Potent Pleasures

  She averted her eyes and began swiftly packing their bags, guessing that Charlotte needed some time to collect herself. A few minutes later, Charlotte was still motionless in the center of the floor. The door flew open and Alex stood there, flanked by his man, Keating. Marie shot a quick look at Charlotte. She didn’t seem to have noticed the men standing in the doorway. Marie darted over and stood protectively in front of her mistress. Keating’s eyes just as swiftly slanted off to the corner. He’s a good man, Marie thought with approval.

  “Get my clothing out,” Alex rasped at Keating. He jerked his head at his wife. “She can go in the third carriage.”

  Marie swallowed. There was a serious breach between them, that was certain. The third carriage was the servants’ carriage. It followed the master’s carriage and the carriage carrying Pippa and her nanny. What would the servants do, having the mistress sitting among them? A look passed between her and Keating and she closed her mouth. Keating was clearly staring at her in a warning fashion, and the last thing she wanted was to be dismissed and leave her mistress alone with this—this madman! She shielded Charlotte until both men exited, lowering her eyes submissively as his lordship left. The cork-brained fool, she thought after the door closed behind them, Keating hoisting a pile of clothing and trailing a few cravats. Well, thank goodness her Cecil had been chosen to accompany Charlotte to Italy. Cecil would sort out the footmen. They would all have to ride pinion, that’s all.

  But Marie’s fears were for naught. When she finally emerged, around an hour later, Alex’s coach was long gone, taking with him four footmen and his secretary. Keating had found the time to organize all the servants. The footmen, Cecil told her, were to ride outside, six hanging on to the back and the normal two in front. Keating would sit with the driver. Which would leave Charlotte and Marie alone in the servants’ coach. Marie nodded. She felt heartsick, unable to look at Cecil with much affection. What monsters men were. And what a monster her mistress had married! Marie knew, with a deep heartfelt certainty, that Charlotte was a virgin. Why, she’d been terrified when Marie prepared her for bed earlier that evening. Marie shook off her thoughts, giving Cecil a brooding look, and started back to the inn.

  A strong arm caught her around the waist.

  “Here you!” a beloved voice said into her ear. “It’s not my fault that the master is a raving madman. We’re all for her. You’ll see.”

  Marie nodded. She headed into the inn. She had left Charlotte sitting in a tub of hot water. When she got upstairs the water had cooled, but Charlotte was still sitting there, for all the world like an infant child, Marie thought. She finally managed to poke her mistress into some clothes. Charlotte had stopped crying, but her white emotionless face shook Marie more than her crying had. Women who looked like that … it wasn’t good. She’d seen that look before, when her own mama miscarried a baby.

  Just then a loud screaming echoed in the hallway. “Mon Dieu!” Marie said, startled into French. It was Pippa, protesting her forced awakening at the top of her lungs.

  At that Charlotte walked away from Marie, who was still buttoning up her traveling gown in the back. She opened the door and said calmly, “Oh, Miss Helms.” Pippa’s nanny Katy looked back up the stairs, her hair bundled wildly on her head. “I’ll take Pippa.” The countess reached out her arms. Katy hesitated, and then walked back up the stairs. Pippa caught sight of Charlotte, and gave an urgent sob.

  “My not-nanny,” she wailed.

  “Here, darling,” Charlotte crooned, cuddling her in her arms. “Let’s go downstairs and get in the coach, shall we? Mama will sing you a song, and you can go back to sleep again.”

  “Papa!” Pippa whimpered. “Want Papa.”

  “He can’t be here right now,” Charlotte said soothingly. “But Mama is here, and I’ll sing you a song about a frog, shall I?”

  On the stairs, the other two young women, Marie and Katy, looked at each other in surprise. Charlotte had never called herself “Mama” before. Yet Pippa seemed to accept it without a tremor. She cuddled into Charlotte’s arms, catching her breath but not sobbing anymore.

  Charlotte looked up at Marie. “I’m sorry, Marie. We seem to have changed our plans. Would you mind bringing my brush to the coach, please? You can do my hair there. I think we had better follow his lordship now.”

