My Naughty Minette (10 page)

She lay still with her eyes shut tight. She heard him walk around the desk, heard the drawer scrape open and heard him drop the paddle inside and shut the drawer again. What now? Would he send her back to the country? Would he punish her further?

She felt his hand on her arm. “Stand up,” he said.

She obeyed, but she couldn’t meet his gaze. She stared at his neckcloth instead and tried to speak through her shuddering breaths. “I’m s-so s-sorry. I suppose I’ve brought nothing but irritation to your life.”

He watched her a moment, then reached in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I asked you to stay at Barrymore Park for a reason.”

“Will you send me back?” She brushed at her cheeks. “I don’t want to go back, but if it will make you less angry, I suppose I will bear it. Because, oh, you hurt me just now.”

“It was a punishment. You disobeyed me, Minette. You went against my express wishes.”

That brought more tears, a veritable fountain of them erupting all over his handkerchief as she balled it against her eyes. She felt his arms come around her, and she leaned into his embrace, as much as she disliked him at the moment. Spankings had never factored into her dreams of wedded bliss, although she knew Warren spanked Josephine when it was called for, and that Lord Townsend spanked Aurelia too. Somehow Minette had believed she would be too perfect a wife for such consequences, especially married to a man she loved so much.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I wish you wouldn’t send me back. I won’t get in your way. I won’t disobey you again, not in anything.”

He drew away from her and took the handkerchief, and dabbed it against her cheeks. “I’ll have to think about what to do. In the meantime, I’ve duties to attend to which your sudden arrival has put in disorder. You may go to your room and stay there for the remainder of this afternoon.”

It was an order, not a request. He still sounded so angry, so cold. She wondered to herself if her stunt had been worth it, to be closer to him. Because sometimes you could be standing a foot away from a person and feel like there were acres between you to be crossed.

August dined alone, after Minette sent down a tersely worded note that she was feeling “unwell.”

He wasn’t feeling so well himself. He’d punished his wife for disobedience, which was his husbandly right. However, he’d also punished her because she wanted to be with him, which didn’t seem husbandly, or right, at all.

But that wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of this afternoon. The worst thing was that he’d gotten aroused while paddling her, a perverse reaction that troubled him in the extreme. Like any English chap, he loved to spank women in the course of naughty games, but he also had a firm grasp of the difference between play and discipline. So why had he gone hard in the midst of paddling Minette, when he only had discipline in mind?

Perhaps it was stress, or his recent lack of sexual outlet. He thought for the hundredth time that he must go see Esme, and realized for the hundredth time that he wasn’t going to do it, especially now with Minette in the house. He went to the ballroom instead, where he could pound out his frustrations at the pianoforte.

As he crossed the vaulted and echoing space, not a velvet curtain stirred, nor chandelier tinkled. Utterly, hauntingly still. He lit a few lamps in the corner, enough to see the music, but not much more. He didn’t like to look around at the ornately beautiful ballroom because it depressed him, and reminded him of times gone past.

How long since this great hall had housed dancing and merriment? Too long. When it was his ballroom, when he was the Marquess of Barrymore, Minette would want to organize balls every year and invite everyone. He could see it so clearly, her bustling about and conversing with all the guests, a proper marchioness. Well, he wasn’t the marquess yet. For a moment, he had a sensation his father was in the room with him, watching him with an accusing gaze. The skin prickled on the back of his neck. He left off playing and turned around, but it wasn’t his father watching.

Minette hovered in the doorway, in a night dress and prettily embellished dressing gown. Warren had always outfitted her like a perfect little doll. August supposed he must do the same, and order her a full wardrobe for winter and the season coming up. Sometime soon, she would need black gowns for mourning...

“How long have you been standing there?” he asked.

“Long enough to hear your beautiful playing,” she said in an awed voice.

