Mary Balogh (21 page)

He lifted his head and looked down into her open eyes. He could see no anger there, no repugnance, no fear—only a calm acceptance of the moment.

He got slowly to his feet, pulled loose the sash of his dressing gown, and shrugged out of it. He watched her, giving her plenty of time to send him away. Her eyes were on his. He lifted his nightshirt over his head, dropping it beside the dressing gown. Her eyes roamed over him as he watched her. She still had not told him to go away.

She lifted her eyes to his as he drew back the bedclothes and grasped her nightgown at the hem and slid it up over her body. She raised her arms when she realized that he was not going to stop at her waist. He dropped her nightgown on top of his own garments.

It was strange, he thought, that in five years of a perfect marriage they had never been naked together. He had never seen her as he was seeing her now. With his hands and his body he had known her to be beautiful and desirable, and his eyes had confirmed the evidence of his other senses when she was clothed. But their married years had been very decorous. Very close. Very, very loving. But lacking somewhat in physical passion.

She was beautiful beyond description, his thirty-six-year-old estranged wife. His daughter’s mother. Livy. She moved over on the bed as he lay down beside her. He did not extinguish the candle.

She was Livy. His eyes told him that in the candlelight, and his hands and his body, too. And yet she was a woman he did not know. His hand at her waist and his mouth on hers told him that she was instantly on fire, that there need be no slow, painstaking efforts to arouse
her. She turned onto her side and her palm pushed its way up from his waist to his shoulder. She sucked on his tongue and arched her hips against his. He heard her moaning, as a certain shock in him gave way to instant response.

Livy. My God, Livy
.

His hand confirmed his expectation that she was hot and wet. Desperate for release. Too aroused for foreplay. He held her with one arm and stroked her with light and knowing fingers until she shattered against him. And he held her, crooning to her, unaware of what words, if any, he spoke, as her shudderings gave place to relaxation.

He held her for a few minutes longer before turning her onto her back and coming on top of her, spreading her legs with his knees, and mounting her while she came awake again.

She was warm, wet, languorous. To be enjoyed at his leisure. He wanted to take her slowly. He wanted always to be where he was at that moment. He wanted it to last forever. There never had been anyone but Livy. There never could be.

He loved her with a slow, deep rhythm, his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of it, his body knowing her again as he had known her as a young man, as a young husband. She was warm and relaxed and comfortable as she had been then. Loving her was an emotional and a physical experience intertwined, inseparable. Loving was the perfect word for what they had always done together in her bed and for what they were doing together now.

And yet he was not in the past after all. He was in the present. And she was different. After a few minutes she was no longer passive. Her hips picked up the rhythm of his loving, circling to his movements, and she lifted her legs from the bed to twine about his. Her shoulders were
pressing into the mattress, her breasts lifting to press more intimately against his chest. She was breathing in gasps.

He lifted his head and looked down at her, and she looked back, her lips parted, her eyes heavy with passion. His woman? Yes, his woman to stroke into, to pleasure, to love. His woman to bury himself in, to bring him release. To bring him peace. And love.

Her eyes closed as he changed his rhythm, deepening his penetration of her body. And she could no longer keep the rhythm, but pushed up against him, taut with need.

He watched her, felt her body’s response with his own, waited for that indefinable moment when he knew that she would come to him, and lowered his head into her hair again, coming to her at the same moment. And he allowed pure physical reaction to take him beyond the moment and into the world of semiconsciousness beyond the climax. Her body was soft and comfortable beneath his own.

S
HE DID NOT
regret it. She
could
not regret it. She had longed for him ever since that afternoon in the hidden garden. She had discovered then how close to starvation she had been for fourteen long years. She might have kept her sexuality unexpressed for the rest of her life, but once having had him again, her hunger gnawed at her like a physical pain, like a warning of imminent death.

She had ached for even a sight of him while in London. She had even cried for him. And she had been unable to sleep earlier, or to read, either, though she had been trying to lose herself in a book. She had been too aware of his presence in the very next room, probably
asleep. Her need for him had been a throbbing deep in her womb.

She had thought first of all when she had turned her head for surely the twentieth time in an hour and seen him standing silently in the doorway to her dressing room that he must be a product of an over-fertile imagination.

She had wanted him with a sick yearning while they talked and when he sat down on the side of her bed and took a lock of her hair between his fingers.

She did not regret what had happened. Or if she did, it was only the fact that she had been so uncontrolled, so unable the first time to wait even for him to come inside her. She supposed she would feel embarrassed at that memory once the night was over. And he would perhaps laugh at the evidence she had given him of just how much she had missed him.

But the other loving, the one just finished, had been wonderful beyond imagining. He had often used to like to be in her for a long time. He liked the feeling of being physically one with her as well as one in every other way, he had used to tell her. “One body, Liv. It feels good, does it not? Tell me it feels good.”

It had always felt good because he was Marc and she loved him and she was doing what a wife does to show her husband that she loves him. Sometimes there had been the beginnings of active pleasure, occasionally even the near completion of pleasure, though always with something just eluding her.

That something was no longer eluding her. And she wondered if he always experienced that pleasure. If so, she could understand why he had liked to be intimate with her so often and why he had always slept so deeply afterward.

It was wonderful. She did not believe her body had ever felt so drained of energy and so relaxed. His weight
was heavy on her. Her legs, which she had untwined from his, were spread wide on either side of his. She felt too wonderful to sleep. She would not be able to lift an arm to save her life, she thought with a smile.

And what next?
her mind asked, refusing to be stilled as the rest of her body was still.
What tomorrow? And what next week—after Sophia’s wedding?
She tried not to think beyond the wedding.

What would she say if he asked her to stay?

What would she do if he did not?

She tried not to think.

