Potent Pleasures

  The silence that settled in the carriage was ominously empty, devoid of kindness or warmth. Alex had an acid taste in his mouth and a cruel pain flickering behind his eyes; he felt as if some important part of himself had been discarded somewhere on the road, back in the dusty column that rose behind the galloping hooves of his horses. He kept thinking: Stop! Put it back the way it was … someone, please, put it back the way it was before I went to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, before I went to Italy, before I left Charlotte’s side.

  But no one offered to do that small service for him, and so Alexander Foakes drew farther and farther ahead of that other Alex, back in the dust: the pre-Hastings Alex, the pre-Italy Alex, the Alex who loved and was loved.

  Chapter 20

  By the time that Alex’s horse was galloping down the straight row of oak trees that lined the road to Downes Manor, he had rebuilt, step by step, the icy wall which memories of Charlotte had toppled in Italy. The last two nights he lay awake, great slashing blows of humiliation shaking his body. Finally he had got to the point where his lips twisted in a wry smile. By God, Patrick always said I had terrible taste in women, he thought.

  The whole scandal seemed horribly appropriate, looking back over his thirty-plus years. He had fallen in love for the first time with a prostitute-in-training, in a garden. And then he had tried to recreate that experience in marriage. Finding a trollop among gently bred women didn’t seem to be so difficult. The problem was that his garden girl had gone on to her chosen career, and the woman he married …

  Well, Charlotte’s record spoke for itself. Alex’s chest felt very tight. He was determined not to lose his temper, as he had in the inn at Depford. What was the point of shouting at someone who was simply acting in the only way she knew?

  Alex caught himself up. He had to keep Maria and Charlotte separate in his mind. After all, Patrick was the first man Charlotte loved. She gave him her virginity. That was not the same as Maria, sleeping with any man with two legs and equipment to match. If he walked into the room and found Charlotte on the point of giving birth he would know it was his child. If she wasn’t, well then the child was his brother’s and, a bitter voice in his head remarked, that baby will probably be your heir. He was done with wives and women, after this. He was giving up the idiotic dream of finding someone as wild and tender as the garden girl. He’d find a woman when he needed one, and leave the titles and land to Patrick’s heir—even if that heir was Charlotte’s child.

  Alex had no idea just how much he was counting on finding a large, bulky Charlotte waiting for him at Downes Manor until he was directed to the new summer house, behind the manor. And there she was. He stood for quite a while, an eternity, it seemed. Charlotte was sitting on the floor of the breezy terrazzo.

  Pippa was sitting across from her, and they were playing with dolls. Charlotte’s doll was talking, and now Pippa’s doll seemed to be clumsily dancing on the floor … but it was Charlotte’s waist that commanded Alex’s eyes. She was clearly pregnant. Her beautiful figure had bloomed around the waist; her breasts, softly caught up in a white muslin day dress, looked lush and generous, blooming from her low-cut gown. And she was glowing, lovely, more beautiful than he remembered. Soft curls fell down her neck, and from his angle long, inky eyelashes brushed her cheeks. She was so lovely that he felt a twist of agony around his heart, as if someone had twisted a key in his chest.

  Just then Pippa’s nanny looked up and saw her master standing just outside the summer house. One glimpse of the earl’s hard, hard eyes and Katy nearly panicked, something she never did. Instead she acted instinctively to protect Pippa from whatever unpleasantness was about to happen.

  “My lady, Pippa and I will be in the schoolroom.” Katy stooped and picked up Pippa, totally ignoring the angry wail that accompanied her rapid decision. Pippa hated to be abruptly swooped into the air. Her small doll fell from her hand and her wail turned to a howl.

  Charlotte pushed dark curls out of her eyes and looked up, utterly confused. Katy was already walking briskly toward the main house, Pippa’s voice growing smaller and smaller as Katy walked. Then Charlotte knew. She turned her head to the left, and there he was, staring down at her.

