His wife’s eyes were still that clear remarkable shade of summer sky blue he remembered so well. Those wide, intelligent blue eyes . . . and the masses of silver gilt hair that tumbled over his fingers and inflamed his twenty-one-year-old body to a peak of embarrassment from which he had never recovered. He had, in fact, spent the past ten years in riotous efforts in other women’s arms to erase his wedding night from his mind.
And her mouth? If it were not pursed into a persimmon pose, as if his mere presence had polluted the room, he judged it, too, would be the same. Magnificently formed, a Cupid’s bow, inviting, nay, promising pleasure to the man bold enough to—
Enough! He was no longer a callow fledgling on the Grand Tour, and she was no schoolroom miss. For better or for worse, each of them had grown and changed, putting childhood behind. Very likely, living so long with Cassandra Pemberton, little Penelope Blayne had acquired as much worldly cynicism as he himself. They were adults now, meeting to discuss something which should have been settled long ago. And now, as then, the power was his. He could do with her as he wished. The trouble was . . . the infinitely vexing trouble was he had once seen her totally helpless, solely dependent on his actions. This beautiful Golden Girl, raised on the principle of feminine independence by Miss Cassandra Pemberton, had been reduced to a commodity to be bought, sold, or given as a gift. Now he himself had the power of a sultan, the right—the duty—to decide her fate.
And he did not want it. Cassandra Pemberton was an evil genie who had cut up his peace and ruined his life. And was now managing to continue her Machiavellian machinations from the grave. There was only one way around this impasse, and he hated it, because it was exactly what the scheming old witch wanted.
Jason Lisbourne, Earl of Rocksley moved out from behind his desk, waving his wife into one of two bergère chairs with caned sides, placed catty corner to the blazing fireplace, before he sat down opposite her. He was pleased with himself. He had arranged a fine informal setting, rather than speaking to his wife from behind the protection of his imposing desk. Unfortunately, a second examination revealed that his wife’s steely, though perfectly composed features, had not softened by so much as an iota.
Annoyed, Jason said not what he planned to say, but leaped straight into controversy. “May I ask what spark of madness inspired you to be out on the road on such a night?”
“Lack of funds,” his wife shot back. “Your Mr. Farley is such a nipcheese I barely had funds enough to pay the postboys a decent vail. There was nothing left for another night at an inn.”
Stunned, the earl opened his mouth, closed it, then said in a completely altered tone, “I assure you he is not my Mr. Farley. He is your aunt’s solicitor, and he is taking his almighty time settling the many legalities involved in an estate the size of hers. If I had ever dreamed he would not provide you with ample funds, I would have sent you a personal draft on my bank. You have my deepest apologies.
“As you may have noticed—” Jason paused, cleared his throat while cursing the pixies still pounding anvils in his head. “I did not expect you before tomorrow at the earliest. I had thought my guests would be gone by then.” The earl eyed his wife with some trepidation. There was no sign of whether or not she believed him. Perhaps, not, for, as he watched, her chin rose by nearly a full inch.
“My Aunt Cassandra was ill for quite some time,” she said. “Until I read her will, I thought she had retained her faculties until the very end. Obviously, I was mistaken.”
“I fear that beneath her iron façade your aunt was a romantic.”
“Do not be absurd!” Lightning flashed from the clear blue of his wife’s eyes.
“Your aunt recalled that you were married, even if you did not.”
His countess gasped, half-rose from her chair. One of the hands that had been so tightly clasped in her lap flew up as if she were about to strike him. Jason raised an eyebrow, but did not stir. “I did not recall I was married?” she cried. “I? Who is it whose name has been linked to half the ladies in the ton, and a vast array of the demimonde as well? Who never wrote to me? Never sent for me? Never acknowledged my exist—”
Jason seized his wife’s still raised arm and lowered it into her lap. “Peace!” he told her, incapable of saying more as long-pent-up emotions warred within. Was it possible she had expected them to live together? All those years while Cassandra Pemberton had urged him to keep his distance, while she had dragged young Penelope Blayne over half the world, the child had thought—
The pixies crescendoed into a grand cacophony of thuds. The earl’s thoughts deteriorated into profanity. But his inner self rallied, valiantly pushing its way through the pain. Perhaps this revelation was all to the good. The past could not be changed, but it was more easily remedied if she was actually willing—
“All I wish from you,” his wife declared with the precise enunciation of a barely controlled temper, “is a small cottage in a quiet country village and enough allowance to live in comfort until I come into my inheritance. You may continue to live your profligate life as you please. I will not trouble you further.”
