“I hope to. We mean to try.”
Geoffrey nodded, unrefined emotion racing through him on this night made to rub a man raw. He drew in a deep breath, and pushed it out in a rush, almost a laugh. “So perhaps you’ll finally move out of the house I require?”
She softly batted his arm, and smiled with him.
“I need time to clear my head,” he declared suddenly. “It has been…well, quite a night.” He glanced back toward the open doorway, his brow wrinkled. “Will you bring Alessandra home, and soon?”
She nodded her head graciously. “Shall I tell her you will speak to her there?”
“Yes. Thank you, Mama.”
As he rode home, the gentle swaying of the carriage and the clatter of the wheels over the cobblestones quieted his mind into some semblance of order.
So. The subject of Jacqueline was dead and in its coffin. And he was nothing but glad of it.
But what of the rest of the evening?
There had been the incredulous scene of his parents laughing, chatting, dancing...a miracle, to his mind. One confirmed by Mama not ten minutes ago. Then there had been Lady Warring, spewing at him her thoughts about possible future suitors for Alessandra. His wife, dancing with others. Too, those scenes of Lessie with Von Brauer, holding his hands in the gardens, out there almost beyond the lights. And overshadowing them all, his uncharacteristic, muddied, enraged response to each and every incident.
Why had he been upset by Lessie gazing so earnestly up at Von Brauer, her petite form standing in the man’s moon shadow? Just to rethink on it was to make a growl begin anew in the back of his throat. Why did the thought of returning to the Sapphire Room, reassuming the cousinly role he had been playing for weeks, suddenly seem so distasteful, so unbearably artificial? Why did a pair of blue eyes, a softly spoken word, a face gentled by slumber—why did these things superimpose themselves over every other thought he’d had for weeks?
That is, when he wasn’t being a whiny, self-satisfied, self-duping blackguard of a fool.
Inside the carriage, Geoffrey knew what he had to do, tonight and never waiting even a half day more.
“You said you were going out, and not to the Bremcott ball,” Geoffrey greeted Elias and Emmeline as he entered New Garden House. “But I find you both here in the front parlor.”
They looked up with guilty faces from the chessboard between them, and each cried, “You are home early!”
“Not particularly.” The dryness of his tone seemed to do something to Elias, who squirmed in his chair.
“Where is Alessandra?” Emmeline fretted.
“Mama is bringing her home.”
“Your mother?” Emmeline sounded worried. “Is all well?”
Before he could reply, a red-faced Elias butted in. “Geoffrey, there’s nothing for it but to tell you that I’ve been an ill-behaved fellow. I have interfered in your marriage.” Instead of looking guilty, he appeared relieved to have blurted out his secret.
Geoffrey lifted a sandy brow. “Von Brauer?”
Elias looked astounded. “Exactly. We,” he pointed between Emmeline and himself, “are aware Alessandra listens to him. We had him come to the house and asked if he would, please…uh, we asked him to sing your praises. To advise her to try to, well, to stay married to you.”
“That truly is interference between Lessie and myself.”
At first Elias’s face went redder, but then his eyes narrowed with his more usual cunning. “So she’s ‘Lessie’ now, is she?”
Geoffrey cocked his head a little to one side, saying nothing, smiling just a little. Elias began to look concerned again.
He stopped directly before them, and said, “When Alessandra returns, will you be so kind as to tell her to come up to the Sapphire Room?” He started to go, but then turned and added, “At one time or another, we will discuss what actions you will never take regarding myself or my wife, ever again, in the future. Both of you.”
Although it was just possible there was a touch of amusement in his tone, Emmeline and Elias nodded up at him, reluctantly and mutely.
They both stared after him as he mounted the stairs and turned to go down the corridor to the room he shared with Alessandra. Then they looked at each other, both rather pale.
“I hope we didn’t just kill this marriage,” Elias half-whispered in a worried voice.
Emmeline, her eyes also full of that very concern, said, “And I hope he won’t kill us.”
***
“Alessandra!” Emmeline called to her, not ten minutes later. She came from the chair she had moved into the hall before the front door, rising in a high state of agitation to meet her sister.
Alessandra looked up from where she had been twisting a poor, innocent kerchief into knots. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Emmeline.
Geoffrey’s parents came in behind Alessandra. Cloch stood silently by, perhaps pondering how to announce callers who had already announced their own presence.
“Thank you for bringing Lessie home,” Emmeline said to Lord and Lady Chenmarth. “Are your horses waiting? We would not keep you unduly,” she suggested with barely a hint of impoliteness.
