by Mary Balogh
He got to his feet again and crossed to the fire, where he nudged a log with his booted foot so that it would burn more easily.
“Aidan and I once had a plan,” he said. “I suppose we were still close to infancy at the time. We would change clothes and therefore identities, we agreed, and our father would never know the difference. Aidan would stay at home and become the duke one day, and I would sail the seven seas and grasp whatever adventure the world and life had to offer.”
Christine kept quiet, startled and fascinated. He was staring into the fire and into a long-gone past. After a minute or two he looked over his shoulder at her and came back from that place.
“But from the moment I was born,” he said, “I was set for the dukedom and for all the duties and responsibilities that came with it, and from the moment he was born, Aidan was marked for the army. We dreamed of changing places, but it could not be done, of course. In the end I betrayed him.”
Beneath the cozy sheepskin, under which she had pushed her hands, Christine felt herself turn cold.
“He did not want his chosen career,” he said. “He was a peace-loving, placid boy. He used to follow our father around like a shadow when he was on farm business, and he used to spend a great deal of time with the steward. He pleaded with our father and enlisted our mother’s aid to plead his case for him. All he ever wanted was to live quietly on the land and farm it and administer it. By what cruel fate he was born second and I first I do not know. After our father died, of course, I might have given him his reprieve. I was only seventeen, he fifteen. He was at school for a few years after that, but when he came home he threw himself into farm business again with great enthusiasm. He knew the farms surrounding Lindsey Hall intimately. He knew how to run them. He had a better instinct for it than I. He tried to advise me—with eminently good advice. He wanted me to retire our father’s steward, who had grown rather old for the job, and let him take over. He tried to point out to me some of the ways in which I could improve what was being done and some of the things I was doing wrong. He meant well—he loved this place, he knew it better than I did, and I was his brother. I purchased a commission for him and summoned him to the library to tell him. He had almost no choice but to obey me. Such was my power as the Duke of Bewcastle even when I was still a very young man. I wielded it unflinchingly. I have wielded it ever since.”
“And you have never forgiven yourself,” she said—she did not have to phrase it as a question. “Even though you did the right thing.”
“I did,” he agreed. “But I had to choose between my role as Duke of Bewcastle and my role as brother—to the boy who had once been heart of my heart. It was the first notable occasion on which I faced the conflict and had to choose. I chose the duke’s role, and have been making similar choices ever since. I will continue to do so until I die, I suppose. I am, after all, that aristocrat, and I have duties and responsibilities to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people that I cannot and will not shirk. And therefore, you see, I cannot assure you that I will become a changed man in order to fit your dream. You find me cold, reticent, hard, and I am all those things. But I am not only those things.”
“No,” she said, though she was not sure that any sound had escaped her lips.
He stood before the fire, his hands behind his back, his booted feet slightly apart, his expression haughty and cold, at variance with what he was saying—or perhaps not. He had chosen to make his role as Duke of Bewcastle the dominant one in his life.
“I cannot offer you anything I am not, you see,” he said. “I can only hope you are able to see that any person who has lived for almost thirty-six years is vastly complex. You accused me a few evenings ago of wearing a mask, and you were wrong. I wear the mantle of Duke of Bewcastle over that of Wulfric Bedwyn, but both mantles are mine. I am not less of a man because I choose to put duty first in my life. And then you wondered if I am a cold, unfeeling aristocrat right through to the very core. I am not. If I were, would I ever have been first enchanted by you and then haunted by the memory of you? You are not at all the sort of person Bewcastle would even notice, let alone choose to woo.”
Christine sat very still.
“But I get ahead of myself,” he said. “I had a good childhood. It was boisterous and happy. I had good parents, though it did not seem to me during my later boyhood that my father cared for me.”
“What happened?” she asked. He had found her enchanting. He had been haunted by the memory of her? Haunted?
“He had a heart seizure when I was twelve,” he said. “He survived it, but he was warned that his heart was weak, that it could stop beating at any moment. He was one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in Britain. He owned more property than almost any other man. His duties and responsibilities were enormous. And yet his eldest son—his heir—was a wild, rebellious hellion.”
It was almost impossible to realize that it was of himself he spoke.
“Although I remained at Lindsey Hall,” he said, “I was almost totally separated from my family. I was put under the care of two tutors. I saw my father infrequently, my mother rarely. Aidan and then Rannulf and finally Alleyne went off to school, as I had expected to do, and I almost never saw them—even during the holidays, when they came home. I was virtually isolated. I fought, I ranted, I pouted, I sulked—and I learned. I had five years in which to learn everything there was to know about the rest of my life. No one knew that there would be even five, of course. There might have been only one, or even less. My father died when I was seventeen. On his deathbed he kissed my hand and told me that sometimes love hurts even though it is nonetheless love. He had had no choice, you see. I was his son and he loved me. I was also his heir. I had to learn to take his place.”
