WidowsWickedWish (25 page)

“Come, Bentley, it can’t be as bad as all that.”

Jack looked up from the tumbler of whiskey in his hands to
find Easton regarding him with unconcealed concern. He ought to be concerned.
Hell, Jack was concerned. He was drowning his sorrows alone at a table tucked
into the dim corner of Lady Marley’s card room. In the distance he could hear
the sounds of an orchestra playing in the ballroom down the hall and laughter
and conversation raised above it.

Somewhere in that ballroom his wife was dancing with some
gentleman or other, working her magic, seeing that his family was invited to
all the best balls, dinners and picnics that would round out the end of the
Season.

“I’ve made a bloody mess of it,” he admitted before downing
the contents of his glass in one long, fiery swallow. “Ruined my marriage
before it even began.”

Easton made no reply, merely sat down across form him and
waited with his customary patience.

“I convinced her I wanted a proper lady for a wife,” Jack
said. “And that’s just what I’ve gotten. The too perfect, too damn proper Lady
Bentley.”

“And that’s a problem because?”

“Because Olivia isn’t that lady. She’s sassy and curious and
stubborn.”

“Are we talking about the same lady?” Easton asked with a
chuckle. “My cousin, the shy little lady with a warm heart who rarely nay-says
anyone?”

“Olivia is so much more than that,” he growled in response.
“Or she was until I lost my head in the stables and lambasted her for something
that wasn’t her doing at all, until I told her I’d had every intention of
marrying her long before I even knew her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Easton asked. “You’ve
known Olivia since she was a girl. And what does your folly in the stables with
Elizabeth have to do with the muck you’ve made of your marriage?”

“Everything,” he muttered, not bothering to explain which
folly in the stables he’d been referring to. “It all started that day. Did you
know that your aunt set a trap for me that day?”

“Aunt Hastings?”

“The one.” Jack ran a hand through his hair in frustration.
“She thought to save her daughter from my dastardly clutches. I don’t know how
she lured Elizabeth to the stables. But it wasn’t happenstance that we were
found together.”

“Why would she think Olivia needed saving from you?”

Jack felt heat wash over his cheeks and ducked his head.

“She was a child,” Easton grumbled.

“She was sixteen, nearly seventeen,” Jack argued. “Nothing
happened between us but you saw how she followed me about. Hell, you teased me
unmercifully. I felt like the lowest cur lusting after your cousin.”

“All those years ago,” Simon murmured. “You wanted her even
then.”

“Nothing’s changed.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Jack hesitated, not at all certain he wanted to admit the
entirety of his idiocy to his wife’s cousin.

“You want her,” Easton said. “She loves you. Sounds like a
match made in heaven.”

“It’s bloody hell,” Jack replied warily. “She may have loved
me once, but no longer. I made damn sure of that. Not only does she not love
me, she doesn’t even want to want me.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“We haven’t…not since our wedding night…she won’t…ah, hell.
She doesn’t want me in her bed.” It hurt to say the words aloud, to admit them
to his closest friend and to himself.

“Olivia has barred you from her bed?” Easton asked in
surprise.

“Of course not. She’s the perfect wife. She’d no more keep
me from her bed than she’d argue with me over when to return to Sedgefield or
whether she’s to be called Lady Bentley or Mrs. Bentley.”

“She has a choice?”

“Apparently.”

“And she’s chosen Lady Bentley and that bothers you.”

“It’s not her choice that bothers me,” he corrected. “It’s the
fact that she didn’t make it. She allowed me to make it. Or rather when I
voiced no opinion she made the choice for Justine’s sake, because she thinks I
married her to raise my daughter high.”

“And you didn’t?”

“No. Yes. I thought I wanted a proper wife and mother for my
daughter, one with the right connections. And I did. What father wouldn’t? But
then I got to know Olivia, to really know her, and now I don’t want that lady
at all.”

“Let me see if I understand you,” Easton replied, his voice
laced with unmistakable irony. “You married my cousin, the daughter of a peer
of the realm, a woman who was raised from the cradle to be a lady, and now you
are complaining because she is a lady?”

“I’m not complaining,” he groused. “What do I have to
complain about?”

