Without answering Alex hoisted himself up and began to leave the room. But he was stopped by Charlotte.
“Why are you leaving?” she demanded. “I don’t understand you,” she said, almost to herself. “You called me a whore because I didn’t act like a lady. You said you would never sleep with me again, because you found out that I lost my virginity with you—whether you wish to acknowledge it or not—before we were married. And when I do act like a lady, you still look at me in utter disgust. What is it?” Charlotte was working herself into a fine rage now. “If you want an heir, make yourself an heir! Use my body; you said it was yours. I’m not stopping you! I am behaving like a lady!”
To her surprise, Alex gave a genuine, if brief, bark of laughter. “Ladies don’t shout,” he observed. But he sat down on the bed again. He looked at her seriously.
Charlotte’s body reacted with a shock of alarm. It was the first time all evening that she had felt in genuine danger. When he looked at her like that, her body grew hotly attentive. And he wasn’t even looking at her seductively; it’s just that his eyes were dark and tender, like the old Alex, she thought wistfully. The before-Alex, who still liked her and didn’t think she was a whore. The thought gave Charlotte a burst of renewed fortitude. This was what he wanted. She had behaved just as a lady should, no matter how difficult it was. So why did it bother him now?
“I’m sorry,” Alex said heavily. “I’m sorry I called you a whore. I realized, a few days later, that you had only lost your virginity to a man you thought was me. I didn’t understand it at the time, and I was so enraged that I couldn’t … I couldn’t control my temper.”
“It was you,” Charlotte persisted. “It was you, three years ago in—”
Alex raised his hand. “I do not want to know the details,” he said, shuddering a bit. “For God’s sake, it’s hard enough for me to accept the fact that my bride slept first with my brother. I definitely don’t want to know on what back step he did it!” His mouth twisted ironically. “We share many things, but your virginity … I’ll leave it to him.”
Charlotte felt sick. He would never believe her; she could see it in his eyes. And so he would always think those ugly things of her. She closed her eyes again. Maybe it would be better to stay here, to live in Scotland. She didn’t know if she could bear to see Alex every day, knowing that he despised her. Even after all his brutal talk, his face was still so dear. It was just too painful. A tear escaped under her closed eyelids.
Alex looked at his wife somberly. She was sorry, clearly. He had no real belief that she would ever sleep with another man. No, Charlotte was a true, loyal person. He picked up her hand and kissed the palm.
“Shall we try again?”
Charlotte wet her trembling lips with her tongue, and Alex felt an immediate lick of fire in his belly. She had the most enticing lips, his wife. They were a deep, dark cherry color, with the promise of passion. Passion she had displayed, he thought. He just had to figure out how to get her to reveal it again.
“Ah, what do you mean?” Charlotte inquired. Something about the way Alex’s eyes were looking at her was setting off alarm bells. Little nerves woke up in her legs; her breasts suddenly longed to be touched.
“Let’s make love again,” Alex said, moving up the bed so he could bend down and brush his lips across hers. “I’m sorry I went insane afterward. I never experienced anything so wonderful, and I simply exploded when I found out I wasn’t the only one. But that’s in the past now. We should think about … about making an heir,” he said with a deep chuckle.
Charlotte dismissed a pang of disappointment. Of course he wanted an heir. It was natural.
His mouth was just a hairsbreadth from hers now. She could feel his warm breath, and then his tongue ran across her lips like liquid silver, icy and warm at the same time. His hand started to run slowly up, under her nightdress again. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to kiss him back, Charlotte desperately reasoned with herself, even as her body began to tremble with desire.
