And then she sat on a sofa close to the pianoforte with Clarence and Emma, and stayed there even when Emma got up to play while Claude’s wife sang. The two of them were deep in smiling conversation, turned toward each other so that they appeared to have eyes for no one else.
The earl strolled toward the two of them. They both looked up and smiled at him.
“We are reminiscing, Marcus,” Clarence said. “It seems only yesterday that Sophia was a child and now she is only a little more than a week from marrying. And looking very happy about it, too.”
“Yes,” the earl said. “She should know what she is about. They have known each other all their lives.” Reminiscing about Sophia’s childhood and girlhood was something he could not participate in.
“Do you remember the first time they met?” his wife asked, smiling up at him in some amusement. “It was at Rushton when she was just a toddler. All the boys had new balls and three of them would have cheerfully indulged Sophia by sharing with her. But it was Francis’s ball she wanted and Francis she wanted to play with.”
Clarence chuckled. “I was there at the time,” he said. “The first notice he took of his future bride was to pull a gargoyle face and poke out his tongue at her, if I remember correctly.”
“A short while before shoving her backward into a patch of only half-dried mud,” the earl said. “Her dress was white, was it not, Olivia?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “so it was.”
“And poor Francis was turned over William’s knee for his first spanking concerning Sophia,” the earl said.
The other two looked at each other and laughed.
The earl turned away when the noise level rose in the room as Francis and Sophia came back, Sophia looking quite unmistakably rosy about the mouth.
His little girl, the earl thought, as the three brothers went into their usual teasing act and Francis pursed his lips and assured them that jealousy would accomplish nothing and Sophia blushed. She was too young to be mauled about by young Francis. But in nine days’ time, she was going to be his bride.
Oh, Sophia, he thought, all the lost years. Years when he had seen her for only brief weeks two or three times a year, though Olivia had never denied her to him when he had asked. Years when he might have watched her growing up and stored away a wealth of memories for his old age and for telling his grandchildren.
His eyes strayed back to his wife, who was laughing with Clarence over something Bertie had just said.
Later that night, he found himself restless as he undressed and made ready for bed. He was unable to think of lying down and addressing himself to sleep. He was not tired. He wandered to the window of his bedchamber and drummed his fingers on the sill. It appeared to have stopped raining outside. Perhaps he could take an early morning ride. But there was a night to live through first.
He thought of going downstairs to the library to find a book. But he did not feel like reading. He would not be able to concentrate.
His wife was in the next room, he thought, stopping abruptly the pacing he had begun. He had felt the emptiness of the room during the previous ten nights, though he had never been into her bedchamber since her arrival at Clifton. But he had felt its emptiness nonetheless. And now she was there again. He could feel her closeness.
Her closeness made him restless. He wanted to talk with her. Only to talk. He wanted her companionship. That was surely what he had missed most through the years. They had been very close friends. They had been each other’s second half. He had not been whole in all the years without her.
He wandered through to his dressing room. She was probably asleep already. And even if she were not, she would be outraged if he went into her room. She was at least entitled to the privacy of her bedchamber. But she was his wife and all he wanted to do was talk. She was probably asleep.
He turned the handle of the door between their dressing rooms quietly, not at all decided whether he would open the door. But he did, slowly and indecisively, and stepped into her dressing room. It smelled faintly of her perfume. Olivia’s dressing room had always smelled this way. The door into the bedchamber was open. There was a candle burning in there.
She was reclining against her pillows, he saw when he stood in the doorway, a book open in her hands. But she was not reading it; she was looking at him and closing the book and setting it down on the table beside her, next to the candle.
Foolishly, now that he was there and she was not after all asleep, he could think of nothing to say. He stood and looked at her and she looked quietly back, not helping him out by saying anything or ordering him from her room.
“Can Sophia survive the next week?” he asked at last. “She seems excited enough to burst.”
“She almost gave in to a fit of terror this afternoon just after our arrival,” she said. “Seeing so many family members already gathered here has brought home the reality of it all to her. She had the feeling of being swept helplessly along by events.”
“She is not having second thoughts, is she?” he asked. “It can still be stopped, all of it.”
“I assured her of that,” she said. “I told her that all that matters ultimately are her feelings for Francis and her wish to spend the rest of her life with him. She realized then, of course, that she has loved him all her life. I think she has, too, Marcus, though how she could have done so through their childhood, I do not know. At least she knows that he is not perfect.”
There was a silence in the room for several moments. He moved beyond the doorway and came to stand beside her bed. She was wearing no dressing gown, only a thin cotton nightgown, quite low at the bosom. Her hair was shining and loose over her shoulders.
“Yes,” he said. “It is important that she knows that. Have we done the right thing, Olivia, in allowing her to marry? I have been feeling something close to panic myself.”
