Seducing the Beast (6 page)

Suddenly Maddie understood. Striding around her sister’s chair, she cried, “Incapable! Of course, I see! You mean he cannot get his cock erect.” Remarkably pleased with herself for figuring it out, she retrieved the embroidery that fell at her feet and used it to cool her sister’s scorched cheeks. “I don’t know why no one ever speaks plainly about these matters. It is only rumpy pumpy and we all know it exists.”

“Ladies,” Eustacia sternly reminded her, “do not use words of that nature in public.”

“None of us would be here without it, would we?” Maddie replied. But her mind already moved on. So much for seduction. Still, there was always an alternative. She could try talking to the man. As her father often said, when there was a favor she wanted badly enough, she could talk the wax out of a man’s ears.

Later, when Gabriel Mallory arrived at the house, Madolyn asked if he might arrange an audience for her with his brother.

His slurred reply was thus: “My dear Mistress Madolyn, he’ll eat you alive. I could not, in all conscience, put you in his way, for he has a temper like the very devil when roused. If you catch him on a bad day he is likely to hunt you down, and your family, to see you hoisted on the gibbet and left for scavengers to pick out your eyes.”

Although he laughed, she was not entirely sure he teased. Luckily she kept a contingency plan already in place. Cousin Nathaniel must be saved and she would put his case before the Beast, one way or another.

It was not in her nature to give up on a good cause, and peril only made her goal that much more alluring.

The day, which began so fine, now returned to its usual mood. A bone-cold wind blew through the arches of the gallery, and the first fat drops of rain spattered Griff’s boots. Looking up, he saw a lit candle fluttering wildly in the open window of his apartments, where the rain would eventually put it out. His new manservant, Wickes, was either airing out the room or too slow to shut the window.

Entering his chambers, he swept off his cloak, yelling for Wickes and kicking the door shut with his foot. There was no refreshment left out, nothing to wet his dry mouth, and he was in no state to survive a visit from his wife without wine to dull the senses. But there was no reply to his gruff summons.

At least the fire was lit.

He sincerely hoped Wickes wouldn’t turn unpredictable or brain-addled, like Matthew, the last good man he was forced to dismiss. Wickes was possibly the most unprepossessing fellow he’d ever hired, but he’d learned his lesson with handsome, spirited, talkative Matthew, who’d had the sheer audacity to fall in “love” and choose a woman over his duty to the earl. Wickes, with his lank, greasy hair, limp demeanor and perpetually moist nose, the contents of which were often smeared along his sleeve, was a welcome change. He, at least, wasn’t likely to run off with a giggling female.

Flinging his drenched cloak across the nearest chair, he cursed the English weather. He’d almost forgotten how quickly the sky could fall.

“Wickes!” he bellowed again.

Striding to the door, he swung it open and looked out into the hall. There was no guard outside his door, an odd fact he was in too bad a mood to consider long. Slamming the door shut, he turned, suddenly catching some slight movement in the shadows.

It was too late for wine. His wife was already there, sitting primly in the corner by the open window, her large, full-lipped mouth curled in disgust and disappointment. Perhaps she’d hoped he wouldn’t return to England, at least not in one piece. The fluttering candle drew sinister shadows across her face, accentuating the elegant slope of her broad brow, the slender line of her nose and the sharp angle of her high cheekbones.

“I sent your man out so we could talk alone,” she said in a dispassionate, clipped voice, each word granted with apathy, as if he bought her conversation by the syllable. Perhaps, he mused, that was how she calculated her annual allowance.

Eighteen years may have slunk by since their wedding night, still, each time he saw her, he relived the humiliating ordeal. He was barely seventeen then, his experience limited to brief, hasty encounters with girls on his father’s estate. The future generation of Swaffords didn’t depend on his performance with them. There was no pressure, merely uncomplicated, quickly-known and speedily-forgotten pleasure. In the case of a wife, especially one hand-picked by his father, it was different. Her only purpose was to beget an heir. Although she’d made it clear from the beginning she found him unattractive and took an aversion to his bed, she was glad enough to revel in his wealth and the privileges she knew as his wife.

