Sweet Temptation (11 page)

Chapter 8

Sara stood at her window and watched the cold dawn turn the sky to ice blue. Everything inside her felt the same way, only there was an emptiness there as well, a feeling of helplessness, a sense of having lost her way and having no idea how to find it again. And there was nowhere she could turn for help. She couldn’t possibly tell anyone what had happened, not even Betty.

She could still feel the tremors of fear that had shaken her body as Gavin tore the gown from her, the flush of chagrin that had turned her skin to crimson as he ravaged her body, the surge of rage that he would, against her will, use her in such a manner. She couldn’t decide whether she had been more embarrassed, afraid, or angry, but what did it matter now? Gavin was gone and unlikely to come back. She told herself she didn’t care if he never came back, but she knew it was a lie. She cared very much, if for no other reason than that her marriage to Gavin was for the rest of her life. She couldn’t just ignore last night and pretend it never happened, but neither did she know what to do to put it behind her. You’ve got to think of something, she told herself angrily. You’re partly responsible. Your abysmal ignorance may not be your fault, but Gavin had a right to expect more from his bride.

She gathered her robe more tightly around her, to keep out the cold that pervaded the room.

She could almost laugh when she thought back to her behavior last night. Could she really blame Gavin for being upset with her complete lack of knowledge? Maybe not, but she could blame him for being drunk and inconsiderate.
Maybe you should have been drunk,
she thought wildly.
At least you might not have acted like a silly idiot.
Cod, what a fool he must have thought her. What a fool she
was
not to have persisted, until someone told her exactly what was going to happen. The mere fact that everyone avoided the subject so assiduously should have warned her there was something very important she didn’t know. She was not used to thinking for herself—no one had ever allowed her to, much less encouraged it—but now she must. It was obvious she couldn’t depend on Betty or anyone else to help her out of this awful mess.

She sighed and leaned against the windowsill. Assigning blame was not going to do the least bit of good, unless she could fix what was wrong. Besides, last night was behind her now. It would do no good to continue to dwell on it. She had been wrapped up in a daydream, convinced that everything would work out after the wedding, just as magically as it had before.

“For an intelligent woman, you have just given a convincing imitation of one of those foolish girls at Miss Rachel’s,” Sara castigated herself aloud. “You have a lot to do, and it will take all the intelligence you possess to accomplish it.”

With energy born of frustration, she turned and strode across the room, only to be brought up short when her eyes fell on her wedding veil. With trembling hands, Sara picked it up. Sadly she looked at the wilted flowers. Yesterday they had been a symbol of joy; today they were as dead as her dreams of the future.

But one thing was unchanged: she still loved Gavin and wanted to preserve her marriage. She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about him now—her feelings were so tied in a tight knot she couldn’t separate one from another—but she understood enough to know that her marriage was vitally important to her. Nothing would ever be the same after last night, but it hadn’t changed the basic fact that she wanted to be Gavin’s wife. She didn’t know why that was so, she just knew it was.

Even though she didn’t want to admit it, Sara knew there was no place for her in society outside of her marriage. If she wanted to be accepted, she had to stay married. If she were to stay married, she had to make their relationship work. And if she were to make it work, she had to have something to build on, even if it were no more than Gavin’s reluctant desire for her body.

And now that some of the shock had worn off, she could admit that Gavin had not been as rough as she had thought at the time. He certainly had not been gentle, especially when she asked him to leave, but then she didn’t understand much about men. She certainly couldn’t understand what he could have liked about last night that would make him want to repeat the experience. She could vaguely remember some pleasurable sensations, but they came nowhere near compensating for the feelings of disgust and shame. But she would think about that later. Right now she had to figure out how to establish some kind of friendship between them. Nothing was going to work, until they could learn to like each other.

Sara let her finger caress the smooth silk of the headpiece. All her life she had dreamed of such a veil. It had seemed a symbol of the love her husband would shower on her. Now she realized that without the love it was intended to represent, this symbol was no more than a cold, plain piece of cloth.

