by Carla Kelly
She had been worrying about Alex and what was happening between him and his brother all afternoon, braced for the sounds of a fight or even, in her more anxious moments, a gunshot.
But as she touched the flame to the wicks of the unlit candelabras that stood around the room he turned and smiled at her, and the relief was enough to make her sit down with a thump on the nearest chair.
‘I’m sorry, I have been neglecting you.’
‘Not at all, only I have so much to report about my discussion with Garnett, Mrs Garnett and Cook that I wanted to tell you as soon as possible. I have a list, but essentially they think it an excellent idea and the staff are very enthusiastic. I spoke to your mother again and promised I would help organise the buffet upstairs in the evening, but we will have plenty of time to spend with our people. I mean your people.’ Lord, what a slip to make! ‘Handing out presents and so forth.’
She produced a notebook and Alex came over and sat next to her. ‘Ah, the infallible notes.’ Tess passed it over and watched him covertly while he read. He looked different, she realised. Younger almost, as though years had been lifted away.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘With this? Yes, excellent as far as I can tell—you know I have no recent experience of Christmas festivities. I have no doubt everyone will have a splendid time. You are a born organiser, Tess.’
‘I meant with your brother. I was rather worried. He seemed so angry.’
Alex gave a snort of laughter. ‘A masterpiece of understatement given that he made a spirited attempt to spit me on a blade. Yes, everything is all right with Matthew. I’ve found my way back to my little brother, Tess, and he needed me.’
‘I am so glad. Oh, Alex, that is such good news.’
‘It is all because of you, little nun.’ His smile was decidedly lopsided now, as though he was attempting to cover deep emotion with a joke. ‘You’ve infected me with your Christmas spirit. I am probably doomed. It will be handbell ringing and carol singing next and then I will be beyond help.’
‘You are such a good man.’ Tess leaned over to emphasise the warmth of her praise with a kiss on Alex’s cheek just as he turned his head towards her. She found herself on his knee, twined in his arms, his mouth on hers, not returning the warm affection she had intended, but with the hard demand of a lover.
It seemed a very long time since he had taken her back to her bedchamber in the pre-dawn gloom. It seemed an endless evening stretched before they could be alone together again.
‘I’ll come to your room tonight, if you still want me to.’ Alex traced the line of her eyebrows. ‘Don’t frown at me, little nun. If you don’t want me I will stay away. My heart will break—’
‘I am not a nun and your heart will do no such thing,’ Tess snapped. She got up and paced down the library. ‘Don’t give me all that flummery. There is a mutual attraction, that is all it is. I am not one of your society flirts who needs seduction wrapped up in sparkly ribbons.’ Of course I want you, you darling man. Are you blind? And I want your heart, not your teasing. And if I got it I would have to give it back, she thought drearily.
Safely on the other side of the table she took a deep breath and found a smile. ‘Now, we haven’t talked about all the details for the Christmas arrangements. We require a cartload of evergreens and then I’ll need to know when you’ll be coming downstairs to give your staff their presents. Do you think your family would enjoy it if they came upstairs at some point and sang carols? They’ve been practising.’
‘If you need evergreens, ask Matthew.’ Alex was on his feet, his face stony. ‘I don’t imagine for a moment that the staff want me down there, they’ll have much more fun if left to their own devices, and if you organise carol singers then don’t expect me to stay and listen to the caterwauling.’
‘Then, that will be your loss. I will go and speak to Mr Tempest.’ Pull yourself together, Tess, she scolded as she picked up her candle and left, managing not to sniff until she was outside the door. You knew he only tolerated your interference to be kind. Lady Moreland had been enthusiastic about the idea of evergreens and this was her house. She set out to look for Matthew.
Chapter Eighteen
Alex arrived five minutes late at the dinner table in a mood that more than matched his father’s.
‘You are late,’ the earl snapped.
