Twelve
“What do you think of this marriage?” Trenton asked his brother. For once Darius was actually sitting, not pacing around the library like a neurotic predator held too long behind the bars of a menagerie.
“I thank God for it,” Darius said, accepting a glass of brandy from Trent’s hand. “That was a very bad business in the park, Trent. If Reston hadn’t happened along, I hate to think what might have happened.”
Trent sipped his drink and took a place beside his brother on the sofa. “If it had been just you or me, or even you and me against five determined miscreants, I don’t think we would have fared as well.” The wording was intended as a sop to fraternal pride wherever it might arise.
“You can accept Reston as a brother-in-law?”
“Of course I can.” Trent’s lips curved up slightly. “He’s devious. Got Wilton to sign a marriage contract, then paid dear Papa off with his own gambling markers. Had the Marquis of Heathgate and one of old Moreland’s sons on hand to witness it, all legal and binding. Papa is still fuming and fretting and trying not to shout. I rather enjoyed it.”
Darius smiled as well. “That’s not devious. That’s sheer genius on Reston’s part. You have to respect a fellow who can orchestrate such doings on short notice.”
“Respect him, hell, I’d kiss him on the lips at Almack’s for what he’s doing for our sister.”
“Interesting offer. One hears many things about Reston, but not that particular penchant, and you a father of three.”
“Shut up, baby brother.” Trent paused to yawn and crack his neck. “Speaking of penchants, when will you stop keeping the company of sluts and gamblers?”
“There is gain to be had in such company,” Darius said, “and you of all people know I am motivated to garner coin when and where I can.” Trent fell silent upon that observation, considering his drink, his circumstances, and his little brother.
“Reston might be able to help.”
“It isn’t Reston’s problem,” Darius said, but without heat.
“Leah is our sister, but she’ll be his countess. I’d say that gives him an arguable interest in your situation.”
“So you’d make Reston privy to the things we perpetrated years ago and haven’t found a way to apprise her of since?”
Trent was silent a long time, feeling Darius shift beside him and tug off his boots. Well, good. It had been forever since Darius had spent more than an hour under Trent’s roof, and Trent missed him.
Worried about him.
“It’s like this, Dare.” Trent leaned his head back and set his drink aside. “I have to admit what a bloody relief it is to be out from under the guilt of failing Leah, and the strain of trying to convince myself I haven’t.”
“Now, now,” Darius said gently, “we got her to Italy, and she was reasonably content there. The talk died down, and Frommer’s people were decent about it, too.”
“I suppose,” Trent said slowly. Decent enough to ignore a woman who’d legally become part of their family. “But back to my point.”
“Your confession, rather.”
“Fine, call it a confession, because that’s what it is. I am relieved to pass Leah off to Reston, and I did much less for her than you did. I would like to pass the rest of our family’s situation along to him as well, just not quite yet.”
“I’d prefer to do that before the ceremony, not after, but I can’t argue with you as strenuously as I ought,” Darius said. “Leah deserves to know the truth, and like you, I want to be out from under the deceptions of the past, but we need to take Reston’s measure first. Let him and Leah get used to their married state and perhaps bury the man’s father.”
Trent ran a hand through his hair. “Hadn’t thought of that. Suppose that will be a bit of a distraction.”
“Suppose. You ready for another drink?”
Trent hesitated. He was trying to moderate his drinking, which was growing steadily greater in quantity.
“Half,” he said, reluctant to leave his brother drinking alone. Darius pursed his lips and nodded, leaving Trent with the conviction Darius saw more than he let on.
Leah was going to hate them. There was no way on earth the truth could come out without Leah being mortally put out with both of her brothers—and that would kill Darius more quickly than any penchant for vice and crime.
When Darius brought the decanter over, Trent grabbed the neck of the bottle and held it over his glass until the tumbler was full to the brim.
