In two steps, he had her in his arms. The rough brocade of his waistcoat teased her still-sensitized nipples to a painful tightness. He captured her quick gasp with his mouth as his hands moved to cup her bottom. She could feel the effect of her nude stroll as it pressed long and hard against her hip. Two could play at this.
She pulled away just enough to break his kiss. Her teeth captured his upper lip and pulled softly. He groaned and tightened his grip on her tender flesh. Adelaide let go of his lip and plunged her tongue inside the sweet sensitive cavern of his mouth. Every flick, every swirl sent a shudder through Marcus. His muscles flinched and tightened and she shivered at every pulse against her swollen breasts.
“Your Grace?” Bess’s quiet knock and inquiry broke through Adelaide’s sensuous haze.
She pressed her hands against her husband’s shoulders. “Marcus, put me down.”
“What?” He stared at her mouth, his chest heaving.
“Bess is here. Put me down.” She pushed her hair over her shoulders and twisted in his arms to search out her clothes.
“Your Grace, are you awake?”
“Just a moment, Bess.”
“Send her away.” Marcus loosened his hold and set his lips to her collarbone.
“You are the one who said I had to get up. Marcus, stop that.” She swatted at him playfully. “We have scandalized the servants enough for one day. I have to get dressed.”
“Why should they be scandalized?” he asked as he retrieved her wrapper from behind a chair and helped her into it. “We are married, after all.”
She lifted her hair over the collar of her robe and tried to comb through the tangles. “When Bess sees the shambles you have made of my hair she will be more than scandalized. This will take hours to comb out. When exactly did you loose my hair, you rogue?” She sat at her vanity and picked up her brush.
“I don’t quite remember,” he murmured. His hands came to rest on her shoulders as he leaned in from behind her. A feather of a kiss brushed her temple. “Last night is a bit of a blur.” She cocked her head and her eyebrow at the same time. “A delightful blur?” he ventured.
“How convenient for you.” She didn’t mean to sound bitter. It just came out that way. His sigh brushed her hair.
Marcus straightened and clasped his hands behind him as he walked away. The stiffness in his shoulders and the pace he adopted to try and hide his limp spoke volumes. He knew of what she spoke. She was not so foolish as to think he would admit it.
“You can come in now, Bess,” she said. Adelaide had no intention of giving Marcus enough time to come up with a correctly measured response. She would teach him to speak his mind if it took the rest of their lives. She wondered if men were any more capable of learning in the hereafter than they were here on earth.
The maid came in, offered each of them a curtsy, and gave Adelaide a pointed look. Both of their lips twitched as Marcus looked at their sly smiles and scowled.
“You were saying we had something to do today, Selridge,” Adelaide started as Bess began to brush out her hair. “How should I dress?”
“For travel.” He sketched her a bow and went to the door. “We are taking a trip.”
“A trip?” Adelaide inquired. “When?”
“Today, of course.” He opened the door and looked back at them with his most superior façade. “I suggest you hurry. Oh, and Addy?” His face appeared to soften for a moment. “The servants adore you.” His tone was cool and even. “And they are not alone.”
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but what was that all about?”
“An apology, Bess.” Adelaide stared dreamily into the mirror.
“I didn’t hear an apology,” Bess mumbled as she worked through the knots in Adelaide’s hair.
“I did.” Adelaide replied. She replayed his words in her mind. A sudden thought struck her. She rose and ran to the door amid Bess’s exasperated protests.
Two startled maids curtsied as Adelaide ran out into the hall. Marcus had reached the top of the stairs. He turned when he heard the servants’ quiet “Your Grace’s.”
“Where are we going, Selridge?”
Marcus’s long fingers gripped the carved newel at the top of the banister. His casual pose, leaned against the railing, sent tiny shivers of need coursing through her body. She clasped her hands together in front of her. It was either do so or fly across the Persian carpet runner and run them over his beckoning body. Even fully-clad Marcus was temptation itself to her.