Alex inclined his head to his father and smiled at his mother. ‘My apologies, Mama, ladies.’ He took his seat and slapped his best amiable mask over an inner scowl. An afternoon of mingled sexual frustration, irritation, awareness that he had blundered with Tess and the necessity to write a ream of instructions to his secretary was enough to both kill his appetite and leave him longing for the brandy bottle.
Tess spared him a glance and a smile, then turned back to Matthew, with whom she was apparently deep in discussion about holly.
‘I gather we’re to have a traditional Christmas.’ His father regarded Tess from under lowered brows and, as she answered, Alex braced himself to come to her rescue.
‘Only if it will not disturb you, Lord Moreland.’
‘Not at all, my dear.’
My dear? What had come over the old curmudgeon? It appeared he approved of Tess.
‘The best berry-bearing holly are those trees along the west boundary of Tom’s Covert,’ his father said to Matthew. ‘You should find something for a yule log in that area—three oaks went down in the big storm last year.’ He stared down the table at Alex. ‘What are you snorting about?’
‘Was I? I am sorry. But yule logs, Father?’
‘If Miss Ellery wants a proper traditional country Christmas, then we need a yule log. I gather she’s not seen one in all that time she’s been in Ghent. Don’t do these things properly over there. Foreigners.’
‘Their traditions are simply different, Father.’
‘I suppose it is too much to expect you to be getting your expensive boots dirty.’ Alex resisted the temptation to produce an artistic shudder. ‘You can go and tell the vicar he’s welcome to bring the carol singers round on Christmas Eve, that’ll liven the place up.’
‘And the handbell ringers, too, I suppose? Father, you should be resting, not having half the village in to create a racket.’
‘We haven’t had a proper traditional Christmas since you left. I think I’d like one this year.’
As if they were days of joy and harmony before! Alex took in the set of his father’s mouth and realised this was more than the desire to give orders. Hell, he thinks it will be his last one. ‘Of course, sir, if it would please you.’ He was rewarded by a speaking look from his mother and warm smiles from Maria and Tess. He still thought it sentimental nonsense, but if it gave his family pleasure he would smile and pretend. Which might put Tess back in charity with him, too.
* * *
Alex scratched on Tess’s bedchamber door as the clock struck one, slipped inside and braced himself for a thrown slipper.
‘Alex?’ She had blown out all the candles and the room was lit only by the glow from the banked fire. It turned the white bedcovers patchily to rose and gold and threw her shadow flickering across the bed hangings.
‘No, the headless ghost of the first earl. Who do you think?’ He turned the key in the door and padded over to the bed.
Tess gave a little snort of amusement and sat up. ‘I thought you wouldn’t come after we quarrelled.’
‘Was that what it was? A quarrel? I thought I was being chastised for insensitivity and a lack of Christmas spirit.’
‘And I was being snappish. You were kind to your father at dinner tonight.’
‘He may not see another New Year. I’m still angry with him, but barring the door to carol singers isn’t going to bring Peter back.’
‘Peter?’
Hell and damnation, she
doesn’t know why I left home. She doesn’t know about Peter. ‘He was a friend of mine and he had a secret, rather a dangerous one. When I left home my father said things about him that led him to commit suicide.’
‘No. How dreadful.’ Tess reached out and caught his hand, tugged him towards the bed. ‘But what on earth could the earl have said for him to do that? Had he committed some crime?’
‘No, but he had wanted to. Tess, I can’t explain.’ He looked down on her bent head as she studied their joined hands and felt her concern and kindness like a caress.
‘Was he in love with you?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Alex realised he had almost shouted it and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘What did you say?’ He tried to tug his hand away, but Tess held tight.
‘There was a scandal last year, the brother of one of the boarders. He wrote a very indiscreet letter to his sister and told her what had happened. He ran away to Italy with his friend.’
‘I had no idea sheltered young ladies knew about such things.’
