The Marriage Wager

by Ashford, Jane

  Even more, she was deeply distrustful. Such feelings were dangerous; they clouded reason, distorted reality, and led one to make terrible mistakes. Hadn’t she learned that, in years of misery? And though it was true the situation was completely different now, it had also been clear that these sorts of feelings weren’t part of the bargain that was her marriage. Comradeship, Colin had said. And he had certainly not shown much eagerness to share her bed.

  Emma turned and began pacing rapidly the other way. When he looked at her today, it had not seemed to be comradeship in his eyes, she thought. It had been something far wilder, something that sent shivers of alarm and anticipation through every fiber of her body. And yet he said nothing, did nothing, about it.

  She turned, and paced even faster. A worried inner voice kept declaring that she was in serious trouble.

  Sitting in the dining room with his second glass of port, Colin was equally restless. He was thinking of the rosy hue of Emma’s skin as it had shown through her shift, and of the enticing outlines of her breasts under the transparent cloth. He was recalling the enflaming curve of waist into hip and imagining quite vividly how it would feel to run his hands along that beautiful line before he crushed her against him. His mind would not be torn from these images and others, and as a result, he was beginning to feel acute physical discomfort.

  The point of marrying Emma had been that the match would not be subject to agitations and upheavals, he thought with annoyance. They were supposed to have a clear understanding, an agreement. They were both adults, with some knowledge of the world. And yet here he was plagued with unfulfilled visions of his own wife.

  With a muttered oath, he drank again. The problem was, with the long journey and so on, the thing had simply been put off too long, he concluded. And the delay had blown it all out of proportion. The solution was to carry through the first time, and then everything could return to normal. It wasn’t as if there was some mystery, something he had never done before. Aware of a keen pulse of anticipation that somewhat belied his reasoning, Colin drained his glass and rose from the table. “Fine,” he said aloud, and went to look for Emma.

  She was not in the drawing room, or the study. Her bedchamber was empty. The upstairs room that the lady of Trevallan customarily used as a private sitting room was also empty. Striding down to the library, and finding it similarly untenanted, Colin began to feel irritated. Where the devil was she?

  In rapid succession, he checked the morning room, the blue parlor, and the billiard room. He was simmering with frustration when he startled a footman in the hall and demanded, “Have you seen her ladyship?”

  “I… I believe she’s out on the terrace, my lord,” was the stammered reply.

  “The terrace,” he echoed, as if this were an incomprehensible choice. “I should have known.”

  Emma started slightly when he walked through the glass doors onto the flagstones, but Colin was beyond noticing such things by this time. “It’s late,” he declared without preamble. “Time we went to bed.”

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard you.” As he came closer, Emma took a pace backward.

  With two quick steps, he was beside her, gripping her shoulders and forcing her to look up at him. He saw his own memories of the day mirrored in her eyes. She couldn’t suppress them any more than he could. Bending, he took her lips in a breathless kiss, his fingers tightening almost painfully on her upper arms. Though Emma felt awkward at first, his mouth was intoxicating—coaxing, softly enticing her to yield. His kiss went on and on, and she was caught by it, astonished once again. Her mouth softened and opened of its own accord. Aroused and exulting, Colin let his hands slide up over her shoulders and then down, lingeringly, over her breasts to encircle her waist and pull her tight against him. He deepened the kiss until it seemed there was nothing else in the world but that link between the two of them. Emma, her senses swimming, melted in his arms, and felt the insistent hardness of his body along the length of hers.

  “Come,” he said after a long while, leading her inside the house to the stairs.

  In her bedchamber, he captured her mouth again and gently coaxed it open so that he could use his tongue to tease and enflame her. Emma responded, at first tentatively and then with more confidence, giving herself up wholly to the kiss. He let his lips move to her neck, then dropped kisses on her shoulder and the swell of her breast above the neckline of her gown while his fingertips brushed across it.

  “Oh,” she breathed.

  She was so beautiful, he thought, gazing up at him with wide dark eyes blurred with passion. He was iron-hard with desire. She breathed his name, and his hands jerked a little.

  Quickly, he undid the buttons at the back of her dress. His hands followed the blue cloth as it slipped off her shoulders and down her arms, over her hips. When it pooled on the floor around her bare feet, she was once again clothed only in her shift, the candlelight gleaming through it.

  Colin flung his coat aside. His neckcloth, boots, and shirt soon followed, so all that remained were his breeches, straining against his arousal. He bent and slid his hands under the hem of her shift and pushed it up, running his palms lightly along her thighs, her hips, her waist, her breasts.

  Emma made a sound—part enjoyment, part protest.

  He threw the thin garment aside and gazed at her, standing before him naked, her pale skin burnished by the leaping candle flames. “My god,” he murmured, gazing at the beauty she offered up to him. Without thought, his hand rose to cup one perfect breast, his thumb teasing the rosy nipple and making her gasp. His desire was almost pain now. He couldn’t stop himself from enfolding her and pushing her backward toward the bed.

