Salt Bride

by Lucinda Brant

  When Salt pulled her corset free and dropped it to the floor leaving her in all her glory she gasped in a little breathless whisper, “Why, my lord, have a care! Do you forget we are in a drawing room? Someone might enter at any moment!”

  “That someone being me. If you’ll stop your twittering, Lizzie, I’d be very pleased to enter you,” he quipped.

  She tittered and melted against him at the thought of him deep inside her as he bent to kiss her throat but wanting him to kiss her mouth knowing he never would. Of all the places he had kissed and pleasured her he had never kissed her mouth. Not that it disturbed her greatly. In all other respects his skill as a lover and the sheer size of him more than satisfied her. Yet, if he would just kiss her mouth she knew he was hers and hers alone. She went for the buttons of his breeches but he caught up her hands and put them behind her back as he stooped to kiss her breasts. She was taken aback by his ardency at this the beginning of their lovemaking. There was a hunger about him, as if he’d gone without a woman for sometime, his want as great as that of a thirsty man in need of water. It thrilled her to think she had aroused this urgent craving in him and she couldn’t wait to impart this newfound power to her friend Diana St. John.

  But her triumph was short lived. Just as quickly as the spark was ignited it was extinguished. The Earl pulled himself free of her embrace and set her aside. And when he blinked down at her as if she was a stranger, flushed and short of breath, Elizabeth was shrewd enough to realize that it was not she who had brought out the carnal urgency in him but the creature in his mind’s eye who occupied his thoughts when aroused. How right she was.

  The moment he’d closed his eyes on Elizabeth Outram into his mind’s eye appeared a pale, ethereal beauty with big, questioning blue eyes that looked up at him with disconcerting frankness, and whose rosebud mouth invited plunder. That he wanted desperately to make love to this ethereal being was not in question, that she was none other than his future wife whose mere apparition possessed the ability to affect his manhood made him seriously question his virility.

  Disgusted with himself, he quickly turned away and adjusted his clothing.

  Unsatisfied and her self-esteem in shreds, Elizabeth angrily scooped up her discarded dressing gown and made a drama of covering her nakedness, despite the Earl having his back to her.

  “After a twelvemonth of my hospitality I believe I have earned the right to know something of your plans, my lord.”

  “Have you?” he answered indifferently. “My plans I leave to my long-suffering secretary.”

  “And your letters to discarded mistresses?” she asked bitterly. “Do they require a woman’s touch and so are left to be penned by Lady St. John?”

  “Lady St. John? What are you blabbering on about, Lizzie?” Salt asked gruffly and turned to face her. “What letters?”

  Elizabeth rummaged in a drawer of the mahogany bureau by the window, found the letter she was looking for and presented it to the Earl with a flourish and a questioning lift of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “My twelvemonth notice. Like your previous interests, Sarah Walpole and Maria Leveson-Gower, just to name the two ladies known to me personally; Lady St. John has provided us all with our notice to vacate.”

  Scowling, Salt opened out the single sheet of parchment with two fingers, stared at the familiar sloping handwriting, turned it over to inspect the broken seal then folded it. “May I have this?”

  Elizabeth shrugged a shoulder. “By all means. Is it news to you?”

  When he did not respond but finished off his glass of burgundy Elizabeth had her answer.

  “Is selecting the Earl of Salt Hendon’s Countess also part of Lady St. John’s cousinly duties?”

  He lowered the wine glass. “Such tedious details are of concern to no one but myself, my dear.”

  The edge to his voice made her wary but she could not help herself. “So Diana doesn’t know. Good. If she did she would not have been able to resist gloating the news to me. It’s a secret, is it?”

  “A word of advice, Lizzie. You are far more beautiful when you’re not ruminating.”

  But Elizabeth wasn’t listening, she was taking comfort in the fact that her friend had been kept in ignorance and that she would suffer certain devastation when the news finally reached her that the Earl, the great infatuation of Diana’s life, had secretly wed another. She hoped she was there to witness Diana’s downfall. The great Lady St. John needed pulling down a rung or two, such was her smugness at being the mother of the Earl’s heir and his closest female relative.

  “I never thought you would marry,” she confessed truthfully.