  Marie went back into the bedroom to pick up the last few things strewn around the room, bundling Charlotte’s ruined nightdress into a bag. She didn’t want to leave it in case the servant who cleaned the room decided to sell the story to the gossip columns. Lord knows, all this upset would be fodder enough for the papers.

  But, in fact, no word of the changed plans of the Earl of Sheffield and Downes reached London. Under Alex’s instructions, Keating handed out a good deal of gold and a strongly worded threat to each and every inn employee. He doubled the yearly salary of the eight footmen who accompanied them to the inn. He paid the captain of the ship that was to take them to Italy triple fare to keep silent about the disappearance of his passengers, and capped the money off with a threat as well.

  So while Charlotte’s mother and father thought she was aboard a ship for Italy, in fact she and Pippa were rattling slowly north. The two coaches Alex left behind were each pulled by two horses instead of four, so the little cavalcade didn’t travel very far in any given day. But that was a blessing, Charlotte thought. Because Alex’s coach was far, far ahead of them, and they didn’t have to worry about him.

  In fact, as each day passed and her husband presumably drew farther ahead, Charlotte deliberately slowed down their journey. They took three-hour lunch breaks while she and Pippa rolled happily in the grass. They stopped at any town that took her fancy and she sketched the church steeple, or gave a chortling Pippa a bath. In short, she and Pippa got to know each other, and she grew calmer, gathering strength for the moment when she would have to encounter her husband again. She felt more composed as each day passed. She had a fairly good sense of what lay ahead. Alex had decided to dump her in Scotland. The prospect didn’t bother her too much. Let him think what he wanted. She was no whore; she had slept only with her own husband.

  But she would never, ever allow him in her bed again. Even the ecstasy, which she allowed herself to remember only in her dreams, wasn’t worth the acute sense of shame and horror that had followed both of her sexual encounters with Alex. She didn’t foresee a problem in that respect: Alex had clearly said he would never sleep with her again. So Charlotte planned for a solitary future in Scotland. Perhaps her parents could visit her next summer. There wasn’t much she regretted about leaving London, although she already missed Sophie acutely. And her mother. More than anything, she would like to sob on her mother’s shoulder. But it wouldn’t change anything, Charlotte counseled herself, as she rose from another tear-filled night.

  By the time the two coaches crossed the border into Scotland, the young, innocent girl who had bumped into Alex on the stairs at Lady Prestlefield’s ball was long gone. In her place was an utterly collected, assured countess who was approachable only when she played with her little girl.

  “She’s a proper lady, hain’t she?” asked a red-haired urchin of his mother.

  “Aw, she’s a Sassenach, and don’t you forget it!” she replied roughly. “Look at all her uppittyness! That sort never let down their hair. They’re not like us.”

  Staring at the beautiful, somehow icy, English countess, the little boy nodded. She wasn’t much like his chubby, beloved mum, that’s for sure. He clutched her around the waist in a sudden hug.

  “Oh, Rickie, do give over!” She pushed off his arms. Just then a little girl hurled herself at the countess, crying loudly. And the exquisitely dressed Englishwoman bent down and swung the babe into her arms, smiling at her tenderly. Maybe they weren’t so different, Megan thought. Megan hauled her own son up for a hug and they stared together as the beautiful countess walked off, her head bent close to her little daughter’s ear.

  Chapter 15

/>   Alex arrived at Dunston Castle, his estate in Scotland, some ten days before Charlotte and her small entourage. He had spent the trip either sitting alone in his coach or riding on Bucephalus, which he greatly preferred. In either situation he cursed the fact that in his rage he had consigned Charlotte to the servants’ coach. Why hadn’t he left her in his coach, where he could have railed at her to his heart’s content? Then, slowly, a feeling of mingled distaste and shame about his own behavior crept into his heart, and he was glad that his wife was out of sight. But out of mind she was not.

  Surges of rage still attacked him when he thought about Charlotte’s deception, but he began to regain an ability to analyze. One day he realized that he was allowing his still vibrant anger about Maria’s betrayals to cloud the situation with Charlotte. And after that perception it was only two days until he sat bolt upright in the morning, Charlotte’s voice echoing in his head.

