The Harem Bride (4 page)

Jason Lisbourne, Earl of Rocksley moved out
from behind his desk, waving his wife into one of two bergère
chairs with caned sides, placed catty corner to the blazing
fireplace, before he sat down opposite her. He was pleased with
himself. He had arranged a fine informal setting, rather than
speaking to his wife from behind the protection of his imposing
desk. Unfortunately, a second examination revealed that his wife’s
steely, though perfectly composed features, had not softened by so
much as an iota.

Annoyed, Jason said not what he planned to
say, but leaped straight into controversy. “May I ask what spark of
madness inspired you to be out on the road on such a night?”

“
Lack of funds,” his wife shot back.
“Your Mr. Farley is such a nipcheese I barely had funds enough to
pay the postboys a decent vail. There was nothing left for another
night at an inn.”

Stunned, the earl opened his mouth,
closed it, then said in a completely altered tone, “I assure you he
is not
my
Mr. Farley. He is
your aunt’s solicitor, and he is taking his almighty time settling
the many legalities involved in an estate the size of hers. If I
had ever dreamed he would not provide you with ample funds, I would
have sent you a personal draft on my bank. You have my deepest
apologies.

“
As you may have noticed—” Jason
paused, cleared his throat while cursing the pixies still pounding
anvils in his head. “I did not expect you before tomorrow at the
earliest. I had thought my guests would be gone by then.” The earl
eyed his wife with some trepidation. There was no sign of whether
or not she believed him. Perhaps, not, for, as he watched, her chin
rose by nearly a full inch.

“
My Aunt Cassandra was ill for quite
some time,” she said. “Until I read her will, I thought she had
retained her faculties until the very end. Obviously, I was
mistaken.”

“
I fear that beneath her iron façade
your aunt was a romantic.”

“
Do not be absurd!” Lightning flashed
from the clear blue of his wife’s eyes.

“
Your aunt recalled that you were
married, even if you did not.”

His countess gasped, half-rose from her
chair. One of the hands that had been so tightly clasped in her lap
flew up as if she were about to strike him. Jason raised an
eyebrow, but did not stir. “
I
did not recall I was married?” she cried
. “I?
Who is it whose name has been linked to
half the ladies in the
ton
,
and a vast array of the
demimonde
as well? Who never wrote to me? Never sent for me? Never
acknowledged my exist—”

Jason seized his wife’s still raised arm and
lowered it into her lap. “Peace!” he told her, incapable of saying
more as long-pent-up emotions warred within. Was it possible she
had expected them to live together? All those years while Cassandra
Pemberton had urged him to keep his distance, while she had dragged
young Penelope Blayne over half the world, the child had
thought—

The pixies crescendoed into a grand cacophony
of thuds. The earl’s thoughts deteriorated into profanity. But his
inner self rallied, valiantly pushing its way through the pain.
Perhaps this revelation was all to the good. The past could not be
changed, but it was more easily remedied if she was actually
willing—

“
All I wish from you,” his wife
declared with the precise enunciation of a barely controlled
temper, “is a small cottage in a quiet country village and enough
allowance to live in comfort until I come into my inheritance. You
may continue to live your profligate life as you please. I will not
trouble you further.”

Jason leaned back in his chair and regarded
his wife from beneath lowered lids. Heaven forbid she should see
what he was actually thinking, for he was strongly considering
sweeping her off to his bedchamber and finishing what had been
started so long ago. She was, he was discovering, rather
magnificent, even in her perfectly plain gray dress, her prim hair
style, and with her arrogant little nose tilted at a deliberately
insulting angle toward the ceiling.

“
A cottage in the country,” Jason
mused, stalling for time. “Have you not had enough of country
living during the long months of your aunt’s illness?”

The chin came down, her eyes as well, though
her gaze did not quite meet his. “I have discovered I like the
quiet of country living, of waking to the security of knowing one’s
neighbors, of knowing the routine of the day. I like walking in my
own garden, watching the seasons change in the same fields, woods,
ponds and streams.”

