Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

M urder.

Madhouse.

The words bounced in Jack's head as he and Leda mounted the hired chaise and set out on the road to Swindon.

It would be past dusk by the time they arrived, an invitation to gentlemen of the road, were any lurking, but he could not ask Leda to stay in Chippenham. She was in agony after the confrontation with her sister. Jack had wondered what could overset the unflappable Mrs. Wroth, and now he knew.

A sister. It seemed Leda's family was alienated from her just as much as Jack's, and for similar reasons: because she had disgraced them.

She was locked up for a time , Ives had said, almost off-hand with the knowledge.

For murder?

Was he riding in a carriage with a woman who had killed a man?

Leda stared out the front window of the chaise into the falling night. He had given her the right side, with the clearer view, since the post boy, a compact man old enough to be someone's grandfather, rode the near horse. After her sister swept away with her back straight as a rod, Leda had paced the courtyard of the Angel while Jack supervised the loading of their luggage onto the post chaise. The sister lived nearby, mistress of some great house—the ostler had given her a deferential nod—but she clearly harbored no intentions to invite the travelers to her home to entertain them, nor interrogate the sibling who had risen from the grave.

"Mrs. Crees," the innkeeper had greeted her cordially. "How was your excursion today? The horses sweet goers? I hope our carriage served while yours was being repaired."

Emilia had been gruff in her answer and ascended the cabriolet waiting for her, the ribbons held by the man in dark livery who had accosted Leda earlier. The one who had addressed her as Mrs. Toplady, which, Jack now realized, was her married name.

Leda had done in her cruel husband by some means, then bundled her cook and maid, and the maid's bastard baby, away from the house. So they could not be made to testify? The nephew had taken over her home, and Leda had been locked away. In a madhouse.

She was no longer in the madhouse, but she'd been hiding from her family—and the nephew—all this time.

The sister had mentioned a murdered babe.

He was taking this woman to his home. To meet his child.

It was as if she read his thoughts, or the agitation rippling from him. Leda stirred and drew a breath that fluttered the scarf tucked into the collar of her smart riding jacket. Jack tore his eyes from her bosom and trained them on the back of the post boy.

"The babe is alive," she said. "You met him. Ives."

The weight of fear left his shoulders. A wren trilled and chirped from a beech as they passed. Jack didn't see many wrens around Holme Hall, but he remembered an odd fact about their mating habits. The male wren made nests around his territory, and the female chose him for the accommodations he could provide. When she consented to be his mate, they selected a nest for breeding and lined it together.

Exactly what Jack had hoped for from Leda Wroth when she agreed to come with him.

"Why would your sister believe the child was murdered?"

"They said so at my trial, and we let everyone believe it. We hid Ives so that my husband's nephew could not find him. We feared what he might do."

At least she had not killed a child. He also wanted to know if she had murdered her husband, but he wanted the other mystery sorted first.

"Your sister thought the child was yours."

‘That is what we let the world think. After Bertram…when Betsey fell pregnant, I was still childless. Despite his best efforts," she said, bitterness lancing her tone. "It was an outrage to me that he meant to turn off my maid and a babe of his blood, instead of accounting for his actions. So."

She drew a deep breath. "I pretended to all, including to him, that I was pregnant. Betsey and I increased together. We had no country estate to hide at, and I could not go to my parents or sister, so we kept to my rooms. Bertram—worsened. I think he suspected what I was about, and it set off some demon in him.

"Then the babe came early, and it was difficult. Betsey nearly died. In the middle of the uproar, my husband's nephew arrived, and they quarreled. I do not know what about—Eustace was upset he would no longer be the heir, made no secret of it. Even his own family hated my husband. I remember standing in the kitchen, making a tincture for Betsey, and then…"

He waited. The chaise dipped and jolted over a rut. One of the horses snorted and tossed its head, jangling its harness, and the postilion scrubbed its neck. A tawny owl called from a hollow in his oak, too-wit, too-wit .