  Her heart leaped with joy to see him. “Alex!” she cried, her face lighting up. He didn’t move. Charlotte smoothly rose from her place on the ground, adjusting her white high-waisted gown. The French styles suited pregnant women terribly well; there was nothing like a waistline under the breasts to diminish one’s girth, Charlotte thought self-consciously. Alex was staring at her middle.

  Charlotte’s eyes danced. Well, of course, he didn’t know she was pregnant. “We’re having a baby,” she said happily. He still didn’t move or speak. Charlotte was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She took a few tentative steps toward him and stopped.

  “We’re having a baby?” Alex finally said, his voice rasping. His eyebrow flew up, in the way she loved, except that now he was looking at her with utter disdain. “Shouldn’t you say, I am having a baby?” His voice settled to its normal deep tones; he was practically purring. “Or let’s see, I think I like this phrasing: The Countess and the Twin are having a baby. Congratulations, everyone!”

  Charlotte’s heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach. She literally couldn’t find any words. She had pictured Alex’s rage over their butler’s depiction of the wedding night. Of course, she knew that he would be furious about the scurrilous innuendo regarding his brother and her. But she had never thought he would actually believe the article. Because he promised to trust her … She didn’t say a word, just stared at him, eyes wide.

  As for Alex—all his planned calmness and control flew out the window. His wife was so beautiful, gazing at him in bewilderment, as if she had no idea what he was talking about! And yet she was so clearly only a few months pregnant. Black, filthy rage slashed his heart.

  “You’re a doxy,” he said, almost casually. “It seems I have a remarkable affinity for women of that stamp.” His laugh was like nothing Charlotte had heard before. “Yes, indeed,” Alex said savagely. “You might say I specialize in whores. But this—this was something special! Why are you looking so surprised? Did you think I would forget that you had your flux when I left?”

  He strolled toward her, his large, lithe body as controlled as a pacing tiger. Charlotte opened her mouth, but he took her chin in his strong hand, holding it brutally tight. “I don’t think so, darling. I don’t want to hear any pleas, this time. The calendar is so deadly factual, isn’t it? I don’t think even you can talk your way out of this one.

  “If Patrick wants you, he can have you. I’ve instructed my solicitor to make up a bill of divorce. If Patrick doesn’t—and I don’t see why he should, given that he’s already had the goods—you can go and live in Scotland. If the baby is born in the near future, he or she will come with me to London. I’m not having my children, either of my children if there are two, brought up by a tart.”

  Charlotte instinctively wrapped her arms around her stomach. He was mad, absolutely mad. She pulled her chin away from his hand. Alex looked at her, a muscle jumping in his jaw. His eyes were as black as pitch. Charlotte shook her head a little, to clear it. Could this really be happening? Was this the man she had waited for and dreamed so passionately about?

  “You promised,” she half whispered. “You promised.” Her face was drawn with pain, but she stood firm, pulling her slender shoulders back to look at his face with dignity. She would not allow herself to curl into a hedgehog and scream aloud.

  Alex’s lip curled. “You promised. You promised to love and obey. With my body I thee worship,” he sneered. “I think they had better take that line out of the marriage service, don’t you? It just doesn’t suit the times.”

  Charlotte stared at him numbly. He was so handsome, even with stark rage written on his face. Part of her longed to throw herself against Alex’s chest, to beg him to listen, to hug him and kiss him. He was in pain: She could see it in his shadowed
eyes and the fierce hunch of his shoulders. But she would not … could not beg him. What she had to do now was protect her child. And Pippa. Pippa couldn’t be pulled from her side after losing her mother. Pippa wouldn’t be able to bear losing another mama. The thought gave steel to Charlotte’s backbone. She thrust the utter despair in her heart to the side.

  “You mustn’t take Pippa away,” she said. “She has suffered too much already.”

  “It will be better for her,” Alex retorted. He turned away from Charlotte and stared across the great, soft green slope leading toward the house. Then he turned back and looked at his wife. “How can I leave her with a woman who is sleeping with my brother, Charlotte? Will you answer that? Even when I thought you had been false to me before marriage, I didn’t really believe you would keep up that behavior after we married. More fool I.”

