The Marriage Bed (3 page)

"Not in a thousand years," she said and turned to leave.

He put his hands on her shoulders to stop her. "An heir is crucial, Viola, and you know it. Without Percy, I need a son of my own."

"You already have a son," she reminded him and wrenched free. "Lady Darwin's youngest boy is your son. Everyone knows that."

"I know that is the
rumor
, but in this particular instance, the
rumor
is false." When she made a sound of disbelief, he went on, "And even if it were true, it would not signify. I need a legitimate heir."

"Why should I care what you need?"

"Like it or not, you are my wife, I am your husband, and circumstances now force us to do what our positions demand."

"Your circumstance and your position force me to do nothing. I am not your brood mare. Our marriage is a farce and always was. I see no reason to change that now."

"No reason? You are a peeress, the sister of a duke and the wife of a viscount. You know the rules that govern our lives, Viola."

She met his gaze with a determination equal to his, and she could almost hear the clash of their wills like the clang of two
sabers
. "I may have to be your wife in name, but I do not have to be your wife in deed. Damn the peerage, damn the rules, and damn you."

"Damn me all you like, but we are taking up residence together when I return from the North. Decide whether you would rather stay at our villa in Chiswick or move to my town house in
Blooms-bury Square
. If you choose the town house, notify Pershing and have your things sent there while I am gone."

"You and I under the same roof?
Heaven forbid!"

"The same roof, Viola, the same dinner table."
He paused and gave her a heated, knowing look.
"The same bed."

"If you think… if you really… if you believe… if—" She broke off, too angry to stop spluttering. The idea of him making love to her after all the other women he had bedded was so galling, so intolerable, she could hardly speak. Taking a deep breath, she fought for self-possession and tried again. "If you think I will ever let you touch me again, you are insane."

"Like it or not, lovemaking is how sons are made. There is nothing insane about it. Married couples do it every day, and from now on so shall we. About damn time we did, if you ask me, since not making love created this whole mess between us in the first place." With that, he bowed, turned away and strode toward the door.

She stared at his broad back as he walked away.
"God, how I despise you."

"T
hank
you for informing me of that fact, darling," he shot back. "I hadn't noticed." He paused at the door with his hand on the knob and turned slightly toward her. His face was in profile, his head lowered,
one
lock of his brown hair falling over his forehead. After a moment, he looked at her, and to her surprise, no easy, careless smile came to his lips. When he spoke, he made no flippant remark. "I never meant to hurt you, Viola. I wish you could believe that."

If he wasn't such a cad, she might have fancied a hint of regret in his expression and sincerity in his words. But he was a cad, he was a liar, and he had never loved her. Any sign of regret was gone before she could be sure it had ever even been there.

"You cannot really mean to do this. You know how I hate you, yet you expect me to take you to my bed now?"

"A bed is the most comfortable place," he said, "but if you've another suggestion, I am willing enough. I know it has been a long time, but as I recall, adventurous lovemaking was one of our favorite pastimes."

She made a sound of outrage, but before she could express it in words, he was gone.

The arrogance of the man.
Seething, she began to pace the library, her animosity toward him so powerful at this moment that she could scarcely believe her feelings for him had once been quite the opposite.

When she had first set eyes on
John
Hammond nine years ago, it had been like something out of a novel. Across a crowded ballroom, he had looked her way, he had smiled, and her entire life had changed.

Twenty-six, he'd been then, and the handsomest man she had ever seen, with eyes the color of brandy and the body of a man skilled at sport. He had just come into his title the previous year, but had he been a tradesman instead of a viscount, she would not have cared. That night on a ball-room floor, she had fallen helplessly in love with that strong, handsome man, her seventeen-year-old heart captured by his devastating smile.

Loath as she was to admit it, he was even more physically attractive now than he had been then. Unlike most other men in their middle thirties, he hadn't started getting stout or bald. Not
John
. He still had the body of a Corinthian, and maturity had only made him stronger. Beneath the broadcloth of his evening suit, his chest and shoulders looked wider than ever, his long legs even more muscular. He still had that thick, unruly dark brown hair, the only change a hint of gray at his temples. He still had eyes like cognac, but there were lines around them now. Laugh lines other women had put there.

So many other women.

Viola sank down in a chair, swamped by a bitterness she hadn't felt for years. As baffling as it seemed now, she had loved him, and with a power beyond all reason. She had married him because she thought the sun rose and set each day just to shine on him. What a fool she had been.

He told her he loved her, but that had been a lie. He had married her not for love, but for her money. All her love wasted on a man who did not love her in return, a man whose mind had decided he needed a wife of means, but whose heart had never belonged to her.

