"I miss you, dammit!" he stated, pushing himself away from the door. "Goddamn you, Juliana. I can't go on like this. I don't know what you've done to me." He pulled her up from her chair. He held her face between both hands and kissed her with a deep urgency. His hands moved upward, pulling the pins from her hair, his fingers roughly running through it as he loosened it; all the while his tongue hungrily probed her mouth.
Juliana was so taken aback that for a minute she didn't respond; then a wild, almost primitive, triumph flashed through her veins. She had this power over him. A woman's power. A power she was positive he had never acknowledged before. Now she clung to him, at last after days of deprivation able to give expression to the unquenchable well of passion that bubbled at her core. Her tongue fenced with his, her body reached against him, rubbing, pressing, moving with sinuous temptation, and she felt him hard and urgent against her belly.
Tarquin bore her backward to the sofa, and she fell in a tangle of skirts to sink onto the shiny taffeta. He didn't release her mouth, merely pushed up her skirts to her waist, released his own aching stem, and drove deep into her body. Her legs curled around his back, and her body moved with all the urgency of a passion that had many causes but only one outlet. Anger, hurt, mistrust, desire, all consumed in the flames.
He drew her legs onto his shoulders, his palms running up the firm calves, over the smooth flesh of her thighs above her garters, cupping her buttocks. His eyes were closed as he held her in his hands, and his flesh was plunging deep into the dark, velvet depths of her body. As the little ripples of her approaching climax tantalized his flesh, he opened his eyes and looked down at her. Her own eyes were wide-open, glowing with joy, not a sign of misgiving or withholding beneath the jade surface. She was giving herself to him as if there had never been a word of doubt between them, and he knew, in that moment, that the giving was a true expression of her soul.
And in the same instant he understood what she wanted from him. A gift that came without reservations. The gift of himself. He had beneath him, her body encompassing his as he possessed hers, the possibility of a love for all time. A partner of his heart and soul.
Juliana reached up and touched his face, a look of wonder now in her eyes. He looked transformed. Her breath caught in her throat as she read the message in the intensity of his gaze. This was no longer a man who couldn't believe in the reality of love.
Chapter 23
George Ridge threw the dice. They rolled across the square of table cleared of debris and came to a halt in a puddle of ale. A six and a one. He spat disgustedly on the sawdust at his feet and tipped the bottle of port against his mouth, taking a deep draft. His guineas were scooped up with a gleeful grin by his fellow player, who spat twice in his hand, tossed the dice from palm to palm, murmured a blasphemous prayer, and rolled them. A groan went up from the crowd around the table as they saw the numbers. The one-eyed sea captain had had the luck of the devil all evening.
George pushed back his chair. He'd continued playing long past his limit and had the sinking feeling that his losses were probably greater than he realized. His brain was too addled by ale and port to function well enough for accurate calculation, but in the cold, aching light of day he'd be forced to face reality.
As he struggled unsteadily to his feet, a hand descended on his shoulder and a voice spoke quietly into his ear. It was a voice as cold as a winter sea, and it sent shivers down his spine as if he were about to plunge into such waters.
"Going somewhere, Ridge?"
George turned under the hand on his shoulder and found himself looking up into a pair of expressionless gray eyes in a lean and elegant countenance. The thin mouth was curved in the faintest smile, but it was a smile as cold and pitiless as the voice. He recognized the man immediately. His eyes darted around the room, looking for support, but no one was paying attention. Their bleary gazes were focused on the play.
"I think we'll find it more convenient to have our little discussion in the stable yard," said the Duke of Redmayne. He removed his hand from George's shoulder. Suddenly George found himself in the grip of a pair of fists that fastened on his elbows from behind as tenaciously as the tentacles of an octopus.
"This a-way, boyo," an encouraging voice said in his ear. George's feet skimmed the ground as he was propelled through the crowded taproom and out into the yard behind the inn.
The night was hot. Two ostlers, sitting on upturned water butts smoking pipes and chatting in desultory fashion, glanced up, at first with scant interest, at the three men who'd entered the yard. Their eyes widened as they took in the curious group. A gentleman in black, gold-embroidered silk looking as if he'd just walked out of the Palace of St. James's; a second gentleman, bulky and red-faced, in a suit of crimson taffeta and a yellow-striped waistcoat; a third man in the rough leather britches and jerkin of a laborer. The second gentleman was beginning to protest, trying to free himself from the grip of the laborer. The elegant gentleman leaned casually against a low stone wall. He carried a long horsewhip that snaked around his silver-buckled shoes of red leather.
"Take your hands off me!" George blustered thickly, finally managing to get a look at the man holding him. He had but a confused recollection of the disruption in the hackney before he'd lost consciousness, but there was something horribly familiar about his captor. He struggled with renewed violence.
"I just want a word or two," the duke said carelessly, snapping the whip along the ground.
George's eyes darted wildly downward. There was something menacingly purposeful about the thin leather lash flickering and dancing across the cobbles. Ted adjusted his grip almost casually, but his victim immediately recognized that he was held even more firmly than before.
"Listen to 'Is Grace, I should," Ted advised. "Listen well, boyo."
Tarquin subjected George Ridge to a dispassionate scrutiny before saying, "Perhaps you would care to explain why you issued such a pressing invitation to Lady Edgecombe. I understand from her that she was not at all inclined to enter your hackney."
Ted shifted his booted feet on the cobbles and gazed about him incuriously, but his grip tightened yet again, pulling George's arms behind his back.
George licked suddenly dry lips. "You have a murderess under your roof, Your Grace. The murderer of my father, Juliana Ridge's late husband." He tried to sound commanding with this denunciation, full of self-confidence and righteous indignation, but his voice emerged stifled and uncoordinated.
"And just, pray, who is this Juliana Ridge?" the duke inquired in a bored tone, withdrawing his snuffbox from the deep-cuffed pocket of his coat. He flipped the lid and took a leisurely pinch while George struggled to make sense of this. Viscount Edgecombe had been convinced the duke knew all Juliana's skeletons.
He took a deep breath. "The woman living in your house. The woman who calls herself Viscountess Edgecombe. She was married to my father, Sir John Ridge of the village of Ashford, in the county of Hampshire." He paused, regarding the duke anxiously. His Grace's expression hadn't changed; he looked merely politely bored.
George continued somewhat desperately, "I daresay, Your Grace, when you found her in the whorehouse you knew nothing of her history… but.…" His voice faded under the duke's now blazing gaze.
"You appear to have lost your wits, sir," the duke said softy, coiling the whip into his hand. "You would not otherwise insult the name of a woman wedded to my cousin, living under my roof and my protection. Would you?"
The last question was rapped out, and the duke took a step toward George, who couldn't move with the man at his back holding his arms in a vise.
"My lord duke," he said, clear desperation now in voice and eyes. "I do assure you I know her for what she is. She has hoodwinked you and she must be brought to justice. Her husband intends to repudiate her as soon as she's brought before the magistrate and-"