Racking her brain for the best way to broach the matter on her mind, she approached the table and poured herself another glass of champagne, oblivious to the fact that her first glass was still full, then she looked around, trying to decide whether to sit or stand. She decided to stand so he would not seem so tall and intimidating.
At the fireplace Jordan raised his glass to his lips, watching her. She could have only two possible reasons for insisting on this meeting, he thought. The first possibility was that she honestly believed she was in love with Tony, and that was why she wished to marry him. If that was the case, she would begin by telling him so—simply and truthfully—as had been her habit The second possibility was that she wanted to be married to whoever was the Duke of Hawthorne. If that was the case, she would now try to soothe Jordan with some form of tender, feminine theatrics. But first she would wait a bit for his temper to cool—exactly as she was doing now.
Jordan drained his glass and put it down on the mantel with a sharp thud. “I’m waiting,” he snapped impatiently.
Alexandra jumped and whirled to face him, appalled by his biting tone. “I—I know,” she said, determined at all costs to speak to him with calm maturity and to make it infinitely clear to him that she no longer wished to be his concern or responsibility. On the other hand, she did not want to do or say anything which might reveal to him how hurt and angry and disillusioned she had been when she discovered the truth about his feelings for her, or what a fool she had made of herself grieving for London’s most infamous libertine. To add to her dilemma, it was rapidly becoming obvious that in his current mood, Jordan was not likely to react reasonably to the scandalous subject of a divorce. In fact, she instinctively knew he would react the opposite. “I’m not quite certain how to begin,” she said hesitantly.
“In that case,” he drawled sarcastically as his blistering gaze sliced over her glorious ice-blue satin bridal gown, “allow me to offer a few suggestions: If you’re about to tell me very prettily how sorely you’ve missed me, I’m afraid that gown you are wearing is a little incongruous. You would have been wiser to change it. It’s extravagantly lovely by the way.” His drawl became clipped and abrupt. “Did I pay for it?”
“No—that is, I don’t know exactly how—”
“Never mind about the gown,” he interrupted scathingly. “Let’s get on with your charade. Since you cannot very well fling yourself into my arms and weep tears of joy at my return, while you’re dressed as another man’s bride, you’ll have to think of something else to soften my attitude toward you and win my forgiveness.”
“Win your what?” Alexandra exploded as outrage conquered her fears.
“Why not begin by telling me how deeply grieved you were when you first learned of my ‘untimely demise’?” he continued savagely, ignoring her outburst of righteous indigation. “That would have a nice ring to it. Then, if you could manage one tear, or even two, you could tell me how you mourned me, and wept, and said prayers for my—”
That was so close to the truth that Alexandra’s voice shook with shamed anger. “Stop it! I have no intention of doing anything of the sort! Furthermore, you arrogant hypocrite, your forgiveness is the last thing I care about.”
“That was very foolish of you, my sweet,” he drawled silkily, shoving away from the fireplace. “Tenderness and dainty tears are called for at times such as these, not insults. Moreover, softening my attitude ought to be your first concern. Well-bred females who aspire to be duchesses must seek to make themselves agreeable to any eligible duke at all times. Now then, since you can’t change your gown and you can’t weep, why not try telling me how much you missed me,” he insolently suggested. “You did miss me, did you not? Very much, I’ll vow. So much so that you only decided to marry Tony because he—ah—resembled me. That’s it, isn’t it?” he mocked.
“Why are you behaving like this?” Alexandra cried.
Without bothering to answer, he moved closer, looming over her like a dark, ominous cloud. “In a day or two, I’ll tell you what I’ve decided to do with you.”
Anger and confusion were warring in Alexandra’s mind, sending her thoughts into a complete tumult. Jordan Townsende had never cared about her and he had no right, no reason to act like a self-righteous, outraged husband! “I am not a mindless piece of chattel!” she burst out. “You can’t just dispose of me like a—a piece of furniture!”
“Can’t I? Try me!” he clipped.
