I have blundered around like a bloody bull in the market square, he thought, sending a smoke ring up to the ceiling. A maid entered and poured more hot water into his bath, and he closed his eyes, relaxing in the luxurious herb-scented water. The Strongwycke household was run on sumptuous lines and he had set himself to enjoy it while it was available. It was not that the Varens estate was austere, but there was a definite difference between an earl’s household and a baronet’s.
He pondered his future. Marriage was not for him, perhaps. Though he would like to be married. He would like children, and he would like a woman who would be there at the end of the day to talk to, to be with, to make love to.
Rachel. He tried to dismiss her picture from his mind. She was only there because he had gotten used to thinking of her as his future wife, that was all. He would now erase her—
Though she had looked so splendid the last time he saw her. And even as angry as he had been with her over the theater episode, he still had never seen nor met her equal. And she had humbled herself enough to apologize to Andy, and very handsomely too, his sister had said. There was a warmth there now when he thought of her.
It was not love though, he reminded himself. It was just friendship. That was all there would ever be between them, that friendship.
And yet— The warm water swirled around his loins and he felt the old, slow arousal, the stirring as he thought of her, imagined kissing her lips, touching her petal-soft skin, caressing her breasts. She was the only woman who had ever moved him that way, made him want her with just a glance, just a touch. He had been with women, but not one could compare to Rachel. Nor ever would, he feared.
A million times he had imagined every detail of their wedding night, down to the moment when he claimed her as his own, his love forever, and then, after, gently showed her what pleasure could be between a man and a woman. And yet she was so cool. Did he know for sure that a fire burned within her somewhere? Every shred of evidence said no, that she was cold through and through. But instinct told him, whispered that she was afraid, that she was deeply passionate and that was why she hid it so well, tamping it down and freezing it out.
The maid came back in with a large, soft towel, and he stood up from his bath. Her cheeks turned bright pink as she offered him the wrap, and he was puzzled until he noted the state his thoughts of Rachel had brought him to, and where the maid’s eyes had wandered. He felt his cheeks turn ruddy and he wrapped himself quickly.
“Send my valet in, will you, Anna?”
She ducked her head and bustled out, and he heard her giggling in the hallway with another maid.
He dried himself, pulled on a robe and moved toward the fire. He must quell his sensual thoughts, especially since he knew there was no way he would ever achieve the object of his desire, Miss Rachel Neville. He must not delude himself that there was some hidden ember within her that he could coax into a flame. She was beyond his touch forever, and would soon be married to that fubsy-faced, frosty iceberg, Yarnell.
He felt the surge of anger in his veins, the fire that burned whenever he thought of the marquess and how he would soon own the fair Rachel, body and soul. He breathed deeply, quelling it, unballing his fists, consciously relaxing his taut stomach muscles. “Save it for the ring, boy,” he said to himself, his voice echoing oddly in the master bedchamber. “Save it for the ring.”
Chapter Ten
“What is your problem, girl?”
Rachel looked up as her grandmother entered the drawing room, leaning heavily on her cane but carrying a roll of fabric under one arm and trailed by a footman with more bolts of material. “There is nothing wrong with me, Grandmother.” She tossed aside her sewing. She hadn’t laid a stitch in it for an hour anyway.
“There is,” the woman asserted, her voice querulous. “You’re sickening for something. What is it?”
“I miss Pammy. And Haven. Our family is breaking up.”
“And soon you will be wed to that long-toothed sober-side and gone, too.” She hobbled further into the room. “Aren’t you looking forward to it? It is all you have talked of since you were fourteen.”
Primly, Rachel said, “I am indeed looking forward to marriage, and being Lady Yarnell.”
The dowager stared at her for a minute, then waved the footman to deposit his burden and be gone. She added her own roll of fabric to the pile and, tapping over to her middle grandchild, she sat down in a chair near her with a groan. She had lived for more than eighty years, and had not been especially dull of wit even as a child; with the added experience and observation of all those years, she was considerably sharper than many people thought.
She leaned forward, supported by her cane, and gazed into Rachel’s face. Many had said that her gaze pierced through the shell of protection most people threw up around their soul. What a bunch of rubbishy nonsense! She just chose to see people’s actions and interpret them. Few folks were truly impenetrable. Rachel, though, was often one of those few. She maintained the façade of an elegant lady even when she was deeply disturbed.
But there was something wrong, and as poorly as she and Rachel got along, she loved her granddaughter fiercely and hated seeing her unhappy. And the girl was unhappy. “You, child, are a liar.” She straightened from her examination.
“Oh, Grand!”
“Hmph, you never call me that. What’s got your tail in a twist?”
Rachel stood and paced the length of the room to the fireplace and stared up at the baroque hearth, the twisted gargoyles and fanciful birds. She put out one hand, blindly it seemed, and touched a tendril of carved ivy leaves. “There is nothing wrong. I have exactly what I want in life, what I have been looking for. Lord Yarnell is a good man, and wealthy beyond even my dreams. He likes me and wants to marry me.”