He didn’t want her to be awed. He wanted her to be sullen and cross from her spanking. He wanted her to revile him and wish to avoid him, but here she was, gazing at him in adoration. “You ought to go to bed,” he said. “It’s late.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

There, that was a hint of reproach. Just a little hint. She crossed the parquet floor, watching him as if she feared he’d send her away. He wanted to. This room was full of sadness and ghosts, but she appeared to sense none of that. In fact, the closer she got to him, the more she brightened, until she stood beside him like a pretty, beribboned flame.

“That song was lovely to listen to. Crashing and full of drama. If anyone would recognize drama, it’s me, wouldn’t you say? What composer wrote that?”

He looked at the music, then down at his hands. “No one you would know. Some obscure fellow.”

“It sounded so strong and complex, and yet melodious, like when someone feels very angry, but then they can’t help seeing some pretty thing and being almost angry at how pretty and nice it is. And you want to compose poetry at the same time you want to take the thing and throw it off a cliff, or pluck off all its feathers if it’s a bird. Because there are a lot of pretty birds out there if one looks for them, but when you’re angry, you feel like you want to wring their little necks. Do you ever have that feeling?”

He looked at his wife in exasperation. “Yes.”

She sat beside him on the bench, not quite touching. She did a little trill amidst the treble keys. “How silly you must have thought me at the Townsends’, picking out our little duet. I never realized you could play with such talent. I wish I wasn’t a disaster at everything I try.”

“You aren’t a disaster at everything you try.”

Minette made a delicate pout. “I can’t play any instruments, I can’t sing well, I make a muddle of anything I embroider, my poetry never rhymes, my letters always ramble in a most regrettable fashion, I step on my partner’s toes when I waltz, unless that partner is an exceptionally strong dancer who can guide me where I need to go, rather like you did that time we danced at Warren and Josephine’s ball—”

“I could give you lessons at the pianoforte if you like.”

Minette left off her list of shortcomings and clasped her hands before her chest. “Would you? That would be wonderful. Does that mean you will allow me to stay?”

He looked back at the keys, picking out a somber melody. “I suppose you must stay. Warren has written that he and Josephine and the Townsends are coming to London in a couple of weeks, to make some purchases for their nurseries, and to visit the both of us.”

“Yes, I suppose there are tons of things they’ll have to buy before their babies come. Little gowns and blankets, and silver rattles, and lacy caps, and soft, tiny stockings for the babies’ feet. Do babies wear stockings? But they must, don’t you think, especially babies born in the winter months when it’s cold?”

Before he could answer, she continued on with the list of items Aurelia and Josephine simply must have, to include things like books and toys and oh, perhaps, a little pony if they bred them small enough for toddling boys and girls, not that she had ever gotten very good at riding horses...

When she was a child, August used to dread her endless, rambling monologues, and avoid her when she was in a mood to prattle. But there was a sweetness in them too, when one wished to forget about troubles and become lost in a pleasant, gentle voice. You never knew what Minette might say. As she chattered on about babies and children, he gazed at her and thought, for the hundredth shocked time,
she is my wife
.

And she was beautiful and charming, and exquisitely formed. He didn’t want to think of her like that, but it was rather hard to avoid it when she sat next to him in fetching evening clothes. Eventually he would make babies on her, and she would hold them on her lap, and blather on to them in this same way she blathered on to him. Perhaps she would tell them nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Perhaps she would sing silly songs made up of her poorly-rhyming poems.

He turned away a little, so he couldn’t look down the front of her dressing gown and see the curve of her breasts. How terrifying to imagine her bearing his children. If anything happened to her in childbirth, Warren would kill him. Were they still friends? He ought to write back to Warren but he didn’t know what to say. The man’s letter had been to the point, almost brusque. Of course, that’s how they’d always written notes to each other, in plain, concise language. What could he say in a letter?
Your sister and I are well.
That would be a lie.
I don’t really want her here. I don’t know how to deal with her. I still can’t believe I had to marry her.
All of those were true, but probably the wrong things to say.

He certainly couldn’t write that he dreamed with plaguing regularity of the night he’d lain with her, or that he’d gotten an aching erection the last time he’d paddled her heart-shaped bottom.

