An Affair Most Wicked (34 page)

“I’m not going to leave you.”

She looked into his eyes and saw sincerity. Desperation. But after everything she’d been through, she wasn’t sure she could believe it. Maybe this was just his way of appeasing her, so she would give him the freedom he needed to…

She didn’t want to think about the rest.

Clara went to the table beside the crib and began to put Liam’s toys back into the toy trunk, one by one.

“She wanted to become my mistress,” Seger said.

Clara froze, then forced herself to continue what she was doing. “That’s not surprising. There are a number of women in London who want the same thing.”

“But I don’t want them. Nor do I want Daphne. I told her that. She is going back to America.”

Clara whirled around to face him. “How can I believe you? She’s the reason you never married for eight years! She’s the reason you haven’t been able to love
me
!”

He shook his head at her. “Maybe she was the reason I chose to live as I did, but she has nothing to do with what is between us today.”

He moved closer and cupped her face in his hands. “I’m sorry I have not been able to love you, Clara, but it had nothing to do with Daphne. It was because I had become so accustomed to a certain way of life, it became almost impossible to imagine anything different. I’d begun to believe that I wasn’t capable of loving one woman. But from
the first moment I saw you, I knew you were different. Everything about you was different, the way you looked, the way you made me feel. All other women were eclipsed by you, and they still are. You have been my best friend and my lover, my confidante and my companion. You have made every day a fragment of heaven, and I think of nothing but you when we are apart. I could no more live without you than I could live without air in my lungs. I would die if I lost you, and that—I believe—is love.”

Clara saw the light in her husband’s eyes, and slowly blinked. Could she believe him?

“Seger…”

She had no idea what she wanted to say. All she knew was that her husband was kissing her. Holding her in his arms and calming her, soothing her.

He was such a magnificent kisser. His lips and tongue moved with gentle, erotic precision. Her body throbbed at the exquisite sensation of her breasts pressing up against the firm wall of his chest. Heat issued forth and simmered between them where their bodies touched. The tight, close contact began to melt the ice crystals she had worked so hard to forge around her heart.

He continued to hold her face in his hands as he gazed down into her eyes. Her body ached with desire. “I want no woman but you, Clara. I
love
you, and I will always love you.”

She felt herself bending to his will as she always did. How could she not? She was melting in his arms, burning to give herself over to his strong skillful hands, quivering with the need to feel his flesh next to hers.

She labored to subdue such weakness. She had to be strong. She could not give in so easily. This was a turning point in her life. She would set the rules now and demand his fidelity and respect, or give him the power to tramp all over her heart in the years to come.

Her voice shook as she spoke. “How can I trust that you’re telling me the truth? That you’re not going to go back to your old ways as soon as this is forgotten? I can’t live like that, Seger, and I won’t. I would rather spend my life alone than suffer that kind of anguish, and I
will
spend it alone if you cannot be constant.”

He stroked her hair tenderly. “Clara, I will be faithful to you until the day I die, and beyond.”

“Those are just words, Seger. I need more than that. I need proof.”

“Here’s your proof!” He touched his open palm to his chest. “I have changed. Everyday since I met you I’ve moved farther and farther away from the shallow shell of the man that I was. I feel it inside myself. I’m whole again. Surely you can see it, too.” He cupped her cheek in his warm, gentle hand. “Can’t you see it in my eyes? Hear it in my voice? Feel it in your heart? God, this morning Daphne appeared,
alive
, and offered to be my mistress, and I sent her away. Isn’t that proof enough that you are the only woman in the world I want? That my heart beats for you and you alone?
I love you, Clara
. You are my entire world.”

Tears of joy welled up in her eyes as she gazed lovingly at her husband and listened to all he said. Really listened. He was right—he had changed, and she could see it in his eyes. She was just so afraid to trust her instincts.

But she did love him. That much she knew.

“I love you, too,” she sobbed.

He gathered her into his arms and held her tight, kissing her cheeks and neck and finally her mouth.

“Clara, you have given me so much, even when I gave nothing in return. I want to spend the rest of my life showing you how much I love you. I want to have children with you and travel with you and grow old with you. I want to prove to you that I will be the most faithful husband England has ever known.”

A wealth of emotions cascaded over Clara as she stared up at her beautiful husband in the afternoon light that was pouring in the nursery window.

“I sent Quintina and Gillian away,” he said. “They will never have another opportunity to cause you pain. No one will, if I can help it.”

He kissed her again until her lips were burning with heat and need and a flickering, licking flame. She clutched at him, feeling as if all her dreams had come true. She did trust him, deep in her soul she knew he was the man she’d always believed him to be. Today, she had feared the worst. She had thought she would be heartbroken for the rest of her life, but he had pulled her out of that and shown her what was real.

“Please know in your heart,” he said, “that I will never leave you, nor will I ever go back to the empty existence that was my wretched life before I met you. You are my whole world, Clara, and I love you with all my heart.”

She smiled and gazed up into his fathomless green eyes, then wrapped her arms around his neck and cried tears of pure, perfect joy.

Three weeks later

Quintina entered the blue guest chamber, which was the room Gillian had taken, at her brother’s home in Wales. A note lay on the dresser.

A powerful surge of dread throbbed inside Quintina’s stomach. She had the distinct feeling this would not be good news.