“Yes, we have,” she said. “I believe they truly love each other, Marcus, and are truly good friends. They have made the decision to marry and we must respect that. She is of marriageable age, after all, though she is young. We cannot live her life for her or ever know if everything we have ever done for her was the right thing. We can only ever do our best. The rest is up to her.”
“We deprived her of a family life,” he said, seating himself on the edge of the bed.
“Yes,” she said. “But we can do nothing to amend what is past, Marcus. And had we remained together just for her sake, perhaps we would have grown to hate each other. Perhaps we would have bickered and quarreled constantly. Would that have been better for her?”
“I suppose not,” he said. “Would it have been like that between us?”
“We can never know,” she said. “We have exchanged some angry words since my coming here.”
“You don’t regret your decision, Olivia?” he asked her.
“There is no point in regrets,” she said.
“Hm,” he said, and he reached out and took a lock of her hair in his hand and spread it over one finger. “Sophia told me that you went to a soirée at Lady Methuen’s. Did you enjoy it?”
“I was surprised to find that I knew some people,” she said, “even after all this time. Joanna Shackleton was there.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “She lives most of the year in town. Her husband is in the government, you know.”
“I liked being in London again,” she said.
“Did you?” He looked broodingly down at her. “You always did like the excitement of a few weeks there, did you not? You might have gone there over the years, Olivia. I always told you that. I would have stayed away.”
“There was always Sophia,” she said. “The country was better for her. Besides, I never had any great wish to go. Rushton has always offered enough social activity for me.”
“I hope you had plenty of new clothes made,” he said. “Did you?”
“Far more than I need,” she said. “I did not realize that you had written to the dressmaker, Marcus. I suppose you needed to, s
ince the order was to be so large and so hurried. But you need not have given her such strict instructions about what I needed.”
“If I had not,” he said, “I would have been fortunate to have found you returning with more than two new frocks and one bonnet. The straw you were wearing this afternoon is very pretty, by the way. It is new?”
“I would neither find nor dream of wearing such a frivolity at Rushton,” she said. “But Sophia would not let me out of the milliner’s without it and Francis, when goaded by her, assured me that I looked very handsome in it.”
“I would rather say that it looks very handsome on you,” he said.
“I was not allowed to pay any of the dressmaker’s bill,” she said. “I intended to pay at least part, but it seemed you had sent strict instructions about that, too.”
“I must be allowed to dress my women for a family wedding, Olivia,” he said.
“Is that what I am?” she said, watching his thumb stroke over the lock of hair across his finger. “One of your women?”
“My daughter’s mother,” he said.
He watched her swallow, and he lowered his head and kissed the pulse at her throat. She was still watching his hand and her hair across his finger when he raised his head again. He waited for her to say something, to become angry, to order him to leave. She said nothing.
With his free hand he smoothed the hair back from the side of her face and cupped her cheek in his palm. He traced the line of her eyebrow with a light thumb. She closed her eyes and he kissed one and her cheek and her chin. He kissed her mouth, and it trembled beneath the light pressure of his.
He lifted his head and looked down into her open eyes. He could see no anger there, no repugnance, no fear—only a calm acceptance of the moment.
He got slowly to his feet, pulled loose the sash of his dressing gown, and shrugged out of it. He watched her, giving her plenty of time to send him away. Her eyes were on his. He lifted his nightshirt over his head, dropping it beside the dressing gown. Her eyes roamed over him as he watched her. She still had not told him to go away.
She lifted her eyes to his as he drew back the bedclothes and grasped her nightgown at the hem and slid it up over her body. She raised her arms when she realized that he was not going to stop at her waist. He dropped her nightgown on top of his own garments.
It was strange, he thought, that in five years of a perfect marriage they had never been naked together. He had never seen her as he was seeing her now. With his hands and his body he had known her to be beautiful and desirable, and his eyes had confirmed the evidence of his other senses when she was clothed. But their married years had been very decorous. Very close. Very, very loving. But lacking somewhat in physical passion.
She was beautiful beyond description, his thirty-six-year-old estranged wife. His daughter’s mother. Livy. She moved over on the bed as he lay down beside her. He did not extinguish the candle.
She was Livy. His eyes told him that in the candlelight, and his hands and his body, too. And yet she was a woman he did not know. His hand at her waist and his mouth on hers told him that she was instantly on fire, that there need be no slow, painstaking efforts to arouse her. She turned onto her side and her palm pushed its way up from his waist to his shoulder. She sucked on his tongue and arched her hips against his. He heard her moaning, as a certain shock in him gave way to instant response.
Livy. My God, Livy.
His hand confirmed his expectation that she was hot and wet. Desperate for release. Too aroused for foreplay. He held her with one arm and stroked her with light and knowing fingers until she shattered against him. And he held her, crooning to her, unaware of what words, if any, he spoke, as her shudderings gave place to relaxation.
