Until You wds-3

by Джудит Макнот

  "Did you get over me as easily as that when we were-" she hesitated, carefully refraining from any mention of the hideous night that had nearly destroyed all chances of a marriage between them, "when we were estranged?"

  "No."

  When they were both in bed and she had curled into his arms, he added, "However, I had known you longer than Stephen knew Ch-Sheridan Bromleigh."

  She nodded, her soft cheek sliding against his arm, and he tightened his hold, drawing her tighter against him because he, too, remembered the event that had nearly torn them apart.

  "Time has little to say to the matter. Do you remember how long after we met again in England it was before you loved me?" she said into the darkness.

  Clayton smiled at the memory. "It was the night you confessed you used to pepper your music teacher's snuffbox."

  "If memory serves me well, I told you that story only a week or two after I came home from France."

  "Something like that."

  "Clayton?"

  "What?" he whispered.

  "I do not think Stephen is going to get over this as easily as you think. He could have any woman he wants, and yet in all this time, she was the only woman he ever wanted-except for Emily, and look how cynical he became after that!"

  "All Stephen has to do is crook his finger, and dozens of desirable women will line up to soothe him. This time, he'll let them because his pride and his heart both took a more serious beating than the last," Clayton predicted grimly. "In the meantime, he'll get completely foxed and stay that way for a while."

  She tipped her face up to his. "Is that what you did?"

  "That's what I did," he confirmed.

  "How very typically male," she said primly.

  Clayton smothered a laugh at her tone and tipped her soft mouth up to his. "Are you feeling superior, madam?" he asked, a brow quirked in amused inquiry.

  "Very," she replied smugly.

  "In that case," he said, rolling onto his back and taking her with him, "I suppose I'd better let you be on top."

  Some time later, sleepy and sated, Clayton settled her more comfortably against his side and closed his eyes.

  "Clayton?"

  Something in her voice made him warily force his eyes open.

  "I don't know if you noticed, but Charity Thornton was in tears today when Sheridan Bromleigh didn't return." When he didn't reply, but continued to watch her, she said, "Did you notice?"

  "Yes," he said cautiously. "Why do you ask?"

  "Well, she told me in the most-most heartbreaking way-that she'd felt truly useful for the first time in decades because she was needed to act as chaperone. And she said she felt a useless old failure because she hadn't found another husband for Miss Bromleigh, besides Stephen."

  "I heard her and so did Stephen," Clayton said, his unease and suspicion vibrating in his voice. "However, I believe her exact words were that she was sorry she hadn't been able to find some other unfortunate, gullible male for Miss Bromleigh to deceive and abandon, instead of her dear Langford."

  "Well, that's almost the same thing…"

  "Only if you consider idiocy almost the same thing as sense. Why," he said with gravest reservations about hearing the answer, "are we having this discussion right now?"

  "Because I-I invited her to stay with us for a while."

  To Whitney it seemed as if he had stopped breathing. "I thought she could help look after Noel."

  "It would make more sense to ask Noel to look after her."

  Uncertain whether his mocking tone disguised annoyance or amusement, she said, "Naturally, Noel's governess would be secretly in charge."

  "In charge of who-Noel or Charity Thornton?"

  Whitney bit back a nervous smile. "Are you angry?"

  "No. I am… awed."

  "By what?"

  "By your sense of timing. An hour ago, before I wore us both out making love, I might have reacted more violently to having her in my house than I am able to now-when I'm too weak to hold my eyes open."

  "I rather thought that would be the case," she admitted guiltily after he deliberately let the silence lengthen.

  "I rather thought you did."

  He sounded almost disapproving of that, and she bit her lip, carefully lifting her gaze to his face, searching his inscrutable features, one by one. "Finding what you're looking for, my love?" he asked mildly.

  "I was looking for… forgiveness?" she hinted, and her glowing eyes were almost Clayton's undoing as he struggled to keep his face straight. "A manly attitude of benevolence toward his overwrought wife? A certain nobility of spirit that manifests itself in the quality of tolerance for others? Perhaps a sense of humor?"

