by Mary Balogh
“Only that he hopes we will be happy,” she said.
Ah. He had not told her, then.
Ralph looked at the work she was doing. She was embroidering an exquisitely fancy W across one corner of a large handkerchief of fine linen. W for Worthingham?
“For me?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
He felt immediate shame for his irritation with her.
“Thank you,” he said, and briefly he squeezed her shoulder.
He wondered if he would ever feel perfectly at ease in her company—or she in his. Her hand, he noticed, was trembling ever so slightly as she tried to find the right place for her needle. He was making her self-conscious. He dropped his hand and made his way back to his chair. She had followed him with her eyes, he noticed after he sat down, her needle suspended above her work.
He sighed out loud.
“Tell me about you, Chloe,” he said. Though he did not know why he had asked. He did not want to know any more about her than she had told him two nights ago. He did not want a relationship. But now the question had been asked—in the vaguest of vague terms and not even phrased quite as a question. “Tell me about your childhood. About your mother.”
He both felt and heard her draw a slow breath. And he watched as she threaded her needle through the edge of the handkerchief and set her work down on top of a pile of colored silks in her workbag.
“Papa always told me he loved me,” she said. “Always. And I never doubted him. He used to take me riding and fishing even when Graham and Lucy did not want to go. He taught me how to bounce stones across water—yes, with a special flick of the wrist. I used to think sometimes that I was his favorite, though it was a wicked thought because he loved us all equally.”
It was interesting that she had chosen to begin with her father.
“And your mother?”
“She loved us too.” Her eyes were directed downward to her fingers, which were pleating the fabric of her dress. “But I always worried—or irritated—her more than the other two did. Lucy was always perfect. I grew far too quickly and was thin and awkward among other things. I think Mama despaired of my ever looking even halfway pretty. I was not sunny-natured or sociable either and would always prefer to disappear into the barn to play with the baby animals when there were some or merely to read in the hayloft than to play with the neighborhood children who were sometimes brought to visit. When I did converse, I wanted to talk about fascinating things I had read in my books even though Mama kept drumming into my head that girls must never appear intelligent in company, especially male company. She was so beautiful herself, so vibrant, so sociable, so easy to love. I was a severe trial to her. She was, I know, afraid for my future. She so hoped to see me settled during that one Season I spent in London. Half a Season.”
Ralph had tipped back his head and stretched out his legs to the fire. He gazed across at her through half-closed eyelids and imagined her as she must have been as a girl—gawky and awkward and showing little promise of the beauty to come, while her mother and sister were both exquisite dark beauties. And riding and fishing with her father rather than playing with other girls. Bouncing stones. A bit unhappy, aware that she was a disappointment to her mother, that she could not compete with her younger sister in looks or charm. Playing with the farm animals. Reading. Losing herself in her own imaginative world. Being called a carrot top and even a rabbit and carrot all in one by the neighborhood children who ought to have been her friends.
And all this he did not want to know.
He did not need to know. For in the knowing he felt a sadness for that lonely girl and for the man who gave her a father’s unconditional love despite the fact that she was not his own. And he felt a sharp anger against the dead woman who had not loved her firstborn as she ought, perhaps because that child reminded her of her own shame and embarrassment.
“Oh, she did love me,” Chloe was saying as though she could read his thoughts—or perhaps merely to reassure herself. “I hope I have not suggested that she did not. She took me to London for a come-out Season when really she ought to have remained at home. She had been very ill, and she was ill again after we returned. I daresay she forced herself out of sheer willpower to appear healthy when we were there. And then she died. She wanted to see me well settled first. Married. She wanted to see me happy. It is all Papa has ever wanted for me too—that I be happy.”
“What did you tell him earlier,” he asked, “when he said just that—that he hoped you would be happy?”
She sank her teeth into her bottom lip for a moment, and her cheeks colored.
“I told him he must not worry,” she said. “I told him I was happy.”
“And are you?” he asked. It was a very unfair question. It was, moreover, another question he did not want answered. But it was too late now to recall it.
She was smoothing out the creases she had just made in her skirt.
“Happiness is just a word,” she said. “It is like love in that way. There are many definitions, all of them accurate, but none of them all-encompassing. I am not sorry I married you.”
“And that,” he said, “is one definition of happiness, is it? That you are not sorry for something you have done?”
She raised her head and looked back at him—and laughed softly. It was a beguiling sight and sound.
“I am a married lady rather than a spinster,” she said. “My present and my future are respectable and secure. I have experienced the marriage bed. Perhaps soon, within the next few months, I will be with child. Perhaps there will be more children after the first. You promised that you would show me respect and courtesy, and you have kept the promise. You promised me a quiet home in the country, and you have given me just that, even though this is a far larger home than the one I expected. Why would I not be happy?”
