The Wicked Wedding of Miss Ellie Vyne (20 page)

“What are we doing here, Smallwick?” she demanded.

“I wanted to be alone with you a while, madam. I find myself possessive of your company.”

“Anyone could come out to check on the animals, especially if they see the lantern light.”

“They’re all busy dancing and carousing. Now kiss me, madam.” With a flourish, he produced a small bunch of mistletoe nabbed from the farmhouse doorway. It was spontaneous, very un-Hartley-like, but tonight he was in the mood to play. She brought out the devil in him, he mused, amazed by the fact that he’d sought a wife as part of his efforts to reform, yet the very woman he needed to fulfill the role should have these rebellious effects upon him. Oddly enough, this woman he’d always criticized to anyone who would listen, turned out to be the perfect partner for him. Could life be any stranger—could it possibly hold any more surprises?

She moved back into the shadowy corner of the stall, and he followed, closing her in.

“I haven’t had your lips on mine for several hours now,” he said huskily as he held the mistletoe over her head.

“Smallwick, you are incorrigible.”

“Yes, madam.”

Unable to wait for her movement, he leaned in and kissed her on the lips, warming them for her. Ellie’s hands quickly moved to his shoulders and then curled around his nape. Despite her feigned reluctance to enter the barn with him, she responded hungrily to his kiss. Very soon, one of her hands swept down his chest to his breeches.

“Smallwick, I never did ask you how you came by your name.” Her fingers trailed over the mound that grew with speed. “It is not very appropriate.”

“I believe it was one of Mr. Grieves’s little jests, madam.”

“Ah.”

“He does like his little jests.”

“Smallwick, these stud services don’t have to be performed all at once. You can take a rest.”

“I have no need of one, madam.”

“So I see.”

He paused. “Do
you
?”

Her eyes twinkled, and she bit her lower lip. A dimple appeared in her left cheek. “Good Lord, no, Smallwick. You’ll have to work a lot harder than this to wear me out.”

Lifting her until her legs wrapped around his waist, he murmured gratefully, “Excellent, madam, because I am of a mind to make every moment we have alone together count.”

***

The wooden slats at her back rattled and creaked. The plow horse in the next stall made a low whinny and shook his mane.

“Ouch, Smallwick,” she muttered. “Have a care, or my hair will all come undone.”

James entered her before she’d finished her sentence, bending his legs and thrusting upward with the full force of his lower body. He grunted, “Your hair won’t be the only thing undone, madam.”

It was a quick, savage mating. Very fitting for a stable, she mused.

She should have declined his offer of a rutting there and then, should never have crept away from the party with him, skulking around and being very naughty in the hay. But she couldn’t keep her hands off him, and he appeared to suffer the same condition of beguilement. It was irrepressible. One might almost think he had some devil to exorcise tonight, something burning up inside him, needing release.

He shuddered and braced her against the wooden divider, his mouth on the side of her neck. His strong male scent mingled with the sweetness of the hay and the waxy oil lamp. She closed her eyes, drinking it in, relishing that moment, holding onto it with all her senses and trapping it within her memory forever. As if this was the last time. Her heart stalled at that thought, and her eyelids flew open.

Eventually he set her feet on the ground again and, like any diligent servant, straightened her clothing and her hair for her. He did not speak. She’d known him many years, and it was apparent to Ellie that he had something on his mind. Some trouble he pondered. She wanted to help, but since he did not share his problem with her, she did not know how. Like her, he was accustomed to keeping his troubled thoughts locked away, hidden behind a smile and a sharp-tongued comment.

***

As they reentered the house, he tucked the mistletoe away inside his coat pocket.

“No one else must be tempted to kiss you,” he said.

She seemed far away, not hearing. “I should talk to my aunt.”

James pressed a warm kiss to her hand and watched her walk away through the merry mob. She had a little straw in her hair, but it was too late to call her back and remove it.

Now he had an important conversation to face himself. Turning sharply, he looked for Sophia. To his surprise, she was looking for him too. Their eyes met, and a silent signal passed between them. She knew he was going to ask about Rafe. Apparently, she was ready to explain.

