Lord of Regrets (15 page)

“She met him on the street.” Natasha’s mother shook her head, one mother to another, complaining. At that familiar tone, for the first time in the hours that she had known to expect her parents, Natasha had the urge to laugh. It was such a commonplace, gossipy way of discussing her affairs.

“I did not,” she protested, as she had denied many things her parents said of her to their friends in her youth. She thought she sounded like Leona and quickly pursed her lips still.

Natasha sighed with relief when the footman stepped in, announcing dinner. Marcus jumped to his feet with alacrity.

Dinner, in fact, passed peacefully. The food was delicious, and though Natasha knew it was not the cuisine her parents preferred, they made no sound or suggestion of complaint. The relative quiet gave Natasha time to think. Time to feel. Five years had wrought its damage in far more ways than even her parent’s betrayal. Distance and hardship had taught her indifference.

…

When the women left the room, Polinoff eased his chair an inch back from the table and raised his hands behind his head, studying Marcus. The man’s heavy-lidded, Slavic gaze was disconcerting, and Marcus moved to the sideboard where the servants had set out a selection of spirits.

“Port?” he asked. “Or do you prefer sherry?”

“Port,” Polinoff said.

The maroon liquid sloshed in the crystal decanter as he lifted it. Then it flowed through air, sliding, hissing, releasing its scent till it hit the rounded bottom of the crystal glasses. He swiveled, handed his new father-in-law a glass. The man accepted it, angled his head back, and fixed Marcus with that deep, hooded stare.

“I should have called you out.” Marcus froze at the words, his hand clenching around the smooth glass ball at the stem of his own glass. Then his fingers eased and he began to cross the room back to his chair.

“My only daughter.” Polinoff shook his head. “I have regretted it every day. But I had no wish to move to the Americas.”

“Yes, you should have called me out.” Marcus heard the words leaving his mouth, knew he was walking in dangerous territory. “You should have forced me at sword point to marry her the minute you knew.”

“You, Templeton,” Polinoff boomed, standing, port sloshing out of his glass as he slammed it on to the table, “should not have made a whore of my innocent daughter!”

…

Natasha winced at her father’s shouted words, muted by walls and space but still there, so bold, so lurid in the Templetons’ elegant sitting room. After retiring from the table, while Kitty and her mother had conversed blandly on who was in London and who was not, Natasha had enjoyed a perverse satisfaction at the uncomfortable silence in which the women had left the men in the dining room. However, clearly that silence had been broken, and from the gasps and sniffs in the sitting room, she knew that the polite veneer in this room was to be cracked as well. She looked to her mother, and her mother met her gaze with one that managed to be sad and disdainful all at once.

“She is respectably married now,” Kitty said, her tone light. Artfully light, Natasha knew.

“Perhaps no shame now, married. Perhaps no shame if she had been paramour to a king, to a royal duke.” Her mother’s voice dipped down in condemnation. It was strange to hear those words, the root of the philosophy that had propelled Natasha to leave her parents for Marcus. “But to him as he was then, nothing.”

Kitty’s sharp inhalation drew Natasha’s gaze, and she found her mother-in-law flushed, her cheeks spotted with pink, her dark eyes sharp and narrow.

“My son is a viscount. Heir to an earldom. Moreover he is a Templeton, an old and honorable family––”

Natasha’s mother laughed, her own small, sallow face full of color.

“As I understand it, he shall inherit his title and lands with barely the funds to pay for it all.”

The sudden desire to defend Marcus to her mother kept Natasha mute with indecision. No one here was defending her, only defending Marcus.

Thudding footsteps on the stairs, two sets of them, indicated that the men were joining them. But her father’s appearance was one of furious emotion. He nearly dragged her mother out of the chair.

“We leave here.” He pinned Natasha with his eyes. “You. Daughter. You will come visit us and bring the child, but I will not stand under this man’s roof a moment more.”

“Prince Polinoff,” Kitty said, but by then Natasha’s father, with her mother in hand, was at the landing, rearing back to avoid hitting Marcus, who moved to let him pass. Her parents were not quiet in their descent.

Agitated, Natasha bunched the fabric of her dress in her fists. Through the rising haze of her own emotions, she noted that her husband’s cheeks were ruddy with color, his usually polished, sophisticated exterior ruffled. He approached her as if they were the only two in the room, his eyes dark and hot.