"I don't know what happened." Leda looked at her hands, tugging her fingers within their gloves. Her voice was a wisp of smoke. "I woke up in my shift, covered in blood. There was a pool of it in my bed. I was barefoot, and my prints traced from my bed to the front parlor, where—" She gulped and struggled. "Where my husband's body lay. Then my tracks led away, into the hall. And I was holding the carving knife that had plunged through Bertram's heart."

Jack said nothing.

"And neck," she added, as if pressed to confess all. "And stomach as well. He had several wounds. The coroner—" Again she struggled. "The coroner said this was characteristic of a crime committed in a fit of madness. And since I could remember nothing, what could they conclude but that I had killed him?"

"You would have been hanged if you were thought sane." A tight band constricted his throat.

"The madhouse was little better than a prison. Eustace was not going to pay to keep me at one of those places that are like a country home. I was a criminal, to all eyes. He said I must have murdered my babe as well, since I could produce no child."

"Where did they put you?"

"An asylum in Gloucester. Fortunately, I was not one of those locked in a cage for people to come look at, like in Bedlam. I was not an entertaining madwoman, and my crime was too horrid to be believed. I was kept hidden."

The sides of her mouth pursed, as if she tasted raw gooseberries. He knew that sensation.

"How did you escape?"

"An accomplice, a gardener I befriended. He smuggled me a tool to loosen the bars on my window. It took a long time. Then I threw myself out the window into a hay wagon, and he drove me away. I bribed the warden to say I had died of typhus and my body burned to stop the spread of the disease. I traded my shoes for a boat to Bristol and from there walked barefoot to Bath and found an angel in the form of a school mistress named Miss Gregoire, and she gave me my life back."

"As Mrs. Wroth." Jack stared out the window. The urge to touch her was strong. He wanted to slide his palm around the nape of her proud neck, sink his fingers into her hair, rub his thumb over her satin cheek. Tell her how astonishing it was that she had survived.

Soothe a possible murderess for what she suffered because of her crime?

"Why that name?"

Her lips turned up, at least on one side, and Jack saw the smile, detached, amused, that had so captivated him in the Upper Assembly Rooms the first time he saw her.

"You have not heard of Lady Mary Wroth? That is indeed a shame. She was a true courtier of the Renaissance, poet, patroness, a marvelous dancer. I read a fabulous poem she composed, though I could only ever get my hands on part of it."

"Why her, though?"

"She endured tragedy and survived. Her firstborn son died young. She struggled most of her life with the debts her husband left. She had a passionate affair with her cousin, in fact bore him two children, though he was never faithful. She was forced to retire from court because the wife of James I, Queen Anne, was jealous of Lady Mary's sophistication and beauty. She has always impressed me as a woman who lived life on her own terms. Who left her mark."

"And escaped the shadow of her husband." Few women did.

Anne-Marie hadn't. Jack tried to picture Anne-Marie climbing out of a window or walking barefoot for miles to find a life of freedom. She'd walked, but only as far as some neighbor's house, possibly right up his bedroom, and then she'd thrown herself off a cliff when the man was done wanting her. It was the only way she could escape Jack.

But Anne-Marie had not been in full possession of her faculties, Jack was sure of that. Leda was.

And if she were indeed compos mentis, as her sister had claimed, she could be hauled before a judge and held accountable for her crimes.

No wonder she was running away to Norfolk.

She looked him squarely in the eye. Once again it was as if she read his thoughts, or read him accurately enough to guess what his thoughts were.

"This is the woman you are bringing to Norfolk, to your home," she said. "If you wish to abandon me in Swindon, I will understand."

The coach jolted in and out of another set of ruts. Jack's dinner swirled in his belly, threatening to make its reappearance.

He was bringing this woman, a woman who claimed to have blacked out in a feverish moment and come to her senses with a knife in her hand and her husband's stabbed body in the house, to his home, to his daughter.

He studied her face, the arch of her cheekbones, the curve of her brow. Her eyes were violet shadows in the growing darkness.

The thought of leaving her, going on without her, hurt much worse.