“You tell me.”

“Olivia never argues with me,” he replied. “She never loses
her temper. She spends every day making plans for Justine’s future, talking
endlessly about schools and desirable friends and the bloody marriage pool. She
takes my stepmother around with her every afternoon to make calls, to introduce
her to the right ladies. Do you know she hosted a dinner last night for
gentlemen who might want to contract with the mining company for ore?”

“It sounds to me like you’ve found the perfect wife,” Easton
replied with a wry smile.

“She welcomed me to her bed and then tried to hide her
passion, clutching at the bedcovers instead of me,” Jack continued doggedly.
“She didn’t ask me for the dirty words. She certainly didn’t give the words to
me. She smiles that damn countess smile all day long and wishes me a pleasant
sleep each night.”

“I’m not sure I want to know the significance of any of
that,” Easton muttered.

“She is the perfect wife. But I don’t want her to be
perfect,” Jack growled. “I just want her to be happy.”

“And you don’t believe she is?”

“Hell no, she isn’t happy. I’ve made her miserable. Every
bloody thing she told me she wanted, needed, I’ve stripped from her.”

“Such as?”

“Her freedom. Somebody promised her freedom and I took it
from her. A house…no, a home. And I’ve got her living in a bloody cramped
little space where the children can’t run about because they’ll knock over one
of a million baubles.”

“I’ve wondered why you don’t reside at Palmerton House.”

“In that mausoleum? Livy hates that house. I thought to
hurry back to my estate but I’m afraid she’ll simply disappear in the country.
Without her family to amuse her she’ll never laugh again. So we stay in Town,
but she’s so busy opening doors to my family that she’s given up finding a home
for us. She’s even given up her violin lessons.”

“Olivia was learning to play the violin?”

“She wanted a pretty little curricle to tool about Town in
so I bought her one. But she just smiled and said Lady Bentley could hardly be
seen whipping through the streets.”

“You bought Olivia a curricle?”

“She wanted to gamble all night. Instead we attend one
ton
entertainment after another where she can cram my father down every gentleman’s
starched neck cloth, finagle my stepmother invitations to every garden party
and pepper her conversations with references of her lovely stepdaughter who
will make some lucky man a wonderful wife someday.”

“Why don’t you just tell her to cease and desist already?”
Easton asked.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” Jack replied. “Olivia only
smiles that damn smile that isn’t a smile at all and reminds me that this is
why I married her.”

“What rot. Why would she think such a thing?”

“She believes that she trapped me into a marriage in which I
will never have what I most want and she must make up for it.”

“What does she think you most want?”

Jack looked away, regretting he’d allowed himself to so much
as hint at the truth. If Easton didn’t know, he could not enlighten him. It was
not his secret to tell, after all.

“Children?” Easton finally answered his own question. “You
want children, a son. And Olivia is unable to bear you one. Did you not know
before you married her?”

“Of course I knew,” he muttered indignantly. “Olivia would
hardly marry me with that secret between us.”

“Then why does she feel she must make it up to you? You
chose her knowing of her barren state.”

“Actually, the choice was taken from me when Johnston opened
that carriage door.”

“And you only found out after…”

“After I’d offered for her,” he confirmed. “Olivia only told
me after I’d spelled out what sort of wife I wanted, how I’d planned to marry
her as soon as I heard she’d been widowed, how I’d mistakenly held her
responsible for my marriage to Elizabeth.”

“You have made a bloody mess of things,” his friend said,
his voice rusty.

“All she wanted was a bit of adventure.” Jack poured himself
another glass of whiskey. “Affection and passion and dark alcoves. But she
won’t allow herself those things now. I’ve not even attempted to visit her bed
since our wedding night. I can’t forget the way she struggled not to respond to
my touch, the way she turned from me afterward, the way she cried silent tears
into her pillow.”

“Bloody hell.” Simon grabbed the whiskey decanter, splashed
two fingers into his glass.

“She’s hidden her true self away from me. I’m afraid I’ll
never get her back.”

They sat in together, silently getting drunk, until Easton’s
wife found them an hour later.

