The Secret to Seduction (26 page)

Lucidity returned to her somewhat as she watched her husband braced over her, and his eyes never left hers. She wondered what he saw in hers. She knew what she saw in his: fierce pleasure in the taking of her, and something else that fought through—a sort of wonder, a sort of surprise. For a moment she suspected he was nearly as helpless in the matter of passion here as she was, but then the moment was gone, and his eyes closed tightly as every bit of him went taut, and he drove himself swiftly to his release.

What if my children are conceived in a room without a carpet?
Sabrina wondered.

Silently he withdrew from her, carefully, gently brushed her skirts down. Refastened his trousers. She fussed with her neckline, straightening it.

Rearranged, they sat side by side on the settee.

“Welcome home,” she said wryly, trying a jest.

He gave a short laugh. It sounded almost pained. And then he went closed and quiet, a quiet she didn’t quite understand, and for some reason didn’t dare breach.

He finally turned to her again. “I’ve things to see to here at La Montagne. If you’ll excuse me?”

He said it gently, but the words were so formal in the wake of feverish intimacy that Sabrina blinked.

“Of course, my lord.” She couldn’t disguise the irony in the words.

He simply rose and nodded shortly to her, and left her in that carpetless room.

He’d vanished into his office to do whatever it was he did at La Montagne, and she didn’t see her husband at all for the rest of the afternoon. But later, an invitation came in the person of Mrs. Bailey.

“The earl would be pleased if you would join him for dinner this evening.”

Such a peculiar way to live, Sabrina thought, even as the invitation undeniably pleased her. How peculiar to be invited to dine with someone in her own home. To be formally invited to dine with her own
husband,
for that matter.

“I am pleased to accept his invitation,” she’d replied with mock solemnity.

And she dressed for him, knowing, thanks to Madame Marceau, what colors suited her: the purple, to make her eyes bewitching and her skin glow like a pearl. Cut to gently skim her curves and reveal a soft expanse of skin and the shadow between her full breasts. In the wicked hope that her husband, while he was here, might want to pay attention to them again.

“Wyndham said you came back from the war full of poetry.”

It seemed a place to begin a dinner conversation, anyhow. But for some reason the question made Rhys go quiet, and Sabrina worried she’d ended the dinner conversation before it could truly begin.

Finally, he smiled a little. “Wyndham talks far too much.”

There was a
chink
in the silence that followed, the sound of his fork stabbing into a bean and missing and striking his plate.

“I’ve read your poetry,” she confessed tentatively.

Rhys stopped and his eyes blazed humor at her. “For heaven’s sake,
I
know that.”

Her mouth dropped open. And then, indignantly, she said, “So you
did
lay a trap.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment.

“A trap is only a trap,” he finally said, “if one’s quarry, by nature,
wants
the bait.” And then he grinned at her.

She couldn’t smile back, because his smile took her breath away. And then she was sorry, because his smile was soon gone again.

“Did you…like it? The poetry?” he wondered. He wasn’t looking at her. He was slicing his beef into little rectangles.

He was trying, she realized, to appear as though he didn’t mind what she thought.

“Yes,” she said fervently. “I didn’t want to, mind you, but…it’s extraordinary. Not . . .” She skipped the word she might have used, which might have been “shocking,” and he looked at her then, his brow leaping upward sardonically. “It’s magical.” The word embarrassed her, but he seemed to take it as a matter of course, being a poet, she supposed. “I found it so, anyhow. Though I know very little about poetry.”

He ducked his head briefly. Sabrina thought she saw him hiding a tiny pleased smile, a flash, there and gone. And he said nothing else.

“I suppose you cannot experience it the way a reader does,” she continued.

“No,” he agreed, his eyes upon her again. “Particularly since most readers seem to be women.” Another smile.

She was ready for it this time: she smiled, too, enjoying his teasing. “Will you write another book?”

He snorted a soft laugh, not an amused one. “I don’t know. I haven’t written a word of poetry in months.”

Her fork paused in midair. “But…but…at your house party you were looking for a rhyme for skin!”

“No, I wasn’t. I was writing a letter to my solicitor.”

She stared at him. “I believe the word you used that night was ‘incorrigible’?”

“Yes.”

“Still fits,” she muttered, and ate a pea.

He laughed.

And then there was a quiet. Not an awkward quiet. Sabrina felt the change in its texture. It was like the rest in a piece of music. They were learning to talk to each other. And tentatively, skittishly…they were enjoying it.

“Have you found your mother’s portrait?” she asked.

“The search continues,” he said shortly.

“I’ve a portrait of
my
mother,” she volunteered shyly.

“Should we hang it in the gallery?” He asked it lightly.

She smiled. “It’s only a miniature. It’s all I have of her. Her name is Anna, or so it says on the back of the image, in script. She looks very like me, or so I’m told.”

And Rhys went strangely still. Something flickered over his face, something Sabrina couldn’t interpret. It was almost as though something had hurt him.

Perhaps he’d swallowed a pea too hard.

“I always wanted to know her,” she added softly.

He finally stirred again. “Do you know how you came to live with Vicar Fairleigh, Sabrina?” She watched his hands fuss with his napkin.

“I only know I was brought to him one evening, shortly before he left for the living in Tinbury. He was told my mother had died, and that I was an orphan.”

“Do you know what year this was, by any chance?”

“Of course. It was 1803. Are you trying to learn my age?” She smiled at him.

Rhys smiled a little, too, but now he seemed distracted. He tipped more wine into his glass, sipped at it while appearing to admire the room, then returned his gaze to her, seeming to decide she was more interesting.

