by Mary Balogh
“I beg your pardon, Chloe,” he said. “I am sorry. Forgive me if you can.”
“It was just a silly quarrel,” she said without lifting her forehead. “There is nothing to forgive.”
“Yes, there is,” he said. “You must have needed me, and I was selfishly unaware of your distress. And then I treated you abominably.”
“You are forgiven.”
The abyss yawned.
“It is beyond your power,” he told her. “You cannot forgive me, Chloe. No one can.”
Not even God. He had tried that, on the assumption that it was God who had given him the unwanted gift of his life on the battlefield, and that it was up to God to forgive him if he was to find the will to go on. But he was not sure he believed in God—though he was not sure he did not. Either way, though, how could a mere concept or spirit or life force or whatever it was God was supposed to be forgive him for doing irreparable harm to people? It made no sense. It was too easy. It was not fair to those people. Divine forgiveness could bring him no comfort.
“Ralph,” she said, and he could hear the raw pain in her voice, “what happened?”
* * *
For a long while he said nothing, and she could feel all the tautness of his muscles through the blanket. She could feel the cold too now that she was out of bed. Her nightgown was too thin to warm her. She shivered.
He was not going to answer, and she had risked his renewed irritation by asking the same question yet again. She ought to have turned over in bed and gone back to sleep. Why had she not?
He must have felt her shiver. He opened the blanket and drew her inside it with him. He wrapped it about her, and she warmed her body against his, her head turned against his shoulder, her hands on his upper arms. She was more aware of his nakedness standing like this than she ever was in bed. She loved his body, so beautifully proportioned, so firmly muscled, so masculine. She even loved his scars because they were a part of him, because they had been dearly earned. Her left hand moved in to rest against the hard ridge of the one that circled his right shoulder.
He did not speak for another long while, though some of the rigidity had gone from his muscles. She realized something then—something she would really rather not have known, though it explained why she had left the warmth of the bed to bring him a blanket and to ask again the question he would not answer. She loved him. She scarcely knew him, of course. There were whole facets of his being that he carefully shielded from her knowing. But there were some things she knew. There was the intensely passionate, energetic, idealistic, charismatic boy he had been when he was at school with Graham. There was the young man with his broken body and shattered dreams who had been brought back to England from the Peninsula closer to death than to life, wanting death more than he wanted life. And there was the closed, disciplined, sometimes morose, very private man he was now with his empty eyes. Though they were not empty to her. The emptiness was like a curtain he had drawn across his soul to hide his pain from anyone who tried to look in.
It was not a romantic love she felt for him, for there were no illusions. She did not expect moonlight and music and roses. She did not even expect a return of her feelings. There was no euphoria and never would be. She was not in love. There were no stars in her eyes.
There was merely an acceptance of who he was, even the vast depths of him she did not know and perhaps never would. She loved the complexity of him, the pain of him, his sense of duty, his innate decency, even his difficult moods. She loved his body, the look and feel of him, the warmth and smell of him. She loved the weight of his body when it was on hers in bed, the hard thrust of his lovemaking, the sudden liquid heat of his seed.
She loved him, though she would rather she did not. For she would rather not be burdened with the one-sided failure of the bargain she had suggested and he had accepted. Keeping to the terms of it was going to be harder to do now that she had allowed an emotional bond after all.
On the other hand, she would rather the father of her children be a man she loved than one she did not. Her courses were due in a couple of days. They sometimes came early. Not this time, though. And perhaps—oh, please, please—they would not come on time either but would be late, nine months late. She desperately, desperately wanted to be with child. It was the one thing that would please him and please her and bind them into a closer tie.
Not that she would ever want to try to bind him.
He spoke at last.
“We very rarely spent school holidays alone,” he said. “We spent them together at one another’s homes. Their parents became like my parents, or at least like favored uncles and aunts, and mine became like theirs.”
He was talking about his three friends. She did not need to ask.
“I did not fully realize at the time,” he said, “how idyllic my boyhood was. Though I did know I was privileged, and I thought privilege brought obligation—to think, to form responsible opinions, to act upon my convictions even if doing so meant disappointing or even hurting those who loved me. As with many boys, my ideals were not tempered with realism or open to compromise. Youth can be a dangerous time of life.”
Chloe said nothing. He was not seeking either approval or consolation.
“I was a leader,” he said. “I do not really understand why, but it was so. Other boys listened to me and followed me, and because I was a boy and had not even entertained the idea that perhaps I might sometimes be wrong, I allowed them to do so, even encouraged it. And sometimes, to my shame, I felt impatience, even scorn, with those few who stood against me.”
As with Graham?
