And for five thousand pounds a year, she owed him a wife as popular and well-thought-of as he. To that end, she made sure she appeared amiable but also sure of herself—her public persona reflecting, at least in some measure, his cool sophistication.
After dinner, the gentlemen rejoined the ladies in the drawing room. From that moment until the ladies retired, he spoke to her only once, to ask what time she had arranged for coffee and biscuits to be brought in—an inattentiveness that was exactly as it ought to be, as the duty of the host and the hostess was to see to the guests, rather than to each other.
Yet she felt herself constantly under observation, a sensation not unlike what she’d experienced the night of their first meeting. He would be speaking to each of their sixteen guests in turn, or participating in a game of cards, or taking part in a duet, his singing voice remarkably pure and warm—and she would feel the tangible weight of his scrutiny.
No solid evidence of this observation, only her intuition. But even her intuition could not quite decipher the nature of his inspection. Did it mean anything at all, or was he merely making sure that her performance as his wife was satisfactory?
At ten o’clock coffee and biscuits were served. The ladies, herself included, retired shortly thereafter. She had told her maid not to wait up for her. That freedom of movement now allowed her to conceal herself in the darkness of the solarium, across from the billiard room.
A quarter of an hour later, the gentlemen arrived in a herd.
“A game, Wren?” asked someone. “I’ll put down twenty quid.”
“Tomorrow, maybe,” answered Louisa’s husband. “I will not be staying long enough tonight for an entire game—I am a married man now, with a married man’s duties.”
His friends chuckled. Some of them teased him good-naturedly. Louisa rubbed her finger on the heavy toile that covered the wall behind her. Did he mean it, or was he only acting the part?
Good for his word, he left the billiard room after only a few minutes. She slipped out of the solarium and followed him. At the stair landing, he stopped and turned around, his person only a silhouette. She caught up to him and together they ascended the steps.
“I am not following you around the house,” she said, a little defensively, once they were out of earshot of those still in the billiard room. “I only wish for a minute of your time.”
“And you are, of course, entitled to that,” he said politely. “Shall we go to my sitting room?”
He was making her nervous, and not in a pleasurable way. Instead, she felt like the insolvent young woman she had been until very recently, attempting to persuade a shopkeeper to extend her more credit.
She preceded him into his apartment. A moment later a light came on, then another. She blinked, looking about, not sure what she was seeing.
The decor was not English, nor exactly what she thought of as the French style. His apartment was an ecstasy of pastels—white, gold, and sky blue. She almost could not imagine how exuberant it would appear during the day, with sunlight streaming in through the windows.
The plaster medallions on the wall, the fresco paintings of pastoral idylls, a ceiling that was the brightest, cleanest sky, with birds in flight and even a hot-air balloon.
What the inside of a fairy-tale castle looked like, more or less.
“It’s beautiful. It’s . . .”
“Rococo is the word you are looking for, I believe.”
“Yes, I suppose.” She had no idea what the word meant, except to know that it was the last thing she’d have extrapolated from his otherwise clean, spare style.
She liked this rococo interior. It was luminous and joyful. But instead of uplifting her mood, it only made her feel more apprehensive. What else didn’t she know about him?
“I would ring for some tea, but the staff has already retired for the night,” he said, quite formally.
“Thank you, but I don’t need any tea.”
“In that case, what can I do for you?”
She bit the inside of her lower lip. “Perhaps you can explain why you are no longer my lover.”
“Am I not?”
“You haven’t touched me in two days.”
“And forty-eight hours is enough to disqualify me?”
“We are on our honeymoon. And you have given me every expectation that I may expect an attentive and frequent lover.”
“You might be recalling things I’d said when I had you in mind as a mistress, whom I might see as little as twenty days out of the year. Marriage is something else altogether.”
“Yet I am confident you said to me, on our wedding night, that you would—that you wanted to—fuck me every hour of every day.”
The inside of her mouth felt as if it were on fire. The word was incredibly vulgar, yet strangely potent and muscular.
His eyes narrowed, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Then he leaned forward a little, his manner almost conspiratorial. “Let me tell you something, my dear: You should never believe what a man says when he is fucking you.”
Now it was the inside of her chest that burned. “If I cannot trust you even in bed, then where can I trust you?”
“I am disappointed. I thought you prudent enough to never trust me anywhere, at any time.”
She was just as disappointed in herself, but there was a small part of her that still couldn’t quite believe that all her worst suspicions were coming true. That the marriage she’d thought might prove to be ultimately heartbreaking was breaking her heart this moment.
“I should have had it written into the marriage settlement—how often I must be made love to,” she said, trying to sound flippant.
He said nothing. She had the sense that he was already waiting for her to leave.
Her heart clenched. Was this it? Was her loss to be so abrupt and unceremonious? And would she accept this banishment so meekly, with barely a murmur of protest?
