The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (56 page)

The silence throughout this day had suffocated him. It had been something loud and accusing, something painful and impenetrable.

Conversation at the dinner table, though there was scarcely a moment of silence, was equally uncomfortable. One topic had never been part of his conversations, he realized now that he had committed himself to it for the coming days and even weeks. He was quite unaccustomed to talking about himself. It was as if, in becoming reconciled to the very public nature his life must take as the Duke of Bridgwater, he had shut away the private part of himself, hidden it away so that no one would take that too away from him.

“George was my dearest friend and my worst enemy,” he told her, beginning abruptly without stopping to consider exactly where he should start. He could hardly begin with his birth, after all, though in more ways than one that had been the most significant event in his life. “I loved him and I hated him.”

“It is something I have always found perplexing,” she said, “but it is something that seems quite natural. I longed and longed to have sisters and brothers. Yet it seems that those who do, spend their childhoods fighting with them.”

“I resented him quite bitterly,” he said. “He was born barely eleven months after me. I never forgave him for
waiting so long. If only he had been born eleven months before me. I am not sure I still do not resent him.”

Her place had been set at the foot of the long table in the dining room. They would have had to raise their voices to converse. He had had her moved beside him.

Her knife and fork remained poised over her plate for a moment. “Is it not usually the other way around?” she asked. “Is it not the younger son who is supposed to resent the elder? Eleven months cut your brother out of the title and the fortune and Wightwick Hall.”

“Even as a child,” he said, “I felt the bars about my cage and knew that for George there were no bars, no cage. Ungrateful wretch that I was, I raged against my bars. Yet strange as it may seem, I do not believe that my brother ever raged against me or the fate that made him the younger.”

He knew that he had started in the right place. If he had told her all the facts of a happy, carefree childhood—and the facts were there in abundance—he would not have told the essential truth. He would not be enabling her ever to know him.

She leaned a little toward him, her food forgotten for the moment. “I cannot picture it,” she said. “You and your title and position seem to be one and indivisible.”

“They are now,” he said. “I am talking about my childhood—my rebellious childhood. I knew very early that life would offer me no choices, you see. Now who would complain about that when he could be secure in this for a future?” He indicated with one hand the room about them. “Only a foolish child, of course. A man learns to accept his fate, especially when it is a fate that brings along with it such luxury and such security and such power.”

“But who can blame a child,” she said, “for wanting to be free? For wanting to dream.”

Ah, she understood. No one else ever had. No one.
Not that he had talked about such things for eleven years. No, longer than that. Not since boyhood. He had never really entrusted himself to anyone. He felt suddenly vulnerable, almost frightened. He concentrated on his food for a while.

“Very few people are free,” he said. “Almost no one is, in fact. It is something one learns as one matures. Something one comes to accept. Yet many people’s cages are poverty or ill health or—other miserable factors. My father was right to call me an ungrateful cur and to squash my rebellion as ruthlessly as he did. He must have been bewildered by me. We must hope that our eldest son will not be so perverse.”

“If he is,” she said, “we must hope that his father will give him the benefit of his understanding.”

He smiled at her. They spoke as if there were a future. Was there? The future was in his hands, he suspected. He had to help her to get to know him. He had to hope that she would like him, that she would wish to spend the rest of her life with him. She must already know that he would never force her either to live with him in the intimacy of marriage or to remain with him in the facade of an empty marriage. She was independently wealthy, with a sizable home of her own.

And he had begun by pouring out the foolish, ungrateful self-pity of his childhood self.

For the rest of dinner, and for a while in the drawing room afterward, he told her happier stories of his childhood, choosing the amusing ones involving mainly him and George. Elizabeth and Jane had been born some years after them and had never really been playmates. He was rewarded with smiles and even with laughter.

