In truth, there was no difference between the acts. Neither she nor his mistress experienced it as Trent did.
“I married you for better or worse,” he said now, “and I will never break my vows. Our friendship means a great deal to me, Merry. I believe that we will have—we do already have—an excellent marriage. It’s all a matter of control. I shall control my temper, and you shall ignore this infatuation until it disappears.”
Merry didn’t trust her voice, so she just nodded. She was trapped. He didn’t believe in love, and her romantic history merely confirmed his skepticism. She had to accept what he was saying because she had no credibility.
There was no sense to demanding words that he couldn’t or wouldn’t give. She took a deep breath. She could prove herself over time. They made love every night; she would just have to show him, without words.
Love him silently.
There was one part of all this that she couldn’t get out of her mind: Trent’s mistress, the woman dismissed with a ruby, the one who loved him.
Merry wanted Trent to think that bedding her—Merry—was the best experience he’d ever had. Later that night, after her bath, she slid into Trent’s bed with a plan in mind. She had decided to put into effect everything she’d learned about his body and drive him mindless with desire.
Damn it, if there was a competition between his mistress and herself—even if it was only in her own head—she was determined to win. She didn’t have to ever say again that she loved him, since he disliked hearing it. But she could show it. She could make love to him as no other woman ever had.
Yet within moments, she was putty in his hands, whimpering, her heart pounding a crazy, blissful rhythm. Trent had never said much in bed, other than growling appreciation of her body, or cursing as she caressed him, learning to please him. When she licked his shaft, for example . . .
But she had to make him speak to her. “Is there anything you’d like me to do differently?” she asked, pitching her voice to a silky, seductive murmur.
He frowned. “Pardon me?”
“I asked if there is anything you’d like me to do differently,” she whispered, peeping at him from under her lashes. At the same moment, she curled her fingers tightly around his “cock,” as he called it.
Maybe he would say that he had never had such a wonderful experience in bed. Ever.
She was just beginning to smile, her heart singing, when he nodded.
Nodded?
Well, spit.
Before she had time to think about it, Trent smoothly took on the role of a tutor, adjusting her body as if she were a wooden model. “I enjoy having my stones caressed,” he told her.
As if he was noting his preference for ale over lemonade.
All the time, he was caressing her, and damn it, the man had learned everything about her body. She was on fire, her hands shaking as she obeyed his instructions until he captured them and held them over her head, using his body and his teeth to make her writhe under him.
A dark voice said in her ear, “Beg me, Merry.”
“Please,” she gasped, without a second’s thought. Over the weeks of their marriage, she had turned the word into a hymn that reverberated in the air between them.
Tonight he made her say it over and over, expertly rearranging her body until her limbs ached with frustrated desire. She started to protest, but at that very moment he pulled her legs apart and thrust inside.
For the first time that evening, she thought he was on the verge of losing control. He looked mad with desire, a groan deep in his throat breaking free. Yet she soon realized that he was changing his rhythm every time the burn began to creep up her legs. By the time he allowed her to have an orgasm, she was sweating and panting.
Pleasure crashed over her with a kind of brutal, melting ferocity such as she had never before felt.
Trent hung over her, panting, and said, “There are other things we can try . . . maybe next time.”
That hadn’t been what she hoped for.
Not at all.
Chapter Thirty-four
Merry spent the day working in the garden with Mr. Boothby, but even the simple pleasure of transplanting lettuce seedlings that she herself had sown a month before didn’t lessen her heartache.
When the last seedling was in place, she wandered around the side of the house to the stone bench where she’d sat with Trent on her first day in the garden. Only the calls of swallows high above broke the song of the honeybees.
Trent had his own odd logic, and he had held firm from the beginning. He had warned her that he loathed excesses of emotion.
She felt both humiliated and foolish. How could she even dream that he would return the wild emotion that she was experiencing? How could she have thought that her meager skills in the bedchamber approached that of the undoubtedly exquisite woman who had been Trent’s mistress?
With all her heart, she wished that she’d never disclosed the stupid, stupid fact that she was in love with Trent. It hadn’t ruined everything . . . but it had changed things. Before, she had felt beautiful and desired.
She no longer felt that way. She couldn’t help thinking that if she were more beautiful, more talented, more amusing, better in bed . . . then he might have fallen in love with her. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.
No, that didn’t make sense, because he didn’t fall in love with his mistress.
All the same, she refused to give up. The idea brought to the forefront all the stubbornness that had driven her father to woo a young English lady who’d shuddered at the very thought of a penniless American.
If her father could do it, she could do it.
She had made a good start last night, asking how to make their bedding more enjoyable. In fact, she was ashamed to think that she had never asked him before. She had just taken and taken, so overwhelmed by his skills that she lost sight of everything but her own pleasure.
No more.
She would not be a selfish bed partner.
And outside the chamber?
Trent hadn’t come to her with a list in hand, but all the same, he desired something that was not so far off from what Cedric had wanted.