“Shall I pose for you, Your Grace?” His voiced poured over her like fresh-combed honey.
“Very funny, Your Grace.” Adelaide crossed her arms over her bosom and huffed at his little joke. “What you shall do is tell me where this little trip will take us, if you please.”
Marcus pushed away from the banister and smiled. “To London, madam. I suggest you hurry and change. We are leaving in an hour.” He descended the stairs without a backward glance.
Adelaide blinked and glanced at the two maids, who quickly curtsied again and hurried up the hall.
“London,” she murmured. “Did he just say…” She ran to peer over the balustrade. “London? Are you mad? I can’t be ready to go to London in an hour.” Her voice echoed to the top of the vaulted ceilings of the foyer. “Selridge. Marcus?” He was gone.
Adelaide slowly walked back to her room. “Why are we going to London?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
After nearly three hours seated in one of the more private corners of White’s, Marcus came to a conclusion that left him disturbed and more than uncomfortable. His discomfort alone was quite the conundrum. London’s premiere gentlemen’s club was designed to cater to a man’s every whim. The very walls of its polished oak paneling created an atmosphere of masculine strength and sensibility.
The chairs, roomy and overstuffed, were said to be the next best thing to a mistress’s arms. The brandy was old, the cigars were fat, and the food was plentiful. Better still, there were no interfering women there to limit one’s unlimited access to any of the three. A man might spend an entire day and night doing exactly as he pleased. Whether his goal was self-indulgence or avoidance of the female inhabitants of his house, White’s was the place where a man could be a man.
As he sat in his corner with a glass of excellent brandy in his hand, Marcus scanned each of the room’s other occupants in turn and arrived at his discomforting conclusion about this bastion of freedom dedicated to London’s gentlemen. More often than not, it was a very lonely place. Not for the knots of young bachelors scattered around the card rooms and parlors. They had each other and no knowledge of how singular their lives would become as their friends married and fell into the roles their titles and money demanded.
For those men who grew old without attachments, who never married or worse, who made bad marriages, White’s was a refuge of sorts. Loneliness, however, was a persistent mistress. Once she claimed a man she was loathe to let him go. For a man with a good eye and experience of same, painful solitude was easy to discern. What disturbed Marcus the most was he had never noticed any of this before he married Addy. He didn’t like to think what it all meant.
They’d been in Town nearly a month. It was now June and the beginning of another Season. His mother had elected to stay with Lady Haverly.
“Good Lord, Selridge, you are newlyweds. No self-respecting bride wants her mother-in-law underfoot whilst she is trying to take her husband and her household staff in hand. Gertrude and I will rub along fine for the Season. I’ll catch up with you two when you head for the country in the fall.”
His only hope was his mother and her old harridan of a friend weren’t arrested or worse, involved in some sort of scandal before the Season was over. Speaking of scandal, Marcus glared at the letters in his hand. He’d commited to memory the words on each page, the threats—each one more pointed than the last, and the price the blackmailer put on his silence and
the return of the rest his damning evidence. He’d studied the handwriting and tried to discover how the letters had arrived at Winfield Abbey. They’d not come by regular post, nor had they been hand-delivered. Not a servant in the house knew how three letters had been slipped into the morning post, Marcus’s study, and onto a table in the kitchens with nought of a sign of intrusion. And apparently, there was to be a fourth letter to come, one in which the blackguard would detail instructions as to how the ransom was to be paid. A dull throb started at the base of his skull.
His and Addy’s marriage, barely six months after Julius’s death, caused some murmurings in the ton. As likely their whispers were more about his marriage to one sister after the other had jilted him, than they were about their abbreviated period of mourning for the previous duke. However, as over seven months of mourning had passed at this point, the invitations began to arrive en masse. Everyone wanted to entertain the new Duke and Duchess of Selridge. The last thing he needed was the havoc this blackmailer might wreak on the family should he go through with his threats.