She took a step toward him. He regarded her with an impatient condescension, the grand aristocrat who found the country bumpkin a terrible bore. But she couldn’t quite comprehend this new reality yet. When she looked at him, she still saw the man who had gone to great lengths with the dress dummies to make her laugh—and only that man.
So she took another step forward. And then another. And placed her hand over his heart.
His fast-beating heart.
She gazed into his eyes. For some reason she could see no contempt in them, only a barely leashed desire. Her hand moved to his jaw, followed by her lips. A chaste kiss, then a touch by the tip of her tongue.
He jerked away, but she only moved closer. This time she put her lips to the side of his neck, just above his starched collar. The rain-fresh scent of him made her light-headed with yearning. She grazed him with the moist inside of her lower lip.
And found herself picked up and pushed against a wall. They stared at each other. Her beautiful lover kept a tight grip on her shoulder, merciless enough to hurt, except she could feel only a desperate thrill.
“I seem to have married the horniest girl in all of England,” he said softly, but with a sharp edge to his words.
“You knew it long before you married me.”
His eyes were now on her lips. “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” he murmured.
“Kiss me,” she heard herself say. “Kiss me as you did the other night.”
“But how will a kiss satisfy you? It is satisfaction you want, isn’t it? Say yes, and I will give it to you.”
She almost could not believe what she was hearing. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. And yes again.”
His hand moved lightly down her arm. For a brief moment, he encircled her wrist with his thumb and middle finger. But the next second he was dragging her skirts up, his motion swift and efficient.
His hand parted her legs, seeking her through the slit of her co
mbination. She was caught off guard. She wanted him to touch her everywhere, of course, but the way he went about it seemed so . . . focused, as if there were no other pleasure to be had except through that one place.
But she could not quite deny that it was a quick and instant source of pleasure. She was glad now of his hand that still pinned her to the wall at her shoulder—without it, her knees just might not support her weight. His fingers, God, those clever fingers, gentle and forceful by turn, knowing just what to do.
Her eyes fluttered closed. The sound of herself panting filled the room. Then she was crying out, her pleasure peaking and cresting.
His lips were close to her ear. His breaths, too, were shallow and irregular. She opened her eyes and turned toward him, his forehead against the wall, his eyes tightly shut.
She put a hand on his arm. But before she could say a word, he pulled back. Just like that, dropping her skirts and walking away. Halfway across the room, he took out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hand, as if he’d touched something dirty.
And then he tossed the handkerchief into a wastebasket.
She was suddenly shaking.
“I believe my work here is done,” he said coolly.
She was too stunned to move—or to cry. She’d never once in her life considered herself unfortunate: She had a healthy, loving family; their roof might leak but it was still a good enough roof, and they’d always had money to buy food and enough left over to look respectable.
But not until this moment did she realize just how fortunate she had always been.
She had never before been dealt such deliberate cruelty. He had meant to humiliate her. He had meant to mock her desire for him. And he had meant to show, once and for all, how little he cared for her.
She pushed away from the wall and walked out without another word, or another look at him.
• • •
Felix stood in place for what seemed half the night.
He’d always known that he was every inch his mother’s son. But still he was stunned by his own viciousness. Being The Ideal Gentleman meant that his cruelty was treated like a piece of ancient weaponry at a private museum, an objet kept inside a glass cabinet, sometimes studied in the abstract, but rarely handled and never actually wielded.
But he had such paltry defense against her. Keeping himself away and otherwise occupied had made him think about her more, not less. The entire time in the drawing room, as he saw to his guests, he was acutely aware of where she was and what she was doing—each time she laughed, it was as if she touched him.
And when she actually put her hand on him, he almost could not remember why he must keep away. All he wanted was to spend the foreseeable future in her arms—make love, make her laugh, then make love again.
Already he thought of how best to make amends. He could write her family for a list of her favorite things. He could show her all the features of her new telescope. He could teach her the mathematics she needed to calculate the orbits of comets and the gravitational pull of planets.
He grimaced. This was why he must never allow himself to love. He was all too capable of it, all too willing to give, and all too accustomed to keep giving, even when his gifts were rejected left and right.
When he finally took himself to his observatory, clouds had already rolled in. But there he remained until dawn, under a sky he could no longer see.
CHAPTER 12
At the end of the first week of the house party, the guest head count at Huntington had climbed to forty. The house existed in a state of permanent bustle, its occupants consuming caviar by the stone and guzzling fifty-year-old claret as if it were so much lemonade.
Bread was brought in by the cartload from the village. Crates of crabs, sturgeon, and whitebait arrived packed in straw and ice. Hens, ducklings, and guinea fowls came in latticed cages, emerging from the kitchen only after having been roasted, stuffed, and stewed.
Temporary cookmaids and scullery maids chopped and washed alongside frantic sous chefs. Footmen were permanently out of breath. The laundry department operated six days a week, bravely attacking mountains of napkins and undershirts.