“My lord, I believe I am ready to return home,” Beatrice
called out cheerfully as she rounded the table to lay one gloved hand on her
husband’s shoulder.

“Yes, my love,” Easton answered, rising unsteadily to his
feet.

“Are you foxed?” she asked with a giggle.

“It is entirely possible,” her husband agreed, spacing his
words precisely in the way that drunk men do.

“Bentley, shame on you.” Beatrice waved one finger at him as
if he were a naughty child. “How do you intend to see your wife home if you
can’t see two feet in front of you?”

“I could only be so lucky as to have my wife two feet in
front of me,” he replied as he staggered to his feet.

Beatrice dropped both her hand and her eyes and Jack
realized she knew. Olivia had told her sister that he did not visit her bed,
that she did not want him there. Rage and humiliation rushed over him in a wave
of searing heat, nearly toppling him as he lurched back, his legs hitting the
chair behind him and sending it sailing across the floor to crash into the
wall.

“Steady there, Bentley,” Easton said with a chuckle, blind
to the danger written across his friend’s face.

Not so his wife. “Don’t do anything you will regret,”
Beatrice warned as Jack pivoted toward the door and the ballroom beyond.

“What’s got into him?”

Jack heard Easton’s question, missed whatever reply his wife
made. He walked as slowly and carefully as he could manage, circling card
tables and dodging around loitering gentlemen until he was in the wide hall
that ran the width of Lady Marley’s Mayfair mansion.

Jealousy coiled low in his belly when he spotted his wife
standing just inside the ballroom surrounded by pretty boys and distinguished
gentlemen and one decrepit old duke. He raked his gaze over her, taking in the
pale-blue gown she wore with its square neckline and wide gray ribbon cinched
around her waist. Her skirts hugged her round hips before flaring out around
her long legs.

Her hair was swept away from her face and held back by a
strand of pearls that wound through the curls piled atop her head and dangled
down along the back of her neck before circling around and around the slender
column. The end of the long strand dipped into the shadowy valley between her
breasts. More than one man’s eyes were riveted to that strand of pearls.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Jack mumbled as he pushed his way
between them to stand before Olivia.

“Mr. Bentley,” she greeted, that damn smile gracing her lush
lips. “I believe you are acquainted with the Duke of Ridgeway and his grandson
Lord Belmont. This worthy gentleman is Lord Casterbury…”

But Jack was no longer listening, had ceased hearing her
words through the blood roaring in his head.

“Belmont?” he barked.

“At your service,” the blond boy replied with a dimpled
smile and a slight nod.

“Cocky little shit,” Jack muttered.

Olivia sucked in a surprised breath, her gloved hands
fluttering about before falling to disappear into her skirts.

“I beg your pardon?” Belmont asked, his smile barely
slipping.

“I believe he said he’s having a coughing fit,” the Duke of
Ridgeway bellowed.

“My husband has caught a terrible cold.” Olivia latched on
to the explanation. “I’d best get him home to bed.”

“Hah, as if you’ve any idea where my bed is,” Jack growled.

“I…what?” Olivia blinked in confusion, or perhaps shock.

“So this is the boy you were to marry?” he demanded with a
nod at the too handsome young man who watched him with a lopsided smile, his
pale-blue eyes twinkling. “He might have been a better choice.”

“Stop this,” she hissed, taking one small step toward him.

“He’s likely too young to know what he’s missing,” Jack
continued relentlessly, ignoring the jab of his conscience.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Belmont argued so jovially
that Jack turned to glare at him. “I’m not so young that I can’t appreciate the
plum that nearly fell into my hands.”

“Plum?” Olivia repeated, her eyes narrowing as she pivoted
to face the young man who might have been her husband. “Did you just call me a
plum?”

Her haughty disdain accomplished what Jack’s anger had not.
Belmont stepped back, the smile falling from his lips.

“I’ll thank you to refrain from comparing me to fruit,” she
told the boy, her voice dripping scorn. “And furthermore, there was never,
never any danger of my falling into your soft, pale hands.”

“She’s a peach,” Jack growled as lust hit him square in the
belly and sunk deep into his groin. “Luscious and juicy and ripe.”