by Gabriel
“Perhaps ladies are immune from base instincts.” Though Marjorie was one of eight children, suggesting Lady Hartle’s theory was questionable. “But I’ve met women of every nationality and social stripe, Marjorie Wendover, and I can tell you, women are not immune.”
“Women.” Marjorie rose and swatted the dead leaves with her whip, sending several twirling into the air. “Can one be both lady and woman?”
Gabriel certainly thought so. On that cheering notion, Polly got to her feet. “If one’s husband is both gentleman and man, I think it becomes second nature. But let’s continue this discussion over a cup of tea, shall we? It’s getting nippy out, and we can’t have two people falling ill at once.”
They made their way back to the house arm in arm, footmen trailing at a discreet distance.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Marjorie said as they approached a back entrance. “Somebody betrayed you, didn’t they? Some man.”
“My lack of common sense betrayed me. It was a long time ago, and there were few lasting consequences. Do you think we’re in for some snow?”
Polly told her polite lie and changed the topic to the weather, but inside, where those lasting consequences threatened another bout of tears, she had to wonder at herself. What was wrong with her, that she could live for years as her daughter’s beloved aunt, but now, separated from Allie for the first time, she felt like a raging fraud?
***
“You’re awake!” George strode into the room, sporting the false cheer of one compelled to visit the sick.
“Barely.” Gabriel dragged himself up to a sitting position, and because he’d been enjoying one of his frequent, shamelessly lovely naps, it wasn’t hard to feign the mental fog and heavy-limbed movement of the indisposed. “Good of you to come.”
“Spot of tea?” George gestured to the service sitting on the raised hearth.
“Help yourself. Maybe half a cup for me.”
“Voluminous intake of fluids is at variance with the need for bed rest,” George observed. “I had a lung fever last winter, which allowed me to appreciate this truth.” He busied himself with the tea service and brought Gabriel’s cup to the bed. “Drink up. A little scandal broth is good for the soul.”
Gabriel took a parsimonious sip because George had added neither cream nor sugar. “I gather Aaron deserted his post in the sitting room, leaving you to take a turn with the invalid?”
“I chased him off.” George fixed himself a cup with the dispatch of a bachelor who knew his way around a tea tray. “He was in a lather to talk to the ladies about something.”
“No doubt trying to cadge another pie out of Miss Hunt, or perhaps Lady Marjorie.” Gabriel again put his lips to the delicate rim of the teacup, but as if he were truly ill, the brew tasted off. He set the cup aside, wondering how long the leaves had been left to steep.
“I think Marjorie is in better spirits for having another lady on the premises.” George flicked out his coattails and took the chair next to the bed. “Aaron might consider hiring a companion for her.”
“Miss Hunt gives Marjorie someone besides her agitating mama for moral support, and evens up the numbers a bit.” Gabriel tagged on a small, raggedy cough lest George overstay his welcome.
“What of you?” George’s smile became sly. “Any new friends of the female persuasion on the horizon?”
Gabriel held up a hand. “Wait until the title has been properly hung around my neck, and then I’ll be swarmed with bleating little debutantes.”
“Assuming the courts don’t march you up the aisle with Marjorie.” George slurped his tea enthusiastically, suggesting the flavor agreed with him well enough. “There are worse fates than ending up with Marjorie for a wife.”
Gabriel produced a semi-genuine yawn. “You’ve been breeding livestock too long. I am not going to marry Marjorie, regardless of what the courts suggest. She is my brother’s wife, and that’s an end to it.”
George peered into his teacup. “Courts don’t suggest. They order, with rather nasty consequences for those who disobey their orders.”
“If I commit a crime, I’ll be tried in the Lords. They won’t hang me for nearly getting killed in Spain, then doing what I thought proper to keep body and soul together. Aaron has forgiven me, and as far as I can see, he’s the most wronged party.”
“You don’t consider Marjorie is wronged?”
