Tempting the Bride Read online

  “Instead you lived to enjoy the rosebushes’ thorny embrace.”

  “I must have a yen for thorny embraces—I daresay there is no embrace thornier than yours.” He pushed off from the door and stalked toward her. “Let me brush your hair for you.”

  Her grip tightened on the hairbrush. “No, thank you.”

  She’d gladly whack him if he dared to take the hairbrush from her hand. But he only walked about her, unsubtly inspecting her from all angles.

  She took a deep breath. “Is there something you wish to say to me?”

  “Why speak when I can look?”

  The slow drawl of his words, the light in his eyes, the closeness of his person…Her throat constricted.

  He settled a hip on the vanity table. “Actually, let me contradict myself. I do have something to say. What do you mean, you are a virgin?”

  She rose and marched to the window to put some distance between them. “What any woman means when she says she is a virgin.”

  He snorted. “What then were you doing all those nights you spent with Martin?”

  “Pleasurable activities that did not impact my virginity.”

  His brow rose. “Did those pleasurable activities include buggery?”

  Another woman might have flushed. She was only further offended. “No.”

  “I find it inconceivable that Martin has that sort of self-control. How could he have you in his bed and not profit from it?”

  “We remained clothed, both of us.”

  “At your insistence or his?”

  “His, but how does it matter?”

  “You would have taken them off?”

  “Yes, I would have gladly disrobed for the man I love.”

  He said nothing, but picked up her jar of toilette cream, unscrewed the cap, and dipped a finger inside. She couldn’t say why, but the gesture made her face burn.

  He rubbed the unguent between his fingers. “Nice. I can probably find some use for it later.”

  Behind her, her hands gripped the windowsill.

  He glanced at her, a heavy-lidded look she felt all the way to her soles. “And you, my dear, will learn to love the idea of disrobing for me.”

  She was still, her gaze focused somewhere behind him.

  Redheads were often characterized as passionate and temperamental. He didn’t doubt that she was passionate, but Helena Fitzhugh had always been cool, a woman who liked being firmly in control.

  Presently her coolness was almost glacial, sharply contrasted against all that Titian hair spilling down her shoulders and back in soft, gleaming waves. Words usually came easily to him, a versatile, malleable medium to be layered and blended like paint on a palette. Yet when it came to her hair, his mind could not conjure anything more imaginative than fire and its various synonyms.

  Flame. Blaze. A conflagration to swallow him whole.

  Her body, leaning against the windowsill, was elegantly elongated. He used to call her a giraffe to her face, which she’d always taken as an insult. But a giraffe in person was an impossibly beautiful creature, a testament to the Creator’s skill and imagination.

  And just a few hours ago, that body had pressed into his, her fingers plunging into his hair.

  “Why?” she asked, snapping him out of his reverie.

  He almost couldn’t recall what they’d been talking about. “Why learn to love the idea of disrobing for me?”

  “No. Why are you involved at all? Were you a more gallant man, I might have understood your action. But you possess not an ounce of chivalry. How does this profit you?”

  Everything he did, he did because he loved her. Her entire family knew it, but she was determined to perpetuate her ignorance.

  He thought of Millie’s advice. She and her husband had been the most affectionate of friends for years, and still she’d hesitated to make her true feelings known. What if she and Fitz had locked horns at every turn? Would she have ever taken her own advice?

  “Were your bosom more bountiful, there might have been something in it for me.” He shrugged. “Oh well, I trust eventually I will come to enjoy straddling your bony person.”

  She pulled her lips taut. “For someone with so little interest in my person, you’ve certainly spent a good deal of time attempting a measure of intimacy.”

  “It’s the nature of man. No one really wants to go to the South Pole or cross the Sahara; they just want to see whether it can be done.”

  “Whether it can be done,” she repeated slowly.

  “Indeed. Shall we proceed?”

  “You will wait until we are, in fact, married,” she said coldly.

  “Mr. Martin didn’t have to wait.”

  “Mr. Martin didn’t actually get to sleep with me.”

  He grinned. “Do to me what you did to him—I should be more than happy enough.”

  She took a deep breath. “You are a disgusting pig, Hastings.”

  She’d compared him to far baser entities over the years, but something in her tone struck him. He’d always been a game to her, a somewhat unsavory game, but one she played with finesse and nonchalance. Now, however, she could no longer rap him on the hand and saunter away; now he was her present and her future.

  Her dismay was a sharp twist in his heart, a feeling of utter futility. As ever, when he felt trampled, he turned to ever greater frivolity and callousness, those false friends who led him only deeper into despair, but who, at least on the surface, imbued him with an appearance of flippant nonchalance.

  “The slings and arrows I suffer for my honesty,” he said, barely feeling the words sliding past his lips. “Very well then, I’ll settle for a description of what you did.”

  “That is none of your concern.”

  “It very much is—I have to do those exact same things, don’t you see, to wipe away his fingerprints from your body, so to speak.”

  She smiled, an expression of arctic certainty. “You needn’t even try. His fingerprints will always be on my body.”