In his heart of hearts, Trent wanted her to be more English.
She had behaved like a child, running around kissing her husband in front of others, and calling him that childish name—Jack—which he disliked. She would hate it if he started chanting, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” And yet, Trent had never objected when she called him whatever she wanted.
From now on, he would be Trent to her, just as he requested.
She could tell that he disliked being kissed in public. She’d felt his body stiffen. She would stop.
Finally, she could not continue to besiege him with protestations of love, nor could she nourish the hope that learning better skills in the bedroom would win his love. She was only demanding something that he didn’t feel.
He had accepted her as she was. He might not like everything about her, but he was a true gentleman. Likewise, she had to accept him as he was—but it didn’t mean that she had to accept herself.
Over time, she could prove that her love wasn’t shallow. English gentlewomen didn’t fall in and out of love like jackrabbits. They didn’t kiss in public or call their husbands pet names.
Love meant you wanted the other person’s happiness more than your own. If you loved a person, you made yourself better.
Glancing down, she discovered that she’d been idly drawing with a stick in the dirt, outlining a plan for including raspberry bushes in Boothby’s expanded kitchen gardens. She scuffed it out with her toe.
That day and all the next, Merry adhered to every precept Miss Fairfax had drilled into her. She was affectionate but not extravagantly so with her husband. A few times, her hand trembled with the instinct to reach out and push back a stray lock of hair, but she refrained.
More than once, she fought an errant wish to weep, but she kept reminding herself that sh
e wanted to make Trent happy. She loved him.
You make people you love happy.
Her aunt had once told her, when she was a little girl and missing her father, “Smile even if your heart is breaking. The grief will still be there, but you are giving it permission to ease. And one day, it will ease and you’ll feel better.”
Merry had done her best then, and she did her best now.
The true challenge came when they were making love. Caught in passion, sweating and trembling, she had to bite her lip ferociously in order to stop herself from uttering love words Trent didn’t want to hear.
She was determined not to impose on him again.
Fortunately, most of the time she was busy making certain that she performed the caresses Trent taught her, in both the proper order and manner. If some spontaneity was missing, she was the only one who seemed to notice.
Married couples do settle into a pleasurable routine, of course.
Chapter Thirty-five
Trent made it through the days that followed Merry’s declaration of love in a haze. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened between them. Thank God, it had blown over quickly, or so he told himself.
On the face of it, nothing had changed. Though why that made him feel like grinding his teeth and cursing, he didn’t know.
His wife seemed to have got over their disagreement promptly and without holding a grudge.
But she had changed. She wasn’t herself. At luncheon the next day, he caught her pronouncing “schedule” with a “shed” sound and not “sked,” as she had before.
She laughed when he pointed it out, and said that their children would be English.
Trent scowled at her.
“All right, I won’t try to adopt an English accent,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “But I would never want our children to feel that they owed allegiance to two countries. It would be confusing.”
She was right . . . was she right? He didn’t know. But he didn’t want Merry to put a hand on his sleeve as if she were Lady Caroline.
The evening meal was surprisingly tedious, because she didn’t take him to task for the inadequacies of the English government, as she usually did. The newspaper reported the despicable treatment of the begums of Oudh by the East India Company, but Merry only remarked on the prospects for a good harvest. She seemed to have made friends with every one of his tenant farmers.
On the second evening, it struck him that she hadn’t told him any facts all that day or the one before. It felt like a clutch at his heart, the idea that his wife would no longer inform him, out of the blue, that King Henry III had a polar bear that used to swim in the Thames.
She’d spent the whole morning going about in that damned pony cart. Holding babies, she said. Talking to tenants.
“What did you talk about?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “We argued. Mr. Middlebryer is in favor of Lord Ellenborough’s bill extending the death penalty to violent crimes. It’s well known that penalties do not discourage criminal activity.”
She was sharing all those facts she had stored in her head with others, but not with him.
Merry must have seen a shadow on his face because she added, “Not to worry, Trent. I didn’t offend him; we both enjoyed ourselves.”
“Why the hell are you calling me that name?” he demanded.
He saw the confusion on her face. “Because it’s your name?”
He felt churlish but couldn’t seem to stop himself. “You said that Trent sounded like a river and you’d prefer Jack when we were alone. We’re alone.”
Merry gave him that charming smile, the one she gave to footmen, and said, “I called you Jack for all the wrong reasons, simply because it was an American name.” It wasn’t his smile. The smile she gave Jack.
Trent nodded at the dog she was cuddling and said, “What about George? He’s named after your president.”
“George is a name that can also honor the king,” she said, scratching the puppy’s head. “George the Third. I’m sure my George is a king among dogs, after all.”
“You may call me Jack,” he said lamely.
“You told me that it was your childhood name, and I didn’t understand how much you disliked it. I apologize,” she said earnestly, obviously meaning it.
Trent finally managed to identify the storm of feelings that was making him feel sick.