Those invitations were directly responsible for today’s visit to White’s. He and Addy had attended a number of small affairs over the last four weeks. Their own “select” dinner party last night was acclaimed a huge success by the arbitrators of those sorts of things—the gossip columnists at The Times. As a result, the dowager and Lady Haverly decided Addy was to hold her first at-home and his presence was summarily declared a nuisance.
He should have been pleased. No man wanted to suffer through the choreographed gawking and gossiping an afternoon at-home entailed. Selridge House, at one of the most coveted addresses in Mayfair, would be scrutinized and criticized. His new wife’s youth, dress, and manners would be put to the test. The delicacies offered at afternoon tea would be publicly sighed over, privately denigrated, and then devoured. Only a madman would want to subject himself to such torture.
Marcus began to think he was a madman. His madness even had a name—Adelaide. Here he sat in the English gentleman’s idea of heaven, or at least heaven’s antechamber and he actually missed his wife. His family was on the brink of disgrace and rather than come up with a plan to avert it, his plans all involved how to tame the hoyden he’d married. The humiliation was almost too much to bear. Of course, he’d tried to blame everything save his own weakness.
The chairs here were not as comfortable as the ones in his library. The brandy was not of the proper vintage. The newspapers were wrinkled and smudged. The room was too dark. The fire was too high. The air was too stale. Marcus folded the damned letters and shoved them into his jacket pocket. He shifted in his chair for the hundredth time. He might as well give up and admit it. The one thing White’s did not have, the one thing that made Selridge House a real haven these days, was Addy. What had he become?
“If solitude is your goal, that look will achieve it, Your Grace.” Creighton’s tone as he sauntered up to Marcus’s heretofore private table reeked of bored indolence. Then again, almost everything about the man was carefully crafted to present the most careless and unconcerned air possible. Marcus was very probably the only person of Creighton’s acquaintance who saw it as just that—a diligently applied image to cover… There, the man had him. He had never been quite certain what it was his friend tried so desperately to hide.
“Do sit down,” Marcus offered after Creighton sprawled into a chair across from him and raised a finger to summon one of the footmen who seemed to fade in and out of the paneling like so much cigar smoke.
“I’ll have what His Grace is having,” Creighton said. “That is French brandy you’re drinking, you know.”
Marcus scowled at him and stretched his legs out toward the hearth just to the side and behind them. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Creighton? Word has it you usually aren’t in here until after six.”
“I cannot help but be touched that you thought enough of me to—”
“Stubble it, Ferret. Tillie happened to mention your habits at dinner last night.” Marcus retrieved his brandy from the table and slouched further into the soft leather of his chair. He regarded his friend through half-closed eyes.
“Ah yes,” Creighton replied. He took his own drink from the footman and dismissed the man with a brief nod. “The delightful dinner party of Society’s new darling—the Duchess of Selridge, written up in The Times, no less. You must be very proud.”
Marcus shrugged and began to swirl the brandy around in its crystal balloon. “I suppose so. The food was good.”
“Delicious. A very fine menu indeed.” Creighton sipped his drink. He appeared to study Marcus’s face assiduously. It was never a good thing to be the subject of one of the man’s intense studies.
“What do you want, Creighton?”
“Want? Why should I want anything? Can’t a man come upon a friend at his club and share a drink with him without being accused of something nefarious?”
Marcus sat up and returned his glass to the table. He propped his elbows on the chair arms and steepled his fingers in front of him. Creighton had the nerve to grin when the duke flexed his fingers a few times. “When that man is you, Creighton, anything is possible. If you wanted to extend your thanks for the dinner you should have stopped by my wife’s at-home. She and my mother will be in alt to hear your good opinion.”
“I just left there, as a matter of fact. Quite the crush.” Creighton settled his brandy next to Marcus’s on the table.
