The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet

by Mary Balogh

  And he had begun by pouring out the foolish, ungrateful self-pity of his childhood self.

  For the rest of dinner, and for a while in the drawing room afterward, he told her happier stories of his childhood, choosing the amusing ones involving mainly him and George. Elizabeth and Jane had been born some years after them and had never really been playmates. He was rewarded with smiles and even with laughter.

  “Tomorrow,” he said finally when he could see that she was tired, “I will show you the house, Stephanie, including the state apartments and the portrait gallery. If the weather is fine, I will show you the park too. We will take tomorrow for ourselves. The day after you can begin being the Duchess of Bridgwater here if you wish.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do wish, Alistair. But tomorrow we will spend together. It is important that we do so.”

  He was leading her up the stairs. He paused outside her dressing room door. “I may come to you tonight, then?” he asked.

  She nodded, and he opened her door and closed it behind her when she had stepped inside.

  He had not told her what a dreamer he had been. There had been the two totally different sides to his nature—the mischievous, energetic, rebellious boy on the one hand, and the lone, moody dreamer on the other. Both had infuriated his father. Both had been quelled, totally repressed.

  He was not sure he could share the second aspect of his nature with Stephanie. He was not sure there were the words. He was not sure he could so bare his soul even for her. And yet, he thought bleakly as he prepared for her, something told him that his only chance with her was in total honesty. Was he capable of it?

  SHE WAS STANDING at the window, looking out, though her head turned back over her shoulder when he came inside the room. It was not a studied pose, he realized—he knew far more about her innocence than he had known on his first acquaintance with her. But if it had been, it could not have been more provocatively done. Her auburn hair, caught by the candlelight, lay in heavy waves down her back. The turn of her body, clad in a fine silk and lace nightgown, emphasized its lithe slimness.

  She turned completely as he crossed the room toward her, and her hands reached out for his. She had said he might come, and she was not going to stint her welcome, he saw. She lifted her face to his.

  He tried to keep his hunger in check, but she opened her mouth as his lips lightly explored hers, and he slid his tongue into moist heat and gathered her closer. She came, arching her body to his, bringing her hands up to rest on his shoulders. He wondered if it was merely duty, but he could feel the heat of her body through his nightshirt and her nightgown.

  He kissed her throat, her ears, her temples, her eyelids. Her mouth again.

  He had hurt her, he thought. He had admitted to her that at first he had believed the evidence of his own eyes above the story she had told him. He had told her in effect that she had been a toy to him, a creature of fun. One he had used for his own amusement and had planned to use for his sexual pleasure. He had denied her personhood.

  And now she had the power to hurt him, to bring shattering down about him the house he had built for himself over the years so carefully that he had not even fully realized it himself. The house inside which he had hidden so that no one would find him and reveal to him the emptiness of his existence.

  Stephanie had found him, whether she realized it or not.

  “Come and lie down,” he said.

  But he stopped her when she was beside the bed and about to lie down on it. He lifted his hands to the top button of her nightgown.

  “May I?” he asked her, looking into her eyes.

  For a moment she glanced aside to the single candle that burned beside the bed. There was a whole branch of candles on the mantelpiece. She nodded almost imperceptibly, and he undid the buttons one by one until he could lift the gown away from her shoulders. She did not even try to hold on to modesty by bending her arms at the elbow. She held them loosely at her sides so that the single garment slithered all the way to the floor.

  She was all slim, taut beauty. She watched him, her face calm, her chin high, as his eyes roamed over her. He pulled his nightshirt off over his head and tossed it aside.

  “Lie down,” he said.

  He hesitated for only a moment. But he did not extinguish the candles. And before joining her on the bed, he stripped back the bedclothes to the foot of the bed. Perhaps he was sealing his own doom, he thought, but if she was going to allow the continuation of their marriage, then perhaps it was as well that she understood the full physical, carnal nature of what they would do together in her bed. He rather suspected that on their wedding night she had hidden behind darkness and closed eyes and beneath bedcovers and inside the instructions on duty that his mother of all people must have given her.

  There could be no more hiding for either of them. Every day now, he realized, and every night, he would risk losing her. But he could only come out into the open with her and take the risk.

  He slid an arm about her shoulders, but did not draw her close. He raised himself on his elbow and leaned over her to kiss her. With his free hand he explored her and fondled her. After a while he lifted his head away and watched what he did. She watched his face.

  He could see and feel and hear her body’s response. Her nipples hardened. She grew almost hot to the touch. She was breathing quickly and rather raggedly. But she lay still and relaxed and continued to watch him.

  He slid a hand beneath her leg and lifted it. She followed his unspoken direction and raised both legs, setting her feet flat on the bed. When he slid his hand between her knees, she let her legs drop open. He fondled her with his hand, parting, stroking, teasing with light fingers while he leaned forward to kiss her breasts and her flat abdomen. He would not move his head lower. Not yet. She was not ready for that kind of extreme intimacy. Perhaps she never would be.

