The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (7 page)

She stared back into his eyes only inches from her own. He could see that he had not left her with any monosyllabic answer to give. She was silent. But there was no withdrawing from the question now. And now his body was willing her to say yes.

“Do you wish to try it?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said in a whisper.

He would not have been surprised by a refusal. She had been an impoverished gentlewoman just yesterday,
forced to earn her living as a governess, forced to suffer any insult or indignity her employers cared to subject her to—the last ones had accused her of lying over something. Today she had achieved the respectability of marriage with the prospect of a more than comfortable settlement for life after a mere few weeks spent in company with him. She might very easily have avoided the one aspect of marriage that he understood was generally distasteful to respectable women. He did not imagine that his bride was either a sensual or a passionate woman. Quite the opposite. But he had given her a clear choice—he wondered how many men gave such a choice to their brides on their wedding night—and she had whispered yes.

Well, then. So be it.

S
HE EXPECTED HIM
to kiss her. His mouth was only inches from her own. She could smell the brandy he had been drinking. If he had kissed her, she could have closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation created by his mouth against her own—she had found his kiss at church quite shockingly intimate even though his lips had not quite touched her own. If he had kissed her, she might have hidden behind her closed eyes and her feelings while the other thing happened.

She did not understand why she had said yes, except that she was weary of trying to sleep and failing to do so, and she had been strangely disturbed by the warmth of him on the bed beside her, and she knew that this was probably her one and only chance in life to experience the deepest intimacy of all. And because the mere smell of brandy was intoxicating her.

He did not kiss her. Or move his head away. He continued to half lean over her and look into her eyes. His own appeared quite black. His hair was tousled. The
hand that was not propping up his head touched her. She felt immediately as if she had been touched by a flaming torch even though it was only her shoulder he touched at first. His hand moved firmly downward to her breast, circled beneath it, lifted it. She thought she might well find it impossible to draw the next breath of air into her lungs. She felt horribly embarrassed. Her breasts were rather large—too large, she always thought.

And then her nipple was imprisoned between his thumb and the base of his forefinger and he squeezed them together almost as if he was unaware that it was there, causing her excruciating pain, though it was not like any other pain she had ever experienced. This was undoubtedly pain, but it shot off upward into her throat and across to her other breast and downward into her belly and along her inner thighs so that she ached and yearned all over. Her breath shuddered and jerked out of her, quite audibly.

She was alarmed. She wished she had said no. Was it too late now? But she was curious too. She wished he would kiss her. Was this not supposed to be romantic? Was it not supposed to be—love? She realized the absurdity of that youthful assumption even as she thought it. This was not love. But it was certainly—exciting. It was not supposed to be exciting. It was supposed to be love—a sweet and gentle thing. Somehow the buttons of her nightgown had come undone and he was repeating his actions on her other breast—her naked breast.

This time pain had her gasping for air.

But his hand had moved on downward beneath the low opening of her nightgown—and on down to the source of the ache the pain had created. She had parted her legs slightly and tilted her hips to allow his hand easier access before her brain understood just where his hand was and exactly what it was doing there. She felt engulfed by embarrassment and by unfamiliar and uncontrollable
achings and yearnings. His fingers were parting, probing, stroking. She could hear sounds of wetness. She would have died of embarrassment, she was sure, if such an act had been within the power of her will.

She opened her eyes suddenly. He was still propped on one elbow. He was still looking down at her. He took his hand away and lifted her nightgown—all the way to her waist. Well, this part she knew about, she thought. She knew what to expect. She drew a deep breath and held it. She was not sorry she had said yes. He was a stranger and she did not believe she could ever like him—partly because she did not believe she could ever know him—but he
was
her husband, and he was undeniably attractive. On the whole she was glad there was to be this experience in her life—just this one time.

“Let it out,” he told her. “You cannot possibly hold it long enough. Breathe normally.”