Alexandra’s mind groped wildly for some way to neutralize his irrational anger and soothe what could only be his wounded ego. Raking a hand through her heavy hair, she sought desperately for some guiding logic. She was the innocent and injured party in their relationship, but at the moment he was the powerful and potentially dangerous party, and so she tried to reason with him. “I can see that you’re angry—”
“How very observant of you,” he mocked nastily.
Ignoring his sarcasm, Alexandra persevered in what she hoped was a reasonable tone, “And I can see there is no point in trying to reason with you in this mood—”
“Go ahead and try it,” he invited, but the look in his eyes said the opposite as he took a menacing step toward her.
Alexandra hastily retreated a step. “There’s—there’s no point. You won’t listen to me. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind . . .”
The quote from Ingersoll caught Jordan entirely off guard, reminding him poignantly of the enchanting, curly-haired girl who could quote from Buddha or John the Baptist, depending upon the occasion. Unfortunately, it only made him angrier now, because she was no longer that girl. Instead, she had become a scheming little opportunist. If she truly wanted to marry Tony because she loved him, she would have said so by now, he knew. Since she hadn’t, she obviously wanted to remain the Duchess of Hawthorne.
And therein lay her problem, Jordan thought cynically: She could not convincingly throw herself into his arms and weep for joy when he had just witnessed her near-marriage to another man, but neither could she risk letting him walk out of this house without taking the first of many predictable steps toward reconciliation—not if she wanted to continue moving in Society with the full prestige and honor of her rank. To maintain that, the ton would need to see that she was in the good graces of the current duke.
She had become ambitious in the last fifteen months, he realized with blazing contempt. And beautiful. Arrestingly so at close range, with her glossy mahogany hair spilling over her shoulders and back in masses of waves and curls, contrasting vividly with her glowing alabaster skin, brilliant aqua eyes, and soft, rosy lips. In comparison with the pale blondes he remembered, who were usually the Acclaimed Beauties, Alexandra was incredibly more alluring.
He stared hard at her, convinced she was a scheming opportunist, yet despite all the evidence, he could not find a trace of guile in those flashing eyes of hers or her angry, upturned face. Furious with his inner reluctance to see her for what she had become, he turned on his heel and walked toward the door.
Alexandra watched him leave, buffeted by a myriad of conflicting emotions, including fury, relief, and alarm. He paused in the doorway and she tensed automatically.
“I will move in here tomorrow. In the meantime, let me leave you with some instructions: You are not to accompany Tony anywhere.”
His tone promised terrible consequences should she choose to ignore his order, and although she couldn’t imagine what form those reprisals might take, or why she should want to walk out and face a furor of gossip, Alexandra was momentarily quelled by the threat in his voice. “You will, in fact, not leave this house. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
With a magnificent gesture of unconcern that completely belied her alarm, she shrugged lightly and said, “I speak three languages fluently, your grace. One of them is English.”
“Are you patronizing me?” he asked in a silken, threatening voice.
Alexandra’s courage warred with common sense, but neither of them won. Afraid to advance and unwil
ling to retreat, she tried to hold her ground by daring to say in the tone of an adult addressing a cranky, unreasonable child: “I have no wish to discuss that or anything else with you when you are in such an unreasonable mood.”
“Alexandra,” he said in an awful voice, “if you’re wondering how far you can push me, you’ve just reached your limit. In my present ‘unreasonable mood,’ nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to close this door and spend the next ten minutes making certain you can’t sit down for a week. Do you take my meaning?”
The threat of being spanked like a child stripped away Alexandra’s hard-won confidence and made her feel as gauche and helpless as she had a year ago in his presence. She put her chin up and said nothing, but bright flags of humiliated color stained her cheeks, and tears of frustration stung her eyes.
He stared at her in silence and then, satisfied that she was adequately chastened, Jordan defied all the rules of courtesy and walked off without so much as a nod to her.
