by Mary Balogh
She heard Gil come in and go to his room about half an hour after he had left. She was seated in their private sitting room, pretending to read a book, when he came out, dressed for dinner.
“Gil,” she said before he could say anything or before a silence could settle between them and be too awkward to break, “I understand. I do. I shall let Elizabeth know that if she wishes to invite the family to tea at her house, I will be delighted to join them, but that it must not be announced as a wedding celebration. I shall tell her how busy you are.”
“Is that the polite way of saying I simply will not go?” he asked her.
She hesitated. “Yes,” she said.
“And so you put me in the wrong,” he told her. “I force you to lie for me.”
“Can we just leave it at that?” she asked him. “Not quarrel anymore?”
“Is that what we have been doing?” he said. But he held up a hand before she could answer. “Yes, it is, and I am entirely to blame. I am sorry, Abby. I should have realized . . . I ought to have understood.”
“Understood what it would mean suddenly to find yourself married into an aristocratic family?” she asked. “Even though I am only an illegitimate member?”
“It did not strike me quite so forcefully with my first marriage,” he said. “I was not made to feel welcome from the start, and there was never any question of my meeting any member of the general’s family or of Lady Pascoe’s. Give me time. And yes, we will leave it at that for now. Let us go down to the dining room and think of some other topic of conversation to pursue during dinner.”
“Agreed.” She smiled at him and took his arm.
They talked about India. At least, he did while she listened with great interest and asked questions. And she talked about growing up at Hinsford, amusing him with stories about some of the people he had met during the weeks he had spent there.
They sat for a long while over their tea after they had finished eating and were the last of all the hotel guests to leave the dining room. Even so they went to bed early, exhausted after a day of travel and the emotional stress of the visit to her mother and the quarrel that had followed.
Not too exhausted, however, to make love before they slept. And how wonderful it was, Abigail thought as she drifted off to sleep, cradled in one of his arms, her head half on his shoulder, half on his bare chest, to be married at long last. And to be married to Gil. He was very different as a lover from anything she had expected. Not that her expectations had been very detailed, since she had no experience whatsoever by which to set them. But she had expected something far more . . . brisk. And forceful.
He was a gentle lover. And he took his time about making her feel somehow cherished, both before he entered her and after. He loved slowly and thoroughly and, she supposed, expertly. She was still a little sore from last night, but when he had asked about it as he was coming into her tonight, she had denied it. For the soreness had felt almost lovely. Ah, it was a good thing she did not have to put her feelings into words. They would make no sense. Her feelings made all the sense in the world.
She did not want to be in love with him. Theirs had never been billed as a love match. It was a practical arrangement between two people who had come to like and respect each other and who had both admitted an attraction to each other.
It would be foolish to fall in love.
* * *
• • •
Gil tipped his head to the side to rest his damaged cheek against the top of Abigail’s head. Her hair was warm. Her naked body, like his own, was still damp from lovemaking. She was lovely to make love with. It felt so very good to have a woman of his own, a wife, a friend. A lover.
She was also one of them. To reason that they were equals because both were the by-blows of aristocratic fathers would have been an absurdity. Her mother was not a blacksmith’s daughter. Neither had she been turned off by her family to raise her children in desperate poverty in a hovel, despised by everyone and his dog.
But a sense of victimhood was an ugly thing to nurture. He had shared it with a thousand other recruits in the ranks but had shaken it off, to be replaced by a determined self-respect when he rose first to the rank of corporal, then to that of sergeant. It had come sneaking back on him after he had been commissioned as an ensign, and then thrust off again during the years following as he doggedly taught himself to speak and behave as a gentleman even if he could never be one or be quite treated as one. His hard-won pride in himself had been severely shaken throughout the whole Caroline saga. He supposed now it had never fully recovered since. And today it had been very nearly shattered.
Both Dorchester and his wife, Abigail’s mother, had invited them to stay there—for dinner, for the night, for as long as they intended to remain in London. Fortunately for him, Abby had been adamant about coming back to the hotel instead. He still did not know what he would have done if she had been eager to stay.
He would have suffocated. At the very least. Even though he had shared their company and that of other Westcotts for a whole week not long ago.
Abby’s head had shifted. She had tipped it back so that she could see into his face. In the flickering light of the candles they had left burning on the dressing table she looked flushed and tousled and lovely. He kissed her softly on the mouth and felt a renewed stirring in his loins.
“You cannot sleep?” she asked him.
“Perhaps I am simply lying here enjoying the aftermath of a bedding with my wife,” he said.
She smiled slowly, but she was clearly not convinced. “You are not relaxed,” she said.
He had thought he was. Lovemaking did that to a man. But perhaps only in body. His mind had been churning with thoughts and emotions that had somehow got trapped up there with them. Negative, self-pitying emotions. Her family had been the model of good manners—and would continue to be, he would guess, provided he did well by Abby, as he fully intended to.
