Whether from fear or desire, Alexandra moaned softly, and the sound somehow penetrated his aroused senses, dousing his desire and dragging him reluctantly back to reality.
Jordan dropped his hands to her narrow waist and raised his head, staring down into her intoxicating young face, unable to believe the passion she had unexpectedly evoked in him.
Dizzy with love and desire, Alexandra felt the heavy thudding of his heart beneath her hand. Gazing up at the firm sensual mouth which had gently, and then fiercely, explored hers, she raised her eyes to his smoldering grey ones.
And she knew.
Something Wonderful had happened. This magnificent, handsome, complicated, sophisticated man was her promised gift from fate. He was hers to love.
Bravely ignoring the painful memories of her equally complicated, handsome, sophisticated father’s treatment, Alexandra accepted fate’s gift with all the humble gratitude in her bursting heart. Unaware that sanity had returned to Jordan and the expression in his eyes had changed from desire to irritation, Alexandra raised her shining eyes to his. Quietly, without emphasis or shame, she softly said, “I love you.”
Jordan had been expecting something like that the moment she raised her eyes to his. “Thank you,” he said, trying to pass her statement off as a casual compliment rather than an avowal he did not want to hear. Mentally he shook his head at how incredibly, disarmingly romantic she was. And how naive. What she felt, he knew, was desire. Nothing more. There was no such thing as love—there were only varying degrees of desire, which romantic women and foolish men called “love.”
He knew he ought to end her infatuation with him right now by telling her bluntly that his own feelings did not match hers and, moreover, that he did not want her to feel as she did about him. That was what he wanted to do. However, his conscience, which was suddenly making a damned nuisance of itself after a silence of decades, would not let him wound her. Even he, callous and cynical and impatient with this nonsense as he now felt, was not callous enough, or cynical enough to deliberately hurt a child who was looking at him with the adoration of a puppy.
So much did she remind him of a puppy that he reacted automatically and, reaching out, he rumpled her thick, silky hair. With smiling gravity, he said, “You will spoil me with so much flattery,” then he glanced toward the house, impatient to return to his work. “I have to finish going over my grandmother’s accounts this afternoon and tonight,” he said abruptly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Alexandra nodded and watched him walk out of the arbor. In the morning, she would be his wife. He had not reacted at all as she’d hoped he would, when she told him she loved him, but it didn’t matter. Not then. Then she had enough love bursting into bloom in her heart to sustain her.
“Alex?” Mary Ellen rushed into the arbor, her face alive with eager curiosity. “I watched from the windows. You were in here ever so long. Did he kiss you?”
Alexandra sank down on a white, ornamental iron bench beneath a plum tree and chuckled at her friend’s avid expression. “Yes.”
Mary Ellen eagerly sat down beside her. “And did you tell him you love him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he do?” she demanded gleefully. “What did he say?”
Alexandra shot her a rueful smile. “He said, ‘thank you.’ ”
* * *
Firelight danced gaily in the hearth, banishing the chill of a spring night and casting shadows that cavorted and bobbed on the walls like sprites at an autumn festival. Propped against a pile of pillows in her huge bed, Alexandra watched the entertainment, her expression pensive. Tomorrow was her wedding day.
Drawing her knees up, she wrapped her arms around her legs, staring into the fire. Despite her thrilling discovery that she had fallen in love with her husband-to-be, she was not foolish enough to think she understood him, nor was she naive enough to believe she knew how to make him happy.
She was certain of only two things: She wanted to make him happy and somehow, some way, she would discover the means to do it. The awesome weight of that responsibility was heavy on her mind, and she wished devoutly she had a better notion of what being the wife of a nobleman entailed.
Her knowledge of marriage was limited and not very helpful. Her own father had been like a charming, elegant, eagerly awaited stranger who, when he deigned to visit them, was greeted with eager adoration by his wife and daughter.
Propping her chin on her knees, Alexandra remembered with a pang of pain how she and her mother had fussed over him for as long as he remained, hanging on to his words and following him around, as eager to please him as if he were a god and they his willing worshipers. Humiliation shot through her when she imagined how dull and provincial and gullible she and her mother must have seemed to him. How he must have laughed at their eager adoration!
With brave determination, Alexandra shifted her thoughts to her own marriage. She was quite certain the duke wouldn’t like being treated by his wife with the extreme deference her own mother had shown her father. His grace seemed to enjoy it when she spoke her mind, even if she said something outrageous. Sometimes, she could make him laugh out loud. But how to go on for the next forty years with him?
The only other marriages she had witnessed firsthand were peasant marriages, and in those marriages the wife cooked and cleaned and sewed for her husband. The idea of doing those things for the duke filled her with quiet longing, even while she knew the notion was sheer foolish sentimentality. This house was crawling with servants who anticipated the occupants’ needs in advance and took steps to make certain their every wish was carried out almost before they thought of it.
With an audible sigh, Alexandra accepted the fact that the Duke of Hawthorne didn’t need her to look after his needs in the way ordinary country-bred wives looked after their husbands’. Even so, she couldn’t help conjuring up a wonderful vision of herself, seated across from him in a chair before the fire, her fingers nimbly adding stitches to one of his snowy white shirts. Wistfully, she imagined the look of gratitude and pleasure on his ruggedly handsome face as he watched her mend his shirt. How grateful he would be . . .
