Married to a Stranger

by Louise Allen

  ‘Yes, I am sure we are doing the right thing,’ she was saying through gritted teeth in answer to the rather more direct question put by one of the elderly Misses Hibbert as the gentlemen came in to join them.

  ‘And where is Callum?’ Lady Atherton asked. ‘I want to know about this house he’s taking his bride to. Poor dear Sophia knows nothing about it.’

  ‘He has a headache,’ William said. ‘And begs to be excused.’

  Sophia doubted he had any such thing. He had simply walked away from the stifling atmosphere of rampant curiosity disguised under banal socialising. But he might have said something to her, taken his leave, she thought with a flash of resentment when Mrs Lambert shot her a pitying look. She did not like being poor, dear Sophia who must be pitied; it was hard enough holding her own in this company as it was.

  ‘The gardens are very fine here,’ Mr Masterton remarked, taking the cup of tea she offered him. He seemed less brittle and dangerous now. Or perhaps resentment at Callum’s abandonment of her made another man seem more attractive.

  ‘Yes. The new terraces overlooking the South Lawn are delightful,’ Sophia agreed.

  ‘I was forgetting you will know the Hall a lot better than I,’ he said, putting down the cup and turning to the window. ‘There is still a little light and it is intolerably stuffy in here. Perhaps you could show me what has been done?’

  It was a tempting suggestion and she was tired of being dutiful. Sophia loved the gardens, and, although she had been careful never to presume on Will’s invitation to use them as her own, she would often come and draw here when the stress of home and the debts became too much.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She caught up her shawl from the back of the chair and went out through the door he held open for her.

  ‘How fresh the air is. The summer is coming to an end, I fear!’

  ‘You are not cold?’ He took her arm and began to stroll along the broad terrace.

  ‘Oh, no, Mr Masterton. There is hardly any breeze. Here is where the old terrace ended …’

  ‘Donald, please. We are about to be family, after all.’

  ‘Donald.’ It seemed a little forward, but she did not care to seem stand-offish. ‘The earl had this part extended so the view of the lake was improved.’

  ‘And that charming structure?’ He gestured to a small temple-like construction on the far corner of the paving. When he lowered his hand it came to rest over hers. Sophia stiffened, but he took no further liberties and she supposed she was being intolerably provincial.

  ‘A little gazebo. It is the most charming spot to sit and read.’ Somehow they were strolling that way. The wash of light from the windows receded and the dusk deepened. ‘There will not be much to see now it is getting dark,’ she added, pausing on the threshold.

  But Donald kept walking until they stood in the centre under the dome, the curving seat with the wall behind blocking the view of the house. ‘Delightful,’ he said, and turned so they were almost toe to toe. ‘And designed for flirtation.’

  ‘Whereas I am not,’ Sophia said, trying for a light touch while her heart pounded. No, she was not being provincial, but naïve. ‘Really, Mr Masterton … Donald, we should be getting back.’ If only Callum had tried to flirt, to court her, Sophia thought with an inward sigh. She would like to be courted.

  ‘Don’t you care for flirting, Miss Langley?’ He was blocking her way back to the house, but he made no alarming move to touch her. If she had had a little town bronze she would know how to deal with this, turn his gallantry aside with a light, dismissive laugh.

  She tried one and thought it quite successful. ‘I do not. I have no idea how to flirt, Mr Masterton, and I have no intention of learning!’

  ‘So Callum has found himself a good girl, then?’ He was teasing her now, but there was an edge to it and she was beginning to think that her pique at Callum’s neglect had led her out of her depth with this man.

  ‘I hope so, indeed!’

  ‘So I cannot wish for so much as a fleeting kiss in the twilight?’ Donald murmured.

  ‘You, sir, are a rogue!’ That sounded quite confident; she was wary of sounding too alarmed for fear of arousing his hunting instincts.

  ‘Just one touch of your lips?’ He caught her hand and stood close, his dark eyes smiling down at her.

  ‘Certainly not.’ She gave her hand a little tug to try to free it. Masterton grinned, teeth white in the dim light, and stooped suddenly, his mouth planting a quick, impertinent caress on hers.