  He walked slowly toward her, his height and breadth somehow multiplying with each step, as did his menace. She realized, for the first time in their long acquaintance, that she’d never encountered his anger—hadn’t even known it was an emotion he ever encountered in his glib existence.

  His voice, however, was utterly velvety—if an upholstered wrecking ball could be called velvety. “I won’t need to try, my dear. My touch will burn away his.”

  She couldn’t breathe.

  “You were always quiet in his bed,” he went on, “but you won’t be in mine. You will scream with pleasure—and you will do it again and again.”

  If she gripped the windowsill any harder, she’d break off a piece of it. “If you are quite finished with your theatrics, I am weary and would like to rest—in private.”

  He loomed over her, his gaze harsh. For a moment she thought he’d flick aside her request and shove her against a wall. But the next moment he shrugged, very much back to being his normal self—the breaking of the tension oddly vacuumlike inside her chest.

  “Of course. I wish you a pleasant night’s rest. I’m sure one of the maids will be eager to entertain me for a couple of hours in your stead.”

  Suddenly it was she who was closing in on him, her finger stabbing into his chest. “I can’t stop you from pursuing affairs, but I will not tolerate any carrying-on with the staff.”

  “That is terrible—such a convenient source of gratification, the maids. Why, one doesn’t even need to leave the house!”

  “You will keep your hands off the maids.”

  “Fine. What about my housekeeper?”

  Mrs. McCormick was rather youngish, only in her late thirties. Helena grimaced. “Not Mrs. McCormick, either.”

  Hastings sighed, as if his patience were being tested by an unreasonable toddler. “Can’t we make a bargain? You can have a go at my grooms while I dally with the maids—provided I get to watch, of course.”

  She hoped he was jesting. But Hastings was such
a swine, it was quite possible that he indeed hoped for such a debauched tableau.

  “No. Nor with your footmen, your coachmen, your gardeners, nor anyone else in or out of your employ.”

  “My God, you are turning into Mrs. Monteth.”

  “Don’t compare me to that harpy—I am not interested in exposing you. But I will protect the staff from your predation.”

  She’d not quite realized it, but she’d been advancing against him and he’d been moving backward, and now they were both back where they’d started, at the vanity table, where she was greeted with the image of his daughter, looking small and meek in her photograph.

  The poor girl, growing up in such a salacious household.

  “When do I meet Miss Hillsborough?”

  He looked nonplussed at the sudden change of topic—and, for once, genuinely surprised. “My daughter, you mean? You wish to meet her?”

  “Of course I wish to meet her. Henceforth I am responsible for her upbringing.”

  “You’ve never asked about her before.”

  “Your illegitimate child is not a subject considered suitable for an unmarried woman to broach. But that is not her fault, only yours. She is approaching an age when she will be in dire need of good guidance—or at least of being spared the sight of you copulating with her nanny.”

  “I don’t copulate with Bea’s nanny—not in front of her, in any case. It bores her terribly and rather spoils my mood when she keeps asking when I’ll be finished.”

  His shallowness and frivolity were fully back to the fore. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or confused. “When do I meet her?”

  “We can leave London as soon as your brother’s dinner takes place—in any case, it will look odd should we continue to remain in town.”

  “That will be satisfactory enough. Good night, Lord Hastings.”

  He nodded. “Lady Hastings.”

  But at the connecting door he turned back. “An experienced virgin, my dear—you are a dream come true. I shall think of you all night long.”

  You never sleep in your own bed anymore,” Millie teased Fitz.

  Her lovely face and sweet eyes—he could not get enough of looking at her. He lifted a strand of her hair and brought it to his lips. “What a shame. And I like my own bed so well, too.”

  She waggled an eyebrow. “I have an idea: From time to time we can both sleep in your bed.”

  He brushed the tip of her nose with the ends of her own hair and lifted a brow back at her. “Does that mean you will actually come into my chamber at night, undress me, and demand satisfaction?”

  She trailed a finger down the center of his torso. “I thought I already did that—twice—when we were on holiday.”

  “That there will be a third time still astonishes me—for almost eight years you said nothing about how fervently you wished to seduce me.”

  “All the more reason for me to do it as often and as brazenly as possible.”

  He laughed softly. “Shall I tell you again how complete my happiness is?”

  She rubbed the inside of her wrist against the beginning of his stubble. “Even with Helena almost ruined today?”

  “You are not still blaming yourself, are you?”

  “Let me assure you, lover dearest, that having gone to America and back, and dragged Helena all over town this Season just so she was never left alone, I don’t feel as guilty as I probably ought. My mother used to say, ‘There is no stopping a determined mischief maker.’”

  “And your mother, bless her memory, was always right.”

  “But I am worried. Helena will want to ignore Hastings to the best of her ability. And Hastings…he’d rather be buried alive than be ignored.”

  Fitz shook his head. “Those two. I’ll have a word with him tomorrow.”

  “I already had a word with him in the last telegram I sent—I don’t suppose he took my advice to heart.”

  “You would no more have followed the same advice had he given it to you a few weeks ago.”

  “True, but I’ve changed. Now I will openly admit my true feelings, which are that”—she cleared her throat playfully—“I am resolutely committed to being the joy and the light at the center of your existence.”

