A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau

by Mary Balogh

  She lay on her back, staring up at the canopy, her eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the darkness. He lay on his side facing away from her. He said nothing. He made no move to break his promise. She fumed. How could he expect her to sleep?

  Was he sleeping? She listened for the sound of his breathing. She would surely hear it if he slept. Yet he was apparently relaxed. He was probably in the process, she thought, of having a good night’s rest just as if he slept alone or with a bundle of rags beside him. How could he sleep? How could he humiliate her so?

  “Damn you, Edgar,” she said. One of these times she would think of something original to say, but at the moment she was not in the business of originality.

  He turned over to face her and propped himself on one elbow. He rested the side of his head on his hand. “My only hope,” he said, “is that you will not be standing beside St. Peter when I appear at the pearly gates.”

  “I am not in the mood for silly jokes,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I am nothing better than a puppet, forced to move whenever you jerk on a string. I do not like the feeling.”

  “If you feel strings connecting you and me,” he said, “they are of your own devising, Helena. I will not touch you—even with a string.”

  “Damn your damnable control,” she told him. “I will have none of it. Make love to me. It is what we both wish to do. Let us do it, then.” She surged onto her side and put herself against him. She was immediately engulfed by heat and hard muscles and masculinity—and a soaring desire. She rubbed her breasts against his chest and reached for his mouth with her own.

  He kissed her back softly and without passion. She drew back her head, breathing hard.

  “It is for mutual comfort, Helena,” he said quietly, “and for the procreation of children. Sometimes it is for love. It is not for anger or punishment. We will not punish each other with angry passion. You need to sleep.” He slipped an arm beneath her head and drew her more snugly against him. “Relax and let yourself sleep, then.”

  She thought she would want to die of humiliation if it had not been for one thing. He was fully aroused. She could feel the hardness of his erection against her abdomen. It was not that she had failed to make him want her, then. It was just that he wanted a submissive wife, who would give him comfort rather than passion. Never! She had only passion to give.

  “Go to sleep,” he murmured against her ear.

  “I thought you were ruthless, Edgar,” she said into his shoulder. “I expected an overbearing tyrant. I expected that you would take advantage of the smallest opportunity to get past that promise and master me. I should have known the truth when you would not quarrel with me. You think to master me in this way, do you not?”

  “Go to sleep, Helena,” he said, his voice sounding weary. “We are not engaged in battle but in a marriage. Go to sleep.” He kissed her temple.

  She closed her eyes and was quiet for a while. If he knew her as she really was, he would not wish to share a bed with her, she thought. Once he got to know her, he would leave her alone fast enough. She would be alone again. She was alone now. But he was seducing her senses with this holding and cuddling and these murmured words. He was giving her the illusion of comfort.

  “Comfort,” she said. “It is for comfort, you say. Do you think I do not need comfort, Edgar? Do you think it? Do you? Do you think I am made of iron?”

  He sighed and dipped his head to take her mouth. His was open this time and warm and responsive. “No,” he said. “I do not think that.”

  “Make love to me, then,” she said. “Let us do it for comfort, Edgar.” She was being abject. She was almost crying and her voice revealed the fact. But she would think of that later. She would despise herself—and hate him—later. At this moment she was desperate for comfort and she would not remember that there was no comfort. That there could not be any. Ever.

  He lifted her nightgown and his nightshirt before turning her onto her back, coming on top of her with the whole of his weight, and pushing her legs wide apart with his knees. She would have expected to hate being immobilized by his weight. But it was deliriously arousing. There was no foreplay. She would have expected to wish for it, to need it. But she wanted only to be penetrated, to be stretched, to be filled, to be ridden hard and deep.

  He was a man of such control, her husband. He was hot and damp with need. He was rigid with desire. But he worked her slowly, withdrawing almost completely before thrusting firmly and deeply inward again. If there had been foreplay, she would have been in a frenzy of passion by the time he entered her, clamping about him with inner muscles to draw him to climax and to reach desperately for her own fleeting moment of happiness.

  But there had been no foreplay. Incredibly, she felt herself gradually relaxing, lying still and open beneath him, taking exquisite enjoyment from the rhythmic strokes with which he loved her. She had no idea how many minutes passed—but it seemed like a long, long time—before she heard herself moaning and realized that enjoyment had turned to a pleasurable ache and that he was going to take her over the edge to peace and happiness without any active participation on her part. For a moment she considered fighting such passivity, but the ache, the certainty that he was going to take her through it and past it to the other side was too seductive to be denied.

  She sighed and shivered beneath him as he made it happen and then with dreamy lethargy observed while he completed his own journey toward comfort. It was a moment of happiness blissfully extended into several moments—a gift she accepted with quiet gratitude. The moments would pass, but for now they were hers to hold in her body and her soul. They were like the peace that was supposed to come with Christmas. And for these moments—they would pass—she loved him utterly. She adored him.

  He moved off her and drew her against him again. They were both warm and sweaty. She breathed in the smell of him.

  “Comforted?” he asked softly.

  “Mmm,” she said.

  “Sleep now, then,” he told her.