“Ellie, my dear, I didn’t want to keep it from you, but I did not know what you’d say.” Her aunt looked down at her toes. “You must think that at my time of life it is quite absurd to marry again. But I’ve been a widow now for more than twenty years, and it does become very lonely.”

“Aunt Lizzie, I am delighted that you found love again. There is nothing I could want more for you.” She gently kissed her aunt’s soft, warm cheek. “I wish you’d told me when I arrived. I thought you had some awful secret. My imagination has been hard at work on all manner of gruesome thoughts.” Ellie paused as another realization slowly dawned. “That is why you let Mary Wills go!”

“It was one of the reasons, Ellie my dear. It is true that I could not really afford her any longer, but Mary was a terrible gossip, and she did like to pry.”

“And then I came along!”

“You are always welcome.” Her aunt patted her hand. “But whatever you do, say nothing to Mrs. Flick. I have not got up the courage yet to tell her.”

They laughed together.

Quite suddenly, Ellie decided to be brave. “Now I have news for you too. Prepare yourself, dear aunt, for a monstrous shock. I have an understanding with James Hartley.”

Her aunt took off her spectacles, wiped them on her lace kerchief, and put them back on. “I should hope so too. It’s about time.”

“Aunt Lizzie! You’re not surprised?”

“Why would I be, dear girl? You’ve been in love with him since you were ten.”

Ellie swallowed hard. A gale of embarrassing tears threatened to pour out of her, when she was never usually prone to fits of hysteria.

“Did you think me blind, Ellie? I’ve seen many love-struck glances back and forth across my parlor over the years. I’ve witnessed acknowledged love and thwarted love, anguish, passion, and denial. Oh yes. It all happens here in Sydney Dovedale.” Her aunt reached up to extract a piece of straw from Ellie’s hair. “Don’t be fooled by the sleepy image.”

Anxious to be busy, Ellie ladled herself a cup of eggnog. Aunt Lizzie was quite a romantic, she mused. In love with James all these years? Ha! Ridiculous. Their arrangement was one of mutual convenience, brought about by the shared enjoyment of a good argument. That was all.

However, if it pleased her aunt to think of it as love…well, she would not argue. Why spoil it for dear, sweet Aunt Lizzie?

She glanced slyly around the room and was relieved to find no eyes upon her at that moment, because she felt the Christmas spirit going to her head already. Confessing about James to her aunt had taken a load from her shoulders. An understanding. Yes, she could call it that without suffering the pangs of fear produced by any mention of an engagement. An engagement sounded too planned, too formal. An “understanding” suggested a meeting of minds and ideas.

But he had looked at her tonight with such warmth in his gaze that she could almost believe…

Oh, she was being a fool.

She used to think James was an uncomplicated fellow, that she had his character neatly pegged. But over the past few days, there seemed to be more Smallwick in him than there was Hartley. Ellie didn’t like to think she’d been wrong all those years when she’d determinedly set about convincing herself and everyone else that she thoroughly despised him.

Her aunt was still talking. “My brother, for instance. He was so in love with Catherine—your mother. She swept him off his feet as no other woman ever did. And he knew many women. The first moment he laid eyes on her, it happened. I was there. I saw it then.”

“Really? It is odd how the admiral never speaks of my mama very fondly. He says she was a scolding nag, and he should never have married her.”

Her aunt turned, smiling, head tilted. “I don’t mean your stepfather, my dear. I speak of my younger brother, Graedon. He was desperately in love with Catherine. Completely smitten. I believe she was the same for him. But there was nothing they could do about it, because she’d already married our elder brother.”

The eggnog slipped too quickly down Ellie’s throat. She coughed.

“When Grae went off with James Hartley’s mother, I knew he was trying to forget Catherine. The Hartley woman was unhappy in her marriage, and she used Grae to escape it. That I saw too. Theirs was an affair of temporary convenience and passing lust, not of love. Unfortunately, it wounded so many innocent folk.”

