The Officer and the Proper Lady

by Louise Allen

  ‘That is a delightful night gown.’

  ‘I bought it today. Nell took me to some of her favourite shops.’

  ‘Now I know why Marcus looks so smug these days.’ Hal took hold of the corner of the sheet and whipped it back. ‘Spending your dress allowance, Julia?’

  ‘My non-existent dress allowance,’ she corrected him, reaching up her hands to flatten the palms on his chest as he leant over her, intent on the ribbons. Under her palms, his skin was smooth and hot, the muscles hard, the hair crisp.

  ‘Such a mean husband you have,’ he sympathised, leaning down, pushing against her hands so she was forced back to the pillows. ‘But you have such delightful taste I can see that I must give you a large allowance, all to spend on flimsy nonsense like this. Now, how does it come off?’

  Of course she had to wriggle and bat at his hands, so that he was compelled to tickle her, roll her across the wide bed, pretending to pounce until she sensed it was time to stop fighting. Julia lay still, quiescent under those clever hands while he smoothed the gown up and over and off, letting it caress her until she did not know what was his fingertips or his breath or the whisper of silk or even, as he bent his head to her breast, the brush of his hair.

  Hal lay on his side and pulled her against the length of his body, then lifted her leg over his hip until she was open to him. It felt strange, but she let him do as he wished, finding she could lean in to lick along his collar bone, his neck, nip the point of his chin with her teeth, soothe with her lips. He tasted good: warm and slightly salty.

  Then he began to explore her with his hands, boldly, intimately, until she writhed against him, panting, the tension mounting and knotting inside her as it had done last night. But this time she knew she was going to get to wherever that spiral of heat was taking her. And then he slid into her, easily, slowly, so that all she was conscious of was him filling her, making them one as he rocked her up, up until she was wound so tight it was impossible.

  ‘Now,’ Hal breathed in her ear. ‘Come with me now.’

  Where? Where… And then she knew and let go and flew with him, over the edge, up and up as he gasped her name and held her safe until, so slowly, the world came back and she was tangled in his arms on the big bed.

  It was possible that she would never move again, that they would stay like this, still joined, for ever. It seemed to Julia to be a perfect fate. She closed her eyes against his sweat-damp chest and floated.

  ‘Are you asleep?’

  Julia blinked and opened her eyes to find his, blue and clear and smiling into hers, very close. She wriggled a little. ‘You’ve gone.’

  Hal chuckled. ‘That happens. Now we start again. Can you ride?’

  ‘No.’ Mystified, Julia watched him roll onto his back.

  ‘Now’s the time to learn.’ He lay there watching her from under hooded lids while she worked it out.

  ‘Me? On top? Hal, that’s…’ Indecently bold. Indecently exciting. ‘Like this?’ His lean hips felt right between her thighs and she kept her weight forward, away from his wound. And beneath her, his body was stirring into life again. ‘Oh yes, I see—Oh, Hal! We fit together so well.’

  And he smiled and then, as she took him fully into herself and began to move, his eyes closed. ‘Julia. Oh my God, Julia!’

  The next morning at break fast, Julia felt as though she must have Satisfied Wife emblazoned across her forehead. They had made love a third time before they slept and then again this morning. Then Hal had kissed her lingeringly and padded off to his own room before her maid came in.

  He had put his foot through the sheet at some point, she realized, finding the maid’s studious disregard of the tangled bedding and crumpled night gown every bit as pointed as a comment would have been.

  But she was too happy to be embarrassed, even though unexpected muscles ached and she was aware of her body, inside and out, just as though he was still touching her.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Carlow,’ Hal said, sitting down again as she took her own seat at the break fast table. He looked, and sounded, politely attentive, but his eyes, full of mischief and messages, were anything but those of a staid gentleman at his break fast.

  ‘Good morning, Major Carlow,’ she rejoined, demurely shaking out her napkin while trying to convey that she was most willing to try whatever that mischief was suggesting.

  No-one seemed to notice the by-play. Lord Narborough, looking rather better that morning than he had for several days, settled back to his perusal of the news pa per while his wife discussed the desirability of harp lessons with Verity.

