone skipped across a lake.

She finally broke the silence. "At last I have money of my own." She jingled her twenty-pence prize winnings in her reticule.

It was childish. Pointed. A bit of a taunt. Meant to prod at the gathering tension of his mood and to ease her own nerves

a little.

He didn't reply.

Once inside their suite he aggressively divested himself of both his greatcoat and his hat, then set to work clawing away his cravat until it hung on either side of his neck. He rolled up his sleeves with equal vigor.

She froze, riveted and startled by the almost aggressive rapidity with which he shed his civilized outer shell.

Her eyes flicked to his arms then swiftly away.

His silence seemed to be gathering density.

She removed her cloak carefully, as if to compensate for his vigorous divesting, and hung it up. She unpinned her coiled braid

and let it tumble down her back.

She pulled off her gloves and laid them gingerly on the mantel, as if they were a loaded weapon, and paused by the fireplace

to warm her hands.

And all the while she was aware that he had paced, slowly, purposefully, across the room, until he was standing just behind

her.

She spun about. "Well, I suppose I'll be off to bed—"

She gasped when he seized her braid, which had nearly lashed him when she turned.

He didn't relinquish it.

And now she was his captive, like a ribbon snagged in branches.

He didn't reply. His eyes were mesmerized. His hand slid up the coppery length of her braid until it settled at her nape.

He held her, gently, but utterly fast.

They stared at each other.

She swallowed. "First I lash you with my ribbons." Her voice was frayed. "Now my braid."

He didn't reply. But his fingertips had begun to delicately trace the downy hair at her nape. His body heat was sinking into

her, lulling her.

"Alexandra," he said softly. "Do you think I'm actually made of stone?"

There was a sort of tender, amused menace in the words.

But it sounded like a serious question.

He could do anything he wanted to her in this moment, should he choose. They both knew it.

But around the edges of those words shimmered something like a plea.

As if, despite everything, he was still at her mercy.

God help her, she wanted him to do things to her.

Anything he wanted.

What madness was this?

She was terrified of these feelings for a dozen reasons. Chief among them: the power the two of them seemed to possess to

hurt each other.

"God, yes," she replied, sincerely, on a whisper.

It was too late for her. The wanting was beyond the reach of reason. Her body was already his. She'd gone pliant. Her thoughts

dissolved, scattered; she would not need them for what she was hopefully about to do.

As his lips moved in a slow curve his hand slid down, down to cup the curve of her arse.

Her breath snagged in her throat when he urged her abruptly up against his cock.

Which was already hard.

This is what you do to me , was the message.

Her heart kicked inside her.

She shifted her groin against him. Testing herself. Testing him. Teasing him.

He hissed in a breath.

And she found his cock was so hard now it nearly hurt to move against him.

The battle between pride and need drew his features taut. His breath shuddered shallowly, hotly, in and out, against her lips.

Mingling with her own.

Her eyes were going heavy-lidded from desire. She fought it, in vain.

It remained a contest of wills.

What if he let her go? Dropped his arms? Decided this was a bad idea? She felt, in that mad moment, that she would crumble

into ash if he did. She felt it would destroy her.

Her lips trembled toward each other, desperate to form the word that meant surrender, that word that would let him know he'd

won, that would betray to him that she would do anything he wanted: please .

He knew. Because she could see the exultation in his eyes.

And when his control snapped it was with a low groan, the sound of someone at last unchained from a dungeon wall.

It vibrated through her body as his mouth at last touched hers.

The rich heat and singular taste of him were a heady shock. The kiss was at once a carnal siege—the sensual glide of his lips, then the silken stroke of his tongue—the object clearly to arouse her past endurance.

She hadn't known a kiss could do this: inebriate like whiskey, render useless the bones in her knees. Obliterate her will.

His hands gripped her arse and he brought her harder up against him just as her knees began to buckle; she fastened her arms

around his neck, held on for dear life, and following his lead, they kissed each other to the brink of madness. Until they

were forced to lift their heads, their breath bursting from their lungs in hot gusts.

They dragged each other down to the carpet like two people competing to drown each other.

Once their knees were on the floor, he took startlingly swift, efficient command. His arms went around her and he quickly

had her on her back in an almost alarmingly businesslike fashion. Getting her into rutting position, because that's exactly

what they were about to do. She looked dazedly up at a big man whose eyes were burning like a marauder's, feeling powerful

as a sorceress to have so inflamed him. And freshly frightened, too, by her own anarchic desire, her willingness to fling

herself into the unknown.

