A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau (29 page)

“And if she had not met him,” he said. “They were both in the process of surviving, Helena. We do not know how well they would have done if they had not met each other. Perhaps they were both strong people who would have found their peace somehow alone. We do not know. Neither do they. I do believe, though, that they could not be so happy together if they merely used each other as emotional props. But they did meet, and so they are as we see them today.”

She withdrew from him and rested her palms on the windowsill as she looked out. “I will not use you as an emotional prop either, Edgar,” she said. “It would be easy to do. You organize and fix things, do you not? It comes naturally to you. You have seen that my life is all in pieces and you have sought to mend it, to put the pieces back together again, to make all right for me. You
took a terrible risk today and won—as you almost always do, I suspect. It would be easy to lean into you as I was just doing, to allow you to manage my life. You can do it so much better than I, it seems. But it is my life. I must live it myself.”

He felt chilled. But he had said it himself of her stepson and his wife—they could not be happy together if they depended too much upon each other. And he had spoken the truth. He could not be happy as the totally dominant partner in a marriage—even though by his nature he would always try to dominate, thinking he was merely protecting and cherishing his wife.

“Then you will do so,” he said, “without my further interference. I am not sorry for what I did yesterday and today. I would do it again given the choice—because you are my wife and because I love you. But you must proceed from here, Helena—or not proceed. The choice is yours. I am going to bed. It is late and I am cold.”

But she turned from the window to look at him, the old mocking smile on her lips—though he had the feeling that it was turned inward on herself rather than outward on him.

“I was not quarreling with you, Edgar,” she said. “You do not need to pout like a boy. I want to make love. But not as we have done it since our marriage. I have allowed you your will because it has been so very enjoyable to do so. You are a superlative lover, unadventurous as are your methods.”

He raised his eyebrows. Unadventurous?

“I want to be on top,” she said. “I want to lead the way. I want you to lie still as I usually do and let me set the pace and choose the key moments. I want to make love to you.”

He had never done it like that. It sounded vaguely wrong, vaguely sinful. He felt his breath quicken and his groin tighten. She was still smiling at him—and though
she was dressed in a pale dressing gown with her hair in long waves down her back, she looked again in the faint light of the moon and stars like the scarlet lady of the Greenwalds’ drawing room.

“Then what are we waiting for?” he asked.

He stripped off his nightshirt and lay on his back on the bed. He was thankful that a fire still burned in the grate, though the air felt chill enough—for the space of perhaps one minute. She kneeled, naked, beside him and began to make love to him with delicate, skilled hands and warm seeking mouth. The minx—of course she was skilled. He did not wish to discover where she had acquired those skills—though he really did not care. He had acquired his own with other women, but they no longer mattered. Just as the other men would no longer matter to her. He would see to it that they did not.

It was difficult to keep his hands resting on the bed, to submit to the sweet torture of a lovemaking that proceeded altogether too slowly for his comfort. It was hard to be passive, to allow himself to be led and controlled, to give up all his own initiative.

She came astride him when he thought the pain must surely soon get beyond him, positioned herself carefully, her knees wide, and slid firmly down onto him. His hands came to her hips with some urgency, but he remembered in time and gentled them, letting them rest idly there.

“Ah,” she said, “you feel so good. So deep. You have not done this before, have you?”

“No.”

“I will show you how good it feels to be mastered,” she said, leaning over him and kissing him open-mouthed. “It does feel good, Edgar, provided it is only play. And this is play—intimate, wonderful play, which we all need in our lives. I do not wish to master you
outside of this play—or you to master me. Only here. Now.”

He gritted his teeth when she began to move, riding him with a leisurely rocking of her hips while she braced her hands on his shoulders and tipped back her head, her eyes closed. Fortunately the contracting of inner muscles told him that she was at an advanced stage of arousal herself. It was not long before she spoke again.

“Yes,” she whispered fiercely. “Yes. Now, Edgar.
Now!
”

His hands tightened on her hips and he drove into her over and over again until they reached climax together.