  “Mmm.” Had she been just a little wider awake, perhaps she would have fought him since the suggestion had been issued as a command. But she slid into instant obedience.

  11

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS and life could not be said to be following any normal pattern, nevertheless Helena began to have some inkling of how her life had changed. Permanently changed.

  No longer would she travel almost constantly. The realization did not upset her enormously. Traveling could be far more uncomfortable and tedious than those who only longed to do it could ever realize. More disturbing was the understanding of why she had traveled and why she had never arrived at any ultimate destination. She had traveled for escape. It was true that she had derived great pleasure from her experiences, but never as much as she had hoped for. She knew finally, as she supposed she had known all along, that she could never in this life—and perhaps beyond this life, too—leave behind the thing she most wished to escape. She could never escape from herself. Wherever she went, she took herself with her. Yes, she had known it before. She had known that she lived in her own particular hell.

  She would live at Mobley Abbey much of the time from now on. Edgar explained to her that his ties with his father had always been close ones and would undoubtedly remain so. For the rest of the time she would live in Bristol, in a home she had not yet seen. It was a large home, Edgar had told her. From the sketchy descriptions he had given of it in answer to her questions, she guessed that it was also an elegant home.

  She was Mrs. Downes. Her title had never meant a great deal to her. She would have shed it if she could after her first husband’s death. It was a reminder of a part of her life she would forget if she could. But there had been a certain dash to being Lady Stapleton, wealthy, independent widow. She had carefully cultivated that image of herself. There was something very solidly respectable about being Mrs. Edgar Downes.

  She was part of a family. Not just some cousins in Scotland and an a
unt whom she treated as much as a friend as a relative, but a real family, who prided themselves on their familial closeness.

  Cora had hugged her hard immediately after the wedding and cried over her and insisted that they be on a first-name basis now that they were sisters. And so must her husband and Helena, she had commanded. They really had been given no choice in the matter. Lord Francis had laughed and Helena had thought how attractive laugh lines in the corners of a man’s eyes could be.

  “Shall we bow to tyranny?” he had asked her, bowing over her hand. “I say we should. I must be plain Francis to you from this moment on, if you please.”

  What choice had Helena had but to reply graciously in kind?

  Her father-in-law, that genial older version of Edgar—genial, yes, but Helena had the strange feeling that she would not wish to be the person to cross his will in any matter of importance—was all that was paternal. One would almost have sworn that he was delighted by his son’s choice of a bride. He rose from the table when she entered the breakfast parlor the morning after her wedding, mortifyingly late, and reached out both hands for hers. He had kept a chair empty beside him.

  “Good morning, Daughter,” he said, taking both her hands in his, wringing them painfully hard, and drawing her close enough to plant a hearty kiss on her cheek.

  Again, what choice did she have? She could not reply to such a greeting with a mere curt good morning. She could not call him Mr. Downes.

  “Good morning, Papa,” she said and took the chair beside him. The combination of calling him that and of realizing that this was the morning after her wedding night and the eyes of all the family and house guests and of Edgar himself, seated farther down the table, were on her caused her to disgrace herself utterly. She blushed. Everyone in the room knew why she and Edgar had married—and yet on the morning after her wedding night she blushed. How terribly gauche!

  She felt trapped. Trapped into something she could not escape simply by packing her bags and planning her itinerary to wherever her fancy led her. This was to be her life, perhaps forever. And last night she had given up the one illusion of freedom and power she had still possessed. She had lacked his control, and so she had given up the greater good for—for what? Not for passion. There had been surprisingly little of that. Not even for pleasure. There had been pleasure—quite intense pleasure, in fact—but it was not for that she had begged. She had begged for comfort. And he had comforted her.

  The memory frightened her. It suggested that she had needed him. Worse, it suggested that he could satisfy her need. She had been so satisfied that she had slept the night through without once waking, even when he had left the bed. But she needed no one! She refused to need anyone. Least of all Edgar. She would be swallowed up whole by him. And then, because she did not enjoy the sensation of being swallowed whole, she would find ways to fight back, to fight free. And she would destroy him. He did not deserve the misery of a shrewish wife.

  She conversed brightly at the breakfast table, telling her father-in-law and her aunt, who sat at his other side, about Christmases she had spent in Vienna and Paris and Rome. Soon her audience consisted of most of the people at the table.

  “And this year,” Mr. Downes said, patting her hand on the table, “you will enjoy a good old-fashioned English Christmas, Daughter. There is nothing to compare to it, I daresay, though I have never been to those other places to judge for myself. I have never had a hankering for foreign parts.”

  “There will be the greenery to gather for the house decorations,” Cora said, “and the decorating itself. And the children’s party on Christmas Day and the adult ball in the evening. There will be baskets to deliver and skating parties down at the lake—the ice will be firm enough in a day or two if the weather stays cold. There will be—oh, so much. I am so glad that Christmas is here this year. And Helena, you shall help with all the plans since you are more senior in this family now than I am. You are Edgar’s wife.” She looked quite unabashed at having been supplanted in the role of hostess.