He hated his victim persona. Like an addiction, it could never seem to be conquered once and for all. It always found a way back in.
“Perhaps,” he said, “that is because I am not yet finished. You have married a greedy man, Abby.”
But she was still unconvinced.
“Gil,” she said, “my family is important to me, and I will always want to be close to them. But if ever I had to choose between them and you, I would choose you without any hesitation. When I married you in the village church, I meant every word I spoke. I married you body, mind, and spirit.”
“I would never, ever ask you to choose,” he told her. “And I am of the firm belief that no one in your family would ask it of you either.”
She smiled her slow, lovely smile again. It was starting to do strange things to his stomach.
“Tell me about your mother,” she said.
Ah, it was starting again, was it? The probing at each other, the unmasking, the getting to know each other at ever-increasing depths. It was something that he and Caroline had not done. He was not sure he wanted to do it with Abby. Except that she wasn’t giving him much choice. And he seemed unable to resist. And it must continue if theirs was to be a real marriage with a chance of lasting contentment.
He felt a lurching of sudden longing for his mother, who had died far too young, exhausted no doubt by the hardness of a cruel life. He sighed.
“If I had to describe her with one adjective,” he said, “it would be proud. We lived in a house unworthy of the name. It was really fit for nothing but to be pulled down. She kept it spotlessly clean and tidy. She kept me clean and dressed me in clean clothes every day even when they were so patched that there were patches upon patches. She forced me to sit silent and idle in a corner for a whole hour at a time whenever I retaliated against those children who called me names by calling them names with language that belonged in the gutter. She insisted whenever I showed signs of slouching along the stre
et, hoping not to be noticed, that I straighten my shoulders and hold my chin high. She always did the same herself. No one walked with a more regal posture than my mother, even when she was carrying a heavy basket of laundry.”
“What did she look like?” she asked.
“It seems strange,” he said, “but I do not believe children really notice how their parents look. Children do not see their parents as people, but only as mother and father. At least, I suppose that applies to fathers too. She was thin rather than slim. She was pale with faded fair hair. But when I bring her face to mind, I can see that she must once have been pretty. Perhaps very pretty.”
She smiled and raised one hand to run her fingers lightly along his facial scar.
“I was incensed when she acquired a friend just before I left,” he said. “I had looked forward to the day when I could be the man of the house and enable her to take in less washing and have a few brief spells each day simply to put her feet up. One of my most enduring dreams was that I would come home one day having spent some of my earnings on a new dress and new shoes for her and see the look of surprise and delight on her face when she saw them.” He sighed, then continued. “He was a groom at the big house a few miles away, that friend, and he bought her a dress and a bonnet one day while I was at the village tavern trying for at least the dozenth time to persuade the publican to hire me to muck out the stables. I wanted to kill that groom. I wanted to rage at the pleased look on my mother’s face. I hope he continued to look after her when I was gone. I hope she had a few happy years before she died. I wrote to her a few times from India. I even sent her money. But she could not write back. She could neither read nor write.”
“You loved her,” Abby said.
“We did not deal in such emotions,” he said. “The poor do not, you know. They cannot afford love.”
“Oh, Gil,” she said, “you cannot possibly believe that. Even with the few details you have given me, I can tell that your mother loved you. And it is perfectly obvious you loved her.”
“I do not know anything about love,” he said. He could not imagine his mother ever using the word. He was quite sure she never had while he lived with her.
“Of course you do,” she told him. “You love Katy.”
He closed his eyes and did not say anything for a while. Truth to tell, he was fighting a soreness in his throat and up behind his nose. It would be shameful indeed if he allowed it to reach his eyes.
“I have not seen her since she was a baby,” he said at last. “I do not even know what she looks like now or what her voice sounds like. I do not even know how much she can talk. When does an infant learn to speak? She would not know me. It is possible she does not even know of my existence. She would probably be frightened of me if she saw me, especially if I tried to take her from the only home she knows.”
“Love will not always cause you pain,” she said. “And even when it does, it is better than the alternative. Being without love would be only one remove from despair. I cannot imagine anything worse.”
Was she asking him to love her? Was she hinting that she might love him? But it was only a word, was it not? He would not be able to define it if his life depended upon it.
“You love Beauty,” she said. “And she loves you.”
“Old softie of a dog,” he said, and she laughed. He loved her laughter. There. He had used the word in his head. He loved her laughter.
But he wanted their relationship to stay like this. Pleasant—except when they quarreled. At this moment it was very pleasant, without any of the wild passions, almost all of them dark, that had swirled through and about his first marriage.
He found her mouth and kissed her, and then prolonged the kiss because she was warm and soft and inviting. He pressed his tongue inside, and she sucked on it before he curled the tip and stroked the roof of her mouth until she made a low sound deep in her throat.