She lived in Leicestershire now, in a house she’d brought to the marriage as part of her dowry. She wanted nothing from her husband beyond his name and wealth, certainly wanted no more of “that” as she called it. And by Christ was he grateful she’d taken an immediate distaste to conjugal relations.

On their wedding night, she’d lain there, this infamous beauty, indifferent and pristine. He’d been almost afraid to touch her in case he got her dirty. He’d tried closing his eyes, thinking of anything else, but she’d been lifeless under him, a reluctant vessel impatient to get it over with. Lady Isabelle Blanchard had been considered prime stock for the Swafford stables, and he a mere boy eager for approval, desperate to prove himself worthy. Five years his senior, a spoiled, cosseted only child with a mean, spiteful temper, she’d ridiculed him for his failure to perform in the marriage bed. He was little better, so she said, than a young bull, sweating over her. She was repulsed by it. The more he’d tried, the more she hated it; the more she’d railed at him and mocked him, the more he’d shrunk away inside, until he shut out the world as far as he could.

When the first few months passed and there was no child in her womb, his father berated him for it, reminding him of his Swafford duty.

“I might have known,” he’d ranted. “I suppose you’ll undo everything ten generations of Swaffords have achieved. Are we to be brought down by a fool boy who cannot perform the most basic of duties?” The marriage, however, was binding. In his father’s mind, an annulment or divorce was a modern-day outrage, an admission of failure, not to mention the scandal it would cause, the besmirching of the honorable Swafford crest. He’d chosen Isabelle for his son and he was always right. It was almost as if he thought Griff had failed deliberately to embarrass him, therefore he must not be permitted to get away with it. He would produce a child with Isabelle. His father, even on his deathbed, still insisted, and his father’s word was law.

Now here she sat, the untouchable fortress, bringing the horror back again.

Always precise and scrupulous in her movements, she slid her elegant hands from a large ermine muff, set it to one side, smoothed down her sleeves, checked her neck ruff, and then slowly lifted the lace veil of her bonnet. Apparently she meant to stay a while, but the quicker he got her out of his sight the better.

“What do you want?” he asked. He could have said, “How
much
do you want?” She always attacked him in the purse, because she knew where it hurt him most. She was cruelly skilled at summing a person up at first sight, finding how best to cause them pain.

“I want an additional two hundred a month,” she said in her brittle, emotionless voice. This was excessive, even for her. Until she added, “To come back and live as your wife.”

A sudden gust blew rain in at the window, ruffling the veil of her headdress, toying with the feathers. For a brief moment, they regained the life they’d known before being plucked from a hapless pheasant and requisitioned for the frivolous decoration of a velvet bonnet.

“I fail to understand.”

“It’s surely time we came to a better arrangement.”

After eighteen years? He thought perhaps he’d walked through the wrong door into some nightmarish, supernatural world, where everything was inside out and upside down.

“I’ll keep Blanchard House as my own retreat, and we’ll share a bed no more than once a month.” She spoke with confidence. No flush of shame colored her face, no nuance of doubt marred her speech. It seemed she thought he pined for her, and would eagerly take her back, arms outstretched. Admired throughout her life as a great beauty, she assumed no man would refuse whatever scraps she threw his way.

“For the discomfort of doing your duty as my wife, you want two hundred additional pounds a month?” he clarified slowly.

Her eyes, previously vacant, shimmered with spite-formed crystals, like frost on a window. “Reasonable compensation for the inconvenience.”

“What happened to your other lovers?” He knew she’d found pleasure with other men since their wedding, and now she assumed the fault for their abysmal coupling lay with him. “Did you grow bored, or did they?”

Gliding silently across his floor, she leaned down, pushing her white, powdered face so close to his that he saw the little cracks forming. “I came here to offer a truce. Do you really want to discuss my lovers and how they pleased me as you never could?”

He was bemused by her apparent desire to see him jealous, when he could hardly care less what she did, or who she did it with. She wanted to prick him with her witch’s needles. It was a female need to make a man jealous, he supposed, any man, even one they hated.

“Why? After eighteen years?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“You need an heir.”

“I have one--my brother.”