‘Some of us do, and we aren’t idiots, Alex. It makes sense of the way Matthew was goading you. But they were wrong, weren’t they? I mean, you and I...’
‘Yes, they were wrong. My father’s an intolerant old bully and I was too artistic, too neat and precise for his liking. Then when he realised what Peter felt—which was more than I did in my innocence—he put two and two together and made fifty. I stormed out full of thoroughly embarrassed righteous indignation, stopped on the way to rant at Peter about the stupidity of my father, then left for Oxford without any idea of the bombshell that I’d dropped at his feet.’
‘If that hadn’t happened, then both you and your father would have calmed down, reconciled,’ Tess said.
The sadness in her voice was like a jab in the solar plexus. What had she to be sad about? Was he just another of her lame dogs to be taken in and cared for? It was his grief, his anger, and he hadn’t asked her to care, certainly hadn’t asked a sheltered young woman to understand variations of sexual preference that should have sent her into strong hysterics. Alex found he was becoming weary of maintaining an unruffled front, of not revealing his feelings, of appearing tolerant and self-assured and all the things that right at that moment he most certainly did not feel.
‘Are we going to bed or am I going to stand here all night discussing my family?’
Tess blinked at him, obviously startled by the harsh edge to his voice. Well, damn it, it was about time she realised that he wasn’t a nice man hiding bounteous goodwill to all God’s creatures behind a cynical exterior. Nor was he some hapless victim of cruel fate. Just at that moment he was a man who wanted a woman and who was on the edge of losing his temper for reasons he was not at all sure he understood.
‘Yes, of course.’ Tess flipped back the covers and moved across. She was wearing a nightgown tonight, he saw. A prim and proper flannel abomination, tight to the throat and the cuffs without a single frill or ornament to its cream plainness. ‘I hoped you would come,’ she added as he tossed his robe aside.
Her eyes widened. Had she seen him erect last night? Surely she had. Was she frightened? Then Tess ran the tip of her tongue over her lips and a surge of primitive power jolted through him. When he joined her on the bed she reached for the hem of her nightgown and pulled it over her head without hesitation, turned into his arms and lifted her face for his kiss. No, not frightened.
He took the lips that were offered to him, caressed the quivering, urgent body, found, without conscious intent, that he was already over her, nudging against the wet heat that was so ready for him. There was a rushing in his ears, a thunder of blood mingling with their panting breaths. Her mouth was open to him, sweet and fierce, her body closed around him, urgent, yielding, demanding. He surged in her, riding the pleasure like a wild horse, focused only on the turmoil of their two bodies, heard her cry and, somehow, found the focus to pull from her body before he crashed into his own shattering climax.
* * *
Pleasure, exhaustion, sticky heat, softness, the beat of a heart under his. Alex lay still, let his lax body come to itself while he gathered his wits, rubbed his cheek against the soft one next to it.
Gradually the human part of his brain gained some ascendancy over the triumphant, sated, animal part. He was sprawled with all his weight on the slender figure beneath him.
Tess. God, what have I done. He rolled off with a contraction of muscles that almost sent him off the far side of the bed. She was as near as, damn it, a virgin, and I used her like a courtesan.
* * *
‘Alex?’ Tess blinked her eyes open onto a chilly world where the lovely, big, muscled body that had been squashing her so deliciously was gone. Alex’s lovemaking had been a revelation. The excitement, the urgency, the sheer vibrant sexuality of it, had shaken her in a different way to his tenderness and care the night before. That lovemaking could be so varied had never occurred to her. What would it be like tomorrow?
He was staring at her across the width of the bed. ‘Tess, I am sorry. I hurt you.’
‘No, not at all.’ Why wouldn’t her come to her, hold her?
‘I was a brute. An animal.’
‘Alex, don’t—’
‘I won’t, don’t be afraid that after that I would touch you. No, don’t try to tell me it is all right, you are too forgiving, Tess.’