Viola stood up. All of that was in the past. She had long ago accepted his perfidy and her own folly. While he had provided himself with a string of mistresses over the years, she had spent her time building a life of her own.
A contented life.
A life of charity work and good friends and serenity.
A life that did not include him.
She had no intention of allowing that to change. Her marital duties and her husband could both go to the devil, where they belonged.

He glanced away and stared at the crumbling gray ruins of Castle Neagh in the distance. He and Percy used to play among those ruins in the summer holidays, acting out sieges and battles.
John
felt a queer, heavy tightness within his chest, thinking of those days.
Thinking of
Harrow
.
And
Cambridge
.
Rowing in the boat races every May Week.
And how Percy had always gone along with him, following him through every boyhood scrape and every youthful adventure, every joy and every pain.
Even falling for the same girl hadn't broken their friendship.

Your cousin is dead. Can you not even grieve for
him ?

Viola's words echoed through the silence all around him, penetrating his muddled senses. Grieve?
So unfair of her to ask that question.
He ached with grief, but to spill it out all over the place in front of people was unthinkable. His emotions were private, hidden by a veneer he had spent his entire life perfecting. Viola was so different; she displayed what she thought and felt openly. He didn't understand that. He never had.

A slight cough brought him back to the task at hand.
John
drew a deep breath and caught stern hold of
himself
. Everyone was waiting. With all the discipline he possessed, he found his place in the words from
Cymbeline
and continued, "'Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.'"

Snapping the book closed with one hand, he bent and reached for a handful of dirt with the other. He held it over the coffin in the grave, listening to the vicar recite from the Book of Common Prayer.

Ashes to ashes.
Percy was dead. He held the dirt over the casket, but he could not drop it onto the polished surface. His hand began to shake, and he tightened his fist around the damp soil in his grasp. He turned on his heel and walked away from the silent mourners, breathing deeply of the cold spring air.

When he reached the ruins of Castle Neagh, he walked around to the other side of the tumbledown turret. Still clenching the dirt in one fist, he tossed the book of Shakespeare aside. Memory guiding him, he placed his free hand on one of the stones, a loose one. Curling his fingers around its crumbling edges, he pulled it out of the castle wall.

Sure enough, it was still there, the niche he and Percy had made behind the stone.
Their secret place, where they used to hide things—snuff and pipe tobacco, naughty sketches, things like that.
He'd hidden
Constance
's chemise there once, he remembered, a pretty, lacy thing of delicate muslin with yellow daffodils embroidered on it. He'd stolen the garment off the clothesline at her house one summer day when they were thirteen and hidden it in here. To his amazement, Percy had laid him out with a blow right across the jaw for that. Twelve years later,
John
had danced at their wedding.

He put the lump of dirt in the niche, crumbling it into a little pile. It seemed right, somehow, to put it there, not drop it over the wooden shell that encased Percy's now lifeless body.

John
stared at the niche and the small mound of dirt for a long time, and the burning in his chest deepened, grew thicker and heavier, until he couldn't stand it. He shoved the stone back into place, turned around and leaned against the rough stone wall, sucking in deep breaths of air.

He sank down to the ground and lowered his head into his hands, swamped by grief and a sudden, terrible loneliness.

Percy had always been a brick—a sensible fellow with sound judgment. He would have been good to
Hammond
Park
, and
Enderby
, and the other estates of the
viscountcy
. He would have taken care of them, preserved them for the next generation of
Hammonds
. He'd known Percy would always be there, at his back, ready to take on a responsibility that because of his own disastrous marriage he had not fulfilled.

The security of that knowledge had given him the convenient luxury of avoiding what was truly his responsibility and always had been— providing an heir. Given that he had not been able to stomach the idea of forcing his wife to an act that had become so repugnant to her,
John
had seen Percy and Percy's son as the only option for the
viscountcy
. It had never occurred to him that his cousin, his best friend, one of the few people in the world he trusted, would die, that his son would also die.
That the next viscount would be Bertram, of all men.

Everything in
John
rebelled against that thought. He had to have a son of his own or see everything he had spent a decade salvaging go to ruin once again. He and Viola had to find a way to come together and rediscover the spark of desire that had been so explosive between them in the beginning. It didn't have to last long—if it did, they would probably destroy each other—but it had to be long enough to have a son.

"Percy always did like Shakespeare. T
hank
you."

Constance
's soft voice interrupted his thoughts, and
John
lifted his head an inch, staring at the black bombazine skirt of Percy's widow, the braided trim of black silk at her hem.
Mourning clothes.
That hot tightness in his chest came rushing back, and he turned his face away, striving for composure.

"They used to call him Owl at school, I remember," he muttered. "He always had his head in a book and had to wear spectacles to read."

"And the other boys teased him mercilessly about it. He told me the story of how three of them took his glasses once and broke them. He said when you found out what they'd done, you went flying after them in a fury. That was the only time he ever saw you lose your temper."