  ‘Would you like to go for a drive, Julia?’ Hal asked. ‘It would be a pleasant day for a ride, but, of course, you do not ride, do you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, compressing her lips. ‘You must teach me.’ Oh but he was wicked, and she did love him.

  Everything was perfect now, except for that one small detail, she thought, the desire to smile fading. He had never said he loved her, not even in the extremes of passion or those precious intervals while he had held her in his arms before they slept. But that was too much to hope for, she supposed. After all, this was a marriage of necessity, not a love match. Hal enjoyed her in bed, he desired her, he appeared to like her company—that was all far more than she had ever looked for in marriage. I must not be greedy, she thought.

  ‘I will see you in the hall in an hour then?’ Hal folded his own news pa per and got up. Julia agreed, managed a smile, and was promptly appealed to for support by Verity whose godfather had promised her a harp if she wanted to learn.

  ‘Only I don’t know if I do,’ she said. ‘It isn’t like the piano—everyone has a piano and it can be fun as well as something one has to do at parties. The harp always seems such a performance.’

  ‘It does make the player appear very graceful and feminine. Perhaps Lord Ked din ton thinks it would be a useful accomplishment for the Season,’ Julia suggested.

  Verity wrinkled her nose. ‘I suppose you mean it will help attract gentlemen. I don’t want the sort of gentleman who would like me because I can play the harp. I want someone dashing, like Hal or Marcus. Or Gabriel,’ she added, with a wary eye on her mother who pursed her lips slightly at the mention of her son-in-law’s name.

  ‘Some excitement is good,’ Julia conceded, wondering what well-behaved, sheltered Verity would make of a dashing and dangerous suitor if she found one. He would probably scare her to death. ‘But I do not think you can predict in advance the kind of man you will want to marry. I thought I wanted to find someone very ordinary and stolid.’

  ‘And instead you fell in love with Hal.’ Verity beamed at her, ignoring Julia’s blushes and her mother’s tut of disapproval.

  And thank goodness Hal was not in the room to hear that, Julia told herself. She hoped he believed she had gone to the battlefield out of friend ship, not because her deeper feelings were engaged. If he thought that, he might easily think she had compromised herself deliberately. She was not certain which was worse: that he might think she had set out to entrap him as a husband, or that he guess she loved him and he, not returning that sentiment, pitied her.

  ‘I am sure Verity will find someone entirely suitable,’ Lady Narborough pronounced, rising grace fully from her place. ‘Unlike dear Honoria, one can always rely upon Verity to do the right thing.’

  ‘That is a most provocative bonnet,’ Hal observed when Julia came down to the hall for their drive. ‘There is the smallest area of tender skin just between the ribbon and your ear that makes me want to nibble.’

  ‘Ssh!’ Julia cast a hunted look round for footmen. ‘Oh thank goodness you are leaving your tiger behind,’ she added as the lad let go the horses’ heads and Hal sent them off towards Piccadilly at a smart trot. ‘If you are going to say such shocking things I most certainly do not want an audience.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ he admitted. ‘But that was not the main reason I wanted to be alone. Green Park or Hyde Park?’

  ‘Green,�
�� Julia decided. ‘So much quieter.’ She felt slightly apprehensive, his tone was so serious all of a sudden. ‘What is it you want to talk about?’

  ‘Hebden. Or Beshaley, to give him his Romany name.’ Hal negotiated the gates and guided the horses away from the reservoir with the strolling pedestrians enjoying the summer morning sun on its banks. ‘I realize you were only trying to provoke me last night, but I need you to be careful with that man, Julia.’

  ‘If he has done all these things, why not have him arrested?’ she asked. ‘Or call him out.’

  ‘If Marcus or I called him out he would avoid the challenge.’ Hal reined the pair into a walk. ‘He has no concept of honour. He is not a gentleman, even though he was brought up as one as a child—until his father was murdered and the family threw him out. Now he has the talents and the instincts of a gutter rat.’