“Tomorrow,” he said finally when he could see that she was tired, “I will show you the house, Stephanie, including the state apartments and the portrait gallery. If the weather is fine, I will show you the park too. We will
take tomorrow for ourselves. The day after you can begin being the Duchess of Bridgwater here if you wish.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do wish, Alistair. But tomorrow we will spend together. It is important that we do so.”

He was leading her up the stairs. He paused outside her dressing room door. “I may come to you tonight, then?” he asked.

She nodded, and he opened her door and closed it behind her when she had stepped inside.

He had not told her what a dreamer he had been. There had been the two totally different sides to his nature—the mischievous, energetic, rebellious boy on the one hand, and the lone, moody dreamer on the other. Both had infuriated his father. Both had been quelled, totally repressed.

He was not sure he could share the second aspect of his nature with Stephanie. He was not sure there were the words. He was not sure he could so bare his soul even for her. And yet, he thought bleakly as he prepared for her, something told him that his only chance with her was in total honesty. Was he capable of it?

S
HE WAS STANDING
at the window, looking out, though her head turned back over her shoulder when he came inside the room. It was not a studied pose, he realized—he knew far more about her innocence than he had known on his first acquaintance with her. But if it had been, it could not have been more provocatively done. Her auburn hair, caught by the candlelight, lay in heavy waves down her back. The turn of her body, clad in a fine silk and lace nightgown, emphasized its lithe slimness.

She turned completely as he crossed the room toward her, and her hands reached out for his. She had said he might come, and she was not going to stint her welcome, he saw. She lifted her face to his.

He tried to keep his hunger in check, but she opened her mouth as his lips lightly explored hers, and he slid his tongue into moist heat and gathered her closer. She came, arching her body to his, bringing her hands up to rest on his shoulders. He wondered if it was merely duty, but he could feel the heat of her body through his nightshirt and her nightgown.

He kissed her throat, her ears, her temples, her eyelids. Her mouth again.

He had hurt her, he thought. He had admitted to her that at first he had believed the evidence of his own eyes above the story she had told him. He had told her in effect that she had been a toy to him, a creature of fun. One he had used for his own amusement and had planned to use for his sexual pleasure. He had denied her personhood.

And now she had the power to hurt him, to bring shattering down about him the house he had built for himself over the years so carefully that he had not even fully realized it himself. The house inside which he had hidden so that no one would find him and reveal to him the emptiness of his existence.

Stephanie had found him, whether she realized it or not.

“Come and lie down,” he said.

But he stopped her when she was beside the bed and about to lie down on it. He lifted his hands to the top button of her nightgown.

“May I?” he asked her, looking into her eyes.

For a moment she glanced aside to the single candle that burned beside the bed. There was a whole branch of candles on the mantelpiece. She nodded almost imperceptibly, and he undid the buttons one by one until he could lift the gown away from her shoulders. She did not even try to hold on to modesty by bending her arms at the elbow. She held them loosely at her sides so that the single garment slithered all the way to the floor.

She was all slim, taut beauty. She watched him, her face calm, her chin high, as his eyes roamed over her. He pulled his nightshirt off over his head and tossed it aside.

“Lie down,” he said.

He hesitated for only a moment. But he did not extinguish the candles. And before joining her on the bed, he stripped back the bedclothes to the foot of the bed. Perhaps he was sealing his own doom, he thought, but if she was going to allow the continuation of their marriage, then perhaps it was as well that she understood the full physical, carnal nature of what they would do together in her bed. He rather suspected that on their wedding night she had hidden behind darkness and closed eyes and beneath bedcovers and inside the instructions on duty that his mother of all people must have given her.

There could be no more hiding for either of them. Every day now, he realized, and every night, he would risk losing her. But he could only come out into the open with her and take the risk.

He slid an arm about her shoulders, but did not draw her close. He raised himself on his elbow and leaned over her to kiss her. With his free hand he explored her and fondled her. After a while he lifted his head away and watched what he did. She watched his face.