When Anne-Marie betrayed him, then betrayed her children, Jack had vowed he would never again let another person throw him into such turmoil. He'd gathered up his acrimony and recriminations and agony and regret and stuffed his feelings into a great traveling trunk in his mind, where they were allowed to reek endlessly, a slow, quiet poison that infected his life. He'd accepted that he was a man who would not be bound to a woman, who would not have the kind of warm, interested affection his parents had shared, nor the wild doting that his sister felt for her architect. He'd accepted that he would remain untouched, likely for his whole life, and become the bitter, misanthropic recluse that, by all accounts, the previous Baron Brancaster had been.

Yet here was this woman calling herself Leda Wroth who had stepped into his life and in the span of mere days—hours, really—made him feel that perhaps there were things he could not live without. That there was a difference between existing, which he had been doing, and relishing life in its full, rich plentitude, with a pleasant companion at his side.

With the hope of other pleasures he had only dreamed about.

He'd watched her with Ives while the boy showed Leda each one of his snake stones, heard how she subtly drew out the boy's interests and a picture of his life. He'd heard her patiently answer the boy's questions about Bath, about the life Ives had been raised to expect when he took over the great house that ought to belong to him. Jack saw that she wanted to prepare him for a great future yet also wanted to keep Ives safe and shielded in his rural refuge. She was crafting a life for him built on a lie, but he could also see she didn't intend to force the boy to her will.

It was a strange plot, for certain, but no more sordid than others he'd heard about. Or had experienced in his own life.

He was absolutely certain she would not hurt Muriel. Nay, the more he was with her, the more Jack longed for Leda and his daughter to meet. For Muriel to see that a woman could be intelligent, educated, graceful, self-possessed. Clever as well as beautiful. From Leda, Muriel could learn that a gentlewoman of maturity was wise as well as kind, capable of humor and discernment. Leda could show Muriel that a woman could be motherly, calm, steady, loyal, interested in those around her. A pillar of good sense, a pillar of light. Leda was all of these things.

As well as, possibly, a murderess.

Jack didn't care. He would take the gamble of waking to a knife in his chest if he could be near Leda Wroth a while more. As long as she would let him.

"I want you."

The words came out more roughly than he intended, and in an inappropriate place, the courtyard of the inn in Swindon where they disembarked. The horses led off, the luggage taken down again from its basket, he had not even let her enter the inn before he answered her question.

"I beg your pardon?"

It was full dark now, and the torches lighting the innyard suffused her face with a haunting glow.

"To come with me. To Norfolk. I want you."

She paused, then drew in a short breath. "Let us discuss it inside. We must decide where we wish to arrange a room."

In the end they settled on staying in the coaching inn, though it would be a noisy night with the horns blowing at every arrival, the shouts of the ostlers and the neighs of horses and the clamor of travelers on the night coach. The innkeeper had two rooms available, tucked side by side beneath the eaves of the second floor, and a private parlor where they could take a light supper. The maid had lit candles, stirred the fire against the chill of the spring evening, and laid a white cloth over a small table when Leda joined him.

She'd set aside her capote and shawl and had repinned her hair, once again anchoring the strands that persisted in sliding free. The traveling gloves had been exchanged for short cotton mittens. Leda Wroth was in no way conventional, yet Jack guessed he would never see her other than neatly dressed.

Unless he ever had the great good fortune to peel her smart attire from her and take her, naked, to his bed.

His body throbbed at the thought, the hectic heat banked beneath the surface of his skin. On the walk through the countryside, in the chaise, during dinner, other sights had pulled his attention away. But in this quiet, candlelit room, there was nowhere else to focus except upon her, and the way she made his senses come alive.

Her eyes were enormous when she met his gaze. Not afraid—he doubted he would ever see Leda Wroth afraid of anything. Not a woman who had survived the detestable horrors that he heard most madhouses were, with the suffering treated like animals, the food poor, the conditions deplorable, and the workers as well as doctors forgetting that their patients were yet creations of God, even if the sense that good Lord imparted to most his human creation had left them.

