A Secret Affair

by Mary Balogh

  But Hannah was laughing.

  “You may convince yourself that you are a dusty spinster, Babs,” she said, “but you will not convince me. You are a romantic, as you have always been. Who else would have waited until she was perilously close to her thirtieth birthday before choosing her life’s companion? Constantine Huxtable’s feelings for me have nothing to do with romance, I do assure you. Which is just as well, you know, because neither do my feelings for him.”

  “Do not let him come here tomorrow to speak with me,” Barbara begged. “I would be so embarrassed.”

  “I shall try to deter him,” Hannah promised.

  Barbara retired to bed soon after ten.

  The carriage arrived at five minutes to eleven. Hannah, who had been ready since half past ten, waited fifteen minutes before leaving the house. When the carriage arrived at Constantine’s house some time after quarter past eleven, the door was locked. Hannah tried it herself when it did not open as it usually did on her arrival and when the coachman’s discreet knock brought no results.

  “Well,” she said, partly dismayed, partly amused.

  And, as if she had spoken the magic word, the door swung open. She swept inside and Constantine shut the door behind her. She turned to face him and could see that he was dangling a large key from one finger.

  “Tyrant!” she said.

  “Minx!”

  They both laughed, and she closed the distance between them, threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him hard. His arms came about her waist like vises, and he kissed her back—harder.

  Her toes were barely brushing the floor when they were finished. Or finished with the preliminaries, anyway.

  “You made a tactical error,” she said. “If you wished to take a firm stand with me, you ought not to have opened the door.”

  “And if you had wanted to take a firm stand with me,” he said, “you would not have got out of the carriage to creep up the steps and try the door handle.”

  “I did not creep,” she protested. “I swept.”

  “It still showed how desperate you were to get at me,” he said.

  “And why exactly,” she asked, “were you skulking behind the door, the key at the ready? Because you did not want me to get at you? And why did you open the door?”

  “I took pity on you,” he said.

  “Ha!”

  And even her toes left the floor as they kissed again.

  “I have some questions to ask you,” she said when she could. “I tried writing them all down, but I could not find a sheet of paper long enough.”

  “Hmm,” he said, setting her feet on the floor. “Ask away, then, Duchess.”

  His dark eyes had turned slightly wary.

  “Not yet,” she said. “They will wait until after.”

  “After?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “After you have made love to me,” she said. “After I have made love to you. After we have made love to each other.”

  “Three times?” he said. “What am I going to look like tomorrow, Duchess? I need my rest.”

  “You will look far more rugged and appealing without it,” she said.

  He set the key down on the hall table and offered his hand. She set hers in it, and his fingers closed about her own as he led her in the direction of the staircase.

  And oh, dear, she thought, she was still feeling happy. She ought to be glad about that. She had looked forward to this spring affair with such eager anticipation all through the winter. And physically speaking, it was more than living up to her expectations.

  Why was she not glad, then? Because of the bickering and the teasing and the laughter? Because she had the strange, uneasy feeling that they had somehow crossed a barrier today from being simply lovers to being entangled in some sort of relationship?

  Because she was feeling happy?

  Could she not be happy and glad about it?

  But she would think later, she decided as she stepped inside his dimly lit bedchamber and he closed the door behind them.

  Sometimes there were far better things to do than thinking.

  THEY MADE LOVE with fierce energy the first time, with slow languor the second—if it was possible to be languorous while making love. Either way they were both exhausted by the time they were finished.

  Hannah curled onto her side, facing away from him, and he curled around her from behind and slid one arm beneath her head while he wrapped the other about her. She snuggled back against him and raised his hand so that she could rest her cheek against the back of it.

  And she slept.

  Constantine did not. An uneasy conscience was the perfect recipe for insomnia.

  Were other people like him, he wondered. Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regular intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone’s life filled with a confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other—good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

  As a boy he had hated Jon, his youngest brother—the very person he loved most in the world. He had hated Jon because he was sunny-natured and warmhearted and guileless despite the difficulties of his life, because he was overweight and ungainly and had facial features that made him look more Asian than English, and because he had a brain that worked slowly—and because he was going to die young. Constantine had hated him because he could not put things right for him—and because Jon had what Con had never wanted anyway. The heirdom.

  How could he hate so fiercely and love with such deep agony all at the same time? He had left home as soon as he was old enough and sowed some pretty wild oats, most of them with Elliott. Constantine had not cared about the way life had treated him or about the people he had left behind. Why should he? But he had known that Jon pined for him, and he had hated him more than ever and had gone back home because he loved him more than life itself and knew he would not have him for long.

  Was everyone’s life such a mass of contradictions? Surely not. There would be no sanity left in the world.