It was easy enough for him to say that, she thought as he moved over her and a considerable portion of his weight settled on top of her. She could feel his hands pushing beneath her, spreading over her buttocks, holding them firm. Her inner thighs were against the outside of his legs, pushed wide. He seemed to be all hard, unyielding muscle. She felt horribly defenseless. But he had given her the choice, and she had said yes. She would say it again if the choice were given her again. Curiosity and fear and excitement were a heady blend, she found.

At first it was enormously frightening. Apart from the conviction that there could not possibly be room, either in breadth or in depth, there was all the fear of being impaled, destroyed while she was pressed wide and was helpless to defend herself. Then there was the terrified certainty that indeed there was not enough room and that she was about to tear into unbearable pain. Then he was deep, deep inside and holding hard and still there,
and she knew with startled surprise that there was after all room and that she would survive—and that it felt unfamiliar and exciting and really rather good.

But she had been right to guess that knowing and experiencing were two quite different things. She could never have imagined the utter carnality of the sensation.

And then she discovered—during several minutes of shocked amazement—that in fact she had not known at all. Only about penetration. She had had no inkling of the fact that penetration was only the beginning. He pumped in and out of her with hard, smooth strokes until the ache his hands on her breasts had already created became raw pain—pain that was not really pain but for which there was no other more suitable word in her vocabulary. And certainly it was beyond bearing and growing more so with every inward stroke.

“Oh,” she said suddenly, alarmed and amazed as she pressed her hands to his buttocks in an attempt to hold him still and deep and as inner muscles she had still not consciously discovered clenched convulsively. “Oh.”

He answered her mute appeal instantly. He pressed hard into her tightness and held there. “My God,” he murmured against the side of her head. “My God!”

Something that she thought might well be death beckoned and she followed without a struggle. Whatever it was closed darkly about her and felt wonderful beyond belief. Nothingness. Total, blissful nothingness.

She was half aware of his moving again, faster and harder than before. She was half aware of a flood of heat deep inside as he sighed and held still again and relaxed his full weight down onto her. Death was not after all to be feared, she thought foolishly and very fuzzily. Death was the fulfillment of all that was most desirable.

She slept. She grumbled only very halfheartedly when the wonderful heat and weight that bore her down into
the mattress was lifted away from her and far lighter blankets covered her instead. Yes, she thought with the last thread of consciousness, there was a method vastly superior to counting sheep.

And love was not always sweet and gentle. And love was not always love.

T
HE ROAD HAD
dried sufficiently by the following morning to make travel possible. And the landlord at the inn where they had stayed the night had proved quite correct in his prediction. The sun shone from a sky that was dotted prettily but sparsely with fluffy white clouds. Fields and hedgerows looked washed clean in the morning air.

It was the perfect day for a homecoming.

The Marquess of Staunton gazed moodily and sightlessly out through the window on his side of the carriage.
Damn and blast
, he was thinking, verbalizing the words in his head with silent venom.

She had actually been blushing when she had joined him in the inn dining room for breakfast. She had looked like the stereotypical bride the morning after her wedding night. She had even been looking almost pretty—not that he had spent a great deal of time looking into her face. He had addressed himself to his breakfast without being in any way aware of what he ate beyond the fact that it was inordinately greasy.

What the devil had possessed him last night? He had felt not one glimmering of sexual interest in her from the moment of spying her in the shadows of the salon where she had waited to be interviewed to the moment during which she had started to talk about sheep and Wales and lumpy mattresses. Not one iota of a glimmering.

And yet he had consummated their union during the very first night of their marriage—and had done so with
great enthusiasm and more than usual satisfaction. He had fallen asleep almost immediately after lifting himself off her and had slept like the proverbial baby until dawn.

What if he had got her with child? It had been almost his first thought on waking up—
after
he had rejected the notion of waking her up and doing it again with her. A pregnancy would complicate matters considerably. Besides, children of his own body were the very last things he wanted. The very idea of impregnating a woman made him shudder. He had always been meticulous about choosing bedfellows who knew how to look after themselves—until last night.