  "All of that?" Clayton said, a helpless grin tugging at his lips. "All of those qualities in one beleaguered male with a wife who has just invited the world's oldest living henwit into his home?"

  She bit her lip to keep from laughing, and nodded.

  "In that case," he announced, closing his eyes, a smile on his lips, "you may count yourself fortunate to have married just such a paragon."

  43

  "I've come to ask you a favor," Stephen announced without preamble two weeks later as he walked into the morning room of his brother's house, where Whitney was supervising the installation of sunny yellow draperies.

  Startled by his abrupt arrival and curt tone, Whitney left the seamstresses alone, and walked with Stephen into the drawing room. In the past three weeks since the aborted wedding, she'd seen him at different functions, but only at night and always with a different woman on his arm. Rumor had it that he had also been seen at the theatre with Helene Devernay. In the revealing daylight, it was obvious to Whitney that time wasn't soothing him. His face looked as hard and cold as granite, his attitude even to her was distant and curt, and there were deep lines of fatigue etched at his eyes and mouth. He looked as if he hadn't been to sleep in a week and hadn't stopped drinking while he was awake. "I'd do anything you asked of me, you know that," Whitney said gently, her heart aching for him.

  "Can you make a place for an old man-an under-butler? I want him out of my sight."

  "Of course," she said, and then cautiously she added, "Could you tell me why you want him out of your sight?"

  "He was Burleton's butler, and I don't ever want to see anyone or anything that reminds me of her."

  Clayton looked up from the papers he was studying as Whitney walked into his study, her face stricken. Alarm brought him quickly to his feet and around his desk. "What's wrong?"

  "Stephen was just here," she said in a choked voice. "He looks awful, he sounds awful. He doesn't even want Burleton's servant around because the man reminds him of her. His pride wasn't all that suffered when she left. He loved her," she said vehemently, her green eyes shimmering with frustrated tears. "I knew he did!"

  "It's over," Clayton said with soft finality. "She's gone and it's over. Stephen will come around."

  "Not at this rate!"

  "He has a different woman on his arm every night," he told her. "I can assure you he's a long way from becoming a recluse."

  "He has shut himself away, even from me," she argued. "I can feel it, and I'll tell you something else. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Sheridan Bromleigh wasn't playacting about anything, including her feelings for Stephen."

  "She was an ambitious schemer, and a gifted one. It would take a miracle to convince me otherwise," he stated flatly, walking back around his desk.

  Hodgkin stared at his employer in stricken silence. "I-I am to be dismissed, milord? Was it something I did, or did not do, or-"

  "I've arranged for you to work in my brother's home. That's all."

  "But was I derelict in any of my duties, or-"

  "NO!" Stephen snapped, turning away. "It has nothing to do with anything you've done." Normally he never interfered with the hiring or dismissal or discipline of the household staff, and he should have left this unpleasant task to his secretary, he realized.

&nb
sp; The old man's shoulders sagged. Stephen watched him shuffle off, moving like a man who was ten years older than he'd been when he walked in.

  44

  It was a mistake to seek Stephen out, even from this safe distance, and Sherry knew it, but she couldn't seem to help herself. He'd told her he went to the opera on most Thursdays, and she wanted-needed-to see him just one more time before she left England. She'd written to her aunt three weeks ago, the day after her aborted wedding, explaining everything that had happened and asking Cornelia to send her enough money for passage home. In the meantime, Sherry had secured a position as governess to a large family without the means to hire a more desirable, older woman or the sense to verify the recommendation letter Nicholas DuVille had given her with Charity Thornton's name listed as a secondary reference-a reference that Sherry suspected the elderly lady knew nothing about.

