Unexpectedly, a smile curved his mouth. “I think we already got to know each other quite intimately, don’t you? That’s the reason for the rush, remember?”
She colored up at once. “I’m serious, Christian. What if we make each other unhappy? I don’t . . . I don’t want to ever make you unhappy.”
He studied her, still smiling a little. “Are you getting cold feet? And if so, do you do this with all your fiancés?”
“I’ve only had two. And my cold feet the first time around was your fault.”
“I’m starting to worry you’ll abandon me at the altar.”
“Oh, Christian, don’t tease. This isn’t funny. I’m—” She broke off, wanting to tell him she loved him, and too afraid of hearing that her feelings weren’t reciprocated. That galled her, that she was afraid, because though she had her faults, cowardice wasn’t usually one of them. She sighed, giving up. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
He studied her for a moment, head to one side, then he took her hand. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I want to show you something.”
He led her all the way to the other end of the house and up a dark, tucked-away staircase. At the top, he took her down a long, equally dark hallway, opening doors into small, plain, empty rooms as he went. Each had one window with a view of the stables, a carpet on the floor, and walnut paneling below faded floral wallpaper.
“Why did you bring me here? What is the purpose of these rooms?”
“This is the nursery.”
“What?” She stopped, looking around the dismal little room, a room that stood in absurdly stark contrast with the lavish guest chamber she’d been given. Her first impression was of lack. Windows not big enough or plentiful enough to let in light, carpets not thick enough for stumbling toddlers, not close enough proximity to the parents’ rooms for the soothing away of bad dreams. She looked back at him, appalled. “This gloomy place, tucked back in a remote corner of the house? You’re not serious?”
But he was. She could tell that by his face.
“You . . .” She paused and swallowed hard. “You were raised back here? You and your brother and sister?”
He nodded. “Once a day, if our parents were in residence, we’d be toddled down all the corridors and hallways to the drawing room, where we’d be dutifully kissed on the cheek by Papa, held and petted by Mama, and admired by any of their friends—until we cried or fussed or asked an awkward question, of course. Then Nanny would come to the rescue, and we’d all be whisked back here again. That was our lives until the age of ten. At that point, each of us was sent off to school. Sylvia to finishing school in France, Andrew and I to Eton, then Oxford.”
“For an education?” she asked, unable to keep the acid out of her voice. “Or to be got out of the way?”
He met her eyes. “Which do you think?”
“No.” She shook her head. “If you brought me here for my opinion, I shall give it gladly. I say no, to all of this. School, yes, I know that’s important, but they don’t go until they’re twelve. And in the meantime, they are not going to be stuck back here in this dark place, unimportant and forgotten. We’ll use these rooms for something else and find a new nursery closer to our rooms, one that has lots of windows to look out of, that has toys and games as well as books. And none of this being seen once a day and sent back to the nanny. No!”
“It’s called a daily viewing.”
“I don’t give a damn what it’s called! No, Christian! Not our children.”
He looked at her. Not a muscle of his face moved, but she saw a smile in his eyes, and she felt sweet, fierce tenderness welling up within her, a bubble of emotion that pressed against her heart until it ached.
Until it demanded her to say what she felt.
“I love you,” she blurted out before she could stop herself, reaching up to touch his face, brushing back a lock of his hair. “I love you.”
Her hand fell away. The silence in the room seemed deafening, and although Annabel didn’t feel that sickening knot of fear she’d felt the first time she’d told a man that, she still wondered if she’d made a mistake. Christian was marrying her because of obligation, he wasn’t marrying her for love. Given his choice, he’d never marry anyone ever again. So in blurting out what she felt, what in tarnation did she expect him to say?
The silence lengthened, and it seemed so long and felt so awful, she had to speak again, say something, anything to break it. “I just wanted you to know,” she mumbled. “In case you were troubling your mind about it.”
She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, but it did, and the fact that she was the only one talking confirmed they both knew it. She turned as if to go, but suddenly, he caught her arms, pressing her back against the walnut paneling behind her.
He kissed her, a hard kiss that stole away her ability to think, or even breathe. His weight pressed her to the wall, and she could feel him, hard against her abdomen. His hands moved between them, working her shirtwaist open. He slid one hand inside to cup her breast through her corset as the other frantically pulled up skirts and petticoats, jamming fabric between their bodies, slipping inside her drawers.
She broke the kiss with a gasp, for she needed air, but she had time to suck in only one breath before he captured her mouth again, almost as if he were afraid she would say something to stop him.
His mouth kissing hers, and one hand at her breast, his other hand slid between her legs to caress her in that special place. Again, she broke the kiss, a moan escaping her. Her head tilted back against the wall and she closed her eyes, feeling hot, sweet pleasure rising within her as the tip of his finger spread her moisture, preparing her, she knew now, making her ready.
“I want you, Annabel,” he said against her ear. “Right here, right now.”