He held her for a few minutes longer before turning her onto her back and coming on top of her, spreading her legs with his knees, and mounting her while she came awake again.
She was warm, wet, languorous. To be enjoyed at his leisure. He wanted to take her slowly. He wanted always to be where he was at that moment. He wanted it to last forever. There never had been anyone but Livy. There never could be.
He loved her with a slow, deep rhythm, his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of it, his body knowing her again as he had known her as a young man, as a young husband. She was warm and relaxed and comfortable as she had been then. Loving her was an emotional and a physical experience intertwined, inseparable. Loving was the perfect word for what they had always done together in her bed and for what they were doing together now.
And yet he was not in the past after all. He was in the present. And she was different. After a few minutes she was no longer passive. Her hips picked up the rhythm of his loving, circling to his movements, and she lifted her legs from the bed to twine about his. Her shoulders were pressing into the mattress, her breasts lifting to press more intimately against his chest. She was breathing in gasps.
He lifted his head and looked down at her, and she looked back, her lips parted, her eyes heavy with passion. His woman? Yes, his woman to stroke into, to pleasure, to love. His woman to bury himself in, to bring him release. To bring him peace. And love.
Her eyes closed as he changed his rhythm, deepening his penetration of her body. And she could no longer keep the rhythm, but pushed up against him, taut with need.
He watched her, felt her body’s response with his own, waited for that indefinable moment when he knew that she would come to him, and lowered his head into her hair again, coming to her at the same moment. And he allowed pure physical reaction to take him beyond the moment and into the world of semiconsciousness beyond the climax. Her body was soft and comfortable beneath his own.
SHE DID NOT regret it. She could not regret it. She had longed for him ever since that afternoon in the hidden garden. She had discovered then how close to starvation she had been for fourteen long years. She might have kept her sexuality unexpressed for the rest of her life, but once having had him again, her hunger gnawed at her like a physical pain, like a warning of imminent death.
She had ached for even a sight of him while in London. She had even cried for him. And she had been unable to sleep earlier, or to read, either, though she had been trying to lose herself in a book. She had been too aware of his presence in the very next room, probably asleep. Her need for him had been a throbbing deep in her womb.
She had thought first of all when she had turned her head for surely the twentieth time in an hour and seen him standing silently in the doorway to her dressing room that he must be a product of an over-fertile imagination.
She had wanted him with a sick yearning while they talked and when he sat down on the side of her bed and took a lock of her hair between his fingers.
She did not regret what had happened. Or if she did, it was only the fact that she had been so uncontrolled, so unable the first time to wait even for him to come inside her. She supposed she would feel embarrassed at that memory once the night was over. And he would perhaps laugh at the evidence she had given him of just how much she had missed him.
But the other loving, the one just finished, had been wonderful beyond imagining. He had often used to like to be in her for a long time. He liked the feeling of being physically one with her as well as one in every other way, he had used to tell her. “One body, Liv. It feels good, does it not? Tell me it feels good.”
It had always felt good because he was Marc and she loved him and she was doing what a wife does to show her husband that she loves him. Sometimes there had been the beginnings of active pleasure, occasionally even the near completion of pleasure, though always with something just eluding her.
That something was no longer eluding her. And she wondered if he always experienced that pleasure. If so, she could understand why he had liked to be intimate with her so often and why he had always slept so deeply afterward.
It was wonderful. She did not believe her body had ever felt so drained of energy and so relaxed. His weight was heavy on her. Her legs, which
she had untwined from his, were spread wide on either side of his. She felt too wonderful to sleep. She would not be able to lift an arm to save her life, she thought with a smile.
And what next? her mind asked, refusing to be stilled as the rest of her body was still. What tomorrow? And what next week—after Sophia’s wedding? She tried not to think beyond the wedding.
What would she say if he asked her to stay?
What would she do if he did not?
She tried not to think.
He woke with a start and then lay still again. She waited for him to move. She hoped he would not. She hoped that he would fall back asleep or else lift his head and kiss her.
Marc. Marc. She tried to talk to him with her mind. She was afraid to speak. She did not know what to say. Did what had happened change anything? Everything? Nothing?
He lifted himself off her without looking at her and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. Then he got to his feet and crossed the room to look out of the window. The candle had burned itself out.
“You have had a good teacher, Olivia,” he said.
“What?” She was not sure she had heard what he had said.
He looked back over his shoulder. The room seemed curiously light. “He has taught you well, whoever it is,” he said. “And has obviously given you many lessons.”
She reached down for the blankets and pulled them slowly up over herself. She was still not quite sure that she understood.
“Clarence, I suppose?” he said.
Clarence? He was accusing her of having had a lover? And Clarence? Did he not know? Marc and he had been friends for years. But then Clarence had said that she was the only one he had ever told and that he had never done anything to make anyone suspicious.
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