***
Leah drifted in a comfortable, contented fog, the rocking of the carriage and the warmth of her husband’s embrace soothing her into a drowsy, post-wedding lassitude. Nick must have been dozing as well, for he’d gone silent before they’d even left Town, and as darkness had fallen, he’d kept his peace.
Leah could not quite sleep, but because the seat was well upholstered and considerably deeper than any she’d seen before, she was content to doze. Her brother Darius’s words of parting after the wedding breakfast kept ringing in her memory: Reston is a damned decent man. He could love you, if you’d allow it. Really love you, not just use you to thumb his lordly nose at his indifferent papa.
Had that been the sum total of Aaron’s interest in her? Leah told herself it wasn’t, that Aaron had been genuinely fond of her and as considerate as a very young man could be. But Darius—damn his too-knowing brown eyes—had a valid point as well. Aaron Frommer had been fond of dramatics too, and of feeling victimized by his place as a marquess’s fourth son. He had been making a play for his father’s attention by riding to Leah’s rescue, trying to assert his independence while proving he’d not achieved it, in truth.
She curled down onto Nick’s chest more snugly, thinking this was an admission she could make because Nick had married her, and married her knowing her past and accepting it.
Accepting her.
“Penny for them?” Nick’s voice vibrated under her ear, and his hand came through the darkness to rest on her cheek. “I’ll light the lamps, if you insist.”
“I’m fine without them. I was thinking you are uncharacteristically silent.”
“Tired,” Nick said softly, his fingers feathering over each of her features in turn. “And worried about my father.”
“You felt his absence today at the wedding,” Leah guessed, closing her eyes beneath Nick’s explorations.
“I felt that, and his presence, his approval. He would like you, Leah. Approve of you. He will like you.”
“You say that as if you’re sure.” Leah turned her head so Nick’s fingers could wander more easily.
“I didn’t realize his approval was a factor until Ethan pointed out Bellefonte would get on with you swimmingly.”
“What are you doing?” Leah asked, stifling a yawn.
“Touching my wife’s face. You met Magda? She’s older than she looks, probably older than Della. Her parents lived into their nineties.”
“I’ve never met anyone who lived so long.”
“Her father lost his sight early in life,” Nick went on, “and she used to tell me about him touching her mother this way. Magda said she was closer to him as a child, because he could tell her mood by the way her feet hit the stairs on their porch, by the way she came through the door, by the feel of her hand in his, or the sound of her exhalations. I’ve been fascinated by that, by the thought that her father knew his daughter so well.”
“A blind hound often does well enough, provided he had some sighted years first.”
This was a new facet to Nicholas Haddonfield, this thoughtful, quiet man with excruciatingly gentle hands. Leah tried to tell herself it was yet more of his cozening, but the notion simply wouldn’t wash.
Nick’s thumb brushed over her lips. “Maybe someday when I am an old, blind hound, I will know your moods by touch, sound, and instinct, Leah Haddonfield, and perhaps you shall even know mine.”
In the soft darkness of the spring night, Nick sounded so wistful, and his hands were so tender as they skimmed and caressed and danced across her face, she felt a lump constrict her throat. Maybe Darius had been right, and this misbegotten union might flower into something real and lovely and permanent.
“I would like that, Husband.” Leah turned her cheek into his palm and kissed the heel of his hand. “I would like, someday, to know you by instinct.”
Leah drifted off, content in Nick’s embrace, and did not wake up until he was hefting her into his arms and trying to extricate her from the coach without disturbing her.
“Nicholas, I can walk.”
“Nonsense,” Nick said, shifting as he freed her from the coach. “I will carry you over this threshold, for it’s one we own. Belle Maison, thank God, is still in my father’s hands.”
Leah did not protest, though she wanted to. With his talk of blind fathers, dying fathers, and thresholds that “we” owned, he was looping one thread of longing after another around Leah’s heart.
“My lord, my lady.” An old fellow standing by the mounting block bowed and picked up his lantern. “Congratulations, and welcome to Clover Down. The lad will light your way.”
