Scotsmen Prefer Blondes (27 page)

Every night, he was ravenous for her. It was astonishing, the speed with which he could transform from the proper, duty-bound Earl of Carnach to the passionate, playful man she’d married. When they were in their chamber, he shed his reserve like he shed his clothes, claiming her like he had to take everything he could before the sun rose.

If this were a fairy tale, he had fallen victim to some dark enchantment — a magical lover at night, destined to turn back to stone in the morning.

He was always out of bed when the sun rose. In Scotland, they had lain in bed for hours some mornings, making love and laughing and getting crumbs from their breakfast in the sheets. In London, he was already cloaked in his mental armor before her sleep-fogged brain could register the change. He would eat breakfast with his papers and leave the house shortly thereafter, obsessed with meeting peers and keeping abreast of the issues of the day. And he wouldn’t return until it was time to dress for that night’s parties — parties where he made all the right noises and said the right things to the right people.

Parties where he never laughed.

It was maddening. Amelia had thought she wanted her days to herself. But when they stretched endlessly in front of her, broken by dull duties to her household rather than passionate demands from her new husband, she wanted the old Malcolm back. She wanted the seductive sorcerer from their library, not the sober politician from their breakfast room. She wanted him to see what the life he’d chosen would cost them — and to understand that there were possibilities other than hardening his soul into a graveyard effigy before his body was even dead.

Amelia sipped her tea. It had grown cold while she brooded. She found she hated it almost as much as her eggs. As she set the cup onto the saucer, she let it slip from her hand. The tea rushed over the lip, flooding the tablecloth and cascading onto Malcolm’s untouched copy of the
Gazette.

He jumped, pulling his ledger out of the way before picking up the dripping paper between his thumb and forefinger. She felt a swift stab of satisfaction as the ink ran and the paper reverted to pulp.

Malcolm looked up at her, but there was no heat in his gaze — just concern. “Are you feeling well, dear?”

Dear
. Not darling. It shouldn’t have bothered her. But her voice couldn’t hide the chill. “Quite. I am sorry my clumsiness has ruined your morning.”

He dropped the paper back into the puddle. “Warwick, send a footman out for another paper.”

The butler bowed. He shouldn’t have had to be told — but then, Amelia suspected the hiring agency had not had many appropriate butlers to send on such short notice, and she’d done little to train him.

“Do you care to go upstairs while you wait for the paper?” she asked her husband. “I’m sure we can entertain ourselves.”

She didn’t even want to — she was too annoyed to fall into his bed so easily. But her request was a test.

For a moment he looked like he might pass. His eyes lit up, turning to that warm silver she now only saw at night, and his hand reached out to caress her cheek. His touch melted some of the ice around her heart, once again erasing the memory of his decision that she was just a distraction...

But when she melted, he hardened. He dropped his hand. “Would that I could. But Parliament just opened two days ago. I cannot miss a session already.”

“Does it matter?” she asked before she could stop herself. “Does anyone care whether you’re there?”

His silver eyes turned to steel. “I must start as I mean to go on. Someday they’ll care. But they won’t unless I’m there enough that they know me.”

“How lovely that you’re giving them a chance to know you,” she murmured.

Malcolm raked a hand through his hair. He looked like he wanted to argue. She hoped that he would. Their fight in the tower before leaving for London had cleared the air for a moment — but as she suffocated in the ton and he did his damnedest to conquer it, she knew their marriage was far from sorted.

They might not be ruined by her secret writing career after all — while Prudence refused to see her, there wasn’t a single whisper about
The Unconquered Heiress
with Amelia’s name attached to it. But after four weeks in London, Amelia knew the biggest danger to their marriage likely wasn’t her writing — it was all the words they weren’t saying to each other, welling up between them. Soon those words would be an ocean, unbridgeable, with dangerous riptides that could suck them both away.

She wanted him to say how he felt. Instead, his voice cooled. “You’re overset. I trust your tongue will be more civil at the parties we’re attending tonight.”

