His arms tightened, keeping her still. Then he sighed. “There’s something I have to tell you.” A moment passed, then he went on, “It would help, a lot, if you remain as you are and listen, and say nothing—do nothing—until I tell you the whole.”
She stayed silent and still within his arms. Wondering…suddenly worried.
He drew breath, then said, “I already know who I want for my wife.”
Her heart constricted, a sharp pain. She moved, unable to stay still.
He tightened his hold. “Just listen.”
There was an urgency in his voice, a taut tension that surprised her, made her listen even though she didn’t want to hear.
“I didn’t know who she was when I returned to fix the mill. But my sisters, and Sybil, too, forced me to look at her—really look. And when I did, I saw…” He paused, then went on, his words falling by her ear, earnest and intent; he wanted her to understand. “I already knew my criteria—the things I wanted in my bride. Age, birth and station, temperament, compatibility and beauty—that was my list. The lady in question obviously satisfied all those criteria except that I didn’t know her well, so couldn’t tell if we’d be compatible.”
He drew breath. “So I set out to discover if we were.” He paused; she suddenly felt cold, suddenly felt an inner quiver. She couldn’t think. Then more softly he asked, “Do you remember when I told you what our first kiss was about—what I said? But before we got to that, you’d already told me in no uncertain terms that you would never believe, refused to believe, that I would want you for my wife.”
A shiver materialized. She ignored it, frowned. “Me?” He shifted, and she wriggled and turned. Stared at his face as he flicked out the silk shawl that had been lying on the daybed’s back and spread it around her shoulders. She gripped it, clutched it, staring, stunned, at him. “You want to marry me ?”
He met her eyes and quietly stated, “All along I wanted to marry you.”
He paused, then went on, “If you remember, I told you I wanted you warming my bed.” He pointed toward the castle. “My bed—the one in the earl’s chambers, the one only my countess will ever grace. That’s where I wanted you—that’s what I meant.”
She still couldn’t take it in. “You meant to marry me—virtually from the first.”
“After that first kiss, yes.”
“But…” Confused, she gestured around them, pushed back her hair. “What was all this about, then? The game we’ve been playing? My seduction?”
His lips twisted, a wry grimace. “You told me why you didn’t believe—no, why you knew I would never seriously consider marrying you, why you believed I never would. You listed your reasons, remember. You had four—that I wasn’t honestly attracted to you, not physically, that you were too old, that you weren’t the sort of lady society would accept as my countess and that we would never get along, the two of us, not in the sense of living together, because we’re too alike.”
She stared at him, her eyes slowly narrowing as she connected actions with his words…she suddenly understood why he was being so careful, why he was tense. “You’ve been attacking my reasons. One by one.”
His lips thinned. “Undermining them. You didn’t give me much choice. I came home from London frustrated beyond bearing—and then I found you, and realized you were the one I wanted, the one I’d been going to London to search for. You were here, under my nose all along, and all I’d had to do was open my eyes. Once I had…I wasn’t about to accept your dismissal and meekly go away.”
She snorted. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘meek.’”
“True.” The tight smile he flashed her was more warning than reassurance. “So I set out to prove to you that I honestly desire you—you can’t possibly question that anymore. And you must by now realize that no one else sees either your age or your nature as in any way disqualifying you for the position of my countess. All our neighbors, all of local society would see a marriage between us as an excellent match.”
“Oh, my God!” Her eyes widened, her lips parted in shock. Then she glared at him. “Who else knows? You said your sisters and Sybil—who else?”
He wasn’t surprised by her reaction, that much was clear from his grimace and ready answer. “Not the whole neighborhood—it’s not exactly something I would shout from the steeple.”
“Thank Heaven for that. So who?”
He sighed. “My sisters and Sybil—as I said, they pointed me in your direction and insisted I look, so they were aware from the outset of my interest.”
She remembered his sisters at the festival, all they’d said. “Dear Heaven! Your sisters are worse than you.”
“Very likely—a point you might want to bear in mind.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “No others?”
He pressed his lips together, then said, “Muriel’s guessed, I think. And your brothers.”
“My brothers ?”
He nodded. “Harry spoke to me—entirely correctly. They’d noticed my interest, even if you hadn’t.”
She stared at him, stunned again. “Good God.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
For a long moment, she simply sat there, naked on the daybed, clutching the shawl about her shoulders, facing him, completely naked, her hips and legs wedged in the space between his knees, and tried, frantically, to get her mind to take in all he’d said, and readjust her world.
In the end, she blinked, focused on his eyes, and asked, “What now?”
“Now?” His jaw set. “Now we go on until you’re convinced we can get along on a daily basis, and then you agree to marry me and we arrange a wedding—and then I get to have you warming my bed.” Taking her free hand, he urged her up. “And if we’re to get you home before dawn, we’ll need to get dressed.”
She glanced at the windows, at the faint lightening of the sky; he was right. Standing, she found her head whirling. “Wait.” Letting the shawl fall to the daybed, she clutched his arm. “You’re rushing ahead too fast.”
