‘Oh, no,’ Jemima said sharply, placing one hand against his bare shoulder to push him away. His skin was warm to the touch and she found herself absent-mindedly rubbing her fingers over the curve of his shoulder. She stopped abruptly and saw that Rob was laughing at her.
‘Admit that I almost caught you out there,’ he said. His eyes were bright with amusement—and desire.
Jemima moved as far away as she could get from him within the window aperture. She felt shaky but she was not going to succumb—not before she had said her piece.
‘It is Delaval that has had all your attention recently, Robert, not I. Your estate is a hard taskmaster.’ She put her head on one side to study him. ‘Or a very demanding mistress.’
Rob smiled faintly. ‘I admit that I have been a little preoccupied with the estate over the past month—’
‘A little?’
Rob gave her a shamefaced smile. ‘A great deal?’
‘To the exclusion of all else,’ Jemima said.
‘I have been trying to make up for lost time,’ Rob said.
‘I understand that. But you have missed dinner on six occasions and on five others you have been so late to bed that I have not heard you come up and sometimes you are gone so early in the mornings that I do not see you all day.’
The look Rob gave her made her break off in confusion. ‘How wifely of you to notice, my love. Does that mean that you care for me a little?’
‘I…’ Jemima bit her lip. She was deeply suspicious that he would use her answer to trap her into some other personal admission. And she did care for him; that was undeniable. The fact that she resented the hold Delaval had on him would have been absurd if it had not made her realise just how much she did care.
‘I do not like to see you wear yourself out,’ she temporised. ‘It cannot be good for you…’
‘Sweet concern.’ Rob bent forward and kissed her cheek. ‘Would it disturb you to know the other reason for my long hours of work, Jemima?’
Jemima’s heartbeat quickened at his nearness. His unshaven cheek brushed the softness of hers and she jumped back.
‘I am deliberately trying to avoid you, Jemima,’ Rob said softly. ‘There is little but you in my mind, whether I am building a wall or milking a cow or discussing the purchase of seed propagators with Jephson…’
Jemima felt her anger start to melt. She smiled a little. ‘This is vastly romantic, Robert. Pray continue.’
Rob ran a hand through his hair. ‘You may laugh, Jemima, but you have no notion of your danger. I thought that if I spent each and every day outside, working myself into the ground, I might be so exhausted that I had no time for more…amorous thoughts.’ He got up abruptly. ‘However, I found that the reverse was true. Physical work seems to make me feel all the more—’
‘Ardent?’
‘Lustful, licentious, libidinous.’ Rob glared at her.
‘Impassioned, improvident and imprudent,’ Jemima said sweetly. She could not help smiling. ‘Oh, Robert—’
‘It is not funny,’ Rob said huffily.
‘No, of course not.’ Jemima slid off the window seat and went up to him. She put her hands against his chest. ‘You could have told me, though.’
‘No, I could not. Talking about it makes it worse. It makes me think about you too much and then I want to kiss you. More than just kiss you, to tell the truth. As I said, you have no notion of the danger you are in.’
‘But because you did not tell me how you felt, I thought you were avoiding me because you did not like me,’ Jemima said. ‘I could see that Delaval meant everything to you and so I assumed it would have your best attention.’
Rob grinned. ‘I would far rather give you my best attention…’
Jemima backed hastily away. ‘You know that you cannot do that.’
‘Would you object if I did? I know that a little while ago you were reluctant, my sweet. I have not forgotten that you think that love is a trap.’
‘I do not know,’ Jemima said, blushing. ‘It is true that I have had thoughts of you, Robert.’
Rob looked entranced. ‘Sweetheart!’
‘But,’ Jemima said doggedly, ‘I am aware that there are still sixty-four days to go.’
Rob put out a hand and drew her into his arms. He did not kiss her, but held her close against his chest. It was sweet and comforting, but it disturbed her too. He smelled of sandalwood and cool skin and water, and Jemima wanted to turn her cheek and taste him; taste the salt and the faint traces of sweat and the coolness.
