The Wedding of the Century & Other Stories (11 page)

With one hand, she unbuttoned the top of his shirt and slipped her fingers inside so she could caress his warm, bare skin. “I think that is a wonderful idea. I only wish that we had started sooner. I was so sure that you married me only because you needed my fortune.”

Expression serious, he said, “Don't ever doubt that I love you, Sunny. I have since the first time we met, when you were the Gilded Girl and I was an insignificant younger son who could never dare aspire to your hand.”

Her eyes widened. “We hardly even spoke that day.”

“On the contrary—we walked through the gardens for the better part of an hour. I could take you along the exact route, and repeat everything you said. It was the most enchanting experience of my life.” His mouth quirked up wryly. “And you don't remember it at all, do you?”

“I do remember that I enjoyed your company, but I was meeting so many people then. You were simply a quiet, attractive man who didn't seem interested in me.”
She looked searchingly into his eyes. “If you loved me, why didn't you say so sooner?”

“I tried, but you never wanted to hear.” He began lazily stroking her bare arm. “Since it never occurred to me that you could love me, there was no reason to burden you with my foolish emotions, even if I had known how to do it.”

A vivid memory of his proposal flashed through her mind. He had said then that she had had his heart from the moment they met. There had been other occasions when he had haltingly tried to declare himself, plus a thousand small signs of caring, from his wedding orchids to the way he had risked his life to rescue a puppy for her. Yet because of her pain over Paul's betrayal and her conviction that Justin had married her only for money, she had spurned his hesitant words and gestures, convinced that they were polite lies. Dear heaven, no wonder he had preferred to conceal his feelings.

“I'm the one who must apologize. Because I was hurting, I ended up hurting you, as well.” She laid her hand along his firm jaw, thinking how handsome he looked with that tender light in his eyes. “Yet you were always kind to me.”

He turned his head and pressed a kiss into her palm. “We gargoyles are known for kindness.”

“I
hate
that nickname,” she said vehemently. “How can people be so cruel? You are intelligent, amusing, considerate, and a gentleman in the best sense of the word.”

“I'm very glad you think so, but society loves cleverness, and a good quip counts for more than a good heart,” he said with dry amusement. “The fact that you love me is clear proof that much of love comes from simple proximity.”

“Nonsense,” she said tartly. “Proximity can just as easily breed dislike. But it's true that I would never have
learned to love you if we hadn't married. You are not an easy man to know.”

“I'm sorry, my dear.” He sighed. “As you know, my mother can be…difficult. I learned early that to show emotions was to risk having them used against me, so I became first-rate at concealing what I felt. Unfortunately, that made me at a flat loss at saying what matters most. I promise that from now on, I will say that I love you at least once a day.”

“I'd rather have that than the Thornborough tiara.” Shyly she touched her abdomen, which as yet showed no sign of the new life within. “Are you happy about the baby? You didn't seem very interested.”

“I'm awed and delighted.” A shadow crossed his face. “If my reaction seemed unenthusiastic, it was because I feared that if it was a boy, you would go off to Paris or New York and never want to see me again.”

“What a dreadful thought.” She shivered. “May I ask a favor?”

“Anything, Sunny. Always.” He laced his fingers through hers, then drew their joined hands to his heart.

“I would very much like it if we slept together every night, like people who can't afford two bedrooms do.” Her mouth curved playfully. “Even with central heating, it's often chilly here.”

He laughed. “I would like nothing better. I've always hated leaving you to go back to my own cold and lonely bed.”

“We can start a new fashion for togetherness.” She lifted their clasped hands and lovingly kissed his fingertips.

He leaned over and claimed her mouth, and the embers of passion began glowing with renewed life. As he slid his hand into the loose neckline of her gown, he murmured,
“We're both wearing entirely too many clothes, especially for such a fine day.”

Remembering their surroundings, she said breathlessly, “Justin, don't you dare! We have already behaved disgracefully enough for one day.”

“Mmm?” He pulled her gown from her shoulder so that he could kiss her breasts, a process that rendered her quite unable to talk. She had not known that there was such pleasure in the whole world.

