The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (20 page)

“It will be all right,” she had assured him. “Everything will be all right, dear.”

Dear
! She hoped fervently he had not heard. The Marquess of Staunton was not exactly the sort of person one called
dear
. Or about whom one felt maternal. She felt anything but maternal at this particular moment. He was awake. His hand was moving in light circles over her back and her buttocks and then moved over her hip to slide up between them to one of her breasts. He stroked it and brushed his thumb over her nipple.

“Mmm,” she said.

It was all either of them said. He lifted one of her legs to fit snugly over his hip, drew her closer, and came into her. She was so very naive. She had not known where his caresses were leading. She had not realized it could be done again so soon—or while they were lying on their sides. But when she tightened those newly discovered inner muscles, she could feel him all enticingly hard and long again. And deep. He withdrew and entered again.
She did not believe there was a lovelier feeling in the world. She wished it could last forever.

She slept deeply after it was over. He had moved her leg to rest more comfortably on the other one and had drawn the blankets snugly about her ears. But he kept her close—closer. He kept their bodies joined. She must leave, she decided before she slid into sleep. There could be no real reason for her to stay longer. He had made his point and his marriage was indissoluble. He was beyond the power he had imagined they wielded over him. She must leave, put her life back together again, proceed to live happily ever after with her family and her six thousand a year.

But she would think about it tomorrow.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
some rain during the night. Drops of moisture glistened now on the grass and there was still some early-morning fog obscuring the hills and the distant trees. But it was a fine morning for a ride. The Marquess of Staunton stood on the marble steps outside the front doors, breathing in lungfuls of the damp, cool air and tapping his riding crop against his boots.

This morning there was no little brown mouse standing on the terrace below him. He had left her in bed. At his suggestion she had settled for sleep again after he had woken her for a swift, vigorous bout of lovemaking. She had turned her face into his pillow and slid her arm beneath it. She had been sleeping before he had tucked the bedclothes warmly about her.

He strode off toward the stables. Was he insane? Totally out of his mind? Three times last night, once three nights ago. What the devil would he do if he had got her with child?
If
? Four times and he was thinking in terms of
ifs
?

But he had come outside in order to refresh his mind
and in order to renew his energies after a night of expending them. He scowled. Why the devil had she been sitting up at such a late hour writing letters? If she had not been, none of that would have happened. He had already resisted the temptation to pay a conjugal visit to her room.

But he was saved after all from such troublesome thoughts. Charles was already mounted up in the stableyard when he arrived there, and was firmly establishing with his frisky mount which of them was in charge.

“You have not forgotten your first lessons in horsemanship, then,” he called from the gateway.

His brother clearly had not seen him until that moment. He touched his whip to the brim of his hat and nodded curtly. “Staunton,” he said.

“But you have learned considerably more in the years since,” the marquess said. “You are a cavalry officer, of course. I suppose riding comes as naturally to you as walking.”

“As it does to all gentlemen, I believe,” Charles said. “Excuse me, Staunton. I will be on my way.”

The marquess did not move from the gateway. “For a morning ride?” he said. “It is my purpose too. Shall we do it together?”

His brother shrugged. “As you wish,” he said.

It was all the fault of that pest of a wife of his, the marquess thought as he prepared his own horse, having waved away the groom who would have done it for him. That little prude with her character analyses and her moralizing, and her insistence that they were a family merely because his grace had fathered them all. When was the last time he had forced his company on someone who wished him to the devil? On that of a young puppy who had been all but insolent to him? It was all her fault that he felt this need to talk.

“You have seen active service?” he asked as they rode
out of the stableyard and headed out to the open fields and hills behind the house.

“Not beyond these shores,” Charles said. “I have been in a reserve regiment.”

“Have been?” The marquess looked across at him. Dressed in scarlet regimentals his brother must be irresistible to the ladies, he thought, his lips quirking. It was still hard to believe that his younger brother was no longer a twelve-year-old boy.

“We sail for Spain within the month,” Charles said. “I intend to be there.”

“Does his grace dispute that?” the marquess asked.

His brother did not answer.

“I suppose,” the marquess said, “that he did not even approve of your choice of career. He intended you for the church, did he not?” He remembered occasionally broaching the topic with their father. He remembered promising a rebellious Charles that he would take his part and see to it that he was not forced into a way of life that held no attraction whatsoever for him. But he had left before he could keep his promise.

Charles had clearly decided that this was a conversation in which he did not choose to participate. He had taken his mount to a brisk canter.

“But I do not remember your ever saying,” the marquess said, catching up to him, “that you wished to buy a commission. Your interest in a military career is of fairly recent date?”

His brother looked at him with hard, hostile eyes. “You make conversation for the sake of being sociable, Staunton,” he said. “Since when have you been interested in my career or my reasons for entering it? And do not say it is because you are my brother. You are no brother of mine except by the accident of birth.”

Ah. Charles had been far more deeply hurt by his desertion than he had ever expected. He had thought that
the boy would recover quickly and with the resilience of youth attach his affections to someone else—perhaps Will. It had been a naive assumption. But then he had been only twenty himself at that time—Charles’s age now.

“You wanted a gentleman’s life,” he said. “You wanted land and farms and responsibilities—even if you did not own the land, you said. You hoped that Will would enter the church or the army and that his grace would allow you to help run these estates or one of the more distant ones. I thought I might be given one of the other estates. We used to joke about it. I would allow you to live there and run it for me while I went raking off to London.”

“Which is exactly what you did,” Charles said. For the first time an open bitterness crept into his voice. “With vast success from all accounts.”

“Do you know why I left?” the marquess asked him.

“Yes.” His brother laughed. “His grace would not allow you to rut with any female within ten miles of Enfield. And with Mother dead there was nothing and no one to keep you here.”