She clawed up her dress to abet him and felt a sense of unreality as the cool air of the room met her bare thighs. With one dexterous hand he managed to free all the buttons on the fall of his trousers and hurriedly dragged them down his thighs, shoving the great swaths of shirt aside.

His huge erect cock curving up toward his belly from its nest of curling dark hair was the most aggressively masculine, primitive

thing she'd ever seen, and it nearly shocked her out of her lust fog.

With no preamble or warning, he slid one testing hand between her legs, up through the curls at the juncture of her legs,

and stroked. Her breath snagged in her throat when a lightning jolt of pleasure arced through her. Her stunned sob of pleasure

evolved into a low moan when he did it again and again. Fierce satisfaction surged in his features.

And then his hands were expertly parting her thighs and she gasped as he guided his cock into her.

It felt at first like a shocking invasion. Utterly foreign. She knew a split second of stark loneliness as she met his eyes,

knowing that all this could mean for both of them was an urgent appeasement of a furious appetite. A mutual vanquishing. The

faster they got what they wanted from it, the better.

And then his hips moved and it became wondrously clear that of course this was exactly what she wanted: every thrust ramped

up the pleasure gathering, threatening to burst the very banks of her being.

She slid her hands under his shirt, her palms savoring the play of muscles under his hot smooth skin as he moved. His eyes flared hotter still when her hands slid down to fit into the scoops of muscle in his hard buttocks, and she gripped him, rising up to meet every thrust. He groaned and muttered a low oath of pleasure as she locked her legs around his hips.

And then all was abandon: the swift collision of bodies, her own sobs of pleasure as he drove her closer and closer to something

glorious she could sense, but could not name. He knew what it was. Surely he knew. Surely this was what he was racing toward.

She prayed he knew.

And then, because she was beyond pride, beyond anything other than need, that word at last rushed past her lips.

"Magnus... please... "

"Tell me..." His voice was a rasp.

"Oh God... please Magnus... I need... I want... I don't know I don't know... help me..."

He reached down and stroked her hard and expertly where they were joined.

Bliss unimaginable snatched her from her body and hurled her into the heavens like so much blazing confetti.

A scream was torn from her; she heard it as if she were miles away, floating somewhere over London, drifting, drifting. Her

body bowed up beneath him.

She was quaking as if lightning-struck.

And that moment he went still with a groan.

He withdrew from her quickly.

He spilled instead on her thigh.

They collapsed, and lay side by side for a time on the carpet like two people flung haphazardly across the road after a carriage accident. She had a new appreciation for the word "sated." She could not move if she tried. Her body felt thoroughly and properly used for the first time ever.

Some absurd, latent reflex toward modesty made her pull her dress down over her hips. It was still furled around her waist.

And that was when Magnus bestirred himself to sit up.

And so she did, too. He'd found a handkerchief in his pocket. He gently, matter-of-factly cleaned her thigh where he'd spilled.

He rearranged his shirt; he pulled his trousers up.

She watched all of this, a little abashed. But still dazed and reeling from her trip into the heavens via an orgasm.

And then they regarded each other as if seeing each other for the first time.

Tentatively, he reached out, and cupped her face. "Alexandra..."

He'd made her name sound like a question. One tinged with faint regret.

She looked up at him and saw silver and gold. His eyes, his skin. Gold is a soft metal , she thought dazedly. He seemed to her, in the firelight, gilded, and dangerously, deceptively soft. A great, battered, beautiful,

pagan beast.

And her heart gave a sharp kick that felt perilously like joy.

Oh, she was very afraid of what was happening to her.

The ultimate punishment for her original crime would be to fall in love with a man she had likely already lost forever.

Perhaps her expression reflected her sudden fear. Because he dropped his hand from her quickly. As though in touching her

he'd somehow transgressed.

Did he think he hadn't the right to offer affection to her? Or could he not bring himself to do it, since he felt honor-bound

or pride-bound to despise her for betraying him?

Or was pride a factor at all when vigorous sex on the carpet was a possibility?

Regardless, she understood ambivalence all too well.

Suddenly the memory of a little pink scrap of ribbon tucked into a box was like a razor cut across her heart.

If she had found him kissing another woman in the garden on their wedding night, would she ever have forgiven him?

She just didn't think so.

And that was the crux of it.

Would bedding her at last satisfy him? After all, she'd been an acquisition. Something to partake.

This thought rang a little falsely. She nurtured it anyway, because somehow it seemed that if she could fan the flames of

righteous anger she could protect herself from being hurt.

"Are you..." He stopped. Pressed his lips together.

