Just One Taste (7 page)

A
year
and a half later

C
hristmas dinner
with the in-laws. It hadn’t been so bad. Dr. Elliot was on a new drug that seemed to be working better for him, and Mrs. Elliot—Will really couldn’t call her Elizabeth even after she asked—was thawing despite the temperature outside. He and Emma had chopped down a tree from his field and brought it over to the Elliots’ house last week, and after Emma had decorated all the places she could reach and he took care of the high spots, it was looking pretty good. A little frou-frou for his taste. A designer tree. There were a lot of breakable gold and silver balls instead of the child and dog-friendly homespun ornaments that Alex put on their own tree in the front parlor of the farmhouse.

There was a couch there now. Actually, two. And a plaid wing chair that was practically as comfortable as a recliner, or so he told himself. The recliner would come once he got around to finishing his man-cave in the basement. They still ate in the kitchen with the chickens since Alex hadn’t found a dining room table she liked enough. It had to be big for when all his family came over, she said, and Will was making one secretly in Jimmy’s garage.

It was supposed to have been finished by now, but it wasn’t. He and his crew had been busy with three big remodeling jobs this fall. He had a buyer for a custom house to be built this spring on his lot on Scotland Road, and with any luck he’d have to turn work away or hire more guys.

And Alex? Well, Alex was busy, too. She’d turned the enclosed back porch into her office once Will plumbed it for heat. Clients could come and sit in the wicker chairs with a pot of tea while Alex made their lives over one distinctive button at a time.

Will knew what a statement piece was now. He was evolving.

She was standing over her mother’s sink now washing glasses that couldn’t be put in the dishwasher.

“Hey, babe.” Will kissed the back of her neck.

“Don’t make me drop this glass. It’s Waterford.”

“I take it you can’t find a replacement at Target. Here, sit down. Let me finish.”

“I’m all right.”

“What you are is stubborn.” Seven months pregnant, and she just wouldn’t stop. She was like the Energizer Bunny on speed, still swinging by the Lassiter stations every couple of weeks and working with an ever-increasing private client list. She had a popular shopping column and blog at the
Hartford Courant
, too—Clothes Encounters, named for her company. And to think, Will had once thought she was a little crazy. He grabbed the glass from her hand.

“Be careful!”

“Trust me. I’m generally very dependable.”

She put a sudsy hand on his cheek and looked up at him. “And pretty hot. I love you.”

She did, too. And Emma seemed to be happy that he was her stepdad. Life was good, even if the Audi had finally died an inglorious death on their driveway. The year ahead would be filled with promise, a new car loan, and a brand-new baby girl to keep Emma company.

Jeez. Two girls. They would keep Will on his steel-toed toes. And who knew? Maybe a little brother would be in their future. Will was ready for anything as long as Alex was by his side.

T
his short story
is set in the same time period as my Edwardian Ladies Unlaced series. The hero Jack Marbury, like Charles Cooper from
In the Arms of the Heiress
, is a Second Boer war veteran and has been absent from his young wife too long. His escape from prison is actually based on a true story—Winston Churchill’s!

Lady Delia Marbury has become accustomed to her widowhood, so much so that she's contemplating another marriage. But when her "dead" husband Jack escapes from a Boer prisoner of war camp and turns up on her doorstep, the happy reunion he's been dreaming of is missing, just like the priceless diamond earring he gave Delia on their wedding night. Virtual strangers when they married, they must decide if their future is worth the cost of betrayal and forgiveness.

L
ondon
, June 1901

D
elia clasped
the velvet-lined jewel case to her heart and closed her eyes, as if wishing it would make it so.

She opened the box. Still the wrong number within. She had two ears, as most everybody did, but nestled in the box’s fiery red bed was a single diamond earring. The space for its twin was empty.

Wear the earrings I gave you, my love
.

She didn’t have to ask which ones—her husband Jack—Major Lord John Marbury to the rest of the world—had given the family heirlooms to her on their wedding night. He’d left the next morning for South Africa and in the ensuing two years had been unable to provide her with any more jewels. Thoughtless of his superiors, and then his captors, to prevent him from showing his undying affection.

Thoughtless of Delia to presume him dead. Somehow, she should have
known
.

Oh, she hadn’t been a merry widow. No one could have faulted her for her deportment and propriety once her husband appeared on the list of the war dead. Delia had been discreet. Dutiful to his memory and her new responsibilities. She’d worn black—hell, she
still
wore black, even though Jack had been home for five days. She had nothing else in her closet, and was still technically in mourning for his aunt.

His return as a hero had been both a miracle and a menace, and she didn’t know how she would get through the evening ahead. Tomorrow the newspapermen would come to learn of his daring escape from the prison camp in Pretoria, and everyone would soon know what
she
had done.