She made one last plea for sanity as he began stripping off his coat. “If someone comes along this path and sees us, what will they say?”

“They'll say that the Duke of Thornborough loves his wife very much.” He smiled into her eyes with delicious wickedness. “And they'll be right.”

Kristin James

A
MY
M
C
A
LISTER HAD NEVER
done anything so daring.

She glanced up at her companion as she tucked her hand in his arm and strolled out through the hall and kitchen onto the back porch. The color was high in Amy's cheeks, partially from the exercise of dancing in which they had been engaged, but just as much from her heightened excitement. It would not be terribly improper to walk with Mr. Whitaker out onto the front porch, for there was such a crush of people inside the house that more than one gentleman and lady had stepped outside on this balmy October evening for a breath of air.

However, it was quite another matter for them to have slipped out onto the small back porch, where there was no one but them. Still worse, Mr. Whitaker was taking her hand and leading her down the steps onto the packed earth of the backyard and across toward the corral. To be alone with a man in the darkened night was not at all proper, especially when he had asked her to slip away with him for a moonlight stroll. In any other woman, such behavior would have been termed loose. In herself, Amy knew, such carelessness would be classified as mere naiveté, for the quiet, plain Amy was “such a
good
girl,” and, moreover, not the sort to drive a man to an act of unbridled passion.

The idea rankled. It wasn't that Amy wished to be thought of as a “bad” girl, or to have some harridan like old Mrs. Gooden call her an “incorrigible flirt”—as she
had Amy's sister, Corinne. She simply found it singularly depressing to know that everyone thought her so indifferent in looks and boring in personality that she would never even be afforded the opportunity to break society's rules.

Amy had unhappily admitted the truth—that she was, indeed, just plain and uninteresting. All the looks in their family had fallen to her younger sister, Corinne, whose blond curls, sparkling blue eyes and creamy complexion had entranced most of the men of the area ever since she grew old enough to put her skirts down and her hair up.

Amy, on the other hand, had rather mousy light brown hair, which she usually wore carelessly screwed up into a knot, a style that did nothing for her features. Her eyes, though large and expressive, were an ordinary brown. Her skin was nice enough, her figure was neat and becomingly curved, and her features were not unpleasing. But Amy had none of her sister's vivacity. Rather than sparkling and flirting, she was apt to be tongue-tied in a man's presence. She tended to look down when she talked, and she avoided talking to people if she possibly could. Moreover, she was well-known around the county as a scholar, and few people were interested in the sort of things she liked to talk about.

As a result, Amy was something of a wallflower. It was a good thing, her mother maintained, that Amy was a calm, sensible girl, obviously happy being immersed in her books, and with no interest in a husband or family.

In that, Mrs. McAlister was wrong. Although Amy was generally calm and sensible, inside her beat the heart of a romantic. She read everything she could get her hands on, from dull histories to the thoughts of philosophers, but what she loved most of all were novels, especially romantic ones, and those she read over and over. Therefore, when Charles Whitaker had leaned down and whispered
in her ear at the end of the dance, suggesting that they slip away from this tiresome crowd and go for a stroll in the moonlight, she had readily agreed.

Her pulse was skittering madly now as she walked with him across the yard. One of his hands covered hers as it lay in the crook of her elbow, warm and full of meaning. He glanced down at her and smiled, his eyes caressing her face. Amy drew in a little breath and gazed up into his face, which was washed romantically by moonlight. Looking at him made her knees a trifle weak.

Charles Whitaker was a handsome man, one who could, indeed, have stepped from the pages of one of her novels. His hair was jet black and thick, springing back from a high, fair brow, and his eyes were dark and intense. From the moment he had ridden into Portersville a few weeks before, he had been the center of intense female interest.

There was a faint air of melancholy about him, and though he was mysteriously silent regarding his past, one or two things he had let drop indicated that his family, once the proud possessors of a plantation in Virginia, had lost it all in the war some twenty-four years before. Amy didn't hold his loss against him. After all, Amy's own father had come to Texas after the war from his native Louisiana with his friend Cal Boudreaux. He had worked hard and built up one of the biggest ranches in the state.