Releasing him, she went to the chair and tugged her chemise from the jumbled pile of her clothes. She struggled into it, then turned to see him looking down, buttoning his trousers. “Just because we’ve been lovers I’m not going to meekly say yes and marry you.”
He looked up at her. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘meek.’”
She grimaced, and reached for her drawers. “As I said, we’re much alike. And that doesn’t necessarily augur well for domestic peace.”
“It does, however, mean we’ll usually understand each other.”
Stepping into her silk drawers and pulling them up, she gave her attention to settling and tying the drawstring at her waist. If she’d stood on painful ground before, at least she’d been confident she knew the landscape. Now he’d shifted everything, and she no longer felt confident of anything at all.
She shot him a dark glance. “I notice you haven’t said that because we’ve been intimate I have to marry you to preserve my reputation.”
“Indeed—do, please, notice that.” He cast her an equally sharp glance, then started tying his neckerchief. “If I thought such a ploy had a hope in hell of succeeding, I’d be pushing the argument for all it’s worth. Explaining the facts of life to Harry—”
When she gasped, he shot her an irritated look. “But as I know you’ll only dig in your heels harder if I take that tack, I didn’t even consider it.”
“Good—because it won’t work.”
“I know—see? Understanding at work.”
She humphed, and wrestled her riding dress into place. “You’ll have to help me with these laces.”
Shrugging on his jacket, he came over and did so, swiftly redoing what he’d earlier undone. She felt him tie off the knot, but then he paused. Then he turned her to face him.
His hands on her shoulders, he looked into her face, into her eyes. For once let her see into his, past his guard—see clearly and without equivocation the possessiveness he
was reining back.
“I want you as my wife—and I don’t like having to wait. But I know you’re not yet ready to agree. However, as I told you at the outset, I want you warming my bed—for the rest of my life. Whatever you want, whatever you need to get you to agree, I’ll do it, I’ll give it. Whatever it takes, I want you as mine.”
She held his gaze steadily, let a moment tick past, then simply said, “I need to think.”
He nodded and released her. As he moved away, heading for where he’d left his boots, he murmured, “If you feel anything for me, don’t take too long.”
Gervase insisted on riding all the way back to the Park with her. Which did nothing to clear her head, or stop her whirling thoughts.
When she woke the next morning—late—she felt muddle-headed, but found she couldn’t think about, couldn’t concentrate on, anything else. Not until she’d decided on this, on them, on him and how she should deal with him.
What she wanted from him in order to agree to be his. What else she needed to know. Whether she dared.
Marriage between people like them was not something to be embarked on lightly, not a link to be recklessly forged.
Leaving Harry to face the ledgers alone, she pleaded a headache and went to walk in the rose garden. To pace.
She’d seen falling in love with Gervase as a risk, a danger, but had embarked on their liaison, their affair, anyway, then, when love had sneaked up on her and blossomed so easily, she’d blithely—recklessly—surrendered to it. She’d meant to stay on guard and be wise, but it—he—had somehow slipped under her shield and lodged in her heart.
That was one thing. Unrequited love when she was merely his temporary lover was a scenario she’d been willing to face and cope with…at least she had been until she’d realized just how strongly she felt about him, how possessive of him she’d grown.
Regardless, she’d accepted the risk and couldn’t now retreat. So she loved him, and knew it. But did he love her?
When they’d been no more than lovers, that hadn’t truly mattered. Now he’d asked for marriage, it did. A liaison lasted for a finite time; marriage was forever. If she agreed to marry him and he didn’t love her…what then?
Could she bear it if, years from now, he found another, a lady whom he did love, and turned from her?
She honestly didn’t think she could.
Head down, hands clasped behind her back, she paced unseeing along the paved path between the burgeoning bushes.
How could she learn if he did, or could, or would, love her? She was too well acquainted with the male of the species to place any reliance on words, especially those uttered in the heat of the moment, under duress—especially, for them, emotional duress. No matter what he swore, or how sincerely he spoke, she wouldn’t accept mere words as proof of his affection.
Where else to look for such proof? That was the first of the questions facing her—the first she had to answer.
The scent of roses wreathed about her. She paced, and thought, and wrestled with her feelings, and tried to imagine his. After a largely futile half hour, she headed inside, her way forward unresolved but her goal at least clear.
To avoid a potentially soul-destroying marriage, or alternatively to grasp a shining prize, she had to find some way to discover whether Gervase Tregarth truly loved her or not.
Somewhat to her surprise—to her unease—the one question she hadn’t even needed to ask was whether she wanted to marry him. That, she’d discovered, not entirely happily, was a want already engraved on her heart.
A little before noon, Gervase called in at Tregarth Manor, the manor house outside Falmouth where he’d been born. He spent an easy half hour chatting with his cousin, who now lived there with his wife, confirmed that he no longer felt any strong connection to the place—it was no longer “home”—then headed on to his destination, Falmouth itself.
He paused on the last hill above the town, studied the roofs sprawled about the harbor, then shook Crusader’s reins and headed down, the steady clop of the big gray’s hooves following his thoughts around and around.