“I’m not going anywhere, Emmeline Hamilton. I wish to speak with my son,” Lady Chenmarth said firmly.
Emmeline looked directly at Alessandra. “Geoffrey asked that you come at once up to the Sapphire Room,” she said. “Cloch could carry down a note from him, saying if Geoffrey is receiving.” Only then did she look to her aunt, perhaps to see if her small defiance was going to be allowed to stand.
Alessandra looked toward the stairs, and could not keep one tear from sliding down her cheek. She had no idea what to expect should she step into the Sapphire Room. And this just after the baron had made her see what she had tried so hard not to see. What did it mean now, this newly realized love she held for her reluctant husband? Did Geoffrey’s inadvertent acts of gentleness, even of attraction, mean anything? Had he not always turned away in the end? Was she just a wishful fool longing for someone already lost to her?
“Lessie? Are you well?” Emmeline cried, her hand to her mouth as she took in the emotions that raced across her sister's face.
“Yes,” Alessandra said curtly. She was well enough, and she would remain so, she decided resolutely. Geoffrey wanted to see her, and she would bid him speak, once and for all, for good or for ill. If it was all over, tonight she would move back to her old room, and her father could yell and rant until he was blue, but nothing would avail her to stay a night longer where she was not wanted.
“Lessie, I fear I have made a grievous error. I spoke with Von Brauer—” Emmeline began.
“Tomorrow, Emmeline,” Alessandra said in a voice made harsh by determination. “You may explain it to me tomorrow.”
Emmeline and Geoffrey’s parents looked at one another, equally rocked by the grim resolution they heard in Alessandra’s voice.
“We need some tea, I think,” Lady Chenmarth decided, crossing the room to take Emmeline's arm in hers. “Come,” she said in a quiet but inarguable tone, “let us leave them to come to terms. There is naught we can do for them now.”
Lord Chenmarth followed the ladies in the direction of the kitchens, plainly disconcerted.
Alessandra moved up the stairs, her white skirts trailing behind her like the tail of a comet, her head held high, her mouth set in grim determination. She had neglected to light herself a candle, but her anger carried her along on feet that knew the way. If this were the final trip to the Sapphire Room, a room she had come to know well and which she felt she could only forevermore loathe, then she would enter it with head high.
She came down the hallway, stopping before the closed door to the room, where she took a fortifying breath before she reached for the door latch.
Just as her hand touched the handle, a pair of hands came out of the darkness, lightly encircling her waist. She pivoted quickly, the breath of air becoming a gasp, and then a pair of lips met hers.
For an instant she was frightened, but just as swiftly she knew it was Geoffrey who was holding her, pressing his mouth to hers. She allowed him to kiss her, until it was no longer an allowance but an aching question where her mouth met his.
He pulled back at last, but only to open the door and pull her into the room after him, where some light let her see when his mouth as it came for hers again.
After several hard thuds of her beating heart, after she tasted hunger and desire and things she could not name on his lips, he started to pull away, and she found her hands at his coat collar, and then around his neck. She knew she was losing her anger, no, more than that, she was losing her head; she wanted him to not pull away, to kiss her again. Oh, she was mad, mad to allow him to do this, all the while with too little idea what it all meant.
At last she turned her mouth away, just a half inch, but he allowed the separation of their mouths if not their lengths.
“It was unfair of me to come out of the dark like that, but I wanted to know.”
“Know?”
“What your unplanned reaction would be.”
One part of her cried out to go on kissing him, to give herself to him under any circumstances, but another part still smarted from the many stings of being uncherished.
“You kissed me back.” His words did not sound like an accusation; in fact, they sounded almost triumphant, jubilant. Oh, do not let this be but cruel teasing…
With a glitter in his eyes picked out by the fire on the grate, his mouth came down on hers again. He kissed her long and hard, demandingly. She could do nothing but respond, kissing him back, her hands in his hair, touching his face, marveling at the feel of him, there, kissing her, holding her. It was the sweetest torture she had ever known, and it was quietly breaking her heart.
Finally, he raised his head, an almost drunken look on his face. He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water, and he grinned at her, and she felt her poor, battered heart turn over yet again, for it was that special smile of his. “What is happening?” she asked desperately.
He moved to set her in a chair before the nearest fireplace, and went down to one knee in front of her. “Alessandra,” he said, then smiled softly, and amended in a low voice, “Lessie.”
