Chapter 5
For Linnie, it had been both humbling and heart-wrenching to discover Jeremy Tremaine, the man she’d loved forever and with her entire heart, desired and loved her, too.
Now finding out he despised her, Linnie hurt with the agony of one thousand burning suns being centered upon her heart.
“I thought . . .” she whispered. Linnie tried again to speak. “I believed—”
“That I wanted something other than sex from you?” He chuckled. “There’s nothing I need or crave from a woman other than sex, and as I said”—he gave her a scathing once-over—“especially not a McQuoid woman.”
Her eyes watered. “You are t-terrible.”
“Yes. No doubt.”
Jeremy sounded positively bored. His desire for her had been great, but his hate was so much stronger that now, knowing her identity, he looked upon Linnie like her skin was scaled and her head horned.
She, however, had been able to separate Arran’s feud from Jeremy, to recall her love and admiration for the latter gentleman. Jeremy, on the other hand, couldn’t disentangle Linnie—or, for that matter, any other McQuoid or Smith—from the fallout between him and his former best friend.
Jeremy hated her as much as he did her cousin Arran. It mattered not that she’d been his staunchest defender amidst her family—a detail he, of course, wouldn’t know.
“I sent you l-letters.” Why was she telling him this? “When I learned about your tragedy at sea, I had them delivered to your brother’s residence, where I heard you were convalescing.”
Maybe if he knew, he’d remember the friendship they’d shared. Yes, that was why.
“Never received them.” He flashed a cold, insincere smile. “And certainly didn’t want them or need them.”
Her teeth chattered.
Everything within Linnie hurt. Unable to face this callous stranger, Linnie glanced about the hiding spot where she and Jeremy found themselves trapped.
Lord and Lady Rutland’s crystal-constructed conservatory.
The conservatory. It had to be this place, one of her favorites in her aunt and uncle’s residence, where she’d always sneaked off to so she might read, and where Jeremy had invariably found her during hide-and-seek—and they’d stay there while everyone still searched for Linnie.
Do not think of him.
Could she really forget with him but a handful of steps away, in the living, breathing flesh, as she’d longed to see Jeremy?
Linnie’s chest tightened.
Stop!
She made herself put all her focus on everything that was not Jeremy.
Her host’s commitment to the Christmastide Season had been carried out to even this remote little corner of his household.
Potted olive-green catmint with a white-trimmed border upon their leaves filled the room. Interspersed between were the vibrant Buxus hedging, trimmed into snowflake-shaped topiaries and life-size angels.
A memory flitted forward, and she drifted back to another exchange several years earlier, back when a grand winter wedding had been thrown for Myrtle and the Duke of Aragon.
To distract herself from the pain of seeing her younger cousin, who’d not even made her debut, wed before her, Linnie had thrown herself into overseeing floral arrangements to mark the grand day . . . when Jeremy had come upon her outside, collecting hardy greenery, brush, and brambles.
A veritable Anthelia, you are, Linnie-Lou . . .
The goddess of gardens and blossoms he’d likened her to, when she’d forever dreamed he’d see her as Aphrodite.
Just moments ago, before he knew your real identity, he treated you just like that glorious goddess of beauty and love.
Pain continued to build in her breast. Linnie hugged her arms close and rubbed at her chilled flesh—a cold that had nothing to do with the harsh bite of winter.
Love? No, all Jeremy felt for Linnie now was a cancerous hate.
She tensed as she felt him come up behind her.
“Here,” he said sharply.
There came a noisy whoosh, a soft rush of air. Jeremy’s heavy, velvet-lined cloak fell about her shoulders.
The heat his body had left upon the garment blanketed Linnie in the greatest, all-encompassing warmth. And his scent, a mix of sweet orange and a spicy hint of clove, so different from the bergamot and sandalwood favored by every other gentleman in London, filled her senses.
That intoxicating combination brought her eyes sliding closed.
He insisted he wasn’t a gentleman, and yet, whether he knew it or not, he lied. That he’d give her, a member of a family he loathed as the Capulets did the Montagues, a sacrifice of his own comfort for hers, told an even greater tale than that fated story of star-crossed lovers.
When she opened her eyes, her gaze collided with the shimmery outline of her and the motionless, stoic man at her back.
Even with their gazes only meeting through an icy, makeshift mirror, the dusky fierceness of his eyes bored through her.