  When he took one of her breasts in his mouth and teased it with his tongue, she cried out with the pleasure of it.

  Colin could bear it no longer; he had to unfasten his breeches and free himself. When he turned back, naked, he found Emma staring at him, obviously startled and fascinated by the sight of his manhood revealed. Another mark against the wretched Edward, he thought with fierce satisfaction, then banished the blackguard from his mind as he captured his wife’s lips once more, demanding now, his hands and lips urgent as he joined her on the bed. Drunk with the feel of her, Colin savored the lovely curves of her breasts and the soft skin of her belly.

  Emma let her hands roam over his muscled arms, into the crisp dark hair on his chest. A sharp urgency that she did not understand was rising in her. As if he knew, Colin’s hand moved to the ache between her legs and caressed her. Emma gasped, gripping his muscular shoulders. She thought she might faint with the intensity of the sensation. She felt as if she had stepped out of reality into a dream world. She had never imagined anything like this.

  Her reactions were overwhelming the last shreds of Colin’s control. He was wild for her. Her soft panting breaths filled his senses. Her eager movements against his fingertip enflamed him beyond all reason. In fact, he realized, he could not wait a moment longer.

  As he rose above her on the coverlet, his busy caresses took Emma to a peak of pleasure that she had never even imagined. It rose and rose until all her muscles were rigid with glorious anticipation. She felt as if she would fly apart. She knew that if he stopped touching her now, she would die.

  Rising on his elbows, he dropped quick kisses on her neck and shoulder as he readied himself.

  “Don’t stop,” cried Emma, clutching his hard upper arms, then reaching up to kiss him pleadingly.

  Her need drove him over the edge. “Only for a moment,” replied Colin thickly. With a groan, he plunged inside her, and nearly exploded with the wonderful feel of her so tight around him.

  As he began to move urgently, Emma once again experienced a tidal wave of feeling. Only this time, he was with her, filling her, and making the torrent of sensation even more intense. There could not be more, she marveled dazedly,
but there was. And then it burst through her body like a shower of fire, a flood that saturated every cell of her body with wave after wave of glorious sensation. Emma cried out at the amazing splendor of it. She didn’t want it ever to end. It flooded through her, making her dig her nails into the powerful muscles of his back and cling to him like a drowning woman. The last crescendo was just receding when Colin cried out once, holding her in a grasp of steel, then collapsed in her arms.

  For a while, then, they lay in a tangle of limbs, hearts thudding, sweating lightly, cooled by the soft air from the window. Emma heard the call of a thrush, lamenting the darkness. The scent of the sea mingled with pine. “I had no notion,” she marveled.

  “About what?” Colin’s voice was lazy, at once softened and roughened by desire.

  “That marriage could be so… exhilarating,” she told him.

  His head turned on the pillow. He gave her a slow tigerish smile. “You haven’t been married to me,” he replied.

  ***

  There was something magical about this place, Emma thought. She was standing alone in the narrow terrace garden of Trevallan, among the summer flowers. Gazing out across the wild cliffs and over the sea, she could watch the sun setting in a blaze of orange. It was as if a spell had been laid over the estate by the lulling rhythm of the waves and the scents of pine and sea salt and the clean blues and greens and grays of the landscape. This was the best part of the year here. It seemed a shame to return to London, as they were scheduled to do in just three days.

  She heard footsteps on the gravel path behind her, and recognized them as Colin’s. “Perhaps we should just stay here,” she said without turning.

  “We would miss the Little Season,” replied Colin, coming up to stand beside her. He put one hand on the stone balustrade that ringed the outer edge of the terrace and joined her in watching the sun’s fiery disappearance. “My mother has planned a ball in our honor.” Colin had already begun to think of London and of certain plans he had made. He needed to make sure they were still in place. To him, it was too obvious for comment that they must go back. Disappearing into Cornwall immediately after their marriage would rouse even more gossip than their unconventional match. The malicious members of the ton, of which there were always far too many, would assume that he was ashamed of his choice or that his bride was not presentable after all and he was hiding her from society. They would spread the most outrageous stories they could fabricate, he thought contemptuously, and the whole of society would enjoy them immensely.

  Colin looked down at Emma, lovely in a gown of pale blue muslin trimmed with knots of dark blue ribbon. A fierce protectiveness, so strong that it was almost like rage, flooded him. So much had been taken from her, he thought. But in this case, unlike the losses of so many others in his life, he had the power to restore it—the laughter and gaieties of peacetime life. Emma would have them all. And the polite world would be made to acknowledge her and offer some recompense for the years she had spent in exile.

  To Emma, his reply had sounded merely polite, and she took it as a gentle reprimand. She had, she felt, received a number of these during their stay. It had seemed to her, at first, that the blazing physical passion Colin had revealed to her on that night after their ride in the rain must change everything. She had never experienced anything like it in her life, and it seemed as if a new epoch had dawned. But the morning after that first night he had been the same as ever—polite, solicitous, amusing—just as he had been on the day after sharing his nightmare. He had not referred to the intimacy they’d shared. He had acted as if nothing worthy of note had happened.