  ‘Let her go.’

  Oh, goodness. With her hand to her lips Sophia stepped back away from Donald Masterton, suddenly aware of how compromising this tête à tête must look. As she turned she could see Callum standing just within the doorway. His face was shadowed, but the anger radiated off him like heat from a fire. Either it was relief at being rescued that was making her breathless, or excitement at how masterful Callum sounded. Perhaps both.

  ‘Just a little flirting between cousins,’ Masterton said with a laugh, but the dark, mocking face was wary.

  ‘But you are not a cousin,’ Callum pointed out and stepped into the gazebo. Sophia looked at his face in the gloom and swallowed. He appeared quite calm—and quite murderous. ‘I don’t want to send you back in there with a bloody nose and cause talk.’ He began to walk towards the other man.

  ‘I’d like to see you try.’

  ‘Callum, really, absolutely nothing of any consequence occurred—’ Callum ignored her. He was over six foot, lean and broad shouldered, but Donald Masterton topped him by an inch.

  Callum kept coming, his hands relaxed by his sides. Surely they were not going to fight, not over a minor indiscretion? And then, as the other man raised his fists into a posture of defence, Callum moved, slick and fast, and Masterton was tumbling through the air to land sprawling on his back on the marble mosaic.

  ‘Get up.’ Callum hauled him to his feet with one hand fisted into his neckcloth. Donald swung at him and Callum ducked, twisted and he fell again, this time harder. ‘You do not flirt with Miss Langley. You do not go aside with Miss Langley. In fact, if I find you within six feet of Miss Langley again I will break your arm,’ Callum said, dusting off his hands. He waited a moment, but Masterton simply closed his eyes and let his head fall back with a muttered oath. ‘Sophia?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course, but you cannot leave him like this.’ She was babbling, she knew. ‘What if he has a concussion?’

  ‘I’ll live,’ Masterton said, opening one eye. ‘Go on, leave me to recover what’s left of my dignity.’

  Sophia gathered up her skirts and almost ran from the little pavilion. She could feel Callum’s presence close behind her, ominously quiet. ‘Callum, I am sorry, I had no idea it was not wise to be alone with him. We were talking and it was so stuffy inside and … And it was just harmless flirtation.’

  ‘Will told you quite clearly that he was a rake.’ Callum took her by the arm and marched her back towards a side door.

  ‘Yesterday in the carriage? I am sorry, but I lost concentration and missed that.’ It sounded a ridiculous excuse, even though it was true. Callum’s eyebrows lifted in what she was certain was disbelief. Sophia dug in her heels and they stopped. ‘I have said I am sorry. I had no intention of flirting with him—or any other man, come to that—if you had not just abandoned me like that.’

  ‘I had hardly abandoned you; you were in the middle of my family. Plenty of company, I would have thought. And what possessed you to go to that summer house in the dark with him?’ Callum sounded every bit as sanctimoniously disapproving as her mother, she thought.

  ‘Because I am not used to rakes,’ she snapped. ‘Or to flirtation.’

  ‘And there I was thinking I was marrying a woman with a degree of savoir-faire and not a green girl,’ he said, just as tartly.

  ‘You know perfectly well that I have not had a great deal of experience in society. And, until you, not much with men, either!’

  He narrowed his eye
s. Sophia tried an olive branch. ‘You were most effective back there.’ It had been impressive, that controlled, skilled violence, and she realised with a pang of shame that she had found it arousing. She wanted to kiss Callum. No, she wanted him to kiss her, to take her in his arms with the same masculine energy he had fought with. She wanted to be swept away by him again. Or perhaps she just wanted him to show her some emotion other than possessiveness.

  ‘It was neater than breaking his nose,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ll send for the carriage to take you home. He’ll be gone tomorrow.’

  ‘It was pleasant to be flirted with,’ Sophia said. He stopped and turned to her in the light from the lantern over the door. ‘Until he kissed me, of course. I would prefer it if you flirted with me,’ she added.

  ‘You want me to flirt?’ He sounded puzzled by the concept.