"Yes. I'm very good. Thank you," she said, with almost absurd formality, as if they were sitting across from each other at

a tea party. "And you?"

His expression remained pensive. Absorbed. His eyes never left her face.

A long moment later he said, "I'm very good." His voice was a husk.

Finally, absently, he swiped his hands through his hair, pushing it away from his sweaty forehead.

Neither one of them stood yet.

They sat together quietly, listening to each other breathing. Listening to the fire pop and snap.

"He was my brother's tutor."

He went rigid at once. His eyes flared in wary surprise.

"You never met him," she added. More faintly. "He was living for a time with the family in the house behind us. And he left

to teach in Africa."

It had taken a lot of her courage to say that.

They stared at each other again. Her heart jabbed at her painfully.

"All right," he said finally. Carefully.

This was the measure and nature of the pain between them, she understood. Of the damage they'd inflicted on each other. That

these questions and revelations could only be approached like shrapnel embedded in the flesh. One shard at a time.

She didn't know what would be left when they were done. Perhaps they never would be done. After all, her husband's leg retained the souvenir of the time he'd saved a man's life. And in rough weather, he limped.

Perhaps the best solution was indeed to put an ocean between them.

"I'll just say good-night now, shall I?" she said softly, but firmly.

She wanted to be alone, so she could take inventory of herself, now that she was forever changed. There wasn't enough room

on the floor for her, and for him, and all of her tumultuous feelings.

He was on his feet at once, his hand extended to her to help her up.

Her hand vanished into his, which was warm and rough and as oddly, immediately reassuring as his coat.

He glanced down at it, his face suddenly bemused. Like a boy, who'd been handed something valuable he wasn't certain he had

the right to touch.

She didn't want to let go of him, which was why she did almost at once.

His hair was wildly mussed, which amused her. She was so tempted to reach up, to smooth it, simply to touch him. To tend him.

How could the people among whom he'd been raised not have recognized the remarkable person in their midst? It seemed a terrible

crime.

If she touched him that way and he stiffened, or dodged away, or worse, looked upon her with surprise, she would have died

on the spot.

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

He stared at her closed door for a few seconds.

Then he dropped his head into his hands.

He breathed in, and out.

In and out.

Christ.

Blazing elation and acrid regret. Triumph and fear. An almost helpless tenderness. The dregs of fury and hurt. They all had

gotten hold of various tag ends of his being, and he felt as though they might split him apart.

He relived all of it now: The unthinkably silken skin of her thighs as he slid his hands down to spread them. His fingers

twining in those damp copper curls over her quim to discover whether she was ready for him. Her uncertain gaze going swiftly

hot and hazy with desire. Her pale throat arching back on a scream of release. Her body pulsing around his cock.

He closed his eyes as fresh waves of lust and shame slammed him.

He could not believe he'd taken his beautiful, estranged virgin wife like a soldier rutting with a camp follower. He knew

how to properly make love to a woman.

But if he wasn't mistaken... dear God, she had bloody well enjoyed it.

He'd thought he'd sensed this between them nearly five years ago: a spark that could be fanned into a conflagration. He'd

wondered since then if it had been a delusion born of wishful thinking. Something he told himself to justify his untenable

want for this one particular woman.

But maybe, for her, the spark—if she indeed felt such a thing—was entirely new.

Her brother's tutor. Every time he pictured that slim, shadowy man reaching desperately for her, her body blending into his—misery

and fury fleetingly slashed the breath from him.

But he found these feelings, for the first time, tempered with sympathy. For all of them.

Even that young man darting away in the dark.

He didn't think Alexandra would ever love an idiot. And that somehow made it both better and worse.

How Magnus had wanted to be her refuge. And yet how odd it was to now feel a little gratitude that she'd had a source of comfort

during a challenging time.

If he'd known she'd just ended a love affair, would he have married her anyway?

He didn't know. Everything about her, in fact, reminded him of everything he didn't know about love.

It still felt to him like a deception.

And he didn't think loving someone was something one could simply cease doing at will.

Would it have been more honorable for her to tell him about her brother's tutor? He didn't know that, either. He did know

that she had stood up in church and forsaken all others for as long as she lived, and hours later she had passionately kissed

another man.

It remained unquestionably a betrayal, by anyone's definition.

And this conviction brushed up against something implacable in him. A wall behind which he could remain safe.

Because if he touched her the way he'd always wanted to touch her, she would understand at once that she undid him utterly.

And his pride still rebelled at the idea of her ever discovering the man known for mercilessness was entirely at her mercy.