JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (36 page)

This morning, everything had seemed so simple and predictable. She had arisen and dressed to be married; she had gone to the church. Now, three hours later, she was married to the wrong man.

Fiercely struggling against her tears, she sat down on the settee and wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to block out the images, but it was no use. They paraded across her mind, tormenting her with vivid scenes of the mindlessly infatuated, besotted girl she had been… She saw herself looking up at Jordan in the garden at Rosemeade. "
I think you are as beautiful as Michelangelo's David
!" she had blurted. "
I love you."
And when he had made love to her, she had nearly
swooned
in his arms, and babbled to him about how strong and wise and nauseatingly wonderful he was!

"Dear God," Alex moaned aloud as another forgotten memory pranced across her mind: she had actually told Jordan—London's most infamous libertine—that
he
obviously wasn't well-acquainted with many women. No wonder he had grinned!

Hot tears of humiliation dripped from her eyes, but she brushed them angrily aside, refusing to cry one more time for that—that monster. She had already wept
buckets
of tears over him, she thought furiously.

Tony's words of a few weeks ago came back to hack at her lacerated emotions: "
Jordan married you because he pitied you, but he had neither the DESIRE nor the INTENT to live with you as his wife. He intended to pack you off to Devon when you returned from your wedding trip, and then he meant to continue where he left off with his mistress… He was with his mistress AFTER you were married to him… He told her your marriage was one of INconvenience
…"

There was a soft knock at the door, but Alexandra was so immersed in misery she didn't hear anything until Melanie had walked into the bedchamber and closed the door. "Alex?"

Startled, Alexandra turned her head and looked round. Melanie took one look at her friend's anguished, tear-streaked face, and rushed to her side.

"Dear God!" Melanie whispered in horror, kneeling in front of Alexandra and pulling out her handkerchief, almost babbling in her agitated alarm. "Why are you crying? Has he done something to you? Did he rage at you or—or strike you?"

Alexandra swallowed and looked at her, but she could not drag her voice past the lump of tears in her throat. Melanie's husband had been Jordan's closest friend, she knew, and now she wondered where Melanie's loyalties would lie. She shook her head and took the handkerchief from Melanie.

"Alex!" Melanie cried in mounting alarm. "Talk to me, please! I'm your friend, and I'll always be," she said, correctly interpreting the reason for Alexandra's wary expression. "You can't keep this bottled up inside you—you're as white as a ghost and you look ready to faint."

Alexandra had briefly confided to Melanie that she had been an utter blind fool about Jordan, but she had never mentioned his complete lack of feeling for her, and had also concealed her shame behind a facade of amused self-mockery. Now, however, it was there in all its naked, mute misery for Melanie to see, as Alexandra haltingly related all the humiliating details of her relationship with Hawk, leaving nothing out. Throughout the tale, Melanie frequently shook her head in sympathetic amusement at Alexandra's naive outpouring of her heart to Jordan, but she did not smile when Alexandra told her of Hawk's intention to pack her off to Devon.

Alexandra finished by relating Jordan's explanation for his disappearance, and when she was done Melanie patted her hand. "All that's in the past. What about the future—do you have any sort of plan?"

"Yes," Alexandra said with quiet force. "I want a divorce!"

"What?" Melanie gasped. "You can't be serious!"

Alexandra was deadly serious and said so.

"A divorce is unthinkable," Melanie said, dismissing that alternative in a few short sentences. "You would be an outcast, Alex. Even my husband, who gives me my head in nearly everything, would forbid me to be in your company. You'd be barred from decent society everywhere, shut off from everyone."

"That is still preferable to being married to him
and
shut away somewhere in Devon."

"Perhaps it seems so to you now, but in any case it doesn't matter how you feel. I'm quite certain your husband would have to agree to a divorce, and I can't imagine that he will. Even so, they must be very difficult to obtain, and you'd need grounds, as well as Hawk's consent."

"I was thinking about that when you came in, and it seems to me I already have grounds, and I may not need his consent at all. In the first place, I was coerced into this marriage by—by circumstances. Secondly, at our wedding, he vowed to love and honor me, but he had no intention of ever doing either—that surely must be grounds enough to get either an annulment or a divorce, with or without his consent. However, I don't see why he'll refuse his consent," Alexandra added with a flash of anger. "He never wished to marry me in the first place."

"Well," Melanie shot back, "that doesn't mean he'll like having everyone know you don't want
him
anymore."

"When he has time to consider the plan, he'll be bound to feel relieved to have me off his hands."

Melanie shook her head. "I'm not so certain he wants you off his hands. I saw the way he looked at Lord Anthony in church today—he did not look relieved, he looked furious!"

"He is ill-tempered by nature," Alexandra said with disgust, recalling their interview downstairs. "He has no reason whatsoever to be angry with Anthony or me."

"No reason!" Melanie repeated in disbelief. "Why, you were about to marry another man!"

"I can't see what difference that should make. As I just said, he didn't want to marry me in the first place."

"But that doesn't mean he'll want anyone
else
to marry you," Melanie wisely replied. "In any case it doesn't matter. A divorce is simply out of the question. There has to be some other solution. My husband returned from Scotland today," she said enthusiastically. "I shall ask John for advice. He is very wise." Her face fell. "Unfortunately, he also considers Hawk his closest friend, so his advice will be somewhat colored by that. However," she said with absolute finality, "a divorce is positively beyond considering. There must be an alternative."

She fell silent for several long moments, lost in her own thoughts, her forehead furrowed. "It's little wonder you fell like a rock for him," she said with a small, compassionate smile. "Dozens of the most sophisticated flirts in England tumbled head over heels for him," she continued thoughtfully. "But except for indulging in an occasional fling with one of them, he never showed any sign of reciprocating their feelings. Naturally, now that he is back, everyone will expect you to tumble straight into his arms—particularly because Society is, at this very moment, recollecting how blindly infatuated with him you were when you first came to town."