  “I didn’t—” Charlotte stopped. This was a reiteration of their wedding night. He didn’t believe her then, and he would never believe her now. He was simply too influenced by his first marriage. She felt such a leaden pain in her chest that she almost fell over. There was no point in talking. But one thing she had to say.

  “You promised to trust me,” she said, looking straight into his eyes. “You promised.” Then she turned and walked away, and no voice called her back.

  Charlotte kept her back very straight, all the way into the house. But she climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the small of her back. She felt like an old, a very old woman. The baby seemed to be pulling her forward. She finally reached the second floor and, turning left, walked straight into Sophie’s bedchamber.

  Sophie gasped and sat up. She had been drowsing in the warm afternoon sun, puzzling over a book of love sonnets written in Portuguese—Sophie, to her mother’s great annoyance, showed an acute and unladylike passion for reading literature in its original language.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked sharply. Charlotte was standing in the doorway, swaying slightly, her face dead white.

  “The baby’s coming!” Sophie swung her feet over the edge of the bed, alarm shaking her to the bottom of her fingers.

  “No.” Charlotte shook her head slowly from side to side. “No, no, no. He’s back.” She paused and collected herself again, her body visibly trembling.

  “Who’s—oh,” Sophie said. She had wondered over the last month whether she should warn Charlotte of Alex’s possible reaction. But then she kept thinking that anxiety wasn’t good for pregnancy, and perhaps Alex wasn’t as rash and stupid as the majority of men she had met in her life. But obviously he was just the same as the others.

  “He doesn’t think the baby is his,” Sophie said flatly.

  Charlotte’s eyes flew to hers. “You knew!”

  “I thought it was likely. Men are such unmitigated idiots.”

  “He wants to take the unborn baby away … my baby and Pippa. He is going to take them away.” Charlotte was clutching her stomach, very close to hysteria.

  Sophie cast a worried eye on her. Hysteria probably wasn’t any better for unborn babies than anxiety. She moved over and stood in front of Charlotte, her eyes commanding her friend’s attention. “Don’t get overwrought, Charlotte. It’s not good for the baby. We have to think.” Sophie pushed Charlotte into a sitting position on her bed.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know … I left him in the summer house.”

  Sophie felt a perk of approval at that news. At least Charlotte had left him, rather than the other way around.

  “Are you absolutely certain about what he plans to do, Charlotte? Perhaps he just spoke in the heat of anger.”

  “He said he couldn’t have his children brought up by a whore, and if the baby was born in the near future he would take it with him to London.” Charlotte’s voice was deadly calm. “He also said that he had already told his solicitor to draw up a bill for divorce.” When she looked at Sophie her face was frozen, tearless eyes looking from a dead white face. “I can’t let him do it, Sophie. Do you think he can?”

  “The law is likely on his side.” Sophie was thinking fast. What they really needed around here was Patrick, who had encountered them at the musicale and started all this mess. If anyone could convince Alex that Charlotte was innocent, it was Patrick. But where was he? Perhaps Alex knew.

  Sophie looked back at Charlotte. She looked fractionally more like herself.

  “I’m leaving,” Charlotte said. Her eyes met Sophie’s. “I’m leaving and I’m taking Pippa with me. I love her; I love her as if she were my own child.” You thought she was your child, a voice screamed in her mind. Charlotte steadily ignored it. She couldn’t afford to listen. “I can’t leave her here with a madman,” she said. “We’ll go to Wales. I doubt that Alex would remember that I have a house there.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” Sophie snapped. “He’s your husband—everything belongs to him now.”

  “No, it doesn’t. My father negotiated a peculiar dowry based on the rumors surrounding Alex’s first marriage. He believed Alex, but he demanded that I retain my own property. And Alex … Alex didn’t care.” She pushed away the memory of a laughing Alex, insisting that he didn’t give a snap of his fingers for her money. That was Alex before their wedding, when he thought she was a virgin. What a tangled mess this is, she thought in a moment of dispassionate logic.