She sucked in a breath. When he grasped her hand to kiss it, she kept it in a fist. He kissed her knuckles anyway.

“If all you want is civility, you should have married someone else,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Can we not talk about our marriage yet again?” he asked, gripping the arms of his chair. “What’s done is done. We’ll have all the time in the world once I’m settled in Parliament. But I trust you can amuse yourself for now.”

They had talked about their marriage — just enough for her to feel nauseated and depressed, and vaguely homicidal.

She lifted her chin as she rose from her chair, tossing her napkin into the pool of tea between them. “Very well, my lord. I will amuse myself. And tonight I will be exactly the type of wife you need.”

He stood, still pretending to be a gentleman despite the glare in his eyes. “If you aren’t, you’ll get that conversation you seem to want — but I promise you will not enjoy it.”

She swept out of the room, ignoring his threat and the servants who gaped at them. He seemed to forget that these people were newly hired and not at all as loyal as his family retainers in Scotland.

But she didn’t care about her reputation. She needed to be away from him, to think about which of them was the guilty party in the mess that their marriage was quickly becoming. She wasn’t innocent either, not with her secrets, not when she was too scared to tell him how she felt or what she’d done until she was certain of his reaction.

And eventually she needed to decide whether to fight for him — or whether her writing, which is all that had mattered for so long, was still enough.

*    *    *

That night, Malcolm leaned back into the cushions of their new town coach. Amelia had greeted him quietly when he’d knocked on her door to escort her downstairs — not with annoyance, as he expected, or pleasure, as he wanted, but with calm resignation. Even now she refused to look at him. She looked down at her hands instead, where they were primly folded in her lap.

“What ails you, dear?” he asked. “You haven’t seemed yourself today.”

Her temper sparked. But if it melted the ice, it only melted it enough to drown her emotion. By the time she spoke, she had frozen again.

“Isn’t this what you want,
dear
?” she retorted. “Propriety?”

She’d promised that morning to be the type of wife he needed. Now he knew she was doing it to provoke him — and she had succeeded. But the carriage was rolling to a halt at the first rout party of the evening. He couldn’t afford to discuss their marriage now, not if he wanted to stay cool in the face of the ton.

So he let her statement pass. She glared at him before she remembered the show she was putting on for him. She returned to staring at her gloves and didn’t look at him again.

The first event passed in a blur of faces and a procession of inane conversation. Malcolm had never liked rout parties, so called for the route taken through the house — he and Amelia made a circuit of the drawing rooms, greeted the hostess, touched fingers and exchanged civilities with the other people they passed, and were out the door a quarter of an hour later.

When their carriage finally came back to them through the crush of vehicles outside the house, Malcolm handed Amelia up into it. She settled her skirts around her, remaking herself into a statue. He saw now why she’d been dubbed the Unconquered. Everything about her was icy perfection, contained, constrained, unattainable.

He wanted to smash through her façade. He wanted to bury his fingers in her hair, rip out the pins, and free her curls to let them flow over his hands. He wanted to hear her laugh, low and throaty and only for him.

The harsh blast of desire startled him. He clenched his fists against his thighs, vowing to stay in control.

“Wasn’t that lovely?” she said, after a few minutes of silence. “I do so love a good rout party.”

Her voice was drenched in sarcasm. He would have laughed, but his mood was too foul. “Then I’m sure the next one will make you even happier, dear.”

She looked out the window of their carriage, watching their slow progress through Mayfair. And she didn’t speak to him again, not at the second rout party, not when they returned to their carriage, and not when he escorted her up the stairs to Lady Delamar’s ball.

It was their final party of the evening. Malcolm didn’t even want to go in. He wanted to take her home, take her to bed, seduce her out of her pique, make her beg, make her scream for him — make her feel everything he felt. Make her accept their life together.

Make himself happy instead of miserable.