Jason leaned back in his chair and regarded his wife from beneath lowered lids. Heaven forbid she should see what he was actually thinking, for he was strongly considering sweeping her off to his bedchamber and finishing what had been started so long ago. She was, he was discovering, rather magnificent, even in her perfectly plain gray dress, her prim hair style, and with her arrogant little nose tilted at a deliberately insulting angle toward the ceiling.
“A cottage in the country,” Jason mused, stalling for time. “Have you not had enough of country living during the long months of your aunt’s illness?”
The chin came down, her eyes as well, though her gaze did not quite meet his. “I have discovered I like the quiet of country living, of waking to the security of knowing one’s neighbors, of knowing the routine of the day. I like walking in my own garden, watching the seasons change in the same fields, woods, ponds and streams.”
“The world traveler has become a country mouse?”
“Yes,” his wife responded on a note of steely determination.
In the sudden silence between them a log hissed, cracked, fell in a shower of sparks. Neither adversary noticed.
~ * ~
Chapter Three
“And now allow me tell you what I have in mind,” Jason said to his wife. He settled his hands on the arms of his chair and made a conscious effort to look older and wiser. He was older and wiser, dammit, and Earl of Rocksley, a member of the House of Lords (however few times his face had actually been seen there). He was Penelope Blayne’s Trustee. He had complete power over her. A cottage in the country be damned. She was his wife!
Penelope Blayne Lisbourne, Countess of Rocksley.
It used to terrify him. Somehow, at the moment, it had a rather nice ring to it. Obviously, the dread age of thirty had scrambled his wits, turned him into an addlepated numbskull, a muttonheaded skitterbrain, possibly short a sheet, even queer in the attic.
“I believe,” the earl said carefully, “that in her last illness your aunt thought about the things she had missed in her life. She may have regretted never settling down in one place, never marrying or having children. Oh, I don’t doubt,” he said, holding up his hand to keep his wife from interrupting, “that Cassandra Pemberton treasured her independence, but in the end I think she may have wished something else for you. Her infamous will was, I believe, not only an attempt to rectify the harm done to you so long ago, but to secure her own immortality through you.”
Jason could see from Penny’s blank look that she had failed to understand him, so he plunged inexorably on. “Has it not occurred to you that neither of us is getting any younger? That we should, perhaps, consider the immortality of offspring, for ourselves as well as for your Aunt Cassandra?”
His wife’s eyes snapped shut, all color drained from her face. Jason leaped to his feet, striding across the room for the brandy bottle. When
she had managed a sip or two, Penelope murmured her thanks, then—quite courageously, he thought—looked him straight in the eye. “You are suggesting, at this remarkably late date, that we live as man and wife.”
“In a word . . . yes.”
For a moment, Penny’s spirit faltered. Her gaze plummeted to the hands in her lap, which were clenched so tightly her knuckles cracked. He dared . . . he dared to calmly sit there, after all these years, and tell her he was at last ready to be married. Rakehell was too fine a word. Beast. Sadist. Satyr!
For the first time since her arrival at Rockbourne Crest Penny took a good look at her husband. Inwardly, a surge of misgiving swept through her, hopefully unnoticed. There was no doubt about why the Earl of Rocksley had acquired his notorious reputation as a rake. Even with eyes still bloodshot from his dissipation of the night before, he was wickedly handsome. If one did not know of his ill-spent life, it would be so easy to say that the promise of his golden youth had been fulfilled. From his fashionably tousled warm brown curls down to the shining tips of his Hessians, the Earl of Rocksley was a wonder to behold. He had grown another inch or two, she thought, and filled out, adding as much as two stone, all of which appeared to be muscle. His nose was a bit more aquiline, accenting the lines that now etched his face. But his eyes . . . they were still that liquid greenish blue that had hovered so close to her own, making silent promises she had thought she understood only to discover—
No matter. Here they both were, and the past must be put behind them. They must deal with their world as it was now, not the world of might-have-been.