  “It would not surprise me if there were even snow for Christmas,” Mrs. Cross said, looking toward the window and drawing general attention that way. The outdoor world did indeed look gray and chilly.

  “Of course there will be snow, ma’am,” Mr. Downes said. “I have decreed that this is to be a perfect Christmas.”

  “The children will be ecstatic,” the Earl of Thornhill said.

  “The children of all ages,” his wife said with a smile. “No one is more exuberant on a sleigh than Gabriel.”

  “And no one makes more angelic snow angels than Jane,” the Earl of Greenwald said.

  “I may have to challenge you on that issue,” the Marquess of Carew said with a grin, “and put forward the claims of my own wife. Samantha’s snow angels come with haloes.”

  “I notice,” Cora said, “that you are conspicuously silent, Francis.”

  “It is against my religion, my love,” he said, “to fight duels at Christmastime. Now any other time …” He raised his eyebrows and winked at her.

  “I believe, Corey,” Edgar said, “there are in the hierarchy of heavenly beings warrior angels as well as cherubic ones.”

  Francis laughed. So did everyone else at the table, Cora loudest of all.

  “What an abomination brothers are,” she said. “You are welcome to him, Helena. Perhaps you can teach him some manners.”

  Helena smiled and met Edgar’s eyes along the table—he looked despicably handsome and at ease—but she could not join in the lively banter. It was too—cozy. Too alluring. Too tempting. It continued without her participation.

  Edgar must be put in his place this morning, she decided, before he could get any ideas about last night’s having begun an era of domestic bliss. And so at the end of the meal, when he waited at the door to escort her from the room, she ignored his offered arm.

  “Oh, you need not worry about me, Edgar,” she said carelessly. “I have things to do. You may amuse yourself to your heart’s content with the other gentlemen or with whatever it is you do when you are at Mobley.”

  “You will need boots and a warm cloak and bonnet,” he told her. “Everyone has been so caught up in the events surrounding our wedding during the past few days that my father is feeling that he has been derelict in his duties as host. He is taking everyone on an exploratory walk about the park. Most of his guests, like you, are here for the first time, you see.”

  “Oh,” she said. And so once again she had no choice. She had not been asked if she would like to trek about the park on a gray, cold day, in company with a number of other couples. She was half of a couple now and it was assumed that she would do what Edgar decided they should do. Besides, he was the heir to all this. Of course she must go. It would be ill-mannered to refuse. And she was finding it very hard here at Mobley to be bad mannered.

  “Take my arm,” he said. “I will come up with you.”

  Staying aloof would have to be a mental thing, then, she decided. And perhaps something of a physical thing, too. Tonight she would reestablish the rules. He would learn that though she had allowed him to touch her once, she had not issued a general invitation to conjugal relations at his pleasure.

  “You are feeling well enough to walk?” he asked her as they entered their bedchamber.

  It was the excuse she might have thought of for herself downstairs. It was the easy solution. But she would not use her condition as an excuse for anything. She would not hide behind female frailty.

  “I am quite well, thank you,” she said, slipping her arm from his and making her way to her dressing room. “Why would I not be? I am expecting a baby, Edgar. Thousands of women are doing it every day.”

  “But only one of them is my wife,” he said. “And only one of them is expecting my baby.”

  She did not even try to interpret the tone of his voice. If he was trying to establish ownership, he might save his breath. He had done that quite effectively yesterday. She belonged to him body and sou
l. But she would not curl into the safety and comfort that fact offered her.

  “I hope, Edgar,” she called from inside her dressing room, making sure that there would be no mistaking the tone of her voice at least, “you are not going to start fussing over me. How tiresome that would be.”

  The bedchamber was empty when she came back into it. He had gone into his own dressing room. She was not sure whether he had heard her or not.

  The walk was going to be far worse of an ordeal than she had anticipated, she saw immediately on their return downstairs. The hall was teeming with not only adult humans but also hordes of infant humans, too. Every child had spilled from the nursery in order to enjoy the walk. The noise was well above comfort level. Helena grimaced and would have returned to her room if she decently could.

  She, it soon became apparent, was to be favored by the personal escort of her father-in-law. He took her arm and directed Edgar to escort her aunt.

  And so by association she became the focal point of all the frolicking children as they walked. Mr. Downes had four grandchildren of his own among the group and clearly he was one of their favorite humans. But there were ten other children—Helena finally counted them all—who had fully adopted him during the few days of their acquaintance with him. And so every discovery along their route, from a misshapen, cracked chestnut to a gray, bedraggled bird feather was excuse enough to dash up to “Grandpapa” so that he might scrutinize the treasure and exclaim on its uniqueness. And Helena was called upon to exclaim enthusiastically about everything, too.

  The Bridgwater baby was too heavy for his mama and papa to carry by turns, Mr. Downes decided after they had walked through a landscaped grotto and about the base of a grassy hill, which the older children had to run over, whooshing down the far side with extended arms and loud shrieks like a flock of demented birds. And so he enticed the babe into his own arms and made it bounce and laugh as he tickled it and talked nonsense to it. And then he decided that he would pass along the privilege and the pleasure to his new daughter-in-law.