Two years ago, she had been ignorant of the rules of etiquette to which polite ladies and gentlemen always conformed; she had not realized then that Jordan was insulting her when he never bothered to bow to her, or to kiss her hand, or treat her solicitously. For that matter, he had never deigned to permit her to call him by his given name. Now, as she stood alone in the middle of the drawing room, she was acutely, furiously aware of all those bygone slights, as well as the new ones he had heaped upon her today.
She waited until she heard the front door close, and then she walked woodenly out of the salon and up the stairs to her room. Anguish and disbelief poured through her as she dismissed her maid and mindlessly stripped off her wedding gown. He was back! And he was worse than she remembered, worse than she’d imagined—more arrogant, more dictatorial, completely heartless. And she was married to him. Married! her heart screamed.
This morning, everything had seemed so simple and predictable. She had arisen and dressed to be married; she had gone to the church. Now, three hours later, she was married to the wrong man.
Fiercely struggling against her tears, she sat down on the settee and wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to block out the images, but it was no use. They paraded across her mind, tormenting her with vivid scenes of the mindlessly infatuated, besotted girl she had been. . . . She saw herself looking up at Jordan in the garden at Rosemeade. “I think you are as beautiful as Michelangelo’s David!” she had blurted. ‘love you.” And when he had made love to her, she had nearly swooned in his arms, and babbled to him about how strong and wise and nauseatingly wonderful he was!
“Dear God,” Alex moaned aloud as another forgotten memory pranced across her mind: she had actually told Jordan—London’s most infamous libertine—that he obviously wasn’t well-acquainted with many women. No wonder he had grinned!
Hot tears of humiliation dripped from her eyes, but she brushed them angrily aside, refusing to cry one more time for that—that monster. She had already wept buckets of tears over him, she thought furiously.
Tony’s words of a few weeks ago came back to hack at her lacerated emotions: “Jordan married you because he pitied you, but he had neither the DESIRE nor the INTENT to live with you as his wife. He intended to pack you off to Devon when you returned from your wedding trip, and then he meant to continue where he left off with his mistress. . . . He was with his mistress AFTER you were married to him. . . . He told her your marriage was one of INconvenience . . .”
There was a soft knock at the door, but Alexandra was so immersed in misery she didn’t hear anything until Melanie had walked into the bedchamber and closed the door. “Alex?”
Startled, Alexandra turned her head and looked round. Melanie took one look at her friend’s anguished, tearstreaked face, and rushed to her side.
“Dear God!” Melanie whispered in horror, kneeling in front of Alexandra and pulling out her handkerchief, almost babbling in her agitated alarm. “Why are you crying? Has he done something to you? Did he rage at you or—or strike you?”
Alexandra swallowed and looked at her, but she could not drag her voice past the lump of tears in her throat. Melanie’s husband had been Jordan’s closest friend, she knew, and now she wondered where Melanie’s loyalties would lie. She shook her head and took the handkerchief from Melanie.
“Alex!” Melanie cried in mounting alarm. “Talk to me, please! I’m your friend, and I’ll always be,” she said, correctly interpreting the reason for Alexandra’s wary expression. “You can’t keep this bottled up inside you— you’re as white as a ghost and you look ready to faint.”
Alexandra had briefly confided to Melanie that she had been an utter blind fool about Jordan, but she had never mentioned his complete lack of feeling for her, and had also concealed her shame behind a facade of amused self-mockery. Now, however, it was there in all its naked, mute misery for Melanie to see, as Alexandra haltingly related all the humiliating details of her relationship with Hawk, leaving nothing out. Throughout the tale, Melanie frequently shook her head in sympathetic amusement at Alexandra’s naive outpouring of her heart to Jordan, but she did not smile when Alexandra told her of Hawk’s intention to pack her off to Devon.
Alexandra finished by relating Jordan’s explanation for his disappearance, and when she was done Melanie patted her hand. “All that’s in the past. What about the future—do you have any sort of plan?”
“Yes,” Alexandra said with quiet force. “I want a divorce!”