“Ah, my love,” she said in that throaty, velvet voice that most belonged here, in their bed. “Ah, my love.” Her head was still tipped back, her eyes still closed.

He would perhaps not have heard the words if they had not sounded so strange and so new to his ears. He doubted that she heard them herself.

She did not lift herself away. She lowered herself onto him and straightened her legs so that they lay on either side of his. She snuggled her head into the hollow between his shoulder and neck and sighed.

“Do I weigh a ton?” she asked as he contrived somehow to pull the covers up over them.

“Only half,” he told her.

“You are no gentleman, sir,” she said. “You were supposed to reply that I feel like a mere feather.”

“Two feathers,” he said.

“Good night, Edgar. I did enjoy that.”

“Good night, love.” He kissed the side of her face. “And I enjoyed being mastered.”

She laughed that throaty laugh of hers and was almost instantly asleep.

They were still coupled.

It was going to be an interesting marriage, he thought. It would never be a comfortable one. It might never be a
particularly happy one. But strangely, he felt more inclined to favor an interesting marriage over a comfortable one. And as for happiness—well, at this particular moment he felt thoroughly happy. And life was made up of moments. It was a shame that this one must be cut short by sleep, but there would be other moments—tomorrow or the next day or the next.

He slept.

C
HRISTMAS
D
AY WAS
one of those magical days that Helena had studiously avoided for ten years. It was everything that she had always most dreaded—a day lived on emotion rather than on any sane rationality. And the emotions, of course, were gaiety and love and happiness. The Downes family, she concluded—her father-in-law, her husband, her sister-in-law—used love and generosity and kindness and openness as the guiding principles of their own family lives, and they passed on those feelings to everyone around them. It seemed almost impossible that anyone
not
have a perfectly happy Christmas in their home.

And it seemed that everyone did.

The morning was spent in gift-giving within each family group. For Helena there was a great deal more to do than that. There were the servants to entertain for an hour while Mr. Downes gave them generous gifts, and there were baskets to be delivered to some of the poorer families in their country cottages and in the village. Cora and Francis delivered half of them, while Helena and Edgar delivered the others.

It felt so very good—Helena was beginning to accept the feeling, to open herself to it—to be a part of a family. To recognize love around her, to accept that much of it was directed her way—not for anything she had ever done or not done, but simply because she was a member
of the family. To realize that she was beginning to love again, cautiously, fearfully, but without resistance.

She had decided to enjoy Christmas—this good old-fashioned English Christmas of her father-in-law’s description. Tomorrow she would think things through, decide if she could allow her life to take a new course. But today she would not think. Today she would feel.

The young people had contrived to find time during the morning to walk out to the lake to skate. They were arriving back, rosy cheeked, high spirited, as Helena and Edgar were returning from their errands. Fanny Grainger and Jack Sperling were together, something they had been careful to avoid during the past few days.

Fanny smiled her sweet, shy smile. Jack inclined his head to them and spoke to Edgar.

“Might I have a word with you, sir?” he asked.

“Certainly,” Edgar said, indicating the library. “Is it too private for my wife’s ears?”

“No.” Jack smiled at Helena and she adjusted her opinion of his looks. He was more than just mildly good looking. He was almost handsome. He offered his arm to Fanny and led her toward the library.

“Well.” Edgar looked from one to the other of them when they were all inside the room. “The hot cider I asked for should be here soon. What shall we toast?”

“Nothing and everything.” Jack laughed, but Helena noticed that his arm had crept about Fanny’s waist and she was looking up at him with bright, eager eyes.

“It sounds like a reasonably good toast to me.” Edgar smiled at Helena and indicated two chairs close to the fire. “Do sit down, Miss Grainger, and warm yourself. Now, of what does this nothing and this everything consist?”

“I have been granted permission by Sir Webster Grainger,” Jack said, “to court Miss Grainger. There is to be no formal betrothal until I can prove that I am able
to support her in the manner of life to which she is accustomed and no marriage until I am in a fair way to offering her a home worthy of a baronet’s daughter. That may be years in the future. But F—Miss Grainger is young and I am but two-and-twenty. Waiting seems heaven when just a few weeks ago we thought even that an impossibility.”

