She felt warm and comfortable at his side, and he led her across the flagstoned terrace and down some steps to the garden, fragrant with spring blossoms. There was a graveled walkway, and he led her to a stone bench some distance from the house and a ways past the last flambeaux. By London standards it was a large garden, and they were far enough from the house that they had a modicum of privacy. They sat together.
What was he doing in the garden with his wife? He had never before or since his marriage had a lover who could excite him as Emily had in their years together, and a part of him longed for that fulfillment. Once experienced it was the measure by which all else was compared. Was it simply desire, then, that coursed through his veins? Could it be sated by possessing her body again, or was there more than mere lust at work?
She shivered, and he realized that it was still a little chilly to be taking a lady for a walk in the moonlight. He did not want to take her back just yet, though, so he peeled off his jacket, an awkward thing to do as his tailor made the fit so damned close, and put it around her shoulders.
“Thank you, Baxter,” she murmured and huddled into it.
How many years had it been since they were alone together? Certainly not since that dreadful day at Brockwith, but not for a long while before, either. Uneasily he recalled the pain in her eyes as he spoke to her that day, until she had summoned up enough ire to strike back at him with angry words. It was as though he had slapped her, and she needed to hit back to maintain her dignity. Afterward he had been glad that she had shrieked at him like a fishwife. At least she had not given one of those martyred sighs or sad little shrugs. She had let him have it with all the angry fire in her.
“Emily, I . . .” This was not going to be easy. She looked up at him, large brown eyes full of questions. “Emily, I owe you an apology. A long-overdue apology.”
“For what?”
She could ask that? Did she really not know?
“I wronged you in many ways, and I am sorry. Even if we had fallen out of love, I should never have treated you the way I did, making you leave Brockwith, but more especially saying the things I said in that last interview.”
• • •
Emily flinched as if he had struck her. Fallen out of love. He spoke of falling out of love as if it was a mutual thing, but it wasn’t. Only he had fallen out of love. Her heart ached with a queer, pulling pain. But he was still talking and she must attend and not lose the thread of what he wanted to say.
“I guess that is the penalty for a marriage such as ours,” he continued. “In our parents’ day we would not have been allowed to marry for love. Maybe that is wiser after all.”
He looked sad, she thought, longing to stroke his face and ease away the lines that time and trouble had placed on his brow. Still so handsome, still the man who made her heart beat faster and her body ache with longing, even as pain coursed through her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I would rather have had those years of love to remember, even considering how it ended, than to have had the most cordial arranged marriage in the world.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, my dear. It eases my burden of guilt.”
A tiny spurt of anger flared in her bosom. Burden of guilt? Is that what she had become in his memory? She moved away from him a little on the bench and gazed off into the dark bushes. “You have no need to feel guilty, Baxter. Life goes on. Our marriage didn’t work, but I’m sure we have both found happiness in other ways.”
She heard his swift intake of breath and turned to gaze up at him in the dim, flickering light shed from the flambeaux on the terrace. His face was twisted in anger, which he mastered quickly. What was wrong that he reacted that way? He threw his leg over the bench and straddled it, moving closer to her. She felt the warmth from his body invading her own, but there was no room to move away from him more. When they were together, he would sit like that and she would lean against him, cradled by his strength. Now she felt suffocated by clamoring need racing through her body like an electrical shock.
His voice was stiff and hard when he spoke again. “I brought you out here to apologize, and I cannot rest until I have been specific. I am sorry for pushing you out of Brockwith Manor. It was your home and you had . . . have, every right to be there.”
“Your mother would never have been happy with me there, Baxter, you know that.”
“I should have insisted she move to the dower house; that was my duty to you.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s duty! What an unpleasant word!” She hunched her shoulder toward him.
“I am also sorry for the things I said to you before leaving. Specifically that maybe if you slept with another man and did not get pregnant you would stop blaming me.” His voice was hard and determined, biting chunks out of the quiet night air.