Alex raised his mouth and looked deeply into her eyes. “Please, darling,” he whispered, and Charlotte’s resistance fell into a hundred splintered pieces. She wound her arms around his neck and raised her mouth to his, her lips already slightly parted, evocative of surrender. And Alex instantly took the implicit invitation, jerking her against his hard chest, driving his tongue into her mouth. His hand slipped naturally to cup the tantalizing weight of her breasts. And when he heard her sharp gasp, it filled his heart with pleasure. His Charlotte was back—more than back. By now he was stretched out beside her and when he began removing the studs from his shirt, Charlotte tremblingly ran her hands over his chest, her fingertips lingering on his nipples. Little jolts of fire ran up her limbs when his eyes widened with obvious pleasure. When she experimentally lowered her head and put her tongue on his chest, he moaned out loud and Charlotte’s belly ignited into a fevered, flaming ocean.
Some time later they were both naked, their bodies glowing in reflected firelight, flushed skin meeting flushed skin, frenzied kiss following kiss. Alex’s hands wandered all over Charlotte’s body, igniting every inch. But it wasn’t until Alex poised himself over her, bracing himself on his forearms, and began deliberately, tormentingly rubbing himself against her that Charlotte felt herself truly losing control. She shut her eyes tight, not even opening them when Alex’s tongue teasingly ran across her eyelids. Alex was concentrating, thinking dimly of holding himself under strict control and making it up to Charlotte. He didn’t notice that her closed eyes signaled distress. He pushed into her a little way. Then he withdrew and circled her again, luring, calling. Charlotte’s hips involuntarily lifted, pressing against him. Despite herself, her eyes flew open and she wreathed her arms around his neck, silently pleading for what she could not bring herself to say. And still Alex teased … breaching her a little farther, pulling back until she was ready to scream. And then, just when Charlotte was about to explode with longing and frustration, Alex drove into her forcefully. Charlotte’s mind went blank and she cried out; and Alex—who had been counseling himself sternly about not losing control—immediately lost all control. He rammed into her again and again, evoking fluttering cries from his wife.
But something wasn’t right. Slowly Alex pulled his consciousness back from his mindless plunging into the hot, tight warmth of Charlotte’s body. Now he saw that tears were seeping out beneath her closed eyelids. Even as her body arched to meet each stroke, she wept. He stilled his body instantly, forcing his throbbing manhood to lie quiescent inside her.
“Darling,” he whispered. “What is it? Does it hurt?”
Charlotte’s eyes opened, huge, tear-drenched. He kissed away the tears, but she turned her head.
“What is it, Charlotte?” Alex’s strong hand pulled her chin back, so he could see her eyes.
“I can’t, I can’t not.” Her breath caught on a sob.
“Can’t not what?” Alex prompted.
“I can’t stop myself.” More tears flooded out now. Alex gently withdrew himself and pulled a handkerchief from the table, blotting Charlotte’s tears.
“What are you talking about, sweetheart?” he finally prompted when it appeared she wasn’t going to continue.
“You said, you said that no lady acts the way I did.” Charlotte was crying hopelessly now, her voice broken by sobs. “You said that you had never heard of a lady p-panting, or begging for it, the way I did.”
Alex’s heart stopped. Had he really said anything so cruel? God, he couldn’t have. In a fit of stupid rage he might have ruined the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him.
“Charlotte,” he said fiercely. “I was an idiot, do you hear me? An idiot. I was off my head, insane with jealousy. I wanted to hurt your feelings, and so I said the cruelest thing I could think of, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it,” he repeated desperately as Charlotte kept crying.
“I just can’t stop myself,” she finally said in a ragged voice. “You
were right. I’m not a lady; I’m a …” But she couldn’t bring herself to say the ugly word, tears welling up in her eyes again.
“Oh, God, Charlotte,” Alex groaned, pulling her into his arms. “Please, please listen to me. If you withdraw from me now, because of the stupid, cruel things I said, it will be the death of me. I will have destroyed the one thing I dreamed of: a passionate, loving relationship with my wife.
“Listen to me, Charlotte!” He bent commandingly over her, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Do you think I sound like a whore when I almost shout every time you touch me? When I am panting, and grunting, and making every ungentlemanly noise I can? Do I repulse you? Do I?”
Charlotte shook her head numbly.
“How does it make you feel when I moan at your touch?” Alex asked, more quietly.