During the day, Louisa rarely had a moment to herself, and she was glad for it. Every servant who approached her with a question or a problem was a welcome distraction, each guest who wanted her attention likewise.
At night, well, it actually wasn’t too difficult to fall asleep, given that she now woke up at four o’clock each morning to spend time with her telescope, which she’d had moved to the balcony outside the sitting room of her apartment.
She started with the much bombarded face of the moon, dear old friend to those lovers of astronomy who could observe only with the naked eye, or a pair of binoculars at best. Then she moved on to the planets. She still remembered her star map, memorized during long-ago childhood summers, so she needed only look for heavenly bodies that were out of place. Mars’s moons, Jupiter’s spot, Saturn’s rings—celestial entities she’d never before seen with her own eyes bowed before the powerful magnification of her telescope.
Only once did she turn the telescope toward the hillock on which the Roman folly sat. The sun had just risen, the belvedere was bathed in a lovely, champagne-colored light, and the dress dummies were nowhere in sight. Vanished, like her husband’s interest in her.
She joined other early risers on daily hikes across the breadth of the estate. Her husband never did, though he was always there to lead interested parties on grouse-terminating expeditions.
His friends were people of boundless energy. Groups of cycle enthusiasts regularly charged down country lanes, to the bemusement of nearby cattle. The gentlemen played cricket and association football. Ladies thwacked away on the tennis courts set up on the west lawn. And almost every afternoon, rowing parties and impromptu races took place on the lake.
And since one could not come by the appellation of The Ideal Gentleman without also being a superlative sportsman, Lord Wrenworth rarely idled, taking part in everything, as graceful and surefooted running across a grassy field as he was turning about a ballroom.
He was the best tennis player among the gentlemen, it was commonly acknowledged, and also the best shot. As for who was the fastest swimmer, that particular question was settled with a contest.
Louisa was on a different side of the house, ensconced among the half dozen or so guests who preferred painting, reading, and gossiping to the more vigorous pastimes. But at the news that at least a dozen gentlemen had waded out into the lake, these supposedly sedentary guests leaped up into a sprint, leaving Louisa no choice but to follow in their wake.
A crowd had already gathered at the edge of the water. She would have been glad to remain at the back of the spectators. But once her guests realized that she had come, they stepped aside and waved her through to the front.
A dense pack of men were in the waters off the far shore. She couldn’t see their faces, but from the rapidly forming wagers, it became apparent that her husband was among the contestants.
Near the middle of the lake, the three or four strongest swimmers separated themselves from the pack.
“Mr. Dunlop is in the lead, Mr. Weston behind him, and Lord Wrenworth in third,” a sharp-eyed matron beside Louisa reported.
A man snorted behind her. “Dunlop’ll fade soon enough—fellow doesn’t know how to pace himself. But that should be an interesting contest between Weston and Wrenworth. Weston’s a bit heavy, but he swims like a fish.”
As he predicted, Dunlop soon dropped out of the lead, and it came down to a spirited sprint between the two others. Louisa held her breath, not so much invested in the result of the race—what did it matter who came in first?—as unhappily gnawing over the prospect of being seen as riveted by his doings, when he couldn’t bother to reciprocate that interest.
Lord Wrenworth won by a full body length. He and Mr. Weston c
ame ashore, laughing, shaking hands, and congratulating each other in easy camaraderie.
They were both minimally clad. Her husband had stripped down to his shirtsleeves. And what garments still remained on him were plastered to his person, limning the strong, lithe form his more formal attires only hinted at. He rolled up his sleeves as he emerged from the lake, exposing long, sinewy arms to the afternoon sun and much avid feminine scrutiny.
“Oh, my!” murmured a lady to the right of Louisa. “What a sight.”
“I had better send someone to collect all the clothes left on the other bank,” Louisa said, very sensibly.
“Leave them,” said another lady, entirely insensibly. “We have no need of them.”
It would have seemed odd if she didn’t join the ensuing tittering, brought on in large part by the collective admiration for her husband’s fine physique, so she did, though all she wanted was to leave, to hide places where she could not possibly be exposed to his beauty and fitness.
That was when he saw her, her hand over her mouth, in a fit of silly giggling.
She kept on giggling, she was sure—the sound echoed in her head. But a scalding mortification filled her, as if he had just wiped the hand that had touched her on a handkerchief and discarded the latter as not worthy of ever being inside his pocket again.
He came to her and kissed her on her forehead. “Aren’t you proud of me?” he murmured, just loud enough for those nearest to overhear.
He touched her like this from time to time, decorously, always before an audience, and always with just a hint of loverly familiarity: a hand on the small of her back, a nudge with his shoulder, and once, a playful tug on her hat ribbon as he passed her.
She knew why he made such gestures. Without ever consulting each other, they played a pair of secretly devoted lovers, as if they’d been colleagues in the same theatrical production for years upon years.
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