  The crowded pit at Covent Garden was occupied by boisterous, restless people who stepped on Sherry's feet and bumped her shoulder constantly, but she scarcely noticed. Her eyes were on the empty box, the seventh from the front, and she stared at it until the gilt flowers and stars on the front of it began to blur and merge. Time ticked past and the ruckus within the opera house rose to a deafening roar. The curtains behind the seventh box suddenly parted and Sherry froze, panicked because she was finally going to see him… and then she was devastated because she did not see him in the group at all.

  She must have miscounted, she thought wildly, and began to count each box, searching the aristocratic faces of its occupants. Each box was separated from its neighbor by a slender gold pillar, and from each pillar a cut-glass chandelier was suspended. Sherry counted and recounted them, then she looked at her hands in her lap, clasping them tightly to stop their trembling. He wasn't coming tonight. He'd given his box to others. It would be another week before she could come again, providing she saved enough money to buy another ticket.

  The orchestra gave out a blast of sound, the crimson curtains swept open, and Sherry mentally counted the minutes, ignoring the music she had once loved, glancing up compulsively at the two empty seats in the box, willing to see him there, and when she didn't, praying that he would be there when she looked again.

  He arrived between the first and second acts, without her seeing him enter the box or take his seat-a dark spectre from the mists of her memory who materialized into the realm of her reality and made her heart thunder. Her eyes clung to his hard, handsome face, memorizing it, worshipping it, as she blinked away the sheen of tears that blurred her vision.

  He hadn't loved her, she reminded herself, torturing herself with the sight of him, she'd merely been a responsibility he'd mistakenly assumed. She knew all that, but it didn't stop her from looking at his chiseled lips and remembering how softly they had touched hers, or from gazing at his rugged profile and remembering how his slow dazzling smile could transform his entire face.

  Sheridan was not the only woman whose attention wasn't on the performance. On the opposite side of the theatre, in the Duke of Claymore's box, Victoria Fielding, Marchioness of Wakefield, was staring hard at the occupants of the pit, searching for the young woman she'd glimpsed earlier making her way into the opera house. "I know the woman I saw was Charise Lanc-I mean Sheridan Bromleigh," Victoria whispered to Whitney. "She was in the lines going into the pit. Wait-there she is!" she exclaimed in a low voice. "She's wearing a dark blue bonnet."

  Oblivious to the curious looks of their husbands, who were seated behind them, the two friends peered hard at the woman in question, their shoulders so close together that Victoria's auburn hair nearly touched the glossy dark strands of Whitney's.

  "If only she didn't have that bonnet on, we'd know her in a minute by the color of her hair!"

  Whitney didn't need to see the color of her hair. For the next half hour, the woman in question never looked anywhere but at Stephen's box, and it was confirmation enough. "She hasn't stopped looking at him," Victoria said, her voice filled with some of the same confusion and sorrow that Whitney felt about the sudden disappearance and behavior of Stephen's fiancee. "Do you suppose she knew he would be here tonight?"

  Whitney nodded, willing the young woman to look in her direction for just a moment, instead of the opposite one. "She knows Stephen comes here on Thursday nights and that he has that box. She was here with him a few days before she… vanished." Vanished was the least damning thing Whitney could say at the moment, which was why she chose the word. Victoria and Jason Fielding, who were also friends of Stephen's, were two of the very few people amongst the ton who were privy to most of the full story because they'd been invited to attend the small celebration that had been planned for after the private affair.

  "Do you think she intends to meet him 'accidentally' for some reason?"

  "I don't know," Whitney whispered back.

  Behind them, their husbands observed the pretty pair who were ignoring a rather excellent performance. "What is that all about?" Clayton murmured to Jason Fielding, tipping his head toward their two wives.

  "Someone must have the gown of the century on."

  "Not if she's down there in the pits," Clayton pointed out. "The last time Whitney and Victoria indulged in a similar huddle, it was because Stephen's mistress was in his box with him and Monica Fitzwaring was in the next box with Bakersfield, trying to look as if she didn't know who was one narrow pillar away from her shoulder."

