Mary Balogh (20 page)

“I don’t think you ought to kiss me,” she said. “We are not really betrothed, after all.”

“But your papa granted us all of half an hour,” he said. “I think I had better, Soph.”

She tilted her face up resolutely and waited.

“You are still puckering.” He looked down at her critically. “Ah, that’s better,” he said when she opened her mouth to make some sharp retort. “Mm.”

Sophia never did make the retort.

“You aren’t still shaking, are you, Soph?” he said against her ear a few minutes later. He had both arms wrapped about her.

“Of course I am not,” she said breathlessly. “Why would I be shaking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But your arms are so tight about my neck that I thought you were afraid of falling.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to remove her arms but finding herself too closely held to have anywhere else to put them. “No. But what else am I to do with them?”

“Put them back,” he advised. “Some poor devil is going to thank me one of these days, you know, Soph.”

“What?” she said. He was distracting her full concentration by nibbling on her earlobe.

“For teaching you how to kiss,” he said. “I must say you are an apt pupil. This is becoming almost as much pleasure as duty.”

She bent her arms back at the elbows and shoved hard at his shoulders. “Please do me no favors,” she said hotly. “It is certainly no pleasure to me. And if I do not look just kissed to your brothers now, Francis, I never will. Besides, I am going to be embarrassed. And besides again, I don’t like kissing and don’t intend to do it with anyone else ever again. I want to go back downstairs.”

“Some poor devil will never know what he has missed, then,” Lord Francis said, strolling across the gallery to extinguish the two candles he had lit earlier, and picking up the candlestick again. “I hate to tell you this, Soph, but any decent lady would not allow herself to be touched anywhere but on the closed lips before her wedding night. I suppose that is some consolation for you, though. You will be spared some shock when your wedding night finally does come along.”

“I didn’t ask you to put your arms about me and pull
me so close,” she said, on her dignity, descending the stairs beside him, a foot of space between them. “And I certainly did not invite you to do that with your tongue. You ought not have started to kiss me when my mouth was open to speak.”

“Ah, Soph,” he said, “you should have kept it firmly shut when I was so close.”

“And I certainly did not give you permission to do that to my ear,” she said severely.

A
PART FROM THE FACT THAT HE HAD BEEN MISSING
his wife and despising himself for doing so, the few days before her return had been pleasant ones for the Earl of Clifton. There was a good feeling to be had from the approach of a daughter’s wedding, he found. He enjoyed the noisy cheerfulness of the duke’s family, and it was good to see his mother and aunt and even Olivia’s parents. Pleased for their granddaughter’s happiness, they had greeted him with warmth and none of the frowns and recriminations he had half expected.

It was good, too, to see Emma and Clarence and be reminded of the good years of his marriage at Rushton. Clarence had been his friend before he became Olivia’s—the two men had gone to school and university together. But they had not seen each other in ten years.

Clarence, in fact, was the one guest who somewhat clouded his general feeling of well-being. He had put on some weight about the middle and his blond hair had thinned, though he was by no means bald. But he still had the pleasant good looks that had drawn flirtatious glances from the barmaids of Oxford and more refined glances from the ladies in the London ballrooms. He had seemed impervious to the charms of them all. He was keeping himself for his future bride, he had always said laughingly when teased by his friends.

Clarence had been Olivia’s friend even before the breakup of the marriage. He had been her close friend since. Her letters occasionally mentioned him, and Sophia frequently referred to him when talking of home.

And Olivia, he remembered from a certain afternoon in the hidden garden, had become a passionate and experienced lover at some time during the past fourteen years.

The earl tried not to pursue such thoughts. But the thoughts and imaginings pursued him, it seemed, and were not to be resisted during the evening on her return. She had sat with her parents and Emma at tea before mingling more freely with the other guests, and ended up standing alone with Clarence beside the tea tray for all of fifteen minutes. At dinner, she sat with the duke and her father. And in the drawing room afterward, she talked with the duchess and Richard and his wife. He joined her there himself and sat beside her until she was called away to help Claude’s wife find some music to play on the pianoforte.