Nick nodded his thanks as the coachmen steered their conveyance around to the carriage house and a young footman held up a second lantern to illuminate the front steps of the manor house. The butler opened the door, offered them congratulations and welcome, and was quickly waved off to bed. Leah gained her feet only when Nick had deposited her in the master bedroom, which to her surprise boasted an enormous tub of steaming, rose-scented water.
“A lookout was no doubt posted,” Nick said, “and the water kept heating in the laundry until we were spotted. Your staff wants you to feel welcome.”
“I most assuredly feel welcome. Perhaps you’d like to go first?”
“We can share. Because this is our wedding night, I will be your lady’s maid.”
Leah turned and offered him her back, thinking how odd it was, to be so casually intimate with Nick once again, and how nonchalant he seemed with the whole business.
“I feel as if I’m watching some woman who looks like me embark on her married life with a man who resembles Nicholas Haddonfield,” Leah said, her back to her spouse.
Nick’s fingers made short work of the myriad buttons on Leah’s wedding dress. “Maybe married life, if it’s to be successful, is no different from the rest of one’s life, or it shouldn’t be.”
“This feels different,” Leah decided, “but not strange.” She turned, the back of her dress gaping, and lifted her hands to Nick’s chin.
“Hold still,” she said, unfastening his sapphire pin and untying the elaborate knot in his cravat. Without pausing, she undid the buttons of his waistcoat, and then relieved him of his sleeve buttons, which also sported inset sapphires.
“You do clean up well, Nicholas.”
“You aren’t going to stop now, are you? I am hardly ready for my bath.”
He was teasing, so Leah humored him. Many married men had no valet, and this was something she could do for him as his wife. She undid the buttons at the knees of his satin breeches and the garters to his stockings, slipped off his shoes, then took another step back. Nick reached forward, turned her by the shoulders, then eased her gown down to her hips and unlaced her stays. Leah balanced on Nick’s shoulder to step out of her gown and found herself facing him in chemise and petticoat.
He smiled down at her. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He knelt to deal with her stockings, garters, and slippers, then unfastened the tapes to her petticoats, gathering the entire frothy pile and dumping it on the couch that faced the hearth.
Leah watched him pad barefoot across the room, and it was as if with each piece of clothing they shed, Nick became more himself and less that polite, well-dressed aristocrat she’d married hours ago.
“You are looking at me, Wife. I like that.”
“You are rather hard to miss.”
Nick walked right up to her and gathered her close. “I will blow out all the candles, sleep in my clothes, pledge to leave you in peace, but on our wedding night it will be expected that we share a bed. I’ll sleep elsewhere if that’s what you prefer.”
He offered her a reprieve. Nick, in his boundless kindness and perceptivity, was offering her a reprieve.
“Let’s begin as we intend to go on,” Leah said, though she could only manage it with her cheek resting against Nick’s chest. The fine linen of his shirt lay beneath her nose, and below that his beating heart. She pushed his shirt aside, put her ear over that heart, and listened to its steady rhythm while Nick’s hands caressed her back.
“It shall be as you wish.” He rested his cheek against her temple, and silence spread around them until Leah planted a tasting kiss over his heart.
“Lovey?”
“Nicholas?”
“What are you doing?”
Such a careful question. She dropped her arms from around him. “I honestly don’t know, though of this much I’m certain: I am not enamored of what passed between us earlier, when you pleasured me and I allowed it. We are to be married, though.”
He remained unreadable, watching her as she visually took in the tub, the bed, the flowers in a vase on the windowsill—red roses, of course, with maidenhair and baby’s breath.
“We are married,” Nick said, as if picking up the conversational shuttlecock and batting it to her.
Leah had thought about this, after he’d left her aching in her bed, when she’d dressed in her wedding finery, and on the coach ride out from London. Her husband was a stubborn, independent, shrewd rogue of a man, but he was also kind and the closest thing Leah had to a friend. She hadn’t been at ease with what had passed between them, but neither was she ready to toss all intimacies with him aside.