A slight smile touched Charlotte’s lips. “Like a queen,” she said.
“I want to be king, Charlotte, king in my own house. Please, darling, please let me be king and you be queen. Nothing you could possibly do when we make love could ever disgust me. It was just rage speaking, not my genuine feelings.”
Charlotte’s lips quivered. “But what if you get angry at me again?” She drew in a shaky breath. “I know you’re right; I don’t behave like a lady. And I would rather not risk your rage again.”
Alex rolled over to lie on his back. This was a facer. He had ruined everything. He hadn’t trusted her; well, now she would never trust him. And that was the end of his dream of an erotic marital union, born of the encounter in the garden years ago, and nurtured stubbornly even during the awful years with Maria. It was over. He stared up at the stone ceiling, his mind hollow.
Then he felt a warm naked body press against his side, and a tousled curly head pressed against his chin.
“Shall we try again?” At first he didn’t understand her whisper, and then he remembered his question. He had asked it only an hour or so ago, but it felt like a century. He turned his head slowly. His wife was looking at him, her beautiful dark eyes no longer brimming with tears.
Charlotte pressed her fingers against his mouth. “If you promise to trust me,” she said shakily, but oh so sweetly, “I promise to trust you. If you believe me, I will believe you about this. I will never sleep with any man other than you in my life, as God’s my witness, and if you will promise never to reproach me with my behavior when we make love … well, I will simply resign myself to behaving like a harlot—at times.”
The gleam of amusement in her eyes evaporated as her husband rolled over, grabbing her in his arms and entering her with one swift, almost brutal stroke. Charlotte spontaneously cried out, her body throbbing with joy, her hands clutching his shoulders.
The night was very long. Alex left the bed only to pile more wood on the fire. They made love and slept; Charlotte woke up to find that a burgeoning presence was demanding to enter her body. Her immediate welcome made Alex’s breath catch and he buried his face in her throat, hoarsely stating that he didn’t deserve her. But when his wife started to tickle him in unusual places … well, his mind couldn’t concentrate on its well-deserved self-reproach. He retaliated, and they finally went back to sleep, replete.
Except that Alex woke up again, some two hours later. Charlotte was deep in the sleep of the utterly exhausted next to him. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t wake her, but then he irresistibly drew off the blanket and looked at the elegant lines of her body. She was his, all his. And when Charlotte awoke, languorously returning to the world, she first shrieked in disbelief, and then in utter, abandoned pleasure. Alex’s dark head was between her thighs and his tongue forced streaks of mindless bliss to rocket through her body.
So the night was long, but it was not, as wise men say, without its rewards. Morning light first slanted below the velvet curtains around six in the morning. In time the lines of warm sunlight crept closer to the end of the bed. They found the Earl, and the Countess, of Sheffield and Downes sleeping the sleep of the just, the exhausted, the newly married, and the thoroughly sated.
Chapter 16
The next two months were long remembered in the history of Dunston Castle, Scotland, the seat of four successive Earls of Sheffield and Downes. In fact, the castle’s butler, Mr. McDougal, confided to his wife that there’d been nothing like it since the third earl, the present earl’s father, he punctiliously explained, brought a young woman up to stay for a week. She was no better than she should be, obviously, and the antics they had to put up with!
There was the time they found the dining room door locked, for example, just as McDougal was about to bring in a flaming tart, himself being just a footman at the time. The tart was ordered special, McDougal recalled, the cook not being used to fancy continental dishes that had to be set on fire. And wasn’t she in a tizzy when the whole thing was brought back to the kitchen, blackened and frizzled?
And there was a young second housemaid who learned entirely too much when she innocently went to dust the music room—and what did she find? His wife nodded knowingly as McDougal waggled his eyebrows.
“I was just a young one then,” he said. “But I well remember the hysterics she had in the kitchen. Such an uproar! The cook finally had to give her a good shot of the cooking brandy, since the butler-that-was, old Grimthorple, was rather tight with the key to the spirits cabinet. Ah, well.”
