Sweet Temptation (14 page)

“That is not the issue at all. You are his wife.”

“Does that automatically make me deaf, dumb, and blind, or am I just supposed to act stupid?”

“You’re supposed to be above such matters. Your purpose is to provide your husband with an heir, and that’s impossible for you to accomplish with Gavin four hundred miles away.”

“I can wait until he returns.”

“If
he returns,” muttered the Earl, mostly to himself. For a moment, his gaze seemed to travel faraway, and Sara thought he was going to sink into an abstraction, but he roused himself and turned back to her.

“I shall join the Duke in two days.” He didn’t even pause to allow Sara to answer him. “I’ve made arrangements for you to have one hundred pounds for your personal needs, paid to you quarterly. However, my steward will remain in control of the house. Do not attempt to alter my arrangements. He has been instructed to ignore any requests to do so.”

“I will not stay locked up in this great house with only the caretaker for company,” Sara declared wrathfully.

“Suit yourself, though I doubt a hundred pounds will run to the lease of a house and hiring of servants.” He rose to go. “Don’t put my steward to a lot of unnecessary trouble. I would dislike it.”

“Don’t you care what
I
dislike?” Sara demanded. She didn’t know why she continued to be surprised at his attitude.

“No,” the Earl said, pausing on his way out. “I am only interested in you as a means of providing the family with an heir.”

“And if I should succeed?” demanded Sara, coming at last to the reason she had wanted to see the Earl.

His cold eyes moved over her with contempt. “Then I suppose I should be forced to reorder my opinion of you.

“That’s not enough. If you want an heir badly enough to force Gavin into marriage against his will, you ought to be willing to give up something important for it.”

“Such as?”

“Control of my own fortune.” The Earl regarded her more soberly for some time.

“And if I refuse?”

“Why should you? You can’t hold on to my money forever, and even if you could, it won’t give you an heir. Also, if you don’t make more suitable provisions for me, I shall bring you into court, and that would create a scandal you won’t like.”

“You won’t succeed.”

“But then, neither will you.” The two protagonists faced each other, each trying to measure the other, each trying to fathom the other’s strength. Sara’s knees shook and her whole body felt weak with uncertainty, but her eyes did not fall.

“I can’t give you control of your principal. Your father’s will leaves it to your husband.”

“But Gavin can turn it over to me.”

“What makes you think he would?”

“He would if you asked him. He doesn’t care about my money.”

“Why do you think Gavin would do anything
I
wanted?”

“You forced him to marry me.”

“Ah, but that was for his mother. I doubt I could persuade him to walk across the street to save my neck.”

“You’ll find some way,” Sara insisted.

“I think I just might,” said the Earl thoughtfully, intrigued by Sara’s proposal. “I have the power to interfere with the property his mother left him. I think he would agree to almost anything, if I were to relinquish that right.”

“Then you will give me my money if I succeed?” demanded Sara. The Earl studied her for a moment, and then brusquely prepared to take his departure.

“I don’t suppose you will be able to do anything more than become a thorn in his side, but if you should succeed, I will transfer control of your principal and income to you. It will be worth anything to keep that bastard Hawley from stepping into my shoes.”

“Put that in writing,” Sara said, and produced a piece of writing paper from her pocket. The Earl regarded her with surprise, and then actually smiled.

“Certainly.” He took up the paper, searched for and found pen and ink, and sat down to write. “I, Oliver Carlisle, Earl of Parkhaven, do agree to hand over to Lady Sara Carlisle control of her inheritance and its income on the day she becomes the mother of a healthy male heir to the Parkhaven title and estates. It is a further condition that she must be living under the same roof as her husband and be in good charity with him.” The Earl read over his words, waved the paper in the air to dry the ink, and then handed it to Sara after signing and dating it.

“There’s your agreement,” he said standing. “Now please don’t inflict yourself upon me, until you’ve fulfilled its conditions.”

But for once his words had no power to hurt Sara. She had the promise she wanted, and the taste of success was sweet.

Chapter 10

Having cleared the first step, Sara was free to concentrate on Gavin, but she hardly knew how to begin. For years she had imagined him to be a slim boy with a merry laugh and dancing eyes, only to learn that he had grown into a tall man with a powerful body and an unforgettably handsome face. Yet before she could begin to assimilate the change, she found herself married to a morose and wrathful young man who had forced himself upon her in a drunken stupor, and kept a mistress besides.

Then, while she was still reeling from the shock of the Countess’s death, she discovered he was haunted by the death of a mother he loved deeply, and the fear he might turn out to be like the father he despised. He was more tortured and unhappy than she had ever been.

But though her mind might not know what to think, her heart felt no indecision. Learning that Gavin suffered and bled like all other mortals somehow made him seem more real, more human, and that had the unforeseen effect of virtually wiping out the nightmare of her wedding night. Her stubbornly romantic heart gathered up all the sympathetic impressions and merged them into a portrait of a man who would someday welcome her into his arms with a kiss and a laugh, and make her feel warm and secure for the rest of her life.

She had no basis for this feeling, neither Gavin nor his father had given her reason to discount the ugliness she saw, but she was convinced that if she could only get past the barriers erected by anger, pain, and fear, her picture of Gavin would be the right one.

It hadn’t taken Sara long to become jealous of the deep and unshakable love Gavin had for his mother. She longed to be the object of such fierce adoration. She chastised herself for being covetous of a son’s love for his mother, but she was envious of it nonetheless. She was certain she could have lived the rest of her life in joyous contentment on just a tithe of the love, gentleness, sensitivity, and consideration he lavished on the Gountess.

