A Bachelor Still

by Rebecca Hagan Lee

  “The downstairs clock struck one shortly after I sat down.”

  Alex squinted at the mantel but was unable to read the face of it in the dim candlelight. “What time is it now?”

  “A few minutes after half past two,” she told him. “The clock on your mantel chimed a few minutes ago. It’s probably what woke you.”

  It wasn’t. The feeling of being watched is what woke him. Alex’s heart pounded in reaction at what might have happened while he slept. She hadn’t been here a few minutes. She’d been sitting in his room silently watching as he slept for ninety minutes. Long enough for any number of calamities to occur. If she had been the enemy, he would be dead—or as good as. Spying was punishable by hanging or firing squad. He shuddered at the thought. “What woke you?”

  Liana shivered, then looked down at the floor. “The bed.”

  “I don’t understand. Is the bed too soft?” he asked, leaning over to strike a match to his bedside lamp so he could see her more clearly.

  She wrinkled her nose at the sulfur smell of the match, then shook her head.

  “Too hard? Lumpy? Filled with bad dreams?”

  Liana looked up and met his gaze. “Too big.”

  For a moment Alex entertained the delightful notion that his innocent bride might be clumsily attempting to seduce him. Theirs hadn’t been a passionate wedding night, but it had turned out to be a rather intimate and cozy one. After Liana emerged from her bath and stepped from behind the screen wearing what she was wearing now, he’d wrapped her wrist in his neck linen once again, slicing the ends with his knife and fashioning ties to secure it into place so she wouldn’t run the risk of sticking or scratching herself with his stickpin in her sleep. Afterwards, they’d sat down to the very informal meal Mrs. Barrett had prepared for them, laughing and talking like old friends until he’d excused himself to make use of his own tub of bathwater.

  He’d returned to the sitting room, still damp from his bath, to bid her goodnight and discovered Liana had fallen asleep in the chair before the fire while waiting for him. The depths of his disappointment had surprised him. But he had to admit finding her that way was simpler. Lifting her into his arms, Alex had carried her to her bedchamber where he’d pulled back the covers and deposited her onto the bed.

  She’d been sleeping soundly when he left and he’d immediately sat down at his desk to write Colin with his account of the events that had led up to, and had followed, his marriage to Liana. Alex hadn’t wanted to write, but he knew from experience it was best to write reports while they were fresh in his mind. Writing to tell one of his blood brothers that he had married his sister was one of the toughest things he’d ever had to do. But better this sort of news come from him than Colin read an account of it in the British newspapers or hear gossip at one of the many parties to which he and Gillian would be invited. But Alex feared Colin would not take the news well, no matter the source.

  Despite the fact that Liana was safely tucked into bed in the lady’s chamber at Greneleafe Abbey instead of Ellsworth Court.

  Where she’d slept for less than an hour before coming to find him.

  Alex studied her. The embarrassed tilt of her face, the hesitant almost coy way she’d looked up and met his gaze, her reddened nose, and slightly swollen eyes…

  A long forgotten memory of being sent to his father’s old school, The Harrogate Boys Preparatory School, at the tender age of six popped into his head. He’d been excited about the prospect and understood that being sent far away to school was a Courtland tradition. It wasn’t meant to be a punishment. Unfortunately, it had become one. Harrogate had terrified him. He’d pretended to be brave and sure of himself, but he’d secretly cried for his mother and his nanny and was convinced he would die from his longing for home before he saw his mother again.

  The homesickness he felt got better when he went to Eton because he had grown accustomed to being at school, but he’d still suffered moments of sheer panic at waking up in a strange dormitory instead of the familiar one at Harrogate or in his bedchamber at home.

  Alex suddenly realized his bride wasn’t trying to seduce him. She was homesick. “Liana…” His voice was gentle and filled with concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I-I…” She faltered.

  He always considered his mother’s pronouncement that Greneleafe Abbey was haunted to be an excuse for not wanting to return to the place where she and his father had been so happy. He’d always believed his mother meant the Abbey was haunted by the memories of his father. Alex had never considered it might be haunted by anything else. Until now. Was it possible Liana had seen or felt or heard some sort of apparition nobody else had ever confronted? Would she confess to it if she had? “Come on, you can tell me.”

  Still Liana hesitated.

  Alex smiled what he hoped was a warm, comforting smile. “You can you know.”

  “Can I?”

  “Absolutely. We’re friends…”

  She wrinkled her brow.

  “We’re more than friends,” he amended. “We’re husband and wife and that means that anything we tell each other is private. Just between the two of us. Just as whatever we do together is our business and nobody else’s. You can trust me to keep your secrets. I’m good at it.”

  “I-I thought I could do it,” she said at last. “The bed and the bedchamber are lovely and I’ve always dreamed of having a bed to myself, but…”

  “You’re in an unfamiliar place among people you don’t really know.”

  Strands of her long blond hair fell forward to hide part of her face when she nodded. “Nothing is as I thought it would be.” Her voice was slightly higher than normal. “Maman or Caroline always brushes my hair a hundred strokes, then plaits it before I go to bed.”