She thought she was going to cry, but she had to listen to him, had to concentrate on his words. There was something...encouraging...in the way he said her name; it had almost sounded like a caress.
“Lessie, I have been the world’s biggest fool.”
She shook her head, completely at sea as to what was happening, though a note, strong and clear and hopeful, seemed to be growing inside her head, ringing through her brain.
“Whatever you’ve ever heard or thought, I don’t care tuppence for anyone, not one woman in this world other than you. Only you. I want you to know that. I have been a fool, letting circumstances tell me how to behave, keeping me blind to the refinement, the nobility, of your person.” He ducked his chin down against his chest. “I’ve been hiding from my own truth, and hiding it from you, and I will not blame you if you’ve had enough of my foolishness. But I hope, I truly hope, to start anew with you. My lady, is that in any way possible?”
Alessandra’s gaze flew to his face. “You…?”
He raised his eyes, and she could see it took courage to do it. “Love you? Yes.”
“How could you possibly?” she whispered.
He laid his head in her lap, his shoulders slumped in agonized laughter, a hurting mirth aimed at himself. After a moment he raised it again, eyes crinkled in worry. “How could I not? I know the lateness of my understanding does not argue well for me, but I’ve come to know I was falling in love with you the minute those blue eyes looked down the aisle of the church at me. Now the only doubt I have is whether you think you could ever fall in love with me?” he asked, hope in every syllable, his hands gathering up hers.
“I…,” she faltered. Could he say such things if he didn’t mean them? How many times had she thought she had seen some sign of regard from him, only to be crushed and hurt anew each time? Or had those moments been what he would now have her think they had been? Had he been quietly, secretly falling in love with her? Had he reprimanded her at the ball because he did not like to see her in another man’s arms? Had he dashed off to that alcove with Jacqueline in order to hurt her in turn? And what the Baron von Brauer had said...the baron had told her she loved her husband, a statement she’d been unable to deny once it was uttered aloud. Was there any possible way Geoffrey could love her as well? Was there any possible way her secret, unspoken dream could be coming true?
Now was the time to find out.
She spoke quickly, before her courage could fail her. “I must be keener than my husband. I have been falling in love with you all along.”
He went silent, then gave a quick burst of a laugh, and leaned his forehead to hers. “Then you were quite wrong not to let me know. Both of us were terribly wrong. What a perfect pair of noddies we are,” he teased her softly, his eyes dancing as his hands tightened on hers. “Lady Huntingsley,” he said formally, his chin rising high, “would you do me the honor of being my wife?”
What if she were wrong? What if he was only settling for second best? But why should he be? They’d had an agreement to go their own ways, from before they even wed; there was no reason he must keep her as his bride, no reason at all.
Except one.
She looked up with eyes at last filled with a wordless elation sprung from a newborn certainty. “Yes,” she whispered, and then his lips were crushing hers, and she was free to hold him, without any reservations.
He pulled them both to their feet, and kissed her over and over again, her pins falling from her long dark hair, allowing the length of it to tumble down her back and become entwined in their embraces. He murmured endearments and half-worded explanations, and he told her she was never, ever to meet with the Baron von Brauer again. She laughed joyously, knowing regardless that one day she must thank the baron for helping her to arrive at this moment.
His arms disentangled from about her, and he murmured in a low voice, “You will have to excuse me now.”
“Excuse you?” she repeated, stunned.
“It is late. And I am not the least tired. I must find my bed for the night.” When she looked at him with wide eyes, he explained in a tight voice, “I am not sleeping beside you tonight, not with a damn pillow between us, so I really must leave before—”
She turned away, but only to approach the bed, pull back the counterpane, and throw one of the pillows to the floor. She raised her eyes, absolutely sure they were full of invitation.
He had frozen in place, his eyes glued to her. “You…you believe we ought to put that sagging mattress to its proper use?”
“A wife should never argue with her husband,” she said demurely, crossing back to his side and letting her arms wrap around his neck once more, rejoicing when she heard his deep-chested laughter.
***
“James!” Emmeline cried as she sat back from playing the pianoforte. She leaped up from among her family members to fly across the room to her husband. “What are you doing here? I’m so happy you’ve come!”
“My duty with the consulate is completed, so I returned home early, only to find my wife has been gone this month past,” he said, no less cheery for all the traveling he had done this day and more to arrive in London. He gave her a big hug in return, and kissed her soundly on the mouth, despite the fact there were several witnesses in the room, and her softly rounded belly between them.