Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride

by Mary Balogh

  He had presented her to Lord Gerson, one of his particular friends, a couple of weeks ago at an afternoon fête. She smiled at the man now and he winked at her. He seemed to find the marriage of his friend a huge joke. In fact, he had remarked to her at that fête that he had never seen Hartley in town during the Season before and had known that there must be a woman behind his appearance this time.

  “And, by Jove, everything is as clear as daylight to me now that I have clapped eyes on you, Miss Newman,” he had said. “Carew is a lucky dog.”

  There was Lord Hawthorne toward the back of the ballroom, not far from Francis. Francis was looking quite eye-catching in a lemon-yellow coat with pale turquoise waistcoat. It looked as if he were flirting with the ladies on either side of him. He was certainly doing a great deal of smiling and laughing.

  Had he been serious? Probably not. He seemed to have recovered very nicely. She hoped he had not been serious. She was fond of him.

  And there was—oh, dear God. Dear God! Had he been there all the time? He was seated in the middle of the ballroom, looking so startlingly conspicuous that she could not believe he had not suddenly appeared there from nowhere. Had he been at the church? What was he doing here? He had certainly not been on her guest list. And not on Hartley’s, either, though he had told her that he had issued some verbal invitations and not bothered to add them to his written list. But Hartley could not have invited him.

  Her eyes met his and he looked steadily and gravely at her before she snatched her eyes away. She had not noticed how hot the room had become, how heavy the air was with a hundred different perfumes. She breathed slowly through her mouth, determined not to pant.

  There were speeches and toasts and applause and laughter. Hartley got up to speak and she smiled and touched his arm, aware that he was saying something complimentary about her and something about his own good fortune.

  He was very sweet. Did he not realize that she was the fortunate one? She felt a sudden wave of gladness—that it was all over and doubts were at rest, that she was safe at last. With a man she trusted and liked.

  Those who had not greeted them personally outside the church did so after the breakfast. Guests milled about the ballroom while servants discreetly tried to clear the tables. Guests wandered into the hall and the drawing room and out onto the terrace and into the garden. Samantha was separated from her husband, who was dragged off to the drawing room by someone she scarcely knew to meet an elderly dowager who had known his grandfather. Samantha was led into the garden by several of her lady friends, two of whom linked arms with her.

  There she received the homage of her court—she could almost hear Gabriel’s voice describing the scene thus and smiled, though she suddenly missed him and Jenny dreadfully.

  Francis told her that they were all going to go into deep mourning the next day and into a permanent decline after that. But she tapped him sharply on the arm and reminded him that his behavior at table earlier had hardly been that of a man planning to pine away from unrequited love.

  He grinned at her and squeezed both her hands and kissed both her cheeks. Sir Robin followed suit and then Jeremy Nicholson and several others.

  She must go and find Hartley, she thought. It felt wrong to be without him.

  “Oh, dear,” she said suddenly, as her eyes blurred and tears spilled over onto her cheeks. Talking thus with all her old friends and suitors, she had realized anew that her life had changed irrevocably today, that she was a bride and a wife. And that the thought was a pleasing one. “Oh, dear, how foolish I am.”

  “You see, Samantha?” Sir Robin said. “You are grieving along with us. But for which one of us in particular? That is the intriguing question.” He smiled kindly at her while Francis handed her a large linen handkerchief.

  She dabbed at her eyes with it and then clutched it in her hand. Francis had turned away, his attention called by one of the ladies who had sat beside him at breakfast.

  “Something old and something new,” a quiet voice said into her ear, and she spun around, effectively cutting herself off from the small group that still lingered about her. “The pearls are the ones you had as a girl. Your mother’s, at a guess. The dress is new and very lovely.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling uncertainly at Lionel. She did not like to ask him what he did there. She feared he must have brazened his way in without an invitation. But why?

  “Something borrowed,” he said, one long, well-manicured finger flicking at the handkerchief she held clutched in one hand. “But nothing blue, Samantha?”

  “I did not think of it,” she said, gazing into his blue eyes. They looked sad.

  “I did,” he said. “I brought you a wedding gift. A family heirloom. It has always been very precious to me. I wanted to give it to you on the occasion of your wedding.” The shadow of a frown crossed his brow for one moment, but he smiled as he reached into a pocket and brought out a small box. He did not hand it to her but opened it and showed her the contents. His eyes looked into her face the whole while.

  She breathed in deeply. The sapphire stone of the brooch was surrounded by diamonds in a pleasingly old-fashioned setting.

  “Something blue,” he said.

  “Oh, my lord,” she said, in deep distress. It was such a beautiful, personal gift. “I could not.”

  “No,” he said softly, “you could not refuse a wedding gift, could you? As a token of my—esteem, Samantha?”

  “No.” She still shook her head. “It is too—personal, my lord. I do thank you. Truly I do. But I could not accept it.”

  “Whatever would Hartley say if you refused it?” he asked.

  “H—Hartley?” She looked at him, frowning.