Sense was a fragile state anyway, as Jack well knew.

"You said you wanted me." The words floated like a whisper, flickering like the candles in their seats.

Yes, he wanted her. Yes, again, and yes, for eternity hereafter. He simply nodded.

Her eyes widened. "You trust me with your daughter?"

Reality slithered in. Jack stood behind the wooden chair, holding its back. Should he tell her this scheme was madness itself, that he must be overcome by the sight of her? Ought he warn her that he held to restraint like a fragile thread and he might, at any moment, lose the leash that held him as a gentleman, abandon courtesy and pull her into his arms, claim her mouth with his, press that delectable body to every inch of him, plunge into her sweet depths and climb with her to the gates of heaven?—

The door opened without warning, and Leda tensed like a deer. She mastered herself in a moment, but Jack detected that she had responded like a wild creature, not sure whether to crouch or flee.

What had her husband done to her?

Jack nodded to the entrant, the innkeeper's wife, but a new wave of emotion rolled over him, the same tenderness he felt when he watched Muriel, uncertain and fearful, confront something new. He would not lose his head and ravish Leda, not without her full knowledge and enthusiastic participation. He would protect this woman with everything in him. He wanted the privilege of protecting her, guarding her, cherishing her, to the end of his life or hers.

He reeled at the sudden surety. He'd leapt from a near future with Leda in his arms to imagining lifetimes now?

As the roaring in his head receded, he realized Leda was chatting as calmly with the innkeeper's wife as she did with everyone else.

"—a nice plump shoulder, my Will said we'd save it for someone fine, and here we are with a lord and baron in our house, and I hope you will find it as welcome a house as any you've been in, milady." Their hostess flicked an inquiring glance at Leda, who promptly clarified the matter.

"I am Mrs. Wroth, a widow of Bath, and companion to his lordship's aunt, Lady Plume. His lordship and I are truly grateful for your hospitality, and this splendid fare you have arranged for us at a moment's notice." She looked with appreciation as a pair of maids, following their mistress, laid the table with covered dishes and a pewter salt cellar. Jack knew that coaching inns typically left a hank of meat to toughen in a stew all day, and the rest of the food could be indifferent at best. But word had spread to the Crown's kitchen that a lord had made his appearance—even if he was a baron, the lowest rank of peer—and the kitchens responded accordingly.

As the chatter continued, the maids stealing glances at him as they set out pearlware plate and pewter cutlery, Leda held out her hand and coaxed the mistress of the establishment into it, with just the right balance of command and friendliness, and a wink at women's secret ways. The maids followed promptly, their admiring looks turning from Jack to include Leda as equally.

The matron shook her head. "And to be such a friend to the family, to travel with his lordship so you might personally arrange a governess for his poor daughter. Not many would be as kind, and put themselves to the inconvenience."

Jack, guilty, tried to catch Leda's eye. He was not typically forthcoming with tradesmen, but he'd needed some explanation, at the innkeep's inquisition, for why he was traveling alone with a woman not his wife or immediate relation. The truth had sufficed, he hoped.

"And with not even a maid to tend ye?" the matron went on, looking Leda over. "You must feel right put out, I should think."

Leda nodded. "Of course, if Lady Plume had been able to join us as intended, we should have had a maid and perhaps one of her footmen as well. But she was, alas, compelled to remain in Bath. She is very sorry not to meet her niece, but his lordship and I must struggle on. It would not do to leave Miss Burnham too long without the loving oversight of her father."

The matron nodded in approval. "And this Lady Plume," she probed.

"The relict of Sir Dunlap Plume of Bristol, who made his fortune with the East India Company and did not live to enjoy the comforts of his old age. Fortunately, her ladyship chose me to be the prop of her days, and her good friend the Duchess of Gordon is in town for a stay, to amuse her while I am gone."

Knights, barons, duchesses, and ladies apparently satisfied the matron that her establishment was serving the finest sort, and she signaled to the maids to conclude their business. "If you need a lady's maid or one to do for you on the road, we might find you a miss as is keen to travel. One good with young children to boot."

