A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau

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A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau Page 5

by Mary Balogh


  “It is time for you to leave, sir,” she said.

  “Past time, I believe,” he said, throwing back the covers and coming off the bed with remarkable grace for such a big man. “It would not do for me to be seen slinking from your house at dawn, wearing evening clothes.”

  “No, indeed,” she agreed. And she stood watching him dress. She had never thought of any other man as beautiful—oh, yes, she had. Yes she had. She clenched her hands unconsciously at her sides. But he had been youthful, slender, sweet.…

  She turned back to the window.

  She shrugged her shoulders when his hands came to rest there, and he removed them.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It was a great pleasure.”

  “I daresay you can see yourself out, Mr. Downes,” she said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, ma’am,” he said.

  She heard the door of her bedchamber open and close again quietly. A minute or so later she watched him emerge from the front door and turn right to walk with long, firm strides along the street. She watched him until he was out of sight, a man quite unafraid of the dark, empty streets of London. But then he had probably known a great deal worse in Bristol if his work took him near the dock area. She would pity the poor footpad who decided to accost Mr. Downes.

  What was his first name? she wondered. But she did not want to know.

  She stood at the window, staring down into the empty street. Now, she thought, her degradation was complete. She had brought home a total stranger, had taken him to her bed, and had had her pleasure of him. She had given in to lust, to loneliness, to the illusion that there was happiness somewhere in this life to be grasped and to be drawn into herself.

  And she was to be justly punished. She already knew it. Her bedchamber already seemed unnaturally quiet and empty. She could still smell him and guessed that the enticing, erotic smell, imaginary though it doubtless was, would linger accusingly for as long as she remained in this house.

  Now she was truly promiscuous. As she always had been, though she had never lain with any man except Christian—until tonight. Now her true nature had shown itself. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the cold glass of the window.

  And she had enjoyed it. Oh, how she had enjoyed it! Sex with a stranger. She heard herself moan and clamped her teeth hard together.

  She was awash with the familiar feeling, though it was stronger, rawer than usual—self-loathing. And then hatred, the dull aching hatred of the one man who might have allowed her to redeem herself and to have avoided this. For years she had waited patiently—and impatiently—for him to release her from the terrible burden of her own guilt. But finally, just a year ago, he had plunged her into an inescapable, eternal hell. She felt hatred of a man who had done nothing—ever—to deserve her hatred or anyone else’s.

  A hatred that turned outward because she had saturated herself with self-hatred.

  She could feel the rawness in her throat that sought release through tears. But she scorned to weep. She would not give herself that release, that comfort.

  She hated Mr. Downes. Why had he come to London? Why had he come to Lady Greenwald’s soirée? He had no business there, even if his sister was married to a member of the ton, even if he was something of a nabob. He was not a gentleman. He had stepped out of his own world, upsetting hers.

  But how unfair it was to hate him. None of what had happened had been his fault. She had seduced him. His only fault had been to allow himself to be seduced.

  For one moment—no, for two separate moments—the loneliness had been pushed back. Now it was with her again, redoubled in force, like a physical weight bowing down her shoulders.

  She must never again—not even by mild flirtation—try to dislodge it. She must never again so much as see Mr. Downes.

  EDGAR FELT SHAKEN. What had just happened had been a thoroughly physical and erotic thing, quite outside his normal experience. He had been caught up entirely in mindless passion.

  Lady Stapleton. He did not know her first name. It somehow disturbed him that he did not even know that much about her. And yet he knew every inch of her body and the inner, secret parts of her with great intimacy.

  He had had women down the years. But except for his very early youth, he had never been led to them from lust alone. There had always been some sort of a relationship. He had always known their first names. He had always bedded women with the knowledge that the act would bring him more pleasure than it brought them. He had always tried to be gentle and considerate, to make it up to them in other ways.

  He had never known a truly passionate woman, he realized—until tonight. He was not sure he wanted to know another—or this one again. There had been no doubt about her consent, but still he felt vaguely guilty at the way in which he had used her. He had not been gentle. Indeed, he had been decidedly rough.

  He felt distaste at what he had done. He felt dislike of her. She had clearly set out to lure him to her bed. If there was a seducer in tonight’s business, it was she. He did not like the idea that he had been seduced. If she had had her way she would have dictated every move of that first encounter, including, he did not doubt, the moment and manner of his climax.

  He had come to London, he had gone to that soirée, in order to find himself a bride. And he had been presented with three quite eligible prospects. He would perhaps choose to pay court to one of them. He would betroth himself to her before Christmas or perhaps at Mobley Abbey during Christmas. He would wed the girl soon after and in all probability have her with child before spring had turned into summer. He had promised his father, and it was high time, even without the promise.

  And yet on the very evening he had met those three young ladies, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a scene of sordid passion with a stranger, with a woman whose first name he did not know.

  She was a lady, not a courtesan. A beautiful lady, who was accepted by the ton. Obviously tonight’s behavior was not typical of her. If it were, she would be unable to keep it hidden well enough to escape the sharp eyes and gossiping tongues of the beau monde. Clearly, then, he was partly to blame for what had happened. He had stared at her when she had first appeared, and she had caught him at it. He had freely admitted his origins and present way of life to her at supper and had thus revealed to her that he was a man outside her own world.

