The Secret to Seduction (23 page)

He remained quiet, and with her body pressed against the heat of his skin, her cheek pressed against the sway of his breathing, the beat of his heart, it was nearly impossible not to drift to sleep. And she did.

He hadn’t meant to take her so quickly, so very nearly roughly, with all the finesse of a boy.

He hadn’t expected to
need
to take her so urgently. For need to rise up and crest over him like a rogue wave, sweeping him along with it. It had been so long since that sort of thing had happened.

Well, at least since the night in the statue gallery.

He
had
intended to make her nearly scream with pleasure, however, and he had.

His wife, the Countess Rawden. He watched her sleep, one arm flung up over her head, mouth parted a little. What a beautiful little body she had, this country girl from Tinbury. Long slim legs, a scar from some childhood mishap, no doubt, shining white on her knee. Tiny waist. Lovely full breasts that tilted up, tipped in palest pink. A small mole in the shape of a crescent moon above one, a sweet punctuation mark, of sorts. He knelt to place the lightest kiss on it now, and she scarcely stirred.

A blend of vulnerable naïveté and stubborn, irritatingly astute observation, all covered in skin like cream silk.

He hadn’t expected to want to take her again the moment she touched him. To be so hard and ready to take her at once.

Or to linger here in this room, when he would rise early tomorrow to leave for London.

Was he now so very jaded that he found innocence erotic?

He fought back a strange sense of impatience. There had never been anything he couldn’t parse with his formidable mind. And whatever he felt now eluded him.

She would be tender in the morning, and it would have been selfish to take her again. Or so he’d told himself. But a part of him worried that he wanted her so very badly. Just as there was a part of him that still resented her for being in his life at all.

The fire was burning low, and he’d begun to feel the coolness of the room.

He rose, knelt, and slid his hands beneath his bride, scooping her gently up, amused to find she wasn’t precisely a feather in his arms. But she was strong and lithe and warm. She didn’t wake; she merely sighed and muttered an incoherent complaint and frowned a little. He half smiled. Ah, so he’d worn her out.

He tucked her into her great bed, pulled the blankets over her around her nude shoulders to avoid titillating the maid when she entered in the morning to build up the fire. He poked up the fire to make sure it would last until then.

And as he’d done his duty by his wife, he went back to his chambers so he could return to London tomorrow.

Sabrina woke with a start to the sound of coal shuffling and a determined shaft of sunlight penetrating the divide between the curtains. Then realizing with another start that she was entirely nude, she pulled her blankets up tightly around her shoulders and peered down at the maid busying herself with reviving the fire, her white cap bobbing efficiently atop her head as she moved about.

The maid must have noticed the change in her breathing, and realized she was awake, because she cast a worried look over her shoulder. “?’Tis sorry I am t’ disturb ye, Lady Rawden.”

Who was—

Oh:
she
was Lady Rawden, wasn’t she?

“Oh, you didn’t disturb me. The sun woke me, truly.” It was a lie, but the sort that wouldn’t send her to Hell, Sabrina was certain.

She sank back against the bed, as soft as a pillow itself, and knew before she looked that Rhys wasn’t there. She slid a hand over to where he might have slept; the bedding was cool. The pillows were still round and plump, not flattened by a sleeping head.

He’d taken her on a fur in front of the fire. And then he’d tucked her into bed.

And then he’d left, duty done.

She sank her head back down against her pillow, and the maid darted from the room to perform the rest of her morning chores.

Sabrina decided to give the fire an opportunity to warm the room before she stirred. She shifted her limbs a little, and they slid over the softest linen imaginable, and she felt stiffness in them, a pleasant heaviness and soreness in her muscles. She recalled last night with extraordinary vividness. Heat rushed over her body at the thought of it.

And then she felt a weight in her chest. So odd to join with a man so intimately and then for him to simply leave.

Perhaps not so odd for him.

There was a warning tap at the door, and Mrs. Bailey entered, accompanied by the scent of steaming chocolate and something warm and yeasty.

Despite everything, there were definitely going to be advantages to being a countess.

“Good morning, Lady Rawden.”

She was ready for the greeting this time. “Good morning, Mrs. Bailey.”

Perhaps he was in his own chambers, or taking breakfast, or moving about his vast property. She wondered at the hope she felt, as they’d had an agreement, after all. And she knew all along he’d intended to go back to London, for his life was there.

Life at the vicarage had always been full. She knew precisely what to do and when; her schedule had been governed by the needs of others, and she’d been happy enough to oblige. For the first time in her life she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with her day.

And suddenly it yawned ahead of her like a year.

Thus her life as a countess began.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

O
N HER FIRST day alone at La Montagne, the army of servants commanded by Mrs. Bailey lined up to be introduced to Sabrina. Among them were girls her own age in soft white caps and snowy aprons; they blushed and curtsied deeply when Sabrina repeated their names in order to remember them. But Sabrina sensed that Mrs. Bailey had it all in hand, that La Montagne would continue on as it always had regardless of whether she or even the earl were on hand to see to it. She would love nothing more than to make improvements, but the machinery of La Montagne’s staff made this nearly impossible. Everything was flawless.

She contemplated writing to Mary and begging her to return, but she knew Mary had fluttered off to collect nectar from another social flower, dragging along her willing husband, and would be very nearly impossible to locate.

So she imagined, again, she had sisters. In her mind an image of two little girls remained. Sometimes she lingered over the pianoforte, and played the beautiful instrument, because there the memories were the strongest. There they seemed to want to bob to the surface through the accumulated memories of her other years.

Maybe, in this quiet house, she would finally remember them.