She had to talk to Gavin. She didn’t know what to say to him, but they had to clear away everything and start anew. She wasn’t sure he could do that, she wasn’t entirely sure
she
could, but there was no other choice, except to spend the rest of their lives blaming and avoiding each other. The picture of Gavin as he stood in the open door of her bedchamber flashed into Sara’s mind, and she knew she couldn’t live like that. She still loved him, at least she thought she did, but she also knew she felt an attraction to him that had not existed before, and that the attraction was physical. From the little she had learned about Gavin, she knew their physical relationship would be essential to any other relationship they had. After last night, she had a nagging suspicion that it could become true for herself as well.

But what if he wouldn’t come back? What if he was content to enjoy his mistresses for the rest of his life? Hadn’t he married her only to please his father and provide his mother with a grandchild? How was she going to recapture his interest? Recapture! How was she going to
gain
his interest when he had so emphatically stated he was not, never had been, and never would be interested in her?

Sara’s eyes misted as she stared at her veil. It was so beautiful and had looked so pretty on her. Gingerly she settled the headpiece on her hair and smoothed the lace veil around her. She almost looked like a bride again. Now her eyes filled with tears. She would never be a bride again, but would she ever be a wife?

For a moment, Sara’s back stiffened with pride. Why should she bother herself with a man who didn’t want her, she asked? She had done nothing to deserve his scorn or earn rejection. If he didn’t come to her, she would simply ignore him. But Sara rejected the thought almost before it Was complete. She had too much to lose by turning her back on her marriage after just one bad experience, no matter how horrifying. There must be something she could do.

She felt an overwhelming sense of despair, but she couldn’t cry. Her tears had run dry during the long hours of the black night. Now she sat dry-eyed, knowing her best weapon was the marriage contract. Gavin was tied to her just as firmly as she was to him; he could not ignore her forever. She would have to be patient, and if he didn’t come back, she would have to go to him. Sara didn’t want to think about that just yet. There were too many terrifying possibilities yawning before her timorous feet, but she was fighting for the rest of her life. It would be foolish to balk at anything that might save her marriage, when the only bar was fear of embarrassment, or fear itself.

Carefully she took off the veil. She would have Betty pack it away. One day she would put it on again, but not, she vowed, until her heart could swell with happiness at the memory of the years gone by.

Sara sat in her chair with stiff formality while the Earl responded to condolences from yet another pair of visitors. In the last two days, Sara had met more people than she had met in her eleven years at Miss Rachel’s. Surely everyone in London had come to Parkhaven House to express their sorrow at the Countess’s death, and extend their sympathy to her family.

As much as she was made unhappy by the Countess’s death—she had looked upon her as her only friend and ally—Sara was relieved that the Earl had something else to occupy his mind besides her own failure as a wife. At least he would have if there hadn’t been the continuing worry over Gavin’s whereabouts. The Earl made no secret of the fact that he held Sara responsible for Gavin’s absence of nearly a fortnight.

“It looks bad,” Olivia, had remarked at dinner the night before.

“And it’s damned hard to explain,” added the Earl. He was endeavoring to do that very thing right now to a fawning mother and her simpering daughter. Sara might be naive and inexperienced, but she could tell they had nourished hopes of Gavin themselves. The knowledge that, even with her freckles and strawberry blonde hair, she was much more handsome than the haughty Miss Dorothea Burroughs gave her vanity a much-needed boost.

“It’s so unfortunate that Lord Carlisle should be away from London at just this time,” Lady Burroughs was saying.

“And him just married, too.” This from Miss Dorothea who cast a smirking glance in Sara’s direction.

“We have been experiencing some difficulties with our Scottish estates as a result of this unfortunate rebellion,” explained the Earl. “He offered to spare me the necessity of traveling north in this season. Neither of us foresaw the Countess’s untimely death.”