“She got the better man.” Gabriel yawned again, because George in the role of Marjorie’s knight errant was tiresome, if novel. “And she’s as besotted with him as he is with her. If you ask me, their marriage is one good thing to come of this mess.” Among several very good things, among which acquaintance with Polonaise Hunt figured prominently.
George set his cup down. “I do believe you have the right of it, at least in Marjorie’s eyes, and Lady Hartle never was one to see what was in front of her face. But I’ve tired you, so I’ll take my leave.”
“You can’t.” Gabriel let his eyelids lower. “Not until you have Aaron fetched from his skirt chasing. I’m not to be alone. Lady Marjorie has declared it a requirement of good care that I have no privacy whatsoever.”
“And we mustn’t disappoint our marchioness, right?” George left on a wink and a smile, dutifully lingering in the sitting room until not Aaron but Polly appeared in Gabriel’s bedroom.
George stuck his head in the door to deliver his parting quip. “She’s easier on the eyes than your brother, and likely to make you recover faster, because you’ll listen to her. Good day, Miss Hunt, and pleasant dreams, Gabriel.”
Gabriel slumped back on the pillows, oddly disquieted by George’s visit. When he let his gaze fall on Polly, his disquiet found a different focus.
“Polonaise, come here.”
“I’m here.” She settled into a cushioned chair. “You’re there, and that’s fine with me.”
“Ah, we’re cranky.” Which in that special lexicon of terms he used to refer to her, meant he needed to hold her.
“Marjorie and Aaron are considering having a child,” Polly said, the way somebody might mention an impending spate of decent weather to a neighbor in the churchyard. “This should relieve your mind.”
“Do not make me spring from my sickbed to chase you around this room, Polonaise. You only think you want to provoke me into a row, but what you really want is comforting.”
“In broad daylight, Gabriel? You really must be feeling better.”
“I’m positively frisky, though that’s no threat to you, I assure you, because my self-restraint is legendary. Now, my dear, quit spooking and shying at imaginary rabbits, and join me on this bed.”
She looked wary and disgruntled as she minced over to the bed and perched at his side. “I’m here.”
“Bodily,” he allowed, studying her face. “You’ve been crying, my love.” He dragged her to his chest and settled his arms around her. “This is not permitted, unless I’m to know the reason why.”
“Damn you.” She sighed against his shoulder. “I have no privacy with you.”
“You deserve none, if all you’re using it for is to hide your heartaches,” he chided. “Talk to me, Polonaise, and if it’s within my earthly power, I’ll make it right.”
“You can’t,” she murmured against his neck. He felt the first hot trickle of a tear slip over his collarbone. “Gabriel, I wish you could, but you can’t help. Nobody can.”
***
“Gabriel has given his permission for my portrait to be done,” Aaron said, his gaze on the embroidery Marjorie was stabbing away at. “I wasn’t aware you embroidered.”
Nor had he known her favorite flower, her favorite dessert, or that she had been as lonely in their marriage as he’d been.
“Only out of sheer desperation.” Marjorie tucked the needle into a corner of the piece. “And not well. You don’t seem pleased about this project, Aaron.”
Aaron, not my lord. He had to hear that as progress, but toward what?
“The prospect of s
itting on my backside, looking elegant or noble or mysteriously impressed with myself for hours on end strikes me as a protracted attempt at fraud, though I refuse to be immortalized dragging dead bunnies about by the ears or breathing in the scent of some hound slobbering at my booted feet.”
“Fraud?” Marjorie brushed her fingers across the fabric in her hoop, upon which had been stitched two creamy-white birds—doves, if Aaron wasn’t mistaken—and some green twiggish things. “Have you seen my portrait yet?”
“I wasn’t aware we were allowed to peek.” He’d wanted to, because if Miss Hunt thought to make his wife look silly, vapid, immature, or anything unflattering, he’d hang the thing in the attic.
“Polly isn’t particular.” Marjorie’s gaze followed him as he paced the sitting room. “I’ve seen it since the day she started, and the whole business is fascinating.”
“Do you like it?”