  He drove in silence for a few moments. ‘And the things he has done are not for public consumption; they affect the honour of wives and sisters, young women like Mildenhall’s new wife who is Hebden’s own half-sister. Or they cannot be proved against him—the attempt to give my father heart attacks, for example. He’s as slippery as a snake and as elusive as smoke, damn him.’

  ‘It all goes back to that murder,’ Julia mused. ‘It seems strange to me: the man was hanged, so why does this still continue?’

  ‘Unless he was innocent,’ Hal said, reluctantly.

  ‘Who is the obvious suspect if—Wardale was it not?—was innocent?’

  ‘My father.’ Hal sounded grim.

  ‘They suspected no-one else was involved?’ He shook his head. ‘But the man who paid the trooper to try and kill you was not Hebden, yet there was that silken rope, so we know there is someone else connected with this,’ Julia said, trying to work through it logically.

  ‘But why the devil would they get involved in Hebden’s vendetta now if they are the real murderer?’ The horses, finding the reins slack on their necks, stopped. Hal did not appear to notice.

  ‘Guilt?’ Julia suggested. ‘After all these years, preying on their minds until they become unhinged? Hebden’s activities are making you all focus on that one event. Perhaps the guilty man thinks you and Marcus have discovered something and are getting close to unmasking him; that might explain an attempt at murder.’

  Hal gathered his team and set them off walking again. ‘Well, we haven’t. In truth, we never questioned Wardale’s guilt, because to do so would have been to believe our father sent an innocent man to the gallows. He had no doubts then that his friend was guilty. After all, he came upon him, the knife in his hands, kneeling over Hebden as he lay dying on our terrace. And we have no proof now, just supposition.’

  ‘Was it in Hertfordshire?’

  ‘No, here at our London house. And Wardale was having an affair with Hebden’s wife, to make things worse. My father strongly disapproved.’

  ‘Wardale made no counter-accusation?’

  The horses broke into a trot, as though Hal had given them a signal. He reined them back. ‘He wrote a last letter to his wife protesting his innocence and voicing his suspicions of my father. Nell showed it to Marcus and he told me of it.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Julia tucked her hand under Hal’s elbow, feeling the need to offer some comfort. ‘But Nell cannot believe Lord Narborough guilty. However much she loves Marcus, she could not be on terms of such affection with Lord Narborough if she believed he had killed her own father.’

  She thought some more as the horses took them into the shade of the elms. ‘Let us assume Wardale was innocent, and accept, of course, that your father is too—for, if nothing else, your own father would not plot to kill you.’ Beside her, Hal stiffened. That friction again. ‘That means we are looking for a very clever man who was in the right place at the right time to kill a man he knew was a threat to him.’

  ‘We?’ Hal queried.

  ‘I am your wife now.’ She leaned against his shoulder, thinking happily of last night. ‘And I am not going to sit around in ignorance expecting to be protected.’

  Hal squeezed his arm against his side, trapping her hand more firmly. ‘Then do not treat Hebden lightly.’

  ‘We know he cannot have been the original murderer. Does Lord Narborough not suspect who it might have been?’

  ‘They operated in isolated groups for security. The three of them were trying to trace one French spy, to read his coded messages. They reported to a minister now dead. Even Veryan has not been able to trace any likely contacts or points of weakness, and he has better access than anyone to the files.’

  ‘Veryan?’ she queried. ‘Lord Ked din ton, Verity’s god father?’

  ‘Yes. He was a junior secretary at the time, so he knew nothing of it then. But last year, when Hebden began his campaign, he looked for clues, even set his new assistant on it. Nothing.’ He frowned. ‘And the young man met with a fatal accident shortly after he began the task. At the time it just seemed to be a random tragedy. Now, I wonder.’

  ‘Hebden is an intelligent man,’ Julia observed. ‘Amoral, dangerous and vengeful—but also clever. If he believed your father and Wardale innocent, then he would be a powerful ally.’

