by Eloisa James
“Love is not a disease!” she said, finding words to defend herself. “You’d think that I was confessing to having the pox.”
Trent swung his legs off the bed and walked to the window, stark naked as he was. Without turning around, he said, “I am uncomfortable with extremes of emotion. In my experience—and in yours—people fall in and out of love with startling regularity.”
Merry knew with perfect certainty that she would never fall out of love with Trent. He was her missing half, the only man in the world for her. What they shared felt as true as hunger and cold. As joy.
Still, dread soured her stomach: the fear that she wasn’t beautiful enough, that she wasn’t ladylike. That she was unlovable. Cedric and Dermot obviously hadn’t loved her, and Trent had taken her in his brother’s stead. He hadn’t wooed her.
She couldn’t expect that he would love her the way she loved him.
“Don’t be angry,” she said, hating that she sounded needy. “Please come back to bed.”
“Of course I’m not angry.” He sighed and turned, coming back, sitting on the edge of the bed. To her relief, his face had softened. “My only concern is that when you fall out of love with me, Merry, you will be disinclined to be my wife, in all meanings of the word.”
“No!” she cried fiercely. “How can you say such a thing? I will never fall out of love with you.”
“I’m brutally rational. How long did you experience feelings for the infamous Bertie?”
Merry swallowed hard before answering. “Two months.” This was so humiliating, being diagnosed as if she were suffering from a case of the measles. She blurted out the sorry tally rather than endure more questions. “Six weeks for Dermot, and a mere week or two for Cedric.”
That wasn’t the truth. She had met Trent shortly after accepting Cedric’s proposal, and in her heart of hearts, she would put the demise of her infatuation at the moment she met a stranger on the balcony.
“Summing that up makes me feel as shallow as a puddle,” Merry said, trying to make a joke of it and not succeeding.
No wonder Trent wouldn’t even consider the possibility that he might come to love her someday. Who could love someone like that? No one in his right mind would risk it.
Trent leaned over and pressed a kiss on her lips. “I think you’re in love with love itself,” he said kindly. “You wouldn’t be my American duchess if you weren’t exuberant and emotional.”
“Flighty, you mean.” Her heart ached, not knowing how she could ever convince him of her feelings, given her well-deserved reputation. “What I feel for you truly is not the same.”
He was silent for a moment. “I do not wish to lie to you, Merry.”
“Please don’t,” she replied. But her stomach clenched. She didn’t want to hear the truth.
“I don’t feel that emotion for you. For anyone. It is not an emotion I believe has merits.”
The words hit her like a blow, and for a moment she struggled to breathe. He was staring down at his hands, choosing his words carefully.
“I value you, and respect you as my duchess. You have become my closest friend in the world. But love, romantic love . . .” He shrugged. “That isn’t going to happen.”
“How can you be so certain?” Merry asked, knowing she sounded like a whimpering fool. “What if I wanted to turn this into a real marriage, in all senses of the word?” Tears stung her eyes, but she refused to allow them to fall.
“Then you’d be disappointed,” he said bluntly.
She pressed her eyes closed, telling herself to accept it.
But she couldn’t; the stubbornness that was her strength was also her weakness. The ache in her heart drove her, the one that was whispering that Trent could have loved a different woman, someone more ladylike than she. She refused to accept that.
“Why? Why is it not even a possibility?” she persisted.
Trent had a beleaguered look on his face. “I’m a duke, Merry. I do not engage in excesses of emotion.”
She frowned. “Your title precludes tender feelings?” Anger came to her aid, making her braver. Anger and love together. “I don’t agree. Why couldn’t you fall in love with me? Am I so objectionable? Too talkative? Excessively emotional? Too American?”
“None of that is relevant,” he retorted.
“The heck it isn’t.” Merry jumped off the bed and put her hands on her hips. “I am standing in front of you, Trent. I’ve just told you that I love you, and you have responded by telling me that you could never feel the same for me. Why not?”
Irritation began to burn up Trent’s spine. This wasn’t the way they had agreed their marriage would go. They had arrived at a rational agreement that precluded just this sort of hysterics, and now she was ignoring it.
“Bloody hell, Merry,” he said, standing up. “I’m the fourth in a line of men you’ve fallen in love with.”
“And the last,” she said defiantly.
“One can only hope. At this rate, I’d expect you to be infatuated with another fifteen in my lifetime.”
She turned pale, but he kept going because he never wanted to have this conversation again. They had to get all this clear between them, for once and for all.
“You’ll have to accept that I won’t fall in love with you. I doubt it’s in me.” He paused and then forced the words out. “I don’t love you, Merry, not that way, and I never will.”
“Because of who I am,” his wife said with a little gasp. Her eyes were shiny with tears.
“No, because of who I am.” Trent felt a wave of guilt but damn it, she had brought up the subject. “This is just what our conversation in the carriage was supposed to prevent,” he growled.
“I must have misunderstood what you meant by marriage.”