Leda nodded graciously. "Our thanks, mistress."

When the door shut behind her, Jack stood yet, clutching the chair, astonished by relief. He hated this, the fuss and attendance that his status stirred up whenever he set foot out of doors. He still felt the mantle of lordship was false, that the title of Brancaster and possession of Holme Hall was some absurd test, which he was failing, and someone would eventually step in to put the family's legacy in better hands. Underneath the pomp of peerage he was still Jack Burnham, shoemaker's son of Norwich, as common as milled grain.

But with Leda arranging things, providing the conversation, pleasing the curious with just the right words, everything was easier. The pressure was off him to perform as a baron ought. And now she was rearranging the table to her satisfaction, seating herself beside rather than across from him, reordering the plates so all sat within Jack's reach, and filling a plate from the assorted dishes with the quiet grace of a woman bred her whole life to preside over a table.

"You'll carve?" She cast him an inquiring look. Jack sat in his chair and took up the carving knife.

He flashed on the image Leda had planted in his brain earlier. Her, trailing gore, wandering the halls of her home in a stained shift, holding a knife, while her husband's body lay soaking blood into the parlor rug, stabbed in multiple places.

He pushed the image away and cut into the shoulder of mutton. When he laid a strip of meat on the plate she passed him, her gaze met his, and he guessed she knew exactly what was in his mind, in that uncanny way she had of reading people.

"You don't fear I would hurt Muriel? Now that you know my story."

She spoke her name as if Muriel were real to her already, not Jack's appendage, not a shadowy concept, but a person taking shape in her mind.

She offered him the plate she held. She had filled his plate first, not her own.

He couldn't remember the last time any person—any woman, outside his darling, distracted mother—had made an effort to see to his comfort.

He took the plate. "I believe Muriel would be better off with you than she is with me," he said frankly.

She filled her own plate almost as full as his. Leda Wroth was not one of those ladies who pretended not to eat in company so she might be perceived as delicate. The candle on the table flickered, casting a veil of light over her cheek.

"I was the Mad Baron even before my wife—" Jack let the sentence end there. "My uncle had petitioned Parliament for an Act of Enclosure in his benefit. I stopped the proceedings when he died and opened the common land back for grazing."

"Thereby injuring your profits, no doubt," Leda observed.

"And leaving my tenants something to live on, like the old ways, having pasture to graze their own animals, and a place to collect fuel for their homes." He forked up a stalk of asparagus, swimming in cream. "Most of the tenant farms were in shabby condition, as my uncle had left off improvements. I believe I was seen helping the thatchers now and again, and repairing one or two brick hearths with my own hands."

She watched him, wide-eyed, nibbling on a pickle. "Truly, the act of a man who has taken leave of his senses."

"Or a baron not fit for his title." He winced. "Then I wooed Anne-Marie, who had turned down every man who approached her. She was known to be contrary. Dreamy. They said she would never make a gentleman's wife, and I was mad to think I could make her a lady."

"Contrary and dreamy are two of my favorite attributes in a young woman," Leda said. "I would have been enchanted, too."

Jack savaged his mutton, tougher than it first appeared. Anne-Marie's face, at their small wedding in a smaller church, had not been of bridal enchantment. She'd worn the stricken look of a bird caught in a snare, debating whether to injure itself to get free.

And he'd not been enchanted either. It seemed a lie to let Leda believe so, and yet—would it make him desirable in her eyes, if she thought him a normal man, with a heart that could be charmed and softened by a woman?

She would hate him when she learned the truth. Everyone did.

"We did not entertain much during our marriage," Jack said. "Anne-Marie disliked crowds of people. Disliked their judgments about her. After she…died, with Muriel being so small, I did not accept what invitations came. I knew the whispers going about and did not want to face them. But by the time I emerged, when I realized Muriel needed more people than just me in her life, the whispers had turned into established fact. And there were no more invitations."