A smothered laugh escaped her as she reconsidered her utter lack of talent with a needle. If she didn’t prick her finger and bleed all over his shirt, she would surely sew the armhole closed or something equally disastrous. The picture of cozy marital bliss faded and her expression became determined.
Every instinct she possessed told her that the duke was a highly complex man, and she hated her youthful inexperience. On the other hand, she was not a featherbrain, despite the fact that his grace seemed to regard her as an amusing child. When necessary, she could draw on a wealth of common sense and practicality. Hadn’t she managed to hold her household together from the time she was fourteen?
Now she had a new challenge ahead of her. She needed to make herself fit to be the Duke of Hawthorne’s wife. His grandmother had already, in the last several days, made a hundred critical remarks about Alexandra’s manners and mannerisms, and although Alex had bridled over what seemed to her be an excessive emphasis on superficial matters of conduct and convention, she secretly intended to learn everything she needed to know. She would make certain her husband never had reason to be ashamed of her.
My husband, Alexandra thought as she snuggled down into the pillows. That huge, handsome, elegant aristocrat was going to be her husband . . .
Chapter Eight
LOUNGING IN A big wingback chair the next morning, Anthony studied his cousin with a combination of admiration and disbelief. “Hawk,” he chuckled, “I swear to God, what everyone says about you is true—you don’t have a nerve in your entire body. This is your wedding day, and I’m more nervous about it than you are.”
Partially dressed in a frilled white shirt, black trousers, and a silver-brocade waistcoat, Jordan was simultaneously carrying on a last-minute meeting with his grandmother’s estate manager and pacing slowly back and forth across his bedchamber,
glancing over a report on one of his business ventures. One step behind him, his beleaguered valet followed doggedly in his wake, smoothing a tiny wrinkle from his finely tailored shirt and brushing microscopic specks of lint from the legs of his trousers.
“Hold still, Jordan,” Tony said, laughing with sympathy for the valet. “Poor Mathison is going to drop dead in his tracks from exhaustion.”
“Hmm?” Jordan paused to glance inquiringly at Tony, and the stalwart valet seized his chance, snatched up a splendidly tailored black jacket, and held it up so Jordan had little choice but to slide his arms into the sleeves.
“Do you mind telling me how you can be so damned nonchalant about your own marriage? You are aware that you’re getting married in fifteen minutes, aren’t you?”
Dismissing the estate manager with a nod, Jordan laid aside the report he was reading, and finally shrugged into the jacket Mathison was still holding out to him, then he turned to the mirror and ran a hand over his jaw to verify the closeness of his shave. “I don’t think of it as getting married,” he said dryly. “I think of it as adopting a child.”
Anthony smiled at the joke and Jordan continued more seriously, “Alexandra will make no demands on my life, nor will my marriage to her require any real changes. After stopping in London to see Elise, I’ll take Alexandra down to Portsmouth and we’ll sail along the coast so that I can see how the new passenger ship we’ve designed handles, then I’ll drop her off at my house in Devon. She’ll like Devon. The house there isn’t so large as to completely overwhelm her. Naturally, I’ll return there to see her from time to time.”
“Naturally,” Anthony said wryly.
Without bothering to answer that, Jordan picked up the report he’d been reading and continued scanning it.
“Your beauteous ballerina is not going to like this, Hawk,” Tony put in after a few minutes.
“She’ll be reasonable,” Jordan said absently.
“So!” the duchess said tautly, sweeping into the room wearing an elegant brown satin gown trimmed in cream lace. “You truly mean to go through with this mockery of a marriage. You actually intend to try to pass that countrified chit off on Society as a young lady of breeding and culture.”
“On the contrary,” Jordan said blandly. “I mean to install her in Devon and leave the last part of that to you. There’s no rush, however. Take a year or two to teach her what she needs to know in order to take her place as my duchess.”
“I couldn’t accomplish that feat in a decade,” his grandmother snapped.
Until then, he had tolerated her objections without rancor, but that remark seemed to push him too far, and his voice took on the cutting edge that intimidated servants and socialites alike. “How difficult can it be to teach an intelligent girl to act like a vapid, vain henwit!”
The indomitable old woman maintained her stony dignity, but she studied her grandson’s steely features with something akin to surprise. “That is how you see females of your own class, then? Vapid and vain?”
“No,” Jordan said curtly. “That is how I see them when they are Alexandra’s age. Later, most of them become much less appealing.”
Like your mother, she thought.
Like my mother, he thought.
“That is not true of all females.”
“No,” Jordan agreed without conviction or interest. “Possibly not.”
* * *
The grooming and dressing preparations for her wedding had taken Alexandra and two maids three hours. The wedding took less than ten minutes.
An hour later, self-consciously holding a crystal glass of bubbling golden champagne in her hand, Alexandra stood alone with her groom in the center of the huge blue and gold salon, as Jordan poured champagne for himself.