He shoved his hand through his hair. “Must you be so dramatic? I feel tremendous regard and affection for you, Merry. I lust after you as if I were a boy of fifteen. Isn’t that enough, for God’s sake?”
Trent prayed that she didn’t start crying. He hated crying women. It had ripped him apart when Merry had wept at the Vereker ball, and now, all these weeks later, he was much more fond of her. He treasured her.
Frustration ripped words out of him. “Marriage isn’t about a veil or a gown; it’s about ordinary days spent together. Our marriage will not survive if you dish up emotional nonsense.”
“By ‘nonsense,’ do you mean my hope that you will love me someday? Or do you mean my loving you? Which is it?” Damn it, a tear was rolling down her cheek. Even so, her voice came out with angry force. “What do you want from our marriage?”
The one thing Trent wanted was to get out of the bloody room. His words came out like the hailstones she was throwing at him. “I refer only to the nonsense about love which you brought up. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
She flinched. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I see.”
Trent was willing Merry to understand him. “I have infinite regard and respect for you, as my duchess and as a woman. Our marriage has been about as damned near perfect as I could have imagined. Could we simply put this to the side, Merry?”
“Of course.” She straightened her back and nodded. “I will do my best.” Her voice wavered but she visibly pulled herself together. “I won’t bring up the topic again.”
“I think that’s better than discussing the precise moment when you fall out of love, don’t you? I think we’d better act as if this never happened. I certainly don’t want to be informed when your feelings change, as they will.”
“Right,” she said. “I understand. I really do.”
He nodded, inwardly surprised that her promise didn’t prompt a sense of triumph. He’d won the argument, hadn’t he?
A couple of hours later, Trent found himself in his study, staring at the green brocade lining the windows. Snowdrop had managed to rip the hem off two panels and she was working on a third, filling the study with the sound of little growls.
He couldn’
t stop thinking about Kestril, the neighbor who was violently in love with Merry. He was well on the way to detesting the man, never more so than when he showed up at dinner with that piece about gardening, from some book Trent had never heard of.
There were likely many such books in the library downstairs. He could start sprouting hoary facts about walnut trees, except everyone would know what he was doing. If he so much as opened his mouth in a discussion of horticulture, everyone would guess he was competing with Kestril for his wife’s attention.
He’d be damned if he did that.
The man didn’t even know Merry. How could he claim to love her?
Trent himself might be incapable of romantic love, at least as people defined it, but he wasn’t incapable of possessiveness.
Merry was his. His for life. He should have dodged the question of love, telling her how much he wanted her, emphasizing the fact that he wanted her so badly it made him weak.
The truth of that made his stomach lurch. If he wasn’t careful, he’d find himself bringing her bouquets of flowers just to make her happy.
They got through dinner that night by being exquisitely polite with each other. Merry didn’t say a word about the report in the papers that Napoleon was preparing to invade the English coast, even though they’d had lively discussions of it every evening. Instead Merry excused herself after only two courses and said she was going to bed early.
A few hours later Trent walked through the door that connected their rooms. Embers on Merry’s hearth still smoldered, lending her chamber a rosy glow.
His wife was a dark lump on the bed, curled on her side. If she fell asleep after making love, her hair would tangle in curls that felt like corn silk.
Tonight she wore her hair in a thick braid.
Trent drew back the covers as carefully as he could and slipped between the sheets, hoping she wouldn’t wake.
Hoping she would.
She didn’t stir, even when he carefully undid her braid and set her hair free, tucking her into the curve of his body with one leg over hers, pinning her down.
No, keeping her safe.
It hardly mattered. The tight feeling in his chest eased as soon as he had his arms around her, when Merry sighed in her sleep and snuggled her bottom against him.
Trent stifled a groan and pushed away the idea that he should roll her onto her stomach . . . Slip his hands under her nightdress.
No.
Merry was a will-o’-the-wisp, but she would return to him. Bees slipped from flower to flower, but they flew home at night.
His arms tightened and he buried his face in her fragrant hair until finally, the duke and the duchess both slept.
Chapter Thirty-three
Merry was awakened the following morning by Trent’s hand stroking her leg, his fingers asking a question. Without thinking, she let her thighs fall apart, and a silent sigh came from her lips as he accepted her invitation.
She didn’t roll over and kiss him, though. She felt bruised inside her chest, as if she’d suffered a physical blow. She was being absurd. A duke lay in her bed, all his restless masculinity focused on her pleasure: what woman would have the right to complain?
Trent kissed his way down her body, slowly and sweetly, the first rays of morning sun making his skin glow like honey. She let her love pour over him as silently as rainwater, voiced only with kisses, touches, moans.
At last she came in a flurry of sparks that hummed through her blood, and returned to herself to the sound of panting—her own panting—in her ears.
Trent turned her over and pulled up her hips, his touch turning her body supple again, awake to every intimacy. He caressed her until she was whimpering, mindless, desire rushing through her body like a tide.