  ‘No!’ Hal said, reining in and turning on the seat to face her. He jammed the whip in its holder and took her chin in his free hand. ‘No, no and no, Julia. Marcus is right: we avoid that man like the plague. He can never be anything but a threat. I don’t know what he does to women—you all seem mesmerised by him.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t under stand,’ she agreed. ‘You are too close to see it. And you are a man. But he is very like you.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘What?’ Hal’s furious bellow had his leader rearing, sending the curricle slewing sideways across the drive. It took a moment to settle the animal. Julia kept quiet, clutched the side rail and concluded that frank speaking was not always ideal in marriage.

  ‘You are comparing me to that bastard?’ Hal finally demanded. ‘Are you all about in your head?’

  ‘Not in your morals or your honour, of course not,’ she said, half fascinated, half wary of the storm clouds in his eyes. ‘But you wonder why he is attractive to women. You are both very beautiful, very male, very fit young men with indecent amounts of charm.’ Hal snorted. Julia noted the flush on his cheek bones and concluded that he was rather flattered by the description.

  ‘He uses all that, quite deliberately,’ she said, thinking about Hebden, how he had looked at her, how he had used his voice and his body. ‘Looking back, he was as calculating as an actor. He knows perfectly well how attractive he is and he wields his personal attributes like another weapon, with calculation. Heaven help the woman he un leashes that on without any artifice and in all sincerity.’ Hal glowered.

  ‘You, on the other hand, are a gentleman. All that arrogance and self-confidence is quite natural, quite unconscious.’ The glower became a scowl. ‘The charm is used with good manners and restraint—which makes it just as lethal for poor, unsuspecting females. We are apt to believe in it, you see.’

  ‘Apt to believe I am a flirt and a rake, you mean,’ he said harshly.

  ‘Well, of course. Hal, I might not be very experienced, but I am female! And I cannot imagine anyone without your charm and address—and looks—being much of a success as a rake.

  ‘And I cannot pretend I do not enjoy having a husband who is—’ she felt the blush but carried on anyway ‘—experienced and attractive.’ He smiled at her, but she could see he was troubled. ‘Hal—what is it? Why are you and your father so con strained with each other? I see him and Marcus talking together, easy with each other. You and your father are always so polite, so distant. And why do you say things that make me think that you are not always happy to be the rake you say you are?’

  For a long moment she thought he would not answer her or would pretend he did not under stand. ‘I’m the second son, of course. And I was always the wild one. Marcus is serious. He will make an excellent earl one day, take his seat
in the House, do all the right things. He even managed to lose his virginity in the correct manner—discreetly at the age of seventeen in a fashionable bordello that he had care fully re searched be forehand.

  ‘I, on the other hand just found girls—and sex—almost too good to be true. I was not the most attentive scholar at the best of times, if the subject was not military history or mathematics, so I’d give our tutor the slip and be off, exploring this much more interesting subject. I’d get beaten when I got back, but that seemed a fair exchange for kisses and exploratory fumbles in hay stacks.’

  The horses were ambling now, the disciplined hand they were used to slack on the reins. Julia kept quiet and let him talk. ‘And then, of course, the inevitable happened and I thought I had fallen in love. The trouble was, she was not some willing milkmaid who had spent a few years being tumbled by rustic swains and knew what she was about. This was the squire’s daughter.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘She was seventeen. I was fifteen. Looking back I’m not sure who seduced who, but there we were one summer’s afternoon in the long grass of a woodland glade—’ Julia gasped. ‘Quite. Just like the glade where you and I…met. I was clumsy, but enthusiastic. I have no doubt we were making a great deal of noise. And then a riding crop landed hard across my ado les cent buttocks and there we were surrounded by my father, her father and his head game keeper.’

  Hal collected his team and drove in silence for a few minutes. ‘They arrived in the nick of time or I’d have found myself a very young bride groom, but you can imagine, perhaps, the impact of it all, being hauled off a sobbing girl while three large men yell at you that you are a whoreson, rakehell, good for nothing young goat. My father was deeply disappointed in me: I was turning out even worse than he expected. He has a strong moralistic streak and my be ha vi our deeply offended and distressed him, I can see that now.

  ‘I could have reformed, been penitent, returned to my books and forswore women. Instead, I set out to prove him right, and I also set out to make sure that no woman ever had cause to complain of my performance in bed.’