She nodded, making a wordless sound of accord, powerless to refuse him. He left off caressing her breast, using both hands to untie her drawers and push them down her legs. He pressed kisses to her throat as he unbuttoned his trousers, his breathing harsh, his moves rough and frantic. And then, his hands were cupping her buttocks, lifting her as she instinctively spread her knees apart. He entered her, pushing deep, taking her in hard, purposeful thrusts, and she hit that peak almost at once. She cried out, clenching around him as the waves broke over her. Over him, too, for his body shuddered with the pleasure as he thrust deep several more times, and then was still, breathing hard against her neck.
He kept her there, pinned to the wall, for several more moments, and then slowly pulled back, slipping free of her and easing her back down until her feet hit the floor. He lifted his hand to touch her face, smiling as his fingertips glided along her check, his expression so tender, she almost believed he had said he loved her. But he hadn’t said it, and the past few minutes, however passionate they were, didn’t change that. He might never say it.
He raked his fingers through her hair to cup her face, and he kissed her one more time, a soft, tender kiss, a kiss so loving, it made her declaration of a few minutes ago even harder to bear.
“You’d best go back first,” he said as he stepped back, releasing her. “If any of the servants see you, you’ve gotten lost.”
“A believable lie. In this house, anyways.”
She retraced her steps, finding her way back to the drawing room. Everyone was there, her whole family, having tea with Lady Sylvia, and she knew she couldn’t join them. Not now, not with her clothes all rumpled and her body in a state. She could feel the moisture still between her legs and the sweat on her skin. She probably smelled of sex, she thought with a grimace, and instead of joining the others for tea, she went to her room. She used the water in the pitcher on the washstand to take a spit bath, then she tipped the basin, drenching herself with the water just for an excuse to change her clothes. Servants, after all, noticed everything.
Dressed in fresh clothes, and feeling a bit fresher all around, she called for a maid to
clean up the water she’d spilled, then pinned back the stray hairs that had come loose from her chignon and powdered her nose. In the mirror, she watched the maid mop the floor, remembering there’d been a time when she mopped floors herself. And scrubbed clothes on a washboard. Now, here she was, half a world away, about to be a duchess.
A duchess. In a marriage without love.
Annabel leaned forward in her chair, plunking one elbow on the table, resting her forehead on her hand. This was sort of becoming an obsession with her now, that word. Why?
She hadn’t cared about love before. She’d been ready to marry Bernard and join up with him for the rest of her life, but she hadn’t loved him. She winced, looking back on it, remembering the lack of love between them, and she couldn’t help wondering what on earth she’d been thinking to agree to marry him when she hadn’t loved him.
That was it, right there. She hadn’t loved Bernard, and in her crazy, mixed-up way of looking at everything, she’d wanted it that way. No love was easier. Safer. Less painful.
Nothing hurts more than unmet expectations.
Christian’s words that day on the ship came back to haunt her now. So true, those words. The best thing she could do was go back to being the girl she’d been two months ago, a girl who’d been happy to get married without love, and without any expectation of it. That girl couldn’t get hurt.
But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She loved Christian, and she was fooling herself to think that the fact that he didn’t love her was all right. It wasn’t all right. It would never be all right. It would hurt her all her days, bruise her heart every time she wanted him to say it and he didn’t. Cut her every time he left her and went off to amuse himself without her.
And he would. That’s how marriage was with a charmer. She knew that. Her daddy had been going off places all the time, and Mama used to cry for days. And then, one day, he’d gone off and never come back.
Bernard had told her, straight out, that they’d be expected to live rather separate lives, each having duties to perform that kept them apart for days or weeks at a time. Strange how that had been okay for her and Bernard, but it wasn’t okay now.
With Christian, she didn’t want separate beds, separate lives, and freedom. She wanted him, every day, every night. Right beside her, doing things together. His first wife had wanted that, too.
Annabel watched the maid in the mirror, and she thought back to a girl in Gooseneck Bend who’d scrubbed floors, who’d worn shoes too tight or no shoes at all because she couldn’t afford new ones, and whose heart had shattered into a million pieces because she wasn’t good enough for a Harding boy to marry. Through all the pain and hardship, the happiness and heartbreak of her life, never once had the thought of ending it even occurred to her. It probably never would. She wasn’t made that way.
But you couldn’t make a man love you. You could just accept the fact that he didn’t and try to be content. Annabel knew she’d never been very good at being content. She probably never would. And she had no reason to think Christian would be any different in his second marriage than he’d been in his first.
Her life loomed before her, wearing a duchess’s coronet and opening fetes and doing charity work and sleeping alone most of the time. Married women told you it was better that way. She used to agree with them. Now, she didn’t.
Without love, none of it means a thing.
Christian was right about that, too. He seemed to know a lot more about life than she did because he had no expectations. She was full of ’em.
With a sigh, she stood up and left her room. She went downstairs for tea, and dinner, and cordials afterward in the drawing room, listening as Christian and Sylvia told her family stories of life at Scarborough, and she tried to cushion herself against expecting anything more than what was right in front of her.
She went to bed early. She didn’t need to invent an excuse. After all, she was getting married tomorrow. Back in her room, she rang for Liza, and as the maid undressed her, she looked at the luxurious furnishings around her—furnishings another American heiress’s money had paid for—and she felt the duchess’s coronet getting heavy. Lord, the shine was off the tiara and she hadn’t even put it on yet.