To Amy's surprise, however, her father seemed to have little sympathy for Charles Whitaker. He had accepted Whitaker in the friendly way people had here, without questions as to his past, but after a few weeks he had taken a dislike to Charles. He had said Charles was lazy and frivolous, and wondered why he hadn't taken a job, as any other man would have. He had told his daughters
grimly that he suspected the man was a fortune hunter, and warned them to stay away from him.

Corinne, of course, had merely laughed and continued to do as she pleased, flirting with Mr. Whitaker as she did with her other many beaux. Even Amy, usually obedient to her father's wishes, thought he was being unkind and unfair, and when Charles had begun paying decided attention to her, she had disregarded her father's warnings. She was thrilled that a man like Charles Whitaker had stopped hanging about her beautiful sister and had chosen her company instead.

They reached the corral, and Whitaker drew Amy into the shadow of the barn. In the distance, Amy heard a trill of laughter from the porch, but it merely blended into the soothing night noises—the shuffle of horses' hooves within the corral, the croak of frogs down by the stock tank, the call of a night bird. She felt wrapped in the darkness, and giddy to be standing so close to Charles and in such a situation.

He smiled down at her, taking her hands in his. “You must think me very presumptuous.”

Amy mutely shook her head. She was more afraid that he would think her overly bold than the other way around.

“I had to speak with you…to be alone with you.”

“Why?” she asked honestly.

Whitaker looked a trifle taken aback by her bluntness. “But surely you have guessed…”

Amy continued to look at him uncertainly. She had noticed that the past few times she had seen Mr. Whitaker, he had paid particular attention to her, no longer dangling after Corinne. But she had refused to let herself believe it, certain that she simply had been reading too much into a look or into the number of times he asked her to dance.

“Mr. Whitaker, I'm not sure—”

She broke off, whirling as the barn door scraped across the earth with a loud noise. A man stepped out of the barn and into the moonlight. He stopped abruptly when he saw them, and his eyes narrowed.

“Oh! Jesse!” Amy breathed a sigh of relief. “You startled me.”

The man walked toward them, his eyes flickering over Charles Whitaker, then coming to rest on Amy. His gaze was expressionless, but still Whitaker shifted a little beneath it. Jesse Tyler was young, no more than twenty, and he was not a big man, but he was leanly muscled and strong. There was about him an air of toughness. Whitaker wasn't sure what it was—perhaps the hard expression in his cool green eyes, or the carefully blank, hard set of his face or even the rough clothes he wore and his slightly shaggy, too-long hair—but it was clear that Jesse Tyler was not a man to tangle with.

“What are you doing out here, ma'am, so far from the party?” Tyler asked Amy mildly, but the suspicious look he shot at Whitaker was anything but mild.

“Just taking a stroll,” Amy answered. “It was awfully hot in there, dancing. You know.”

Jesse nodded, biting off the end of his cheroot, then putting it in his mouth and lighting it. Amy eyed him uncertainly. She liked Jesse; he was one of her dearest friends. Though others often said he was tough, even mean, Amy had never seen anything like that in him. She reached out and placed a hand affectionately on Jesse's arm. He paused in the act of lighting his cheroot and looked up at her. His gaze was long and considering.

“You won't say anything about my being out here, will you, Jesse?”

“I don't think your pa would like it,” he responded.

“Perhaps not, but there's nothing wrong with it. You
know I wouldn't do anything wicked or reckless, don't you?”

“
You
wouldn't,” he said with careful emphasis, and his eyes flickered to Whitaker.

“I'm in good hands with Mr. Whitaker,” Amy replied blithely, and smiled. “You mustn't worry about that.”

Tyler continued to stare at Whitaker, his gaze hard. “Yes. I'm sure Mr. Whitaker will be very careful to take good care of you.”

Charles raised his brows in lazy disdain at the hint of a threat in the other man's words, but he sketched a little bow, inclining his head to show that he understood Tyler's implication.

“Good night, Miss Amy.”