And then she sat on a sofa close to the pianoforte with Clarence and Emma, and stayed there even when Emma got up to play while Claude’s wife sang. The two of them were deep in smiling conversation, turned toward each other so that they appeared to have eyes for no one else.

The earl strolled toward the two of them. They both looked up and smiled at him.

“We are reminiscing, Marcus,” Clarence said. “It seems only yesterday that Sophia was a child and now she is only a little more than a week from marrying. And looking very happy about it, too.”

“Yes,” the earl said. “She should know what she is about. They have known each other all their lives.” Reminiscing about Sophia’s childhood and girlhood was something he could not participate in.

“Do you remember the first time they met?” his wife asked, smiling up at him in some amusement. “It was at Rushton when she was just a toddler. All the boys had new balls and three of them would have cheerfully indulged Sophia by sharing with her. But it was Francis’s ball she wanted and Francis she wanted to play with.”

Clarence chuckled. “I was there at the time,” he said. “The first notice he took of his future bride was to pull a gargoyle face and poke out his tongue at her, if I remember correctly.”

“A short while before shoving her backward into a patch of only half-dried mud,” the earl said. “Her dress was white, was it not, Olivia?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “so it was.”

“And poor Francis was turned over William’s knee for his first spanking concerning Sophia,” the earl said.

The other two looked at each other and laughed.

The earl turned away when the noise level rose in the room as Francis and Sophia came back, Sophia looking quite unmistakably rosy about the mouth.

His little girl, the earl thought, as the three brothers went into their usual teasing act and Francis pursed his lips and assured them that jealousy would accomplish nothing and Sophia blushed. She was too young to be mauled about by young Francis. But in nine days’ time, she was going to be his bride.

Oh, Sophia
, he thought,
all the lost years
. Years when he had seen her for only brief weeks two or three times a year, though Olivia had never denied her to him when he had asked. Years when he might have watched her growing up and stored away a wealth of memories for his old age and for telling his grandchildren.

His eyes strayed back to his wife, who was laughing with Clarence over something Bertie had just said.

Later that night, he found himself restless as he undressed and made ready for bed. He was unable to think
of lying down and addressing himself to sleep. He was not tired. He wandered to the window of his bedchamber and drummed his fingers on the sill. It appeared to have stopped raining outside. Perhaps he could take an early morning ride. But there was a night to live through first.

He thought of going downstairs to the library to find a book. But he did not feel like reading. He would not be able to concentrate.

His wife was in the next room, he thought, stopping abruptly the pacing he had begun. He had felt the emptiness of the room during the previous ten nights, though he had never been into her bedchamber since her arrival at Clifton. But he had felt its emptiness nonetheless. And now she was there again. He could feel her closeness.

Her closeness made him restless. He wanted to talk with her. Only to talk. He wanted her companionship. That was surely what he had missed most through the years. They had been very close friends. They had been each other’s second half. He had not been whole in all the years without her.

He wandered through to his dressing room. She was probably asleep already. And even if she were not, she would be outraged if he went into her room. She was at least entitled to the privacy of her bedchamber. But she was his wife and all he wanted to do was talk. She was probably asleep.

He turned the handle of the door between their dressing rooms quietly, not at all decided whether he would open the door. But he did, slowly and indecisively, and stepped into her dressing room. It smelled faintly of her perfume. Olivia’s dressing room had always smelled this way. The door into the bedchamber was open. There was a candle burning in there.

She was reclining against her pillows, he saw when he stood in the doorway, a book open in her hands. But she
was not reading it; she was looking at him and closing the book and setting it down on the table beside her, next to the candle.

Foolishly, now that he was there and she was not after all asleep, he could think of nothing to say. He stood and looked at her and she looked quietly back, not helping him out by saying anything or ordering him from her room.

“Can Sophia survive the next week?” he asked at last. “She seems excited enough to burst.”