“I have learned much since moving to Yorkshire,” she replied quietly, resolved not to quarrel with him. There was no point in anger after all these years. “I have learned that no matter how much two people love each other, they cannot know each other’s thoughts. Assumptions are made, feelings are hurt, mistakes are inevitable. I never blamed you for not giving me a child. I thought you blamed me though, as your mother did . . . as she still does.”
“And that is another thing. I am sorry for not protecting you from my mother.” His voice was softer, not as harsh. “She can be a bit much at times.”
Emily chuckled into the darkness. “A bit much? Oh, Baxter! Understated as always. Wellington should have set your mother loose on the French. Napoleon would have had a mass rebellion in his ranks in a week and the war would have been over.”
He was silent and she bit her lip. She had offended him, and after she had meant to maintain peace with him. She turned toward him and looked up into his dark, hooded eyes, glittering in the wavering light from the flambeaux. There was pain there, but not anger, this time.
“I should apologize myself for a few things,” she said. “I know it must have seemed like I blamed you that I could not conceive, but I never did. I did withdraw though, from you. I remember times when you offered me . . .” Her voice broke, but she cleared her throat and continued, though she could no longer hold his gaze. “You offered me tenderness, and I could not return it. I was so unhappy . . . wanted a child so badly. Not just for the succession, but just to have our child. I felt less of a woman for not being able to conceive. I have always wanted . . .” She turned away from that unprofitable line of thought. Dwelling on the past and on what she would never have was a mistake; she had learned that in the years of their separation. She took a deep breath, and said simply, “I was wrong to draw away from you. I apologize.”
She risked a glance up into his eyes. There was turmoil in their dark depths.
“Emily, how could you ever think yourself less of a woman for not being able to bear a child? It is not that important in the larger scheme of things that I have an heir. I have a cousin, William, a rather nice young fellow down in Shropshire, who will make a superb marquess. And he is even now married and his wife with child. The succession is secure.”
“I told you it wasn’t just the succ—”
“Shh, Em. I know. A child of our own.” He stopped and looked down into her brown eyes sparkling with unshed tears, and a fissure cracked in his heart. She had not blamed him; it was her own feelings of inadequacy that caused her to pull away from him, to grow cold in their lovemaking! But he had reacted with harshness and fury. He reached out and wrapped his arms around her. “Oh, Emily,” he whispered in the echoey darkness of the garden.
Chapter Eleven
She relaxed, her softness cradled against him. “Emily, I . . .” She was gazing up at him, her rosy lips parted, her warm breath fanning against his mouth like a gentle touch and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss her. Her eyes fluttered closed as his head lowered and he tasted her lips with curiosity. What would it be like, after all these years?
She was pliant and unresisting in his arm
s, a warm, soft bundle of womanhood begging to be loved. He deepened the kiss, feeling heat bloom in his lower regions as arousal swelled against her rounded bottom, snug against his groin. She parted her lips and he slipped his tongue in, groaning at the warm, sweet taste of her. He plunged deeply into her luscious mouth, relishing the satiny feel of her skin where his tongue probed, pushing deeper, demanding more. She quivered, and he heard her faint, stifled moan of suppressed excitement. He held her close and tight, her shivers of growing excitement vibrating through his body.
As the fog of sexual excitement closed in around his brain, comparisons raced through the small part of his mind that was still working. He had kissed Belle, but she was impatient and demanding, forcing the lovemaking to move on to intercourse immediately. Emily surrendered herself to him and followed his lead, her arms going up around his neck as she moaned against his lips. Her awakening desire was a powerful aphrodisiac, and he knew he was already more aroused than ever he was with Belle.
This was his wife in his arms, his wife of over fifteen years, and yet he felt like he was stalking a new mistress, enjoying the eroticism of the hunt, the urgent thrill of pursuit and capture and delectable ravishment.