“But the funeral is to be held tomorrow morning,” tuttutted Lady Burroughs. “I don’t see how he can possibly return in time.”

“I’ve sent someone after him,” the Earl said. “That is all we can do.”

Gavin had
not
been notified, because no one knew where he was. Every one of the Earl’s attempts to locate his errant son had came to naught, another of the circumstances which had conspired to put him in a black rage. Between the stream of awe-inspiring visitors and the reports of yet another failure to locate Gavin, Sara had come to dread the sound of the knocker.

“It will certainly be a sad homecoming,” stated Lady Burroughs, with a suitably lachrymose expression. “Everyone knows how extraordinarily fond Gavin was of the Countess. Are you sure there is nothing my son can do to help? He and Gavin are quite old friends.”

The Earl’s expression seemed unchanged, but Sara had learned that the color in his dark blue eyes turned almost black when he was angered. Now, in the face of Lady Burroughs’s patent refusal to believe that Gavin had gone to Scotland and her determined effort to wrest information from him, the Earl’s eyes were as black as onyx.

“It is most thoughtful of you to offer, but I expect we should see his arrival before we could get a new effort mounted.”

Hardly had the words left the Earl’s mouth when a disturbance was heard outside in the hall. Before anyone had time to wonder aloud at the cause of such an inexplicable commotion, the salon doors flew open with an ear-splitting crash, and Gavin stood on the threshold, Clarice Wynburn followed uneasily in his wake.

Sara’s first impulse was to jump up from her chair and rush to Gavin’s side. The expression on his face made her pause, but it was the woman at his side who kept her rooted to her chair. She was a beautiful woman, sophisticated and mature, and her body was expensively gowned in a way that made Sara feel like a blushing, ignorant, sexless girl. Who was this woman and why was she with Gavin instead of his wife?

“Poor, unhappy boy,” gushed Lady Burroughs, the moment Gavin stepped through the door. She surged to her feet, her arms outstretched with the apparent intention of pressing the unfortunate “boy” to her very ample bosom. “Allow me to offer you my sincerest condolences.” But Gavin stared past Lady Burroughs at his father, his own black eyes filled with pain and rage.

“Clarice tells me Mother is dead.” He was unable to keep his voice from breaking on the last word. Sara was almost embarrassed to have to look upon the suffering in his face, but the Burroughs women hungrily devoured every detail, no doubt storing it up for retelling later.

The Earl rang a small bell before answering. “She died two days ago,” he said, struggling to contain his feelings in the face of the inquisitive visitors.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was so ill?” Gavin demanded.

Sara wondered if he could have endured watching his mother die. She wondered, too, if it might not have been the Countess’s decision not to tell her beloved son that she had so little time left.

“Since you profess to love your mother so very greatly, I wonder that you did not see she was gravely ill.”

“I didn’t know.” It was not offered as an excuse. It was an acceptance of guilt.

Two weeks of living in Parkhaven House had done a lot to disabuse Sara of her favorable opinion of the Earl’s character, but the pointless cruelty of his words truly shocked her and she dug her nails into the arms of her chair as she watched Gavin turn white with shame. The accusation was cruelly unfair, but she could see Gavin thought he deserved it, and that he would never forgive himself for not being at his mother’s side at the end.

But Sara knew it was his marriage to her which had driven concern for his mother from his mind. She could not evade the feeling of guilt that settled over her like a suffocating blanket, but even stronger was the feeling of anger at the Earl’s brutal treatment of his son.

Couldn’t he see how much Gavin was suffering? Couldn’t he at least wait until these horrible women had left? The words of reproof popped out of her mouth before she had given them conscious thought.

“I’m certain Gavin would have, remained here if everyone in the house, including the Countess, had not done their best to keep him from knowing just how ill she was,” Sara said angrily. “Did you tell him she had very little time left, or did you leave him to guess?”