All this news sank in slowly. Ellie gazed across the room and saw James talking to Sophie. He looked very stiff, angry. Sophie looked…guilty. What were they talking about? Was she being a fool to think he could ever care for her as he once did for her friend? Her aunt was so right—all these secrets, all this jealousy.

She thought of her uncle Grae. Her childhood memories of him were mostly of a tall, lean, handsome fellow with a big, booming laugh, bouncing her on his lap as he taught her card tricks. He had often come to Lark Hollow, and she assumed, naturally, that he came to visit his brother, the admiral. She closed her eyes and pictured him, a commanding presence striding into their drawing room, filling it with his jokes and laughter. He always went immediately to the chair in which her mother sat, so he could kiss her hand before he greeted anyone else.

Ellie remembered his gallant manners, the way his eyelashes flickered upward even before the kiss on her mother’s hand was complete. A look passing between the adults. A look she was too young then to understand.

“When Grae left England, I gave him a portrait I’d painted of Catherine. She wanted him to have it, and it was my way of telling him I knew, I understood. I forgave him for the Hartley scandal, but my elder brother never could. Then only two years after Grae left England, Catherine was dead, of course. Poor Grae. It must have broken his heart all over again that he could not even attend the funeral.”

Would James marry her but always, secretly—or not so secretly—continue to be in love with Sophie? Once again she tried to pretend it didn’t matter. But it did. It always would.

Was she in love with him? She’d tried not to be. Ever since she heard him spitefully mocking her when she was just sixteen and a trifle plump, dreadfully clumsy, and extremely self-conscious. She’d tried to hate him with every part of her being. But even a rock can be dented over time by a steady, insistent trickle of water. What hope did her heart have?

***

Sophia had clearly prepared herself for this. As she led him into the scullery where they could talk alone, she kept her head up, hands clasped before her. Although her pose was calm, he saw the whirlpool of emotion in her green-and-gold-grained eyes.

“I shouldn’t have kept him from you, James,” she confessed, “but I tried assuring myself it was the best for everyone if you didn’t know. You had your busy life in London. How could you raise a child? I feared you might send him to live with your grandmother.” She shuddered. “I could raise him here, in his uncle’s home, where he’d be loved and cared for. I thought it was best for my husband too, if he did not know. So I…” She swallowed. “I never told him that you are Rafe’s father. He never knew the name of the gentleman who abandoned his pregnant sister.”

James felt his temper mounting. “I did not abandon Rebecca. It was a brief affair. She left the house, and I never knew why. By the time I received her letter asking for help, it was too late. I rode back to London as soon as I could, but she was gone.”

She studied his face, cautious, fearful.

“For these last two years, Sophia, I believed the child was dead.”

“I did not say that he died,” she demurred.

“However, you let me assume it was so.”

Sophia’s hands came up to her face, and he saw that she clutched a kerchief. “He loves it here. He thrives here. Don’t take him from us.”

His throat burned with anger. “You mean don’t take him away from you as you took him from me, his father?”

The first gleam of tears bubbled over her lashes. James took a deep breath and rubbed his brow with one hand, trying to smooth his scowl away.

“You are fond of him, I see,” he managed tightly.

She nodded, lips clenched.

“I won’t spoil Christmas for everyone,” he snapped. “There is no need to pursue this subject tonight, but he is my son, and he should know who he is.”

She blew her nose into the kerchief and murmured a soft assent.

“And it should be his choice where he lives,” added James firmly. “I may not have seen eye to eye with your husband in the past, but I believe even he would agree with me on that score. We’ll discuss what is to happen in the New Year.”

“Yes.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “He should be in school.”

“He is.” She took the kerchief away from her damp face long enough to exclaim, “He comes to my school every day, except during harvest, and he improves greatly.”

James knew Sophia ran a small village school, but in his opinion, a boy of twelve needed a more thorough education. He didn’t say that though, for it would hurt her feelings.

Oh, he realized, chagrinned, how much he’d changed in these last few years.

“You won’t send him away to boarding school?” she demanded, her face pale.

