Potent Pleasures

  “That’s just it. I do like him. He reminds me of the little brother I used to wish I had. As a child, I often heard my parents fighting with each other. My mother used to care a good deal more about my father’s inability to resist a lovely Frenchwoman than she does at this point. I would wish and wish that I had a little brother: someone uncomplicated and loving. And Braddon is like that, Charlotte. He’s very uncomplicated. I know he’s loving—I overheard Sylvester Bredbeck say that Braddon has more mistresses depending on him than a lawyer has cases. Although, to do him justice, he keeps his mistresses out of the ballroom.”

  Charlotte involuntarily giggled, even as she winced at the sad image Sophie offered of her childhood.

  “But, Sophie, you can’t have children with someone who is like a little brother!”

  “I want to marry someone who will be—a pleasant acquaintance. That strikes me as the best kind of ton marriage,” Sophie said. Then she brightened. “Have you heard how well your protégée, Chloe van Stork, is doing? I vow, that girl is in a fair way to claiming some of my suitors! Not that I mind. She could even have Braddon but the gossips suggest she is waiting for Will Holland.”

  Charlotte thought back to her wedding ball. “Chloe liked him very much,” she said.

  “Well, she doesn’t show any signs of grief, although he’s still in the country. She has four or five constant beaux—they accompany her everywhere, hanging from her every word. I hear that they are betting in the clubs that she will take Lord Winkle.”

  “I’m glad,” Charlotte said decisively. “She’s a lovely girl and she deserves to be admired.”

  As Sophie chattered on about the particular snub that Lady Skiffing dealt Camilla Prebworth, the wife of Captain Prebworth, Charlotte’s mind wandered to Alex. She knew exactly where he was. He had been pulled into his study by his long-suffering secretary, Robert Lowe, to deal with the correspondence that had built up over the last months.

  Just then her husband appeared at the door, and Charlotte’s face unknowingly lit up.

  “Alex!” she cried, springing up from her chair.

  Alex winked at Sophie, whom he had come to like a great deal over the two insufferably long months of his engagement, took his wife in his arms, and slowly, deliberately, backed out of the door of the salon.

  Sophie’s clear laughter echoed after them as Alex stood in the marble hallway of Sheffield House, passionately kissing his bride until her knees trembled and she clutched the front of his coat.

  “Alex, we must return to the salon,” she whispered. “I can’t just leave Sophie alone like this. It’s too impolite.”

  “Swear that you’ll meet me in one hour, in our chambers.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Swear that you will or I won’t allow you to return.” Alex traced a fiery path down Charlotte’s throat to the rapidly beating pulse at its base. He licked it, and she almost moaned out loud.

  “Alex!”

  “Swear!”

  “No. I have an appointment to visit Madame Carême in two hours.”

  “I’ll get you there,” Alex promised hoarsely. “I’ll drive you in the phaeton.” He showed every sign of going even lower in his outrageous kissing.

  “I swear,” Charlotte finally gasped.

  But her husband wasn’t listening. Having ascertained that there were no footmen stationed in the hallway at the moment, Alex was craftily trying to maneuver his wife against the wall. The moment he had her back to the wall he crushed his body against hers, thrusting his knee between her legs and grinning down at her wickedly. His hands swept down her back and cupped her buttocks, pulling her up against his erection. Charlotte’s bottom was so curved and delicious that Alex could have wept.

  The next second his wife pushed him away indignantly, although Alex noted with satisfaction that her hands were trembling and her cheeks were deeply rosy.

  “Alex!” Charlotte snapped.

  She whisked into the salon where she had left Sophie. Sophie was peacefully eating lemon wafers and drinking tea. She laughed out loud when she saw Charlotte. Charlotte’s hair looked as if she had been in a high breeze; even the vagaries of Monsieur Pamplemousse’s fashionable haircut couldn’t explain the countess’s current look.

  Alex didn’t seem to have followed her, so Sophie felt free to comment on the situation. In fact, Alex was staring at the birds that adorned the wallpaper in the hallway and waiting for his rigid arousal to subside. These knitted pantaloons really were inadequate, he thought glumly. At least for the kind of raging lust he felt for his wife. A tiny grin crept over his face.

