Chapter 4 #3
He nodded, frowning. The deed…something distasteful that needed doing.
He walked to the dressing table and stood behind her, aware that she watched him very nervously in the mirror.
He touched the fall of her hair; the strands were as soft as skeins of silk.
She lowered her lashes, and he felt her tension.
She was dying for him to go away; to leave her alone.
But she had just married him, fully aware of everything he expected from marriage.
She was going to be careful.
And play the role of delicate Southern belle to the hilt.
Her eyes met his in the mirror once again. “I—I swear to you, Sloan, I am not trying to be disagreeable to you, but I feel absolutely horrible.”
“Sabrina, I don’t think that you need to try to be disagreeable to me; you seem to manage to do it effortlessly. But you can relax. Remember, I told you this afternoon that I was aware of the fact you felt wretched. I’ve no intention of pressing a husband’s rights upon you tonight.”
Her sigh of relief was so great that he was tempted to change his mind, but he kept from doing so.
Her lashes fell again, concealing the pleasure and triumph in her eyes, and she leaped up quickly, turning away from him.
As pleased and happy as a little lark, she drew the cover back from the bed and plumped the pillows on it, setting them in the middle.
Sloan felt his temper smoldering, and he fought to control it. He walked past her, drawing one of the pillows back to the left side of the bed. “If you don’t mind?” he queried with polite warning.
Her eyes widened as they met his. “But you said—”
“I said that I wasn’t going to force myself on you,” he interrupted bluntly. “But I’ve spent enough time sleeping on bare ground and floors. I will take half the bed, if you’ll be so kind.”
She stared at him angrily, then swept out a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice sweet with false innocence. “It was my belief that you grew up in a tipi and liked sleeping on the floor. I stand corrected.”
He fought the urge to throttle her. “I did grow up in a tipi—and, come to think of it, I spent half the War of the Rebellion in a tent. Very similar, actually. I believe I have actually spent much more time sleeping on the ground as a White soldier than I did as a Sioux child. Ah, well, it’s certainly no matter now, because, my love, I have discovered that I do like beds. I even like sharing beds—”
“So I’ve heard,” she murmured.
“So you’ve witnessed,” he said and smiled.
If possible, her pallor became greater.
He turned away from her, snuffing the candle on the bedside table. Shadows fell across the room as he began to discard his wedding apparel. She stood in darkness herself, not moving as she watched him disrobe; frock coat, boots, socks.
“You’re free to go to bed,” he told her politely.
She still stood rigidly. “You said that—”
“I said that I know you don’t feel well, and that you needn’t indulge in marital relations. I didn’t say that I would sleep on the floor, or fully clothed.” He dispatched his shirt and breeches, ignoring her, then crawled into bed and drew the covers comfortably about himself.
She still stared at him. “Fine. I’ll take the floor.
“No, you won’t.”
She hesitated. “I’ll take the chair by the fire—”
“No. You won’t.”
“Dammit, Sloan, I will do as I wish! You may order army privates about as you like, but not me.” She grabbed a pillow off the bed and sailed regally over to the richly upholstered chair before the hearth.
He let her sit, then went after her, scooping her up into his arms and meeting her eyes with a frown of pure warning.
She’d been about to scream, but the sound seemed to die in her throat. She grated her teeth together, pressing against his chest, then drawing her fingers back with alarm when she touched his bare flesh. “Sloan, you said—”
“Mrs. Trelawny, you married me,” he reminded her, turning away from the fire and depositing her back on the bed.
He truly had no intention of insisting on marital relations—a pity now, because his own nudity coupled with her touch and the silken caress of her hair against him were all but unbearably arousing.
Yet, no matter what this torture to her—or himself!
—he was convinced that the night would be a foretelling of the future, and he’d be damned if he’d be celibate now indefinitely.
Set back upon the bed, she looked up at him and let her eyes slip over the length of him.
When he heard her sharp intake of breath, he leaned over her, a streak of maliciousness within him.
“I’m trying, my love. Honestly, I’m trying.
Yet each time you move, each time I touch you…
well, you can see what torments nature casts down upon me.
And to think, you are my wife, and it is our wedding night… ”
Her lashes remained lowered; she folded her arms across her chest in prayer like fashion, almost as if she were dead. “I’m going to sleep now. I hope you’ll be very comfortable.”
He smiled slowly and returned to his own side of the bed, slipping back beneath the covers.
He reached for her, finding resistance at first, but forcing her gently into his embrace.
He willed himself not to want her. That would never work.
But he did want to touch her at the very least, draw her near as he did now, feel her hair tease his chest, chin, nose, scintillating with its delicate scent.
He wondered ironically if she knew that it was the Sioux who had taught him self-control; in Sioux beliefs, relations with a woman weakened a warrior, and so all young Sioux men learned not to have all that they wanted.