“August? Did you hear my question?”

She gazed at him, sweet, chattering Minette, and he felt like the world’s greatest pervert for the lurid direction of his thoughts. “I... Forgive me. What did you say?”

“I asked if you knew the age at which children begin to walk. Because then, of course, they would need proper shoes. I’m sure Aurelia and Josephine will figure it out long before the shoes are actually needed. I’m ever so glad they’re having children first so they can teach me everything they learn.”

August watched her, uncertain if he was still expected to respond.

“So you don’t know when they begin to walk?” she asked after a moment.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about children. I was the youngest growing up.”

“But your sisters have children now, don’t they? You’re an uncle, and my goodness, I suppose I’m an aunt now. You must tell me all my nieces’ and nephews’ names and ages, and what they look like, and what manner of children they are, whether they are timid or bold, or silly or serious, or bookish or adventurous, oh, and we must know their favorite foods for when they come to visit.”

August twined his fingers together in his lap. “I can’t remember all of that off hand. My sisters never trusted me to be around them much.”

“Whyever not?”

He turned to her, this cheerful, winsome wife who must delight all children without so much as lifting a finger. “I’m not the type of man who knows what to do with children.”

“Don’t you like them?” Her face clouded at his tone. “Don’t you want to have children of your own?”

“Of course I do, eventually.” But having children would mean bedding Minette again, repeatedly, in fact, until she fell pregnant. And when he thought about bedding Minette, a great conflict of feelings roiled in his brain until he couldn’t think about anything at all. “I only wonder if now is a bad time for it,” he said in a hedging way. “Perhaps we ought to practice being an auntie and uncle first, until things settle down. You’re very young. We’ve plenty of years yet to start a family.”

“I’m not so young. Not
very
young.”

“You seem very young to me.” And he felt old, so old and corrupt compared to her. He played a couple of grimly dissonant chords. Minette sat up straighter and seemed to shake herself from the pall of his pensive mood.

“Well, thank you for letting me stay here at Barrymore House even though you didn’t want me here with your father’s illness and whatever else has got you down. I’ll try not to be a nuisance, although I would love some piano lessons, so I might be a nuisance about that. Which is a shame, because I know you’re very busy, and I’ve already inconvenienced you just by being here, which I am so sorry for, even though you’ve punished me already and therefore gotten us back on an even keel—”

“How about now?” he asked, interrupting her. He leafed through some music on the sideboard until he found the piece he sought. He put it on the stand and slid to the left so Minette would have better access to the keyboard. “Play this piece for me as well as you’re able, so I can see where you are in your training. It’s a simple piece, a minuet. It’s good for learning notes and keeping a steady tempo.”

“What did you call it again? A Minette?”

“A min-u-et,” he corrected, before he realized she was making a joke. An impish smile broke across her face, bright humor in this dim sepulcher of a room. He didn’t intend to smile back, but he did. She had a devilish ability to make people grin even when they didn’t want to. With effort, he composed his features and pointed to the keys.

“Come, we must be serious if you want to learn.”

“I will try my best to play it,” she said with a nod. She began to plink at the notes, a laborious process, since she looked up at the notation and then down at the keyboard nearly every measure. He let it go on a while, and then he tapped the page.

“No, look up here. This is where the notes are. An accomplished pianist never looks down at his or her fingers.”

She paused on a ragged chord. “But how can I play the right note if I don’t look at the keyboard?”

“You must come to know the keys by touch. You must learn to see them with your fingers.” When he was a child, too young to light the lamps, he’d played the piano in the dark with his eyes closed. He couldn’t tell her about that, about those frightening, dark nights. He thought instead of the dark night when he’d touched her and explored her, and taken her virginity. He’d done all of that by touch alone. “It’s something that comes with practice,” he said in a tight voice. “Try to feel the keys without looking at your hands. You know middle C. The others follow in a very predictable fashion.”