“What did you say to him?” Natasha asked, as if she hadn’t heard her father’s shouted words.

Footsteps on the marble floor below echoed in the hall beyond the open door.

“I said that I love you, and I won’t apologize to anyone for that, not even your father.”

The front door opened and shut, and a waft of cool air shuddered through the house. But still Marcus’s words hovered, charging the air between them. It was a challenge to her, Natasha understood. He would not apologize to
her
.

“Well, then,” Kitty said softly, “I think the evening went rather well. I believe I shall retire now.”

For a brief moment, the room felt deflated in Kitty’s absence, as if all that had been needed to break the tension was that one tiny shift. Then the weight of the evening pressed back down on Natasha. Frayed and tattered, she stood, her hands fisted, in the middle of the room. She wanted to throw herself on the settee and sob. She wanted to throw herself at Marcus and make him feel the pain and humiliation she felt. And the darker, deeper despair that she didn’t even know how to name.

“I hate you, Marcus,” she said instead.

Chapter Nineteen

I hate you, Marcus.
Her words still echoed in the room. She knew Marcus had heard her, but instead of flinching, instead of moving away, he stepped closer. He wrapped his arms around her and held her there in the warmth of his embrace.

“Your father should have challenged me, killed me even,” Marcus whispered, his mouth pressed against her hair. “If any man treated Leona as I have treated you…”

She didn’t move, yet inside her, everything was trembling. Or perhaps outside, too, because he held her tighter, and she felt her teeth chattering as if she were frozen through.

“I loved you then, Natasha, and I love you now.”

But I hate you,
she thought, the words tiny, weak, and false inside her mind. She simply wanted him to stop, to take back his own insistent declaration.

Suddenly, she was exhausted, bone tired, and she lifted her gaze to Marcus.

“I’d like to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

“You have nothing to fear,” he said as he shook his head, denied her request. But she saw what was in his eyes, the echo of his declaration not five minutes earlier. He loved her.

He
loved
her.

She shivered. Took a deep breath. And then nodded.

Even in his bed, she remained in the firm circle of his arms. Despite her exhaustion, restless thoughts plagued her. And at some point, the warmth of his touch became the warmth of dreams.

When the morning came, it seemed an impossibility, unreal in its normalcy. She stumbled into her room and, as she had the last three days, performed her morning ablutions without ringing for the maid. She eschewed her new morning dress for one of her older ones of simpler construction.

After her first stop at the nursery, where she learned Mary had taken Leona out for a stroll in the square’s park, she took herself downstairs. The breakfast room was empty, but one of the maids––there were so many Natasha hadn’t yet gathered all their names––was quick to ask her wishes. A moment later, Kitty entered.

The older woman looked tired, pale, as if the night before had worn on her as well, and a twinge of something like guilt plucked at Natasha’s stomach. She reached to ring the bellpull, but Kitty held up her hand.

“I’ve already breakfasted. I simply wished to speak with you.”

“I apologize for last night,” Natasha said before she knew she would say anything. “This situation is not your fault.”

Kitty laughed, an edge to the sound, as she lowered herself into a chair. “It could hardly be my fault unless we begin to invoke the sins of the father…or the mother. No, it was too much to assume that good breeding would carry the day. It is clear to me that foreigners have all too different a sense of what is polite.”

“Last night was an extraordinary circumstance, Lady Templeton.”

“Was it not? If it had been someone else’s scandal, I would have been quite diverted. As it is, it is ours. All of ours.” The maid entered, carrying a tray of toast and chocolate. When she had left once more, Kitty fixed Natasha with a stone-hard stare. “And you are a Templeton now.”

It was as if, by saying that name, Kitty invoked something greater than Natasha.

She shivered, reaching for the warming cup of chocolate.

“You are not a Polinoff anymore,” Kitty continued, and the very English way the woman said her father’s name created distance, made it foreign even to Natasha. A sudden yearning opened up inside her, gaping and raw, needy.

“I shall always be––”

“Keep your chin up, girl,” Kitty interrupted. “You
are
a Templeton, just as I became when I married Marcus’s father.”

There was nothing to say to that. As Natasha barely knew where she began and ended these days, she could hardly argue against what was simply fact. In truth, she was grateful to Kitty, who despite her prejudices and snide remarks, had been a stoic force of stability since Natasha had arrived in London.