  "I remember," Jason said with a grin. "As I recall, they were on the side of Helene Devernay that night."

  "Whitney laughed all the way home," Clayton said.

  "Victoria declared it the most diverting three hours of the entire Season," Jason added, and leaning forward he whispered jokingly, "Victoria, you are in imminent danger of toppling out of this box."

  She sent him an abashed smile but did not cease her scrutiny of whatever they were watching.

  "She's leaving!" Whitney said, feeling both relieved and crestfallen. "She didn't wait for the performance to end, and she didn't leave her seat between acts, which means she doesn't intend to meet him here accidentally."

  As puzzled as he was amused by their girlish whispering, Clayton leaned sideways, scanning the rows in the pit, but he waited until they were on their way to their next engagement-a lavish midnight supper-before he brought the subject up to his preoccupied wife. "What were you and Victoria doing all that whispering about tonight?"

  Whitney hesitated, knowing he would not be pleased that Sheridan Bromleigh had reentered their sphere or be interested in the reasons. "Victoria thought she saw Sheridan Bromleigh tonight. I couldn't get a good enough look at her face to say for certain that Victoria was correct." Clayton's brows drew together into a dark hostile frown at the mention of the woman's name, and Whitney decided to let the subject drop.

  The following Thursday, after seeing that their husbands were occupied elsewhere, Victoria and Whitney arrived early at Covent Garden, and from the vantage point of their box, scanned the faces of every new arrival who entered the pit and the gallery, searching for one particular face. "Do you see her?" Victoria asked.

  "No, but it's a miracle you noticed her in the crowd at all last week. It's impossible to see everyone's features clearly from up here."

  "I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed," Victoria said, sitting back in her chair when the curtain went up, and they still hadn't had a glimpse of the woman they'd thought was Sheridan Bromleigh last week.

  Whitney sat back too, silently sorting out her own reaction.

  "Your brother-in-law just arrived," Victoria said a few minutes later. "Is that Georgette Porter with him?"

  Whitney looked across the theatre at Stephen's box and nodded absently.

  "She's exceedingly lovely," Victoria added in the tone of one who is trying very hard to find and give encouragement about a situation that is not particularly encouraging at all. She liked Stephen Westmoreland very well, and he was one of a very few people whom her husband considered among his close fri
ends. She had also felt an instantaneous liking for Sheridan Bromleigh, who, like herself, was also an American.

  Whitney contemplated Stephen's attitude toward the woman at his side, who was smiling at him and talking animatedly. He was listening with a look of fixed courtesy, and Whitney had the impression he didn't know Georgette Porter was talking, or that she had a face, or that she was even in his box. Her gaze shifted inexorably to the seats below in the pits, scanning the rows of heads again. "She's here, I know she is. I mean, I have a feeling she is," she amended as Victoria glanced sharply at her.

  "If I hadn't seen her arriving last week and been watching for her to come into the pit, I'd never have been able to point her out to you. We could never find her now, among all these rows of people."

  "I know a way!" Whitney said on an inspired stroke. "Look for a head that is turned toward Stephen's box instead of the stage." A few minutes later, Victoria grabbed her arm in her excitement. "Right there!" she said. "The same bonnet too! She's practically beneath us, which is why we didn't see her."

  Now that she'd spotted the other woman, Whitney observed her steadily, but not until she stood up to leave did she get a clear look at the other woman's wistful face. "It is her!" Whitney said fiercely, feeling a swift stab of helpless sympathy for the naked sorrow and longing she'd seen on Sheridan's face as she stood up to leave just before the opera's end.

  Sympathy was not an emotion her husband was likely to share-at least not unless he too saw the way Sheridan Bromleigh had sat in silence, her gaze on Stephen. But if he were to see it, and if his attitude toward Sheridan were to soften, then Whitney thought he might be persuaded to talk to Stephen, to urge him to seek her out. Clayton was the only one, she knew, who had enough influence on Stephen to possibly sway him.