  “Does he kiss well?” Sophie asked. “You know I deserve an answer, given that you simply deserted me.”

  Alex inched a little closer to the open door. Surely it wasn’t eavesdropping when the subject was as important as this one.

  Charlotte gasped and then laughed. “Yes, he does,” she replied. “He only has to kiss me and I—” She broke off, shrugging her shoulders.

  “You what?” Sophie asked. Sophie knew a great many sophisticated jokes about erotic matters, but she didn’t, in fact, see much point in carnal relations.

  “Well, I just melt, that’s all.”

  “It sounds like such an uncomfortable encounter,” Sophie said. “Mind you, I’m not quite sure I understand exactly what happens—but please don’t feel you have to tell me, Charlotte. While I feel certain that my mother will never get around to explaining the facts, at some point I’m going to accept one of these dunces who are courting me, and I’m sure he’ll explain the whole awkward business.”

  Charlotte turned even pinker, if that was possible. “Well, it is awkward, but it’s rather magnificent too.”

  Sophie looked at her curiously. “My cousin told me that marital relations are a matter of extreme discomfort, and must be endured in return for one’s place in society.”

  “That’s not … it’s not like that with Alex.”

  “Just my luck,” Sophie said gloomily. “You take the one man in London who has any idea how to make the business comfortable, and I’m left with old Braddon. I’m sure he would explain it to me by reference to his stables. Sometimes I think he considers me to be prime bloodstock, just like his best mares.”

  “It’s more than comfortable,” Charlotte burst out. She was dying to tell someone, and she couldn’t discuss it with her mama. “It’s actually rather—glorious. Sometimes it’s the only thing I can think about, all day,” she confided.

  Sophie was staring at her, blue eyes wide. “Maybe I shouldn’t marry Braddon,” she finally said. “I am quite sure that I would never think about him all day, no matter how he kissed. Does your husband kiss better than Will Holland does—or did?”

  Charlotte blushed again. Sophie thought they were talking about kissing, and she had been talking about … She probably shouldn’t discuss anything like this with an unmarried woman. Sophie seemed so sophisticated, but she obviously wasn’t.

  “What do you mean ‘did?’” Charlotte replied, adroitly changing the subject. “Isn’t Will kissing anymore?”

  Out in the hallway Alex leaned his head back against the wall. There was no way he could ever join them in the salon. Hearing Charlotte’s confession that she thought about sex during the day had made him harder than a rock. He groaned and set off toward his study. He might as well go through the rest of his correspondence. Given that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything intelligent until Charlotte met him an hour hence, the least he could do was make Robert happy.

  Another month passed. Charlotte’s and Alex’s lives had fallen into a comfortable pattern. Charlotte painted in the morning. She embarked on a portrait of one of the kitchen maids, a large, bony girl named Mall who’d grown up near the Welsh border. At first the countess and the kitchen girl regarded each other circumspectly; Mall’s certainty that her mistress was dicked in the nob didn’t make sittings any more comfortable. But Charlotte persisted. Ever since she had seen Mall’s face when she restocked the
fireplace one morning she had wanted to paint her. After a while they became friends, and Charlotte learned all about Mall’s seven brothers and sisters, and even some gossip about the staff. The butler, Staple, for instance—he sounded like a veritable tyrant. And if she understood Mall’s marked Welsh brogue correctly, he wasn’t behaving as he ought to around the younger female staff, either. That very night Charlotte dismissed Staple, who seemed inclined to argue about it. But Charlotte was not the daughter of the Duchess of Calverstill for nothing. She drew herself up and gave him a duchess look, a stiff-necked, extremely unpleasant look. And Staple found himself walking right out of the room, willy-nilly.

  Charlotte wrote a note to Mr. McDougal in Dunston Castle. Would he and Mrs. McDougal like to move to London? Since there was no housekeeper at the moment in Sheffield House, they would both be more than welcome. Charlotte named a salary well in excess of Staple’s.