He woke with a start and then lay still again. She waited for him to move. She hoped he would not. She hoped that he would fall back asleep or else lift his head and kiss her.

Marc. Marc. She tried to talk to him with her mind. She was afraid to speak. She did not know what to say. Did what had happened change anything? Everything? Nothing?

He lifted himself off her without looking at her and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. Then he got to his feet and crossed the room to look out of the window. The candle had burned itself out.

“You have had a good teacher, Olivia,” he said.

“What?” She was not sure she had heard what he had said.

He looked back over his shoulder. The room seemed curiously light. “He has taught you well, whoever it is,” he said. “And has obviously given you many lessons.”

She reached down for the blankets and pulled them slowly up over herself. She was still not quite sure that she understood.

“Clarence, I suppose?” he said.

Clarence? He was accusing her of having had a lover? And Clarence? Did he not know? Marc and he had been friends for years. But then Clarence had said that she
was the only one he had ever told and that he had never done anything to make anyone suspicious.

“You must not be afraid of me, you know, Olivia,” he had said to her one evening when he was escorting her home across the park from Emma’s.

She had never before thought of being afraid of him. But one gossip of the village had regaled them all quite improperly for part of the evening with tales of an unknown rapist in a town no more than ten miles distant. And she had not really been afraid, of course, only more conscious of the darkness and loneliness of the park.

“Perhaps you wonder why I have never tried to make love to you since Marcus left,” he had said. “I suppose you realize that there has been some gossip about us in the village since we do spend a great deal of time together.”

“I care nothing for gossip,” she had assured him.

“I must tell you something,” he had said. “Something I have never told anyone, Olivia, and never thought to tell. But you need to know that you must never fear me. I do not care for women in that way, you see.”

She had been stunned. “Do you mean …?”

“Yes, I do,” he had said. “And unfortunately it is something one cannot change by a mere effort of will. I am as I am. But no woman or man knows except you. For willpower does enable one to be chaste, you know. I have chosen chastity over the other choice. Are you totally disgusted?”

She had been. Nauseated, too. But he had been her dear friend for several years at that time.

“I am sorry,” she had said, “I cannot respond so soon, Clarence. I want not to be shocked. Certainly I want not to be disgusted. I think life must have been hard for you.”

“Life is never easy, is it?” he had said. “You know that better than anyone, Olivia. I shall call on you in a few
days’ time and you shall tell me quite honestly if you can continue to be my friend. And you must not lie to me. I shall know, you see.”

No, she supposed Marc did not know.

“You need not think that I am waiting for an answer,” he said. “I am not accusing you, Olivia. It would be rather ridiculous to start acting the outraged husband at this late date, would it not? I am glad, in fact, to find that you have been having some pleasure out of life. I imagine that he has been good to you?”

“He is my friend,” she said. “My dear friend.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Lady Mornington was at Lady Methuen’s soirée,” she said.

“Ah, was she?” he said. “I hope you avoided the embarrassment of coming face-to-face with her.”

“No,” she said. “We spoke. She seems a refined lady.”

“You expected a vulgar whore?” he said. “She is not. She is my friend.” There was a pause. “My dear friend.”

She said nothing.

He crossed the bedchamber and stooped down to pick up his nightshirt. He pulled it on and drew his dressing gown over it.

“Well,” he said, “must we feel guilt at this night of infidelity to our dear friends, Olivia? I think not, do you? We are, after all, still married in the eyes of church and state. And sentiment always attaches itself to such occasions as family weddings. I think we can forgive ourselves.”

“Yes,” she said.

He laughed softly. “At least you can forgive yourself,” he said, “even if you are unable to forgive others. Good night, Olivia. Sleep well.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good night, Marcus.”

After he had gone, she got out of bed, drew on her
nightgown, and sat on the window seat against which he had stood a few minutes before. A little later she returned to the bed to fetch a blanket to wrap about herself. And she stared out of the window into the darkness until she finally fell asleep a little before dawn.

T
HEY CAME SEEMINGLY BY THE DOZENS DURING
the next week, the wedding guests. There were family—the duke’s brother and sister and the former’s wife; their children with their spouses and children; two cousins of the earl’s and one of the countess’s, with their families; and friends of everyone, including the bride and groom.

“I had not realized there were so many rooms at Clifton, Papa,” Sophia said to him one afternoon after they had greeted cousins of two generations and a few infants of the third.

“If any more people arrive,” he said, putting an arm about her shoulders, “we may have to sweep the cobwebs out of the attics, Sophia, and even set up tents on the parapets. The next time you decide to marry, my girl, remember all that comes along with a wedding, will you?”

The next time you marry
. His eyes were twinkling down at her. He was teasing, of course. But she silently resolved that there would never be a next time. She could not do this to Papa again. Besides, she would have no wish to marry once this betrothal was safely in the past.

“Everyone has arrived,” she told Francis that evening when several of the younger people had strolled outside.

“And so they have,” he said. “I’ll wager your papa is glad there are only three more days of this, Soph. One trips over guests wherever one turns. Are you cold?”

“No,” she said through chattering teeth. “We cannot wait any longer, Francis. It is going to have to be done tonight. Is it to be by violent quarrel or amicable mutual consent? Either way it must be mutual, I think. I do not want you to seem thoroughly jilted.”

“You think we should have a few servants round everyone up and send them to the drawing room?” he said. “There is going to be an almighty squash in there, Soph. And who is to make the announcement? It can hardly be me since honor does not allow me to break a betrothal. You?”

“Me?” Her voice came out a squeak.

“Or perhaps there should be a private meeting with our parents first,” he said. “Perhaps your papa will make the announcement.”

“Oh,” she said and unconsciously took a death grip on his arm. “He will be so humiliated. It does not seem fair that the task should be his, does it?”