The Lady's Tutor (23 page)

“A respectable woman does not desire physical demands from her
husband. If you want more children, we will discuss it over breakfast.”

Hysteria clawed at her throat.

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry.

Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined this response from
her husband.

A coldness settled over her that had nothing to do with the chill
air.
The Bastard Sheikh had known.

“I want to discuss this now, Edward.”

“You will not like what I have to say.”

“I do not like it now. I cannot imagine that I will like it any
better over tea and crumpets!”

“You are getting hysterical.”

“No.”
Yes.
Elizabeth took a calming breath. “I am trying to
understand our marriage. You say you do not have a mistress; rumors abound that
you do. Phillip is fighting to protect your reputation; Richard is sick with
unhappiness. If there is anything I can do to please you, I will do it.
Tell
me what you want, Edward.”

He released her wrist. “Very
well. Cover yourself.”

She fumbled for the velvet comforter, wrapped it around herself.
Edward pulled the sheet and quilt up to his waist, as if afraid she would
attack him.

“I do not want your body, Elizabeth. You have great udder breasts
and flabby hips. It was a chore bedding you the number of times I did to get
you with children. Richard and Phillip are healthy. I will not put myself
through the trouble of bedding you again just so that you can lie with a man.
Do I make myself clear?”

The pain started low in Elizabeth’s chest and worked its way up
into her throat. She couldn’t breathe past it; she couldn’t swallow. She could
barely talk.

But oh, she could think. And reason.
And remember.

“You said the children were for me, but that is not true, is it,
Edward? They were for you, so that you could gain popularity with the voters.”

“The middle class prefers a candidate who has a family.”

He had come to her bed
to seed the grounds
for his
political career.

“How many children does it take to please your voters?”

He walked into her trap. “One will suffice.”

Elizabeth’s voice in the dark was unnaturally calm. “The last time
you came to my bed was when Richard was ill with diphtheria.”

“The doctor said he was dying.”

And he had been. Her four-year-old baby had burned with fever. But
Elizabeth had refused to let him go. She had bathed him with toilet water and
held him and sang to him until she fell into an exhausted stupor.

Edward had carried her downstairs to her bed and joined her there.
At the time, she had thought he made love to her to comfort her.

“So you gave me another child to replace Richard. Just in case the
doctor proved to be right and you lost favor with your voters.”

“But Richard lived and I gave you Phillip, a bonus, if you like.”
His voice in the darkness was so reasonable, the voice he used when answering a
dissenter’s questions after a speech. “You have two sons, Elizabeth. No
respectable woman could ask for more.”

“What do you have, Edward?” Elizabeth asked in a brittle voice.

“I will be prime minister.”

While she continued living a life that was no life at all, wanting
the love of a man.

Raw rage pushed aside the hurt. “Where do you spend your nights,
Edward, when you aren’t at home? Who is the woman you have been seen with?”

“I have told you there is no woman. Politics is demanding. Your
father has twice been prime minister now. I will do whatever I have to do to
succeed him.”

Anything but bed her.

Elizabeth stared at the dull blackness of Edward’s hair and
mustache, all that was visible against the white pillow.

“This whining of yours is neither complimentary to you or pleasant
for me. I will turn onto my side now so that you will not further humiliate
yourself by displaying your naked body to me when you leave my bedroom. You
have a busy day today; I expect you to attend the charity auction this evening
and later the ball.”

Suiting
action to words, Edward rolled onto his side, away from her.

Elizabeth
could no longer feel the cold February air pressing around her. “I will not be
a pawn, Edward.”

“You already are, Elizabeth.”

Tears burned the backs of her eyes. Defeat was an ugly emotion. It
was far worse than the frustration she had lived with for the past sixteen
years.

She clumsily slid off the bed; her ankle twisted, a sharp,
welcoming pain. One by one she picked up her discarded clothes, scooped up the
reticule from the chest of drawers. The connecting door closed behind her with
a final click.

Inside her bedroom the curtains were closed, blocking out a world
that rejected a woman’s need for sexual satisfaction.

Great udder breasts.

How dare he! How dare any person so humiliate another!

Throwing the bundle of clothes as far and as hard as she could,
she turned up the gas lamp by her bed. Standing naked in front of the cheval
mirror, she studied herself with eyes unclouded by wishful fantasies or lustful
desires. Ruthlessly, she appraised the heavy weight of her full breasts and the
faint stretch marks that marred her rounded hips.

A womanly figure, the Bastard Sheikh had said.
Be proud of your
body,
he had added.

The Perfumed Garden
praised breasts and hips on a woman.

What things can a man do with a full-breasted woman that he cannot
do with a less generously endowed one?

He can position his manhood between her breasts and press them
together . . . so that he is buried between them . . . as if they were a vulva.

Elizabeth threw her head back, eyes squeezed shut. Even as she
trembled with rage and pain she remembered the feel of the artificial phallus
and the mesmerizing pull of turquoise eyes.

She had wanted him.

A man with his experience would know that.

The Bastard Sheikh was probably laughing at her. As was her
husband.

Dear
God, Edward had turned onto his side away from her lest he get another glimpse
of her “womanly” figure.

Springing into action, she twirled around, breasts jiggling, and
leapt toward the scattered clothes. She dug her reticule out from underneath
the horsehair-stuffed bustle.

