A Secret Affair (19 page)

“I cannot possibly describe how I felt when my father left me after telling me to buck up and look cheerful—the emptiness, the loneliness, the
terror
. And that was when I discovered that we had not been alone in the library. The Duke of Dunbarton had been there all the time. He had withdrawn there out of boredom with the festivities and was sitting in a wing chair that he had pulled up to a window, his back to the room. I did not know it until I was crying so hard that I thought I would die. Literally die.”

Constantine turned the curricle between the park gates, but he had slowed its pace.

“I will always remember the first words he spoke to me,” Hannah said, closing her eyes. “‘My dear Miss Delmont,’ he said in that bored, sighing voice that was so characteristic of him, ‘no woman can possibly ever be too beautiful. I see I am going to have to marry you and teach you that lesson until you believe it beyond any doubt. I shall make it the final project of my life.’ And strangely, unbelievably, I was laughing at the same time as I was crying. We had all been terrified all day just
knowing
he was there at the wedding. We had all avoided him
as much as we could for fear, I suppose, that he would strike us down with one glance if we presumed to step across his path or raise our eyes to his illustrious person. Yet there he was telling me that he must marry me, that he must make my education the final project of his life. And handing me his fine linen handkerchief with a rather pained expression on his face.”

Constantine had drawn the horses almost to a halt.

“Now
are you satisfied?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “I feel quite suitably chastened, Duchess. You could not have found a more effective way of punishing me, in fact, than answering all the questions delicacy and tact would not allow me to ask last night. And you have made me feel all the impertinence of the questions I did ask. I beg your pardon, though I realize that apologies are almost always inadequate. For would I now be begging your pardon if I had not been discovered? I do not know, though I did feel remorseful even at the time when I understood that Miss Leavensworth was uncomfortable with my questions and that I was being less than honorable in asking them of her instead of you.”

It was, she supposed, rather handsome as apologies went.

“I shall call on Miss Leavensworth tomorrow if I may,” he said, “and make my apology in person.”

Even at the snail’s pace at which they were moving they would be among the fashionable afternoon crowd soon.

“What now?” he asked. “Do you wish me to take you back home? Would you prefer that we proceed no further with our liaison?”

The last question jolted her.
Would
she? She would probably have said yes last night or this morning. Even earlier this afternoon. But all he had done, when all was said and done, was ask a few questions about her. Was he so different from her? She wanted to know about him too. Except that she had always planned to drag it all out of him personally.

“Oh,” she said with a determined twirl of her parasol, “I need an affair. I do not need marriage. Not yet, anyway, and perhaps never. I
cannot yet let go of the conviction that I am still married to the duke, even though he has been dead for longer than a year.”

“You loved him,” he said.

She turned her head toward him, looking for irony. But she could see none in his face and had heard none in his voice.

“I
did
love him,” she said, “with all my heart. He was my rock and my security for ten years. He loved me unconditionally and totally. He adored me, and I adored him. No one will ever believe that, of course, but I really do not care.”

She was rather horrified to note that her voice was shaking slightly.

“I believe you,” he said quietly.

“Thank you,” she said. “I need a
lover
, Constantine. It is too soon for anything else—love, marriage, whatever. And in one way—and one way only—the years of my marriage left me feeling starved. If I let you go, I will have to start all over again to find another lover, and I would find that tiresome.”

“I am forgiven then?” he asked. “I will not pry again, Duchess. You may keep your remaining secrets, if there are any. I will not try to uncover them.”

“You do not want to
know
me, then?” she asked him. “You do not want to know everything there is to know about me?”

“Like you, Duchess,” he said, “it is a
lover
I want, not a wife. Curiosity will not get the better of me again.”

“I, on the other hand,” she said, “still want to know everything there is to know about you. A lover is not an inanimate object, after all. Or even just a body, even if it
is
a very splendid body and makes love in a very satisfactory way.”

He was smiling, she could see when she looked at him—something he did not often do. It was an expression that did strange things to her breathing.

“Forgiveness comes at a price, Constantine,” she said. “You are in my debt. You will answer some of my questions tonight after we have made love.”

“Come home with me now.” He turned his head to look at her.

“Barbara will be home for dinner,” she said, “and I have accepted no invitations for tonight. We are to enjoy a blessed evening at home just talking to each other and enjoying each other’s company. She is more dear to me than anyone else in the world, you know, now that the duke has gone. You will send a carriage at eleven.”

“Does anyone disobey your commands, Duchess?” he asked.

She half smiled at him. “You do not
wish
to see me tonight?” she asked him. “Or to make love to me?”

He actually grinned.

“I shall send a carriage at eleven,” he said. “You will be ready. If you are not at my house by a quarter past, I shall personally lock the door.”

She laughed.

And they were swallowed up in the crowd.