“Love it.”
Aaron paused in his peregrinations to stare at her, because for a moment, his wife’s lashes had lowered, and her voice had turned smoky. For that instant, she hadn’t been the rather-too-young marchioness, but a pretty woman bent on enticing her husband.
“What do you like—love—about it?”
“That’s hard to say.” Marjorie set her doves back in a sewing basket. “Polly did a number of preliminary studies of me, and she showed me those too. She showed me that I can be different people.”
“As we all can, I suppose.” Aaron was not agreeing merely to be polite, but because Marjorie certainly had many interesting facets.
“She’ll show you some of those people you are but didn’t know you had lurking inside.”
“And what if I don’t like what she shows me?”
“You will,” Marjorie said. “Because even a part of you that doesn’t have much appeal deserves to be acknowledged, and when you allow it’s a part of you, it loses some of its… disenchantment. I am too easily swayed by my mother’s opinion, but when I see an image of myself as a bewildered little girl whose gowns look too big for her—”
“They aren’t too big for you. They fit… exceedingly well.”
His cravat was fitting exceedingly well too, and the air in Aaron’s lungs had gone somewhere unavailable, while Marjorie continued to study him in a considering, very female way.
“You like my gowns?”
“I do.”
“That was the easy version,” Marjorie said. “Do you like me?”
“I always have.” He’d gotten it out without a hint of hesitation, for it was the truth, and idiot that he was, he’d forgotten it himself. “I have always thought you were the pick of Hartle’s litter, the one with the most sense, joie de vivre, and beauty besides. I envied my brother, not his title, not his wealth, not his impressive Town friends, or his first in Latin, but you.”
“Me?”
“Just you.” He stepped closer, because words like this, too long unspoken between them, were not for overhearing or mistaking. “Will we be trying for that baby, Margie?”
She regarded him with a slight frown, then went up on her toes and pressed her lips to his.
He froze, trying to recall when, if ever, in the two long, lonely years of their marriage, she’d initiated a kiss on the mouth; and then he couldn’t recall what day it was, because Marjorie Wendover was running her tongue over the seam of his lips and sliding her hand right over his chest to encircle his neck.
“I’m thinking about it,” she murmured before seizing his mouth again.
He wrapped his arms around her, cradled her head for a better angle, and thought about it right along with her for a good five minutes. When she sighed and subsided against him, she tucked her cheek against his chest, kept one arm around his neck, and one hand laced with his where he’d folded it against her heart.
“Was that an affirmative decision?”
“Perhaps.” She fell silent for the space of an inhale and a slow exhale, while Aaron knew his heart must be hammering under her ear. He could feel his pulse in his privy parts, for God’s sake, and she wasn’t being shy about the consequences where his erection pressed against her belly.
And she was saying “perhaps.” Perhaps was not “no,” but it left a great distance to “yes.”
“What can I do to assist with an affirmative decision?”
She nuzzled him, and he knew a compulsion to sweep her off her feet and abandon this duel of words to the saner arguments of the body. He wanted her, had always wanted her, and she seemed to want him.
And they were married with a duty to the title, and he had a cock-stand this bloody, panting minute.
“Do you care for me, Aaron?”
“Of course.” He couldn’t help holding her more tightly as the words made it past his lips. Then, more deliberately, “I care for you and your happiness a great deal, Marjorie, and I’m sorry if I’ve given you leave to doubt. This marriage is not your fault. I’ve never believed it was.”
She regarded him, some of the haze leaving her eyes.
Was that the wrong thing to say or the right thing? He watched her with an intensity he couldn’t mask.
“Then to assist me in coming to an affirmative decision”—she kissed the side of his neck—“you must tell me these things, Aaron. Husband.”
“Husband.” He’d always thought the word prosaic, perhaps a little negative, implying as it did a man answerable under the law for the care and well-being of at least one female, and possibly a brood of hatchlings as well. Not a very free person, the husband.
But on her lips, “husband” sounded like the highest title in the land, carrying the greatest wealth and privilege.