It struck Christine suddenly that he had probably never told this story to anyone else—just as she had never told the story of the events surrounding Oscar’s death to anyone but him. It was a realization that frankly terrified her—and threatened to bring tears to her eyes. He was baring his soul to her. Because . . . because he had been enchanted with her and then haunted by the memory of her. Because he had brought her here deliberately—here to Lindsey Hall, here to the dovecote, his private hermitage, for just this purpose. Because he had begged her to give him a chance.
She was, she realized, terribly in love with him. And yet . . .
And yet she no longer believed in happily-ever-after. She was no longer the girl she had been ten years ago, when she had rushed headlong into a relationship that she surely would have avoided if she had only given herself more time to get to know Oscar better. She had loved him to the end, but in her heart she knew that she had detected quite early in their marriage his essential weakness of character. Theirs had not been the grand, lifelong passion of her dreams.
This time she was wiser and far more cautious. This time she was well aware that no happily-ever-after danced merrily just beyond a proposal of marriage and its acceptance. And yet . . .
And yet he was a man whom, against all the odds, she had grown to like. And he was a man she was unwillingly coming to admire. How could she not admire a man to whom honor and duty meant everything? Whose sense of responsibility to hundreds or even thousands of dependents was more important to him than personal gratification? His education might have been oppressive, even brutal, but his father would have seen to it that it did not actually break his spirit. He could, then, after his father died, have turned his back on everything he had been taught. He could have become a wild, extravagant young man, as so many other men in similar circumstances did. He had had the power and wealth to get away with it, after all.
But he had held firm. From the age of seventeen on, he had donned the mantle of the Duke of Bewcastle and worn it unflinchingly.
How could she not admire him? And, God help her, how could she not love him?
She smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said. “I understand that you are a very private person. Thank you for showing me this enchanted privat
e place and for telling me about yourself.”
He gazed at her, as stern and formidable as ever, his eyes as inscrutable as they ever were.
“I have dreamed,” he said, “for almost a year I have dreamed of seeing you here, sitting there, just as you are. I am not going to ask any questions today. The time is not right. I will tell you something, though. I did not bring you here to seduce you. But I want you. You know that. I want to have you now, here on that bed. I want it as a free expression of what I feel for you and what perhaps you feel for me. No commitments, no obligations—unless there are consequences, which you told me once before are unlikely. Will you lie with me? Ah, I have asked a question after all.”
Her mind went numb though it raced with a million thoughts at the same time. Her body felt anything but numb. Her breasts tightened with instant desire, and a sharp ache stabbed downward through her womb and along her inner thighs. She felt robbed of breath. Here? Now? Again? Memories of the night out by the lake at Schofield came flooding back. And she said exactly what she had said that night when he had asked basically the same question.
“Yes,” she said.
He took the three steps that separated them and held out his right hand, palm up. She pushed the sheepskin aside and set her hand in his.
He raised it to his lips.
21
WULFRIC PICKED UP THE SHEEPSKIN AND TOSSED IT over the bed before pulling back one corner with the bedsheets. When he turned back to her, she was standing where he had left her, watching him, though she had taken off her pelisse and thrown it over the back of the chair.
She was wearing a dress of pale yellow wool, though one side of it looked more apricot in the red light from one of the windows overhead. It was a high-waisted, high-necked, long-sleeved dress with no adornments. It hugged her trim, shapely figure and needed no other allure.
“Come closer to the fire,” he said, walking back toward her, setting a hand at the small of her back, and moving her nearer to the hearth, where they would feel the full benefit of the heat from the burning logs. He did not want this to be a simple outpouring of sexual hunger as it had been last time. Although he had not used the word to her and would not, he wanted to make love to her.
He did not immediately kiss her. He framed her face with his hands and ran his thumbs over her eyebrows. Her eyes were wide and bright. Pink and lavender light from the windows overhead gave a glow to her complexion. She had a lovely mouth, with soft, smooth lips that were almost always curved upward at the corners. He ran his fingers through her hair. It felt soft and clean. The short curls bounced back into place after the passage of his fingers. The style suited her to perfection.
He moved his hands down over her shoulders and behind her, felt the row of buttons at the back of her dress, and undid them one at a time until he could draw the edges back off her shoulders and down her arms to her waist. It fell the rest of the way to the floor on its own. She was not wearing stays. Her shapely body was her own, as nature had intended it to be. She wore a plain linen shift, which covered her from her bosom to just above her knees.
He took a step back from her and went down on one knee to remove her shoes one at a time and then her garters before rolling her stockings down her legs and off her feet.
He kissed the side of one foot before setting it back on the floor, and then the inside of her knee.
She had not, he noticed as he stood again, touched him yet. And yet he knew from her slightly parted lips and drooped eyelids that she wanted this as much as he did.