The marquess winced. Perhaps he should have forced himself to say good-bye. Perhaps he should have tried to explain. But no—there had been no way to explain the pain, the outrage, the humiliation.

“And Will would have knocked your teeth in if you had gone near Claudia,” Charles added.

Ah. Twelve-year-olds sometimes noticed and understood far more than adults realized.

“I loved Claudia,” he said. “I thought she loved me. But once she was married to Will, I never would have gone near her.”

“You always were insufferably arrogant,” his former admirer said scornfully. “Anyone with eyes in his head could see that it was Will she wanted and that Will lived
in a sort of hell because he thought you were going to have her and he dared not fight you over the matter. You are not the sort of man to appeal to Claudia, Staunton. Claudia, for all her beauty, likes safety and security and tranquillity. She likes Will.”

Good God! Had he been so blind? So humiliatingly self-deluded? Apparently so.

“I left for other reasons,” he said. “Life had become intolerable and Will’s marriage and Mother’s death pushed me very close to the edge. Not over it, though. There were still you and the baby.” He drew a deep and ragged breath. He had not thought of it specifically for years. He did not know now if he could talk of it. “Something else pushed me over.”

If Charles did not prompt him, he would not say it, he decided. It was all in the past. He had got over it, recovered his life and his pride, forged an independence for himself.

“Well?” Charles said impatiently and rather impertinently.

“He accused me of stealing,” the marquess said. “His grace, I mean. He had searched my rooms himself and found it. He was waiting there for me with it in his hand. He hit me across the face with it in his open palm. It drew blood.”

He did not even look at his brother, who said nothing in the short silence that followed.

“He ordered me downstairs to await him in the library,” the marquess said. “I knew what would be at the end of the wait, of course. Any one of us would have known, would we not? I was twenty years old and innocent. I told him that I would do it, that I would wait there, that I would not fight with him or argue with him further. I told him that I would take the whipping just as if I were still a helpless child. But I told him too that I would be gone before the day was out, that I would
never set foot on Enfield property again, that he would never set eyes on me again. His grace would never bow to such threats, of course. It was the severest whipping he had ever given me. I had great difficulty riding my horse afterward, but I would not spend another night under the same roof with him.”

Charles still said nothing.

“When I made the threat, I did not speak in haste,” the marquess said. “I knew exactly what I was saying, and I knew the choices I was making. I knew that I would have to leave the baby, whom he would not even look at, and I knew I would have to leave you. You were the most precious person left in my world. But I will not use such an argument with you in self-defense. You were a child. You needed me. And I did not even have the courage to say good-bye to you. I would not have been able to leave if I had done so and I had to leave. More than my self-respect was at stake. I felt as if my very life, my soul were at stake. When one is twenty, Charles, as perhaps you will admit, one sometimes dramatizes reality in such a way. Perhaps, in retrospect, my self-respect and my life and my soul were of less importance than a child to whom I was something of a hero.”

He realized then in some horror why Charles was saying nothing.

“The devil!” he said. “This is not a tale that calls for tears, Charles. It is a foolish and sordid episode from the past. The long-forgotten past. I could not even keep my vow, you see. I am here on Enfield property again after just eight years. I am on almost civil speaking terms with his grace.”

Charles spurred on ahead and the marquess let him go. Twenty-year-olds who were also cavalry lieutenants did not enjoy being seen crying.

He drew his own horse to a halt. No, he would not even ride after his brother in a few minutes’ time. Charles
would be devilishly embarrassed, and he might feel it necessary to comment on what he had been told. Nothing more needed to be said on the matter. Charles now knew at least that he had left not merely to take his rakish pleasure in town after their mother’s death had released him from any need to stay at Enfield. It would not make a great deal of difference. Certainly his reason for leaving was no excuse for what he had done. He had broken the bonds of love and trust. And he was not the only one who had suffered as a result.

He turned his horse toward home, changed his mind, and went trotting off in a different direction. He would find some open countryside and take his horse to a gallop until they were both ready to collapse.

C
HARITY SLEPT FOR
only half an hour after her husband had left. Despite the fact that she had slept for only the last few hours of the night and even that sleep had been disturbed when her husband had woken and wanted her again, she found that old habits refused to be ignored. She had always been an early riser.

She breathed in the smell of him on his pillow and mentally examined the mingled feelings of soreness and well-being and languor and energy that all laid claim to her.
It must be very pleasant
, she thought,
to be married permanently, to wake every morning like this
. But hers was not a permanent marriage, nor did she wish it to be. This family had more troubles than she could list on her ten fingers. She had a family of her own with whom she was quite contented. And she would be with them soon. There was the ball tonight. Tomorrow or the next day she did not doubt the Earl of Tillden would remove his family from Enfield. Then her function would be quite at an end.

Tomorrow morning she would ask the Marquess of
Staunton when she might leave. He would probably want her to stay a few days longer, but by this time next week she could reasonably expect to be home. She threw back the bedclothes and sat on the edge of the bed. How excited they would be to see her. How excited she would be! And what wonderful news she would have to share with them. She would tease them at first. She would pretend to them that she had lost her position and was destitute. And then she would watch their faces as she told them the real story.

Penny would not approve. And Phil would be thunderous. He might even refuse to touch a penny of the money or allow her to pay off any of the debts. But then she had been fighting Phil all her life. And she was the elder, after all. Somehow she would persuade him.

A short while later—she had not summoned her maid, but there had been an embarrassing moment when she had passed through her husband’s dressing room, clad only in her nightgown and with her hair all tangled and disheveled, and found his valet there clearing away his shaving things—Charity descended to the breakfast room. It was still very early. She hoped no one else would be there yet. She hoped
he
would not be there. She would not quite know how to look at him or what to say to him. But only Charles was there, looking youthful and handsome in his riding clothes.