She hid her blushing face against him. ‘Is it very vulgar to wish to spend time with one’s own husband, Robert?’
‘Very unfashionable,’ Rob said. She could hear the smile in his voice. He loosened his grip a little. ‘As it is to wish quite desperately to kiss one’s own wife. I fear that we are both quite as bad as each other.’
Jemima put her fingers against his lips. ‘Wait! You cannot kiss me.’
Rob groaned. ‘Oh, Jemima, please.’
‘No, indeed. We are in your bedroom—’
‘Yes,’ Rob said, an edge to his voice, ‘I had observed that.’
‘So it would be very dangerous.’
Rob grasped the bedpost in one hand, trapping Jemima between him and the foot of the bed.
‘One kiss does not break a vow of celibacy,’ he said.
‘That depends on—’
‘The kiss?’
‘On what constitutes celibacy,’ Jemima said quickly. ‘What do you think, Rob?’
Rob shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I will not be drawn into a philosophical discussion at a time like this. Tomorrow maybe, when we go out riding together.’
‘Are we going out riding tomorrow?’
‘I thought that it would be nice. As we do not spend enough time together…’
‘But I cannot ride.’
‘Then I will teach you.’ Rob laughed. ‘That should be enough to kill all passion between us. We shall be brangling within a few minutes. So let us make the most of it now…’ He made to draw her closer again.
Jemima slipped under his arm and made for the door. ‘When you have taught me to ride, then you may consider whether kissing is permissible or not under the terms of the will.’
‘Jemima,’ Rob said. ‘Hell and the devil!’
But his wife had whisked through the door to her bedroom. He heard the key turn firmly in the lock.
Rob slowly picked up his shirt and tried to ignore the persistent message his body was sending him of how very attractive he found his wife, and how very provoking the whole situation was becoming.
‘I hope you are a quick learner,’ he muttered to the panels of the closed door, ‘or I shall probably expire with frustration.’
Chapter Eleven
The riding lessons were a disaster. Jemima was not afraid of horses—she had been quite accustomed to the dray horses in the streets of London—but she quickly realised that she had no talent for riding. Rob was very patient with her, but Jemima knew that she could never match the powerful precision with which he controlled his black stallion, Arrow. Rob had told her that he had been riding since he was a child, and it showed. When he was in the saddle there was a fluid grace about the movement of man and horse together that quite took her breath away.
Alas, there was no fluid grace about Jemima’s own efforts, only a lumpen lurching that left her breathless and the mare bad-tempered. After Jemima had fallen off twice and Poppy had galloped off across the meadow with her bouncing in the saddle like a bag of coal, she had given up altogether and retreated to the gig, which was pulled by a placid pony of some twenty years and never went faster than a slow trot. In this way they progressed about the estate, Rob riding slowly alongside the gig so that he could point things out to her and they could talk. And just occasionally Arrow would become skittish and Rob would gallop off to give him some proper exercise whilst Jemima sat and watched them disappearing over the fields and into the distance.
‘Why did you w
ish to leave Delaval and join the army, Rob?’ Jemima asked as one afternoon at the end of September, as they walked together along the northern avenue. She could see the house in the distance like a child’s dolls’ house, growing larger as they walked towards it.
‘When you had all this and it is evident that you love it so, it seems strange that you chose to leave it behind.’
Rob drove his hands into the pockets of his worn shooting jacket.
‘It was a great deal to do with this business of being told I could not do something,’ he said, with a crooked smile, ‘and a little to do with believing that some things are worth fighting for.’
Jemima was watching his face. ‘What do you mean by saying that it sprung from a dislike of being told that you could not do something?’
Rob’s face lightened into a smile. ‘My parents forbade me to go to fight, so of course…’ he shrugged ‘…I was immediately desperate to do it. I was always a most contrary child and my grandparents spoiled me and made me worse. I had good principles to follow, but not the self-discipline to behave well.’