“Come across me,” he said. When she looked inquiringly at him, he moved his hands to grasp her by the hips and lift her over him until she was straddling his body. Her knees were on either side of his hips, her hands spread over his chest, and her hair was falling forward in a tangled cascade over her shoulders.
She had a body that delighted him—flat stomach and ribs, breasts just large enough to fit into his hands, rose-tipped nipples that hardened easily against the light stroking of his thumbs. Her hips were shapely though not large. Large enough, though, he thought, to allow for the easy passage of a child. Her legs were slim and long. And her skin in the candlelight was the color of alabaster and as smooth as the finest silk.
He guided her over him and drew her down onto his erection. Her eyes closed and she clenched inner muscles about him, and it was exquisite pleasure-pain.
“Ride,” he said.
Her eyes flew open and came to his. Then they drifted closed again and she rode. He lay still for a long time, reveling in the feel and sight of her, his hands and forearms along the outsides of her bent legs. His body urged him to grasp her hips, to drive up into her, to force a climax and release and relaxation. His mind, that hornet’s nest of churning emotions for the past several hours, commanded him to be still, to allow himself to be . . . loved. Or enjoyed. That would be a better word. For there was no doubt that she was enjoying what she did.
And then her eyes came open again, looking very blue in the guttering light of the almost-spent candles, and her hands slid up to his shoulders, and her head bent closer to his.
“Gil,” she whispered, and he obeyed instinct and grasped her hips and took them swiftly and together to the place for which they strove.
The breath shuddered audibly out of her when finally they were still and the tension had gone, and he brought her down to lie full on him, her legs relaxed on either side of his own, her head turned face in against his shoulder. With one foot he nudged up the bedcovers until he could grasp them with one hand and pull them higher.
“Gil,” she murmured again.
Now at last he would sleep. Thoughts had been routed by sexual satisfaction and the warm, relaxed weight of his wife’s body on his own. He did not try to find words.
He was still inside her.
Eighteen
They spent a large portion of the following morning in the gloomy, wood-paneled chambers of the law firm of Grimes, Hanson, and Digby. Mr. Grimes was a thin man of medium height and silver hair, a pair of spectacles resting halfway down a sharp nose so that he could peer downward through them when reading and over the top of them, with a slight dip of the head, when he was talking to his client. He appeared unassuming and unimpressive, but his eyes, which looked alternately upward and downward, were keen, and his questions proved thorough, his opinions and pronouncements blunt.
He looked Gil over from head to foot as he shook hands with him, his eyes resting rather longer upon his facial scar than on any other part of him.
“I do not know, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, “if you intend to take my advice and resign your commission or retire from the army. But I would strongly recommend that you wear your dress uniform when you appear before the judge who will decide your case. Your formidable appearance will be less daunting perhaps when seen in the context of your military background.”
Gil had taken great care over his appearance, since this was his first face-to-face meeting with his lawyer. But apparently he looked sinister nonetheless. It did not help that he towered over the man by a good six inches, and that he probably weighed twice as much.
“I shall think about it,” he said, nodding curtly. “Allow me to present Mrs. Bennington, my wife.”
She had dressed in a rather severely styled moss green walking dress, which nevertheless looked smart and expensive and accentuated the slimness of her figure. She had styled her hair smoothly over the crown of her head and twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck beneath her brown bonnet. There was not a stray curl
in sight. There was a certain regality about the way she reached out her right hand toward Grimes and slightly inclined her head. She looked every inch the Lady Abigail Westcott she had once been.
“How do you do?” she said.
“Ma’am?” The lawyer took her hand and bowed over it before returning his gaze to Gil. “I am delighted that you followed this particular piece of advice of mine,” he said. “Will you come into my chambers and be seated, Mrs. Bennington? Lieutenant Colonel?”
A clerk followed them in, bearing three cups of coffee on a tray with a silver jug of milk and bowl of sugar.
“I will also be putting an end to my military career,” Gil said when the clerk had withdrawn and closed the door quietly behind him. “I intend to be a full-time husband and father.”
Grimes nodded his approval and turned his attention back to Abby. “And who, ma’am, might you be?” he asked, his eyes peering very directly at her over his eyeglasses.
Gil bristled. “I hardly think—” he began, but he was stopped by an imperious hand, which was raised palm out.
“I am sure you do not, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “But it is the first thing Sir Edward Pascoe’s lawyer will want to know. And only the first. He will want to know—and he will discover—everything there is to know about your wife in the hope of finding something or several things that would disqualify her from being a suitable mother for Miss Katherine Bennington.”
“If anyone has anything to say in criticism of my wife,” Gil said, on the verge of getting to his feet and taking Abby away from there, “he may say it to me, sir. You can be sure I—”