  Somehow he had tempted her. He understood that young widows—and perhaps those who were not so young, too—could feel loneliness and sexual frustration. One of his longer-lasting mistresses had been the widow of a colleague of his. He might eventually have married her himself if she had not suddenly announced to him one day that she was to marry a sea captain and take to the sea with him.

  He had done Lady Stapleton a great wrong. It would not be repeated. He wondered if he owed her an apology. Perhaps not, but he owed her something. A visit tomorrow. Some sort of an explanation. He must make her aware that he did not hold her in contempt for what she had allowed tonight.

  He did not look forward to the visit.

  LORD FRANCIS CAME out of his library as Edgar let himself into the house. He lifted the cup he held in one hand. “The chocolate is still warm in the pot,” he said. “Come and have some.”

  Edgar had hoped everyone would be safely in bed. “Waiting up for me, Francis?” he asked, entering the library reluctantly and pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

  “Not exactly,” Francis said. “Waiting for Cora, actually. Annabelle woke up when we tiptoed into the nursery to kiss the children, and Cora lay down with her. I daresay she has fallen asleep. It would not be the first time. Once Andrew came to me for comfort and climbed into bed beside me because his mama was in his own bed fast asleep and there was no room left for him.”

  “That sounds like Cora,” her brother said. He felt some explanation was necessary. “I escorted Lady Stapleton home because she had no other escort. And then I decided to walk about Mayfair and get some fresh air rather than return to Greenwald’s.
A few hours at such entertainments are enough for me.”

  “Quite so,” Francis said. “Firm up the story for Cora by breakfast time, old chap. She will wish to know about every post and blade of grass you passed in your nocturnal rambles. You do not owe me any explanation. She is a woman extraordinarily, ah, well-endowed with charms.”

  “Lady Stapleton?” Edgar said carelessly, as if the idea were new to him. “Yes, I suppose she is.”

  Lord Francis chuckled. “Well,” he said, “I am for my lonely bed. You look as if you are ready for yours, too, Edgar. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Edgar said.

  Damnation! Francis knew all right. But then he would have to be incredibly dim-witted to believe that story about the walk and fresh air.

  4

  HELENA WAS USUALLY FROM HOME IN THE MORNINGS. She liked mornings. She loved to walk in the park early, when she was unlikely to meet anyone except a few tradesmen hurrying toward their daily jobs or a few maids running early errands or walking their owners’ dogs. Her own long-suffering maid trotting along behind her or, more often, the menacing figure of Hobbes, the one servant who traveled everywhere with her, made all proper. She liked to go shopping on Oxford Street or Bond Street or to the library to look at the papers or borrow a book. She also liked to visit the galleries.

  Mornings were the best times. The world was fresh and new each morning, and she was newly released from the restlessness and bad dreams that oppressed her nights. Sometimes in the mornings she could fill her lungs with air and her body with energy and pretend that life was worth living.

  But on the morning after Lady Greenwald’s soirée, she was at home. She had not found the energy nor the will to go out. The clouds were low and heavy, she noticed. It might rain at any moment. And it looked chilly and raw. In reality, of course, she rarely allowed weather of any type to divert her when she wished to go abroad. This morning she was tired and listless and looking for excuses.

  She would send for her aunt, she decided. Aunt Letty liked town better than the country anyway, and would be quite happy to be summoned. She was, in fact, more like a friend than an aging relative—and therein, perhaps, lay the problem. Helena had numerous friendly acquaintances and could turn several of them into close friends if she wished. She did not wish. Friends, by their very nature, knew one intimately. Friends were to be confided in. She preferred to keep her acquaintances at some distance. She certainly did not need a friend in residence. But, paradoxically, her friendless state sometimes became unbearable.

  She procrastinated, however, even about writing the letter that would bring her aunt home. She stood listlessly at the drawing room window, gazing down on the gray, windblown street. She was standing there when she saw him coming, walking with confident strides toward the house just as he had walked away from it last night. He wore a greatcoat and beaver hat and Hessian boots. He looked well-groomed enough, arrogant enough, to be a duke. But that firm stride belonged to a man who had all the pride of knowing that he had made his own way in his own world and was successful enough, rich enough, confident enough to encroach upon hers.

  She hated him. Because seeing him again, she felt a deep stabbing of longing in her womb. What she had allowed last night—what she had initiated—was not so easily shrugged off this morning. Her hands curled into fists at her sides as she saw him turn to approach her front door. She stepped back only just in time to avoid being seen as he glanced upward.

  So he thought he had acquired himself a mistress from the beau monde, did he? As a final feather in his cap? She supposed that a mistress from her class might be more satisfactory even than a wife, though perhaps he thought to acquire both. The Graingers would not have shown such interest in him last evening if they had not heard somewhere that he was both eligible and available.

  He thought that because he had given her undeniable pleasure last night she would become his willing slave so that she could have more. She swallowed when she remembered the pleasure. How humiliating!

