A Christmas Promise (16 page)

“Ellie.” His voice was a groan. “I love you. It was only love that induced me to set you free. I thought I had nothing to offer you. But I was wrong. Nothing matters more than our love. And by now I would have had a great deal besides to offer you.”

“All I ever wanted,” she said softly, “was your heart. I never wanted riches or position. Especially not position.” Her voice was shaking. She fought tears—she could not go back upstairs with red eyes. “Go,” she said. “Please go. I should not have come down here with you after all. I must be alone for a few minutes.”

“Ellie,” he said.

“Please,” she said, and finally he turned abruptly and left the room.

She whirled around to face the desk and leaned her arms on it. She closed her eyes and drew a few steadying breaths. He did not seem to understand that everything had changed, that no matter how they might regret decisions they had made in the past two months, there was no going back now to change matters. She blamed him for coming. And for writing that love letter. And yet she did not want to blame him. She wanted to find excuses for him. But what did he want of her? A clandestine affair? Did he not understand that she was married and that her marriage vows were sacred and quite unbreakable? Did he not know her after all?

She turned from the desk finally, her gaze on the floor. If she did not go back upstairs soon, someone was going to come looking for her. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her head.

Her husband was standing in the open doorway, one shoulder leaning against the door frame, his arms folded across his chest. She stood still and looked at him as he stepped inside and shut the door firmly behind him.

He stood and looked at her for a long while. She was pale, but she was not crying. And she was looking steadily back at him. Of course, she would scorn to lower her eyes.

“Well, my lady,” he said at last.

“I assume you heard all,” she said. “Eavesdroppers rarely hear good about themselves.”

“I did not even suspect that there might be need to eavesdrop,” he said. “He is your cousin. I followed you down to help him choose a book, since I am more familiar with the library than you. But he did not need one, did he? He left here empty-handed.”

“No,” she said, “he did not need a book. But you have nothing to accuse me of, my lord. If you heard all, you will know that.”

“It seems,” he said, “that I was not the only one to give up a previous attachment to make this marriage.”

“No,” she said.

“And it seems,” he said, “that you married me only because you thought your cousin would not have you and because your father was dying and you wished to please him.”

“Yes.”

“Not because you wanted to be a countess and a member of the
ton?
”

She looked at him scornfully. “You would naturally assume that,” she said. “There would seem to you to be no higher pinnacle to which a woman could aspire. I prefer real people, my lord. I prefer people who work to achieve what they want to those who live off the work of others and then squander their wealth on riotous and irresponsible living.”

“As I did,” he said, “to get myself so deeply into debt.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He looked at her broodingly. “Things are not always what they seem to be. I could enlighten you, but frankly I have no wish to do so at the moment.”

You know I do not
, she had said when her cousin had asked her if she loved her husband. Those words and the scornful tone in which she had spoken them were echoing in his head. And he felt wounded by them. Foolishly hurt. He had known that. There had been no pretense of either love or affection on either side. Quite the contrary. And yet her words had hurt him. Perhaps because they had been spoken to someone else? Because someone else now knew the emptiness of their marriage?

All I ever wanted was your heart
, she had told her cousin, her voice soft and wistful. Those words compounded the hurt. She loved Wilfred Ellis but had firmly spurned his advances. Her behavior had been commendable. Perhaps he wished it had not been. He had no cause for fury and yet he needed the outlet of anger.

“Don’t just look at me like that,” she said, raising her chin. “Either say something or let me go.”

“It seems we are not on an equal footing after all,” he said. “We did not have equally base reasons for marrying.”

She said nothing.

“And I suppose,” he said, “that this family gathering, this merry Christmas that you are all enjoying so greatly, was deliberately planned to show me how very little you need me.”

“You told me I might invite guests of my own,” she said.

“You really do not have any great need for me, do you?” he said. “Your father left you almost half his fortune, and you have family members who would be only too happy to take you in.”

“If you think to rid yourself of me so easily, my lord,” she said, “you will be sadly disappointed. You are under no compulsion to live with me, I suppose, since you have several homes. But you are obliged to house and to provide for me. I will not leave you. Do not expect it of me or hope for it. According to the morality of my class, the marriage vow is taken for life.”

“Apparently Mr. Wilfred Ellis does not know that,” he said.

“I cannot answer for Wilfred,” she said. “Only for myself. I am the troublesome little something that came along with what you really wanted when you married me. The money can be quickly and easily spent. I do not doubt that you will be as penniless and as hopelessly in debt after one year as you were two months ago. But there will still be me, my lord. You must accustom yourself to the fact.”

“I intend to,” he said. “We had better go back upstairs to the drawing room before all our guests wonder what has befallen us.”

“Oh,” she said, “doubtless they will think that we have stolen a few minutes to be together. I would not worry about our reputations, my lord. We are newlyweds, after all.” Her voice was bitingly sarcastic.

“And so we are,” he said, walking toward her. “It would be a pity to disappoint them, would it not? They should be able to look at you when you return and see all their happy suspicions confirmed. You should have a just-kissed look.”

He stopped when he was close to her, set a hand behind her neck, and lowered his mouth to hers. She stood like a marble statue, though he persisted for a while, moving parted lips over hers, trying to soften them and force some response. Her eyes, he saw when he opened his, were not closed.

“You will live with me,” he said, raising his head, “as long as I do not touch you? Is that the way it is? As it was with your father?
Don’t touch me? Don’t hug me?
”

“My father was in pain,” she said. “It hurt him to be touched. But I have no right to refuse your touch. I made no objection, my lord.”

He laughed. “Beyond schooling every muscle to rigidity,” he said. “You are my wife, as you have just been at pains to remind me. Much as we both may wish that it were not so, reluctant as we both may be to continue what we both freely started, it is so. And by God, you will be my wife, my lady, from this day on. Expect me tonight in your chamber and every night henceforth.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said.

