Tempting the Bride

chapter 5



Unfortunately, the topic of conversation was not so easily changed. Venetia’s baby would not need any special consideration until it was born, but Helena’s “elopement” was very much a problem that had to be dealt with here and now.

Venetia sent an announcement to the papers right away. Millie and Fitz, who happened to have scheduled a dinner for the following evening, decided they would use the occasion to fete the “newlyweds.” Lexington, who’d originally intended to hold only a small house party in August, said he would now open the invitation list and throw in a country ball to mark Hastings’s entry into the family.

Their kindness made Helena feel twice as wretched. She’d not only betrayed their trust, she’d done so in the most incompetent manner possible. But they did not censure her; instead, they were throwing their combined influence behind her, so that no one would dare question her actions or her place.

None of it would have been necessary if only she’d—and this was the worst realization of all—if only she’d listened to Hastings’s repeated warnings.

When her siblings were at last satisfied that they had a workable strategy, Helena was allowed to leave with Hastings in the duke’s best town coach, a large portmanteau of her belongings having already been sent ahead on a lesser vehicle.

“You will need to do better at my house,” said Hastings as the carriage rolled away from the curb. “My staff, unlike your family, do not know you have been carrying on with someone else. They will expect far more enthusiasm from a pair of eloped lovers.”

He sounded bored, as if the novelty of having her for a wife had already begun to fade. It struck her: In three months’ time he’d grow entirely weary of her.

The thought should have brought her relief, yet it filled her with something akin to horror. “I will give every impression of being happy,” she said through gritted teeth.

“See that you do. I have a reputation to uphold: I am never seen with reluctant women.”

“No, those you save for fiction.”

“And closed doors, perhaps,” he murmured. “But you won’t be reluctant. You’ll like it too much, if anything.”

Not for the first time did the memories of their kiss resurface in her mind. She had not wanted to acknowledge it then—or ever—but her body had liked his, had enjoyed their contact most mindlessly.

She was afraid of that mindlessness, her own hidden sybaritic nature that would allow her to be enthralled with the intimate touches of a man whom she disdained intensely.

“Oh, I’m sure I shall enjoy myself well enough by pretending you are someone else.” She made her tone cutting.

He flicked away an invisible mote of dust from his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll take you only under strong light and with your eyes wide-open.”

He raked her with a slow, heavy-lidded glance. A point of infinite heat flared low in her abdomen—while chills spread everywhere else.

Helena had stepped into Hastings’s town house several times before—he hosted a dinner every Season and her siblings always dragged her along. It was a good house at a fine address, eminently respectable, well proportioned, and it gave an impression of comfort and durability rather than magnificent wealth, even though he did possess a great fortune. Or rather, he’d inherited one; he could have squandered it in the years since, for all she knew.

She entered the house on Hastings’s arm. His staff, lined up to congratulate and welcome her, was half bewildered and wholly curious. She acquitted herself with nods and a few half smiles, leaning into him the entire time—and becoming increasingly and uncomfortably aware of his body. Beneath her hand, his arm was hard as granite. From time to time, he placed his hand over hers with a possessive familiarity, the heat of his touch penetrating her glove. And worse, whenever he had something to say, he did so with his lips almost touching her ear, the caress of his breath broiling her nerve endings.

The housekeeper, Mrs. McCormick, informed her that her portmanteau awaited her in her rooms. She seized upon the opportunity to let go of Hastings. “You will excuse me, my dear, won’t you? I must see to the placement of my wardrobe.”

He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her wrist, a very slightly moist kiss that shot a sensation that was almost pain into her arm socket. “Of course, my dear. Do get yourself settled in your new house. I will have supper sent up for us.”

She escaped, knowing her reprieve would be brief—that henceforth her reprieves would always be brief. With Mrs. McCormick in front of her, and two upper maids trailing behind, Helena made her way upstairs, her face frozen in an expression of counterfeit pleasure. But as she stepped into her bedroom, that counterfeit pleasure swiftly gave away to a groundswell of genuine delight.

Above the wainscoting, the walls of the room were not papered, but painted. For a disorienting moment, she felt as if she stood upon the rampart of a high castle, surveying her own private kingdom. Green, terraced hillsides sloped away from her, vineyards and orchards in full cultivation. Streams and rivulets tumbled toward a blue, distant lake. Drays piled high with wine barrels and bales of hay wended their way along meandering roads.