‘You do not give that impression now,’ Jemima observed, surprised. ‘Indeed, you seem very disciplined. Did the army instil that in you?’
‘It did. I soon grew up when I was confronted with genuine conflict and I had people relying on me.’ Rob expelled a long breath. ‘The India campaign had felt like a boy’s adventure, but when I went to the Peninsula, that was different. By then I was a hardened soldier and I had seen the sorts of sights I had never dreamed of. In fact, I realised what a spoiled brat I had been in the past.’
They turned down one of the grassy rides that led from the main avenue. The turf was springy beneath their feet and from the grass the late wild flowers peeped; white clover and ox eye daisies. The sunlight cut through the branches in slanting green lines.
‘You have not spoken much about your childhood here,’ Jemima said. ‘Were you happy?’
‘I was very happy to live here.’ Rob looked about him. ‘How could I not love Delaval? I have cared for it with a passion since I was a small boy.’
Jemima smiled at the thought of the serious little child with his intense love of his home. ‘And what were your parents like?’
Rob frowned slightly. ‘I was a late child. By the time my sister was born Mama was already forty and it was another two years before I put in an appearance. I always felt that there was a huge gulf between my parents and Camilla and me—not just in age. Papa was a very distant parent. For the first sixteen years of my life, until my grandfather died in a shooting accident, Papa was Viscount Selborne, the Earl in waiting. I sometimes wonder whether that frustrated him. He always seemed most irascible.’
‘I suppose that it must be strange waiting to step into another man’s shoes,’ Jemima said. ‘Your grandfather must have been very hale.’
‘Oh, he was. Had it not been for the accident I believe he might have lived to a hundred.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was all very unpleasant.’ Rob gestured towards the far side of the wood. ‘We had gone out in a party, shooting pheasant, and my grandfather had taken Ferdie with him—my cousin Ferdie Selborne, whom you met at the wedding?’ When Jemima nodded, he continued, ‘There was a dreadful accident and my grandfather tripped over his own shotgun. He killed himself. Ferdie was utterly distraught. He was only fifteen and he and the beater had been alone with Grandfather when it happened. There was nothing they could do. He had practically blown his head off.’
Jemima shuddered. ‘How dreadful for Ferdie.’
‘Yes, indeed. To my knowledge he has never been shooting since.’
‘And the beater?’
‘Fellow called Naylor. He was a groom on the estate. He went off to the wars and we never saw him again.’
‘So your father inherited at last, although not under the circumstances that anyone might have wished?’ Jemima wondered whether the hot-tempered Earl had felt in some way cheated by his manner of accession. His father’s death had not been a natural end and it was not what anyone would have wanted.
‘He did. He inherited the earldom and he did not become any less irascible. We all lived here together until I went off to India—my grandmother, my parents, Camilla and I.’
‘I should have liked to meet your grandmother,’ Jemima said, smiling a little. ‘Any lady with the eccentricity to attach such a condition to her will would have been well worth the meeting, I think.’
‘She would have liked you,’ Rob said. ‘She always told me I should marry a girl with something about her, not a milk-and-water miss. I am glad that I would have pleased her in my marriage.’
Jemima felt warmed by the compliment. ‘I do not suppose that your father would have approved of me, though. How could he have wished for a tradesman’s daughter in the family?’
‘Ah, well, my father was different. He valued accomplishments rather than character,’ Rob said. ‘He was not particularly interested in Camilla and myself as children, for example. Apparently he was pleased and a little surprised when we were born, but after that his interest waned until Camilla could make a good match and I could take on all those responsibilities that the heir to the estate was supposed to fulfil.’
‘Was that when you went against his wishes?’ Jemima asked. ‘He must have been quite shocked.’
She felt a little tentative to be probing family history, but on the other hand it helped her understand more about the reasons Rob had left Delaval—and the devils that now drove him to restore his home to its former glory.