  ‘I would like to be courted, not taken for granted. And I assume you do know how to flirt,’ she said and saw him become as still as a heron poised above a pool, his eyes, glinting in the reflected light, as focused. He looked tired, she thought. There were shadows under his eyes, fine lines at the corners she had not noticed before.

  ‘Is that wise?’

  Was that sarcasm? ‘I want to forget Mr Masterton. It is you I am betrothed to and this is rather a pleasant evening.’ She wanted to add I would never have flirted with him if you had been paying me any attention, but that would sound peevish.

  ‘I can’t say I want to flirt with you just so you can forget your indiscretions,’ Callum remarked. ‘But if you insist … Wait there just one moment.’

  Sophia stood and glared at the door as it swung to behind him. No one, it seemed, could accuse Mr Callum Chatterton of impulsive romantic gestures, or of being carried away by passion or even, she decided, of chivalrous behaviour. He had felled Masterton because he was dallying with his betrothed, not because he wanted to rescue a lady in distress or because he wished to be kissing her himself. She had thought, from what one read in sensation novels, or heard in whispers from one’s friends, that violent action in defence of a lady would produce almost unconquerable passion in the male breast.

  ‘Here.’ Callum came out onto the terrace and offered her a champagne flute. ‘Will’s best vintage should banish any lingering thoughts of Donald. And I certainly don’t want to taste him on your lips.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sophia took it and tossed back the entire glass. ‘What a practical solution, Mr Chatterton. No one could suspect you of hot-blooded passion, could they?’ The shadowed garden seemed to be swaying slightly.

  ‘I am sorry to be a disappointment to you, Sophia. Perhaps you are forgetting the afternoon at Long Welling?’

  ‘You mean your outrageous kisses? Those were simply designed to overwhelm me, sweep me into agreeing. I am talking about courtship, about getting to know each other.’

  ‘Damn it, Sophia, it was not like that.’ Callum emptied his own glass and set it down on the low wall that edged a formal knot garden. The scent of thyme and rosemary drifted up on the evening breeze.

  ‘No? If you told me you were swept away on a tide of romantic desire I would, naturally, have to believe you.’

  ‘It is a little late to rake over these coals, is it not? You have agreed to marry me, the die is cast.’ Callum leaned against the door frame, the picture of careless masculinity confronted with irritating feminine nagging. He had not answered her question, of course. ‘I told you not to expect a love match. If you want me to pretend this is a romance, then I must disappoint you.’

  ‘I know that! But now I have to live with you for the rest of my life—and you have to live with me and I thought some closeness … On Sunday I thought …’ Her voice trailed away in the face of his lack of reaction. ‘Oh, never mind. I should not be out here, not even with you. Let me past, if you please.’

  ‘No.’ He stood upright and put a hand under her elbow. ‘Come along.’ He walked her along the terrace, around the edge of the house, across the end of the carriage drive and into the stable yard. ‘The carriage to take Miss Langley home,’ he said to the groom who came running at the sound of their footsteps.

  ‘I cannot just walk away—I should say goodbye to the guests,’ Sophia protested. ‘And to your brother.’

  ‘I will tell them you have a headache,’ Callum said, bundling her into the carriage as it came to a stop. He climbed in after her and slammed the door. The groom had set a taper to the internal lantern and she searched his face for some clue to his feelings.

  ‘Both of us? That was your excuse for disappearing earlier, was it not?’

  ‘They will assume we are having a mutual headache,’ Callum said as he settled himself on the seat next to her.

  ‘A mutual—? You mean they will assume we are alone somewhere making love?’ Sophia demanded on a wave of indignation.

  ‘Probably. We had better make it so, don’t you think?’

  Chapter Seven

  Callum turned and pulled her into his arms. ‘We both taste pleasantly of champagne, I imagine.’

  Sophia felt her body sway towards him. She could hardly complain about him not courting her and then object when he wanted to kiss her. The blinds were down. No one would be able to see.