  When their father died and Jon became Earl of Merton at the age of thirteen, Constantine had effectively run the estate and his other affairs for him even though their father, in his questionable wisdom, had appointed his brother-in-law, Elliott’s father, as Jon’s guardian. And then he had died two years later and Elliott had inherited the guardianship. And so Elliott, Constantine’s best friend, had become his prime adversary. For he had chosen to take his position seriously and had muscled in where his father had been content to let Con take charge.

  And the great enmity had begun—the bitter estrangement that had lasted ever since. For Elliott had refused simply to trust his cousin to run the estate efficiently and to do what was best for Jon. He had intruded, and it had not taken him long to discover that a fortune in jewels was missing, though none of them was technically part of the entail. And he had jumped to all the obvious conclusions, and the accusations had flown.

  Constantine had invited him to go to hell.

  He had not simply explained, taken Elliott into his confidence. Oh, no, that would have been far too easy. Besides, Elliott had not simply asked, invited his closest friend to explain. He had known, or thought he knew. And he had called Con a thief, the worst kind of thief, one who would steal from his mentally handicapped brother who loved him dearly and trusted him implicitly and knew no better.

  And, truth be told, Constantine had resented Elliott even before the discovery and accusation, for his cousin, newly elevated to the title of Viscount Lyngate by the death of his father, was a cruel reminder that Con had not become Earl of Merton on the death of his father, though they were both eldest sons.

  However it was, he had told Elliott to go to hell.

  Unlike the other times during their youth when they had quarreled, they had not been able simply to put up their fists and fight it out bef
ore grinning at each other and admitting that that had been fun—even as they mopped at bloody noses and pressed fingers gingerly to swelling eyes.

  It had not been that sort of quarrel. It had not been fixable.

  Instead of turning to fisticuffs, Constantine had set out to make Elliott’s life hell—whenever he came to Warren Hall, anyway. And he came often. Constantine had used Jon to play games with Elliott, games that had annoyed and frustrated and even humiliated him, games Jon had thought enormous fun, games that had widened the rift between the cousins. Sometimes, for example, Constantine would have Jon hide when Elliott came, and precious time would have to be spent hunting for him. Con would usually stand by, watching, one shoulder resting against a doorframe, smiling with contempt.

  Quarrels always brought out the worst in people. In him, anyway.

  Even now he could not feel as sorry as perhaps he ought for the childishness of his behavior. For Elliott, who had known him all his life, had actually believed—and still did—that he was capable of robbing his own brother because Jon was easily exploited. It had hurt, that sudden loss of trust. It still would if he had not converted pain into hatred.

  But he was in many ways as bad as Elliott. He did not even try to deny that fact now as he held Hannah’s warm, relaxed body against his and stared at the wall on the far side of his bed. Instead of sitting down with him and discussing the guardianship, as two men—two friends—in their twenties ought to have been able to do, he had been cold and distant and sarcastic, even before the jewels had been missed. And Elliott had been cold and distant and autocratic.

  It had been pretty childish, really. On both their parts. Perhaps they would have got over it if it had not been for the infernal jewels. But they were indisputably missing, so he and Elliott never had got over it.

  They were equally to blame.

  Which fact did not make Constantine hate Elliott the less.

  He buried his nose in Hannah’s hair. It was soft and warm and fragrant—just as she was. He thought of kissing her awake to distract his mind, but she was sleeping peacefully.

  He had upset her last night. She had still been upset earlier today.

  And he had upset the totally innocent Miss Leavensworth.

  Just as he had upset Vanessa soon after she married Elliott.

  Did other people do such things? Did everyone have these shameful, damnably uncomfortable skeletons in their closets?

  He was a monster. He was the devil incarnate. People were quite right to call him that.

  Perhaps one of the worst of his sins, a very recent one, had been his denial of all that he knew to be true of human nature. All people—all—were a complex product of their heritage, their environment, their upbringing and education and cumulative experiences of life as well as of a basic character and personality with which they were born. Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.

  No one was shallow. Not really.

  But he had chosen to believe that the Duchess of Dunbarton was different from every other human being. He had chosen to believe that beneath the surface appearance of beauty and vanity and arrogance there was nothing to know. That she was an empty vessel, not truly human.

  It was what people had chosen to believe of her all her life—except, it seemed, the late duke, her husband.

  He had been no better than her own family, who perhaps had loved her in their own way, but who also had assumed that her beauty made her less sensitive, less needy than her plainer sister. Her father had sympathized with the sister, assuming that his elder daughter could cope better with the vicissitudes of life. Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty, insensitive shell?

  Why had he assumed it?

  Had he failed to accord her full personhood because she was beautiful?