Helena hugged Fanny. She was not in the habit of hugging people—had not been for a long while. But she was genuinely happy for the girl and her young man. And she was happy for Edgar, who must have felt guilty about the expectations he had raised in the Graingers.

“Well.” Edgar was smiling. “The long wait can perhaps be eased a little. Since you have become a close friend of my family, Miss Grainger, and you are to be a favored employee, Sperling—provided you prove yourself worthy of such a position, of course—I daresay the two of you might meet here or at my home in Bristol with fair frequency.”

Fanny bit her lip, her eyes shining with tears.

“I thank you, sir,” Jack Sperling said. “For everything. We both do, don’t we, Fan?”

She nodded and turned her eyes on Helena. There was such happiness in them that Helena was dazzled. The girl had a long wait for her marriage—perhaps years. But happiness lay in hope. Perhaps in hope more than in any other single factor. The moment might be happy, but unless one could feel confident in the hope that there would be other such moments the happiness was worth little.

“I will be new to Bristol,” Helena said. “And though I will have Edgar and have already met here some of his friends, I will still feel lonely for a while. Perhaps we can arrange for you to stay with me for a month or two in the spring, Fanny. I believe you have an aunt in Bristol? I would be pleased to make her acquaintance.”

Two of the tears spilled over onto Fanny’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she murmured.

The hot cider had arrived. They were all still chilled from the outdoors. They toasted one another’s happiness and Christmas itself and sipped on the welcome warmth of their drinks.

E
DGAR DID NOT
plan to attend the children’s party in the ballroom during the afternoon. They could be dizzyingly noisy and active, even the fourteen who were house guests—fifteen now that the young and very exuberant Peter Stapleton had been added to their number. With several neighborhood children added, the resulting noise was deafening. He intended only to poke his head inside the door to make sure that the ballroom was not being taken to pieces a bit at a time.

In the event he stayed. Cora’s four descended upon him just as if he had a giant child magnet pinned to his chest. Then Cora herself called to him and asked if he would head one of the four race teams with Gabriel, Hartley, and Francis. Then he spotted Priscilla Stapleton and his wife playing a game in a circle with the younger children. And finally he noticed that the person seated at the pianoforte ready to play the music for the game was Sir Gerald Stapleton.

It was his wife who kept him lingering in the ballroom even after he had served his sentence as race-team leader. Children always seemed the key to breaking through all her masks to the warm, vibrant, fun-loving woman she so obviously was. Perhaps she did not know it yet and perhaps she would resist it even when she did—but she was going to be a perfectly wonderful mother. Her resistance was understandable, of course. She had convinced herself that her stepson was a child when she had tried to corrupt him. And so she feared her effect on children.
But her effect was quite benevolent. The Greenwalds’ Stephen adored her—she came third in his affections, behind only his mama and papa.

Edgar had decided to enjoy Christmas, to relax and let go of all his worries. He had decided not to try to control events or people any longer—not in his personal life, anyway. He had married Helena and he loved her. He had discovered her darkest secrets and had made an effort to give her the chance to put right what had happened in the past. She had not entirely spurned his efforts—she had been remarkably kind to Priscilla and to the child. She had been civil to Gerald. But she had not reacted quite as Edgar had hoped she would.

He could do no more. Or rather, he
would
do no more. The rest was up to her. If she chose to live in the hell of her own making she had inhabited for thirteen years, then so be it. He must allow it. He must allow her the freedom she craved and the freedom he knew was necessary in any relationship in which he engaged.

He was going to enjoy Christmas. It was certainly not difficult to do. Apart from the basic joyfulness of the day and its activities, there had been the happy—or potentially happy—outcome of his scheme to bring Fanny Grainger and Jack Sperling together. And there was more. His father had made several appearances at the children’s party and had been mobbed each time. On his final appearance, just as the party was coming to an end, he invited Edgar and Helena, Cora and Francis to his private sitting room.