He set his lips to her shoulder and licked its warm, smooth, slight saltiness. She shivered despite the heat from the fire. He drew down the strap of her shift, uncovered one breast, and cupped it in his hand as he kissed his way down to it. It was perfect—soft and heavy, yet firm and uptilted too. He parted his lips over the nipple, breathed in through his mouth and then out again, and then suckled her. For the first time she touched him. Her fingers tangled in his hair, her head came down to touch his own, and she made a low sound in her throat.
It occurred to him that though he had been intimate with her once before, he had never seen her unclothed. He wanted to see her now. He wanted to make love to her with no barriers between them.
Need, desire, longing throbbed in him with every pulse beat. He could feel the heat from the fire all down his left side.
He lifted his head, and her hands fell to her sides again.
“Come to bed,” he said.
He undressed her completely after she lay down. A band of pink light from one of the windows slanted across the upper half of her body, blending into red across her legs and one hip. But though he could have stood there for a while just drinking in the sight of her, they were some distance from the fire here and it had not yet taken the chill from the whole space. He covered her with the sheet and the sheepskin and sat on the side of the bed to pull off his Hessian boots before standing again to remove the rest of his clothes. When he was naked, he lifted the covers and lay down beside her.
She was enticingly warm. He turned to her, burrowed them both deeper beneath the covers, and touched her again.
He set about arousing her with all the skill and patience of which he was capable, using his palms, his fingers, his lips, his tongue, his teeth. And all the while he burned for her and for the moment when he could mount her and consummate his passion for her again.
She was not idle. Her hands moved over him, tentatively at first, with growing boldness as he felt her body grow hotter and heard her breathing become more labored.
The time had come, he knew at last—and the temptation was to roll over to cover her, to dip his hands beneath her, to spread her legs with his own, to mount her, and to ride them both to completion.
But he wanted to make love to her.
He lifted his head and looked down into her face.
“Christine,” he whispered, and he kissed her for the first time, lightly, brushing parted lips over hers.
Her eyes opened wider.
“Oh,” she murmured.
“Christine,” he said again, “you are so very beautiful.”
And he kissed her deeply.
But they were both far gone into sexual passion. He moved onto her, and she opened to him, spreading her legs wide, lifting them from the bed, and twining them about his. He slid his hands beneath her, positioned himself, and entered her with one glad, slow thrust. At the same moment she tilted to him and drew him deeper with tightly clenched inner muscles.
He slid his hands free, took some of his weight onto his forearms, and lifted his head to look down into her face again. Her eyes laughed rather dreamily into his.
“Wulfric,” she said. “A powerful name for a powerful man. Very powerful.” She laughed softly and wickedly.
He lowered his head to the soft spot beneath one of her ears and growled. She laughed again, and her legs tightened about his and her inner muscles clenched about him again.
He loved her slowly and for a long time beneath the warm cocoon of the covers, while the fire crackled in the hearth and red, pink, and lavender light danced over the surface of the sheepskin blanket. He loved her until they were both gasping for breath and their bodies slid damply and hotly together. He loved her until she moaned to his every thrust and strained up harder against him.
He brought them both to a swift, pounding climax.
“Wulfric,” she protested sleepily as he rolled away to lie beside her after realizing that his full weight was bearing her down into the mattress. He felt a sudden chill down his damp front, but the bedcovers soon settled warmly over him.
He turned to watch her with narrowed gaze as she slept. Pale colored lights were catching one side of her face, while the other side lay in shadow. Her curls were tousled.
He was, as she had just reminded him, a powerful man. He had, it seemed, everything any man could possibly want in this life. But there was something else that he wanted, and he was not at all sure he would ever have it. He was cert
ainly not going to ask today. Maybe not even tomorrow or the next day.
He was afraid to ask.
He was afraid the answer would be no. And, if it was, he could never ask again.
So the question must wait.
He wanted her love.
THE CLOUDS HAD moved off and the sun was shining by the time they left the dovecote. The wind was still blowing, though, and it was still a chilly day.
They walked back in the direction of the house as they had walked back from the lake at Schofield—not touching and not talking. But it felt different this time. This time their silence and proximity felt companionable. Though perhaps that was not quite it either. There was a knowledge between them. They had shared far more than they had at Schofield. They had shared bodies there. Here they had shared themselves.
Christine still felt weak-kneed and vulnerable. She was deeply in love. At the same time, she was trying to convince herself that since being in love and loving were two quite different things, she must be sensible. She was relieved that he had not asked the question. She hoped he would not ask it—ever. For if he asked, she would have to answer and she honestly did not know what she would say.
She knew what she ought to say, but not what she would say.
But what if he never did ask? How could she bear it?
He had asked once and she had said no. Surely he would not humiliate himself by asking again.
Then what was this visit to Lindsey Hall all about? What was this afternoon all about?
He had called her Christine. It was absurd to remember that as perhaps the most tender and precious moment of all. But it had been precious—Christine, spoken in his very cultured, very aristocratic voice. Though he had whispered it the first time. And when she had called him Wulfric, he had growled at her.