  “Nor did I,” he remarked as he shrugged on his frockcoat.

  She rushed over to him then and threw her arms around his neck. “If it’s a marriage of convenience,” she asked hopefully, “then surely we need not end our liaison?”

  He removed her hands and turned to the looking glass to adjust the folds of his cravat. “I apologize for Lady St. John’s letter. It was not her place to bring our enjoyable connection to an end. But her letter coincidentally arrived at a most opportune moment.”

  Elizabeth pouted. “So you’re going to let her get away with it?”

  “I have enjoyed our times together, Lizzie,” he replied smoothly.

  That he used the past tense was not lost on her and she tossed her blonde curls with a huff. “Your little country bride will bore you within a week of marriage!” When this had no effect on him, she sighed tragically, a finger outlining the pattern of an embroidered flower on his waistcoat as he continued to fiddle with his cravat. She tried to cajole him. “In gaining a wife surely you need not forfeit your visits here…”

  She made one last attempt to rekindle his interest, going up on tiptoe to kiss his mouth, her naked body under the thin silk dressing gown pressed against him, hand cupping his sizeable manhood. But he quickly turned his head away before her mouth touched his, removed her hand and put her away from him.

  “My dear, may I suggest you give the latch key to Pascoe; the only Church I’ve ever come across who actively promotes promiscuity and vice in all its forms.”

  Elizabeth put up her nose and spoke as if she had no idea to what the Earl was alluding. “Lord Church? What is he to me? I have so many, many admirers.”

  At the door Salt bowed to her with excessive politeness. “Ah. And I thought you had an eye to the main chance.”

  “Damn her!” Salt muttered, thoughts still consumed with Jane’s declaration that she must marry him. As soon as he returned home he would have his secretary get his hands on a copy of Jacob Allenby’s will. He didn’t put it past that merchant hellhound to add some odd codicil to his will, all to inflict a final humiliating revenge with his last dying breath.

  Absently, he pressed his gloves on a blank-faced footman standing the vestibule of his club in St. James’s Street, then presented his back to another to help him shrug out of his heavy great coat, oblivious to the group of noblemen who had all turned to look at him on his muttered oath.

  “You may damn as many females as you please, Salt,” drawled a smooth-tongued, perfumed and beribboned nobleman up to his ear. This confection of lace and velvet regarded the Earl with quizzing glass plastered up to one eye and a bejeweled white hand holding aloft an enamel and gold snuffbox, and added with a snicker, “but we’ll be damned if you’re going to get leg-shackled without the commiserations of friends by your side.”

  Salt came out of his abstraction and eyed Pascoe, Lord Church with resentment, nodded to a group of bewigged nobles being divested of swords by attentive blank-faced footmen, and strode through a number of noisy card rooms to the sanctuary of the reading room. Here he took refuge in a comfortable wingback chair in the furthest corner and spread wide a copy of the London Gazette; indication enough he wished to be left alone. But Pascoe Church and Hilary Wraxton Esq. did not take the hint and soon Salt found himself being scrutinized over the top of his newssheet by their powdered heads. He sighed, ke
pt his eyes on the newsprint and made no effort to offer the two gentlemen the vacant seats opposite.

  “There’s a rumor that you’re getting married tomorrow,” said Pascoe Church and flicked a speck of snuff from his embroidered cuff, although his attention was firmly on the Earl’s profile. “It says a great deal about our friendship when your nearest and dearest know less than the hired help! One would think you wanted such a momentous day to pass unnoticed.”

  “Yes, one would think that,” Salt stated and turned over a page.

  “Now we know, got to invite us! Don’t he, Pascoe?” Hilary Wraxton assured the Earl with a confiding smile. “Got to be surrounded by friends and family. What!”

  “Most certainly,” agreed Pascoe Church, nonchalantly dangling his quizzing glass by its black riband. “But perhaps our dear friend has his reasons for not wanting his friends in attendance?”

  Hilary Wraxton blew out his cheeks. “Reason? What reason? Not every day a man takes the great plunge; except Pascoe with your sister. Said next Sinclair to walk the matrimonial plank would be Lady Caroline. But if Salt wants to tie the knot before his sister then so be it.”