She donned her nightgown and slid between the sheets of her bed, but she didn’t sleep. Instead, she lay in the dark and tried to console herself with the hope that he might not love her now, but maybe, someday, he would. That seemed a very small consolation and a very faint hope, but it was all she had.
Funny how she used to think love wasn’t what she wanted. Now, it was what she wanted most, and it was the one thing money couldn’t buy and position couldn’t guarantee. Tomorrow was her wedding day, but without Christian’s love, tomorrow was really just another day on the calendar.
Chapter Nineteen
It was almost time. Christian paused in front of the mirror, listening to the chapel bells ring in the distance for a moment, then he met his own eyes in the mirror, as Annabel’s words from yesterday went through his mind.
I love you.
When she’d said that, he hadn’t really believed her. He’d put her declaration down to desire and the need many women had to equate that with love. But this morning, he’d woken with those words ringing in his ears, and he decided, quite consciously, that he was going to believe those words were true every day from now on. He’d make them true, he vowed, even if it took his whole life to do it. This was his second chance, and hers, and he wanted it. He wanted Annabel. He wanted her beside him every day and every night for the rest of his life. He loved her. He’d probably loved her ever since that night in the Ford when she’d given him a tipsy grin and told him she bought the bank, when she’d pulled him, laughing, into a Turkish bath, even the next day when she’d dealt him a smashing right hook to the jaw.
He’d never thought in a thousand years he’d fall in love. He never had before. But he was in love now, and he knew it because he felt his heart pounding in his chest, because his nervous hands couldn’t seem to perform the simple act of tying a cravat, and most of all, because the man looking back at him in the mirror had the sappiest grin on his face that Christian had ever seen. Men, he reflected, always looked ridiculous when they were in love.
They did ridiculous things, too. Like stand up, sodding drunk, and stop a wedding. If anybody stopped his today, he’d kill the bastard.
Behind him, McIntyre gave a cough. “Would you like me to do it, Your Grace?”
That brought him out of his reverie. “No,” he answered and wiped the grin off his face, returning his attention to the task of tying his white silk cravat. When he finished, he lowered his hands and studied it for a moment. Satisfied, he turned around.
McIntyre, not satisfied, tweaked it a bit before inserting the tie pin. The valet then reached for the knee-length wedding coat he’d laid out on the bed earlier, brushed away a speck of lint that had dared to rest on the lapel, and held the garment open for him. Once Christian had slid his arms into the sleeves and shrugged the garment on, he turned around so that McIntyre could button it. The valet pinned the spray of white rosebuds and lily of the valley to his lapel, and then handed him a pair of white gloves.
“Thank you, McIntyre,” he said, as he donned the gloves. “Have Carruthers bring the carriage. I’ll be down shortly.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The valet departed with a bow. Christian didn’t follow, for he knew that there was one more thing he had to do before he departed for the chapel. He left his rooms and went down the stairs, but instead of going to the entrance hall, he turned to walk in the opposite direction, his steps taking him to the gallery.
He paused at the entrance, took a deep breath, and walked down the long length of the room, passing ancestors and relations until he came to one portrait in particular, the portrait of a pale, slim girl with golden-blond hair, an image he hadn’t looked at for twelve years.
Evie’s portrait was the only tangible trace of her life here that rema
ined, and he’d avoided looking at it for long enough. He forced himself to look at it now. He forced himself to study that shy, timid smile, to meet straight on those blue eyes that had gazed at him adoringly so long ago, and made himself remember the events that had transpired. His father’s death, Min’s vanished income, and Andrew hammering away at him about family honor and duty to Scarborough. The London season with all its balls and parties and pretty heiresses from America, and Evie looking up at him as if he was king of the earth when he walked over to her chair against the wall and asked her to dance with him.
He forced himself to remember the summer they’d spent in Philadelphia when he’d asked her to marry him. To remember the reassurances that he’d given her parents and the cynicism of his own soul when he’d thought how extraordinary Americans were to hope love played the major part in the business arrangement called matrimony.
He looked at Evie and forced himself to remember the lies he’d told her, and the ones of omission, too. The lies that had been in his smile and in his eyes and in his voice during their courtship. The lies in the vows of love and honor and comfort he’d made to her on their wedding day.
He forced himself to remember the man he’d been when he made those vows, a young and callow man who, though never technically unfaithful in the three years of their marriage, had never been much of a husband, a man who’d continued to gamble and drink and fritter away his time on useless pursuits and shallow companions, neglecting the girl he’d promised to cherish as he’d lived his own life and spent his allotted share of her money. He’d never stopped to appreciate the depth of her loneliness, and he hadn’t been with her in her darkest moment of despair.
Today was his second wedding day, and as he looked up at his first wife’s portrait, he endured the pain of saying to her what he’d only said in his mind, what needed to be said out loud, here, as he looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Evie.” His voice was a quiet hush in the empty gallery. “Please forgive me.”
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