Penny’s gaze dropped lower. There was some satisfaction in noting that he had dressed for the occasion. No country clothes this morning for the Earl of Rocksley. Of course, that was more likely due to the efforts of his valet, who would have heard the tale of her disaster of an entrance last night. She flicked another glance at her husband’s face. Sadly, Penny concluded that Jason had probably been in no case to choose his own clothes this morning. She could dismiss the thought that the perfectly cut burgundy tail coat, the finely embroidered cream waistcoat with gold buttons, or the biscuit-colored pantaloons had been donned in her honor. And, certainly, it was his valet who had fashioned the intricate arrangement of his cravat. Her husband’s boots, she noted as her gaze lowered still further, did not sport the tassels so prized by the dandies of the ton.
“Will I do?” the earl inquired in an ominously silky tone.
With as much slow insolence as she could manage, Penny raised her eyes from the earl’s Hessians. “I waited, you know,” she told him. “I waited until I was eighteen and quite grown up. Then I waited until I was nineteen, certain that you would send for me. And then I made excuses. With all our travels, your letters must have gone astray. Yes, surely that was it. The next time we returned to Pemberton Priory, there would be word. A summons for me to take my place beside you.”
Penny plunged on, disregarding the faint sound of the earl drawing a deep breath. “And then, finally, when Aunt Cass told me I must put a stop to my foolish notions, that I must forget you, live my life as if you had never existed, I made a quite determined effort to do so. I presumed”—it was Penny’s turn to draw a deep breath—“I presumed you, or perhaps your father before his death, had arranged an annulment. Under the circumstances . . . it would not have been too difficult, not for someone with the wealth and influence of the Earls of Rocksley.”
She wanted to tell him more, to twist the knife, recounting the hours she had spent waiting for her hero, her savior, her lover, to remember he had a wife. But she wouldn’t, of course. She had too much pride.
“There was no annulment.”
“I suppose I made a very fine shield,” Penny spat, anger erupting as from a volcano bursting its bonds. “You could rake and riot all you wished and never fear parson’s mousetrap. Tell me, my lord, how many times have you waved your marriage lines before an outraged father’s face?”
“Nothing quite so dramatic, my dear,” the earl responded, calmly enough. “Our marriage lines are locked safely away in the Muniment Room, and I have never actually had to show them. After all, no one would dare question my word.”
“You are horrid! I cannot think why I wore the willow—”
“Cut line, dear girl. Oh, I may have been a callow young pup with visions of Camelot, dragons, and fair maidens scrambling what wits I had at that age, but I was not without honor. I, too, fully expected our marriage was a commitment for life. But your darling Aunt Cass—the selfish old witch—warned me off. Evidently, she did not wish to lose you. Or your services. And I, I admit, was glad enough to have a few years of freedom, to rake and riot, as you call it. A man needs to feed his amour-propre, to spread his wings and preen before the ladies. To allow the gentler sex to knock off the rough edges before settling down to just one female.”
“Ten years, Rocksley? Ten years?” Penny sputtered.
He held up his hand, palm out. “Two years ago, all too aware that I had left the business to drag on too long, I wrote to your Aunt Cassandra. And discovered her illness. I could scarce take you away at such a time—”
Fury shook her. “You could not have written to me, allowed me to make that decision for myself? I was well past one and twenty, Jason. Well past.” Penny gulped, her fury threatening to spill into tears.
The Earl of Rocksley stuck out his finely shaped lower lip, much in the manner of a recalcitrant child. People did not respond with anger to Jason Lisbourne. It simply wasn’t done. “I remembered you as a schoolgirl, Penelope, looking closer to thirteen than just-turned sixteen.” Except for that one particular day. And night. A vision of exquisite beauty flashed through his mind, causing his loins to clench.