  “So the house in Wales is my property. I shall go there until the baby is born, and then I am going to travel to America.”

  Sophie thought about this. Charlotte was clearly hysterical, even given her collected tone. She couldn’t take Alex’s children and move to America; they would find her and throw her in jail. On the other hand, Sophie judged that Alex probably needed a cooling-down period. Not too long, because he had to be there for Charlotte’s delivery or he might never believe that the child was his.

  “All right,” Sophie said with sudden resolution. “How are we going to get out of the house without Alex knowing?”

  “Oh, Sophie. You are a sweetheart, but you can’t come with me. You’d be ruined.”

  “Don’t be a fool. I won’t be ruined.”

  “Yes, you will,” Charlotte insisted passionately. “You won’t be able to get married if you run off with me—my God, you probably shouldn’t even be visiting me now!”

  Sophie looked at Charlotte wryly. Clearly this was the first time the thought crossed Charlotte’s mind. She was such an innocent!

  “Sweetheart, don’t you realize that it’s all about money? I am my father’s heir. Nothing could ruin me except being found absolutely naked in someone’s bedroom.”

  “I don’t believe you, Sophie. Look what ruined me: a faint and a touch on Patrick’s cheek.”

  “You’re married,” Sophie explained. “Once you are married, it’s all different. A married woman can sleep with as many men as she wants, as long as she is absolutely discreet. Because common adultery is not really interesting. You may make the gossip columns but you won’t be ruined. But a wrong move in an interesting direction—say, showing affection for your husband’s brother, and compounding that with getting pregnant in his absence, and not showing how close you are to giving birth—well, that can ruin a woman. But even that kind of ruination can be salvaged, because you are so very rich, Charlotte, and so is Alex.”

  Charlotte digested all this in silence. “It doesn’t matter,” she finally said flatly. “Because Alex thinks I did sleep with his brother. I suppose if I stayed here and the baby was born tomorrow, he would believe that the child was his. But he would still take the child away. He thought I was a … a trollop before.”

  “Why?” Sophie asked.

  Charlotte hesitated. She had never told Sophie the reason why she and Alex had had such a tempestuous wedding night.

  “I slept with him before we got married,” Charlotte said. “I slept with him at a ball.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it was at the Cyprians’ Ball, so-called. “And he doesn’t remember it, and thinks I slept with his brother.
So to him all of this gossip is confirmation that I really love his brother. Oh, God, how could I have been so stupid!” Because now Charlotte realized that of course Alex would believe the article. Of course he wouldn’t think the child was his.

  Sophie was looking at Charlotte with fascination. She sat down next to her. “You slept with him—at a ball?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “And he doesn’t remember? Lord, how many women has he deflowered at a ball?”

  Charlotte shook her head helplessly. “We never discussed the place. He jumped to the conclusion, on our wedding night, that I had slept with Patrick. And then he refused to talk about it again. He promised … he promised.” Charlotte’s voice caught on a sob, but she steadied herself. “He promised to trust me.”

  Sophie gave her a sympathetic squeeze. She had virtually no belief in male promises, but it didn’t seem the right moment to point that out. Charlotte was extraordinarily beautiful when she was her ordinary self, but pregnant … she was exquisite. It was very hard to believe that a man had allowed sex with Charlotte to slip his mind.

  “I still can’t believe that he doesn’t remember sleeping with you—especially given that you were a virgin.”

  Charlotte shrugged. “He says he never met me before.”

  “Who should we bring with us?” Sophie said practically.

  “Katy, Marie, and your maid,” Charlotte replied. “Keating and Mall are already in Wales, thank goodness.”

  “The problem is that we need to get Alex out of the way. Let me take care of it,” Sophie said with sudden vigor. She left Charlotte to find Katy and instruct her to pack Pippa’s things. Sophie walked down the stairs, straining to hear Alex’s deep voice. The house was silent. Her feet resounded on the marble floor of the entrance-way as she hesitated a minute. Then she headed for the library. She entered and closed the door, leaning back against it.