  Callum’s mouth was firm and cool on hers and tasted, as he had predicted, of champagne. It also tasted of him, which was disturbing. She was coming to know that taste, to want it. But he did not repeat the all-consuming, passionate kisses that had so overwhelmed her before, but brushed her lips lightly with his in a whisper of a caress. Then he began to untie the ribbons that held up her long evening gloves and rolled the right-hand one down, almost to her wrist. He bent his head and touched his lips to the inside of her elbow, his tongue tracing the tendons, delving into the warm softness and then trailing down to her wrist where the pulse was pattering, faster it seemed than even her heartbeat.

  ‘Callum,’ she whispered as he began to pull off the glove, finger by finger. ‘Callum?’ The thin silk slid off and he raised her hand to his mouth.

  ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ he asked, her hand so close to his lips that the breath warmed her knuckles.

  ‘Yes. No—I do not know! Callum, I wanted you to want to flirt with me. But I should not have asked. Now I do not know whether you want it or if you are simply obliging me.’

  ‘I am always ready to oblige you,’ he said with a catch in his voice that might have been a rueful chuckle. ‘I rather think I have forgotten how, though.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ It was her turn to be rueful now.

  ‘No, I mean it.’ In the silence she could not see his face, but their interlinked fingers gave her some hope that he would not close himself off from her again. ‘At the risk of shocking you, Sophia, I could make love to you, bed you, very easily. That is instinct and technique. But I seem to have lost the ability to make love lightly, to tease. To flirt, if you want to call it that.’

  ‘You appeared to be making a good job of it just now,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Callum said drily. ‘The truth is, I want to be married to you. I want you in my bed, I want you in my home. I want—I need—this state of limbo to be over. I do not want to be flirting with my betrothed.’

  She could understand that; she felt much the same way, she supposed. Get this over with and they could settle down to their new life with the uncertainties out of the way. The undercurrent of bitterness in his voice warned her to be careful. She dare not say the wrong thing.

  ‘Callum—’ The carriage swayed as it rounded the corner into the lane and jerked violently as one wheel hit the pothole that had grown steadily deeper all winter. Callum caught her hard against him and then sat her safely back on the seat. ‘Callum, do you really have a headache? You look as though you have not been sleeping.’ She stroked her fingertip beneath his eye and he flinched. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I have a headache. I have suffered with them since the wreck, but I am getting them under control now. You need not fear you are marrying a man
who will turn invalid on you.’

  ‘I do not fear that,’ Sophia said quietly. ‘And you should not feel having headaches is a weakness, they will go with time.’ He said nothing about his lack of sleep and she did not want to probe too deeply. He was doubtless very busy, that was all.

  By the time the carriage stopped in front of the Langleys’ garden gate Sophia had her glove safely secured and her voice calm. ‘Thank you, Callum,’ she said as he helped her down and opened the gate. ‘No, please do not trouble yourself,’ she added as he would have walked her up the path to the door. ‘I am safe enough now. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Cal said and watched his affianced bride disappear through her front door without a backward glance. ‘That went well,’ he snarled under his breath as he got back into the carriage and stuffed his cold hands into his pockets. Damn this country, was he never going to get warm?

  He had not invented the pain that had built inexorably in his head during dinner to the point where his eyes had lost focus. The migraine headaches had attacked him relentlessly in the first few months after the shipwreck, but he had thought they had almost run their course. Perhaps they would not while the nightmares disturbed his sleep with such regularity.

  The evening air on the terrace had been cool enough to revive him a little and the sight of Sophia vanishing into the gazebo with Donald Masterton had cleared his sight, even as it had fuelled his temper.

  The pleasure of fighting Masterton was visceral, dark, elemental. It made him realise how therapeutic violent and uncivilised behaviour might be. He wanted to pound Masterton into a pulp and he wanted to drag Sophia into the nearest bedchamber and possess her to the point of mutual exhaustion.

  Which was impossible. He could not behave like that to her. But he did not want the mild kisses that were acceptable for a betrothed couple, the sort of kiss they had exchanged in the carriage just now. He needed mindless passion, to lose himself utterly in a woman. Any woman, provided she was an abstraction and not a person he had to feel for, to love. It was too dangerous to love. The ladybirds he entertained provided sexual release, but you could not treat a wife in that way.