He could see and feel and hear her body’s response. Her nipples hardened. She grew almost hot to the touch. She was breathing quickly and rather raggedly. But she lay still and relaxed and continued to watch him.

He slid a hand beneath her leg and lifted it. She followed his unspoken direction and raised both legs, setting her feet flat on the bed. When he slid his hand between her knees, she let her legs drop open. He fondled her with his hand, parting, stroking, teasing with light fingers while he leaned forward to kiss her breasts and her flat abdomen. He would not move his head
lower. Not yet. She was not ready for that kind of extreme intimacy. Perhaps she never would be.

She was slick with wetness. Ready for him. He slid a finger in and out and listened to the erotic sucking sound. When he looked into her face, he found that she was still looking at him. But her eyes were heavy-lidded, and her lips were parted. He knew that she was listening too and that tonight she was not embarrassed by the sound.

She would not hide from any of it, he decided. She would not use his body as a blanket. When he moved over her, he knelt between her thighs and lifted her legs up over his and positioned himself. Her eyes dropped from his eventually when he paused and waited for her. She watched. He pushed himself slowly inside until he was fully embedded. And drew out again almost his full length and pushed inward once more. She was watching.

“Touch me,” he said to her as he leaned over her and set his hands on either side of her head, holding himself above her with straight arms. “Put your arms about me.” Her arms were lying flat on the mattress beside her as they had on their wedding night.

She set her hands on either side of his waist. He watched her swallow and move them to his hips and around to touch his buttocks briefly. She rested them against his waist again and closed her eyes at last as he resumed his movements in her. She was soft and hot and wet. He closed his own eyes and held himself above her while he worked. He could smell her. Pure woman.

He waited for her body to move beyond arousal into the beginnings of fulfillment. He stroked her firmly for a long time, holding back his own pleasure. But he knew finally that it was not going to happen. There was no tension in her, only relaxed acquiescence, even though her legs were still twined about his and she was rocking to his rhythm. He could have moved her on to the next stage by sliding his hand between them and caressing a
part of her she was probably unaware of. But he sensed that she did not want to abandon control. Control at the moment must be more important to her than almost anything else.

But she was not even trying to hide her quiet enjoyment of what was happening. She liked what he did to her, as she had two nights ago. It was enough. For now it must be enough.

He lowered his weight onto her and thrust deeply and quickly and repeatedly until release came and his seed spilled into her. He heard himself sigh against her hair.

He set his hand over hers after he had uncoupled them and moved to her side. She drew her legs together and lay quietly on her back.

“Thank you,” he said.

She turned her head to look at him. “It is very pleasant, Alistair,” she said. “I always expected it would be, but it is even more pleasant than I imagined. I want you to know that it was for myself that I said yes tonight. Not just because of duty and not because of … of you. It was for me. I decided to be selfish. So I must thank you too, you see.”

He leaned over her and kissed her mouth. He was surprised to find that he was feeling almost amused, almost lighthearted. Did she realize that she was turning the tables on him? That she was making him her slave? That she was punishing him most effectively? Should he tell her?

“You may be selfish any time you wish, my dear,” he said, “if the results for me are so very pleasurable.”

She smiled at him tentatively as he smiled back. It was enough. Hope was born in him as he kissed her again and then reluctantly removed himself from her bed to return to his own room.

IFE BECAME SO BUSY FOR
S
TEPHANIE OVER THE FOLLOWING
month that she had blessedly little time for thought. She was mistress of Wightwick Hall, a daunting task even for a bride who had been brought up to expect such a life. The only experience she had of running a home had been gained at the vicarage after her mother’s death. It was pitifully inadequate as preparation for what faced her now. The month-long training given her by her mother-in-law helped a great deal. But she found that she had to learn to do the job in her own way. She had been taught to remember who she was and refuse to be intimidated by a regal housekeeper and a despotic cook. Yet she forced herself to remember too that her servants were people, that they had lives and dignity and pride of their own. She had to learn to command through a combination of firmness and kindness.