Seducing an Angel (40 page)

And he felt so happy that he stopped himself only just in time from laughing out loud.

How odd
that
would have been.

He had flashing images of seeing her in Hyde Park, so heavily shrouded in black mourning clothes that it was impossible to see her face. And of seeing her at Meg’s ball a day later, a vivid siren with her emerald green gown and startling red hair and mask of proud scorn.

And yet surely he had known even then. Surely he had.

He would
surely
have recognized her anywhere in the whole universe in the whole of eternity.

His love.

Except that
love
—that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power—could not possibly be contained in a single word.

She was at his side and they were turning to face the vicar, and Young was giving her hand into the keeping of the man who would cherish it and her through a lifetime and beyond if it proved possible. And the vicar was addressing his dearly beloved in a voice that might have filled a cathedral, and Stephen was vowing to love, honor, and keep her, and she was vowing to love, honor, and obey him, and he was holding his breath as he took the ring from Elliott’s damnably steady hand in the hope that he could put it on her finger without dropping it. And then he was smiling at her when he did
not
drop it, and the vicar was pronouncing them man and wife.

And it occurred to him that he had missed his own wedding service, that it was over, and Cass was his wife, and if he did not lead her to the altar for communion without further delay he might well make an utter ass of himself and whoop for joy or something equally ghastly.

Cass was his
wife
.

He was
married
.

And then, before he knew it, the communion service was over, the register had been signed, they had left the church, smiling to left and right as they went, and everyone was out on the churchyard path, hugging and kissing both Stephen and Cass.

The blue sky was raining rose petals.

And at last Stephen laughed.

The world was a wonderful place, and if it was true that there was no such thing as happily ever after, then at least sometimes there was happiness pure and unalloyed, and one ought to grasp it with
both hands and carry it forward to make the hard times more bearable.

Today he was happy, and from the look on her face, so was Cass.

The wedding breakfast, for which several neighbors had joined the wedding guests, had stretched well into the evening. But finally everyone had left Warren Hall. Even those people who had been staying here had now moved to Finchley Park so that the bride and groom might be left alone.

Her bedchamber was square and spacious, Cassandra had discovered. It had a large adjoining dressing room and a cozy sitting room beyond that. A door at the opposite side of the sitting room presumably led to Stephen’s dressing room and bedchamber.

They shared a large suite of rooms overlooking the fountain and the flower gardens before the house.

Cassandra, brushing her hair even though her new maid had already brushed it to a bright sheen, looked out on darkness and listened to the soothing sound of the fountain through the open window and waited for Stephen to come.

He was not long. She turned to smile at him as he tapped on her dressing room door and let himself in.

“Cass,” he said, coming toward her, his hands reaching out for hers, “alone at last. I love them all, but I thought they would never leave.”

She laughed.

“Your staff would have smirked for a month,” she said, “if everyone had left early and we had retired to bed even before it was dark.”

He chuckled.

“I daresay you are right,” he said. “They will smirk for a month anyway when we do not go down for breakfast before noon.”

“
Ah
,” she said, “you plan to sleep that late, do you?”

“Who said anything about sleeping?” he asked.

“
Ah
,” she said.

And she released her hands from his and loosened the sash of his dressing gown. He was naked beneath it. She opened it back and moved against him, feeling his warm, strong nakedness against the fine silk of her nightgown.

“Stephen,” she said, her mouth against his throat, “you have no regrets?”

He slid his fingers through her hair until his hands cupped her face and lifted it toward his.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Unfair,” she said. “I asked first.”

“I believe,” he said, “that life is made up of constant occurrences of decisions to be made. Where do I go now? What shall I eat now? What shall I do now? And every decision, small or large, leads us inexorably in the direction we choose to take our lives, even if unconsciously When we saw each other in Hyde Park and again at Meg’s ball, we faced choices. We had no idea where they would lead us eventually did we? We thought they were leading in one direction, but in reality they were leading here, via numerous other choices and decisions we have made since. I do not regret a single one of them, Cass.”

“Fate has led us here, then?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Fate can only present the choices.
We
make the decisions. You might have chosen someone else at Meg’s ball. I might have refused to dance with you.”

“Oh, no, you could not have done that,” she said. “I was too good.”

“You were,” he admitted, grinning.

“I might have let you go,” she said, “when I understood that you would carry on with our liaison only on your own terms.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “you could not have done that, Cass. I was too good.”

“But what are you good for now?” she asked him, lowering both her voice and her eyelids. “Only to talk through your wedding night?”

“Well,” he said, “since words do not appear to be satisfying you, I had better try action.”

They smiled at each other until their smiles faded and he kissed her.

She knew his body. She knew his lovemaking. She knew how he felt inside her. She knew the sight of him and the smell of him and the feel of him.

But she knew nothing, she discovered over the next half hour—and through the night that followed. For she had known him in lust and in guilt, and she had felt his pleasure and her own almost-pleasure.

She had not known him in love.

Not before tonight, their wedding night.

Tonight she recognized his body and his lovemaking, but tonight there was so much more. Tonight there was
him
. And there was
her
. And four separate times there was
them
. Or, since even that word suggested a plurality and therefore a duality, there was the entity they became when they soared over the precipice of climaxing passion together to that place beyond that was not a place and was not any state that could be described in words or even remembered quite clearly afterward—until it happened again.