“What?” Melanie gasped. “You can’t be serious!”
Alexandra was deadly serious and said so.
“A divorce is unthinkable,” Melanie said, dismissing that alternative in a few short sentences. “You would be an outcast, Alex. Even my husband, who gives me my head in nearly everything, would forbid me to be in your company. You’d be barred from decent society everywhere, shut off from everyone.”
“That is still preferable to being married to him and shut away somewhere in Devon.”
“Perhaps it seems so to you now, but in any case it doesn’t matter how you feel. I’m quite certain your husband would have to agree to a divorce, and I can’t imagine that he will. Even so, they must be very difficult to obtain, and you’d need grounds, as well as Hawk’s consent.”
“I was thinking about that when you came in, and it seems to me I already have grounds, and I may not need his consent at all. In the first place, I was coerced into this marriage by—by circumstances. Secondly, at our wedding, he vowed to love and honor me, but he had no intention of ever doing either—that surely must be grounds enough to get either an annulment or a divorce, with or without his consent. However, I don’t see why he’ll refuse his consent,” Alexandra added with a flash of anger. “He never wished to marry me in the first place.”
“Well,” Melanie shot back, “that doesn’t mean he’ll like having everyone know you don’t want him anymore.”
“When he has time to consider the plan, he’ll be bound to feel relieved to have me off his hands.”
Melanie shook her head. “I’m not so certain he wants you off his hands. I saw the way he looked at Lord Anthony in church today—he did not look relieved, he looked furious!”
“He is ill-tempered by nature,” Alexandra said with disgust, recalling their interview downstairs. “He has no reason whatsoever to be angry with Anthony or me.”
“No reason!” Melanie repeated in disbelief. “Why, you were about to marry another man!”
“I can’t see what difference that should make. As I just said, he didn’t want to marry me in the first place.”
“But that doesn’t mean he’ll want anyone else to marry you,” Melanie wisely replied. “In any case it doesn’t matter. A divorce is simply out of the question. There has to be some other solution. My husband returned from Scotland today,” she said enthusiastically. “I shall ask John for advice. He is very wise.” Her face fell. “Unfortunately, he also considers Hawk his closest friend, so his advice will be somewhat colored by th
at. However,” she said with absolute finality, “a divorce is positively beyond considering. There must be an alternative.”
She fell silent for several long moments, lost in her own thoughts, her forehead furrowed. “It’s little wonder you fell like a rock for him,” she said with a small, compassionate smile. “Dozens of the most sophisticated flirts in England tumbled head over heels for him,” she continued thoughtfully. “But except for indulging in an occasional fling with one of them, he never showed any sign of reciprocating their feelings. Naturally, now that he is back, everyone will expect you to tumble straight into his arms—particularly because Society is, at this very moment, recollecting how blindly infatuated with him you were when you first came to town.”
The realization that Melanie was perfectly correct made Alexandra feel quite violently ill. Leaning her head against the back of the sofa, she swallowed and closed her eyes in sublime misery. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re absolutely right.”
“Of course I am,” Melanie absently agreed. “On the other hand,” she declared, her eyes beginning to shine, “wouldn’t it be delightful if the opposite happens!”
“What do you mean?”
“The ideal solution to the entire problem is for him to fall in love with you. That would enable you to keep your pride and your husband.”
“Melanie,” Alexandra said dampingly. “First of all, I don’t think anyone could make that man fall in love, because he doesn’t have a heart. Secondly, even if he does have one, it’s certainly immune to me. Thirdly . . .”
Laughing, Melanie caught Alexandra’s arm, hauled her off the sofa and pulled her to the mirror. “That was before. Look into the mirror, Alex. The female looking back at you right now has London at her feet! Men are quarreling over you—”
Alexandra sighed, looking at Melanie in the mirror rather than her own image. “Only because I’ve become a sort of absurd, fashionable rage—like damping one’s skirts. It’s fashionable for the moment for men to fancy themselves in love with me.”