  She was slick with wetness. Ready for him. He slid a finger in and out and listened to the erotic sucking sound. When he looked into her face, he found that she was still looking at him. But her eyes were heavy-lidded, and her lips were parted. He knew that she was listening too and that tonight she was not embarrassed by the sound.

  She would not hide from any of it, he decided. She would not use his body as a blanket. When he moved over her, he knelt between her thighs and lifted her legs up over his and positioned himself. Her eyes dropped from his eventually when he paused and waited for her. She watched. He pushed himself slowly inside until he was fully embedded. And drew out again almost his full length and pushed inward once more. She was watching.

  “Touch me,” he said to her as he leaned over her and set his hands on either side of her head, holding himself above her with straight arms. “Put your arms about me.” Her arms were lying flat on the mattress beside her as they had on their wedding night.

  She set her hands on either side of his waist. He watched her swallow and move them to his hips and around to touch his buttocks briefly. She rested them against his waist again and closed her eyes at last as he resumed his movements in her. She was soft and hot and wet. He closed his own eyes and held himself above her while he worked. He could smell her. Pure woman.

  He waited for her body to move beyond arousal into the beginnings of fulfillment. He stroked her firmly for a long time, holding back his own pleasure. But he knew finally that it was not going to happen. There was no tension in her, only relaxed acquiescence, even though her legs were still twined about his and she was rocking to his rhythm. He could have moved her on to the next stage by sliding his hand between them and caressing a part of her she was probably unaware of. But he sensed that she did not want to abandon control. Control at the moment must be more important to her than almost anything else.

  But she was not even trying to hide her quiet enjoyment of what was happening. She liked what he did to her, as she had two nights ago. It was enough. For now it must be enough.

  He lowered his weight onto her and thrust deeply and quickly and repeatedly
until release came and his seed spilled into her. He heard himself sigh against her hair.

  He set his hand over hers after he had uncoupled them and moved to her side. She drew her legs together and lay quietly on her back.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She turned her head to look at him. “It is very pleasant, Alistair,” she said. “I always expected it would be, but it is even more pleasant than I imagined. I want you to know that it was for myself that I said yes tonight. Not just because of duty and not because of … of you. It was for me. I decided to be selfish. So I must thank you too, you see.”

  He leaned over her and kissed her mouth. He was surprised to find that he was feeling almost amused, almost lighthearted. Did she realize that she was turning the tables on him? That she was making him her slave? That she was punishing him most effectively? Should he tell her?

  “You may be selfish any time you wish, my dear,” he said, “if the results for me are so very pleasurable.”

  She smiled at him tentatively as he smiled back. It was enough. Hope was born in him as he kissed her again and then reluctantly removed himself from her bed to return to his own room.

  16

  IFE BECAME SO BUSY FOR STEPHANIE OVER THE FOLLOWING month that she had blessedly little time for thought. She was mistress of Wightwick Hall, a daunting task even for a bride who had been brought up to expect such a life. The only experience she had of running a home had been gained at the vicarage after her mother’s death. It was pitifully inadequate as preparation for what faced her now. The month-long training given her by her mother-in-law helped a great deal. But she found that she had to learn to do the job in her own way. She had been taught to remember who she was and refuse to be intimidated by a regal housekeeper and a despotic cook. Yet she forced herself to remember too that her servants were people, that they had lives and dignity and pride of their own. She had to learn to command through a combination of firmness and kindness.

  Sometimes she envied her husband, who needed to use neither. His word was everyone’s command. He never raised his voice, never spoke harshly to anyone. Often he did not even have to speak at all. A lifted forefinger at the table would bring a footman smartly hurrying with the coffeepot. Raised eyebrows would send the instant message that a door should be opened or that one course of a meal might be removed and the next brought on.

  But she could not be like him. She had to learn to live her new life her own way. She no longer needed to feel guilty about deviating from some of the instructions she had been given.

  There were neighbors to meet, visits to make, entertainments to plan. There were tenants to be called upon and laborers too. There were the sick and elderly and very young to identify so that she might learn to give them extra attention. There were the rector and his sister to be seen and parish concerns to be discussed.

  There were letters to write. After the restrictions imposed upon her by the Burnabys, writing and receiving letters were among her greatest pleasures. But there were so many. The dowager duchess wrote to her as did Cousin Bertha, her sisters-in-law, Jennifer, Samantha, Cora, Miriam, and Tom’s wife.

  There was her own estate with which to concern herself. She summoned her steward to Wightwick and spent hours with him over four separate days, asking questions, looking at ledgers, listening to advice, making decisions. She was very tempted to ask her husband to oversee the estate for her since she knew that he was more than competent with his own. And she knew that he waited to be asked, even though he said nothing but merely entertained their guest with his usual correct, rather austere courtesy. But she did not give in to the temptation. It was her property, and perhaps she would wish to live there one day—perhaps soon.