He closed his eyes. Did she realize that she had not answered his question—are you happy? After listing a number of reasons why she should be happy, she had summed up with a question of her own: Why would I not be happy?
But she was right in saying there was no satisfactory definition of the word happiness. All definitions, or all attempts to give the word meaning, merely revolved endlessly about an empty center, a core of indefinable nothingness. As a boy he had known what happiness was without any need of words, and he had forged his way toward it with confident, unfaltering strides. Happiness in those days was doing what was right against all the odds and all the naysayers. It was accomplishing a noble goal through the efforts of his own body and mind and will so that he could see the world set to rights forever after. Happiness was about certainties.
Foolish, idealistic boy. He had accomplished the exact opposite of what he had intended, and he had destroyed life and happiness and certainty in the process. He had destroyed innocence.
The light from the fire, low in the hearth, was flickering off her face when he opened his eyes. She was looking steadily back at him.
“Have I said something wrong?” she asked him. “I do not expect you to give me happiness. It is something I will draw for myself out of the conditions of my life. Any happiness I achieve will be my own, with no obligation upon you to provide it or to pretend to share it. Is it not better that I be contented than that I be miserable? We did not promise each other misery.”
She made him sound like a coldhearted monster, though such was not her intent, he knew. She was not far wrong, though, was she? Could she possibly find any sort of happiness with him? And why could he not . . .
He got abruptly to his feet again. For a moment he stood gazing down into the dying fire, troubled by that familiar sense of yearning, the kind he could never explain to himself in words but only feel to the marrow of his bones.
She had risen too, he realized when he felt her hand light on his arm.
“I do not want to be miserable,” she said. “I do not want you to be
miserable either. Surely we are allowed—”
His arm came about her waist and drew her to him, and his mouth descended upon hers all in one swift movement, cutting off the rest of what she was saying. The fingers of his free hand threaded through her short curls, holding her head still.
And he allowed himself the full luxury of desire. Except, he realized after a while, that it was more than just a physical thing he was allowing. His yearning for something unnamable had just been multiplied tenfold until he was afraid—yet again—that if he lifted his head away from hers he would be sobbing.
He gentled the kiss, explored her lips and the inside of her mouth more lazily with his tongue, wondered if he was offending her, guessed he was not. For her arms were about him too, and she was leaning into him, and her mouth was open to welcome the invasion of his tongue.
Perhaps . . .
He raised his head and gazed into her face. Her lips were moist and slightly swollen. Her cheeks looked flushed in the semidarkness. Her eyes were both bright and heavy lidded.
His insides lurched uncomfortably.
“Sex,” he said. “It is just sex, Chloe.”
“Just?” Her voice was a whisper of sound that he felt against his lips. “That word suggests that it is a slight thing. I think it must be more than that.”
He was amused despite himself. “It is,” he agreed, opening his eyes. “But it is still just sex. It is not love. Or happiness.”
“I understand that,” she said. “But it always feels good anyway. Is it not meant to?”
For a long time after his return from the Peninsula he had refused to allow himself to feel any pleasure at all, for there were men who were dead and would never feel anything ever again. There were families who would never quite recover from their grief. He had worked through that particular phase, which had included the compulsion to end his life, with the help of the physician at Penderris and with the sympathetic understanding of his fellow Survivors. There was nothing to be gained by punishing himself forever, he had come to understand and accept. It was a kind of selfishness. Those men were beyond pain. He lived on. Those families could not be comforted by his suffering. Perhaps there was a reason he had not been killed too. Who was he to deny the unexpected, unwanted gift of life and a future?
But he had never returned fully, or even nearly fully, to his old self. He had instinctively shied away from pleasure, laughter, anything bordering upon happiness, illogical as he knew it was.
He was not alone in this marriage, however—the very reason for his reluctance to marry. He did owe his wife something despite the chilling terms of their bargain, to which she had agreed—which, in fact, she had suggested. She wanted happiness, though she would not demand that he provide it. She enjoyed sex, it seemed, as a momentary means to pleasure. Or perhaps it was just kisses she enjoyed. Perhaps she equated them with sex. Or perhaps it was the night and morning brief ritual of their joining.
Perhaps it was time to find out how much she enjoyed it.
“It could feel better if we went to bed,” he said. “But it would have to be somewhat different from what we have been doing there since our wedding, Chloe.”
She gazed at him.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would prefer to get back to your embroidery.”
“That can wait,” she told him.
He stood back and offered her his arm very formally.
Very formally, she took it.
He could not, it seemed, hold back change. But he had learned that lesson long ago. How foolish of him to have forgotten when he had come to marriage terms with her.