  He was starting to get a headache. And he was beginning to get pins and needles in the arm beneath her head. He had an itch on his bare shoulder that he needed to scratch. He was not going to sleep at all. That was obvious. Neither was he going to make love again. Not until he had done a good deal more thinking.

  He drew his hand carefully from beneath her cheek and slid his arm slowly from under her head. She grumbled sleepily and burrowed her head into the pillow.

  “Constantine,” she muttered, but she was not awake.

  He got off the bed and went into his dressing room. He got dressed, though he did not pull on a coat over his shirt or tuck the shirt into his pantaloons. He went to stand beside the bed to look down at Hannah. She was half awake and blinking up at him.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  And he bent over her and set his lips to hers. She kissed him back with lazy warmth.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’ll be back,” he told her again and made off to the kitchen down two flights of stairs.

  He built up a fire from the embers of last night’s, half filled the heavy built cast-iron kettle, and set it to boil. He raided the pantry for something to eat and set some sweet biscuits on a plate. Awhile later he was climbing the stairs again with a tray, on which were a large pot of tea covered with a thick cozy to keep the brew hot, a milk jug and sugar bowl, cups and saucers and spoons, and the plate of biscuits. He took the tray into the sitting room next to his bedchamber and then went to fetch Hannah.

  She was still hovering between sleeping and waking. He went into his dressing room again and came out with a large woolly dressing gown, which he wore on chilly evenings when he was at home alone and merely wanted to lounge inelegantly with a good book.

  “Come,” he said.

  “Where?”

  But she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood as he held out the dressing gown. She pushed her arms into the sleeves, and he wrapped it about her before securing it with the sash. She looked half buried.

  “Mmm,” she said, turning her nose into the collar. “It smells of you.”

  “Is that good?” he asked.

  “Mmm,” she said again, and he was smitten with guilt once more.

  He picked up the branch of candles and led the way to the sitting room. All the furniture was large in here—deliberately so. Large and soft and comfortable. This was a room in which elegance and posture did not matter. This was a place for slouching and risking irreparable damage to one’s spine. This was where he relaxed.

  Strangely enough, no one else was ever invited in here. None of his former mistresses had set foot inside here.

  She sat in a deep leather chair, curled her legs up under her, set her head back, and snuggled into the dressing gown. She gazed at him from beneath lowered lids as he poured the tea, though not in the way she usually did. This time it was a genuinely sleepy look. A look of contentment, or so it seemed.

  “Milk? Sugar?” he asked.

  “Both,” she said.

  He set down a cup and saucer on the table beside her and offered her the plate. She took a biscuit and nibbled it.

  “You make a lovely hostess, Constantine,” she said. “Virile. And generous. You have filled my cup to the brim. I will need a steady hand not to spill it.”

  He never saw the sense in half filling a cup. Cups were usually too small to start with.

  He sat facing her, a short distance away, a biscuit in one hand, his cup in the other. He slouched back in his chair and crossed one ankle over the other knee.

  A pretense of relaxation.

  “Tell me, then, Duchess,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  And suddenly a huge, dark, empty hole seemed to open up deep inside him. An enormous vulnerability.

  But it was the only way he could atone.

  HANNAH WAS IMPRESSED. Most men would surely have avoided the issue for as long as they could. And she
had been fast asleep when he got out of bed. She would probably have slept all night. But he had chosen to remind her that she had the right to ask him questions about himself and to expect answers.

  He was a man full of secrets, she suspected, and she doubted he ever gave up any of them willingly, even to those nearest and dearest to him. He was a private man.

  And who were his nearest and dearest? His cousins? The ones who had usurped what should surely have been rightfully his?

  Was he a lonely man? Suddenly she suspected that he was.

  He was also, it seemed, a man of honor. He had behaved badly with poor Barbara, and he knew it and was remorseful. Now he would atone in the only way he knew how. He would answer any and all of her questions.

  It would be cruel under the circumstances to ask them, to force him to give up the secrets of the life he guarded so carefully.

  He was not looking his dark, elegant, dangerous self at the moment. He was sitting quite inelegantly, in fact—as was she. He looked gorgeous.

  Something touched her heart—and was denied entrance.

  She finished eating her biscuit.

  “I might have known,” he said, “that you would respond with unpredictable cleverness to my offer to tell all.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “With silence,” he said.

  And she realized that when she had chosen Constantine Huxtable to be her first lover she had done so not just on the basis of his physical attractions, considerable though they were. She had also been drawn to the closed look of him, hinting at depths of character and meaning that might contain nothing but darkness but might just as well hide universes of light. She had been attracted by the mystery of him, though she had had no evidence that there was any mystery at all.

  She had known all this from the start, of course. She had told him before they became lovers that she would insist upon knowing everything there was to know about him. But she had not really understood what she was saying. She had still thought that primarily her interest in him was physical.