  While she was painting, Alex worked in his study. In the first few weeks after they returned to London he used to wander into her studio and read a book on the days when she didn’t actually have Mall sitting with her, but after a while Charlotte banished him. Not only could she not concentrate properly with him in the room, but he consistently put down his book and sprang on her.

  “Like a tiger with its prey,” Charlotte complained.

  “It’s not my fault,” Alex said, grabbing his prey. “You have wanton eyes. You look at me over your easel and I know that you are silently begging me to caress you.”

  “If you do it only for me, you can leave off,” Charlotte said pettishly. “I was thinking of my work, not of you.”

  “You can’t fool me. You had such a melting look around your mouth….”

  “Why don’t you go fence with Lucien? You can play your games with him!”

  “Because,” her husband growled, “I like private play, at private houses. This house.” And with that he bore her off to the old settee in the corner, and there was another morning lost. So she banned him from the studio, and he took to fencing with Lucien every morning.

  “I have to do something!” Alex would complain. But Charlotte knew he loved the rough maleness of the fencing studios, the sharp give and take of insults that accompanied fencing matches. He always came back to the house glowing—and ready to lure her upstairs.

  In the afternoon Charlotte played with Pippa, and in the evenings she and Alex went to the usual round of balls. Even if Charlotte occasionally affected a fashionable air of weary sophistication, she enjoyed balls as she never had before. There was nothing as delicious as meeting your own husband unexpectedly in a hallway, and having him whisper a promise in your ear that made you rosy-pink for the next hour. Or having your husband pull you so close on the dance floor that people whispered—but we are married, Alex would reassure her. Or he would smile at her devilishly and say, “Let’s do something for the benefit of my reputation,” and kiss her right there, in front of everyone.

  By the time Charlotte had been married four months, she was certain of two things. One was that she wasn’t pregnant yet, and she would have to inform her husband of this signal fact (thereby curbing their joyful and button-liberating nightly activities), and the second was that she was falling, or had fallen, deeply, irrevocably in love with her husband. Her heart danced to see him; she was diminished when he wasn’t in the room. Whenever they made love, the words almost burst out of her mouth, but she stopped them. What had he said when he asked her to marry him? Love was built from trust. And she wasn’t sure he trusted her yet. Her mind wove into tangled, tiresome explanations of why she shouldn’t tell him. But the truth was, she was a little afraid. He said so bluntly that he didn’t love her. Charlotte felt shy, and vulnerable, and … well, as if she would rather not be the first to say “I love you.” What if Alex thought she was trying to bribe him, to make him forget that she didn’t tell him about her lack of virginity?

  So she kept silent, and when she felt most like saying “I love you,” she covered his face with passionate kisses instead, or offered to rub his back until he went to sleep. And then when she was quite sure he was fast asleep she would whisper “I love you” into his thick curls or against the rock-hard surface of his chest. The tension would drain out of her until the next time she caught sight of him laughing and had to fight the impulse again.

  That night Alex found himself up against the ladylike training that Charlotte was, generally speaking, ready to toss to the side. But not tonight. In fact, she had secretly thought she was pregnant, since she hadn’t had her flux during their entire married life, but it started that morning. And Charlotte was determined to follow her mama’s outlines regarding this contingency.

  “No!” she said, looking at Alex in fascinated horror.

  “Why not?” her husband said in his sweetest tones, kissing her neck. “Six more days?” Alex asked against her lips. “Six more days, Charlotte? I can’t make it; I can’t live through it.”

  Charlotte didn’t dare answer. Her whole traitorous body was urging her to give in but she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t.

  “I will not,” she finally said. “I’m truly serious, Alex. Perhaps I had better sleep in the other room tonight.”

  “Oh, no,” Alex said hastily, giving up. He had no real hope, but he certainly didn’t intend to forgo Charlotte’s sweet, curvaceous self lying next to him in the bed. Later he managed to reduce his wife to a flushed, longing beauty without even getting her long white nightdress above her knees, but still she was adamant.

  “Six more nights,” she said firmly. “Seven days is what my mama said, and I’m sure she’s right about this. Perhaps I should go sleep in the other room.”