“
The world traveler has become a
country mouse?”

“
Yes,” his wife responded on a note of
steely determination.

In the sudden silence between them a log
hissed, cracked, fell in a shower of sparks. Neither adversary
noticed.

~ * ~

“
And now allow me tell you what I have
in mind,” Jason said to his wife. He settled his hands on the arms
of his chair and made a conscious effort to look older and wiser.
He
was
older and wiser,
dammit, and Earl of Rocksley, a member of the House of Lords
(however few times his face had actually been seen there). He was
Penelope Blayne’s Trustee. He had complete power over her. A
cottage in the country be damned. She was his wife!

Penelope Blayne Lisbourne, Countess of
Rocksley.

It used to terrify him. Somehow, at the
moment, it had a rather nice ring to it. Obviously, the dread age
of thirty had scrambled his wits, turned him into an addlepated
numbskull, a muttonheaded skitterbrain, possibly short a sheet,
even queer in the attic.

“
I believe,” the earl said carefully,
“that in her last illness your aunt thought about the things she
had missed in her life. She may have regretted never settling down
in one place, never marrying or having children. Oh, I don’t
doubt,” he said, holding up his hand to keep his wife from
interrupting, “that Cassandra Pemberton treasured her independence,
but in the end I think she may have wished something else
for
you
. Her infamous will
was, I believe, not only an attempt to rectify the harm done to you
so long ago, but to secure her own immortality through
you.”

Jason could see from Penny’s blank look that
she had failed to understand him, so he plunged inexorably on. “Has
it not occurred to you that neither of us is getting any younger?
That we should, perhaps, consider the immortality of offspring, for
ourselves as well as for your Aunt Cassandra?”

His wife’s eyes snapped shut, all color
drained from her face. Jason leaped to his feet, striding across
the room for the brandy bottle. When she had managed a sip or two,
Penelope murmured her thanks, then—quite courageously, he
thought—looked him straight in the eye. “You are suggesting, at
this remarkably late date, that we live as man and wife.”

“
In a word . . . yes.”

For a moment, Penny’s spirit faltered.
Her gaze plummeted to the hands in her lap, which were clenched so
tightly her knuckles cracked. He dared . . . he
dared
to calmly sit there, after all these
years, and tell her he was at last ready to be married. Rakehell
was too fine a word.
Beast. Sadist.
Satyr!

For the first time since her arrival at
Rockbourne Crest Penny took a good look at her husband. Inwardly, a
surge of misgiving swept through her, hopefully unnoticed. There
was no doubt about why the Earl of Rocksley had acquired his
notorious reputation as a rake. Even with eyes still bloodshot from
his dissipation of the night before, he was wickedly handsome. If
one did not know of his ill-spent life, it would be so easy to say
that the promise of his golden youth had been fulfilled. From his
fashionably tousled warm brown curls down to the shining tips of
his Hessians, the Earl of Rocksley was a wonder to behold. He had
grown another inch or two, she thought, and filled out, adding as
much as two stone, all of which appeared to be muscle. His nose was
a bit more aquiline, accenting the lines that now etched his face.
But his eyes . . . they were still that liquid greenish blue that
had hovered so close to her own, making silent promises she had
thought she understood only to discover—

No matter. Here they both were, and the past
must be put behind them. They must deal with their world as it was
now, not the world of might-have-been.

Penny’s gaze dropped lower. There was
some satisfaction in noting that he had dressed for the occasion.
No country clothes this morning for the Earl of Rocksley. Of
course, that was more likely due to the efforts of his valet, who
would have heard the tale of her disaster of an entrance last
night. She flicked another glance at her husband’s face. Sadly,
Penny concluded that Jason had probably been in no case to choose
his own clothes this morning. She could dismiss the thought that
the perfectly cut burgundy tail coat, the finely embroidered cream
waistcoat with gold buttons, or the biscuit-colored pantaloons had
been donned in her honor. And, certainly, it was his valet who had
fashioned the intricate arrangement of his cravat. Her husband’s
boots, she noted as her gaze lowered still further, did not sport
the tassels so prized by the dandies of the
ton
.