  He laughed suddenly. “My cousin,” he said. “My cousin Hartley. We practically grew up together. Has he not told you? And I have not, either, until now, have I? There are some things one assumes another must know; but there is no reason you should have. I am sorry. My mother and his father were sister and brother. I spent a large part of my youth in Yorkshire, at Highmoor.”

  She could remember that one year, when Jenny was to have made her come-out and her engagement to Lionel was to become official, it had all been postponed because Lionel was in Yorkshire attending his uncle, who was gravely ill. And she remembered that it was some ghastly personal feud between Lionel and Gabriel that had thrown Jenny into the midst of such a dreadful scandal and had forced her to marry Gabriel. But she had never known or asked for all the details. Lionel was Hartley’s cousin?

  “The idea has taken you by surprise,” he said. He was unpinning the brooch from its small velvet cushion inside the box. “But you see, you and I are cousins by marriage. And this is a family heirloom. You will not refuse it now, will you? And you really must have something blue.”

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “Thank you, my lord.”

  She watched rather unhappily as he took the brooch from the box and reached across to pin it himself on her dress, just above her left breast. The pin was stiff. His fingers lingered for what seemed an eternity and burned her flesh through the thin muslin of her dress. One of his hands brushed downward over her breast, touching the sensitive nipple, when he was finished and was examining the effect of his handiwork.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I knew this was where it belonged, Samantha. I could only wish that circumstances had been different, that you had been someone else’s bride today. But I wish you every happiness, my dear.” He made her an elegant bow, his eyes holding hers.

  “Thank you, Lionel,” she said, realizing only when it was too late that she had used his given name, something she had not done in six years. “I must go and find my husband.”

  “Your husband,” he echoed. The sadness was back in his eyes. She turned and hurried in the direction of the house, though she was stopped and kissed by wedding guests no fewer than three times before she stepped indoors.

  HE HAD SOMEHOW GOT himself cornered by five elderly ladies, all of whom see
med pleased to reminisce about his father or his grandfather—“that handsome devil”—and all of whom agreed that it had been extremely naughty of him to hide himself away from the public gaze for most of his life.

  “We will just have to hope that dear Lady Carew will effect a change in you,” one lady said, startling him with the use of Samantha’s new name.

  “And really, you know,” another said with unashamed lack of tact, “you need not hide away on account of a limp and a withered hand, Carew. Many of our war heroes have fared far worse. Young Waters, my sister’s grandson, came home without one leg and with the other sawn off to the knee.”

  It was a great relief to see Samantha in the drawing room doorway, looking about her until she spotted him. Everyone she passed on the way wanted to talk to her and kiss her, but in five minutes’ time she was at his side and smiling and talking easily with the dowagers, two of whom were not above giving her rather earthy advice about the coming night and then cackling at their own wit and her blushes—as well as his own.

  Samantha had the social skills to extricate them easily from the situation after a mere few minutes. He headed into the hall with her, where some of their guests were finally taking their leave. They had no time for private words for some time to come.

  He longed for privacy. He was the one who had wanted a large wedding, and indeed he was not sorry. This would be a day to remember for the rest of their lives. But he longed to be alone with her. Even though there was a large part of the day left and he would not be tasteless enough to try taking her to bed before it was time, nevertheless he longed for just her company, just the two of them talking together or perhaps even silently sitting together.

  He felt a sudden nostalgia for those afternoons at Highmoor. Soon. Within a week they would be back there and would proceed to live happily ever after.

  He took her out to the garden eventually, past the thinning crowds of their guests. He breathed in fresh air, tucked her arm through his, and walked with her toward a small rose arbor, which he hoped would give them a few moments of privacy. Fortunately there was no one there. He seated her on a wrought-iron seat and sat at her left.

  “Someone should have told me,” he said, “that the person one sees the very least on one’s wedding day is one’s bride.”

  “But this has all been so very pleasant, Hartley,” she said, turning to smile at him.

  That was when he saw it for the first time. His eyes fixed on it and he felt the blood drain from his head.

  “Where did you get that?” he whispered.

  “What?” She frowned. But her eyes followed the line of his and she flushed and covered it with her hand. “Lionel—L-Lord Rushford gave it to me as a wedding present,” she said. “He said it was a family heirloom. Of your family. He said—I did not know he was your cousin, Hartley. I did not know you were close. He implied that you would want me to have it. He made a joke about it being something blue. I had the other three things—my mother’s pearls, my new dress, Lord Francis Kneller’s borrowed handkerchief. I—Do you recognize it?”

  It had been his mother’s. One of her precious possessions, given her by his father on their wedding day—as “something blue,” she had always said. She had worn it almost constantly. She had told him when she was dying that he was to have it and give it to his own bride one day. For some reason that had stuck in his mind more than anything after she died, and he had hunted for the brooch, asked his father about it, asked his aunt, Lionel’s mother, about it, grieved over it almost as much, it had sometimes seemed, as he had grieved over his mother.

  He had never found it.

  Lionel had had it. Perhaps he had taken it, or perhaps it had been given him. But no one had ever told him, Hartley. He had been left to search, far beyond the bounds of reason, for years.

  And now the brooch had been given to his bride after all—by Lionel.

  “Yes, I recognize it,” he said. “It was my mother’s.”