  Alex rolled over on top of Charlotte hastily, just in case she was really thinking about getting out of bed. He rubbed her nose gently with his, exactly as they both often did with Pippa. “I love being married to you, do you know?” His dark eyes stared down into hers as if they looked to the bottom of her soul. That’s almost like saying “I love you,” Charlotte thought.

  The next morning Alex was sulky as a bear at breakfast, and then suddenly made a wry grimace at Charlotte.

  “Is it just me?”

  “I feel as if someone dumped itching powder on my head,” his wife replied, smiling.

  “Well, at least I’m not alone.” Alex returned to the newspaper and then strode off to his study. Later that morning he uttered a muffled curse and dropped the piece of paper he was holding. Robert looked at him sympathetically. Then he moved forward and handed his master a heavy, embossed envelope marked Ministry for Foreign Affairs across the top.

  “There’s this one too,” he said.

  Alex read the message and let out a loud, heartfelt “Damnation!” Any other time he would be delighted with the invitation contained in these pages—invitation? Command, more like, he thought, his eyes skittering over the elegantly scripted letter from Lord Breksby, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He couldn’t leave Charlotte now, he thought, his blood heating at the very thought of her. But he couldn’t bring her; it was far too dangerous. He crumpled the heavy parchment in his hand and threw it violently into the corner.

  “Send around a message telling that fellow that I will wait on him at four o’clock this afternoon,” he barked at Robert. “And tell Lucien I will be at his house at five.” Then Alex strode out of the study.

  Alex tracked Charlotte down in her studio. She was frowning over the portrait of the third kitchen maid. Sophie was sitting with her and regaling her with Braddon’s latest marriage proposal, attempted while they were both riding in Hyde Park.

  “Was there something unpleasant in your correspondence?” Charlotte rang the bell for tea. She wasn’t sure whether her husband looked so glowering because of last night, or due to another reason.

  “I don’t want tea,” Alex said impatiently. “Tell the maid to bring me some brandy.”

  Charlotte came back to the divan, her eyes puzzled. Alex rarely drank in the afternoon. But he clearly di
dn’t want to discuss the problem. Sophie, with her ever-present sensitivity to the moodiness of the male sex, was already gathering up her wrap and talking lightly of seeing them tonight at Lady Combe’s ball.

  Charlotte and Alex arrived at Lady Combe’s ball late that evening. Even for a couple who had shocked and delighted the ton by their shamelessly affectionate behavior, their conduct at Lady Combe’s ball was outrageous. For example, the countess was dancing with the Honorable Sylvester Bredbeck when her husband simply barged onto the dance floor and nudged Sylvester out of his place, without even a word of warning. All he did was grin at Sylvester—who took it very well, everyone thought—and announce that he had to hold his wife now. Hold his wife indeed! That wasn’t something married people said about each other, as Lady Skiffing punctiliously pointed out.

  Intriguingly, Lady Prestlefield swore that later that evening she saw the two of them having a squabble on a balcony. The Earl of Sheffield and Downes had his face buried in his wife’s hair, but she looked fit to be tied, Lady Prestlefield recounted with relish.

  She was more than fit to be tied. Charlotte was enraged and terrified by turns. Alex was setting off on one of the most foolish, quixotic journeys she had ever heard of. Who cared if he had perfect Italian and could pass as an Italian? No one in their right mind would venture to spy on the French, given the fragile truce holding between Napoleon and the English government. As for Lucien! She had always liked her husband’s friend before; in fact, ever since she realized at the picnic that Lucien had lost both wife and child in France, she had felt tenderly affectionate toward him. But now! If he dared to present himself to her, she would say something horrible to him.

  “And don’t tell me this is just female scruples, Alex!” she flashed at her husband later that night. “No one with the slightest consideration for your well-being would ask you to do such a thing. Go to France! Pretend to be Italian! Look for some girl who has likely, poor thing, been discovered and imprisoned, and then try to get you both out of the country. Let alone traveling with a well-known French count—it will get you arrested in a minute!” Charlotte rigidly controlled her tears.