But he handed their cloaks to a maid, escorted Amelia into the ballroom, and greeted the hostess instead. He had turned thirty-five two weeks earlier — more than half the age his father was when he had died. Malcolm would run out of time to save the Highlands — he couldn’t waste the opportunities these social events offered.

“How long do you wish to stay, my lord?” Amelia asked when they left the receiving line.

He shrugged. “It depends upon the guests. If there are men worth meeting, we shall stay longer.”

There was a flash of something on her face — sadness? It surely wasn’t pity, but for a moment he saw her as he had in the old dower house, mourning for him even though he was alive at her side.

“May we dance first?” she asked. “I know it’s not proper for me to ask, but they are starting a waltz.”

He’d denied her that morning when she tried to lure him back into bed. But he wasn’t strong enough to deny her again.

“One dance,” he said.

“Of course. And then you can go be Lord Carnach.”

There was no accusation in her voice, just resignation.

He pulled her onto the floor. She’d taught him the waltz while they were in Scotland — it was still unacceptable in some circles and hadn’t been danced in London at all when he’d last visited the capital. In their castle, he could get as close as he liked, molding himself to her, teasing her until most of their lessons ended in lovemaking.

Here he held himself at the proper distance. But as they moved together across the floor, the music lured Amelia out from behind the wall she’d created. Perhaps it lured him out from behind his own wall, too. Somewhere, somehow, their marriage had devolved into a siege.

But when they were in each other’s arms, all of that faded into the background. As long as the music played, he could believe that the last few weeks were just a bump in the road, that their marriage would right itself again once they settled into their roles.

“I would ask your thoughts, but I think mine mirror them,” she said.

“I doubt that.”

She raised a brow. “So you’re not experiencing the same confusing mush of wanting to do murder or run off to the nearest bedchamber?”

He laughed. “You win the point, darling. That is what I was thinking.”

“Did you just laugh?” she asked with a quizzical frown.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

She paused while they negotiated around a slower couple. Then she looked at his face again, trying to read what else might be lurking in his eyes. “You never laugh at these events. I’ve missed it.”

“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” he said.

It was her turn to laugh, but hers was pained. “Romeo and Juliet had it easy, didn’t they?”

His hand tightened on her waist. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s easy enough to have a wedding. But everything that comes after...do you think they really would have been happy together? Or would their passion have flared out?”

“If you plan to drink poison, I’ll murder you myself,” he warned, suddenly worried.

“You know I’m too violent for poisons,” she said. This time her laugh was genuine. The light in her eyes was back, the light he now saw only in their bed.

He caressed her hand. Her other one dug into his shoulder. “Our passion shows no sign of slowing,” he said.

She didn’t answer. They finished the dance. Every time their bodies touched, the friction wore away at his resolve. Neither of them were happy — it was as plain on her face as it was in his gut.

But what would it take to be happy? And how could he put their happiness above the livelihoods of an entire clan?

Just as the music ended, Amelia sighed. “Thank you for the dance, my lord.”

She was wistful. He realized that she expected him to walk away. His last bit of resistance snapped. He could spare them a night, even if he couldn’t promise her tomorrow.

“Shall we go home?” he asked. “Only if you want to, of course.”

She smiled, slow and sultry. “Do you promise to laugh at least twice?”

“You’re making a bad bargain, wife.”

“I’m happy with the terms,” she said.

“You shouldn’t be.” He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, each one on its own, far less discreet than he should have been. “There are many things I want to do at least twice tonight — things you’ll find much more pleasure from.”

Amelia laughed. For a moment, it was like they were in Scotland again — just the two of them, with nothing hanging between them. He wanted to bottle that feeling, cork it and keep it someplace safe, so he could pull it out and quench himself with it during their next silent battle.

In the next minute she froze.

“What?” he asked, turning to look over his shoulder in the direction of her stare. Prudence Etchingham sat ten feet away, alone, at the periphery of a circle of spinsters and chaperones. It was the first time they’d encountered her at an event — either Lady Harcastle was economizing, or they weren’t usually invited to the caliber of parties that Malcolm and Amelia attended.