Page 44 of The Mad Baron's Bride
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.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Holme Hall was the wildest, loneliest, most isolated place Leda had ever seen.
It was also the most beautiful.
The landscape had changed when they left Cambridgeshire and entered the Fens, low-lying marshes that could not decide whether to be land or sea, and which reeked the rich smell of growing things. They passed the town of Ely, with the towers of its great cathedral climbing the sky, and Jack made her laugh with stories of his eccentric schoolmasters.
At Lynn Regis, the air smelled of salt, and the spires and towers of more medieval buildings combed the heavens. They traded their comfortable chaise and the turnpike road for a dog cart and a rutted track that led north through pasture and common and small flocks of trees, and the smell of salt marsh came with them.
Jack pointed out the long, grey outline of Castle Rising, where Isabella of France, the guilty widow of Edward II, had lived out her exile. They passed Snettisham, which he said was the nearest market town, then small cliffs like curled waves where chalk had been dug from the ground, and a scatter of ruins he called Ringstead Parva.
He pointed to a wooded clump to the east where sat Hunstanton Hall in its park, home of the ancient Le Strange family and currently the domain of the Reverend Armine Styleman. Then the lane turned east and the thin line on the horizon advanced into a band of blue Jack called The Wash, and Leda felt she’d arrived at the furthest reaches of the known world.
The house rose straight from the ground with no gracious setting of sculpted parterres or naturalized landscaping, simply walls of stone angled up from the earth in the blocky Jacobean style. Crenellations lined the roof, their forbidding outline offset by homey chimneys sprouting along the length, one quietly breathing smoke. The tall arched windows were set with red brick facing, accenting the blocky gray stone of the walls, lined with what looked like large pebbles.
“Flint,” Jack said, watching her study the building. “It’s a common building material around here, as much as brick.”
Brick walls encased the front and sides of the building in concentric rectangles, holding off the wind to shelter gardens, a regular set of treetops that suggested an orchard, and most likely animal pens. As they approached the rock-clad outbuildings came into sight, organized into a neat horseshoe at the rear of the house. Holme Hall seemed enormous, framed against clumps of gray clouds that drifted and spun out overhead. The wind carried sea spray, salt marsh, and the highbrr-eek, brr-eekof curlews.