He felt as guilty as if he’d killed a robin in its nest.
It turned out he had a conscience. Yet what had he done, precisely? He’d never asked Merry to turn mealymouthed or English.
He had liked her just as she was. He liked being called Jack.
Now she was every inch a duchess: affable to all, irreproachable in her kindness, courteous to her husband. The household eddied around her like leaves caught in a river, and she seemed to effortlessly keep it all going.
The thought sent him, brooding, into his study. He suspected he knew what was going on: in her courageous, cheerful way, Merry had determined to make the best of things. He had as much as told her that she was immature and shallow, but he was an idiot.
She was at the mercy of her emotions, after all. It wasn’t as if she’d said, I think I’ll fall in love with Cedric today. Or Bertie, or that other idiot over in Boston.
Or him.
As far as he could see, emotion stormed over her like a hurricane and left as quickly. The harsh pain in his chest was hard to ignore; he wanted to turn back the clock. Why in hell hadn’t he luxuriated in her love while he had it? He was damned sure that Bertie had been wildly happy for the two glorious months that Merry loved him.
The reminder that she’d fallen out of love with Bertie made Trent feel like a feral dog chained to a tree. Something uncontrollable rose up in his gut, demanding attention. Some . . . feeling. Worse than his attack of conscience, worse than lust, worse than anger.
It took the discipline of a lifetime to shove that emotion back into the locked box where it belonged.
Chapter Thirty-six
After a few days, Merry was pretty sure that Trent didn’t appreciate her efforts to become more English. His mouth tightened when she tried to modify her voice. He growled at her when she praised British policy.
Perhaps he wanted her, the real her.
Unfortunately, she was growing confused about who the real her was.
Being a duchess was a lot of work. It seemed selfish to spend time picking flowers when so many people living on her husband’s land were in need: sometimes of no more than a friendly word, but often, once she sat down to talk, she learned that Mum had rheumatism, or the roof was leaking, or their only cow had died and they hadn’t milk for the children.
Who would listen, if not the duchess?
Today she had to visit a new widow, and she’d promised to stop by the vicarage. The late duchess’s orphanage urgently needed beds; the littlest ones were sleeping in threes and fours. At home, Mrs. Honeydukes wanted to show her samples of serge for the footmen’s new livery.
Merry sighed and turned away from the window. It was time to bathe and dress. All she wanted to do was garden, but it was out of the question. Maybe tonight she could find some time for the design of a new hedge maze to replace the decrepit one.
No, tonight the squire and his wife were giving a dinner party to celebrate the fact that their only son had graduated from Cambridge with highest honors. Her heart sank even further: Kestril would be in attendance.
Kestril spilled his adulation for her as easily as a bag of grain pours out its seed, and her marriage only seemed to have exacerbated things. It had become intolerable. Tonight she would have to make a stand and tell him plainly that if he didn’t change his behavior, she would have no choice but to exclude him from her social circle.
That evening she put a gown whose leaf-green skirt showed through translucent silk gauze trimmed with ribbons the color of cherries, along with high-heeled Italian shoes that matched the ribbons. She might not act like a perfect duchess,
but she was reasonably certain that she looked like one.
She was fidgeting around the drawing room, sipping a glass of sherry, when Oswald informed her that His Grace was unavoidably detained, and had requested that she precede him; he would join the party as soon as he was able.
Merry put down her glass. Could it be that Trent was avoiding a carriage ride with her? “Of course,” she said to Oswald, managing a smile. “My wrap, if you please. The carriage can return for His Grace.”
She had made such a foolish mistake when she’d told Trent that she loved him. By pushing him, she had ruined everything they had between them.
No, that couldn’t be true.
He would love her someday. She simply had to give him time.
Look at the story he’d told her about his mother. What’s more, his only sibling was Cedric. She shuddered at the thought. Trent had never been loved; how could she expect him to recognize the emotion when he felt it?
If only she hadn’t told him. That was what had created this painful awkwardness between them. It was always there in the room now. He felt she was fickle and shallow, and then she’d demanded an emotion he didn’t feel for her.
His words beat through her head, creating a repeating memory as powerful and painful as it had been the first time she’d heard it. I don’t love you, Merry, not that way, and I never will.
She wrenched her mind away. Enough. She would prove her constancy by loving him, and after a year, or five years, or however many it took, she would mention it again.
Meanwhile she had to love him silently while becoming who he wanted.
He would fall in love with her. It would just take time.
She was learning to be a duchess as fast as she could. She was already better in bed, making certain that she caressed him in all the right ways every single time. She hadn’t called him Jack once, although he didn’t seem to notice either way.
What’s more, she hadn’t let herself cry in front of Trent, no matter how anguished she felt, because she knew how much he hated it. It turned out that if a woman clenched her fists hard, driving her fingernails into her palms, she could stop tears from falling. Then she could pull on gloves and cover up the white marks left on her skin.