She felt suddenly and quite breathtakingly
happy
.

B
ARBARA WAS TIRED
after her day at Kew Gardens, though she had had a wonderful time there and told Hannah all about it, especially about the pagoda, which she thought one of the loveliest structures she had ever seen. And she had been perfectly delighted with Simon’s cousins, whom she had not met before. They had treated her as though she were quite one of the family already, and she had made them laugh by trying to see resemblances between them and Simon. She had played a game of hide-and-seek with the children even though they were twelve years old. They were twins, a boy and a girl.

She was eager to hear all about Hannah’s tea party, which had been planned and arranged in such a hurry after breakfast. And she listened in some dismay as Hannah informed her that Constantine would be calling in the morning to apologize for last night.

“You must tell him that he is forgiven,” she said, “as indeed he is. I daresay he meant no real harm, Hannah. He merely wanted to know
more about you, and I must honor him for that as it suggests he values you as a person. Perhaps he is in love with you. Perhaps—”

But Hannah was laughing.

“You may convince yourself that you are a dusty spinster, Babs,” she said, “but you will not convince me. You are a romantic, as you have always been. Who else would have waited until she was perilously close to her thirtieth birthday before choosing her life’s companion? Constantine Huxtable’s feelings for me have
nothing
to do with romance, I do assure you. Which is just as well, you know, because neither do my feelings for him.”

“Do not let him come here tomorrow to speak with me,” Barbara begged. “I would be
so
embarrassed.”

“I shall try to deter him,” Hannah promised.

Barbara retired to bed soon after ten.

The carriage arrived at five minutes to eleven. Hannah, who had been ready since half past ten, waited fifteen minutes before leaving the house. When the carriage arrived at Constantine’s house some time after quarter past eleven, the door was locked. Hannah tried it herself when it did not open as it usually did on her arrival and when the coachman’s discreet knock brought no results.

“Well,” she said, partly dismayed, partly amused.

And, as if she had spoken the magic word, the door swung open. She swept inside and Constantine shut the door behind her. She turned to face him and could see that he was dangling a large key from one finger.

“Tyrant!” she said.

“Minx!”

They both laughed, and she closed the distance between them, threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him hard. His arms came about her waist like vises, and he kissed her back—harder.

Her toes were barely brushing the floor when they were finished. Or finished with the preliminaries, anyway.

“You made a tactical error,” she said. “If you wished to take a firm stand with me, you ought not to have opened the door.”

“And if you had wanted to take a firm stand with me,” he said, “you would not have got out of the carriage to creep up the steps and try the door handle.”

“I did not
creep,”
she protested. “I
swept.”

“It still showed how desperate you were to get at me,” he said.

“And
why
exactly,” she asked, “were you skulking behind the door, the key at the ready? Because you did not want me to get at you? And why did you
open
the door?”

“I took pity on you,” he said.

“Ha!”

And even her toes left the floor as they kissed again.

“I have some questions to ask you,” she said when she could. “I tried writing them all down, but I could not find a sheet of paper long enough.”

“Hmm,” he said, setting her feet on the floor. “Ask away, then, Duchess.”

His dark eyes had turned slightly wary.

“Not yet,” she said. “They will wait until after.”

“After?” He raised his eyebrows.

“After you have made love to me,” she said. “After I have made love to you. After we have made love to each other.”

“Three
times?” he said. “What am I going to look like tomorrow, Duchess? I need my rest.”

“You will look far more rugged and appealing without it,” she said.

He set the key down on the hall table and offered his hand. She set hers in it, and his fingers closed about her own as he led her in the direction of the staircase.

And oh, dear, she thought, she was
still
feeling happy. She ought to be glad about that. She had looked forward to this spring affair with such eager anticipation all through the winter. And physically speaking, it was more than living up to her expectations.

Why was she
not
glad, then? Because of the bickering and the teasing and the laughter? Because she had the strange, uneasy feeling
that they had somehow crossed a barrier today from being simply lovers to being entangled in some sort of relationship?

Because she was feeling
happy?

Could she not be happy
and
glad about it?

But she would think later, she decided as she stepped inside his dimly lit bedchamber and he closed the door behind them.

Sometimes there were
far
better things to do than thinking.

T
HEY MADE LOVE
with fierce energy the first time, with slow languor the second—if it was possible to be languorous while making love. Either way they were both exhausted by the time they were finished.

Hannah curled onto her side, facing away from him, and he curled around her from behind and slid one arm beneath her head while he wrapped the other about her. She snuggled back against him and raised his hand so that she could rest her cheek against the back of it.

And she slept.

Constantine did not. An uneasy conscience was the perfect recipe for insomnia.

Were other people like him, he wondered. Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regular intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone’s
life filled with a confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other—good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.