  “It’s lovely as it is,” he said, tremendously relieved his bride’s concerns were of the mundane, rather than the apparitional sort.

  “Thank you.” She looked up at him. “But it will be a rat’s nest of tangles in the morning if I leave it loose.” She held up her injured wrist. “And I won’t be able to comb the tangles out.”

  “I’ll comb them out for you,” Alex promised. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t mean to complain. Heaven knows you’ve been the very pinnacle of understanding and kindness…”

  Alex inclined his head slightly to acknowledge her compliment. He had shown an extraordinary amount of restraint for a man known as the headstrong member of the Free Fellows League. He wasn’t sure he’d been the pinnacle of understanding or kindness, but he appreciated her saying so. “But?”

  “I’m tall for a woman…”

  He quirked an eyebrow at that. He supposed she was right, but the truth was she was so slender and delicate looking that he thought of her as small. The Duchess of Sussex came close to looking him in the eyes while the top of Liana’s head barely grazed his chin.

  “Not as tall as Miranda, of course, but my feet generally touch the footboards of our beds. The one in the lady’s chamber is bigger.”

  “Courtland men tend to be tall,” Alex explained. “Our feet hang off normal beds. We require larger ones. The bed in the lady’s room is a feminine version of this one. It’s painted white and gilded and the carvings on the headboard are roses instead of lions, but the beds are identical otherwise.” He almost ended his explanation, but he impulsively decided, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. “So the lord will be comfortable in either bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you prefer a smaller bed, that can be arranged.” He was guessing. “Something more in line to the one you had in London?”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head once again. “I’ve always wanted a bed large enough for me to stretch out the way Caroline does in our bed at home.” A sheen of tears appeared in her eyes and Liana hastily blinked them away. “I thought I would enjoy having the whole bed to myself. It seemed so wonderfully decadent, but…”

  “But?”

  “I’ve never had a be
d to myself before and it’s horribly empty and cold and…” She fought valiantly to keep from releasing her tears, but she couldn’t prevent the stray one that slipped over her bottom lashes onto her cheekbone.

  “Lonely.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. There were plenty of things about his bride and about married life he didn’t understand, but this he understood. Alexander Courtland knew what it was like to shed silent tears into a pillow while your heart ached with loneliness, knew what it was like to struggle against your fears, trying to bravely endure the darkness when the rest of the dormitory or the Abbey or the world was fast asleep.

  “Yes,” she whispered, ashamed of her weakness, ashamed of her fears.

  Alex’s heart melted. That this incredibly brave young woman, who had faced a monster and narrowly avoided being devoured by his evil, should shed tears of abject loneliness on her wedding night struck him to the core. She had had one damnable wedding day and while he couldn’t do anything to change or ease the distress of that, he could change this…

  Careful to maintain his modesty, Alex flipped back a corner of the covers and patted the mattress beside him. “You must be freezing over there. Why don’t you join me and get warm?”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Tis no sin to be tempted, but to be overcome.”

  —William Penn, 1644-1718

  A beam of winter sunlight shone through the narrow gap between the heavy velvet draperies and fell across the bed, illuminating Liana’s hair and making the blond shimmer like newly minted silver coins.

  Alex lifted his hand from its resting place on his bride’s midriff, watching as long strands of it slid over his hand. Her hair was silky soft, fine, and straight. He liked the feel of it against his skin. He smiled. It was also as tangled as a rat’s nest on one side just as she’d predicted. He liked that, too. Because he’d promised to comb the tangles out of it for her and tackling that massive snarl would give him a reason to touch it as much as he liked. He had forgotten how soft a woman’s hair could be.

  His bride slept on undisturbed, pressed against his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder, her right arm draped across his chest, her right leg flung over his. She had taken the whole of her side of the big bed and a goodly portion of his until she was sprawled almost on top of him.

  Alex didn’t dare move for fear of waking her, or worse, waking the part of his anatomy he was trying desperately to ignore. Not that he minded. He had forgotten how it felt to wake up beside a woman.

  Before becoming a Free Fellow, he’d brought girls to the Abbey for a bit of carousing in his old quarters—the rooms he’d occupied in the bachelor wing from the age of fourteen. Never in the apartments reserved for the lord and lady. But as his responsibilities increased he’d recognized the danger in spending the night with women he didn’t know or trust and the overnight stays had ceased.

  Until last night when he’d brought home a bride. When he’d brought Liana home. Alex sighed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so soundly or so late. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d lazed around in bed. He lay patiently staring at the ceiling, performing mathematical calculations, reciting bits of Homer and Virgil to himself in Latin, doing whatever he needed to do to keep his mind off the fact that a thin layer of cotton was the only thing separating their naked bodies.

  But nothing could prevent him from knowing the moment Liana shook off the last vestiges of slumber and began to awaken. Yawning and stretching, she moved her arm across his stomach and lower abdomen, blithely unaware of the danger in doing so until he covered her wandering hand with his larger one. “Whoa.”