  “I didn’t sleep with other men! I only slept with you, once, years ago!”

  And then there was Charlotte talking about sex: “I didn’t know … it was wonderful, so wonderful … it wasn’t at all like the other time. No pain …”

  So Charlotte wasn’t quite the arrant betrayer that Maria had been. No, she had slept with only one man, years ago—and she thought it had been him. It cast an ugly light on why she agreed to marry him, but that didn’t matter, Alex thought, consigning dreams of love to the fire. He was no idiot. It was clear what had happened. Charlotte had slept with Patrick, and due to the unlucky fact of Patrick being out of England when the two of them met, she believed she had lost her virginity to him. Alex swallowed hard. He and Patrick had shared women in the past … but never a wife. It was a hard thing to contemplate. Still, if one had to marry under these circumstances, wasn’t it better that the other man had been one’s twin?

  He thought about this for the last few days before Charlotte arrived, calming his intense irritability by casting fishing lines into foggy Scottish streams and pulling out trout that no one wanted to eat. So he threw them back. He spent hours staring at the gray-green water as it rippled slightly in the wake of his line.

  Probably the most surprising part of the last three weeks, he finally realized, was how much he missed Pippa. For months he had been the primary person in her life—and then, in a fit of petulant rage, he drove off and left her in a carriage with a nanny and a stepmother she barely knew. And he missed her now, missed her with a deep visceral ache in his belly. He found himself wondering in the middle of the night how she had gone to sleep without him twirling the curl on her forehead and telling her to have sweet dreams. If nothing else, the Pippa ache told him that his scheme to bury Charlotte in Scotland wasn’t a good one. Unless he buried himself as well.

  No, Alex thought grimly, he’d accept his wife. He would bring her back to London. They could rub along pretty well together, now that he had given up his rosy illusions about falling in love with the woman he married. They would have to go to bed together, because he needed an heir. (That he was using the necessity of an heir as a justification, given the likelihood that Patrick would have a child, was just barely hidden from Alex’s consciousness.)

  He shook his fishing line irritably. Where the hell was Charlotte? For the last two nights his mind had filled with the alarming stories he’d recently heard about raiders lurking on the Scottish border, waiting to jump on unsuspecting English travelers. God, why had he been such a hotheaded, arrogant brute? What if Charlotte and Pippa were robbed, taken for ransom—or worse? Even as Charlotte’s carriage stopped, a mere two hours from Alex’s estate, and the occupants ambled into a flowery meadow for a leisurely lunch, Alex tortured himself by imagining a far crueler fate.

  So when the two travel-stained carriages finally trundled through the huge stone walls marking the entrance to the courtyard, Alex glimpsed them from his library window, and just barely controlled himself from bounding down the stairs and pulling his wife and child into his arms. Instead he stayed next to the window, rigidly braced against the sill. There came his wife, nimbly stepping down from the third, rather shabby servants’ carriage. Then the second carriage opened and Pippa half-tumbled out, running over to Charlotte and holding up her arms. Alex couldn’t know that this had been the arrangement for the last two hours only, that normally Charlotte rode in Pippa’s coach. Pippa had tormented her nanny for the last hour, demanding her mama. He saw Charlotte laughingly swing Pippa up into her arms, and Pippa wind her little arms around Charlotte’s neck and nuzzle her. This was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?

  Time to go downstairs. Alex walked down the twisting stone steps from his library, mentally bracing himself. He had forgotten, in the intervening weeks, just how much Charlotte’s beauty moved him. Even the sight of her trim bottom as she bent over to pick up Pippa sent a stab of lust to his groin. Well, all the better, he reasoned, pacing calmly toward the entrance. She was his wife, after all. Maybe he could keep her too busy to roam to other men.

  He walked into the courtyard. Servants were pouring out of the door, lining up for their formal introduction to the new countess. Charlotte was standing, Pippa in her arms, looking slightly amused. Her expression didn’t change when she saw him. She merely inclined her head a fraction of an inch and said, “My lord.”

  Alex looked at her thoughtfully. He inclined his head in response.