Every breath in Linnie’s body became trapped in her lungs. He’d never looked at her so. She could almost believe they’d returned to the point where only she knew his identity, when she’d been a complete stranger to him.
A decidedly female, pain-filled cry pierced the thick silence, intruding on her and Jeremy’s silent exchange. She found herself plopped right back where they’d begun, hiding together while Cousin Arran . . .
Horror sent her mind into a full recoil.
Could Jeremy not just say something or do something so she didn’t have to suffer through any more of the vile sounds of her cousin making love to not one, but two women?
“Given there’s only one way out, it appears we are to be stuck together for some time,” Jeremy remarked, bored.
“Yes.” Bitterness tinged her response.
“When presented with listening to your blackguard cousin fucking two women—two women who were, by the way, my intended companions for the evening—or speaking with you to mute some of their cacophony, I find myself preferring the latter.”
Jealousy sank her cruel, sharp green fangs inside Linnie. “Well, that would require me to speak to you, and given how nasty you’ve become, Jeremy, I find myself—”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Preferring to listen to your cousin taking two women at the same time?”
Linnie pulled a face. “I’d rather cut my ears off,” she grumbled.
Jeremy chuckled.
Had he truly laughed? Stunned, Linnie’s gaze went flying to Jeremy. Sure enough, little crinkle lines of mirth marred the corners of his eyes. The generous grin revealed genuine amusement and not the harsh ugliness of his earlier mockery.
“Do tell me, Miss Smith, what accounts for you sneaking about, sad-eyed, when you spent years begging the McQuoids and me to escort you to a masquerade?”
Her heart jumped.
Linnie couldn’t stop herself from asking, “You remember that?”
At his silence, she sighed. Another time, a lifetime ago, she would have told him the exact reason for her doleful state.
She’d have confided everything: her fear, frustration, sorrow, all of it at being so pathetically rejected by society that her family sought to find a husband for her, and her frustration at how little control she had over her life and decisions.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said softly.
“Probably not.”
“And you definitely wouldn’t care,” she added as a reminder for herself.
“Try me.”
She snorted. “I’d rather not.”
“I want you to.”
Linnie spun to face him. “Why?” she asked quietly. “Are you looking to ridicule me?”
Jeremy hitched his hip onto the back of a white-painted, wrought iron bench. “I’m not asking you, love. I’m telling you.”
She bristled. His imperious order marked that beautiful—though carelessly given—endearment as empty. “No.”
“You’re going to tell me,” he murmured.
“Do you think so, Captain Tremaine?”
“I know so.” He curled his lips in a hard grin.
Strange that this cynical, smug one should have the same effect on her senses. “You are arrogant, Jeremy Tremaine,” she said, her reply unsteady.
He straightened and strode close in languid steps. “Not without reason.”
Or maybe she’d taken him for self-confident, both of which really weren’t so different.
Jeremy stopped a hairbreadth away, so close Linnie needed to look up in order to meet his gaze.
She scowled. No doubt he struck that position to assert his power and control over her and their exchange. Refusing to be cowed, Linnie arched her neck back until her muscles strained under that act of defiance.
Everything spasmed inside.
Up close, the scars upon his face shone vividly, those marks of his suffering, and surely the reason for his rage.
Do not cry. Do not. He will hate you more . . .
“You’re going to tell me the reason for your woefulness, Linnie-love, because you want to,” he murmured with an unerring accuracy that roused an uneasy feeling in her belly.
“You’re going to share exactly what it is that has you so downtrodden because you want to—no, you need to—confide in someone, and the only people you can speak to are cousins and sisters, who, I’d venture, are likely contributing to your sad state. ”
“I’m not in a sad state,” she mumbled, her protestations weak to her own ears.
The shrewd glint in his storm-grey eyes mocked her as a liar.
Perhaps it was the madness of this night, or maybe it was that she’d spent so much time as friends with Jeremy over the course of her life and his hatred was so brand new, but she found herself needing to confide in someone.
Her shoulders sagged. “I’m not married.”
“Ah, I take it you want to be.”
I want to be married to you. What if she answered him with that truth?
“I want a choice in life of making my own decisions, and certainly over whom I shall marry. I want to have what Myrtle and Cassia have with their husbands, and what Dallin has with his wife,” she said softly.
“Wealth and power?”
Linnie rolled her eyes. “Oh, come, Jeremy,” she said, exasperated. “You know that isn’t what compelled their unions.”
“What was it, then?”
She registered the irreverent glimmer in his deep-grey eyes.