  As their time in Cornwall passed, he took her riding, showed her the surrounding countryside, introduced her to neighbors. And each night he came to her chamber and dazzled her with the most amazing caresses. After which he went to his own bed. He still had the nightmares, too; she heard them.

  Emma sighed silently. She didn’t understand him. But she had taken the point that they were to present a picture of unbroken, amiable compatibility to the world and even to each other. Perhaps this was precisely what she was supposed to comprehend, she thought, what their bargain had really been about—that the level beneath the surface of things was not to be discussed or even acknowledged. Perhaps this was truly why he had not wanted a giddy schoolgirl who would be continually plaguing him and think herself head over heels in love. And if she was discovering a distressing tendency to feel such emotions, she had best keep them hidden.

  Colin had no desire to stay here alone with her, she thought. No doubt he had many friends he wished to see and things he preferred doing in town. She would have to develop her own round of activities and circles of companions. “Of course, I must order the new wallpapers and draperies for Trevallan,” she said with determined cheerfulness. “And a few carpets as well.”

  “You have a free hand,” said Colin with a smile.

  “Take care, my lord. Aren’t you afraid I’ll indulge in an orgy of spending?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “You think I am too careful and frugal?” asked Emma, wondering whether she liked such a prudent characterization.

  “I think your taste is too good for excesses. You will buy exactly what is needed to refurbish the place, and I believe I can easily afford that.”

  Emma laughed. “I see through you, sir. This flattery is designed to keep my spending within bounds.”

  “Indeed not,” he replied, but amusement glinted in his eyes.

  “No, no. You imagine you have put me on my mettle, and that I will now exhaust myself searching out bargains to prove you right.”

  “I had no such plan.”

  “Good. For I mean to go to the most expensive merchants in town and order their finest goods.”

  As she had intended, Colin laughed. But then he remembered some of the things she had told him about her life in the last few years, and some that he had worked out for himself. “Do,” he urged. “I’ll instruct my bankers to pay any bill you present to them.”

  Something in his voice stopped Emma’s teasing. But she couldn’t identify just what it was. Puzzled, she turned back to the sea, dark now that the sun was gone. The sky above it still held a little light, and it was a clear, deep blue with a scattering of stars. How wonderful it would be, she thought, to live amid all this beauty. Then she shook herself a little and returned to reality. “Shall we go in?” she said. “Mrs. Trelawny will be waiting dinner for us.”

  Seven

  Mud-spattered, behind a tired team, the Wareham traveling carriage clattered over the London cobblestones and pulled up before the front door of St. Mawr’s town house. Emma stumbled a little when Colin helped her out. Her legs were stiff from days of traveling, and she was exhausted by the endless jolting. The weather had broken during their journey back, with a steady cold rain that turned the roads to morasses and slowed their progress to a crawl. It hadn’t done much for tempers, either; there had been intermittent flare-ups between the coachman, Reddings, the footmen, and the outriders. It was obvious from their quick movements and the relief in their faces that everyone was exceedingly grateful to be home. Emma herself was longing for a bath, a cup of hot tea, and her own soft, clean bed.

  The front door opened before they could knock, revealing a tall, imposing figure in black whose face might have been carved from granite. Emma groped for the name of St. Mawr’s butler and majordomo—Clinton, she remembered from her single introduction. But had he looked quite so forbidding then?

  Colin confirmed her memory by greeting the man by name. Emma echoed him. “Everything in order?” Colin added, and walked inside without waiting for an answer. Clearly, he had never received a negative to such an inquiry, Emma thought with slight amusement. She entered the grand front hall, with its black-and-white marble floor and elegant staircase curving into the upper stories.

  “Not precisely, my lord,” replied Cl
inton as the carriage clattered around to the back of the house and the great front door was shut behind them.

  Colin didn’t hear. But Emma was at once on the alert. “What has happened?” she had begun to ask when a bloodcurdling shriek rang out from the lower regions of the house, reverberating through the hall like a regimental bugle.

  “What the devil?” exclaimed Colin.

  Clinton’s face merely grew stonier, Emma noticed. He did not appear at all surprised. She began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “That would be Nancy, my lord,” he told Colin glumly.

  “Nancy? Who in blazes is Nancy?” Colin was also very tired, and rather irritable.

  “The second housemaid, my lord,” said Clinton in a sepulchral tone.

  “The…?” Colin’s violet eyes fixed his butler with a look that had caused more than one line of enemy infantrymen to waver. “What’s wrong with her?” he demanded.

  Before Clinton could answer, a second, lesser shriek rang through the house. It ended in a gurgle that sounded very much like laughter to Emma. The sinking feeling grew stronger. She began to be very much afraid she knew the explanation for these unorthodox noises.

  “Nancy is an excitable girl,” said the butler.

  “Evidently,” responded Colin.

  “She cannot seem to restrain her… enthusiasm for the stories told by Mr. Ferik,” the man added.

  “Oh dear,” said Emma, her fears confirmed.