Emily pulled away and started to stand, her eyes unfocused, her face a mask of confusion, but no, he was not going to stop yet! He pulled her back to him, his body aching with desire, ferociously, hungrily aware that it felt good to be the pursuer rather than the prey, as he was with Belle. He kissed Emily’s lips again, plundering the delicious mouth, tasting faintly of wine as she shivered in his arms, quiescent now.
He moved his lips down to her throat and she threw her head back in mindless pleasure, her hands on his shoulders kneading and massaging through his shirt fabric as he kissed the pulse point at the base of her throat. He nipped her skin and she gasped, a startled, faint moan of delight following. The inviting slope of her bosom and deep cleavage teased him, and he spread warm kisses down the silky skin, breathing in her delectable fragrance and nuzzling the full, rounded mounds that curved above the low neckline of her dress. He ached to dare more, to do more, and as he tongued the deep cleft of her exquisite bosom, he felt her body jolt with sensual awareness.
“Baxter,” she sighed into the quiet night as he spanned his large hand over the fullness of one breast.
“Oh, Baxter, we mustn’t.”
Her words died as he kissed his way down the plump mound to the very edge of her lacy neckline. He pushed his tongue under the snug neckline and she grasped his shoulders, clutching at the fabric with hands tightened into claws, a low, inarticulate groan of raw need her only sound. He felt a surge of triumph and desperately tried to think—though his mind was remarkably uncooperative as far as coherent thought went—if he could convince her to go to his carriage with him. His arousal was almost painful now, throbbing against the tight confines of his breeches and the inviting roundness of her hip and bottom. If not the carriage, was there a gazebo or summerhouse? Somewhere! Anywhere he could lay her down or get under her skirts, or—
Footsteps crunched on the gravel path just beyond the hedge. “Emily? Chérie?”
Emily pulled away from Baxter and with trembling gloved fingers tried to restore order to her clothing. Her cheeks were flushing a deep crimson. The young French vicomte turned the corner of the gravel path and came upon them. Baxter watched the slender young sprig with ill-concealed anger. Marchant paused.
“Do I come at a bad time, Emily?”
Emily forced a smile. “Of course not, Etienne. We were just . . . uh, talking.”
The young Frenchman approached closer and his darting eyes slid over her disarrayed dress and her blush. His eyes narrowed to slits and he cast an acrimonious glance on Baxter. He held out his hand and Emily took it, rising to stand beside him.
“Are you sure you are all right, chérie,” he said, his voice tender and full of concern.
It was an absurd scene, Baxter thought, his passion blazing into anger. He felt like he had been caught groping another man’s wife instead of his own! If Marchant and his wife were having an affair, as it appeared from the young man’s possessive demeanor, then what was she doing sitting in the garden allowing him to take liberties with her?
“We were just talking!” Baxter said loudly, backing up his wife’s assertion. Emily looked relieved. Marchant still had her rose-gloved hand in his own and was stroking it with the familiarity of a lover.
Marchant pointedly glared at Baxter’s coat, which had fallen from Emily in the passion of the moment, and then his contemptuous gaze flicked over the evidence of Baxter’s arousal. “Perhaps, my lord, you should achieve control over your person before rejoining the party.”
With that, he tucked Emily’s arm through his and walked her back to the ballroom.
• • •
Marchant was silent as he walked Emily up the gravel path and onto the terrace. Before entering the ballroom, he drew her aside and gazed into her eyes with blazing yearning.
“Emily, may I come to you tonight? After the ball?”
She pulled away from him. They had been through this, and she thought he understood. “No, Etienne, you know you cannot. I told you the other night; you are everything that is amiable, and very handsome and very sweet, but I cannot have an affair. I am still married, and when I said the words ‘till death us do part,’ I meant it. Forever.”
“So, is that what you were doing in the garden with him? Mending your broken marriage?” The Frenchman’s normally melodious voice came out in a harsh croak.