  He couldn’t help smiling: How fortunate he was, how privileged, to have her tonight and always. “Come here, Joy-and-Light,” he murmured. “Let me hold you with both arms.”

  Hastings very much wished to bang his head on a bedpost. Another time he might have done so, but Helena was in the next room. Should she hear any suspicious sounds coming from his direction, she’d immediately assume that he’d defied her edict and was rutting with a housemaid in a deliberately noisy fashion. He was almost tempted to make his bed squeak, just to see whether she’d kick down his door in anger.

  This was not at all how he’d imagined it would be when he finally had her in the mistress’s room. At this point in the night, after having exhausted themselves making love, they should have been snuggled under the covers, whispering and giggling like children, telling each other naughty jokes, describing slightly impossible sexual feats they planned to try as soon as they’d regained their breath.

  That future was not supposed to feel more distant than ever.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hastings had instructed his staff not to trouble their new mistress until eight o’clock in the morning. But she was awake at the crack of dawn, moving about in her room—so close, yet so inaccessible.

  He bathed, dressed, and entered her room after a quick knock. She wasn’t in the bedroom, but in her sitting room, standing before a shelf of books in a visiting gown, examining the titles on the spines. Each title had been chosen either because she’d expressed a preference for it, or because he’d inferred, based on what he knew of her tastes, that it would meet with her approval.

  Indeed, when she turned around at the sound of his approach, she wore a small frown of disorientation. “Who put these books here?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? The study probably became too crammed and the staff used the shelf to house the overflow.”

  “I see.” She set back the book of Sappho’s poems that had been in her hand. “And what are you doing here?”

  “I thought it would not be amiss to exchange a cordial greeting the morning after our wedding night—and to sacrifice a few drops of my blood to the sheets to preserve your reputation.”

  “I already did that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Go look for yourself.”

  He reentered her bedroom, lifted the covers, and grimaced at the drops of blood smeared onto the sheets. “It would look like this only if your hymen had been broken with a knife.”

  She appeared in the doorway. “What do you mean?”

  “When a hymen is disposed of by a cock, as it usually is, there is never just blood on the sheets.”

  “There is nothing I can do about that.”

  “I suppose I must do something about it, contribute my share to the stains.”

  The corners of her lips turned down in distaste. “Suit yourself. I am going out.”

  “Where are you going at this early hour?”

  “To call on my family. They would like to know that married life has not disagreed too terribly with me—and I will lie accordingly.”

  Something in her demeanor made him ask, “And then?”

  She barely glanced at him, speaking to the doorjamb. “And then I plan to meet with Mr. Martin. At the offices of Fitzhugh and Company, preferably. At his home, if necessary.”

  He felt as if he’d been slapped. “To finish what you didn’t have time for yesterday?”

  “Mr. Martin will be worried about me. He will be blaming himself. I’d like to assure him that I am fine, public marriage notwithstanding.”

  “He ought to blame himself. If he’d kept to his word, you would not be in your current predicament.”

  “And if he did not, it was only because I convinced him otherwise.”

  “Wh
y do you keep taking responsibility for his actions?”

  “I care about him and will therefore do my utmost to ensure his happiness, a concept I am sure is entirely alien to you.”

  “One that is no less alien to Mr. Martin. What has he ever done for your happiness? And think carefully before you answer. His acquiescence to your wishes—and he acquiesces to everyone’s wishes—does not constitute effort on his part.”

  He was glad to see a flicker of doubt in her eyes, but when she spoke again, her tone was as firm as ever. “I will decide whether Mr. Martin has done enough for me.”

  “And I will decide,” he heard himself say, “whether a woman who arranges to see the man who compromised her isn’t too stupid and morally adrift to meet my daughter, let alone be an influence in her life.”

  Hastings sat slumped in Fitz’s study, his hand over his eyes.

  Fitz, thank goodness, drank his coffee and left Hastings alone.

  For about a quarter hour or so.

  “All right, David, enough moping,” said Fitz, setting down his coffee cup.

  Reluctantly, Hastings removed his hand from his face and sat up straighter. “I haven’t formally congratulated you, have I, Fitz, on making the right choice in your marriage and being blessedly happy as a result?”

  Fitz smiled. “Thank you. Although, looking back, it wasn’t just one choice, but the accumulation of many choices.”

  Hastings sighed. “I’m afraid the same can be said about Helena and me, years of less than stellar conduct on my part, continuing to this very moment.”

  “My wife would have you confess your love at the earliest opportunity and be done with it. But if you are reluctant to do that—and something tells me you are—then it might not be a bad idea to simply stop antagonizing Helena.

  “I know she makes you lose your mind, but at our age, that is no longer a good enough excuse. If you want her admiration, you cannot keep aiming for her abhorrence. Let her ignore you. Give her time. Show her that you are more than merely an assemblage of insults and innuendos in bespoke boots.”

  Hastings chuckled despite himself. “You are right, of course. And I needed the chastening.”

  “Patience, my friend,” said Fitz. “Rome wasn’t built in—”