“And so they came to war with me, those three boys,” he said, “and they died. Ah, you might say that they came of their own free will, that they died for a righteous cause, one in which they believed. You might go on to say that countless thousands died in the course of those wars, including helpless civilians, even innocent women and children who happened to find themselves in the path of war. I cannot burden my conscience with the deaths of all those poor souls, though. And perhaps I would be able to let my friends go too if it were only they who had suffered, for, yes, each had a mind of his own and had made his decision to go with me. But each one had a family, people who loved them and lost them and have lived on, people for whom I have been the cause of endless suffering. People who took me into their homes and loved me. People I supposedly loved.”
“They have surely forgiven you—if they ever blamed you in the first place,” Chloe said. She could understand why he blamed himself. The whole experience had, after all, been unbearably distressing for him. But surely the families of his friends would not blame him. Those three boys had been leaders in their own right, according to Graham. They had not been helpless pawns in a reckless or ruthless game Ralph had been playing. “Have you seen or spoken with any of them since?”
“I saw Max Courtney’s young sister a few times after I left Penderris,” he said, reaching a hand beyond her shoulder to close the curtains as the flaming torch of the night watchman came bobbing into view in the square below. “And she wrote to me. She saw me as a final link to the brother she had adored and lost. She fancied herself, I believe, in love with me. I did all in my power to avoid her without being openly cruel. I even offered to fetch her a glass of lemonade at one ball but left the house instead and then London itself the next morning. She was the only one I saw, though. Her mother died a couple of years after Max did, and it was her aunt who was bringing her out into society. She—Miss Courtney—wrote to me earlier this spring when I was staying at Vince’s home to inform me she was about to marry a clergyman. I let her down. I had a chance to comfort someone, for the pain I had caused, but I did not do it.”
Miss Courtney, it seemed, had not blamed him for her brother’s death. Had he realized that? But something else occurred to Chloe.
“Was she at the theater tonight?” she asked.
�
��Miss Courtney?” he said. “No. But Viscount Harding and his wife were. Tom’s parents. He was their only son, their only child. They doted on him.”
His muscles had tightened again. Chloe set her hands on his shoulders and tipped back her head to look up at him. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and she could see the hard, bleak emptiness of his expression as he gazed back.
“They begged and pleaded with him not to go,” he said. “The viscountess, his mother, even wrote to me to beg me to use my influence with him. And I did.”
Chloe tipped her head to one side. “And afterward?” she asked him.
He stared back. “There was no afterward.”
“You did not hear from them?” she asked. “Or write to them?”
“No.”
“Did they see you tonight?”
“Our eyes did not actually meet,” he said. “But, yes, I believe they might have seen me.”
Without stopping to think what she was doing, Chloe cupped his face between her hands.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“Do?” He frowned. “Nothing. What is there for me to do? If they recognized me, I ruined their evening. I know I have ruined their lives. I owe it to them to stay out of their way. If they do not leave London, then I may have to—we may have to. That ought to please you.”
He curled his fingers around hers and removed her hands from his face. He held them clasped between their bodies, and the blanket slithered off his shoulders to the floor.
“We will run away?” she asked. “Because you saw the parents of one of your friends and I saw Lady Angela Allandale?”
“Run away.” He laughed softly, but there was no amusement in the sound. “Did you not know, Chloe, that that is an impossibility? You ought to know. You have tried it a few times. The trouble with running away is that you must always take yourself with you.”
“You must face them, then,” she said. “You must call on them. Perhaps, as with Miss Courtney, they will see you as a link with their son and be delighted to see you.”
He dropped her hands in order to brush her hair back from her face, to cup her cheeks as she had done his, to tip her face closer to his own.
“No,” he said softly.
“You are content, then,” she said, “to live out the rest of your life in hell?”
She had not planned those exact words. She heard their echo as though someone else had spoken them. His eyes looked like large pools of darkness.
“Content?” He laughed again. “It is as good a word as any, I suppose. A wife is a troublesome thing to have, Chloe.”
“An interfering baggage, do you mean?”
“As I recall saying once before quite recently,” he said, “if the glove fits . . .” But he did not speak with irritation this time.
“I cannot help caring just a little bit, you know,” she told him. “I care that you are unhappy.”
“And you?” He moved his head a little closer. “How could I not have known Lady Angela Allandale was at the theater? You are sure it was she?”
“Yes,” she said. “And even if I could not be sure, the reaction of the audience would have told me I had not mistaken.”
“And I missed it all,” he said, “selfish brute that I am. I am sorry, Chloe.”
“It does not matter,” she said. “We bear a coincidental likeness to each other. People will soon grow tired of remarking upon it.”
“Yes. They will.” He closed the distance between their mouths and kissed her.
It was not a sexual kiss. Or, rather, it was, but it was more than just that. There was warmth in it and something else. Need, perhaps. Yearning, perhaps. Or perhaps something that went deeper than feelings and therefore deeper than words.
Her arms went about him and his came about her, and the kiss deepened as his tongue sought the inside of her mouth and she felt his hardening erection against her abdomen.
Even when he took her back to bed and stripped off her nightgown and laid her down and came directly on top of her and into her—even then, as he moved in her and she twined her legs about his and moved with him, it was not really a sexual coupling. Or not just, or not primarily. Nor was it only about the begetting of a child.