She had a way of being totally submissive and yet of sounding and looking so thoroughly aloof that she seemed like an impregnable fortress. He might have her body, she told him beyond the medium of words, but she would not allow him to touch any other part of her being. Her heart and her soul belonged to her and he would never be permitted a glimpse into either.

He felt chilled, and he wanted suddenly to get back upstairs, where there were people and gaiety and the beginnings of Christmas. Where there was the illusion of warmth and family and even love.
Her
family.

He made her a formal bow and extended an arm to her. “Shall we rejoin our guests?”

“If you wish, my lord.” She set her arm lightly on his. “And if you have changed your mind about giving me that just-kissed look.”

“I shall leave that for later, in the privacy of our own apartments,” he said, his voice as cold as her own.

And he realized for the first time consciously what had been happening to him in the last few days and even weeks. He had wanted to make something of their marriage, he had decided, because it had seemed the sensible thing to do in light of the fact that he was honor bound to spend a year with her. And yet inclination had had as much to do with his decision as good sense. He had wanted her, had begun to find her attractive. And not just physically. He had seen, especially since her family’s arrival, that she was capable of warmth and laughter and spontaneity.

Well, so much for good sense and inclination. She had married him because her father wanted it and because the man she loved had refused to marry her. She hated the aristocracy in general and despised him in particular.

And the warmth and magic of Christmas, which perhaps he had come almost to believe in that day, were all illusion. It was no longer Christmas that was decorating his house but merely plants that would have to be taken down and somehow disposed of in a few days’ time. And what were they doing anyway, celebrating Christmas with her father dead less than two months? Should they not still be in deepest mourning? He and she and her whole family?

They were singing again inside the drawing room, he could hear. Or some of them were. There were also voices talking and laughing. All the signs of high spirits that he had thought until half an hour before that he might perhaps after all enter into. But they were from a different world, her people. A world that was closed to him because of his background and upbringing. And because he had taken one of its members as his wife and destroyed her chances of happiness in so doing. Or had she destroyed his? He could not be sure which. Perhaps both.

He opened the door of the drawing room and stood aside to allow his wife to precede him inside.

S
HE WARMED HER HANDS
before the fire and stared into the flames and felt like crying. Not that she would cry, of course. She could not do so. She had been unable to cry since before Papa died. And she would not cry anyway when he would be coming into her room at any moment.

Christmas was going to escape her this year, she thought. Oh, it had seemed all day as if it was to be there with all the joy and wonder and magic that it usually offered. But it was not to be so. The decorations had failed to warm her heart on her return to the drawing room from the library, and the Christmas carols had failed to make her remember Bethlehem and a stable and a child and the meaning of it all. She had suddenly, with a great stabbing of grief, missed her father—and wished that he had not made her promise to enjoy Christmas for him. How could one force oneself to enjoy Christmas?

Her family’s teasing had failed to amuse her. Uncle Sam had wanted to know, in a voice that had drawn the attention of everyone in the room, where they had been, and the witticisms had flown from Uncle Sam to Uncle Ben to Uncle Harry, and Aunt Eunice and Aunt Irene had advised the two of them to take no notice, and Aunt Ruth and Muriel and Susan had blushed. And then Tom had noticed where she was standing and pointed out the fact to her husband, laughing.

So he had been forced to join her beneath the kissing bough and set his hands on her shoulders and kiss her on the lips, while the teasing and affectionate jokes had resumed and Aunt Ruth had blessed her soul.

Eleanor shivered. There was to be no happy Christmas after all. And yet she had promised Papa.

Quite by accident she had met Wilfred’s eyes across the room when the kiss was over. He had not even been disguising the look of desperate unhappiness on his face.

And now her husband was coming to her, she thought, shivering again. Because his pride had been hurt. Because he had realized that she had never wanted his precious title and was not groveling at his feet with gratitude. Because he felt the need to make her his possession and destroy her own pride.

But she did not want it like this. She had been fooling herself since their arrival in the country. Not imagining that he loved her or even felt any real affection for her—no, definitely nothing as fanciful as that. But hoping perhaps that there could be peace, respect, even a mild friendship between them. But that hope was all destroyed now because he had found out about her feelings for Wilfred.

Wilfred! But she could not spare thoughts for him now. She would not. She had married someone else and there was only her marriage now. There was no point in pining for a love that could never flourish again.

And then he was in her room, without even the courtesy of a knock. She turned from the fire to look at him. He was wearing only a nightshirt. He looked grim. Not as if he were coming into his wife’s room to make love to her.

She should fight him again, she thought as he crossed the room to her. But she did not feel like fighting. She had done so on her wedding night only because she had been terrified. She was not terrified now. Only very depressed because she did not want it this way. Not in coldness and anger. She pushed a stray lock of hair back over her shoulder.

Say something
, she begged as his hands reached out to undo the buttons of her nightgown. But her plea came from so deep inside herself that it did not even reach her eyes, into which he was looking.
Kiss me. Let there at least be some pretense of tenderness.
But he said nothing and she stood still and impassive as he pushed the nightgown off her shoulders and it fell all the way to the floor.

He stood and watched her, waiting perhaps for her to do what she had done on their wedding night. Perhaps he expected her to undress him. She stood still, making no attempt to cover herself with her hands or to move closer to him so that he would not see her.

“Lie down,” he said, and she turned to the bed and did as she was told.

She stared up at him as he pulled his nightshirt over his head and dropped it to the floor.
Please
, she begged him.
Oh, please, not like this.
But what did she want? Warm words? From him? Tenderness? Why should there be tenderness between them?
But please
, she begged nevertheless as she stared impassively up.