She poked about in the library. She poked about the halls and in the rooms of La Montagne, until she’d memorized every curve of every statue in the gallery and every face on every painting. She could almost picture the paintings that belonged in those eloquently empty spaces on the walls.

She visited the windows in the gallery where Wyndham painted, but she never seemed to be there in time to see the moon and the stars reflected on the floor.

And at night, alone in the large, soft bed, she thought of one thing only: her husband. With ambivalence and a new, uncomfortable physical yearning that she partly resented, because the yearning would never have been there at all if not for him.

If she’d married another man she might never have known this remarkable pleasure. But she might have known peace, and she might not have been alone.

On the fourth day, magically, a modiste appeared.

Madame Marceau was a tall, briskly cheerful woman with a regal, homely face, and she came armed with bolts of fabrics and books of fashion plates and complaints about the roads on the way to La Montagne from London.

She had been charged by Rhys to dress her as she would any countess, and she set to her task with zeal. Sabrina was examined and measured and clucked over, and a dizzying array of fabrics and choices were laid out before her to rub between her fingers and hold up under her chin as she faced the mirror. Sabrina remembered being caught in a curtain dress on her very first day at La Montagne, and asked Madame Marceau, with all seriousness, her opinion of the curtain color, bringing her into the small room.

Madame Marceau thought perhaps a deeper purple would be even better. She had just the satin. And she was right: the deeper purple made Sabrina’s green eyes brilliant when she held it beneath her chin.

Sabrina was promised dresses of wool and of silk, pelisses lined in fur, chemises and night rails of softest lawn, silk stockings and gloves and boots and bonnets—all inside a fortnight. She had made her own clothes almost since she could wield a needle, and the very idea of this bounty arriving so quickly seemed as likely as Madame Marceau’s gathering up all the stars and bringing them down from the sky.

Then again, it had begun to be clear that there was very little the Earl of Rawden’s money couldn’t make so.

Sabrina couldn’t help but wonder whom the beauty would benefit. Then again, she would be like the other things in the grand house: beautiful, polished, decorative. And perhaps this was the point.

And when the modiste left to return to London, she took with her color and chatter, and Sabrina felt more alone than ever before.

This was when, out of desperation, Sabrina asked Mrs. Bailey to find a ball of wool and a pair of knitting needles. She hadn’t done anything productive in days, and she had come to realize that her very nature centered about organizing and producing and…helping.

Mrs. Bailey didn’t seem surprised by the request. No doubt years of serving the aristocracy had drummed the capacity for surprise out of Mrs. Bailey.

“What color would you like, Lady Rawden?”

Of course there would be a
choice
of colors here at La Montagne.

Dyed wools in brilliant shades danced in Sabrina’s imagination. She considered asking about red…she did like red, and it was cheerful on winter days. White was simple, and elegant. Gray was practical, and would be—

No: blue. It needed to be blue.

She might knit a scarf to the length of a hundred ells before she saw her husband again. And even when she did, she wondered if she would have the nerve to present him with a scarf she’d knitted to match his eyes. She also wondered at the impulse, except that they were undeniably beautiful, his eyes, and she had almost nothing else to do.

Finally, at the end of the first week at La Montagne, the snow had melted enough to make the roads to Buckstead Heath passable, and Sabrina decided she could ride out to the town. A groom insisted upon accompanying her, saying it was more than his life was worth to allow her to go alone, which would have been what she preferred.

She glared at the man in what she hoped was a countess-y way.

“Mr.—”

“Croy,” the groom supplied patiently.

“Mr. Croy, I’ve ridden entirely on my own since I was a very little girl, and I lived in a town very much like Buckstead Heath before I came to live at La Montagne.”

The groom, however, had more than twice her years, a few daughters of his own, satisfaction in his pay, and a healthy respect and fear of the very large Earl of Rawden.

“Aye, but ye’re nay a little girl anymore, are ye?” he said mildly. “Ye’re a countess. I’ll saddle a mare fer ye, Lady Rawden, and I’ll ride wi’ ye into town.”

In Tinbury, riding was a necessity, a way to get from one place to another. They kept a mule at the vicarage, and the versatile beast pulled plow and carts and carried Sabrina on errands on the occasions the weather was too brisk for a walk. Sabrina’s legs only just fit over its broad back, and he lifted his feet high and put them down hard, the mule did. She’d always felt every inch of the road when she was riding him, every shift of his great haunches.

But the mare she rode now flowed beneath her with a gait as smooth as water. Sabrina wondered if one day she would become accustomed to such luxuries, a brown mare with a delicate, tossing head and slim legs, a mare that might very well be pleased to fly, it seemed, if only Sabrina would allow her to.

Mr. Croy was taciturn; clearly he believed his duty was confined to steering her in the proper direction and seeing that she kept her seat. After a few vain attempts to engage him in conversation, Sabrina abandoned the attempt and instead took in deep gulps of country air.

Buckstead Heath came into view over a rise, little cottages scattered about, smoke wisping up from chimneys, and a central street where Sabrina suspected the shops in the town could be found.

But it was the church that caught her eye. Modest, a few hundred years old. Built of sturdy tawny stone with thick walls, inset with simple stained-glass windows, a shining cross finishing the tall, narrow spire.

And she knew, before she did anything else, before she rode farther into town, she should speak to Geoffrey, whom she hadn’t seen since the disaster that preceded her wedding. She wasn’t quite certain what she would say to him, but if they were to be neighbors, they ought to at least be friends.

“We’re going to church, Mr. Croy.”

The groom nodded and touched his fingers to his cap.

It was just shortly after the time Matins would have been spoken. The people of Buckstead Heath, if they had attended church this morning, had already left, and it was empty and quiet with the sort of hush that only churches seemed to contain, as though the walls had been soaked with centuries of worship.