Almost as significant was Gavin’s violent condemnation of his father. It must have taken great courage to oppose the Earl so openly. Not only did he risk being disinherited, he risked being cut off from the only society of which he could ever be a part. No, it didn’t matter what the Earl said or what Gavin did, Sara was convinced that somewhere inside Gavin was the boy she remembered and the man who could love so generously, hate so intensely, and suffer so deeply.

It was a relief to have her mind made up at last. In the days immediately following their wedding, she had hidden in her bedchamber, horrified by the kind of man she had married, afraid he would come back, afraid he wouldn’t, afraid of facing the Earl’s anger, afraid of going back to Miss Adelaide. She had been helplessly caught between a past she didn’t want and future that didn’t want her, but the Countess’s death had disclosed the pain and fear that knotted and confined Gavin’s heart. Sara all but forgot her own misery in the face of his torment. Maybe he never would be the hero of her dreams, maybe he never would love her as much as she loved him, but there was a fine, honest, warm, and caring man hidden somewhere inside Gavin Carlisle, and she was determined to find him.

“We ought to go back to Miss Adelaide’s,” groaned Betty. “You have no business living in this great house alone.”

“I will
never
go back,” said Sara, her teeth clenched tight with determination. “We are going to Scotland and find my husband.”

“B-but we can’t,” stammered Betty. “That must be hundreds of miles away!”

“If he can travel that far, so can we.”

“He may not take you in.

“I’m his wife. He has to.”

“We don’t even know where he is.”

“I can always ask the solicitor,” Sara said, undaunted. “I have to see him about getting my money early.”

But the solicitor would not agree to pay Sara any of the hundred pounds until the first of the year. Once again her proud spirit got her back up, and she marched back to Parkhaven House, a defiant look on her face.

“It’s just as well we stole that money,” she barked at Betty, as soon as she stepped inside the door. “That miserable little man won’t give me a shilling until the first of the quarter. I refuse to sit around here another four weeks, but I don’t know if our fifty pounds will be enough. Do we have anything we can sell?”

“There’s all those clothes the Earl had made for you. Then there’s always your wedding ring.”

Sara looked down at the thin, gold band, and knew she could never part with her ring. There were times when it was the only thing that made her believe she was really married, that this whole terrible nightmare wasn’t just a bad dream.

“You’ll have to find something else,” she said quietly, as she lovingly fingered the golden circle. “This ring will never leave my finger.”

“A man!” echoed Sara, thunderstruck, when Betty told her she must travel in a disguise. “Why can’t I be disguised as a maid? You should be the man. As tall as you are, no one will question you.”

“But you’re too pretty to travel as a female.”

Sara was still so unaccustomed to hearing herself described as pretty, that she couldn’t repress a smile of satisfaction. “Then we’ll just have to travel as a lady and her maid.”

“We can’t,” Betty told her. “We don’t have enough money to hire a chaise and postilions. A real lady has to travel in a certain style, or nobody will believe she’s a lady. Then there’s the matter of accommodations. The best inns will turn us away, because a real lady never travels without male protection. I’m sorry, milady, but there’s nothing for it but for you to go as a man. Inns and taverns are not safe for a gently bred woman.”

“We can travel on the mail coach.”

“There’s still bound to be men who will take advantage of you,” Betty continued. “You know I’ll do my best to protect you, but his lordship wouldn’t like it if we was to get into trouble and have to disclose your identity.”

“Then his lordship should have seen to it that I was not put to the necessity of traveling alone,” snapped Sara.

“Of course he should, but there’s no sense blinking facts, and the fact is he ain’t here. I’ve thought it all out, and you can be my younger brother. Everybody’ll be so busy gawking at me, they won’t have any time to be wondering at your fair complexion and slight figure.” Sara continued to object, but her protests grew more feeble as she perceived the truth of Betty’s words, and Betty grew more firm as she noticed her mistress’s waning resistance. But when Betty returned with a suit of men’s clothes and a pair of scissors, Sara’s acceptance was at an end.

“You can’t expect to be taken for a young man unless you wear men’s clothing,” Betty pointed out sensibly, “and there’s no way you can hide all that hair under a hat. The first good breeze will blow it off, and then we will be in the suds.”

“I won’t let you cut my hair, not even to protect my virtue.”

“I won’t have to cut much,” Betty assured her. “The gentry wear their hair almost as long as ladies.” But the twelve-inch lengths that lay on the carpet after Betty had finished the job seemed like a lot to Sara.

“I look like a sheep after the shearing,” she said, staring gloomily at her reflection in the mirror.

“You won’t even notice it with this hat.” Betty handed her a three-cornered hat, and Sara laughed when she put it on, but she balked when Betty handed her the pants.

“It’s indecent.”

“Nobody will know it’s you,” Betty reasoned somewhat obscurely. “They’ll think you’re some schoolboy and pay no attention.”

Sara wasn’t convinced, and she was even less convinced when she saw herself in the shocking outfit. “I can’t possibly be seen like this,” she protested, cringing at the thought of appearing in public.

“You’ll have to act like a man, too,” Betty warned her. “That means no hiding in corners. Men aren’t shy that way, and they never stay indoors unless they have to. And when they do, they always keep to the company of other men.”

“But I don’t know what men do,” Sara protested, a feeling of panic rising inside her. “I never even had a brother.”

“That’s true,” admitted Betty, pausing to ponder this point.

But the thought of going back to Parkhaven House, or living in some cheap lodging until Gavin returned, stiffened Sara’s resolve. Her bet with the Earl held out the promise of a freedom which looked sweeter every time she thought about it. And then there was Gavin. Pride might decree that she wait for him to come to her, but common sense told her it was a waste of time and a dangerous gamble.

“I’ll think of something,” she told Betty, with a confidence she didn’t entirely feel. “I
will
reach Scotland.”