“I don’t rightly think that this earl should be compared to his father,” said his wife comfortably. She ran the laundry, linens, and weaving section of the castle operations, and what she didn’t know about castle occupants wasn’t worth knowing. “These two are sweet on each other and newly married. And the countess is no slip of a girl. Even if one does see them kissing now and again, she is always respectful and courteous to me.
“And Ira,” she told her husband for the third time, “it fair took my breath away when she came to me and said, ‘Mrs. McDougal, I have found a few slight discrepancies in the housekeeping records, and I wondered if you might help me understand them?’ Ira, it took my breath away. That Mrs. McLean—some housekeeper she is!—has been filching linens from my very cupboards practically as long as she’s been here, and no one has taken a bit of notice. You can tell our lady has been brought up the right way.”
McDougal acknowledged that he too liked the young countess. Who would not, given her kindly, sweet manner? But he ventured to say that he shouldn’t like his daughter to be seen kissing her husband in back of every statue in the gardens, and hadn’t Mrs. McDougal told him herself that the countess’s French maid said she was spending most of her time sewing buttons back on her mistress’s clothing?
“She’s French,” Mrs. McDougal replied, assessing the evidence of a Frenchwoman at a very low rate indeed. “But even if Marie were telling the truth, what’s the matter with a few buttons lost between a man and his wife, eh, Ira?”
Her husband chuckled appropriately and talk passed to other things.
Meanwhile the master of the castle kissed his wife behind statues, scattered small pearl buttons around the matrimonial bedchambers, and played with his child in the castle garden. And when the time came for the family to travel back to England, the three large coaches stayed together, if only because Pippa switched frequently between her mama and papa’s coach and that of her own dear nanny. So the coaches wound toward London as slowly as the servants’ coach had found its way up, and Charlotte buried memories of tearful nights by romping half the night with her husband in the same inns.
No one who saw the young countess on the way back to England, rather than on the way to Scotland, could have said she looked distant or snobbish. Due to Pippa’s frequent presence in the coach, Charlotte often looked rumpled. But if the truth be told, even when Pippa was not in their coach, her husband took over the job of rumpling himself.
The day after the first coach, drawn by four prancing steeds, drew up before Sheffield House in Grosvenor Square, Sophie York swept past the butler with an airy “Charlotte expects me.”
?
??So,” Sophie demanded impudently. “Tell me all! How is married life?”
Charlotte blushed.
“That good?” Sophie asked, laughing.
“What has happened to you in the last two months?” Charlotte asked.
Sophie twinkled at her, just to show that she noticed Charlotte’s evasion, and then she wound into a long tale of Braddon Chatwin’s pursuit (having missed his chance with the one reigning beauty, Charlotte, he had adroitly turned to the other, Sophie).
Charlotte alternately laughed and choked. In fact, she found herself wondering whether she had missed most of Sophie’s jokes before she got married. Would she have understood Sophie’s joke about the newlywed Lady Cucklesham, who married for money and then wore her maidenhead on her finger in the likeness of a large diamond?
“Were I minded to be the wife of a fool,” Sophie said a little moodily, “I couldn’t do better than Braddon. He would never bother to question what I was about, and he’s eternally good-natured and discreet. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s ungentlemanly behavior.” She gave a little shudder.
Charlotte looked at her friend sympathetically. Everyone knew that the Marquis of Brandenburg could not resist a Frenchwoman, particularly when he drank overmuch.
“Don’t do it, Sophie,” she urged, a little surprised at her own fervency.
“Why ever not?”
“Because … it is wonderful being married to a man who isn’t a fool.”
“They are all fools,” Sophie said rather shortly. Then she smiled wryly at Charlotte. “I don’t mean to take away from your married bliss. But in my experience—granted, only gained by observation, but none the worse for that—in my experience, even the best men take to foolish behavior like a duck to water.”
“Still,” Charlotte persisted. “You could find a fool whom you like more than you like Braddon.”