  And there was the summer fête to organize. There were to be stalls and competitions and maypole dancing in the village, and cricket and races in the park. There were to be refreshments all day in the park and a grand ox roast there in the evening to be followed by an outdoor dance. All the celebrations in the park for years past had been organized by the dowager duchess. Now the task fell upon Stephanie’s shoulders. The fête was the biggest event of the year in the neighborhood. She knew she would be judged harshly if it was poorly organized.

  She might have busied herself with her tasks as Duchess of Bridgwater from the time of her early rising until bedtime, she sometimes thought, and still not feel that everything was done. But there was another major area of her life too, and it took at least half her time. She had a new marriage to work on.

  Strangely, it was not difficult. It might almost have been idyllic if she had wanted it to be, she thought. Her husband made time to spend with her, though her mother-in-law had warned her that she must not expect to see a great deal of him once the marriage had been solemnized.

  He was the one who showed her the house the day after their arrival, though Mrs. Griffiths seemed somewhat taken aback. He took her through the state apartments, rooms that awed her with their size and magnificence. He took her to the portrait gallery on an upper floor and spent longer than an hour there with her, pointing out his ancestors to her, telling her their stories. He paused longest before a portrait of his mother and father, painted soon after their wedding. His mother was beautiful then as she still was now.

  “Oh,” Stephanie said, going one step closer, “you are very like your father. You might almost be him.” The former duke stared back at her from the canvas, proud, aloof, almost arrogant—and very handsome.

  “Yes,” her husband said quietly. “Perhaps that was part of the trouble. Because I looked so like him, I was expected to be like him in all ways.”

  She turned to look at him. “You did not love him?” she asked incautiously.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I loved him. And he loved me. Perhaps that was part of the trouble too.”

  He did not elaborate, but he was not silent with her. He talked to her almost constantly, telling her about his life, about his heritage.

  He loved his home, she thought. Perhaps more deeply than he realized, though he had once described it as his pride and joy. If he had wanted none of it as a child, he certainly loved it now.

  “You love Wightwick,” she said to him, smiling at him. “If you had been the younger son, it would have been George’s now.”

  “Yes.” He looked about him. “Yes, and so it would.”

  He walked about the park with her, showing her its most obvious attractions, taking her on walks that had been carefully laid out to give both a picturesque route and unexpected and glorious prospects of greater distances. He took her on a shady walk through a grove of trees until they reached a small, secluded lake she had not suspected was there.

  “Hartley—Lord Carew—redesigned the park for me several years ago,” he said, “before his marriage. He has great talent as a landscape gardener. Indeed, when he and Samantha first met, she mistook him for the gardener of his own estate.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I hope he disabused her as soon as he realized what had happened.”

  “No.” He smiled ruefully. “We men do not always do what we ought, Stephanie.”

  He took her riding. She had ridden as a girl, though not a great deal since her father had kept only one horse and that exclusively for the cart. She had not ridden as a woman. But he chose a gentle mare for her and rode patiently at her side while she cautiously walked the horse and eased it into a canter until the world seemed to be flying past at a dangerous pace to either side of her. Once she caught him laughing at her—it was when she had taken her horse to a canter for all of thirty seconds across a perfectly level meadow and then hauled back on the reins before blowing out her breath from puffed cheeks.

  He looked like a mischievous boy when he laughed. She wondered how he had looked when he was nine or ten—when he had got up to some of those wild escapades he had told her about. She could not imagine his doing anything wild.

  He always attended her in the drawing room when she was entertaining, even if it was just some of th
e ladies to tea. He made pleasant, courtly conversation with them. He always accompanied her on visits, even to his tenants. She suspected that he drank more tea during the first month of their marriage than he had drunk in the whole year previous to it.

  He came to her bed every night. She was sometimes alarmed by the thought that she might be becoming addicted to what happened between them there. She found herself anticipating it with eagerness all day long, and willing it not to end while it was happening, and then fighting bleakness after he had returned to his own room at the thought that there was the rest of the night and all the next day to live through before it would happen again. The marriage act was the most enjoyable activity the world had to offer. She was convinced of it.

  She was disturbed by her enjoyment, felt guilty about it. Sometimes she wondered if she stayed just for that. How would she live without it now that she had experienced it?

  How would she live without him?

  On the surface the marriage was not an unhappy one. Their neighbors and acquaintances had a way of looking at them—with a sort of amused indulgence—that suggested they were seen as a newly married couple living through a honeymoon. And in many ways they were. Stephanie found that even her need for quietness and privacy was waning. A couple of times during the evenings after dinner she had retired to her own sitting room with a book, feeling the need to be away from his eyes and his voice. Feeling the need to be herself. And yet the second time it happened, remembering how the first time she had been unable to concentrate on her reading or do any constructive thinking either, she took her book and went back downstairs. She found him in the library, also reading.

  “May I join you?” she asked.

  He had got to his feet as she entered; he always stood when she came into a room. He was always the perfect gentleman.