I will come over there and show you the opposite of forgiveness if you won’t let me get a word in, Alex Tempest! She opened her mouth to override him, shout him into being forgiven for whatever male sin he thought he had committed, if that was what it took to wipe that look from his eyes.
‘I meant to say this after Christmas, but it is best now. Tess, I can’t have you going back, dragging round agencies, finding yourself a position as some sort of drudge to a cantankerous old lady or a house full of screaming brats.’
‘But—’
‘I will find you a house somewhere, a pleasant market town, perhaps. Somewhere you and Dorcas can settle down respectably. I’ll give you an allowance. You won’t have to see me again. My man of business will handle it all discreetly.’
You won’t have to see me again. At first her brain could not make sense of what he was saying, then it was as though her body realised at some deeper level. She began to shiver. ‘You are paying me off? A house and an allowance is very generous in exchange for two nights in my bed, especially considering my complete lack of skill or experience. My goodness, what might I ask for if I acquire some more tricks?’
‘Tess, it is not like that.’ Alex swung off the bed and stood up, over six feet of naked, angry male. ‘You didn’t expect me to marry you. We talked about that. And don’t flinch. Do you think I am going to hit you next?’
‘I am not flinching. I am recoiling from a man I thought I knew and now find I do not. How dare you treat me like a whore! How dare you offer me money!’ She scrambled from the bed in an ungainly lurch, picked up his robe and threw it at him. ‘How dare you suggest that I am angling for a marriage so far above my station!’
Alex caught the bundle of red silk one-handed. ‘Tess.’
‘Miss Ellery to you, my lord.’ The shivering had stopped, replaced by a strong desire to be sick. ‘Now get out of my bedchamber.’
At least he had the sensitivity to go without saying another word. It was difficult to move after the door closed behind him. After a while she became conscious that she was cold, so she moved round to the side of the bed nearest the fire and stood there, watching the dull glow of the coals. Then it occurred to her that she would like to wash, so she did, all over, in the water that had cooled almost to the temperature of the room.
There were marks on her body, red pressure marks where Alex’s weight had lain on her, a roughness on her shoulder that his evening beard must have left. Yesterday the slight soreness and stiffness th
at lovemaking had created had been exciting, welcome. Now she moved gingerly as though she were ill, trying not to send those aftershocks of pleasure through her belly, through her limbs.
When she was sure she had scrubbed the scent of his body from hers she turned to the bed, pulled on her nightgown, flapped the sheets, found several brown-gold hairs that she threw on the fire. Then she climbed back into bed on the far side from the one they had made love on and curled into a tight ball while she waited for sleep.
* * *
‘Miss Ellery, are we overworking you?’ Lady Moreland put down the teapot and looked at Tess in a way that made it quite clear that her mirror had not lied. She did have dark circles under her eyes and she was pale and, try as she might, her cheerful expression looked as though she had cut it out of a print and pasted it on.
‘No, not at all. I simply had one of those inexplicable sleepless nights. You know, I am sure, the kind where you toss and turn and can’t drop off.’
‘Oh, dear, that is so annoying when it happens. I wouldn’t mention your looks if any of the men were down to breakfast of course, but Alexander and Matthew have gone out with the workers from the Home Farm to cut evergreens and my husband is staying in his room.’
‘Alex—Lord Weybourn has gone out to cut evergreens?’
‘Yes, and I hope some fresh air and exercise will put him in a better mood,’ Maria said as she heaped eggs on her plate. ‘He looked positively grim this morning. I thought he and Matthew had been arguing again, but they seem perfectly in charity with each other.’
‘I think perhaps he is a little low because of having to give up his art business,’ Tess suggested. ‘It must be making a great deal of correspondence.’ She wanted to throw the entire contents of an art gallery, preferably one full of marble busts, at his head, but it would be unfair on the rest of his family if she let her misery show. They had to live with Alex and she did not want their reconciliation spoilt by a sordid squabble.