"Did you kill your wife?" Leda asked in the most reasonable of tones, as if she were asking him to pass the salt cellar.

"No!" Jack's gaze leapt to her face.

She nodded, as if that decided the matter. "Then I shall keep my promise to accompany you and arrange proper guidance for Muriel. I do not fear gloomy households, and if I do not need fear being murdered, then you offer me a better situation than I had in my marriage."

Jack laid down his knife, haunted. "You thought your husband might kill you?"

Had Anne-Marie feared him that way? Was that why she'd chosen the path she did?

Fury reared in him, shockingly sudden. His wife had never known him at all. Had never given him a chance to woo and win her, a chance to offer her the life she wanted, a chance to please her. She had decided against him from the beginning.

While he'd done everything in his power to please her, and Leda's husband had put her in fear of her life.

"I was seventeen when I was betrothed," Leda said, spooning gravy over her meat.

"That seems the usual threshold." For gentlemen's daughters, at least, which she seemed to have been.

"Most girls." Leda nodded. "Alas for me, I was the dreamy and contrary type, too. When my sister married, the anchor was taken from my world. My mother only cared that I show well in company and hired a governess to teach me. She was a lovely woman, Miss Elam, frightened of her own shadow, and thought she would lose her post if she opposed my will, so I spent very little time cultivating the graces and more of my time tramping the pastures and reading poetry in the orchard."

"What poems?" Jack asked, fascinated. She did not appear to him to be lacking in any of the graces, but then, he was the last person equipped to judge such things.

"Milton. Donne. Herbert, Marvell, Herrick. I imagined myself another Susanna Blamire, composing verses in a meadow by a stream, pinning my poems to trees."

"Then, let me guess. You married a man who had no soul for poetry."

"My parents chose me a husband who had no soul for poetry, but a fine house near Cirencester which he had bought from a widow whose husband had died in the Americas. Bertram was several years older than I." Unabashed, she took a second helping of pudding, offering Jack a scoop as well. He accepted.

"I, for my part, imagined I would run away to Gloucester and find work in a shop. But my parents held the key to the lock on my bedroom door, and my sister implored me to believe they knew what was right. I let her persuade me I would be settled and content in time, as she was."

"Were there any times? Of contentment," Jack asked softly.

She dipped her head, staring at her plate. "When he was gone." She drank the rest of her wine in a long swallow. "Mrs. Blake had worked for the previous family and stayed on, and she was a comfort. He hired Betsey when we married. I had friends nearby, though none I could ask for help, and the friends I could confide in lived back near home. Miss Elam—I wonder what happened to her? I had no reply from my letters."

Jack tried to imagine it: a young woman, trapped in unkind circumstances, isolated from her loved ones. Anne-Marie had gone mad with it, and she'd had a child to live for, and a husband who was not unkind.

Leda Wroth was as different from Anne-Marie as sand from flint.

He drained his own wine. "Do you believe you killed him? Your husband."

She looked up, her eyes full of shadows. "I had the knife. I suppose you think I should turn myself in, and let justice be done? But if he can hurt no one else, then I say justice was done." She pushed away from the table. "Please excuse me. If we are to travel tomorrow, and you trust yourself in close confines with me, it will be a long day."

Jack shot to his feet. He couldn't let her leave like this, the same haunted look with which she had parted from her sister. Not if he had the power to comfort her. "Leda."

She whirled from the door, eyes wide with surprise.

"I know I have no right." His voice rasped. He had no right to use her given name, no right to approach her as he was doing. But the hurt in her face drew him like a siren's call.

"I believe you have paid your price." If she had taken a man's life, that was a sin for which her Creator would call her to account. "And I see now why you are an unmatch-maker." She had been locked away in a madhouse, her freedom further denied her, and now that she was at liberty, she had dedicated herself to keeping others from couplings that would injure their happiness. Surely that penance counted for something.

He caved to the impulse that had rode him hard all day and curled a hand around her forearm.

She was slight but substantial. Present. Real.