The realization that Melanie was perfectly correct made Alexandra feel quite violently ill. Leaning her head against the back of the sofa, she swallowed and closed her eyes in sublime misery. "I hadn't thought of that, but you're absolutely right."

"Of course I am," Melanie absently agreed. "On the other hand," she declared, her eyes beginning to shine, "wouldn't it be delightful if the opposite happens!"

"What do you mean?"

"The ideal solution to the entire problem is for
him
to fall in love with
you
. That would enable you to keep your pride
and
your husband."

"Melanie," Alexandra said dampingly. "First of all, I don't think anyone could make that man fall in love, because he doesn't have a heart. Secondly, even if he does have one, it's certainly immune to me. Thirdly…"

Laughing, Melanie caught Alexandra's arm, hauled her off the sofa and pulled her to the mirror. "That was
before
. Look into the mirror, Alex. The female looking back at you right now has London at her feet! Men are quarreling over you—"

Alexandra sighed, looking at Melanie in the mirror rather than her own image. "Only because I've become a sort of absurd, fashionable rage—like damping one's skirts. It's fashionable for the moment for men to fancy themselves in love with me."

"How delightful," said Melanie, more pleased than before. "Hawthorne is in for the shock of his life when he realizes it."

A brief flare of amusement stirred in Alexandra's eyes, then abruptly dimmed. "It doesn't matter."

"Oh, yes, it does!" Melanie laughed. "Only consider this: For the first time in his life, Hawthorne has competition—and for his own wife! Think how Society will relish the spectacle of England's most practiced libertine, trying without early success to seduce and subdue his own wife."

"There's another reason why it won't work," Alexandra said firmly.

"What is that?"

"I won't do it. Even if I could accomplish it, which I can't, I don't want to try."

"But why?" Melanie burst out. "Why ever not?"

"Because," Alexandra declared hotly, "I don't
like
him! I do not want him to love me, I do not even want him near me." So saying, she walked over to the bellpull to ring for tea.

"Nevertheless, it is still the only and best solution to this coil." Snatching up her gloves and reticule, Melanie pressed a kiss to Alexandra's forehead. "You're shocked and exhausted, you aren't thinking clearly. Leave everything to me.

She was halfway across the room when Alexandra realized that Melanie seemed to have a specific destination in mind and that she was in some haste to get there. "Where are you going, Mel?" she asked suspiciously.

"To see Roddy," Melanie said, turning in the doorway. "He can be depended upon to make certain Hawthorne is informed at the earliest possible moment that you are no longer the naive, unsophisticated country mouse he may think you are. Roddy will adore doing it," Melanie predicted cheerfully. "It's exactly the sort of rabble-rousing he most enjoys."

"Melanie, wait!" Alexandra burst out tiredly, but she did not particularly object to this part of Melanie's plan—not at this moment when exhaustion was beginning to overwhelm her. "Promise me you won't do anything else without telling me."

"Very well," Melanie said gaily and vanished with a wave.

Alexandra leaned her head back and closed her eyes as drowsiness began to overcome her.

The clock chiming the hour of ten, combined with the incessant arrivals of callers in the main hall downstairs, finally brought her fully awake. Leaning on an elbow, Alexandra blinked her eyes in the candlelit gloom of her bedchamber, surprised that she had somehow fallen asleep on the settee at what was normally considered a very early hour of the evening. She listened to the commotion downstairs, the constant opening and closing of the front door, and she sat up, groggily wondering why the entire
haute ton
seemed to be arriving on their doorstep… And then she remembered.

Hawk was back.

Evidently everyone thought he was here, and they were too eager to see him and speak to him to follow their own precepts of decorum, which would have required them at least to wait until tomorrow to call.

Hawk must have anticipated this, Alexandra decided irritably, as she got up and changed into a silk peignoir and climbed into bed. That was probably why he had chosen to spend the night at the duchess' house, leaving the rest of them here to try to deal with the furor of callers.

Her husband, she had no doubt, was blissfully in his bed, and enjoying a peaceful night.

«
^
»

A
lexandra was wrong
on both counts. Jordan was not in bed and he was
not
enjoying his evening.

Seated in the baroque drawing room at his grandmother's town house, with his legs negligently stretched out in front of him and a bland expression upon his face, he was with three friends who'd come to welcome him home, as well as Roddy Carstairs, who'd apparently come to regale him with "amusing" stories about Alexandra's escapades.

After listening to Carstairs' tales for nearly an hour, Jordan was not mildly exasperated, nor somewhat irritated, nor very annoyed. He was livid. While
he
had been lying awake at night, worrying that his adoring young wife would be out of her mind with grief,
she
had been setting London on its ear. While he rotted in prison, Alexandra had been carrying on a dozen widely publicized flirtations. While
he
lay in chains, "Alex" had evidently pursued victory in a race at Gresham Green, and fought a mock duel with Lord Mayberry while wearing tight-fitting men's breeches that reportedly so distracted her opponent that the famous swordsman lost the match. She had gallivanted about at fairs and participated in some sort of havey-cavey assignation with a vicar at Southeby, who Jordan could have sworn was at least seventy years old. And that was not the half of it!

If Carstairs were to be believed, Tony had apparently received six dozen offers for her hand; and her rejected suitors had taken first to arguing over her, then quarreling, and finally one of them, Marbly, had actually tried to abduct her; some young fop named Sevely had published a poem in praise of her charms called "Ode to Alex"; and old Dilbeck had named his new rose "Glorious Alex"…