“Oh? I shouldn’t wonder every tabby in the ton hasn’t been by there. Hence my relocation here for the afternoon.” Marcus shuddered deliberately. “All those chattering women are guaranteed to give a man a headache.”
“Yes. Well. I would tend to agree with you, Selridge, but your wife has had as many gentlemen call as she has ladies this afternoon. I wouldn’t venture into your parlor when you go home if you wish to avoid a headache. All of those flowers set poor Tillie to sneezing immediately.”
“Tillie was there? He might as well have stayed the night. He was one of the last to leave after dinner. Why on earth was he there again this afternoon?” Marcus did not know why he was annoyed, but he was. A dinner party every now and again was fine, but he did not relish the idea of entertaining Tillie every night, or anyone else for that matter. He found he rather enjoyed quiet evenings at home with Addy, although he would rather have his good leg cut off than admit it.
“Actually, he arrived in company with his brother to thank the duchess for a lovely evening.” Creighton grinned and relaxed into his chair. “It was quite comical to see them both dressed to the nines, each with bouquet in hand, and surrounded by all of those women.” Marcus had to laugh at the picture his friend painted. Hubert hadn’t ventured out in Society for years because of his girth. Two visits to Selridge House in as many days was apt to set the ton on its ear.
“I daresay it was quite a sight, although I am certain Addy made them feel welcome.”
“To be sure. She admired Tillie’s daffodils and Hubert’s lilies and introduced them both to every lady in the room.” Creighton’s expression sobered. “She was very kind to Hubert last night as well. She has earned Tillie’s undying devotion for that alone. “
“Yes, well.” Marcus leaned back and glanced at the fire. When he looked up Creighton seemed to be lost in the flames as well. “When we were at school, I think in all our jests about his brother we forgot how devoted Tillie is to Hubert. It was poorly done of us.”
“Perhaps,” his friend mused. “I never refined on it overmuch until last night. Your wife has a way of making everyone feel… valuable.” He shifted in his chair. Marcus glanced at him and realized he’d rarely seen the man look so puzzled. It was as if Addy’s brand of sincere kindness was some oddity Creighton could not understand.
“If I recall, my wife was not the only one who was kind to Hubert last night.”
“Very observant of you, Major,” Creighton said. “You saw the beauty who sat with Hubert whilst the other young people played at charade
s?” The way he said “charades” brought a smile of commiseration to Marcus’s lips.
“Lily Faversham? She and Addy went to school together. I was made to understand she was the Season’s Exquisite a few years ago. She seemed very taken with old Hubert.”
“She should be. She is his betrothed, thanks to your late brother.”
“Julius?” Marcus was genuinely surprised. “That must be a devil of a story.”
“I have no idea. Julius never said and Hubert refuses to do so. The tale must be fantastical to say the least. After all, she is a beauty and he is… Damn. I did it again, didn’t I.”
Marcus picked up his brandy once more. “You are nothing if not consistent, Creighton. Especially in your attempts to throw me off the scent. You did not answer my original question.”
His friend paused, retrieved his own brandy, and then made a great production of getting comfortable in his chair. After a long moment’s pause he smiled and spoke. “Would that be your question as to my nefarious purpose in coming to a club I frequent every evening and joining one of my oldest friends for a drink?”
“That would be the one.”
Creighton sighed. “Very well then, if you insist. Actually, I could ask you the same thing. Why are you in London, Selridge? Please don’t do me the disservice of saying you are here to enjoy the delights of the Season.”
“I have a young wife to entertain, Creighton. Perhaps it is she who wanted to come to Town, and I am merely indulging her.” Marcus made a conscious effort to keep his tone as well as his grip on his brandy light. He was certain he had succeeded until he saw Creighton’s eyes narrow before he replied.
“Well, I hate to tell you, Your Grace, if that is the case you are doing a poor job of it. If your wife has enjoyed any of the events you two have attended these last weeks, I am a vestal virgin.”
Lost In Love (Road To Forever Series #1) Page 28
