Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Careful, man!” James winched as another bandage was tightened around his left arm.
Rowena could not help but smile at the outraged indignity on his face as her friend Adena glared back at him.
“If you would just hold still for five minutes, then this ordeal would already be over,” she snapped back. “For both of us!”
Rowena’s smile widened as she watched James open his mouth to retaliate, and then immediately wince as Adena twitched the bandage once more. To know that he was not in danger relieved her heart of so much concern. It was enough to know that he was well. It was enough to know that he was safe.
“Do not be such an infant,” retorted Luke, and Rowena was forced to hide her smile as the Marquis of Dewsbury – her friend’s husband, she had to remind herself, for it was as much of a shock to her to discover the Marquis standing in their bedchamber as it was for James – grimaced as Adena poked his leg to keep him quiet.
“Will both of you hush and be still?” Adena muttered, carefully tying a small knot in the bandage around James’ arm, as the two gentlemen sat side by side on the bed. “It may be early, but you will wake up the entire place with your yammering if you cannot stay quiet.”
She looked up at Rowena as she handed her friend another clean strip of linen – donated by the fearful innkeeper, who looked as though he would rather not know that an illegal duel had taken place at his inn – and the two friends exchanged a glance: half mirth, half relief.
“If you had not been so rash to jump to a fight,” Adena continued, turning to face her own husband now, who had the good grace to look a little sheepish, “then you would not have to put up with the pain now, then would you? All that running about in the carriage from inn to inn, searching for Rowena, and you both leapt to attack each other!”
The two men murmured something incomprehensible, and quelled as Adena glared at them.
James looked up at Rowena, and smiled gently, holding out his hand, which she immediately took. No words were needed between them: she could not help but be impressed with him, and it would not do to say such a thing before others.
Watching, as she had been, from the side lines, it had been immediately clear that James had found his mark but had no wish to kill.
The cut that Adena was so fastidiously seeing to on Luke’s leg was but a scratch: the bullet had barely touched him, and but for the heat of the moment, there would barely by a mark on him.
Unwilling to kill, but able. Ready to protect her honour, defend it, risk his own life for it, but determined not to take a life himself.
She stared into his sparkling eyes, and wondered whether she would ever meet a man that she could love more than he – for she did love him. How could she not? He was everything that she wanted from a man, everything that Oscar Bentley was not: brave, thoughtful, insightful, caring.
As Adena clucked around her charges, Rowena tried to ignore the growing pressure on her hand from his that matched the growing pressure on her lungs. His eyes did not waver from hers, and she felt herself falling into them, unable to breathe for love of him.
There was something between them, she knew it.
She could feel it and surely he could too.
But there was no agreement between them.
Marriage had not been spoken of, a proposal was not necessary.
She had taken him to her bedchamber, that was true, knowing what would happen – but there had seemed no other alternative.
She had wanted him, and her honour was lost, and what else could she lose but her heart?
“There.” Adena’s voice cut through her thoughts and jerked her to the present.
James dropped her hand, and it fell empty and cold to her side.
“The best thing you can do now is rest, and put as little weight on that leg,” looking pointedly at her husband, “and that arm,” turning to glare at James, “as possible.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Luke with a lazy grin, which quickly vanished as she gave him what Rowena had always called, ‘Adena’s look’.
“Let me help you take these downstairs,” Rowena said hastily, lest James say a single word as that was likely to set her friend off when she was in such a temper.
She gathered up the excess linen strips, and tugged at Adena’s arm. “Come on.”
Leaving the two men to sit together in silence – a far greater punishment, thought Rowena with a smile, then any duel – she stepped towards the door as her friend followed her.
“Men,” Adena muttered under her breath as they moved down the stairs. “Such babies.”
Rowena shivered. The thought that one, or both of them could have died over her rash decision to take pleasure with another: it was enough to make anyone stop and consider their actions.
“You are cold – and mayhaps in shock a little, too,” Adena stopped on the stairs, and took the linens from her. “Run back upstairs and get your shawl, and you and I can break our fasts downstairs by the fire.”
“I am quite well,” protested Rowena, but one look from her friend was enough. “I will go and retrieve my shawl,” she said meekly.
The door to her chamber was slightly ajar when she reached it, and just as she reached out her hand to push it open, Rowena heard something that made her stop and pause.
“…still not want to marry her?”
Heart racing, heart horrified, Luke’s words echoed around the room for several seconds before she heard James’ answer.
“My good man, I never intended to marry her in the first place!” James voice was exasperated, a little irritated, but clear through the gap in the door. “May I remind you that I am not the one that she actually eloped with?”
Rowena’s cheeks crimsoned, but there was no one to see them. Stood as she was inches away from the door, she was unable to see anything but a chink of light, but the words spoken were easy to hear.
“Nonetheless,” came Luke’s reply, “after taking her innocence, what else did you think you were going to do?”
Her fingers were still outstretched, and as though unable to stop herself, Rowena pushed it forward just an inch, her heart pounding and her blood boiling.