“In any event,” Kitty said, clapping her hands together in a gesture that was fast becoming familiar to Natasha, “there is much to do today.”

The days passed quickly and smoothly. Kitty was unfailingly polite and helpful, though she always kept an amused detachment toward Natasha. Under her direction, Natasha engaged a lady’s maid and conducted the interviews for a governess for Leona. On Friday, with more of Mrs. Burgh’s dresses hanging in that large wardrobe, Kitty insisted on taking Natasha with her on a round of afternoon calls. There was Lady Sloane, who was of an age with Kitty and clearly of a mind. The two had been neighbors in their youth, had come out together the same Season, and had remained friends ever since. She and all the other women Natasha met were curious but polite, accepting what was told to them, which were the barest facts––Leona never mentioned. On Saturday, when they went shopping in Pall Mall, and on the first Sunday, when the family went to St. George’s for services, the introductions made were few and brief. It was easy. Almost too easy, and Kitty expressed cautious optimism that it would remain that way.

Natasha took Leona to meet her grandparents. It was strange to enter her childhood home, with its rooms that were at once so familiar and strange. It was so small, too. Small and dark, and it was hard to imagine that so much of her life had been spent airless and trapped within its walls. No wonder she had sought something else, had let her imagination and fantasies have free rein. No wonder Marcus’s arms had been so appealing.

Despite the disparaging, lamenting remarks over Leona’s parentage, her grandparents were pleased to meet her. And pleased to hear the girl speak Russian and French, though her accent was not up to snuff. Leona, at turns, played shy and bold. She loved most especially the knickknacks gathered about the rooms, the colorful nesting dolls and painted plates. And in a quiet moment after tea, when Leona and Natasha’s father had disappeared from the sitting room, Natasha learned that her parents had been shamed greatly by her choice, that their friends had looked down on them, and though none stopped receiving them, they were the object of pity and scorn.

“I’m sorry you suffered,” she told her mother, and she was. She hadn’t thought beyond her own needs, her own desires. Even as she had felt herself expanded in her love for Marcus, she had been as selfish as well.

“When Lord Templeton came to us, after you left him,” her mother said, holding Natasha’s hand in her own, “your father was still so angry. And we didn’t know what had become of you.”

“Did you ever try to find out?” Natasha thought of the men Marcus had said he’d hired to scour the countryside for her. Her parents would not have had the funds for such a search.

“Who would we have asked?”

Natasha laughed. It was true. The fault for these last five years was her own.

In the wake of that visit, a resigned peace fell over Natasha. She had the sense that things were slightly amiss, but yet, everything seemed to be falling into its place, including her. A governess and nanny were hired; Mary was sent back to Little Parrington. That moment, too, was one that held a symbolic import. Natasha watched the girl leave with the feeling that the last thread of her old life had been cut.

Marcus––the lynchpin around which this new life had been constructed––was unfailingly polite, charming even. He left early, often before she awoke, and returned for dinner filled with stories about his work, the meetings and negotiations in which he had engaged. She was learning him anew, this man who had taken over the body of a boy she had once loved. A man she might someday be able to love, if only everything weren’t so careful, so strained between them.

By the eighth day in London, she was exhausted. By the eighth night, she longed for sleep, longed for home, and thought those two words ineffable and unattainable. Twelve nights she had slept in his bed, within his insistent embrace. Twelve nights she had burned with anger, frustration, resentment…and the lingering flame of attraction. He smelled like a mixture of citrus soap, made at a factory in which he had invested, and that deeper, more familiar scent that was his own. It called to her memory, to the young woman who had awakened under his touch, whose body still pricked with awareness when he neared.

Each night he lay beside her, his hands never straying from the safety of the curve of her hip, his lips resting on her hair or on the back of her neck––which didn’t feel safe. Her belly tight with desire, she stayed awake hours after she heard his deep, even breaths, till finally the warmth of his touch again melted her into sleep.

Marcus was achingly rigid in his schedule: the hours he was gone from the house, the time he set to spend with Leona, the hour at which they retired for the night. Tonight, however, he had left after dinner with the shortest of apologies, and now it was past three in the morning. It was no use pretending to sleep anymore. Awake and wondering where he was, she lit the candle by the bed and padded softly to the chair over which her bed robe was draped.