  “Oh!” Liana came fully awake only to discover she had her arm draped across Alex’s stomach and her leg wedged between his. She was pressed so closely against him she could see the individual whiskers darkening his jaw and chin, she could feel the heat of his body against the length of hers through the fabric of her borrowed nightshirt and the sharp angle of his naked hip bone beneath the palm of her hand. “I’m so sorry.” She would have retreated, but Alex held her fast.

  “I’m not,” he said softly.

  “But I’m all over you again,” she protested.

  “Who knew one of my virtues was that I make a good pillow?” He tried to put her at ease by making a joke.

  “I must have,” Liana said. “I’ve been using parts of you for one ever since we left St. Michael’s yesterday.”

  “I’m probably to blame. I take up a great deal of room. I’m always encroaching on other people’s spaces.”

  Liana pretended to give his chivalrous statement serious consideration, then burst out with a giggle. Looking across his handsomely sculpted chest, Liana saw that he was so close to the edge of his side of the bed that his shoulder was brushing the bed curtains. While she had all of her side of the bed and most of his. “All evidence to the contrary.”

  Alex laughed.

  Liana felt the rumble of his laugher against her face and beneath her palm. “I’m ashamed to admit I’m no better than Caroline. In my effort to stay warm, I’ve chased you all the way across your bed.”

  “There’s no need for shame,” he told her. “We’re married. If you want to chase me across the bed every night for the rest of our lives I won’t complain.” He smoothed his thumb up and down the soft cotton covering her arms in a steady, reassuring rhythm. “There are worse ways for a man to wake up.”

  “Mmm…” She sighed and cuddled closer. “You are so warm. Much better than a warming pan or a hot brick wrapped in flannel.”

  Alex tried not to think of several more inventive ways to warm their shared bed. “I generate a great deal of heat.” And was generating more by the second. “So much that I generally kick the covers to the side at night.”

  “I wish I generated heat.”

  “You do.” The words left his lips before he could stop them.

  “How can that be when I’m always cold?” Liana raised up on her arm so she could look down at him. She would have used her injured arm to prop on his chest, but that meant sliding her hand and once again, Alex stopped her. “Perhaps it’s because you generate heat in other people,” he said, calling himself ten kinds of a fool for doing so. He had opened Pandora’s Box and he might not be able to stuff everything he should have kept to himself back inside.

  Liana scoffed at the notion. “If that were true Caroline would stay on her side of the bed.”

  Alex bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. Great Zeus’s Garters! She was like a dog with a bone. “Caroline is female. Perhaps you generate heat in members of the opposite sex.”

  “I’ve never shared a bed with a member of the opposite sex,” she indignantly informed him.

  Alex quirked his eyebrow in disbelief. “All evidence to the contrary.”

  Remembering that she was sprawled almost atop his body and using him as a pillow, she belatedly added, “Except you.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” he drawled. “And to be the exception.”

  “Last night.” Her indignation increased. “And as you keep reminding me, we are married so there is no shame in our sharing a bed.”

  He nodded.

  “If what you suggest is true, the only person in whom I could possibly generate heat is you.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you don’t need it,” she concluded. “You generate enough of your own.”

  Truer words were never spoken. “Exactly.”

  Her curiosity piqued by his one-word replies, Liana demanded, “Explain how that is possible.”

  “Surely, your mother explained it.”

  “Explained what?”

  “What happens when you share a bed with a man.”

  “Why should she? I had never shared a bed with a man until last night.”

  Alex sighed. He remembered being on holiday from Eton at fourteen and going to his father with a problem very much like the one he had now. The boys at school had explained what was happening to him
and had made several graphic suggestions for remedies—including using his hand, buggering one of the younger boys, or finding a willing street girl. The idea of buggering one of the younger boys he’d prevented from being buggered by bloodying the older boys’ noses was repellant to him, as was the idea of approaching a less than clean street girl in order to transact something that involved close contact with a stranger’s nether regions, so he’d learned to use his hand and a cast-off stocking.

  But that didn’t solve the problem of what he was supposed to do with a female. So Alex had done the reasonable thing and approached his father who had explained that Courtland men were traditionally introduced to the act of intimacy with a female at fifteen. His father had promised to take Alex to a certain house on Portman Square where a certain lady would see to his instruction during the first school holiday following his fifteenth birthday.

  But his father had been murdered shortly after Alex turned fifteen. He never had the opportunity to arrange it. Or so Alex thought. Until he found himself the new Lord Courtland, at fifteen, standing outside the door of Number Forty-Seven Portman Square with his father’s close friend, Lord Rob Mayhew, who had made the arrangements with the lady at Portman Square and the introductions.

  When Alexander, Lord Courtland left Portman Square, he’d learned most of what he’d ever needed to know about the supremely intimate act of making love with a woman. He only hoped he could explain it—or part of it—to Liana.

  “Surely, she prepared you for the realities of marriage…”

  Liana thought for a moment. “She did mention what was required of wives when the announcement that I was to marry Lord Rothermere appeared in the Times and in the Morning Chronicle.”

  Alex breathed a sigh of relief. Liana wasn’t completely ignorant of the facts of life. Her mother had done her parental duty and seen to that. Once he explained his predicament, his bride should understand what he was trying to tell her. “How did she explain it? What did she tell you?”