He had the uneasy feeling this morning that he might have been at least partly deceived in his wife. True, she had been innocent and ignorant and awkward and virgin. She had also been a powder keg of passion just waiting to be ignited. And he had provided the spark. And had heedlessly spilled his seed in her.

She had proved him wrong in his conviction that he had nothing new to learn sexually except what it felt like to mount a virgin. Very wrong. He had known women come to sexual climax. It happened routinely with all his mistresses. But he had understood last night with humiliating clarity that women faked climax just as they faked delight in the whole process, knowing that for a conceited man it was important not only to receive pleasure in bed but also to believe that he gave it. Thus many women earned their daily bread—making their employers feel like devilishly virile and dashing and manly fellows.

Charity Earheart, Marchioness of Staunton, had taught him a lesson last night—quite unwittingly, of course. The shattering reality of her own untutored, totally spontaneous response to being bedded had exposed all the artificiality of all the other women he had ever
known. His wife had made him feel stupidly proud of his performance. She had made him want more—he had wanted it as soon as he awoke.

He was furious, the more so perhaps since he did not quite know on whom to concentrate his fury. On her? She had merely reacted to what he did to her. On himself? His lips thinned. Was he incapable of being alone with a woman—even such a woman as the one he had married—without making an idiot of himself?

“It is pretty countryside,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence.

“Yes, it is.” She had tried several times to initiate conversation. He had quelled each attempt with a curtness bordering on the morose. He had no wish to converse, especially on such intellectually stimulating topics as the prettiness of the countryside.

It would not happen again, he decided. They would have separate bedchambers at Enfield, of course, and would be expected to keep to them except for brief, discreet, and dutiful couplings. But the door between their rooms would remain firmly and permanently closed. He would not touch her again with a ten-foot pole.

“What is Enfield Park like?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Large,” he said. But such a brief answer crossed the borderline between moroseness and downright rudeness. She had done nothing wrong, after all, except to say yes last night. But he was the one who had asked the question. “The house is Palladian in style, massive, with wide lawns and flower beds and ancient trees all about it, sloping down at one side to a lake and up on the other side to woods and planned walks and artful prospects. There is a village, there are farms, some old ruins—” He shrugged again. “There are all the usual trappings of a large estate. It is extremely prosperous. Your husband is like to be a very wealthy man, my lady—far more wealthy than he already is—and quite
well able to keep you in comfort for the rest of your life.”

“Is your mother alive?” she asked. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“My mother died,” he said curtly, “soon after giving birth to her thirteenth child. There are five of us still living.” He did not want to talk about his mother or about her frequent pregnancies and almost as frequent stillbirths. The number thirteen did not even include the four miscarriages. Devil take it, but he hoped he had not impregnated his wife. “I have two brothers and two sisters.”

“Oh,” she said. He could see that her head was turned in his direction. He kept his eyes directed beyond the window. “Are they all still at home?”

“Not all,” he said. “But most, I believe.” Marianne wrote to him occasionally—she was the only one. She had married the Earl of Twynham six years ago. They had three children. Charles must be twenty now. Augusta would be eight—twenty years younger than he. There had been seventeen pregnancies in twenty years for his mother. He did not want to think of his mother.

“How happy you must be, then,” his wife said—he had almost forgotten that she shared the carriage with him, “to be coming home. How you must have been missing them.”

She set one hand on his arm and he turned his head sharply to look pointedly down at it and up into her eyes. “It is the first time in eight years, my lady,” he said, and he could hear the chill in his voice. “And my absence has been entirely voluntary. I come now only because the Duke of Withingsby is in failing health and has summoned me, doubtless so that he can assail my ears with a recounting of my shortcomings and a listing of my responsibilities. There are certain burdens attached to being the eldest of five living children and to being the heir to a dukedom and vast and prosperous estates.”