Which left only one course: “Nicholas, will you teach me what pleases you?”
***
Nick could not form an answer, for his mind was whirling, robbing him of coherence.
Why, why in the name of sweet, squalling baby Jesus, did his wife have to be the first woman to ask him how she might please him?
Women who were intimate with Nick were safe with him; they could take and take and take to their hearts’ content, and that was how he wanted it. He’d learned, to his eternal heartache, that when he took, misery followed.
So he gave generously and skillfully, and got his pleasure that way.
He wanted to give to Leah—had planned on years of that very martyrdom—and here, she wanted to give as well.
For the first time, he experienced the subtle rejection of the pleasured by the pleasurer who would not yield to her own desires. She sought to make love to him, not with him, and the distinction made his heart shrink even as his cock began to stir.
And between bewilderment and arousal, Nick felt fear licking through his veins.
He wasn’t going to be able to keep his distance from her, to offer her pleasure and companionship and the kind of fondness he offered most any woman who sought it. She was going to wind herself around his body, and around his heart, and he’d be reduced to begging, breaking a promise he’d made to himself on Leonie’s behalf, and regretting and regretting and regretting.
God help him, if he wasn’t careful he’d be falling in love with his own wife.
“Nicholas?” Leah peered up at him, concern in her pretty brown eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I will be fine, though tonight would serve us both best if we used it to get some rest,” he said, his voice sharper than he intended.
Leah peered at him briefly then stepped away. “If you say so. The day has been long.”
Before the hurt in her gaze had him howling on his knees for forgiveness, Nick turned and ducked into the adjoining dressing room.
“Here.” He held out a robe, a deep blue velvet, the smallest he had, but it still pooled on the floor at Leah’s feet, leaving inches of hem trailing on the ground. Leah shrugged into the robe, regarding him with puzzlement.
“Thank you.” She belted the robe as best she could. “Shall we to bed?”
He would rather have crawled over hot coals. “A capital notion.” And worse than hot coals was the uncertainty he’d put in his wife’s eyes. “The footmen will deal with the tub tomorrow.”
“A cricket pitch of a bed,” Leah remarked, eyeing the vast, dark, canopied wonder where Nick slept. “Do you prefer one side or the other?”
“I sleep in the middle. But we’re both probably so tired we won’t know we’re sharing. And tomorrow night, your things will no doubt have arrived in your chambers.”
“So we are not to share a bed regularly?” Her tone was perfectly casual; Nick wasn’t deceived for a moment.
“Our bedrooms adjoin,” Nick said, moving around the room to blow out candles. “I will be happy to accommodate you when you desire it, Leah.”
“I see.” Leah’s voice radiated with suppressed hurt, but Nick steeled himself against it and turned in the dim light to face her.
He was going to burn in hell for this day’s work. Slowly, while every neglected wife in the realm jabbed at his parts with a hot, rusty pitchfork. “Shall I pleasure you now, Wife?” he asked softly.
“I think not. Fatigue is catching up to me.”
“As you wish.” Nick took a candelabrum down from the mantel and blew out the last of the lit candles. He cursed himself for hurting his new wife, cursed her for being so damned desirable and good and lovely and married to him. He cursed marriage as an institution and the Creator for making conception so pleasurable for the child’s father, and he cursed himself again, because he hadn’t seen this disaster looming.
Val’s words came back to Nick as he eased the robe from Leah’s shoulders then accepted her chemise when she pulled it over her head. She paused for a moment, naked beside his bed, illuminated only by firelight.
“In you go,” Nick said. “I could lend you a shirt, but it would likely strangle you.” He did not dare pat her bottom, lest he then tackle her and doom them to further miseries.
Leah climbed on the bed, and Nick tried to recapture the admonition Val had left him with—something about Nick’s heart breaking when he disappointed Leah.
“You don’t sleep in anything?” Leah asked as Nick moved around to the other side of the bed.