  “Oh.” She sounded enormously relieved. “Then it was a very kind gesture, was it not, Hartley, for him to give it to me? To give it back to you through me. It is a wedding gift for both of us. It is yours as much as it is mine.”

  “It is yours, Samantha,” he said, “just as it was my mother’s. It looks good on you.”

  She smiled at him and fingered the brooch again. But he felt a deep and impotent fury—partly against himself. Apart from her wedding ring, he had not yet bought her a gift, he realized. His mother’s lovely sapphire brooch, the “something blue” for the wedding day, had been a gift from Lionel.

  What the devil had he meant by it?

  Was it a peace offering?

  The marquess did not for one moment believe it.

  13

  SHE HAD OFTEN BEEN A GUEST IN OTHER PEOPLE’S homes. She was accustomed to sleeping in strange bedchambers. Indeed, it could be said that she had had no real home of her own for a number of years. It was hard now to grasp the reality of the fact that this room was her own. She belonged here at Carew House as she belonged at Highmoor Abbey by virtue of the fact that she was married to the owner of both.

  She wrapped her arms about herself, though she was not cold, as she gazed about the large square room with its high coved ceiling, painted with an idyllic pastoral scene, its warm carpet underfoot, its elegant furniture, its large, silk-canopied bed.

  It seemed it was to be a normal marriage—there was no reason at all why it would not be, of course. He had said he would join her here shortly. Her mind touched on what Aunt Aggy had told her yesterday and on what Jenny had said in her letter. But she did not expect either extreme from her wedding night. She did not expect to find it fearsome and distasteful. Neither did she expect to find it beautiful and wonderful. She expected—she hoped—to find it pleasant.

  She had been pacing, she realized when there was a tap on the door and she stopped. She did not call to him to come in. He opened the door and stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a wine-colored brocaded dressing gown with a satin collar. He was smiling at her as he came across the room toward her, his hands reaching out for hers.

  “I thought this moment would never come,” he said. “I have been shamelessly looking forward to it all day. All month.”

  He was not wearing a glove. She found herself glancing down at his right hand as it clasped hers. It was paler than the left and thinner. His fingers were bent sharply at the joints. His wrist was bent.

  “I wish I could be whole for you,” he said.

  “Whole?” She looked into his eyes. “You mean because of your accident? Do you think that makes a difference to me? Because you limp? And because you have lost some of the use of your hand? You are whole in every way that could possibly be of importance to me. I regret these things only in that they cause you distress.”

  She lifted his right hand to rub her cheek against his fingers. She turned her head to kiss them.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I was a little afraid.”

  She smiled at him—and blushed.

  “You are nervous?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “Just a little—embarrassed, perhaps.” She laughed. “And I suppose nervous, too. But not afraid or reluctant.”

  He took a step closer so that he was almost touching her and set the backs of the fingers of his left hand against her cheek. “I have some experience,” he said. “Which I say not as a boast but as some reassurance. I know how to relax you and how to give you pleasure. And I believe I will be able to minimize the pain of this first encounter for you.”

  He kissed her.

  She was rather surprised, despite the fact that this was their wedding night and he had just come to her bedchamber, and despite the fact that he had kissed her at the Rochester ball—at her request. She had not expected him to kiss her tonight. Kissing was somehow suggestive of love and romance.

  But she was glad. She set her arms about his neck and leaned into him. He was warm and comfortable and someho
w familiar. He had said he knew how to relax her. He was doing it now. It would not have been relaxing to have been led immediately to the bed and to have been taken into the marriage act without further ado. She parted her lips as he had done and felt the increased warmth and intimacy of the meeting of inner flesh. She felt his tongue stroking the soft inside of her mouth.

  She kept her eyes closed as he kissed them and her temples and her chin and her throat. His hair was soft and silky between her fingers. He intended for them to be lovers, she thought in some wonder, as well as friends and man and wife who had conjugal relations.

  His mouth returned to hers. His hands were stroking up and down her back, relaxing her further. His left hand came forward to circle gently over the side of her breast. She turned slightly without conscious thought until her breast was cupped in his hand and his thumb was rubbing very lightly over the nipple.

  Oh, he felt very good. She had known that he would feel good. How wrong Aunt Aggy had been—had her own marriage been so dreadful? This was lovely. Though this, of course, was not the marriage act.

  “We will be more comfortable lying down,” he said against her lips, as if he had read her thoughts.

  She wondered if the time would come—she supposed it must—when all of this would be so routine that she would hardly think about it at all. But suddenly, as she lay down on the bed and watched him blow out the candles and waited for him to join her, she was glad this was the first time. Two of the most momentous experiences of her life—her wedding and her first sexual encounter—were happening today, and she wanted to remember them for the rest of her life as also two of the most pleasant experiences of her life.

  He slid his right arm beneath her head and drew her against him before kissing her again. He was wearing only a nightshirt now, she could feel. He was very warm. She snuggled into his warmth. He felt solid and dependable. She was so glad it was he. She was so glad this was not an experience of wild passion and love. She would have been terrified. This she could enjoy. Thoroughly enjoy.