Harsh things needed to be said, Harriet felt. It was like lancing a wound. “Proper little girls couldn’t come to Fonthill,” she said flatly. “Let her visit me, Jem.”
He slammed his palms down on the mantelpiece. “I’ve bungled it all, haven’t I? I should have sent her away.”
“I suppose you might have done that,” Harriet said cautiously.
“Sally died the night she was born. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it for months. Sally was so young—and I’d never even thought about death. It never occurred to me, fool that I was!” His voice was savage.
“But if you had thought about it, what could you have done?”
He swung around, eyes burning. “Don’t you know? You’re a widow.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I’ve never found there was any way to prepare for death.”
“I could have said goodbye,” he said, his lips a thin line. “I would have said goodbye. I would have told her that I loved her. I would have—” he broke off.
A tear rolled down Harriet’s cheek. “I’m sure she knew you loved her. She knew.”
“I doubt it. I never told her.”
“You don’t need to be told those things,” Harriet said. “People rarely talk of love.”
“My father arranged the marriage,” Jem said, his mouth twisting. “I was too much of a hellion, he said. A danger to all of England.”
“Really?” Harriet asked, jumping at the chance to lighten his tone. “All of England?”
“The facts of the matter are rather ironic, under the present circumstances,” he said, smiling faintly. “My father didn’t mind when I was raising Cain at Oxford. He wouldn’t have cared how many demi-reps I bedded. He told me repeatedly, since I was five years old, that a bordello is man’s version of paradise.”
“Oh.”
“My personal rebellion,” Jem said broodingly, “is that I have never paid a woman for her attentions. And I never will.”
Harriet swallowed. “I suppose that’s good,” she ventured.
“As a youngster, I managed to find plenty of women who were happy to do the deed for free, thus following the family tradition while engaging in a little mutiny at the same time. It was only when my father thought I was pursuing men that he got the wind up.”
“Men!” Harriet exclaimed.
“Men.” He shrugged. “It’s not in me. But one of my closest friends from Oxford was of a different sort. He was a true friend. Not my lover, but my father couldn’t be bothered to see the difference.”
“Isn’t he alive anymore?”
He shook his head. “Killed. No goodbye there either. At any rate, my father thought I was learning to share his proclivities, so he married me off to Sally.”
“What was she like?”
“Funny,” Jem said. “I resented her, of course. She was tall and slim, and I fancied my father had picked her because she looked like a boy. But she was a woman, all through. She could pull witticisms out of the air.”
Jealousy sometimes masqueraded as hatred. Sometimes it was just hatred, though. Harriet thought she probably hated tall, slim Sally.
“It’s been eight years since she died,” he said. “We had very little time together. But we had amusing times while she was alive.”
“Wonderful,” Harriet said flatly. And then she added: “I can see why you wished you had said goodbye. I’m sorry that wasn’t possible.”
“Did you say goodbye to your husband?”
“No.”
“Was it quite sudden?”
She nodded.
“They came and told me Sally was dead,” Jem said, dropping into a chair. “And then they brought me Eugenia. She was ugly, of course. She had an odd head because Sally had labored so long. I thought she looked like some sort of monkey. But she looked at me with her squinty little eyes, and I could see Sally there.”
“That’s so sweet,” Harriet said, feeling a lump in her throat.
“Not really,” he said. “I didn’t see Eugenia herself. All I saw was that Sally had left a scrap of herself behind, and that I had to treasure it. So I bought this house and had the west wing secured to keep her safe.”
“But why on earth would you have to worry so much?” Harriet asked. “I just don’t understand—”
“I’m the richest man in England,” Jem stated. “My father had a fair amount, as well. And my sister—”
“What happened to your sister?”
“A man kidnapped her and forced her into a false marriage. My father had him tracked down and killed, of course. Just like that, my sister became a widow.”
“She must have been so distressed by the whole event!” Harriet cried.
“She was distressed long before,” Jem said. But his tone didn’t invite any more questions.
“There has to be some way that Eugenia can have more of a childhood,” Harriet said. “If she visited me, no one would suspect who she was; she would be perfectly safe.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “All this talk of visiting…you haven’t left yet, Harriet. You’re in my house…” She loved that look in his eye. “In my bed…”
His hand slid under her and wrapped around her bare bottom; she started to say something but his mouth was on her breast. This was no whispery little caress. His mouth was warm and wet. A tremor went through her body. He sucked harder and whatever Harriet was going to say died on her lips.
He was shaping her buttocks in his hand, pulling her up and toward the pull of his mouth. He made his way down her body with tiny bites, and every touch of his mouth made her shake.
He reared up and she opened her eyes again. There was a wicked spark in his eyes, something that spoke of lust, pure lust.
“I want you. Now.” He ran his thumb over her nipple. “Do you understand, Harriet?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He rubbed a little harder. “I think I’m going to want to make love to you in the morning as well.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but he ran his thumb down between her legs and she started gasping instead.
Eyes still on hers, he put a hand on her breast. “You’re part of this, Harriet. You’re not just the audience.”
“I know,” she said, hearing the desire in her own voice. Then she woke up to what he was saying. “What do you want me to do?” She looked rather wildly at his body. Would he like to be kissed?
He grinned, and the sparks were wild in his eyes. “For now, lie back and tell me exactly what you feel.”
It took her a while. Harriet had not been raised to tell men what to do. Yet perhaps the fact that she’d practiced that particular skill in a court of law lay behind her success: by twenty minutes later, she was very comfortable with the practice indeed. “Yes,” she found herself saying. “No, not there—there!” And finally she couldn’t form words anymore, but by then Jem had turned her body into a musical instrument. He knew her strings and chords and melodies…
He knew her song and he loved it.