“Typically, no,” Nick said, unbelting his robe. His cock was still more than middling interested in the woman sharing his bed, and so Nick mentally cursed his simpleminded organ for good measure too. “One of the characteristics of great size is an ability to conserve heat, so I’m more comfortable without yards of nightshirt around me.”
“Well, then.” Leah let out a soft, gusty, unhappy sigh. “Good night, Husband. Thank you for marrying me and keeping me safe from my father.”
She sounded so forlorn, Nick’s chest began to hurt.
Damn it, damn it, damn it…
“Good night, Wife. Thank you for marrying me and allowing me to keep my promise to my father.”
And thank you, he silently went on, for even asking what pleases me. He shifted on the bed, and with one more hearty curse directed at his whole, stupid life, Nick linked his fingers through Leah’s and gently squeezed.
He fell asleep like that, cock throbbing, heart aching, fingers entwined with the hand of the wife he would protect with his life, but whose body he would never fully know.
***
Only slightly comforted by the feel of Nick’s fingers closed around her own, Leah struggled with her thoughts long after her husband had drifted off. What had she said; what had she done? Something had put Nick off, had shifted his mood from playful and intent on marital intimacies of some kind, to remote, edgy, and out of sorts.
At least Nick didn’t intend to torment her by sleeping beside her each night. No doubt, this initial night of sharing a bed was for the sake of appearances, to further ensure their marriage was unassailably valid.
Leah eased her fingers from Nick’s. This marriage was going to be long and lonely, probably for them both. She’d be safe from Wilton, at least. But his pure, unrelenting malevolence was a simple source of pain compared to the complication that was Leah’s marriage.
Morning arrived with sunlight bursting through the bed curtains and a pervasive sense of warmth flooding Leah’s awareness. Nick’s scent enveloped her, bringing with it associations of safety, affection, and… frustration. Opening her eyes, Leah eyed the room in which she’d spent the night. The world’s largest tub in the middle of the room was the only jarring note in an otherwise elegant and luxuriously appointed bedchamber.
Nick’s scent, Nick’s house… Nick’s bride.
“You’re awake.” Nick’s voice rumbled from behind her, and Leah realized she was wrapped in his arms, tucked on her side against his chest. His lips grazed her neck, and then she felt those arms withdraw. “I’ve been down to the kitchen.” Nick’s bulk shifted as he bounced over to the far side of the bed. “Our breakfast is being brought up. This is the smallest shirt I could find.” He passed her a linen shirt that could have fit four of Leah inside it, and lifted his velvet dressing gown from the foot of the bed.
“One doesn’t want to scandalize the help,” Nick said, shrugging into his dressing gown while he presented Leah with a fine view of his muscular backside. “Do you need help with that shirt?”
“I’m fine,” Leah reported just as her head emerged from the shirt. “But if for any reason I can’t locate my arms, please notify them that a search has been started.”
Nick smiled and tugged the shirt down. “Arms in sight, and all is well.”
Their eyes met, and Nick’s unfortunate word choice reverberated in the silence.
He sat back. “About last night?”
“What about last night?” She tied the shirt closed at her throat, but it still dipped below her collarbone.
“I have a very clear idea how I do not want to go on with you,” Nick said slowly. “But that doesn’t tell me much about how we should go on, or what you’ll need to be happy as my wife.”
I need you. Leah wondered where that ridiculous sentiment could have come from. Nick was providing her safety in exchange for an untroublesome, virtually white marriage. They could be friends, eventually, if she were very determined and Nick amenable.
“What is it that you don’t want?” Leah asked, but Nick’s answer was preempted by the arrival of breakfast and a parade of footmen intent on draining and then removing the great round tub.
“Gentlemen.” Nick raised his voice slightly. “If you could wait until my wife and I have absented ourselves from the chamber?”
“Very good, my lord.” The head footman bowed and waved the other three away.
“They all wanted a peek at you,” Nick groused when the room was once again devoid of servants. “Let me prepare you a plate. There’s more food here than Napoleon needed to reach Moscow.”