The dowager felt her stomach wring as if someone with strong hands was twisting it in their grip. There was so much unhappiness in the child’s voice, all the more desperate because she was trying so hard to suppress it. That she was so easy to read was a testament to how deeply disturbed the girl was. The dowager had never truly understood Rachel because the child was so self-contained and aloof. Since she was thirteen, shortly after her father died, actually, she had retreated into a shell and stayed there.
But she had always seemed happy enough in a calm, self-possessed way. There were no wild ups and downs the way her sister, Pamela, experienced them. Everyone—including her grandmother—had always assumed she just did not feel things very deeply.
Could they have been wrong?
“Child, come here.”
Rachel was reluctant; it was there in the stiff line of her backbone, the rigid set of her shoulders, but she obeyed.
“Sit!” As Rachel sat before her, the dowager set aside her cane and took the girl’s face within her two bony, knobby hands and stared into her pale, lustrous eyes. She looked deep, reading, learning, and was startled to see two giant teardrops squeezing up into the corners of her granddaughter’s eyes.
“You have a grave decision to make, and do not know what to do, is that true?”
Rachel gasped and brushed away the tears as her grandmother released her face. “How did you . . . ? What do you mean, Grandmother?”
The dowager shook her head slowly, not even sure how she knew what she knew. “You have always been the child I did not worry about. You seemed to know what you wanted from the day you were fourteen, and so I believed you, believed you could handle things on your own without my elderly interference. But now I see turmoil in your eyes, indecision. You do not know what to do about something, and I must imagine it has something to do with your marriage.”
Rachel collapsed on the table in front of her, burying her face in her arms and sobbing. The dowager stroked her head, letting her get it all out, winding the chestnut curls around her knobby arthritic fingers and feeling love for her middle grandchild swell into her heart and fill it, like springwater in a newly drilled well. The girl had not cried since the night her fat
her had died.
But a lack of tears did not mean a lack of feeling.
“My son loved you best of all his children. Did you know that?” she asked Rachel.
Rachel nodded, even though her face was still covered and the tears were still flowing.
“It hurt you badly when he died, did it not?”
She nodded again. “He w-was the only one who ever loved me,” she sobbed.
“Nonsense. I love you. And your mother! She thinks the world of you, too, child!”
“Mother loves me as long as I do well, like now, with Yarnell. But if . . . if I was not to make this brilliant match . . .” She shook her head, raised her face and sniffed back her tears. “Mother really loves Haven best; we all know it. He is her golden boy, even when she is berating him.”
The dowager cocked her head on one side. “I have not thought that, but perhaps you are right. That’s not important right now, though; you are. Let us come to the present day. You aren’t sure about Yarnell, is that it?”
Rachel shook her head slowly. “I . . . don’t know. I was. He truly is a good man, Grandmother, I know he is. He is a little haughty. I know that. But I have been accused of that too. That’s why I thought we would suit; I understand him.”
The dowager sat back and listened, amazed at the self-knowledge the girl had when she had always thought Rachel single-minded and indifferent to others’ opinion. “You were, as a child, the sweetest of all the children, the most vulnerable, I always thought. Haven, being a boy, had a natural toughness to him and Pamela was resilient, like a willow, bendable, but you . . . I have never seen anyone hurt so deeply as you when your father died.”
Rachel was silent for a long minute, and her voice, when she did speak, was broken and quiet, clogged with tears. “I knew, when he died, that no one ever again would love me so deeply, without reservation, without hesitation. And I knew I would miss that.”
The dowager watched Rachel as she wiped the tears from her eyes in an uncharacteristically inelegant movement, and remembered Sir Colin Varens and his oft-repeated proposal. She had always ridiculed the fellow for his devotion to Rachel in the face of Rachel’s unwavering rejection of his suit. Did the boy know something they had all missed? Was Rachel really the passionate, tenderhearted one in the family, and had she submerged that side of herself out of fear of pain?
“What is it now that gives you doubt about your marriage?” she asked, wanting to get to the heart of the problem. Who knew how long this strange fit of openness would last before Rachel would shut again as tightly as a clam? She laid her knobby hands flat on the table in front of her, then scratched at a groove in the wood with one thick fingernail.
“I am afraid he loves someone else.”
She stopped her scratching.
“What?” Whatever she had expected, it was not this. “What do you mean?”
Rachel told her the tale of meeting Miss Millicent Danvers, and seeing her fiancé’s reaction to the young lady. She seemed not so much jealous as puzzled.
“If there is feeling between them, why are they not betrothed?”
Rachel nodded, as if her grandmother had hit what she herself had been wondering. “Well, Miss Danvers’s background is in trade. Yarnell is—”
“A long-nosed sour-faced elitist.”
“Grandmother, I am only guessing about the . . . the division between them. There could be other reasons, more personal things.”
“And you are guessing at the love, too, are you not?”
“Yes. I have no proof, just the way they look at each other.”
“Do you love him?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Are you still intent on marrying him?”