It hadn’t been so daring, he shrugged before he took to his bed, Delia fluttering in confusion around him. He’d hidden under the floorboards as the Boers transferred the prisoners to some other hellhole. When the silence had simply been overwhelming, he’d crawled out and walked out of the unlocked building, bartered his way to a train to Portuguese territory, then found himself in prison all over again.

True, an English prison this time. He’d been investigated over his capture and finally exonerated. The fact that he was half-starved and feverish was in his favor. It was not his fault that another body had been misidentified as his. At that point, he had been almost sorry to be alive.

But not completely.
I wanted to come home to you, Delia
.
The thought of you was the only thing that kept me sane.

And she had betrayed him.

Delia set the box back on her dressing table. There had been no letter informing her he was alive. No cable from the government. A rather suspicious set of oversights. They’d certainly let her know soon enough when they declared him dead. Who was buried in the family plot? No time to worry about that now.

There had been no warning until her brown scarecrow of a husband collapsed in the front hallway, the very day after—

Well, they said timing was everything, and Delia’s sense of timing was, to put it bluntly, atrocious.

A tear escaped. Jack had been too weak to bed her at first, but tonight from his hints she knew he intended to resume their marriage. Their one-day marriage in a span of almost seven-hundred and thirty days. Was anything ever so ridiculous?

He didn’t know her; she barely knew herself any more. The dashing army officer and the naïve debutante were dead right along with the poor man in the Marbury cemetery plot in the country.

She was in Town now. Delia looked around her cozy room at Marbury House in Belgravia, its new William Morris paper a rebuke. She would have to leave.

Leave her son behind.

She couldn’t bear it.

If she told Jack the truth, could he forgive her? He had already suffered so much.

But so had she.

She could lie and say she’d lost the earring, which was true enough. Delia didn’t have to say where, now, did she? But Arthur would tell, since there was no hope of her meeting his demands. His letter yesterday had made that very clear.

Her little experiment had been horrible. She’d been a fool, and now there was a price to pay.

Delia gave a bitter laugh. My word, she was becoming melodramatic. One only needed some frantic organ music as an accompaniment. She was hardly the first wife to find herself in such a predicament. And she
was
happy that Jack was alive. Her baby would have his father, even if her role in his life would be curtailed. One wouldn’t want the future Viscount Marbury raised without a proper male influence.

God knows, Arthur did not qualify.

J
ack Marbury woke
hot and breathless from the same dream that had plagued him while he was in captivity. He was surprised to see his hands weren’t bloody from the spiky barbed wire that he’d just torn down.

No. There was no blood, no barbed wire. He was home, really home.

For months, he’d escaped during the night, only to find himself back on the floor in the shed in the morning, flies buzzing, the sweat of the other soldiers and swelter of the windowless hut almost paralyzing.

The Boers hadn’t been prepared to take prisoners of war, and conditions were deplorable, to say the least. Wounded and unconscious, Jack had been rounded up with a handful enlisted men—no cushy officers’ quarters for him once he came to. It hadn’t seemed cricket to make a fuss, and as an aristocrat, he was not about to make himself a bargaining chip. In truth, he was no more valuable than the men he shared scanty rations and latrine trenches with.

But waking up in Marbury House from an afternoon nap was a rather different proposition. For one thing, it smelled better. Smelled like heaven, and one didn’t even have to die—lavender-scented sheets, beeswax, fresh flowers on every flat surface of his room from friends and well-wishers.

But nothing smelled as heavenly as Delia.

His wife
.

Their courtship had been dreadfully rushed, the wedding by special license. Jack had only known her a month. He’d had to have her before he was shipped out. It was as simple as that. They would have time to get to know each other once he came home from this stupid war—they had their whole lives ahead of them.

His friends had teased him mercilessly—Major Lord John Marbury, a rich and unrepentant rake, cut down in the prime of life by a seventeen-year-old orphan with violet eyes. He was a decade older, some said too young to marry himself. But her guardian agreed and so had she, her fabulous eyes shining up at him.

She’d been a “Professional Beauty” in her first Season, photographs and India ink sketches of her in prime position in all the Fleet Street windows. Delia had been embarrassed by them; Jack had been mesmerized. She was as sweet as she was beautiful.

Or had been. She was too quiet now, haggard in black, which didn’t suit her at all. Jack sensed he made his wife very nervous. He understood—she had thought him dead. How had his letter not reached her? The poor girl had been alone, raising his child and fending for herself with only his aunt and cousin to help her, and then, not even them.

He had a son
. Those awkward, fumbling minutes of their wedding night had produced an heir. It was a miracle, was it not?

He’d do better this time. Two years ago he’d been terrified that he would terrify
her
. She’d been whiter than her monogrammed bridal sheets, and stiffer than the bedposts. His throat had dried, preventing him from uttering the usual nonsense as he moved over her. She was so lovely it almost hurt to look at her.