The book lied.
The Bastard Sheikh lied.
There was no
satisfaction for a thirty-three-year-old woman who showed the first strands of
silver in her hair and the effects of two children on her body.

Slamming open the roll-back top of her desk, she grabbed pen, ink,
and paper.

Her writing was scrawled as opposed to the neat, precise lines
that her governess had forced her to practice all during her childhood. As the
notes she had left on the Bastard Sheikh’s desk had no doubt been scrawled,
forty
ways to love. Damn all of them.

Ramiel reread the note.

Thank you for the loan of your book. While
interesting, it has not proved to be practical.

Best regards

The
words that Elizabeth had spoken only hours earlier flooded his head, poignant
words, pain-filled words.
I
was seventeen years old and I was going
to have a baby and I wanted to see what had made me that way. But the leaf
would not budge.

Ramiel felt like a fist squeezed his heart.

Dust motes danced in the watery noonday sunlight. He had slept for
four hours, dreaming of Elizabeth’s mouth, her breasts, her naked need.

He crumpled up the note.

Muhamed waited in the doorway of the bedroom. He was not disturbed
at the sight of Ramiel’s nudity. “It is for the best,
El Ibn.”

Ramiel’s eyes glittered. “Do you read my correspondence, Muhamed?”

The Cornishman’s turbaned head snapped back. “You know I do not.”

“Then
how the bloody hell do you know what’s in it?” Ramiel lashed out.

“The book,
El Ibn.
She has returned the book.”

Ramiel stared at the plainly wrapped package in Muhamed’s hands.

The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui.
An Arabic celebration of love and folly,
sex and humanity, the absurd and the sacred.

“How do you know what book she sent?”

“Because I know,
El Ibn.
You hunger for a woman to take the
Arab in you. The paper lying on your desk Friday morning contained information
from the sheikh’s book. The handwriting was not yours.”

Conflicting emotions slashed at Ramiel’s gut. Anger, that Muhamed
had read words that only Ramiel should have seen. Pain, that Elizabeth thought
so little of him that she terminated their lessons with a note rather than
face-to-face.

Why had she returned the book?

He uncrumpled the ball of paper he had reduced her note to.

It smelled faintly of her, the natural sweetness of a woman’s
flesh; overriding it was the fresh scent of ink and vellum. The words ran
together, as if she had written with great speed.

Or under great duress.

Ramiel reread the last part of her note:
While interesting, it
has not proved to be practical.
And realized what he had inadvertently
pushed her into doing.

She had tried to appease the passion he had deliberately aroused
in her by seducing her husband.

What had she done to entice Edward Petre? Had she done to him the
things that Ramiel wanted her to do to him? Had she taken him into her hands
and pumped and squeezed him?
Had she taken him into her mouth?

Perhaps Edward would have liked that, Ramiel thought on a surge of
jealousy. With his eyes closed, Elizabeth’s mouth would feel no different from
the mouth of a man.

Ela’na.
Damn.
Elizabeth was inexperienced. Uncertain. Vulnerable. She would not understand
that it was her sex and not her body that failed to please her husband.

The fist wrapped around Ramiel’s heart convulsively clenched.
She
had touched him . . .
With her words, her passion, her curiosity, her
honesty,
her saliva-slick finger.
How could she go to another man?

What had Edward Petre done to her that she would so abruptly end
their lessons?

Ramiel snared Muhamed’s gaze. “Where is Petre now?”

“At the Queen’s Hall.”

“Why?”

“There is an auction for a charity.”

“Where will he be tonight?”

“The auction will be followed by a ball.”

And where Edward Petre politicked ... Elizabeth would follow.

Ramiel may have lost the right to be loved nine years ago, but he
would not lose Elizabeth. Women begged him to bed them in the dark of night and
spurned him in the light of day and
it had not mattered
until she had
shown him that an Englishwoman needed an Arab bastard for more than raw sex.

If she truly desired to terminate their relationship, she would do
it to his face.
Tonight.

And then he would convince her otherwise.

lazing chandeliers spotlighted a sea of black tails and
jewel-colored gowns. Silk, tulle, and velvet fabrics wafted benzene, heavy
perfume, and unwashed musk. Elizabeth swayed, lightheaded from lack of oxygen
and sleep.

“As you are aware, the benefits of this auction will feed and
clothe homeless women and children whose brave, heroic husbands and sons lost
their lives in Africa, fighting to advance the freedom of our great
Commonwealth.”

An enthusiastic round of applause filled the prime minister’s
strategic pause. Elizabeth concentrated on the man standing on the dais in
front of the musicians, who patiently waited with their instruments, instead of
the suffocating mass of bodies pressing in and around her.

Andrew Walters’s hair was more silver than auburn; his hazel eyes
were bright with the charm he never failed to exercise in front of the public.
She had only to look at him and see what she herself would look like in
twenty-seven years.

With practiced ease he held small, slender hands up for silence. “In
reward for your charitable contributions we have arranged a buffet and dancing.
But first, let me digress for a moment. As you know, my daughter has presented
me with two fine grandsons—future prime ministers.”

Masculine guffaws and feminine titters rippled around Elizabeth.

“Now, now, no laughter. They are young now, but they will grow
into their positions. And that, of course, brings me to my son-in-law. Ladies
and gentlemen, may I present to you your next prime minister, Edward Petre,
Chancellor of the Exchequer!”