A glimpse of James appeared in the gap. He was smiling, and he shrugged with a wince as he replied, “I never had any intention of marrying her, and that was never promised. Understand, man, she wanted me to make love to her, and I was not strong enough to say no.”
Shock and pain ricocheted through Rowena’s body as her mouth fell open in silent dismay. She had had no expectations, certainly, but it was devastating to hear that James had no feelings for her at all.
As though he could hear her thoughts, she heard Luke ask quietly, “Have you no feelings for her at all?”
From her vantage point, Rowena could not clearly see James’ face. Something flickered across it: pain, or confusion, or doubt, she could not tell, but she could hear his words, and his laughter.
“Once you get the clothes off, all women are very much the same,” he joked.
There was no decision: just action.
“Well, I am glad that I know that now,” Rowena said icily as she pushed the door open and strode in. “I had known that marriage was not the destination of our voyage together, but I had hoped to be treated a little better on the way.”
James’ eyes were wide with dismay and he rose from the bed hastily with his hands raised as though to stop her barrelling at him.
But she had no intention of going anywhere near him. Hope had died within her, and all she could do was treat him as disdainfully as he had treated her.
“Rowena, I – ”
“To hear oneself spoken of like a piece of meat is incredibly unkind,” Rowena said quietly, staring at his cool eyes. “I hope that you never experience it as I have.”
There was silence. Nothing moved and no one spoke for a full minute.
Rowena kept her gaze on his, hoping for…
she knew not what. A confession of love?
How could it happen, hearing what she had just heard?
Regrets? She did not want to hear that he regretted their lovemaking.
No, there was nothing he could say, nothing at all that could make them what they had been, to take them back to what they once were.
“I think I will see where Adena has got to.” Luke rose awkwardly and despite the pain in his leg, hobbled to the door, closing it behind him.
James had no idea how to respond, but he knew how his heart moved: astonishment at her reaction, and joy, almost relief that Rowena Kerr clearly had feelings for him.
“I admit myself surprised,” he said finally, as the two of them stood together alone in the room where they had shared so much. “I…I had not realised that you cared for me so.”
“You should not have expected anything less,” Rowena countered, the anger in her eyes refusing to dissipate. “Do you think I give myself to any man, to anyone I meet?”
The memory of her above him, of her discovery of her own body, of the pleasure rising in her, the flutter of her eyelashes, the moaning in her throat, made James smile.
It was the wrong thing to do, and he knew it immediately.
A flash of anger burst across her face. “Do you think that this is a laughing matter, sir? I suppose it must be, when any woman is exactly the same, once her clothes are off.”
His smile vanished, and instead nausea rose up in his throat. By God, she had heard that – and if she had heard that, then she had heard all.
“Rowena,” he began, but he was interrupted.
“Can you even comprehend how rude and dismissive your words are?” Rowena spoke with an air of finality that hurt James, but she continued, “I do not think you can. I do not think that it even occurred to you that there was another person that you were injuring.”
James coloured, and took a deep breath. It would take much to admit this to her – it was a strain to admit it to himself.
“Rowena, I…you have to understand. ‘Tis difficult for me to speak of my true feelings to anyone, let alone a stranger I had just met – not you!” He said hastily.
“Dewsbury. I did not want to appear…well, weak before him. To let him see how greatly I cared for you, for him to know how desperately I wanted you…”
His voice trailed off as he saw the anger rise in the woman he loved.
“Being true to your own feelings would have been the honourable thing to do,” she said coldly. “If you had any, that is.”
A spark of anger rushed through James now, and he could not help but say, “Feelings? Rowena, you barely comprehend your own feelings, so do not tell me what my own are. Three days ago, you thought you were in love with someone else! I thought that I was nothing more than an itch you wanted to scratch – how could I assume that you cared for me?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew that they were the wrong thing to say. The outrage in her eyes, the bristling of her shoulders, was enough.
“I apologise, Rowena, I – ”
“I have no wish to stay here a moment longer,” she said curtly, striding forwards and grabbing her luggage in one hand.
James tried to move towards her but she was too fast for him, stepping through the door and down the stairs as he called out, “Rowena!”
There was no reply, and he hurtled to the door, but had to pause for a moment as stars appeared before his eyes. He had lost too much blood to be running after anyone, but he must get to her: Rowena Kerr could not leave the King’s Head Inn without knowing his true feelings for her.
He would not let her.
“Rowena!” James called again as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and he started to move again, losing ground as she almost ran through the inn.
By the time that he had stumbled outside, Rowena was being handed into a coach by the Marquis of Dewsbury, a look of revulsion on his face as he beheld the staggering Viscount.
“Rowena, wait!”
But she did not wait. She did not even look back, and as the Marquis settled himself into the coach after her he tried to run forward – and the coach pulled away.
James, Viscount of Paendly, stood in the courtyard of the King’s Head Inn for above ten minutes, watching the road that Rowena Kerr had taken, left with nothing but a freshly bleeding arm and a secret bleeding heart.