“As much as all that?” Leah gathered the shirt up and craned her neck to see the tea cart Nick had wheeled to his side of the bed. Luscious, bacony, toasty breakfast scents assaulted her nose, and her stomach reminded her audibly that she hadn’t eaten much on her wedding day.
“Eggs and toast,” Nick said, “bacon, ham, scones, butter, jam, fresh oranges, forced strawberries, kippers, sweet rolls, muffins, and what’s this? A pot of chocolate for my lady, and perhaps for my lord, if she’s willing to share. What can I get for you?”
He was back to being his smiling, charming, agreeable self, but there was something off about the performance. For it was a performance, a very good one, in a role Nick adopted as easily as a second skin, but a performance nonetheless.
“Let’s start with bacon and eggs, toast with butter, and some of that chocolate,” Leah replied. “What will you be having?”
“All of the above.” Nick filled a plate for her, the portions generous but reasonable. “And some ham, and an orange or two, as well as the inevitable cup or three of tea.”
Leah built her breakfast into a sandwich.
“I take it,” she began between bites, “we shared this bed last night to create the appearance of consummating the marriage?” Her tone was casual, but she had the sense it took Nick a heartbeat or so to comprehend the substance of the question.
“Just so,” he said, studying the chocolate pot. “I trust my staff, but they do gossip, and Wilton can hire spies as well as the next person can. I wouldn’t want Wilton using any doubts to his advantage.”
“If I am asked,” Leah said, pausing in her consumption of the sandwich, “I can honestly say I made love with my husband.”
He bristled beside her, the chocolate pot returning to the tray with a sharp little clink. “Meaning?”
“Aaron Frommer assured me he was my husband in fact,” Leah said. “I made love with him, or consummated the marriage, in the necessary fashion.” She took a sip of her chocolate, keeping her expression placid. “I think every marriage takes some getting used to, just like the first time you ride a new horse or sail a new boat. I will not render all you’ve done for me pointless, Nicholas.”
Her words did not have the intended effect of putting him at ease.
“Nor will I allow my efforts to keep a promise to my father be shown as an empty exercise,” Nick said. “So like the good English folk we are, we will maintain appearances, but, Leah?”
She was Leah this morning, not lovey, not lamb, not sweetheart.
“I hope we can do more than that,” Nick said. “I don’t know how, not when the entire business of the marriage bed is going to be complicated, but please know I want us to be at least cordial.”
“Cordial.” Leah blew out a breath, hating the word. “I can manage cordial, if that’s what you want.”
“I think it for the best. Shall I peel you an orange?”
A cordial damned orange. Despair reached for Leah’s vitals with cold, sticky fingers. The sandwich she’d eaten abruptly sat heavily in her stomach, and the chocolate less comfortably still.
“No, thank you,” she said, feeling her throat constrict again. She didn’t cry, as a rule, not when Wilton insulted her before guests, not when her brothers lectured her about finding a husband, not when Emily was thoughtlessly cruel in her parroting of Wilton’s positions and sermons and criticisms.
She hadn’t cried when her mother died, hadn’t cried when her father warned her Hellerington would offer for her.
If she cried now, Nick would hold her and stroke her back gently and murmur comforting platitudes, all the while oblivious to the fact that he was breaking her heart with his very kindness.
“I suppose our dressing rooms connect?” Leah asked, her voice convincingly even.
“They do,” Nick said, watching her from the corner of his eye as he buttered a scone. “And you have a sitting room between your bedroom and the corridor, though I do not. I had my bedroom redesigned to encompass my sitting room as well.”
Always helpful to know the architecture of one’s husband’s rooms.
“I think I’ll find my things, then.” Leah tossed back the covers and threw her legs over the side of the bed. “I can’t very well review the staff in your shirt.”
She managed to get free of the room without facing him. The next challenge was closing two doors quietly, calmly, and then the third challenge—barely any challenge at all for her—was to sob out her heartbreak without making a single sound.