  At this revelation Salt glanced up at Pascoe Church, a faint rise to his eyebrows.

  “The Lady Caroline walk the plank?” Lord Church said with a light laugh, clearly flustered and fighting hard to keep his cool façade under the Earl’s haughty gaze. He tossed off the quizzing glass so that it fell against his silken chest with a thud. “I have no idea where you get such notions, Hilary.”

  “From you,” Hilary Wraxton replied simply. “Last week, when sitting down to whist with Walpole, you said you’d almost got up the courage to approach Salt about—”

  “Courage?” Pascoe Church snorted. “My dear Hilary, when the time comes for me to approach our dear friend here—”

  “You are destined for disappointment,” Salt interrupted softly, returning to peruse the newssheet.

  Hilary Wraxton sighed deeply. “Guess that settles it, Pascoe. The Lady Caroline ain’t walking any planks, matrimonial or otherwise, with you. When Salt says you’ll be disappointed you’re bound to be.”

  “It settles nothing,” Pascoe Church hissed in Hilary’s ear, and to return the sting of his disappointment at being rejected as a suitable husband for the Lady Caroline Sinclair, said petulantly to the Earl, “Just so you are aware, Salt, the rumor in drawing rooms—”

  “I can hazard a guess which drawing room,” Salt interrupted dryly, with the flicker of a smile.

  “Can you?” Hilary Wraxton asked in surprise and viewed Pascoe Church through his quizzing glass with one hideously magnified eye. “But you said Salt hadn’t the foggiest notion about your frolicking forays with Luscious Lizzie. You said—”

  “Never mind that now!” Pascoe Church demanded and tried to regain his composure and the cool venom to his voice. “This rumor, Salt, says that you’re keen for a quiet wedding because the bride is either plain-faced and pudding shaped with a pedigree worth a gilt frame or, and this will amuse you greatly, the beautiful daughter of a drunkard merchant with upwards of a hundred thousand pounds to add to your coffers.”

  “But Salt don’t need the blunt, Pascoe.”

  “What say you to that, Salt?” persisted Pascoe Church, ignoring his friend. “I’ll hazard it’s the latter. What a pity her great beauty and wealth will never be adequate perfume for the foul odor of trade that must forever linger about her person.”

  “And all the pudding shaped heiresses are taken,” added Hilary Wraxton with a firm nod.

  “God help us when the divine Diana finds out,” Pascoe Church added with a sigh, for good spiteful measure. “What a social plummet for the House of Sinclair!”

  “God help us indeed, Pas,” agreed Hilary Wraxton with a sad shake of his powdered wig.

  “God help you both if you don’t scuttle off under the floorboards from whence you came!” Salt growled as he shot up out of his chair to tower over the two men, and with such a look of suppressed fury that it did not need his hand about Pascoe Church’s beautifully arranged cravat for that gentleman’s throat to constrict alarmingly. But no sooner was Salt on his feet than he regretted his action and was immediately angry with himself for allowing his sister’s rejected suitor and his moronic comrade to prod the raw nerve of his upcoming marriage.

  For want of something to cover the awkward moment Hilary Wraxton made an elaborate display of checking the hour with his gold pocket watch before pronouncing that he was extremely late for an appointment with his wigmaker; Pascoe Church adding that he too was needed elsewhere, although he did not offer up a name or direction. Salt wasn’t sorry to see them depart and watched the two noblemen waddle off in their high heels, huddled together as if in need of mutual propping up. And he was under no illusions about the thin-shouldered nobleman’s ability to be vexatious. Pascoe, Lord Church might have turned frigid with fright and lost his breath at Salt’s angry outburst, but once recovered and at a safe distance he would use his waspish tongue to good effect to ensure Polite Society was fully appraised of the Earl of Salt Hendon’s upcoming marriage.

  Cursing himself for such lack of restraint, Salt ordered a bottle of claret from a passing soft-footed waiter and resumed his seat only to be on his feet within five minutes to warmly clasp the hand of his closest friend, the younger brother of Lady St. John, Sir Antony Templestowe. A large handsome gentleman held in high regard by all who knew him, Sir Antony was considered by the Foreign Department, where he held a lucrative sinecure, to have a good head on his shoulders, and thus certain to rise to the rank of Ambassador one day. No two siblings could be more opposite in temperament than the diffident Sir Antony and his social butterfly sister, the beautiful and gregarious Diana, Lady St. John.