  The door of the drawing room opened to admit her butler. There was a card on the silver tray he carried. She picked it up and looked at it, though it seemed an unnecessary gesture.

  Mr. Edgar Downes. Edgar. She had not wanted to know. She thought of Viking warriors and medieval knights. Edgar.

  “He is waiting below?” she asked. It was too much to hope, perhaps, that he had left his card as a courtesy and taken himself off.

  “He is, my lady,” her butler told her. “But I did inform him that I was not sure you were at home. Shall I say you are not?”

  It was tempting. It was what she wished him to say, what she intended to instruct him to say until she opened her mouth and spoke. But it was not to be as simple as that, it seemed. She was on new ground. She had done more than flirt with this man.

  “Show him up,” she said.

  She looked down at the card in her hand as she waited. Edgar. Mr. Edgar Downes.

  She felt very frightened suddenly—again. What was she doing? She had resolved both last night and this morning never to see him again. He posed far too great a threat to the precarious equilibrium of her life. She had spent six years building independence and self-assurance, convincing herself that they were enough. Last night the glass house she had constructed had come smashing and tinkling down about her head. It would take a great deal of rebuilding.

  Mr. Edgar Downes could not help. Not in any way at all.

  She could no longer possibly deny that she wanted him. Her body was humming with the ache of emptiness. She wanted his weight, his mastery, the smell of him, his penetration. She wanted him to make her forget.

  But she knew—she had discovered last night if she had been in any doubt before that—that there was no forgetting. That the more she tried to drown everything out with self-gratification, the worse she made things for herself. She should not have told Hobbes to send him up. What could she have been thinking of? She must leave the room before they came upstairs.

  But the door opened again before she could take a single step toward it. She stood where she was and smiled.

  AT EACH OF his professions in turn Edgar had learned that there were certain unpleasant tasks that must be performed and that there was little to be gained by trying to avoid them or put them off until a later date. He had trained himself to do promptly and firmly what must be done.

  It was a little harder to do in his personal life. On this particular morning he would have preferred to go anywhere and do anything rather than return to Lady Stapleton’s house. But his training stood him in good stead. It must be done, and therefore it might as well be done without delay. Though he did find himself hoping as he approached the house that she would be from home. A foolish hope—if she was out this morning, he would have to return some other time, and doubtless it would seem even harder then.

  He knew that she was at home when he turned to climb the steps to her door and looked up and caught a glimpse of her at a window, ducking hastily from sight. She would not, of course, wish to appear overeager to see him again. His irrational hopes rose once more when that pugilist of a manservant who answered the door informed him that he thought Lady Stapleton might be from home. Perhaps she would refuse to see him—that was something he had not considered on his way here.

  But she was at home and she did not refuse to see him. He drew deep breaths as he climbed the stairs behind the servant and tried to remember his rehearsed speech. He should know as a lawyer that rehearsed speeches scarcely ever served him when it came time actually to speak.

  She looked even more beautiful this morning, dressed in a pale green morning gown. The color brought out the reddish hue of her hair. It made her look younger. She was standing a little distance from the door, smiling at him—that rather mocking half smile he remembered from the evening before. The events of the night seemed unreal.

  “Good morning, Mr. Downes.” She was holding his card in one hand. She looked beyond his shoulder. “Thank you, Hobbes. That will b
e all.”

  The door closed quietly. There was no sign of the aunt or of any other chaperone—an absurd thing to notice after last night. He was glad there was no one else present, necessitating a conversation about the weather or the social pages of the morning papers.

  “Good morning, ma’am.” He bowed to her. He would get straight to the point. She was probably as embarrassed as he. “I believe I owe you an apology.”

  “Indeed?” Her eyebrows shot up. “An apology, sir?”

  “I treated you with—discourtesy last evening,” he said. Even in his rehearsed speech he had been unable to think of a more appropriate, less lame word to describe how he had treated her.

  “With discourtesy?” She looked amused. “Discourtesy, Mr. Downes? Are there rules of etiquette, then, in your world for—ah, for what happens between a man and a woman in bed? Ought you to have said please and did not? You are forgiven, sir.”

  She was laughing at him. It had been a foolish thing to say. He felt mortified.

  “I took advantage of you,” he said. “It was unpardonable.”

  She actually did laugh then, that low, throaty laugh he had heard before. “Mr. Downes,” she said, “are you as naive as your words would have you appear? Do you not know when you have been seduced?”

  He jerked his head back, rather as if she had hit him on the chin. Was she not going to allow him even to pretend to be a gentleman?

  “I was very ready to take advantage of the situation,” he said. “I regret it now. It will not be repeated.”

  “Do you?” Neither of them had moved since he had stepped inside the room. She moved now—she took one step toward him. Her eyes had grown languid, her smile a little more enticing. “And will it not? I could have you repeat it within the next five minutes, Mr. Downes—if I so choose.”

  He was angry then. Angry with her because despite her birth and position and title she was no lady. Angry with her because she was treating him with contempt. Angry with himself because what she said was near to truth. He wanted her. Yet he scorned to want what he could not respect.

 

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