Now that he'd touched her, he couldn't stop. He cupped her elbow, slid his other hand from her wrist to the shoulder of her other arm, tugging her gently toward him. She smelled of wine that had stained her lips ruby. He bent his head, bringing his face close to hers.

"But you cannot let the judgments of others rob you of happiness now. Believe me when I say it does no good to wish you could change the past. That will truly drive you to madness."

She searched his eyes with that direct, unhesitating gaze of hers. "You are no more mad than I am."

"I think I will part from my senses completely if I cannot kiss you again."

He waited for her to express dismay, or revulsion. She had spurned him earlier. But she tilted her head and lifted her chin, and when her mouth slid along his, he could have roared with triumph. Instead he squeezed his hands, gathering her to him, and claimed her mouth fully.

She tasted of berries and sugar, and her lips were smooth and cool while inside her mouth was smooth and warm. He closed his teeth around her lower lip, tugging gently, and she met his kiss with increasing ardor. Heat licked up his thighs and bulleted his groin. She was warmth and silky softness, and her breasts against his chest made his breath stop. A murmur rose from the back of her throat, and the sound pierced and heightened his ache.

The door was near and when he pressed her against the wooden surface he could lean all of himself against her. He propped his elbows against the wood and plunged his hands into her hair, angling her chin so he could stroke his tongue into her mouth. She murmured again, the sound a small moan, and dug her fingertips into the back of his shoulders. He was as hard as the door and he swore she pressed back against him, her hips lifting ever so slightly, enough to cradle his groin with hers. Heat fogged his brain, strangling all thought of caution. She met his tongue with hers, a tentative lick, and fire roared into his belly.

Relief was a few centimeters away, the thickness of fabric, her skirts, his breeches. And she was responding to him, welcoming him. She was trying to tug him closer still, though there was no space between their bodies, hers curved tightly and sweetly against his, her thighs fitting around his manhood. Ah, God, it had been so long, and no woman he'd touched had been this soft, had tasted this sweet. He sank against her, rolling his hips, wanting to fasten her to him entirely.

She went taut and still, her body vibrating like a drawn bow.

He lifted his head. It took a moment to find his voice. "Did I hurt you?"

"No."

He blocked the light, leaving her face in shadows, only the curve of one cheek and the slope of her neck glowing like cream. He wanted badly to taste her.

"Will you come to my room?"

"No."

Somehow, though his body was wood, he leaned back, and she eased away from him. The delicate skin around her mouth was smudged pink from his evening stubble.

"No," he said stupidly. To his own ears he sounded like a beast in pain. He was going to explode from the agony of extended arousal and he would be no good for a woman again, if he ever had been.

Leda did not want him, either.

"I do desire you," she whispered.

He leaned his head against the door frame, struggling for composure. Damn her for reading him so accurately.

"But."

"But we cannot dally."

Dally . The word sounded so light-hearted. A walk through a river meadow on a warm spring day, blackbirds calling, the snake's head fritillary abloom. When he ached for her with a force that could rend stone, shoot geysers of lava from the earth.

"Why not?" He forced the words through gritted teeth.

She touched the scarf at her throat, now crushed from their embrace. "Because when a man and woman are—intimate, certain expectations arise. He makes demands. He wants her to comply with his wishes." She straightened her shoulders. "I have had my freedom for six years, and I find I wish to preserve it. I do not wish to be in a position where I am bound to please a man." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Even you."

He opened the door and she slid past him. The scent of almonds teased his nose.

He dealt with himself in his room, quietly, fiercely. It wasn't nearly enough to relieve the agony. Anne-Marie had not wanted to be bound to him, either. Was he incapable of pleasing a woman? Or had he caged his wife, without meaning to, and she found the chains so vile that she was willing to kill herself to be free?

Only when he was finally drifting off to sleep, one ear straining to hear sounds from the next room, did he repeat her words and understand their meaning. She said she'd had her freedom for six years. She'd been widowed for eight.

She'd spent two years locked in a madhouse. No wonder she valued her freedom above all else.