  “It’s just as well Bedford could spare you from the Peace negotiations for a couple of weeks,” Salt commented, looking Sir Antony up and down. “Paris has added inches to your girth.”

  “A couple of hours running about your tennis court should take care of M’sieur Chef’s fine cream sauces and delectable choux pastries,” Sir Antony replied good-naturedly as they both made themselves comfortable in wing chairs. He unbuttoned two silver buttons of his striped saffron silk waistcoat and accepted the glass of claret from a blank-faced waiter. “But I’m surprised the tournament is to go ahead. I thought it’d be left to Ellis to take your place on the court, what with you on your honeymoon—”

  “There isn’t going to be a honeymoon,” stated Salt, taking out his gold snuffbox but not flicking open the enamel inlaid lid. “Parliament still sits, which means I’ve too much business to attend to here in London to go gallivanting about the countryside, this side of the Channel or that.”

  Sir Antony pulled his chin into his lace cravat and studied his friend a moment. “To say your letter informing me of your immediate intention to enter the matrimonial state knocked me off my chair would be an understatement, dear fellow. But I’m a diplomatist, so understatement is my forte. That you want to keep the occasion hush hush is your affair, and I’ll ask you no questions, if that is your wish, but surely I’m not the only one going to attend the ceremony to, as it were, prop up your elbow?”

  Salt took snuff, frowning into the middle-distance. “The least fuss the better.”

  “What does Diana have to say about your sudden leap into the matrimonial fire?”

  “I haven’t told her.

  Sir Antony hid his astonishment behind a frown. “Haven’t told Diana?” he repeated mildly. “You’re not getting leg-shackled without her approval, surely? God! She’ll have a fit of the sullens that neither of us will manage very well. I wish I was still in Paris. You know what an interest she takes in you—”

  “—and my earldom.”

  Sir Antony pursed his lips and counted to five. “Yes, you can be cynical if you choose,” he commented. “But is it any wonder she takes an interest when she’s the mother of your heir? Little Ron will one day succeed you. Up until four years ag
o it was her husband who stood to inherit your earldom. St. John’s untimely death affected her greatly, as it did all of us.” Sir Antony shifted uncomfortably on the wingchair adding flatly, “And you know as well as I that she married St. John in a fit of pique because you wouldn’t ask her. And if you ask me, she still holds out a candle in hope that you might still get up the courage. Why do you suppose such a good-looking woman has remained a widow? It’s not from lack of offers, I can tell you!”

  Salt shifted his gaze to the dark red liquid in his wine glass, a heightened color in his lean cheeks. “Diana was the wife of my best friend and closest cousin, Tony. I have and always will hold her in the highest regard. But that’s all I can—will ever—offer her.”

  “Granted. But Diana will never look on you as a brother,” Sir Antony argued. “As long as you know that.” He gave a half-hearted laugh. “No wonder you don’t want me returning to Paris any day soon if Diana don’t know your news. You’ll need reinforcements when she’s presented with your marriage as a fait accompli. And as for Caroline’s reaction… If you haven’t told your little sister she’s about to gain a sister-in-law, I pray she isn’t coming up to London because we won’t be able to contend with two grief-stricken females—”

  “It’s Jane Despard,” Salt interrupted quietly.

  Sir Antony’s gaze never wavered from the Earl’s handsome angular face but his mouth hovered between an absurdly stupid grin and blank amazement so that he looked stunned, as if someone or something had smacked him across the back of the head. Mute stupefaction made him drink his wine in one gulp, realizing now why his elder sister and the Lady Caroline had been kept in ignorance of the Earl’s imminent marriage. The bride was so far off the social register, indeed being disowned by her father was as nothing when compared to her depraved lifestyle living unmarried under the roof of an old Bristol merchant, that if the truth was ever revealed to family and friends they would wonder at the Head of the Family’s mental stability, and if it ever got out to the world, well, the Sinclair family would be forever ridiculed and thus socially ruined.