On one wall, golden and glowing, the sun peeked just slightly above the horizon. The color of the sky, just like that of dawn—or dusk, for that matter—changed as one’s gaze marched across the ceiling, to a twilit blue on the opposite wall, upon which a few faint stars twinkled.

“My goodness,” she murmured. “Who painted this?”

“The master, my lady,” said Mrs. McCormick.

Helena’s pleasure wilted instantly. Not him.

“Very nice,” she said stiffly. Then, realizing she sounded insufficiently enamored, she added more truthfully, “Breathtaking.”

She spent the next hour with Mrs. McCormick and a pair of upper maids, directing them in the arrangements of the various dresses, blouses, and skirts that had arrived in the portmanteau that Venetia’s maid had packed for her—when there was nothing she cared for less now than the whereabouts of her clothes. But she kept at the task doggedly: It was one of those overwhelmingly feminine flurries that kept away any masculine presence.

After there was nothing more to be done for her wardrobe, she bathed and emerged to find her supper. To her surprise, it had not come with Hastings’s company. She didn’t know whether she was further relieved or insulted.

The food she barely tasted, but the mural she could not help study with a scowling concentration. She supposed she ought not be so surprised. Hastings drew well. No reason he couldn’t have also studied oil painting. But the sheer scale of the work, the grandeur and fineness of it, spoke of a dedication she found difficult to ascribe to him.

A sense of déjà vu stole upon her. She was certain she’d never set foot inside this room before. Yet with her initial astonishment fading, the murals began to feel like dear old friends whom she had not seen for quite some years.

The panorama was that of Tuscany, made familiar by Renaissance masters who substituted the vistas of their native country for those of the Holy Land. It wasn’t, however, a generic sweep of hills and cypresses. The ocher-colored house with those green-framed windows, where had she seen it before? The same was true of the line of pristine washing, and the small roadside shrine with bouquets of marigolds laid at the Virgin’s feet.

A maid entered and took away Helena’s plate. Helena repaired to the vanity and ran a brush through her hair. On the vanity was a framed photograph the size of her palm of a small, fair-haired girl in profile. She puzzled over it for a moment before she realized the girl must be Hastings’s daughter.

It was, she supposed, commendable enough of him to see to the child’s welfare. But at the same time, it infuriated her that he could have so many sins under his belt—the fathering of an illegitimate child with a Cyprian included—and still be accepted in every drawing room in the land. Whereas she had to marry the first man who would have her, or be sundered forever from the bosom of her family.

“Lovely sight,” came Hastings’s voice.

She glanced sharply at the connecting door. He stood in the doorway in a black dressing gown, one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb.

“It has been a long time since I last saw you with unbound hair.”

“You speak of the occasion when I found you loitering outside my window and pushed you off?”

“You were murderous. I could have fallen to my death.”

“Instead you lived to enjoy the rosebushes’ thorny embrace.”

“I must have a yen for thorny embraces—I daresay there is no embrace thornier than yours.” He pushed off from the door and stalked toward her. “Let me brush your hair for you.”

Her grip tightened on the hairbrush. “No, thank you.”

She’d gladly whack him if he dared to take the hairbrush from her hand. But he only walked about her, unsubtly inspecting her from all angles.

She took a deep breath. “Is there something you wish to say to me?”

“Why speak when I can look?”

The slow drawl of his words, the light in his eyes, the closeness of his person…Her throat constricted.

He settled a hip on the vanity table. “Actually, let me contradict myself. I do have something to say. What do you mean, you are a virgin?”

She rose and marched to the window to put some distance between them. “What any woman means when she says she is a virgin.”

He snorted. “What then were you doing all those nights you spent with Martin?”

“Pleasurable activities that did not impact my virginity.”

His brow rose. “Did those pleasurable activities include buggery?”

Another woman might have flushed. She was only further offended. “No.”

“I find it inconceivable that Martin has that sort of self-control. How could he have you in his bed and not profit from it?”

“We remained clothed, both of us.”

“At your insistence or his?”

“His, but how does it matter?”

“You would have taken them off?”

“Yes, I would have gladly disrobed for the man I love.”

He said nothing, but picked up her jar of toilette cream, unscrewed the cap, and dipped a finger inside. She couldn’t say why, but the gesture made her face burn.

He rubbed the unguent between his fingers. “Nice. I can probably find some use for it later.”

Behind her, her hands gripped the windowsill.

He glanced at her, a heavy-lidded look she felt all the way to her soles. “And you, my dear, will learn to love the idea of disrobing for me.”

She was still, her gaze focused somewhere behind him.