“Are you truly content to leave the estate in Gabriel’s tender hands, knowing his choice of female companion? Rumor is he plans to marry Lady Shelton.”

His hands clasped tightly around the arms of his chair, his eyes focused on her narrow, veiny throat. “My brother’s choices continue to disappoint, but he’s young yet. His tastes will mature.”

“Apparently he’s in love with her. Men will do strange things for love.”

Love
? Even this viper of a woman believed in that nonsense? Apparently he was the only sane soul in the country.

She straightened up, palms pressed together. “Will you let her offspring sully the Swafford lineage? Can you tolerate the idea of her child inheriting the estate and the earldom?” Now she raised her praying fingers to her chin in a thoughtful pose. “I hear her father languishes in debtor’s prison, and her brother is exiled for piracy. Her family is nothing. She has no fortune. She’s been passed from man to man, and put three husbands in their graves already. Will Gabriel, your beloved brother, be her fourth victim? Once he’s impregnated her with the next Earl of Swafford, of course.” She smiled thinly. “Is that what you want?”

“It will never happen.”

“Then you must provide another heir.”

“How do you propose I do that?” he ground out his words, each one carefully controlled.

She shrugged. “We can try again. We are, sadly, stuck with one another. Rather than let
her
child inherit, I’m willing to share your bed once a month, until the child is conceived. Then it need not continue and you can pay me a lump sum, to be agreed upon later, depending on the sex of the child. Think of it as a pension of sorts.”

Oh, she had it all planned. He ought to give her credit for thinking of her future financial status. If Gabriel did marry, she realized her position would slowly be usurped, ultimately her power stripped away. Having provided no heir, she’d be superfluous, and when Griff died, she’d be passed over, her advantages as his wife, gone. There was, of course, a widow’s jointure, but she was a woman of expensive tastes. She wanted to be the mother of the next earl as insurance for her future comforts and she knew how devoted he was to Swafford duty.

Alas, these were his sad choices: bed his wife, or rely on his brother’s judgment to provide a worthy heir. Not for the first time, he wished he might escape this life and be someone else entirely, even if it was for one day only.

It was sickening, her cold, calm cunning, her willingness to use his bed despite her obvious disgust for him as a man. Accustomed to being used, he knew he’d never been anything more to his wife than the provider of her feathered nest. Why it should suddenly hit him so hard today, he couldn’t imagine, but the thought of trading his life in for another became more and more agreeable.

If he was truly as powerful as most folk believed, he could simply have her neck broken and her body thrown down a flight of stairs, as, it was rumored, Robert Dudley dealt with his unwanted wife. Alas, he was obliged to be civilized. Duty and honor came first in the life of a Swafford, and for him, there was no option of annulment or divorce. Such a scandal was not to be borne, and he was, as she said, “stuck” with the woman he married, as many unhappy Swaffords had been before him. He’d promised his dying father that this marriage, like a foul canker, would take one of them to the grave before it was ended, and a Swafford vow, once made, was not to be undone, however tortuous.

She was, he realized, nearing the end of her childbearing years, hence the sudden haste. He actually considered it for a moment. Having another heir to the Swafford estate would certainly solve the problem with Gabriel. The countess was, in the eyes of God and the law, still his wife. Her body was his property.

However, a new spirit flourished inside him today, spinning clumsily, knocking into things. It was nothing to do with Swafford obligation and everything to do with him as a person, as a man. He couldn’t understand it, or where it came from, and it made any sensible, dutiful decision quite impossible.

Slowly he drew his fingers across his mouth. “Unfortunately, I have a number of appointments this evening. I must decline the offer, however enticing. Perhaps…another time. We’ll talk again later.”

Isabelle stared, uncomprehending.

“In the meantime, I’ll give due consideration to your proposal,” he added. “I’m flattered by your willingness to suffer degradation on behalf of future heirs to my estate.”

She finally understood he mocked her. “Do you think I wanted to come here and throw myself at your feet? I could have anyone.”

“As indeed you do, so my spies inform me.” He leaned back, stretching out his long legs, ankles crossed. “I think I’ll skip my turn today. If you make haste you might catch the crowd exiting the theatre and find someone there to service you.”