“
Will I do?” the earl inquired in an
ominously silky tone.

With as much slow insolence as she could
manage, Penny raised her eyes from the earl’s Hessians. “I waited,
you know,” she told him. “I waited until I was eighteen and quite
grown up. Then I waited until I was nineteen, certain that you
would send for me. And then I made excuses. With all our travels,
your letters must have gone astray. Yes, surely that was it. The
next time we returned to Pemberton Priory, there would be word. A
summons for me to take my place beside you.”

Penny plunged on, disregarding the faint
sound of the earl drawing a deep breath. “And then, finally, when
Aunt Cass told me I must put a stop to my foolish notions, that I
must forget you, live my life as if you had never existed, I made a
quite determined effort to do so. I presumed”—it was Penny’s turn
to draw a deep breath—“I presumed you, or perhaps your father
before his death, had arranged an annulment. Under the
circumstances . . . it would not have been too difficult, not for
someone with the wealth and influence of the Earls of
Rocksley.”

She wanted to tell him more, to twist the
knife, recounting the hours she had spent waiting for her hero, her
savior, her lover, to remember he had a wife. But she wouldn’t, of
course. She had too much pride.

“
There was no annulment.”

“
I suppose I made a very fine shield,”
Penny spat, anger erupting as from a volcano bursting its bonds.
“You could rake and riot all you wished and never fear parson’s
mousetrap. Tell me, my lord, how many times have you waved your
marriage lines before an outraged father’s face?”

“
Nothing quite so dramatic, my dear,”
the earl responded, calmly enough. “Our marriage lines are locked
safely away in the Muniment Room, and I have never actually had to
show them. After all, no one would dare question my
word.”

“
You are horrid! I cannot think why I
wore the willow—”

“
Cut line, dear girl. Oh, I may have
been a callow young pup with visions of Camelot, dragons, and fair
maidens scrambling what wits I had at that age, but I was not
without honor. I, too, fully expected our marriage was a commitment
for life. But your darling Aunt Cass—the selfish old witch—warned
me off. Evidently, she did not wish to lose you. Or your services.
And I, I admit, was glad enough to have a few years of freedom, to
rake and riot, as you call it. A man needs to feed his
amour-propre
, to spread his wings
and preen before the ladies. To allow the gentler sex to knock off
the rough edges before settling down to just one
female.”

“
Ten years, Rocksley?
Ten years
?” Penny
sputtered.

He held up his hand, palm out. “Two years
ago, all too aware that I had left the business to drag on too
long, I wrote to your Aunt Cassandra. And discovered her illness. I
could scarce take you away at such a time—”

Fury shook her. “You could not have
written to
me
, allowed
me
to make that decision for myself?
I was well past one and twenty, Jason. Well past.” Penny gulped,
her fury threatening to spill into tears.

The Earl of Rocksley stuck out his finely
shaped lower lip, much in the manner of a recalcitrant child.
People did not respond with anger to Jason Lisbourne. It simply
wasn’t done. “I remembered you as a schoolgirl, Penelope, looking
closer to thirteen than just-turned sixteen.” Except for that one
particular day. And night. A vision of exquisite beauty flashed
through his mind, causing his loins to clench.

Ruthlessly, Jason thrust away the image. It
did not, after all, bear any resemblance to the woman who now sat
before him. “A child, Penelope, that was how I remembered you.
Truthfully, it never occurred to me to write to you directly.”

“
That is it, then,” his wife scoffed.
“I was an ‘object’ when you first saw me, and an ‘object’ I have
remained through all these years. And now I am still an ‘object,’
the only legal device through which you may immortalize yourself.
You are saddled with me, a millstone about your neck, and are
graciously willing to accept the inevitable. How vastly kind of
your lordship to consider my humble self—”