14
He took her to his own bed again, that vast monstrosity on its high pedestal that was nevertheless more comfortable than any other bed Chloe had ever encountered. He did not allow her to go to her own room first to change into her nightgown. When she protested, he informed her that she would not need it. And he proved his point as soon as the door was firmly shut behind them by unclothing her one garment at a time, including her stays and her shift and her garters and stockings, until she was standing naked before him, bathed in the light of what seemed like a million candles. He had a good look too while he was playing lady’s maid, and he made no effort to stop his hands from brushing against her skin. Indeed, he was probably making an effort to see that they did touch her.
What surprised Chloe most was the fact that she hardly felt embarrassed at all. It would have been a bit silly to do so, of course, since she had been his wife for longer than a week and had already lost an exact count of the number of times he had had relations with her. But even so, standing naked before a fully clothed man with all her imperfections ought to have been more disconcerting than it was. Except that he did not look disappointed and her body was humming with what she could only guess was desire.
It occurred to her that perhaps she ought to unclothe him since he had done it for her, but she could not bring herself to be quite that bold. And he seemed to be doing well enough on his own. She noticed after his waistcoat and then his neckcloth had followed his evening coat to the floor that he really looked very attractive indeed in his shirt and tight pantaloons, but he was not wearing the former much longer. He peeled it off over his head and dropped it. His valet was going to be very cross with him in the morning. It was a good thing she had no maid yet to be cross with her.
He undid the buttons at his waist and opened the fall of his pantaloons, and in no time at all he was as naked as she. The difference was, of course, that she had seen him before. There were other scars in addition to the one about his shoulder and the one that slashed across the left side of his face. None of them—even the facial scar—marred his beauty. And he was beautiful.
His hands came to her shoulders then—they looked very dark-skinned against the paleness of her own flesh—and down behind to spread over her shoulder blades so that he could draw her against him until her nipples touched his chest, shocking her all the way down to her toes. He was rock solid—except that a rock was not warm and inviting and did not have a heartbeat. Her own hands found his shoulders as he lowered his head and kissed her openmouthed again.
Kisses were such an unexpected delight. And a shock too, for she had never imagined that lips would part, that mouths would open, that tongues would explore and tangle and even simulate the marital act—or that such shocking activities would have a taste and a sound and would send sensations to which she could not put a name sizzling through her whole body until she yearned for the touch of him there.
Oh, she thought—and it was one of her last coherent thoughts for some time to come—she must not fall in love with him. It would be the most naïve and foolish thing she could possibly do.
Sex, he had said. It is just sex, Chloe.
She must, must, must remember that.
But just sex was glorious beyond imagining, she discovered during the hours after he took her up the steps and laid her on the bed. He followed her down onto it without extinguishing any of the candles. She was able to watch everything they did and to see that he watched too until at some time during the night the candles guttered out one at a time and there was darkness. By then, though, they were sated and exhausted.
His hands, his fingers, his lips, his tongue had touched every inch of her body on the outside and a good portion of her body on the inside too. And after the first round of . . . sex, her own hands and mouth had grown almost equally bold. He had been on top of her, she had been on top of him, and once he had even been on her but behind her. And none of it had been just the mildly pleasurable experience she had come to look forward to since her wedding night. Instead it had been . . .
But there were no words. Only feelings that built and built, time after time, to some pinnacle of glory, before exploding into something that made glory seem a paltry thing.
Oh, no, really there were no words.
It occurred t
o her once or twice—particularly when she heard herself cry out for no apparent reason—that perhaps she ought to be ashamed, that perhaps ladies did not behave with such wanton abandon. Undoubtedly ladies did not, in fact. But she always pushed the unwelcome thought aside. If ladies did not experience the wonders of sex, then they were to be pitied. They did not know what they were missing.
By the time the last of the candles wavered and went out he was sleeping, sprawled on his stomach beside her, his head turned toward her, his nose almost touching her shoulder, one of his arms flung heavily across her waist. He smelled of sweat and something else very male. It was surely one of the most enticing smells in the world—which was a very strange thought to be having. The bedcovers were down around their knees.
It had been sex, she told herself. And, because it had been just that, he had enjoyed it as much as she had. And it was enough. She would make it enough. But please, please let their relationship not revert now to the way it had been every other night. Let him not be satisfied simply to have proved a point to her. She had enjoyed every night and every early morning with him too, but from now she knew they would not be enough without this at least occasionally.
It was just sex, of course. But it was surely better than love, for there was too much turmoil, too much uncertainty, too much danger of heartbreak in love. There was only enjoyment to be had from sex.
She ignored a twinge of doubt as she closed her eyes and relaxed into the delicious languor that came after the exertions of sex.
This had been better than love.
* * *
When Chloe awoke sometime later, Ralph was gone from the bed though it was still full dark. He was not gone from the room, though. He was standing by the window with the curtains pulled back, and he was half dressed again in his shirt and pantaloons. His hands were on the windowsill, his shoulders slightly hunched.
“Ralph?” she said. It was chilling to see that he was dressed when there was still no sign of dawn.