As they circled one female—one frustrating, stubborn, when it came to herself blind Valkyrie he was one step away from forcibly seizing and carrying off to his bed. And keeping her there until she agreed to marry him forthwith.
Even now, hours after the fact, he was still grappling with the frustration that had gripped him when he’d realized the direction of her thoughts. Lady Hardesty’s blindness—which would have made Madeline’s more understandable except that they lived in deepest Cornwall, not London—and the insult the group had, albeit unintentionally, handed her, had made him see red. Literally. He was still amazed he’d handled the moment with passable civility. “Civil” wasn’t how he’d been feeling.
But then to discover that she had still not grasped the notion that she was the lady best suited to be his wife, that she still saw herself as a passing fancy, a local lady he’d seduced to be his mistress for the summer, had all but shredded his control.
He’d felt distinctly violent in that moment on the dance floor, then even more so when on the beach she’d confirmed her complete lack of comprehension of all he’d spent the last weeks trying to show her. To demonstrate to her, because actions spoke so much louder than words.
In her case, not even actions had sufficed; she’d thought her way around them, rationalized them—had made them fit her entrenched view that she was not the lady who would be his countess.
But she was. His jaw clenched; he tried not to let his grim determination seep into his expression—no need to scare the other travelers on the road.
Regardless of her willful stance, she was the one, the lady who would, as he’d informed her, warm his big bed at the castle for the rest of his life.
In the face of her determined refusal to see, he’d jettisoned his careful approach and told her the blunt truth—not solely so he could more openly forge ahead with his campaign to win her, but equally in response to her question of how long he would remain in the country—how long he would remain with her—and the vulnerability he’d sensed behind it.
He didn’t know if she loved him as yet, but he suspected she was at least close to it. That realization had been the only bright moment, one moment of blessed relief among the other, less happy revelations of the night.
So now she was at least thinking of him and her in the appropriate way, and considering agreeing to marry him. He hadn’t exactly proposed; he inwardly winced as he recalled what he’d said, how he’d put it. But at least she now knew how he felt, how he saw her.
Of that, at least, she could no longer harbor any doubt.
Unbidden, his mind ranged ahead, to their wedding—he assumed it would be at the church at Ruan Minor. That seemed likely; both their families were part of that congregation. He knew the church well, could imagine himself standing before the ancient altar, could imagine turning and seeing her, walking up the aisle to his side…
Crusader jerked his head, jerking Gervase from his dream. He realized; frustrated irritation swamped him. “Good God! Now I’m fantasizing.” His sisters would laugh themselves into fits. It hadn’t even been the wedding night he’d been fantasizing about.
“First things first,” he muttered beneath his breath. How to get her to agree.
Slowing Crusader to a walk as the first cottages neared, he considered what he could do, what ammunition he had. He could bring in the heavy artillery and recruit her brothers…or unleash his sisters, Sybil and even Muriel; he was sure they’d all be happy to fight for his cause.
If she proved obdurate, and he got seriously desperate, such actions were an option. However…he grimaced; trying to understand women in general was hard enough, but trying to understand her…
Instinct was all he had to guide him, and that urged him to give her at least a little time—time enough to see and accept his constancy, that he was determined, had been from the first and wasn’t about to lose interest and change his min
d, much less draw back. For someone of her character, her particular traits, convincing her of that would be half his battle—and something he would need to achieve on his own.
How?
Visions of stocking the boathouse with flowers, of arranging to have a rose on her pillow every night, of learning what she most craved—new novels, the latest music sheets, what else?—and getting those things for her, all the usual things a gentleman might do to assure a lady of his affection, danced through his mind, but none of those actions would work, not with her.
They might even make her suspicious of him and his motives.
In the battlefield terms with which he was most familiar, he needed to make his point more forcefully, not simply nip at her cavalry’s heels. He needed some more powerful and definite way to make a statement.
Cobbles rang beneath Crusader’s hooves as the town closed around them. Setting aside his mental quest for some suitably dramatic action, Gervase straightened in the saddle and refocused his mind on his immediate objective.
He knew the town well, and many there knew him. Passing the town hall, he turned down Market Street and headed for Custom Quay. His first port of call would be the harbormaster’s office.
The early afternoon found Madeline in the arbor, sitting on one side bench studying the daisy she held in her fingers. She was tempted to try the “he loves me, he loves me not” test—it seemed as likely to yield an answer as any of the other approaches she’d thought of; despite her earlier efforts to clear her mind, she’d accomplished very little that day.
Sighing, she sat back and surrendered—gave her mind up to the topic that despite her best efforts had dominated her thoughts. Perhaps examining the pros and cons of marrying Gervase might shed some light.
The benefits were easy to enumerate—being the countess of a wealthy earl was nothing to sneeze at, being the mistress of his castle, the social position, the local status, even being closer to his family—his sisters and Sybil—all those elements spoke to her, attracted her.
Stephanie Laurens - B 6 Beyond Seduction Page 30