Redheads were often characterized as passionate and temperamental. He didn’t doubt that she was passionate, but Helena Fitzhugh had always been cool, a woman who liked being firmly in control.

Presently her coolness was almost glacial, sharply contrasted against all that Titian hair spilling down her shoulders and back in soft, gleaming waves. Words usually came easily to him, a versatile, malleable medium to be layered and blended like paint on a palette. Yet when it came to her hair, his mind could not conjure anything more imaginative than fire and its various synonyms.

Flame. Blaze. A conflagration to swallow him whole.

Her body, leaning against the windowsill, was elegantly elongated. He used to call her a giraffe to her face, which she’d always taken as an insult. But a giraffe in person was an impossibly beautiful creature, a testament to the Creator’s skill and imagination.

And just a few hours ago, that body had pressed into his, her fingers plunging into his hair.

“Why?” she asked, snapping him out of his reverie.

He almost couldn’t recall what they’d been talking about. “Why learn to love the idea of disrobing for me?”

“No. Why are you involved at all? Were you a more gallant man, I might have understood your action. But you possess not an ounce of chivalry. How does this profit you?”

Everything he did, he did because he loved her. Her entire family knew it, but she was determined to perpetuate her ignorance.

He thought of Millie’s advice. She and her husband had been the most affectionate of friends for years, and still she’d hesitated to make her true feelings known. What if she and Fitz had locked horns at every turn? Would she have ever taken her own advice?

“Were your bosom more bountiful, there might have been something in it for me.” He shrugged. “Oh well, I trust eventually I will come to enjoy straddling your bony person.”

She pulled her lips taut. “For someone with so little interest in my person, you’ve certainly spent a good deal of time attempting a measure of intimacy.”

“It’s the nature of man. No one really wants to go to the South Pole or cross the Sahara; they just want to see whether it can be done.”

“Whether it can be done,” she repeated slowly.

“Indeed. Shall we proceed?”

“You will wait until we are, in fact, married,” she said coldly.

“Mr. Martin didn’t have to wait.”

“Mr. Martin didn’t actually get to sleep with me.”

He grinned. “Do to me what you did to him—I should be more than happy enough.”

She took a deep breath. “You are a disgusting pig, Hastings.”

She’d compared him to far baser entities over the years, but something in her tone struck him. He’d always been a game to her, a somewhat unsavory game, but one she played with finesse and nonchalance. Now, however, she could no longer rap him on the hand and saunter away; now he was her present and her future.

Her dismay was a sharp twist in his heart, a feeling of utter futility. As ever, when he felt trampled, he turned to ever greater frivolity and callousness, those false friends who led him only deeper into despair, but who, at least on the surface, imbued him with an appearance of flippant nonchalance.

“The slings and arrows I suffer for my honesty,” he said, barely feeling the words sliding past his lips. “Very well then, I’ll settle for a description of what you did.”

“That is none of your concern.”

“It very much is—I have to do those exact same things, don’t you see, to wipe away his fingerprints from your body, so to speak.”

She smiled, an expression of arctic certainty. “You needn’t even try. His fingerprints will always be on my body.”

He walked slowly toward her, his height and breadth somehow multiplying with each step, as did his menace. She realized, for the first time in their long acquaintance, that she’d never encountered his anger—hadn’t even known it was an emotion he ever encountered in his glib existence.

His voice, however, was utterly velvety—if an upholstered wrecking ball could be called velvety. “I won’t need to try, my dear. My touch will burn away his.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“You were always quiet in his bed,” he went on, “but you won’t be in mine. You will scream with pleasure—and you will do it again and again.”

If she gripped the windowsill any harder, she’d break off a piece of it. “If you are quite finished with your theatrics, I am weary and would like to rest—in private.”

He loomed over her, his gaze harsh. For a moment she thought he’d flick aside her request and shove her against a wall. But the next moment he shrugged, very much back to being his normal self—the breaking of the tension oddly vacuumlike inside her chest.

“Of course. I wish you a pleasant night’s rest. I’m sure one of the maids will be eager to entertain me for a couple of hours in your stead.”

Suddenly it was she who was closing in on him, her finger stabbing into his chest. “I can’t stop you from pursuing affairs, but I will not tolerate any carrying-on with the staff.”

“That is terrible—such a convenient source of gratification, the maids. Why, one doesn’t even need to leave the house!”

“You will keep your hands off the maids.”

“Fine. What about my housekeeper?”

Mrs. McCormick was rather youngish, only in her late thirties. Helena grimaced. “Not Mrs. McCormick, either.”