Only when she was trembling with anticipation did he finally thrust inside, their bodies brought into perfect alignment by the hands gripping her hips, his large body rhythmically surging over hers again and again.
They made love like that, in utter silence. Merry hung her head as tears slowly trickled over her cheekbones before disappearing, drop by drop, into her hair.
Yet at the same time, that delicious tension grew within her, winding tighter and tighter until she couldn’t feel anything but the imminent burn spreading through her limbs. She pushed back, desperate and hungry for more.
“That’s it,” Trent growled.
“Please,” she said, her voice coming on a sob. “Jack, please. Harder.”
He responded with a savage maleness, a wild strength that shocked her into the deepest pleasure. She had scarcely recovered before he put a hand between her legs.
His hips moved again, his body hunched over hers, on and on until she cried out again and convulsed, such violent heat sweeping her that she scarcely noted the deep groan that broke from his chest, or the way his fingers tightened on her hips as he gave a final thrust.
The next moment Merry slipped flat onto her stomach, boneless and enervated. Hair tumbled over her face but she didn’t move to brush it away, just lay still, dragging air into her lungs.
She could hear her husband’s harsh breathing behind her as he toppled to the side, onto his back.
She felt as tender and vulnerable as a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. Her love for him felt like a mark branded on her skin that he could read, no matter how sophisticated she pretended to be. She lay quietly, and prayed that he would leave without speaking.
“Merry,” Trent said, after a time. Of course he wouldn’t leave without speaking. It would be ungentlemanly. Her husband was never ungentlemanly.
“Yes?” She tried to sound half asleep, but she sounded alert, even alarmed. “I’m very tired,” she added hurriedly.
“I’m sorry about our argument last night.”
“As am I,” she said.
“Could we simply put this all behind us?”
Put behind her the fact that her husband would never love her? What had made her weep for a full hour the day before was her fixed idea that out of everyone who knew her, Trent alone had known her inner heart.
She had believed he was the one person who didn’t find her fickle and shallow.
She was being stupid; she knew she was being stupid. But every one of her insecurities had rampaged through her mind in the night, reminding her of all the things that she was hopeless at, even the way that Lady Caroline looked at her.
Yet when they made love, as they just had . . . He might say that he didn’t love her, but the way he’d ravished her said otherwise. He was seductive, yes, but always tender.
The thought gave her backbone. That was the way to show him that he already loved her, because of the tender intimacy they shared. She sat up and looked him in the eye. “How would you characterize what we just did? Was that making love?”
Trent’s expression was perfectly blank. Then he said, “Making love is just a more palatable label for intercourse, Merry. Like ‘gooseberries,’ in fact, which is a word that is misleading in almost all aspects. So is ‘making love.’”
“What would you call what we did? How do you think of it?”
His reply was instant and didn’t spare her on the grounds of delicate sensibilities. She flinched when he said the word. She’d heard it a few times, but always charged with hostility. It didn’t correspond to what they did together.
She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it. “Is being with me precisely the same as it was with your mistresses, then?”
“I would prefer not to discuss it,” he said, with the kind of polite restraint that called attention to itself.
“Why not? Essentially, you are saying that making love to them is the same as making love to me. Although perhaps I am not as skilled as they.”
“There is no comparison between you and my . . . those women.” Finally, she saw an emotion in his eyes: distaste.
“But you’re saying that you don’t make love to me.” She got herself out of bed and grabbed her wrapper. “Presumably, you didn’t make love to t
hem, either. If love plays no part in intimacy, there can be no difference between bedding me or them.”
If he refused to call it love, she would try to accept it. But it wasn’t friendship, either. One didn’t make love to a friend as her husband made love to her. It was the only ammunition she had, and by God, she was going to use it.
“That being the case, I’d like to know how I compare in the bed to your last mistress, the most recent one,” Merry said. “The one to whom you gave a ruby.”
Trent’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know that?”
“Cedric told me.”
Darkness swept up his face as if a storm had blown in from the sea. “I find it intolerable that you and my brother discussed the subject.”
“I am sympathetic,” she retorted. “Nor was I happy that you and Cedric chatted about my supposed erotic experience. But I digress. You do not love me, and there is no such thing as ‘making love.’ Emotion other than lust plays no part in the matter. Therefore, you probably enjoyed it more with her, since she is presumably more experienced?”
“You are my wife, Merry. That changes everything.” His lips barely moved and every muscle was taut.
Merry felt as if she were outside her own body, observing herself prod a lion in its cage. Why was she pushing him? And yet her heart was beating with an anguished fury, raging at the idea that their couplings had been nothing more than what he had shared with his mistress.
“Why did you give her a ruby?” she demanded. “Cedric thought you wildly overpaid her.”
His eyes met hers directly, without emotion. “She announced that she was in love with me. She became distraught when I did not reciprocate.”
Just like that, the supposed comparison she had set up—between his mistress and herself—fell to pieces. She loved Trent. Just as his mistress had loved him, and he certainly hadn’t fallen in love with the poor woman as a result.