“Cass,” he said sleepily when daylight was already showing its face at the window and a single early bird was already practicing its choral skills from somewhere nearby, “I wish there were a thousand ways to say
I love you
. Or a million.”

“Why?” she asked him. “Would you now proceed to say them all? I would be asleep long before you had finished.”

He chuckled softly.

“Besides,” she said, “I cannot imagine ever growing tired of hearing just those three words.”

“I love you,” he said, rubbing his nose across hers after propping himself on one elbow.

“I know,” she told him before he rolled onto her and showed her again without words.

“I love you,” she said afterward.

But he only grunted sleepily and was asleep.

Another bird, or perhaps the same one, was singing to someone else too, someone who was already up in that early dawn. He had not spent the night at Warren Hall. Nor had he gone to Finchley Park with the rest of the family. How could he when he and Elliott had scarcely spoken to each other for many years?

Elliott had accused him of stealing from Jonathan, who was easy prey. And Elliott had accused him of debauchery, of having fathered the bastard children of a number of women in the neighborhood.

Elliott, who had once been his closest friend and partner in crime.

Constantine had never denied the accusations.

He never would.

He had spent the night at the home of Phillip Grainger, an old friend of his in the neighborhood.

He stood now in the churchyard outside the little chapel where Stephen had married Lady Paget the day before. There were still rose petals dotted about on the path and grass, hurled at the bride and groom by the children.

He stood at the foot of one of the graves, looking down broodingly at it. His long black cloak and tall hat, worn against the chill of the early morning, gave him an almost sinister appearance.

“Jon,” he said softly, “it seems that the family will go on into another generation. Nobody has admitted anything yet, but I would wager a bundle that Lady Merton is already with child. I think she is decent after all. I know
he
is, though I used to wish he weren’t. You would like them both.”

A few rose petals, browning around the edges, littered the grave. Con stooped down to remove them, and he brushed one petal off the headstone.

“No,” he said, “you would
love
them, Jon. You always did love extravagantly and indiscriminately. You even loved me.”

He did not come often to Warren Hall these days. It was a little painful, if the truth were known. But sometimes he yearned for Jon. Even for this, all that was left of his brother—the slight mound of a grave and a headstone that had already darkened and mossed slightly with age.

Jon would have been twenty-four now.

“I’ll be on my way,” Con said. “Until next time, then, Jon. Rest in peace.”

And he turned and strode away without looking back.

THE world had been reduced to a cocoon of pain and a few blessed moments of respite in which her breath might be caught but no real rest could be grabbed.

It had been a long and hard labor, but Margaret had not stopped assuring her for hours on end that this was the very reason the birthing of a baby was called
labor
.

“Men know
nothing
,” she had said after Stephen had come for one of his frequent visits but had put up no great resistance to being shooed out again. “They cannot even bear to
watch
pain.”

Perhaps, Cassandra had thought from deep within her cocoon, pain was difficult to watch when one had caused it but could do nothing either to stop it or to share it. But she did not spare many thoughts to such sympathies. She spared more to the conviction that she would not allow Stephen near her
ever again
.

Please, please, please, please, please
, she thought as she drew breath against another onslaught of pain that tightened her abdomen unbearably and ripped through her womb.

Please
what
?

Stop the pain?

Let this baby be born?

Let it be born alive?

And healthy?

Please, please
.

The seven months of her marriage had been almost unbelievably happy ones.

They had also been filled with terror.

Her terror.

And Stephen’s, always masked with a brisk cheerfulness.

“She is doing well.” The calm voice of the physician, who was a man and knew
nothing
.

“She is at the point of exhaustion.” Margaret’s voice.

“She is almost there.” The physician.

And then a deep breath and a—

Please, please
.

An unbearable urge to push. And a pushing and a pushing until a voice urged her to stop, to conserve her energy until there was another contraction. And then—

Oh, please, please
.

A frantic, unending pushing until all the breath was gone from her body and the world was pain and pushing—

And a gushing that suddenly released all the unbearable pressure and gave her a moment to breathe and—

A baby’s cry.

Oh.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You have a son, my lady,” the physician said. “And he appears to have ten toes and ten fingers and a nose and two eyes and a mouth that is going to give you notice for some time to come whenever he is hungry.”

And Margaret was dashing from the room to tell Stephen, who nevertheless was not allowed inside the room until she had returned to wash the baby and bundle him inside a warm blanket and set him in his mother’s arms while she cleaned both Cassandra and the bed and then stood back to smile at mother and child with flushed satisfaction.

Margaret and the physician left the room while Cassandra gazed in wonder at the red, ugly, beautiful face of her son.

Her son.

Where was Stephen
?

And then he was there, white-faced, with dark circles beneath his eyes as if he had been in hard labor for many hours. As in a way he probably had, poor thing. He was approaching the bed as though he was afraid to come closer, his eyes on hers. As though he was also afraid to look at the blanket-bound bundle.

“Cass,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I am tired enough to sleep for a month.” She smiled at him. “Meet our son.”

And he leaned closer, his eyes wide with wonder, and gazed downward.

“Could anyone be more beautiful?” he asked after a few awed moments.