  “Charlotte.” There was silence in the courtyard. Pippa, who had been watching the horses over Charlotte’s shoulder, twisted her little self around. Alex smiled at her and held out his arms. But rather than say “Papa” in her lovely Italian accent, or struggle to get down and run to him, as she had to Charlotte, Pippa took one horrified look, twisted her free arm around Charlotte’s neck, and burst into loud sobs.

  “Sweetie,” Charlotte said, “I told you Papa would come back. You see, Papa is here, and he missed you, and he loves you very much. He didn’t leave forever. Do you remember what I told you?”

  There was no answer. Pippa just buried her face more tightly into Charlotte’s neck. Alex felt a burning red creep up his neck. His own daughter was rejecting him in front of some thirty servants, all of whom were craning their necks to see what was happening. Alex walked over to the two of them, his body rigidly disguising his impulse to pull Charlotte into his arms and kiss her until she lost that distant look.

  “Pumpkin,” he said, his deep voice calm and persuasive. “I missed you very much. In fact, I thought every night about how much I wished that I had never left you. But here I am, and I would very much like a hug from my own pumpkin.”

  Pippa raised her tearstained face. “Papa?” she asked. Alex stooped down, ignoring the fact that Charlotte drew back slightly as he came close. He rubbed noses with Pippa. She giggled and held out her arms. “Papa,” she said. “Papa!”

  The Italian accent was gone forever, Alex thought. But the warmth of his daughter’s small chunky body clinging to his was all that mattered. “I love you, pumpkin,” he whispered into Pippa’s neck. He forgot all the bystanders.

  Charlotte stared at her husband. It was the old Alex, the premarriage Alex, the loving father she had seen before their wedding night. A sense of relief filled Charlotte’s heart. Besides her own heartbreak, she had worried fiercely about Pippa. How could Pippa cope with the death of her real mother, if her newfound papa decided to just ride off and leave her in Scotland? But perhaps his plan wasn’t quite so vengeful as she had imagined. Alex and Pippa snuggled together, seemingly oblivious of their audience.

  Suddenly Alex swung up his head. His eyes ranged over the assembled servants. “This is your new mistress, the Countess of Sheffield and Downes.” He gave all the servants an arrogant stare; he didn’t want them to slight the new countess, having seen her descend from the servants’ coach. And wait until they heard stories from the footmen who arrived with her. Inside he groaned, but his face remained haughty and confident. Then he smiled suddenly. “And this is my daughter, Lady Philippa.”

  There was a resoundin
g cheer and a flurry of clapped hands. Alex held out his free arm to Charlotte. She took it lightly and he led her to the front of the line and began making painstaking introductions to the primary servants of the estate.

  For her part, Charlotte was delighted with herself. She felt nothing. After all the agony of the last three weeks, she looked at Alex, her husband, and she felt nothing: neither attraction nor acute rage. She felt a twinge of pity because he looked singularly drawn and tired. But seeing him didn’t sway her resolution one tiny bit, she was happy to find. Even as she smiled and chatted with the servants, she inwardly gloated about the fact that his alarming effect on her, the inner weakness that made her shake every time he so much as touched her finger, was gone. She was holding his arm and she felt—nothing.

  Finally Charlotte had met all the upstairs servants. She liked the butler enormously, judged that one of the upper housemaids would probably have to be replaced, made a mental note to have the housekeeper’s records checked. Then she smiled generally at the mass of unnamed servants and dropped Alex’s arm. Side by side they walked up the four stone steps and into the front hall.

  “My goodness,” she exclaimed as they entered the echoing stone entrance.

  “I inherited it through my great-grandmother,” Alex said cheerfully. Now that he had Pippa in his arms and Charlotte didn’t seem to be looking at him as if he were a monster, he felt as if the world was manageable once again. As soon as he had the chance, he would simply explain to Charlotte that although she had slept with his brother, he—Alex—had magnanimously decided to forgive her for the lapse. He smiled to himself. This was the right way to behave. His mother would have approved. His father—no. His father would definitely have cast Charlotte off, or left her entombed in this Scottish castle in the back of nowhere. But he wasn’t like his father. He would have a marriage based on magnanimity, even if not on love. In fact, Alex was practically glowing with virtue.