"All that young and innocent, yet you believed I loved you? That it wasn't some sort of schoolgirl infatuation?"

"I sometimes hate the way your brain works."

"So does my family." She sighed. "There is so much going on here at Pendragon. There is the someone who doesn't want me here, enough to try to kill me. Then there's you, Thomas. You don't know whether you want to strangle me or kiss me or just slam out of the room."

"If you are giving me a choice, then I would prefer to kiss you." He had to touch her breasts, had to mold his fingers around her through that satin, and so he did and he closed his eyes as he cupped her in his palms, as his fingers roved over her.

He felt her pushing against his hands, and he opened his eyes. He smiled down at her. "I believe you want me as badly as I want you."

"More," Meggie said. "You taught me, Thomas, and you taught me well." She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his mouth. "Please open to me," she whispered and he did, and all his heat, all the strength of him, all his passion and the immense hurt she'd dished out to him, it was all in that kiss, in the way he held her so tightly, she believed her ribs would crack, and then she just didn't care.

The huge old bed was only ten feet away. When he lay her on the Aubusson carpet that was so threadbare she felt pricks of cold air touching her shoulder blades, he forced himself to stop, just for a moment, and said, his voice thick and deep and guttural, "I want this to be hard and fast, Meggie."

Meggie couldn't think of a single word, she was thrumming, mewling like her racing cats she was so excited, she felt so very urgent, it was beyond anything she could begin to understand. She grabbed him around his neck and pulled him down to her. "Please, now, Thomas. Now."

He was a wild man, all over her, not a touch of gentleness, and Meggie hummed with power and urgency. She also hummed with something else, but she didn't know what it was.

Meggie would swear that the gloomy room lightened, that the air itself lifted and fluttered when she yelled to those beams in the darkened ceiling. But he wasn't through, bless him, and within a very short time, she was breathing hard again, beside herself, her hands all over him, pulling and caressing and hitting, and her cries heaved out of her mouth against his shoulder.

"I'm going to die now," she said, "a happy woman," and she didn't move a single muscle.

He grunted beside her.

"I felled you."

He grunted again, and she would swear she felt a smile on his mouth before he kissed her hair and collapsed again.

"Will you give me another chance, Thomas?"

"Your timing is excellent," he said, and was asleep, sprawled naked on the Aubusson carpet, a smile on his face.

Meggie's brain began to function again only when she realized she was shivering from cold. She came up on her elbow over her husband, looked down into his hard face, not so hard now in sleep, and said, "Thomas, how am I going to get you into bed?"

He grunted, then opened a dark eye and looked up into her shadowed face. "If I really concentrate on this, I can move."

"What will I do," she said, lightly caressing his shoulder, kissing his face, light nipping, sweet kisses, "when you are an old man and we end up on the carpet?"

"You will just roll me up in the carpet and leave me be."

She laughed even as he scooped her into his arms and carried her into the White Room. She kissed his shoulder, whispered against his neck, "Are you willing to let me perhaps kiss your belly the way you kiss mine?"

His breath whooshed out and he ran through the adjoining door, nearly knocked Meggie in the head when he ran too close to the wall. He was laughing until her hair cascaded over his belly and she touched him with her mouth. He nearly heaved himself off the bed. Nothing could be better than this, he thought, and nearly expired. Dear God, her mouth.

His last thought before he fell into a blessedly numb sleep was that his wife, the vicar's daughter, would come to love him. He was smart and he was persistent. He was also determined.

The following morning, however, Thomas wasn't smiling.

Chapter 30

YOU DAMNED IDIOT, you've been home only a fortnignt and you've already done this?"

William didn't feel well, he really didn't, and here was his too-sober half-brother, his voice black as the misery William was feeling, each word staccato, colder than an Irish winter morning, slamming right into his ear. He wanted to bolt behind the wainscoting. He wanted to seal up his ears until he knew his head wouldn't explode.

Thomas said, "Teddy MacGraff was here, fists at the ready, his face so red I was afraid he would fall over with apoplexy, that or come up here to your bedchamber and wring your damned neck."

"Let him," William said. "I want to die."

"Damn you, you're a man, get up and face this!"

Thomas jerked his half-brother from his bed and dragged him across his bedchamber to his dressing table, where there sat a pitcher filled of water, waiting for soap and his razor.

Thomas poured the water over William's head. William howled, flopped about, but it didn't matter.

Thomas let him slide to the floor, then called for his valet. "Wring the little sot out, Dickie. When you have poured enough coffee down his throat, bring him to me in the estate room. Oh, and don't let him out of your sight, he's liable to slink out of here and try to hide."

He heard Dickie say in a far-too-kind voice, "Come along, Master William. It's not a good thing you've done and you're in for it. Best face it like a man."

William moaned.

Thomas was shaking his head, wondering how he was going to handle this one, when he nearly ran into Meggie, who was dancing down the corridor, humming an arpeggio. He grabbed her arm to keep her upright. She squeaked in surprise, looked up at him, blushed-it was that blush that alerted him-then gave him a fat smile, and he knew, knew all the way to his belly, exactly what she was thinking, saw it clearly in his mind. She was kneeling over him and her mouth was on him. And her hands. And the feel of her hair on his belly. Oh God. He couldn't bear it. He was shaking.

"Good morning." He kissed her hard and fast, then straightened, took two steps away from her. When she reached for him, he said, "Don't, Meggie, I can do nothing about it, at least for the next couple of hours. William has gotten another girl pregnant. Her father came here, fully prepared to send William all the way to Botany Bay. In a boat without a paddle. Perhaps without a boat as well."

"That's it, Thomas. I'm going to kill the little sod, right now."

He managed to grab her before she ran around him. She was breathing hard.

"No, sweetheart, you can't."

"Of course I can. Just watch me."

"I mean, since I'm the magistrate and I would be a witness to the crime, I would have to take you to the gaol in Dublin."

But Meggie had already moved ahead. "But how can William have gotten another girl pregnant? He's only been here a matter of weeks."

Thomas sighed. "The little sod was home before."

"This is just too much, Thomas. Let me go. I will get a gun. I will shoot him in the feet, make him crawl away from Pendragon. You won't have to be a witness and arrest me."

"No, Meggie, keep away from William. If you would, please ask Aunt Libby to come to the drawing room. It is time that she faced what William is, what he has done, what he's obviously done every chance he'd gotten since he was old enough to figure out what to do."

"Aunt Libby doesn't know about any of the other girls? She doesn't know what he's like?"

He shook his head. "I don't see how she could. William certainly would never tell her, you can wager your last groat on that, and I've kept quiet, protecting her. But now this cannot continue. She needs to know. If she has any control, any influence over him, now's the time she used it."