Hastings sighed, as if his patience were being tested by an unreasonable toddler. “Can’t we make a bargain? You can have a go at my grooms while I dally with the maids—provided I get to watch, of course.”

She hoped he was jesting. But Hastings was such a swine, it was quite possible that he indeed hoped for such a debauched tableau.

“No. Nor with your footmen, your coachmen, your gardeners, nor anyone else in or out of your employ.”

“My God, you are turning into Mrs. Monteth.”

“Don’t compare me to that harpy—I am not interested in exposing you. But I will protect the staff from your predation.”

She’d not quite realized it, but she’d been advancing against him and he’d been moving backward, and now they were both back where they’d started, at the vanity table, where she was greeted with the image of his daughter, looking small and meek in her photograph.

The poor girl, growing up in such a salacious household.

“When do I meet Miss Hillsborough?”

He looked nonplussed at the sudden change of topic—and, for once, genuinely surprised. “My daughter, you mean? You wish to meet her?”

“Of course I wish to meet her. Henceforth I am responsible for her upbringing.”

“You’ve never asked about her before.”

“Your illegitimate child is not a subject considered suitable for an unmarried woman to broach. But that is not her fault, only yours. She is approaching an age when she will be in dire need of good guidance—or at least of being spared the sight of you copulating with her nanny.”

“I don’t copulate with Bea’s nanny—not in front of her, in any case. It bores her terribly and rather spoils my mood when she keeps asking when I’ll be finished.”

His shallowness and frivolity were fully back to the fore. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or confused. “When do I meet her?”

“We can leave London as soon as your brother’s dinner takes place—in any case, it will look odd should we continue to remain in town.”

“That will be satisfactory enough. Good night, Lord Hastings.”

He nodded. “Lady Hastings.”

But at the connecting door he turned back. “An experienced virgin, my dear—you are a dream come true. I shall think of you all night long.”

You never sleep in your own bed anymore,” Millie teased Fitz.

Her lovely face and sweet eyes—he could not get enough of looking at her. He lifted a strand of her hair and brought it to his lips. “What a shame. And I like my own bed so well, too.”

She waggled an eyebrow. “I have an idea: From time to time we can both sleep in your bed.”

He brushed the tip of her nose with the ends of her own hair and lifted a brow back at her. “Does that mean you will actually come into my chamber at night, undress me, and demand satisfaction?”

She trailed a finger down the center of his torso. “I thought I already did that—twice—when we were on holiday.”

“That there will be a third time still astonishes me—for almost eight years you said nothing about how fervently you wished to seduce me.”

“All the more reason for me to do it as often and as brazenly as possible.”

He laughed softly. “Shall I tell you again how complete my happiness is?”

She rubbed the inside of her wrist against the beginning of his stubble. “Even with Helena almost ruined today?”

“You are not still blaming yourself, are you?”

“Let me assure you, lover dearest, that having gone to America and back, and dragged Helena all over town this Season just so she was never left alone, I don’t feel as guilty as I probably ought. My mother used to say, ‘There is no stopping a determined mischief maker.’”

“And your mother, bless her memory, was always right.”

“But I am worried. Helena will want to ignore Hastings to the best of her ability. And Hastings…he’d rather be buried alive than be ignored.”

Fitz shook his head. “Those two. I’ll have a word with him tomorrow.”

“I already had a word with him in the last telegram I sent—I don’t suppose he took my advice to heart.”

“You would no more have followed the same advice had he given it to you a few weeks ago.”

“True, but I’ve changed. Now I will openly admit my true feelings, which are that”—she cleared her throat playfully—“I am resolutely committed to being the joy and the light at the center of your existence.”

He couldn’t help smiling: How fortunate he was, how privileged, to have her tonight and always. “Come here, Joy-and-Light,” he murmured. “Let me hold you with both arms.”



Hastings very much wished to bang his head on a bedpost. Another time he might have done so, but Helena was in the next room. Should she hear any suspicious sounds coming from his direction, she’d immediately assume that he’d defied her edict and was rutting with a housemaid in a deliberately noisy fashion. He was almost tempted to make his bed squeak, just to see whether she’d kick down his door in anger.

This was not at all how he’d imagined it would be when he finally had her in the mistress’s room. At this point in the night, after having exhausted themselves making love, they should have been snuggled under the covers, whispering and giggling like children, telling each other naughty jokes, describing slightly impossible sexual feats they planned to try as soon as they’d regained their breath.

That future was not supposed to feel more distant than ever.