‘He was both shocked and angry.’ Rob shrugged awkwardly. ‘I disappointed him dreadfully, I think. The difficulty was that I felt smothered by his expectations. I was twenty-one and he was expecting me to settle down and produce an heir for Delaval and take up the reins of the estate. I had had that expectation on me for as long as I can remember.’ He shifted his shoulders again uncomfortably. ‘Camilla had made matters worse in a way, although I do not blame her. She did not marry well, you see, at least by Papa’s standards. She fell in love with a sea captain who was visiting his brother in the neighbourhood and she was determined to make the match. He was of good family, but it was not an outstanding alliance. Papa was disappointed but he let it go as Camilla was already three and twenty and had not had a great many suitors. Most of his energies were focussed on me, and on making me fit into his plans.’
Jemima was intrigued. ‘What happened when you told him you wanted to join the army?’
Rob stopped walking. Jemima could feel the tension in him, though he spoke dispassionately.
‘There was an almighty argument, as you might imagine. It was all fairly predictable. He threatened to disinherit me.’
‘Yet still you went away.’
Rob gave her the ghost of a smile. ‘The estate is entailed, so I knew he could not deny me Delaval. But, yes—I left him blustering and my mother crying, and I went to India with Sir Arthur Wellesley and then to the Peninsula. I wanted to do something, anything, to prove that I could follow my own course. And I thought that Delaval would always be there waiting for me.’ His expression hardened. ‘And, of course, it was, but not in the way I had imagined it. Decimated, broken down, deserted. And my parents dead. I cannot forget that the last words we spoke to each other were in anger.’
Jemima went to him and took his hands in hers. She wanted nothing other than to make him feel better and try to assuage some of the guilt that held him fast.
‘You could not have known that this would happen, Robert.’
‘No.’ Rob’s grip tightened on her for a moment. ‘But I would have liked to make my peace with my father in this world rather than the next.’
Jemima stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘Perhaps he already knows,’ she whispered. ‘You are here now and you have already worked so hard…’
There was a second of tension whilst they looked at one another, then Rob’s arms were about her and his cheek was pressed against her hair.
/>
‘As have you. I swear, Jemima, that you are so sweet I do not know what I have done to deserve you.’
They stood very still and very quiet for a long moment.
‘Did you marry me because you like to go against convention, Rob?’ Jemima said, muffled.
Rob tilted her face up to his and smiled down at her. ‘No. I married you because I like you. I wanted you with me almost from the first, Jemima, even when we were saying our vows. I knew that our original agreement was not enough, not what I wanted.’ He sighed, releasing her. There was a rueful look in his eyes. ‘I never thought that keeping the terms of the will would be like this. I did not expect it to be so difficult. A part of me wants to hold you at arm’s length to make things easier for us, but another part…’ his eyes held hers ‘…another part of me wants quite the reverse…’
Jemima could not pull her gaze away from his. She felt shivery cold, though the day was warm. There was a question in Rob’s face, and when she took one step closer to him, he bent his head. His lips touched hers and lingered for a moment, lightly, almost experimentally. There was a second when Jemima tried not to succumb, tried not to close her eyes and tumble into the sensual spiral that was waiting for her. This went against every sensible tenet that she had learned in her life, and yet it was impossible to resist because she did not want to. And after a moment she gave herself up to Rob, and to the kiss, leaning in to his body, kissing him back mindlessly as the world spun around her and she felt as though she was falling into such a hot, dark and exciting place that she never wanted to escape ever again. They pressed together as the leaves stirred overhead and the shadows danced.
‘I married you because I like you.’
Liking and loving…Jemima was suddenly unsure where one ended and the other began. She drew away, dazzled by emotions that she was only just beginning to understand.
‘Rob…’ She smoothed her bodice down with fingers that shook. ‘We must not.’
The Penniless Bride Page 15