“Good night, Jesse.”

Tyler strolled away in the direction of the house. Charles and Amy did not watch him go, so neither of them saw him stop when he reached the shadows of the house and turn back to look at them. He ground out his cheroot in order to rid himself of its red glow, and he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the side of the house, studying the couple by the corral.

Charles took Amy's hands in his. “Please, Miss McAlister, come for a stroll with me—away from the yard. If we stay here, we'll only be interrupted again.”

Amy paused uncertainly. She was dazzled by the attention Mr. Whitaker was paying her; no man had ever flirted with her so assiduously, or paid her such pretty, extravagant compliments. It made her feel almost beautiful, as if she were a belle of the county like her sister, instead of a washed-out nonentity, relegated to line the wall with the matrons and the other spinsters while the sought-after girls danced.

She knew that it would be improper to walk out of the yard alone with a man late at night. Why, it wasn't really
proper to have come this far away from the others with him! Yet she could not bear to give up this chance to be with him and hear the wonderful things he had to say. He seemed to actually be smitten with her, and it would have taken a stronger woman than she—or one far more sure of herself—to give up this opportunity.

“All right,” she murmured, her pulse racing as he took her hand and led her away from the corral and barn. “But only for a little while.”

“Of course.”

They took the path that led toward Rock Creek. The moonlight made it easy for them to pick their way along. Some distance behind them, Jesse Tyler left the shadow of the house and followed.

Amy was grateful that Charles kept up a constant flow of conversation as they walked along, for she usually found herself without anything to say around gentlemen.

They reached the creek, whose banks were lined with trees, and Amy started to turn back, assuming that this was as far as they would go. But to her surprise, Charles led her along the bank of the creek. The moonlight filtered down through the branches, and now and then, in an open place, it sparkled on the water, a beautiful and romantic sight. They reached a grove, and Amy came to an abrupt stop. There, at the edge of the grove, was a horse and buggy, unattended. Amy stared at it in surprise.

“What in the world? Who—” Her heart began to thump, and she glanced around nervously. There must be someone else here.

“Charles, let's go,” she whispered urgently.

“No. Wait. Don't be scared. This is my buggy. There's no one here.”

“Yours?” Amy looked at him in blank surprise. “But what is it doing here?”

“It's a surprise.” Again that beautiful white smile
flashed on his face, asking her to share in his pleasure. “I put it here because I wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise me? But I don't understand.” Amy was puzzled, yet she let him pull her along to the buggy.

“You'll see.” He put his hand at her elbow to help her into the buggy. When she hesitated, he murmured, “Please, don't spoil the moment, darling.”

Darling!
Heat rose in her face at his use of the endearment, and her stomach knotted. She knew that her mother would not approve of her doing this, but… Was it really so improper? After all, it was merely a ride in the moonlight with a gentleman. No doubt Corinne and other girls like her had done it many a time; it was just an indication of her own inexperience that she had never been asked to do it. She felt silly, yet at the same time thrilled by the loving word that had slipped from his lips, and both sensations served to drown her unease at being alone in a buggy at night with a man.

She climbed into the buggy, and they started off across the land, coming out at last on a narrow, rutted road that marked the end of her father's land on the south side. The land was lovely, bathed in moonlight, and it was breathlessly exciting to be alone with Charles, but gradually her uneasiness won out. She was sure she should not be doing this.

“Perhaps we'd better start back now,” she murmured.

“In just a moment,” Charles replied. “There's a place I want to show you.”

The buggy rattled across the old wooden bridge spanning the creek and stopped on the small rise just beyond. It was a pretty view. Even the old sheepherder's hut below them, abandoned years before, took on a romantically ruined aspect in the pale wash of the moonlight.

Charles got down and came around to help Amy out of
the buggy, taking her arm and drawing her over to look at the view.

He turned and looked down at her seriously. “Miss McAlister, I don't know whether you are aware of the high esteem in which I hold you.”

Pleased, Amy smiled, but could think of no way to answer his remark.

“I have tried to contain my feelings. I know I am unworthy of you.”