“I remember only…,” she began. “I remember being awakened in the middle of the night, and there were other little girls there, too. And we were crying. And I remember the voice of a woman, soft. But I don’t know whether it was my mother or not.”

Rhys stared at her as if she’d just confessed to making love to King George. Or something
just
that shocking. Perhaps the memory stirred his own memories of his mother and sister, both of whom had died. Perhaps he was feeling keenly again his own losses.

She changed the subject. “I’ve noticed you’ve no paintings by Mr. Wyndham hanging here at La Montagne.”

“Have you?” he asked idly, looking down at his plate.

“And yet you’ve commissioned quite a few. Mr. Wyndham doesn’t think he’s a good painter, but he thinks that you believe he is.”

Rhys helped himself to another slice of beef. He chewed for a bit. Swallowed.

“Wyndham is a good
friend,
” he finally allowed, the words careful.

Sabrina’s mouth dropped open. She clapped it shut, realizing something. “You—you—”

“I?” Rhys coaxed, amused and a little puzzled.

“You like to
help,
too! You commission Wyndham, and La Valle, and—because you want to help them! You
help
!”

This seemed to give Rhys pause.

“For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone,” he finally said, sounding abashed.

She laughed, delighted.

Rhys had bid her good evening after dinner, perhaps vanishing into his office; Sabrina had retired to the library to read, but found herself taking up her knitting needles, adding more rows to the blue scarf she would someday, if she’d the nerve, give to her husband.

If he’d wished to find her, he could have looked in the library. He did not.

So Sabrina retired to her bedchamber. But now it was late, and the lure of bed was strong. She began preparations for sleep, plucking up her hairbrush. She began to brush out her hair, and remembering the night of her wedding, her strokes slowed. She half hoped Rhys would appear to do it for her again. She’d been so afraid that night, and lonely, and he’d managed both to soothe and seduce her with the homely little act, though he’d left her the following day. He was an observant man. She was beginning to believe he might also be a kind man.

She was beginning to—dare she say it—like him.

But a hundred strokes later, her hair was gleaming in a sheet to her waist, and she was still alone.

Sabrina pulled a night rail over her head, this one warm and very fine, a new one. And like the night of her wedding, she waited. Tensed in anticipation, and in a peculiar hope.

But the door between their rooms never opened.

Ah. So perhaps he thought he’d done his duty by her for this visit.

A knot of desolation in her stomach pulled tight, and her hands went there protectively, covering it. She remembered what Mary had said about thinking about what to serve for dinner the following day when she was lying beneath her husband, and for another instant Sabrina rather wished someone like Paul would come through the door.

Finally Sabrina slipped beneath her blankets and tossed and turned, restless as if she’d gone to bed without supper. It was a new and different sort of appetite, however, that remained unsatisfied, and her new unhappiness was born of having a brief taste of happiness.

At last she drifted, as the fire grew lower, to a fitful sleep.

He didn’t know why he resisted.

He’d prepared himself for sleep, stripped himself of clothing and built the fire up higher than necessary, and fully intended to
only
sleep, so he might rise early and be on the road again to London in the morning very early, because there was a soiree he should attend. A new young poet would be reading, and Rhys could add his own cachet to the event.

Actually, it wasn’t entirely true: he did know why he resisted.

Everything he’d tried in the name of curbing restlessness—alcohol, opium, music, poetry, gambling, sport, woman after shockingly skilled woman—he’d been able to leave behind. He’d known pleasure. Sometimes
acute
pleasure. He’d known oblivion. He’d accumulated a store of extraordinary memories, memories few other men could afford or would ever have.

But not one of those things had ever felt like a
need.

And this…this had begun to feel perilously like need.

He didn’t want to ever need again.

So he doused his lamp, and lay in the dark and waited for the oblivion of sleep.

He didn’t know how much time had passed before he realized that sleep would be denied him. That he would have to, for perhaps the first time in his life, surrender.

Sabrina had been sleeping for some time when she awoke and stirred groggily, realizing that a warm body had slid beneath the blankets next to her. She stirred into a dreamlike wakefulness when his arms went around her, and turned up to face his shadowy face in the dark; instinctively, as if of their own accord, her arms reached up to wrap around his neck. He was bare; his skin was fire-warm. His mouth found hers, and her lips fell open beneath his, and he tasted a little of brandy, felt like warm velvet. She kissed him hungrily back, reveling in the taste and texture of him. Her body moved to fit beneath his, wanting him. He gathered up her night rail until it bunched around her waist, and his hands were hot and urgent against her skin, skimming across her belly, over the curve of her hips and waist, filling impatiently with her breasts, stroking, until her body was exquisitely awake, even as she half felt she was dreaming.

“
Yes,
” she whispered, and arched into him, abetting him, asking for more.

And like this, in the near-total darkness, Rhys made love to her, swiftly and without words. In the dark he was hardly more than a shadow; it was like making love to night itself. He braced himself above her and then he was inside her, and her hips rose up to meet his driving hips, knowing now how to take her pleasure from him, and the low roar of breath and the meeting of their flesh were the only sounds.

And then it was done, his breath against her throat lulling as he lowered himself again to lie next to her.

“Rhys,” she murmured.

Spent, she drifted to sleep again, his body stretched out next to hers, his arms around her.

The next morning she awoke in an empty bed, to the sound of a maid poking up the fires. Sabrina slid a hand over, and found the sheets cold.

He might as well have been a phantom.

And for a disorienting moment, she felt a bit like a phantom, too.