Delia was different from his other conquests. A virgin. An innocent. And she’d inflamed him as if he were a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. It was not his proudest moment, but he’d been powerless to stop his desire from spilling all too quickly.

He was almost as desperate for her now as he’d been then. But first he’d have to tidy himself up and try eating dinner in the dining room instead of on a tray in his bedchamber.

Delia hadn’t changed anything in the house, hadn’t made her mark, except in her own rooms, which he was anxious to see for himself again tonight. She had been careful with money, she told him, which was absurd, as both of them had more than they knew what to do with. Jack supposed there hadn’t been much time between the baby and Aunt Elizabeth’s sudden death.

He was relieved to see the house had not been made over to be a shrine to him. The one thing she had moved was a portrait he’d posed for when he’d first taken colours. It used to hang in the parlor, but it was now over the mantel in his bedroom.

Lord, he looked like a cocky, smug bastard. All of nineteen. Knew everything then, Jack did. Had to unlearn most of it.

He’d come into the viscountancy at the tender age of four, and his widowed Aunt Elizabeth had moved in to raise him. She’d been just as indulgent with him as she’d been with her own son, his cousin Arthur, and the two of them had been spoiled rotten. Jack liked to think that this past two years had changed that, at least for him. He had no idea if Arthur had seen the error of his ways.

Jack had written to Arthur Kemp once he was invalided and on his way home, asking him to tell Delia personally to soften the awkward surprise of his sudden reincarnation. He’d enclosed a letter to Delia, too. The letters were probably blowing across the African veld or at the bottom of a snake-infested river.

It had been awful to shock Delia so. He’d never seen a woman faint before. Jack had been perilously close to fainting himself. He’d been too weak to pick her crumpled body up from the tiled floor and had to leave it to the footman he didn’t recognize.

Delia had not been overjoyed to see him
. Oh, she’d made up for it in the past few days, being overly solicitous, fussing around him like a black butterfly. She only relaxed when she was showing him the baby, John, named for him. Jack had missed the child’s first birthday, something he vowed he’d never do again.

His son had the fair Marbury looks, but Delia’s eyes. One day he’d break hearts, but hopefully not his mother’s.

Delia had gotten used to running the show without his aunt. Even Arthur had moved out for propriety’s sake. She wasn’t the shy girl Jack married, though she was still incredibly young. He would have to be careful. He was, after all, a stranger to her.

Jack didn’t have a valet yet, so after his bath he rang for a footman to help him dress. His old jacket hung on him—he’d probably lost two stone. But at least he’d started his war nourished—there were so many soldiers who were barely fit to serve. It was a disgrace, a blot upon the Empire that there were people hungry and ill in the service of His Majesty. He had half a mind to say so when he spoke to the reporters tomorrow. What could the government do? Arrest him again?

He supposed they could. The brass were not at all pleased that their officers were captured and went out of their way to shame them. Jack almost preferred the Boer farmers’ interrogations—they, at least, had not thought him a coward.

He was feeling a little cowardly now, though he was as ready as he’d ever be. The mirror reflected a painfully thin fellow with shocks of sun-bleached hair and a sun-baked face, its color fading to a rather sallow yellow. Two years ago, he’d had fewer wrinkles. Jack practiced a smile—did it reach his eyes? Not quite. He was a different man than the one who’d left his young bride sleeping in her bed.

He wouldn’t leave her again. He’d resigned his commission—hell, he shouldn’t have gone soldiering to begin with. He was the Viscount Marbury and had numerous important affairs to attend to. His cousin Arthur had once been his heir, but now Jack had a son to raise. Birthday parties to organize. A country estate to supervise. A wife to talk up sweet and buy pretty trinkets for.

She’d worn the Marbury diamonds on their wedding night, a pair of earrings said to belong to a long-dead maharani.
Just
the diamonds—he’d been a dog to be so demanding, but she’d obeyed, the earrings glittering against her loose dark hair in the low lamplight. Jack supposed given her natural reticence she would have preferred to keep her exquisitely embroidered lawn nightgown on, but he’d been a greedy fellow and wanted to see all of her.

And seen her he had. Snow-white skin so translucent he could trace her veins. Small breasts the size of apples and tipped with deep brown areolas, such a contrast to her pale body. Dark curls at the juncture of her thighs which she’d tried to cover with a slim hand before he persuaded her to use it elsewhere.

She was perfect. What a lucky man he’d been, if only for one night.

He’d thought of that night through all the days he’d spent away from her. Now he wondered if she’d been glad he was gone.

Jack and Delia weren’t in love when they married, but their match was suitable in every way. They had been equal in looks and fortune and consequence. The love might come yet. Jack was ready for love—he’d earned it under the scorching South African sky.