“What must I tell you?”
“That you care for me, that you desire me, that you do not resent me,” Marjorie said. “I will tell you the same things.”
She cared for him? Desired him? “Love words? You want us to court each other?”
“We never did, and yet I don’t think it beyond us if we’re to expect a baby of each other.”
“It’s not beyond us.” If she’d told him to run to London and back, he’d do it in his bare feet. “It’s just… you want this?”
“I do not want to have a baby to placate a solicitor or to drive off my mother’s wrongheaded notions, Aaron.”
Damn and blast. “You don’t.”
“I want to have a baby, your baby, because you are my dear husband and it will make our family real.”
Husband, family. Two words he’d have to reconsider—later.
“And you are my dear wife,” he said, his embrace gentling. “And it will be my privilege to court you, but, Margie? We haven’t a great deal of time. Your mother might join suit at any moment.”
“This is true.” Marjorie’s smile was diabolically sweet. “So you’d better get busy, hmm?”
***
Gabriel’s hand smoothed over Polly’s hair in a repetitive, soothing rhythm, and the intended comfort of it just made her cry harder. He began speaking to her, softly, so softly that in her great upset, she likely wasn’t intended to hear his words.
“Hush, my love, be calm in your heart. I’m here, I’ll never leave you to face your troubles alone. Take courage, and lean on me, for my life is given meaning by the ways I can ease your burden and share your path. This is caring, too, to comfort and aid each other, and I offer it to you. Take it, take it please, and take my heart with it.”
How florid his sentiments, and Polly had no idea what to make of them. Just words, likely, to pour over her weeping, like a lullaby to the ears of a distraught, weary child. She took the handkerchief he’d tucked into her hand and tried to tidy her face.
“I hate to cry.”
“You need to cry more then,” Gabriel said, resting his chin against her temple. “One gets better at it. It merely wants practice.”
“As if you’d practice your crying.” She knew what he was up to. Confounding her, tangling her in a small argument to distract her. “Don’t be so sweet.”
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br /> “Sweet?” He made a face; she could hear him making a face, and she wanted to see it but didn’t want him to look at her, all blotchy and red and at her worst. “For you, I can tolerate being called sweet, but I know what you’re about, carping at me already and my handkerchief not even dry. You won’t sway me from my interrogation, Polonaise. Who has put you in such a lachrymose frame of mind, so I might call them out or simply shoot them on sight?”
“You’d never do such a thing.” She bundled in closer as his hand slipped to her back, there to caress away her sorrows.
“For you, I’d challenge the French army single-handedly, provided you’d fed me properly first. Now, spill.”
“I miss Allie.” Saying the words out loud was hard, and good, too. Gabriel had loved that child if he’d loved anyone—admitted to himself he’d loved anyone—and Allie had loved her Mr. North.
“She is easy to miss.” His voice held no teasing, no banter, no latent challenge. He missed Allie too, and that was as much a comfort as the strength of his arms around her. “She writes to you though.”
“She does, though the letters are not her usual cheerful chatter. She’s lonely, Gabriel, and growing up and not sure what to make of Beck, or the baby, or of all those people Beck is related to.”
“Family like that would overwhelm anybody. Particularly a little girl raised almost exclusively by her womenfolk. Would you like to go visit?”
She bit her lip to stop herself from saying that what she wanted was to go home, to set aside this silly notion of painting portraits for coin, and reestablish herself in the Three Springs kitchen, scolding as exuberantly as she cooked.
“I’ve had another letter from Tremaine,” Polly said. “I haven’t opened it. He’s no doubt asking for another progress report and crowing about more sales or commissions.”
“Your commercial success doesn’t warm your heart, does it, Polonaise?”
He meant this as a comfort, as an admission he’d make for her so she need not articulate it herself. “Success warms my pockets. I have a need to warm those, Gabriel. I hated, absolutely hated, being dependant on my sister for my every meal when I was younger. At least at Three Springs, I could work for a wage.”