It was . . .
Ah, no. There were no words.
But he needed her. He did not just want her. He needed her. As she needed him. She had been more upset by the events of the evening than she had realized at the time.
And so she opened to him as she had not done before, even during that one night of unbridled passion. She opened everything that was herself and gave. She gave her heart and her love, without speaking a word. And she received too. For when he finally stilled and spilled his seed in her, the warmth and the wonder of it spread to fill her whole being.
Or so it seemed. Neither of them spoke.
But though he disengaged from her and moved off her, he stayed within her arms, his head nestled against her bosom, his legs entwined with hers. And she heard him sigh and felt him relax into sleep.
She nestled her cheek against the top of his head and closed her eyes and felt a strange, seductive happiness.
18
“Aunt Julia is coming in the carriage for me at ten,” Chloe explained at breakfast when Ralph asked about her plans for the day. “We are going shopping. I need new clothes. I hope you do not mind.”
“Of course not,” he said. “You have carte blanche.”
“Oh.” She smiled at him. “You may regret that.”
“I think not.” He did not actually smile in return, but there was a certain warmth in his eyes. They had woken at the same moment early this morning. He had still been in her arms, his head pillowed on her shoulder. He had sighed with what had sounded like contentment, kissed her breast, and proceeded to make lingering, almost tender love to her.
It had seemed like tenderness. It had seemed like lovemaking.
“Perhaps,” she said, “I have wildly expensive buying habits. And perhaps I have a quite uncontrollable attraction to the gaming tables. Perhaps I adore glittering objects, especially if they are made of diamonds.”
He leaned back in his chair, his coffee cup in one hand, and actually did smile.
“And that puts me in mind of all the family jewels locked away at Manville,” he said. “They are ancient and priceless, and no modern woman would be caught this side of the grave wearing any of them. I have not bought you anything except your wedding ring, which we really must have made a little smaller for you. I will buy you jewels for our reception and ball.”
“Oh,” she said, “there is no need.”
“On the contrary.” He raised his eyebrows. “There is every need. Besides, it will give me pleasure. I hope it will give you pleasure to wear them.”
Chloe was sure her cheeks were flushing. “It will,” she said. “But there is still no need.”
“I looked in at the study on my way here,” he said. “Lloyd was not there yet, but there was a formidable pile of mail on his desk. Mostly invitations, I would imagine. He should be there by now. Shall we go and look? And I asked him yesterday to start compiling one of his famous lists of what must be done in preparation for our ball. It would be strange indeed if the list is not already as long as my arm. Shall we see it?”
It felt lovely, she thought as she took his arm, doing things together, planning together, being part of each other’s lives. It was more than she had expected.
There were indeed invitations. Mr. Lloyd had already divided them into three neat piles, one for probables, another for possibles, and a third for improbables. Chloe read every one, as did Ralph, and discovered that the secretary’s judgment was nearly faultless. They decided to accept all but one from the first pile, only one from the second, and none from the third.
“And the ball, Lloyd?” Ralph asked.
Mr. Lloyd produced two lists. One was for all the preparations he could think of. Chloe looked it over and added a few more points. The second list, a very long one, was of prospective guests. It was divided into the same three categories as the invitations: probable, possible, improbable.
One set of names on the improbable list caught Chloe’s attention.
“The Marquess and Marchioness of Hitching and family?” She looked inquiringly at Mr. Lloyd.
He looked downward in apparent confusion. “I thought it possible, Your Grace—” he said. “That is—”
Ralph came to his rescue. “I would have put the names on that section of the list too,” he said, “if I had put them anywhere at all.”
“You will be sure to send an invitation to the marquess and his family, Mr. Lloyd,” Chloe said.
“Are you quite sure?” Ralph was frowning at her.
“Yes,” she said, though her legs felt distinctly unsteady. “I will not allow a little mischievous gossip from last year to cause me—or you—to slight perfectly innocent people by excluding them from our guest list.”
“Very well, then, Lloyd,” Ralph said. He tapped his finger on another name, one on the main list. “But here is someone you may exclude.”
Chloe leaned forward to read the name. “Lord Cornell?” she said. Did Ralph know, then?
“He is not welcome in my home,” Ralph said. “Or within half a mile of my wife.”
Ah, he did know.
They spent a few minutes longer discussing both lists. But Chloe could not delay long. Her aunt would be coming soon.
She went about the rest of the day with something of a spring in her step. Her marriage was progressing far better than she had expected when she suggested it, even if it would never be the stuff of which dreams were made. This morning she was going shopping with her aunt, something she always enjoyed. And this afternoon she would go visiting with her mother-in-law and Nora, who may not like her yet but would go out of their way to smooth her entry into society as the Duchess of Worthingham. And she would hold her head high. She had nothing of which to be ashamed, after all.