“Can you not guess?” He caught her hand. She did her best to pull back from him, but he was too strong, yanking her forward and forcing her to stumble toward him, barely staying on her feet. “If I cannot have you legally,” he hissed, his lips moving near her ear even as she leaned as far away from him as she could possibly get, “then I will have you outside of marriage.”
“No,” she murmured in horror, fearing what he would make her do in this river. She looked around herself, scrambling for some sort of escape from him.
“Be my mistress, Frederica.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
“No!” the word escaped Frederica in an explosion. She thrust both palms into Lord Wetherington’s chest, and in his surprise, he released her, falling into the shallows of the water on his rear.
Such rage emanated off him that Frederica scrambled up the bank to be rid of him.
“I would never do that. I couldn’t betray Allan in that way, and the mere thought of being intimate with you makes me sick,” she spat at him over her shoulder. “I came to you to tell you to stop, not to give you the chance to bully me into your bed.”
She was halfway back across the path when he caught up with her, his clothes now completely sodden after his fall in the water.
“You want to refuse me?” he said, his voice dangerous in its seething quietness.
“Take the hint, My Lord,” she said angrily. “I’ve been refusing you ever since you came into my life. Would you at last just accept defeat and go away!”
He advanced toward her. She reached out at branches behind her, taking hold of them in the trees, ready to use them to defend herself in any way she could think of though he pushed them aside as if they were nothing to him.
“He cannot love you,” he hissed.
“He cares for me,” she insisted, thinking of the way he had kissed her.
“You can’t know it.”
“I do know it. I know it with all my heart, and even if he did not, I’d rather stay married to a friend than go anywhere near you.” She gestured toward him.
“You don’t mean that. Who in this world doesn’t want to marry for love, Frederica?” He moved toward her, and she took off in the other direction, walking purposefully back down the path. She was intent on making it back to the carriage, now, escaping as quickly as possible. “Everyone does, you want it as I do.”
He caught her wrist though she flung it out of his grasp. “Don’t you want to feel loved?”
“Not by you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“What is wrong with your intelligence?” she rounded on him, losing patience entirely. “Can you not hear properly? I want nothing to do with you. Leave me be. I do not want to be loved by you. The only thing I ever want from you is silence.”
He looked like a kicked puppy in that moment, his expression so hurt that it alarmed her. She took advantage of his sudden sadness, trying to walk away from him again.
Any pity she might have felt for that expression was quickly drowned when she felt his hand take hold of the back of her skirt.
“Release me!” she demanded as she was flung back into his chest. He pressed his head close into the curve of her neck though she fought him constantly, pushing him off her. “Do not touch me again.” She stamped down on his foot, forcing him to let go.
“If you do not give me what I want, you both shall pay for this,” he called to her.
She burst onto another path, certain now that she was lost. She doubled back in the other direction, surprising Lord Wetherington so much at one point that he jumped out of her way before he realized his missed opportunity and raced after her again.
“Do you hear me, Frederica? Be my mistress —”
“Never.”
“Then you and your husband will pay.”
“You will never touch him.” At a turning in the path, she turned to face him again, now recalling where she was. “If you so much as touch him, I know to tell the constables exactly who did it. Crimes are taken very seriously in this country, MyLord. You’d find yourself in Newgate within a day.”
“You are imagining a man who is subject to the law.” He smiled, a malicious smile that made her quiver. “There are men who know how to bend the laws, to get around them, to obtain what they want.” His eyes shot down at her again.