"Percy was right behind me,
believe
me, and did his fair share to square things up. We beat them to a pulp, and almost got sent down because of it. Afterward, they still called him Owl, but they never broke his spectacles again."

Constance
sank down on the grass beside him. "What did they call you,
John
?"

He turned and looked at the woman he and Percy had both known since childhood, remembering the girl both of them had fallen in love with that summer they were thirteen.
Constance
had been the first girl
John
had ever kissed. About her, he had written some of the worst poetry ever conceived. About her, he'd had every erotic fantasy a boy could invent. He had stepped aside when she married Percy that autumn nearly ten years ago, pretending for their sakes that it hadn't hurt. But it had taken a lot of drink, a lot of sleepless nights, and a lot of pretty women to get over
Constance
.

He looked into the gray eyes and tearstained face of his childhood love and saw his own grief mirrored back at him. Yet he knew it was far worse for her, for she had lost both her husband and her son. He focused his mind on the trivial subject that might keep both of them from shattering. "My nickname was
Milton
."

"That's right. I had forgotten." She took out her hat pin and pushed back her black straw hat, letting it fall down her back. The sun gleamed on her dark reddish-brown hair, making it look like satin-finished mahogany. "Why
Milton
?" she asked. "It doesn't suit you at all."

He forced himself back once again to nicknames from
Harrow
.
The mundane seemed comforting just now, comforting and safe.
"But it does suit me.
Very well, in fact.
Didn't Percy ever tell you how I acquired it?"

"Strangely enough, he didn't." She paused, then said, "It's odd, all the things about your spouse's life you don't know. After ten years of marriage, I thought I knew everything there was to know about my husband, but I was wrong. The past few days, so many people have been telling me stories about him. Some of them I knew, of course, but some I had never heard before. So many stories—" Her voice broke and tears glistened on her dark lashes, threatening to spill over.

"Connie, don't cry!" he ordered in a ravaged whisper. "For God's sake, don't cry."

She turned her face away, composing herself for his sake, knowing how much he hated tears. After a moment she turned back around, smiling a wobbly little smile. "So, are you going to tell me how you got your glorious nickname?"

"On my first day at
Harrow
, I got into trouble— of course—and Master
John
son told me if I kept up that sort of thing, I'd never serve heaven well when I died. I answered that was all right, since I intended to rule in hell."

"You would say something like that," she said, laughing even as she fought back tears. "You've always gone your own way."

The nine years of his marriage flitted across his mind in the space of a few heartbeats. He hadn't ruled his own hell
all that
well. "I've gone my own way too much, perhaps," he admitted.
"So sensible of you to pick Percy instead of me."

"Nothing sensible about it.
You were a viscount's son, and would have been a far more sensible match for a girl like me. I was the daughter of a man in trade, a girl who had plenty of money but no connections. No, no. I picked Percy because he loved me so very desperately.
" .
"I loved you," he said with a rueful smile. "It didn't help me."

"Well, he's the one who proposed."
Constance
smiled back at him right through her tears. "Besides, you never loved me,
John
. Not really."

He sat back, staring at her, unable to believe what he had just heard. "What are you talking about? If you only knew how it wrecked me to come home from
Europe
that autumn and find that Percy had stolen your heart away from me. I was in agony at your wedding."

She shook her head.
"Nonsense.
That was your pride. You never loved me, not in a way that makes for marriage. You always flirted with me, and charmed me, and remembered my birthday. You wrote me letters from school every week, picked my favorite flowers, and gave me the right compliments. You stole kisses from me behind the hedgerows, and said the most torrid things to me, but you never did the one thing that a man does when he is truly in love."

"What's that?"

"You never made a fool of yourself for me."

He blinked, trying to understand what she meant. "Well," he said after a moment, "I did write you some god-awful poetry. Does that count?"

"You did?" she asked in astonishment.
"When?"

"
Cambridge
days.
I never showed it to you."

"Exactly my point.
If you had read some of it to me, even just once, things might have turned out very differently, for I was madly in love with you."

That startled him. "You were?"

"I was. But I knew you didn't really love me, and when you went to the Continent for your Grand Tour, I got over you."

"With Percy's help."
He could say that lightly now, for he felt no bitterness. Many years had passed since then.

"He loved me,
John
."

"I know."
John
glanced over his shoulder, looking up at the stone where the niche was hidden, and he thought of the look in Percy's face when he'd found that chemise. "He always loved you, Connie. As I said, you were very sensible to choose him."

She began to laugh. "He blundered his way through the most incoherent marriage proposal you ever heard at the May Day fete, in front of Lord and Lady
Moncrieffe
, the Miss
Dansons
, the vicar, and heaven knows how many others. In front of all those people, right on the village green, he got down on his knees, confessed eternal love in the most passionate language you can imagine, and said that if I didn't marry him and end his misery, he would shoot himself and end it for me."