“We will discuss this matter in the New Year. All of us, including Rafe.”

She wiped her eyes again. James was disconcerted by the strength of her tears for a boy who was not her own child. It was a good thing they’d never married, for he wouldn’t know how to handle this many tears.

“You should be proud of him, James,” she sputtered just before her face crumpled and she descended into more sobs. “He’s a good boy,” she wailed. “He’s ever so patient with the animals on the farm and takes all his duties seriously. He’s a little mouthy sometimes, but he works so hard! You should have seen him in the harvest this year—”

James cringed as she covered her face with the kerchief and mewled into it, making a sound not unlike cats fighting in a coal scuttle. He winced, reached out one arm, and patted her shoulder awkwardly. “There, there. Don’t distress yourself. I’m sure it will all work out in the end.” Once again, a woman melted to sobs in his presence. This time she was crying for him, it seemed, not for herself. He truly was getting old if even Sophia felt sad for him.

She moved two steps closer and laid her head on his shoulder, still sobbing. “I’m sorry, James. I should not have kept your son from you. Now that I see how my husband loves our son, I know I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”

“Of course, Sophia.” What else could he do? Hold a grudge? There had been enough of that. He knew it was too late to worry now about what should have been done. The good thing was that Rafe, his son, was alive and healthy. They must look to the future and put things right. It was something Sophia had once been fond of saying. Finally he understood her meaning.

***

The dancing was set aside to give the musicians a rest, and the party guests were just about to play “bullet pudding.” Ellie had looked all over the house for James and then saw the scullery door ajar, a thin light within. She approached quietly and peered inside. James held Sophie in his arms and comforted her.

The shocking sight caused Ellie to turn away so rapidly she almost knocked a plate of gingerbread from Farmer Osborne’s hand.

“Are you all right, m’dear? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

Yes, the ghost of an old romance.
“I was just looking for…something…”

The kindly gentleman raised his eyebrows and offered her gingerbread. She declined, feeling wretched. She thought of running all the way back to her aunt’s house. Then she thought of bursting in and confronting them both, but she controlled both urges. Slowly her pulse settled, her mind likewise.

There must be some perfectly reasonable explanation for the embrace. Sophie was an honest and true friend, content in her marriage, and could never deceive anyone. It was patently ridiculous to suspect Sophie of being complicit in anything of that nature.

But what secret did they share that caused such tenderness after all this time?

Suddenly she felt a chill. It traveled right through her clothing as if she wore her thinnest summer muslin with no heed to the season. She finished her eggnog in one unladylike gulp. Ah, better. That got a little warmth back.

What, in heaven’s name, did it matter? She knew what she was getting into when she agreed to this arrangement. Ellie concluded that her aunt’s tale of a tragic love triangle had wound its way inside her head like the serpent that tempted Eve with the apple. She had briefly allowed herself to ponder hopes that should never be let in.

An
affair
of
temporary
convenience
and
passing
lust, not of love.
Her aunt might as well have been describing this “understanding” she had with James. There was no reason to suddenly expect more from him. Unfortunately, while he was the obliging, fun-loving “Smallwick,” it was too easy to forget the reality.

She glanced at her empty cup and shook her head. No more eggnog for her, or she might end up saying something embarrassing to James—something she would hate herself for admitting once sanity returned.

She pasted a cheery smile on her face and returned to the party. When the missing couple reappeared a short while later, James came immediately to her side, but she was still too unsettled to look at him. She was not angry. She kept telling herself that.

But
it’s a minuet. People will think we’re in love.

Nonsense. They know us better than that, madam.

“What’s this?” he asked as he watched Sophie’s husband carry a tall mound of white flour to the table, set it down with care, and then balance a bullet on the very top.

Ellie forced herself to answer. The easiest way to mask any unusual quavering was with a cross tone. “It’s a bullet pudding. Don’t Hartleys play games at Christmas?”

“No, we—”

“I suppose you just sit around being very grand and despising other people.”

“What ails, Miss Vyne?”

“Don’t you
Miss
Vyne
me,” she snapped.