Despite her determination to ignore it, her wedding had a distinct aura of unreality, of strain. Her mother and Uncle Monty had attended and been barely tolerated by the duke and his grandmother, even though Uncle Monty was on his very best behavior and had scrupulously refrained from eyeing the derrière of any female in the room, even the duchess’. Lord Anthony Townsende and Mary Ellen had also been here, but now everyone was already on the way home.
Surrounded by the stifling elegance of the gilt salon and garbed in Jordan’s mother’s fabulous wedding gown of ivory satin encrusted with pearls, Alex felt more like an interloper than she had at any time since coming to Rosemeade. The feeling that she was a trespasser, who had invaded a world where she was no more welcome than her relatives, was nearly choking her.
It was odd that she felt so insecure and uneasy now, Alexandra mused, for she was wearing a gown more glorious than any she had ever imagined, and she looked far prettier than she had ever believed she could. Craddock, the duchess’ dresser, had personally supervised Alexandra’s toilette this morning. Under her exacting ministrations, Alexandra’s riotous curls had been brushed until they gleamed, then swept into a mass at the crown and held in place at the sides with a beautiful pair of pearl combs that matched the pearls at her small ears.
Alexandra had looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror in her room and been privately overjoyed. Even Craddock had stood back and announced that she looked “very well indeed, considering—” But Jordan had said nothing about her appearance. He had smiled reassuringly at her when Uncle Monty placed her hand in his, and that had been enough to sustain her during the hour since the ceremony had taken place. Now, however, they were alone together as husband and wife for the first time, and the only sound was that of servants carrying their heavy trunks down the stairs and out to the traveling chaise, where they were being loaded for the wedding journey.
Uncertain of what to do with the champagne, Alexandra chose the path of least resistance and drank some of it, then she put it down on an elaborately carved gilt table.
When she turned, Jordan was studying her as if seeing her for the first time. Not once all morning had he commented on her appearance, but now, as his gaze drifted from the top of her shining hair to the hem of her gleaming satin gown, she sensed that he was finally going to comment, and she held her breath expectantly.
“You’re taller than I originally thought.”
The unexpected observation, added to his genuinely puzzled expression, wrung a startled laugh from Alexandra. “I don’t think I’ve grown more than a few inches in the last week.”
He smiled absently at her quip and then continued thoughtfully, “In the beginning, I mistook you for a boy, and you would be small for a boy.”
Determined to inject gaiety into their relationship at every possible opportunity from this day forward, Alexandra said teasingly, “I am not, however, a boy.”
Despite his intention to treat her impersonally after yesterday’s kiss, Jordan was not proof against her sunny, entrancing smile. It even dispelled the gloom of his marriage ceremony from his heart. “You are not a boy,” he agreed, smiling back at her. “Nor are you a young girl exactly. But then, neither are you a woman.”
“I seem to be at an awkward age, don’t I?” she agreed, her eyes aglow with gentle mockery of his fixation with her age.
“Evidently,” he chuckled. “How do you describe a young lady who is not quite eighteen?”
“I am already eighteen,” Alexandra said seriously. “Today is my birthday.”
“I had no idea today was your birthday,” he said, truly apologetic. “I’ll buy you a present on our trip. What do girls your age like?”
“We like not to be constantly reminded of our extreme youth,” Alexandra said lightly, but with a meaningful look.
Jordan’s sharp bark of laughter echoed throughout the salon. “God, you have a quick wit. Amazing in one so youn—so pretty,” he corrected swiftly. “I apologize once again—for teasing you about your age and for forgetting the matter of a present.”
“I greatly fear that, like it or not, you were my birthday present.”
“What a way to phrase it,” he chuckled.
Alexandra glanced at the
clock; it was less than a half hour before Jordan had said he wished to be off for their ship. “I’d better go upstairs and change my gown,” she said.
“Where has my grandmother gone?” he asked as she started to leave.
“I believe she has taken to her bed, prostrate with grief over your unfortunate marriage,” Alexandra said with a lame attempt at humor. More seriously, she added, “Will she be all right, do you think?”
“It would take more than our marriage to send her to her couch calling for her hartshorn,” Jordan said with what sounded very much like fondness and admiration. “My grandmother could take on Napoleon himself and emerge victorious from the encounter. When she was through with him, he’d be plumping up her pillows and begging her pardon for his bad manners in making war on us. A little thing like my ‘unfortunate marriage’ won’t send her into a decline, believe me. And now that you bear my name, she will flay anyone alive who dares to cast aspersions on you.”
* * *
A half hour later, clad in the cherry traveling costume the dressmakers had designed for her, Alexandra climbed into a shiny black-lacquered coach with Jordan’s ducal seal emblazoned in silver upon the door, and settled back against incredibly luxurious grey velvet squabs. The coachman put up the stairs and closed the door, and with scarcely any sensation of motion, the well-sprung traveling chaise glided down the long drive behind four prancing bays, escorted by six liveried outriders.
Alexandra glanced about her, admiring the heavy silver handles at the doors and the crystal-and-silver lamps. Luxuriating in the unexpected comfort of the spacious conveyance, she tried to believe she was really married, really leaving on her wedding trip. Across from her, Jordan stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankles, and stared out the window, lapsing into a comfortable silence.