Epilogue

Quintina read the note twice, then sank into a chair by the bed. No, no. No! Gillian could not have gone off with a prison convict. She could have been so much more! She could have married a duke or an earl!

What would Susan think if she were alive today? She would blame Quintina for not making things right, for not taking better control of her daughter.

Quintina buried her face in her hands and sobbed. She could not accept that her dear niece—her dead sister’s only child—was going to become an American!

Clara raised the covers for Seger to slide into bed beside her, and inched down cozy and warm. “I’ve been waiting for you for almost ten minutes. What took you so long?”

He smiled that rakish grin that she loved. “I wanted to make sure my robe was on straight and my hair was just right.”

“Why?” she asked in a coquettish voice. “It’s just me.”

“Just you? Just you? You are the center of the universe, my love.”

“Not for long,” she replied.

He gazed questioningly at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, there’s going to be a new center in our universe very soon, darling. In about eight months to be exact.”

His eyes sparked with a joyful, loving ray of light. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I saw the doctor today.”

Seger went pale, then gazed down at her flat stomach and rested his warm hand upon it. “A baby.”

“Yes, Seger.
Our baby
.”

He met her eyes and lowered his lips to hers. “I am the luckiest man on this earth. You have made me so.”

“Just as you have made me the luckiest woman.”

Seger covered her body with his own and kissed her again, more deeply this time with full abandon as his tongue slid into her mouth and mingled with hers. His hips thrust forth, gently but firmly, causing a sensuous arousal deep in her feminine core. She thrust her own hips forward to meet his, and wrapped her long legs around him.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot and moist. He laid a trail of soft, open-mouthed kisses down her neck, driving her mad with sizzling, hungry lust.

“I love you, too. I never knew life could be so wonderful, Seger. Make love to me.”

He grinned and nuzzled her nose. “I will fulfill your every desire, my lady. Where would you like me to begin?”

Clara smiled in return. “Wherever you wish. You always seem to know what I want before I know it myself.”

She lifted her head off the pillow and kissed his open mouth, then relaxed as his lips made their way down her neck to the open collar of her nightgown. Gooseflesh shimmied down her spine. He slid his warm hand inside and massaged her breast, and Clara sighed with perfect, bewildering enchantment, reveling in the tingling sensation of his mouth closing around her nipple, his tongue flicking over it again and again.

“What did I ever do to deserve you?” he asked, sliding her nightgown up, and cupping her behind in his hand.

“You gave me pleasure.”

“More than just pleasure, I hope.”

“Yes, much more.”

He positioned himself above her and paused there at the entry to her womanhood. She could feel the tip of his sex, creamy against her own. With a flare of impatience, she thrust her hips upward and felt the head of his erection enter her. He went still, grinning down at her.

“I want the rest,” she said directly.

His voice was laced with seductive teasing. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

He kissed her on the nose in the flickering candlelight. “Positively sure?”

Her head came off the pillow as her body trembled with need. “Yes!” she cried out, laughing.

Seger smiled. “Then you may have all of me, my love, for the rest of my days and beyond. Thank you for giving me back my life.”

Then he slowly, very slowly, pushed the rest of the way into her until she quivered all over with ecstasy.

According to Oscar Wilde, the English gentleman admired the American woman for her “extraordinary vivacity, her electrical quickness of repartee, her inexhaustible store of curious catchwords.” If such a woman was also an heiress, all the better.

In the late Victorian period and early in the twentieth century, approximately one hundred American heiresses married British nobles. A fair exchange of titles for money became the business of the day, and millions of American dollars wound up in the hands of impoverished English lords, who certainly couldn’t work to replenish their bank accounts. That would have been ungentlemanly.

In that light, marrying for money was nothing new in the British aristocracy. It had been going on for centuries. With modern industrialization in America, however, Wall Street had come into its own. New Money was everywhere, and there was a freshly stocked market for brides who were not only wealthy, but beautiful and spirited.

But why were these American fathers willing to send their daughters and their hard-earned fortunes across an ocean to a country they had fought a war against one hundred years before?

As Marion Fowler states in her book,
In a Gilded Cage
, they longed for “the
poetry
of class.” They felt the chill from those with Old Money in America, who turned their noses up at a society who had earned its fortune, not inherited it. The New Rich wanted respectability. Refinement. Something more than mere economic standing.

So it went that in the late Victorian period, red-hot American blood penetrated the more reserved blue-blooded veins of England.

Princess Diana’s great grandmother was an American heiress. In 1880, Frances Work of Newport married the Honorable James Burke-Roche, younger brother of an Irish baron. Burke-Roche had traveled to America and spent time in Wyoming, raising cattle, before meeting the woman of his dreams—the beautiful and very wealthy daughter of a Vanderbilt stockbroker. The couple traveled back to England where they had twin sons, one of which was Diana’s grandfather.

Winston Churchill is another offspring of a transatlantic marriage. His mother was Jennie Jerome of New York, who in 1874 married Lord Randolph Churchill, second son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. He proposed to her when she was nineteen, three days after meeting her on board a cruise ship, at a ball held in honor of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1895, Randolph died. Jennie married two more times, and devoted herself to her son’s political career. Jennie had two sisters who also married Englishmen.

I hope you’ll look for the other books in this series, based on three fictional American sisters: Sophia, Clara and Adele. Sophia’s book is
To Marry the Duke
(June 2003), and Adele’s story will be published in late 2004.