“She almost gave in to a fit of terror this afternoon just after our arrival,” she said. “Seeing so many family members already gathered here has brought home the reality of it all to her. She had the feeling of being swept helplessly along by events.”

“She is not having second thoughts, is she?” he asked. “It can still be stopped, all of it.”

“I assured her of that,” she said. “I told her that all that matters ultimately are her feelings for Francis and her wish to spend the rest of her life with him. She realized then, of course, that she has loved him all her life. I think she has, too, Marcus, though how she could have done so through their childhood, I do not know. At least she knows that he is not perfect.”

There was a silence in the room for several moments. He moved beyond the doorway and came to stand beside her bed. She was wearing no dressing gown, only a thin cotton nightgown, quite low at the bosom. Her hair was shining and loose over her shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “It is important that she knows that. Have we done the right thing, Olivia, in allowing her to marry? I have been feeling something close to panic myself.”

“Yes, we have,” she said. “I believe they truly love each other, Marcus, and are truly good friends. They have made the decision to marry and we must respect
that. She is of marriageable age, after all, though she is young. We cannot live her life for her or ever know if everything we have ever done for her was the right thing. We can only ever do our best. The rest is up to her.”

“We deprived her of a family life,” he said, seating himself on the edge of the bed.

“Yes,” she said. “But we can do nothing to amend what is past, Marcus. And had we remained together just for her sake, perhaps we would have grown to hate each other. Perhaps we would have bickered and quarreled constantly. Would that have been better for her?”

“I suppose not,” he said. “Would it have been like that between us?”

“We can never know,” she said. “We have exchanged some angry words since my coming here.”

“You don’t regret your decision, Olivia?” he asked her.

“There is no point in regrets,” she said.

“Hm,” he said, and he reached out and took a lock of her hair in his hand and spread it over one finger. “Sophia told me that you went to a soirée at Lady Methuen’s. Did you enjoy it?”

“I was surprised to find that I knew some people,” she said, “even after all this time. Joanna Shackleton was there.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “She lives most of the year in town. Her husband is in the government, you know.”

“I liked being in London again,” she said.

“Did you?” He looked broodingly down at her. “You always did like the excitement of a few weeks there, did you not? You might have gone there over the years, Olivia. I always told you that. I would have stayed away.”

“There was always Sophia,” she said. “The country was better for her. Besides, I never had any great wish to
go. Rushton has always offered enough social activity for me.”

“I hope you had plenty of new clothes made,” he said. “Did you?”

“Far more than I need,” she said. “I did not realize that you had written to the dressmaker, Marcus. I suppose you needed to, since the order was to be so large and so hurried. But you need not have given her such strict instructions about what I needed.”

“If I had not,” he said, “I would have been fortunate to have found you returning with more than two new frocks and one bonnet. The straw you were wearing this afternoon is very pretty, by the way. It is new?”

“I would neither find nor dream of wearing such a frivolity at Rushton,” she said. “But Sophia would not let me out of the milliner’s without it and Francis, when goaded by her, assured me that I looked very handsome in it.”

“I would rather say that it looks very handsome on you,” he said.

“I was not allowed to pay any of the dressmaker’s bill,” she said. “I intended to pay at least part, but it seemed you had sent strict instructions about that, too.”

“I must be allowed to dress my women for a family wedding, Olivia,” he said.

“Is that what I am?” she said, watching his thumb stroke over the lock of hair across his finger. “One of your women?”

“My daughter’s mother,” he said.

He watched her swallow, and he lowered his head and kissed the pulse at her throat. She was still watching his hand and her hair across his finger when he raised his head again. He waited for her to say something, to become angry, to order him to leave. She said nothing.

With his free hand he smoothed the hair back from the side of her face and cupped her cheek in his palm.
He traced the line of her eyebrow with a light thumb. She closed her eyes and he kissed one and her cheek and her chin. He kissed her mouth, and it trembled beneath the light pressure of his.