Rachel sighed. She covered her face with both slim hands, but then uncovered her face and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
The dowager decided to approach the problem from the opposite end. “Why does it matter to you if he is in love with another woman?”
Wistfully, Rachel gazed off out the dirt-clouded window. Her gaze was unfocused. “Lately, it seems as if everyone is in love with someone. And they all look so happy. Even when they’re agonized, they’re still happy to be in love.”
This was a new side to her grandchild, one that she had never seen, and the dowager did not quite know what to say, except, “Ask him. You must ask him if he is in love with the Danvers chit. You will not be happy until you know the truth.”
“I can’t do that, Grandmother. And our wedding has already been announced. I think I’m better off not knowing.” She sighed again. She straightened her back and stiffened, taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “No, our future is set. Yarnell and I will marry and be happy. He is a good man, and I can be his wife and raise our family.”
The dowager frowned as she watched the coolness set in, like frost on an October night stealing over her. Rachel’s slim fingers checked her hair, making sure no stray curls escaped her perfect style, and she adjusted her lovely dress, settling the folds into perfect order. The dowager liked the other Rachel much better, the one that was uncertain and misty. But this was the one she was accustomed to. Finally, she said, “You must do what you think best, Rachel, but remember: you only have one life. Live with no regrets.”
• • •
Live with no regrets. Her grandmother’s words echoed in her head, taunting her with the temptation of life lived on terms other than society’s rigid expectations. What would she do if she had only herself to consult, only her own pleasure and desires, and not societal strictures? Rachel pondered that for the rest of the day.
• • •
“Lord Yarnell has arrived, Miss Neville.” The butler bowed in her fiancé, who looked as dapper and neat as always.
“Miss Neville, you look blooming as always,” he said, coming forward and kissing her hand.
“Yarnell,” she said coolly.
“I thought we would go for a drive in the park. Would you like that?”
His uncertainty was endearing, in a way, and Rachel saw a flash of what Miss Danvers was perhaps speaking of when she had mentioned his charm. “I would like that,” she said, smiling up at him. She called her maid and donned her bonnet and pelisse, and took his arm as they exited.
“I brought the landau. We will have . . . Miss Neville?” He looked back up the steps at her.
Rachel had stopped at the top of the steps down to the street. There, in the landau, was Lady Yarnell, sitting grimly and waiting for her son and his future wife to join her.
“I did not know your mother was to accompany us,” Rachel said in a strangled tone. “I thought we could talk.”
“We can talk,” he said, looking up at her with a frown. “Miss Neville, you can say anything in front of my mother. She is to be your mother soon, too, you know.” He stepped up the two steps to where she stood, frozen, took her hand, and led her to the carriage.
The ride to the park was accomplished in grim silence. The landau was elegant but ponderous, and the park was crowded. Yarnell, Rachel had noticed, was always more silent and reserved in his mother’s presence, and since she was usually around, he was generally silent.
They passed a carriage of older people at one point, and Lady Yarnell said, “Yarnell, have Coachman slow. I wish to talk to Mrs. Forest for one moment.”
The carriage was duly stopped, and Lady Yarnell leaned over the edge and talked to her acquaintance.
“Yarnell,” Rachel said in a low tone. “I must speak to you.”
“About what, Miss Neville?”
He kept a decorous six inches between them at all times, but Rachel moved closer and hissed, “Not here. Will you walk with me?”
“I don’t think . . .”
Rachel summoned all of her considerable firmness and said, “I will go no further until we talk, Yarnell. Let us stroll, and meet your mother further along.”
Disconcerted and frowning, Yarnell acquiesced, though Lady Yarnell was still asking what they wanted to wa
lk for, what they were to talk about, and why they needed to leave her alone, as they walked away.
Once alone, Yarnell said, “Miss Neville, I’m not accustomed to being rude to my mother. What is this all about, and why must we walk when we have a carriage?”
Her lips clamped together, Rachel guided him to a quiet, tree-lined walk, and stopped, turning and gazing up at him. A breeze riffled through the trees, but she noted it did not dare lift his thick hair, so well had it been damped down and rigidly styled. “Yarnell, first, I think as your fiancée I deserve as much consideration as your mother, and I would think you would wish to be alone with me on occasion. That you don’t does not show a proper amount of feeling toward the woman who will be your wife and bear your children.” As she talked, she felt a freedom taking wing in her heart. She had been silent too long, and it was not like her.
“Miss Neville, I must say this outburst is most unlike you, and it borders on . . . on insolence. And I do not like this loose talk of children. And I dislike very much that you felt compelled to drag me away from my mother. It shows an improper lack of feeling.” His voice was hideously priggish and his expression was prim.
Anger welled up into her heart. “I will not be treated as second best to your mother, Yarnell. So if you chose me as a wife because you thought I would be silent and scared, then I am the wrong wife for you.” She took a deep breath. “But that is not what I drew you aside to talk about, although it is high on my list of things we need to straighten out. Foremost on that list is something entirely different. My lord, are you in love with Miss Millicent Danvers?”
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