After a moment, she eased against him, her cheek against his chest, her hand lightly resting upon it. She wasn’t in a position to feel the extent of his arousal and so seemed peaceable enough after a number of minutes had reassuringly ticked away. “Sloan?” she said after a moment.
“Yes?”
“What are we going to do—now? That this is done. It was so sudden…”
She sounded desolate.
Again, he controlled his irritation that life with him, and a child of his, should be such a burden to her.
“It’s not really so sudden, is it? We’ll go home; the child will arrive in good time.”
“Home—an army barracks,” she murmured.
“You’ll make an outstanding military wife!” he assured her dryly.
“How can a barracks be a home?” she whispered.
He thought of the many women he had met who had followed their husbands westward with nothing but hope.
And love.
And belief, of course. Women who had made homes out of blankets beneath wagons, in shanties in hastily built towns.
His fingers had been moving gently over her hair; they stopped midstroke.
He struggled to keep from allowing them to tighten into the auburn mass.
“Oddly enough, Sabrina, I do have a home—the kind you’re talking about.
It’s an outstanding Federal manor in Georgetown, and should my aunt die without issue—which is likely, considering that she is nearly fifty now—it actually falls to me.
Through the Trelawny side of my lineage, naturally.
Most admittedly, my grandfather was deeply distressed by what had happened to my mother, and it was probably difficult for him to accept me at first. But for some reason, the old tyrant and I do get on rather well.
He’s blunt, honest, and fair, and it’s a damned pity, actually, that he retired from the military. ”
“Then you could retire and live in Washington,” she told him.
He hesitated. “Yes, I could.”
“Perhaps that wouldn’t be quite so bad,” she murmured.
“I find my work with the military particularly important right now.”
“But perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps we could have a home in Washington and—”
“Oh, I see. You could live in Washington, and I could ride off with the military.”
“It’s done all the time.”
“You’d be happy as a little lark; it’s the world you know and love. You’d be wonderful—the elegant young lady flirting happily away with besotted young congressmen, and possibly even influencing national policy!”
“You’re being absolutely wretched.”
“I’m not—you told me that you’d wanted your freedom to live in luxury back East.”
“That’s not exactly what I said—”
“Close enough—”
“Then you could retire.”
“But I won’t,” he told her firmly. “And you will not live away from me. Besides, would you really want to be so far away from your sister?”
She didn’t reply.
“We’re going to go home,” he said quietly.
“Fine, then. Let’s go live where the Sioux slaughter the Whites, and the Whites are trying to decimate your friends and relations. It sounds like a wonderful life.”
“It will be what we make it.”
Once again, she didn’t reply. She didn’t move. She lay in silence for a very long time. He was certain that she wasn’t sleeping at first, but in time he felt the even pattern of her breathing. He moved his hand over the softness of her hair.
A strange tremor shot through him. He willed himself not to want her so badly. He wondered what he had entered into; if he hadn’t been the biggest fool of all time. He grew more obsessed daily. She had married him simply because it seemed that life had offered her no alternative.
Would it be like this, night after night, wanting her and lying awake at her side, tense as a grizzly, hungry as a caged wildcat?
No, she’d have the baby in due time.
And if he survived the torment of this marriage until then?
There would have to be a reckoning.
He closed his eyes and prayed for sleep.
He awoke several hours later.
She was moaning softly in her sleep, thrashing about. He sat up, concerned, placing a hand on her shoulder, shaking her slightly. Her eyes opened; he realized that she had actually been awake.
“Sabrina?”
“Sloan…”
She eased to her back, biting her lower lip. In the dim firelight, he could see tears of pain in her eyes.
“Shh, shh, I’m here. What is it?”
“It—hurts.”
“What? Where?” he asked, smoothing back the tangle of her hair from the clammy dampness of her face.
“I don’t know…my back, my lower back. I was queasy all day, but I’ve been sick so much lately that I didn’t really think…Now it hurts!” she whispered.
“It will be all right,” he heard himself assuring her. “I’m going to get James McGregor.”
“James…”
“James McGregor. He is a doctor, Sabrina.”
She nodded. James had been a convict for several years with David Douglas, but Sloan knew that if David had befriended the man, he had to be completely trustworthy.
He had also come to know the good doctor well himself, since it was James’s arrival in America that had brought Sloan to Scotland.
He didn’t think, though, that he needed James to explain to him what was happening to Sabrina.
He didn’t know why he was so certain, yet he did know, with absolute certainty, at that very moment, that Sabrina had lost the baby.
Life.
It had its ironies.
Her fingers suddenly curled around his arm, so tightly that the nails dug into his flesh, drawing blood. She cried out—a sharp, swift, agonized cry.
Then she passed out, her fingers falling from his arm.
“Sabrina! Dear God, Sabrina!”
Indeed, he was certain that they’d lost the baby.
But he was suddenly praying with silent fervor and vehemence that he hadn’t lost her.