Ruthlessly, Jason thrust away the image. It did not, after all, bear any resemblance to the woman who now sat before him. “A child, Penelope, that was how I remembered you. Truthfully, it never occurred to me to write to you directly.”
“That is it, then,” his wife scoffed. “I was an ‘object’ when you first saw me, and an ‘object’ I have remained through all these years. And now I am still an ‘object,’ the only legal device through which you may immortalize yourself. You are saddled with me, a millstone about your neck, and are graciously willing to accept the inevitable. How vastly kind of your lordship to consider my humble self—”
“You are not an object!” the earl roared. “Nor were you when we met. You were a sweet and charming child of barely sixteen, all silver gilt curls and innocent eyes. The epitome of the English schoolgirl.”
“Not for long.” Unable to continue the battle, Penny sagged back against the rich tan leather of the bergère chair and closed her eyes.
“Penelope. Penny.” The earl’s fingers closed over hers. His voice was unaccustomedly soft and gentle. “Please remember that this abominable situation was not of our choice. There simply was nothing else to be done at the time. That we are still alive is the miracle. Perhaps we—I—might have handled matters in a more proper manner over the past few years since you are grown, but that cannot, now, be rectified. So may we not make the best of the years we have before us?”
“Please . . . I should like to leave now,” Penny whispered, head down. She did not see the earl recoil at her words.
“I thought you had more courage,” he taunted, thoroughly stung.
“I do. I have . . . but I must go now. Truly I must,” Penny murmured, pushing herself to her feet. “I must go!” And she fled the room before hot tears could scald her eyes and run down her cheeks, revealing to all the world what a bubbleheaded fool she was. Because the thought of being Penelope Lisbourne, Countess of Rocksley, the pinnacle of all her foolish girlhood dreams, was quite too much for that sad resigned spinster, Miss Penelope Blayne, to handle.
“Hovering, were you?” the earl growled, as, after a single knock, the door inched opened and, with exaggerated caution, Gant Deveny peered round the edge.
“Dear chap, the entire household was hoveri
ng. Including Mrs. Coleraine, who, I might add, shows no sign of packing her bags and fading quietly into obscurity.” Lord Brawley favored his friend with a mocking, yet sympathetic grin, then sauntered across the room, neatly flipping up the tails of his jacket before sitting in the chair just vacated by the Countess of Rocksley.
“Daphne?” The pixies returned on a roar of arrhythmic noise, sounding like the triumphant heralding of yet another soul descending into hell.
“The glorious Daphne,” Lord Brawley confirmed in sepulcher tones. “Not the best plan to have her here, Rock, if you were expecting your wife.”
“I was not expecting Penelope until— Oh, to the devil with it!” Jason groaned. “I’ve made a rare mull of it, my friend. Nothing to do but brazen it out. Ring for Hutton, will you? I daresay your legs are less like a blancmange than mine.”
When the butler appeared, still looking a bit green and bleary-eyed, Jason told him, “Send Mrs. Wilton and two maids to aid Mrs. Coleraine with her packing. And see that Miss Blayne remains in her room until after Mrs. Coleraine’s departure.”
“Yes, your lordship.” Hutton swayed slightly to the left. “Ah, my lord,” he inquired, “was you expecting me to put a footman outside her door? And what should he say if Miss wishes to leave her bedchamber?”
“Hell and the devil!” the earl bellowed. “Tell Mrs. Wilton to lock the door, if you must.”
“Rock!” Gant Deveny hissed. “If you truly wish to be married—of course, it’s more likely you do not—then it’s best to turn the key on La Coleraine!”
Jason’s head dropped into his hands. “Go!” He waved Hutton out of the room.
“Do you wish to be married?” Lord Brawley inquired, taking no pity on his suffering friend.
“I am obliged to have heirs,” the earl muttered from behind his hands.
“So you married a child, then abandoned her for what—ten years? A fascinating way to set up your nursery, Rock. Don’t doubt some academic will wish to write a paper about it.”
The Harem Bride Page 3