Wrapped warmly in her robe, she ventured out into the hallway. In the short time in which she had lived in this house, she hadn’t explored more than the common areas, Leona’s room, and this room that wasn’t her own. Inherited through Lady Templeton’s father, The Honourable Mr. Pleasant-Anstrathem, the house had been let for years. Lady Templeton had undertaken a renovation the instant she had arrived in London a month earlier, and some disorder still remained.

Natasha finally settled in the library, where the fireplace held a residual warmth and where the ever-filled decanters offered a path to a different sort of warmth. And oblivion.

…

It was late when Marcus arrived home, found his bedroom empty, and went in search of his wife. At dinner he had watched Natasha with a growing desire, watched her lips move and her fingers curl around her knife and fork and wanted to touch those hands with his tongue. The knowledge that this night, too, he would need to keep himself restrained, share a chaste bed with her, had filled him with frustration. He had fled the house, sought his club and then, as he hadn’t in five years, sought a gambling hell to find some other distraction.

Only when he had tripled his purse and dulled his mind had he felt himself calmed enough to return home, return to his steady wooing of his wife.

There was a soft glow from the library and Marcus made his way there, curious. The door was ajar, the lit candelabra creating eerie shadows in the corners of the room. He pushed the door open.

The room was cold and smelled of whisky. On the far side of the room, curled up on the seat beneath a window frosted from the night air, was Natasha. Her hair streamed down her shoulders and she stared at him with those wide-set eyes. He shivered at the intensity of her gaze.

Then she smirked, resting her head back against the seat, and he found himself watching the small movements of the pale, arched line of her neck.

“Would you like some?” she asked, her words slurring as she held up the near empty glass in her left hand.

She was drunk…and she was charming, elegant, the way her hand swayed through the air. He remembered the last time he had seen her this way, tipsy after they had lost themselves in two bottles of champagne. He had carried her from the carriage into the house and made love to her on the plush carpet in the entryway. They had awoken, hours later, uncomfortable and cold, so he had carried her to bed and made love to her all over again.

“What, did you drown yourself in a bottle of Scotch?” he teased, coming closer, reaching for the glass. He sat close to her on the edge of the window seat. She burned with the drink despite the chilled room. He placed the glass on the floor.

She still stared at him, though now from under heavy lids, her features beginning to twist from their relaxed amusement to something that resembled anger, and Marcus moved before he thought twice. He kissed her quickly to stop the words and the argument, cupping her head with his palm, angling her just right so that she was open to him. She pushed at him, and then suddenly she was kissing him back. He tasted the alcohol on her lips and grew drunk on her taste. She was vicious and writhing in his arms. Just as she had been greedy that night in Little Parrington a month before, she demanded now.

Her legs twisted, slid, and she was half-atop him, straddling him. His body answered immediately, hard, buzzing from head to toe with the feel of her.

He needed her.

With her nightgown and robe hiked up to her thighs, he could feel, gratefully, that she wore none of those new undergarments, and he slid one hand along her leg, savoring the smooth, silky flesh, enjoying her shiver and the way she pressed herself closer to him so that he was nestled right up against her. He could feel her burning hot and wet even through the fabric that separated them.

It was the alcohol that was making her respond to him, making her delve her tongue into his mouth and lick his skin as if he were her evening meal. It was the alcohol, yes, but she clearly wanted him.

Yet, for a moment, his hand stilled. Was this a wrong move? Would taking what she offered ruin the courtship? Horses and dogs couldn’t be pushed too fast. Likely the same logic applied to his wife. He pulled back.

When he turned his face slightly away, her lips, the pointed tip of her tongue, moved to his neck, her hands unbuttoned his falls, and in that moment, it no longer mattered if it was a mistake.

Someday soon there would be time, enough time to savor her taste, the feeling of her under his hands and his tongue. But right then he was free and hard in her hands, and the touch of her fingers on him was the sweetest torture. He moved his hand forward along her thigh, reaching for the hot depths of her. She was wet and ready for him, so that the working of her fingers, spreading his liquid slick over him, was superfluous.

He lifted her hips and she helped him, rising up on her knees. Her fingers, wet with him, found purchase under his waistcoat flat against his chest. She hovered over him, hot and coming down, opening herself up to him. He groaned as she sank down, enfolding him in the scorching moisture of her body.

He thrust up as best he could, but she was in control, on top of him, setting the pace. Torture, absolute torture. At the same time it was an erotic dream, here in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, as if the fighting of the daylight hours didn’t exist.