Had he fallen in love with her? Emily wondered. They had not known each other long enough, had they? But she had fallen in love with Baxter in a split second, or so it had seemed to her at the time, when she first met the man she would marry. She shivered in the night air, cold now that she did not have Baxter’s arms around her, and considered her next words.
“I don’t know what that was about, Etienne,” she told him truthfully. Honesty was all she could offer him. “He kissed me, and for a moment it felt like the old days, before we grew apart. Perhaps we can mend our marriage.” A tiny bud of hope blossomed in her heart at the thought. He had apologized to her, perhaps not in the most eloquent way, but he had still apologized. And she had said to him what she had long hoped for the opportunity to say, that she had never blamed him for anything; or at least, if she had, she had long forgiven him.
“Alors, I wish you well,” Marchant said sadly, guiding her into the ballroom through open French doors. “I hope—”
His words were broken off when Lady Grishelda approached, glancing over her shoulder and then walking more swiftly. “Emily, there you are! Please come to the withdrawing room with me!” She grasped Emily’s arm and darted another glance over her shoulder.
“Grishelda, what is wrong?”
“I can’t explain here!”
Emily glanced around, but it didn’t seem to her that there was any immediate threat in the large, crowded ballroom. Strangers surrounded them, the steady hum of conversation filling in while the orchestra paused between pieces. It would do the girl good to calm herself, and courtesy demanded an introduction. “Lady Grishelda van Hoffen, may I introduce you to Vicomte Etienne Marchant?”
“My lady,” he said, bowing and taking her hand. He gallantly kissed it.
Grishelda pulled her hand away as if it had been stung and the young viscount gazed at her with surprise. Then he smiled, a slow, seductive smile that lit his brown eyes with warmth.
“Please excuse me,” Grishelda said, reddening unbecomingly as she curtseyed. “I am a trifle agitated at the moment.” She turned away from the viscount without ceremony and said, “Please, Emily, come with me!”
Emily threw Etienne an apologetic look and bid him a hasty good-bye, then followed Grishelda from the ballroom, threading, with difficulty, through the throng of people, some who wished to stop her to gossip. One even alluded, with arch looks, to the fact that she had disappeared from the ballroom with her husband and
reappeared with the handsome Frenchman everyone was talking about. She made her excuses and followed Grishelda, who, more slender and not as well known, had gotten through the crowd much more quickly.
The ladies’ withdrawing room was a morning parlor with cheerful, butter yellow walls and comfortable chairs, as well as a screened-off portion of the room for more intimate functions needed after too much wine or punch. There was a fire in the hearth, a tray of restoratives for any lady who might feel faint, and a pert lady’s maid ready to help with a torn flounce or other emergency.
Emily waved her away when she stood to approach them and joined Grishelda by the fire.
“What is wrong, my dear?”
The girl looked up at her with naked misery in her normally calm eyes. “I overheard my mother and Captain Dempster talking tonight to that miserable old goat, Lord Saunders, when they thought I was not around. He wants a young female to bear him a child, and that is to be me! They are going to marry me off to that filthy old lecher.” Her voice caught on a sob and she covered her face with her slender hands.
Emily sat down opposite her on a low stool in front of the sofa and pulled the young woman’s hands away from her face. “Grishelda, you must be strong if you are to protect yourself.” She stared into the leaping flames of the fire for a minute thinking. “Did you hear how they plan to marry you off without your consent?”
Grishelda shook her head. Her hair was back in its usual severe bun and her dress was gray silk, elegant but austere. She was adorned with no jewelry, no bows or frills and not an inch of lace. “I can only assume,” she said, her voice calmer, “that they intend the kidnap scheme. But how am I to guard against that?”
“And your mother is aware of all this?” It seemed incredible to Emily that any mother, even a sluttish tart like Lady van Hoffen, would countenance such treatment of her daughter!
“I don’t think she knows the whole of it. Emily, there is more.” Grishelda’s voice was low, almost inaudible.
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