by Liz Carlyle
He had thought he would feel impatient; that he would spill himself like some virgin schoolboy up to the hilt in his first woman. But it was worse than that. He could not rush. He felt…right. Perfect. And perfectly unhurried—as if he were slowly drowning in her beauty. Camille’s somnolent eyes watched him as he thrust, luring him onto the shoals like a silent siren. He prayed for the strength to survive it—this, her, all of it. Already she was driving him mad. Breaking his heart—and he’d scarcely known he had one.
Camille’s eyes were lazy with spent passion. Her face was smooth now, her mouth relaxed. Her body called to him—drew him like the pull of the ocean—as if she meant to coax the essence of life from his loins. His arms set wide above her shoulders, he bent his head to kiss her. Her cheeks, her eyebrows; he let his lips move over her face. Suddenly, he sensed a shift in her. Camille’s breath came faster. Her knees drew up, one foot sliding sinuously along his inner calf. Her hips arched to his, and her hands left his back to roam restlessly over his buttocks.
“Mon Dieu,” she whispered. “Ahh—”
Just as they had done with the bedcovers, her fingers dug into the muscle of his hips as he rode her. She cried out again beneath him, a soft, sweet sound of triumph. They drove one another over the edge, tumbling and falling into the brilliant abyss as one. And fleetingly, he felt at peace.
When he came back to his conscious self, his arms were shaking. “There,” he said, touching his forehead to hers. “There, Camille. I have done it.”
Her serious brown eyes searched his face. “What, chéri?” she whispered. “What have you done?”
“I have given you what you needed,” he rasped. “And I hope I have given you our child. If not, well, we must simply try again. And again. Until I get it right.”
A faint, drowsy smile played at her lips, but she said no more. He rolled onto his side and drew her to him, her back against his chest. He felt joyous, yet oddly shaken, as if something he had known with a certainty seemed suddenly unfathomable. His own mind, perhaps. Or his heart.
Rothewell curled his body protectively about hers and closed his eyes. When Camille shivered in his embrace, he reached down and drew the counterpane up to cover them. They lay together, perhaps even dozed, for a time. Each moment with her in his arms felt precious, but the candle she’d lit was much shorter now, and daylight was not far away. The house would be stirring.
Rothewell allowed himself to roll up onto his elbow, just for the pleasure of looking down at her. Her beauty was breathtaking. And it would be eternal, he thought. It had been a long time since he had looked at a woman so. Perhaps he never had? A strand of her hair had slipped from behind her ear, dark as ink against the perfection of her cheek. Gently, he tucked it back again.
She turned her head slightly on the pillow, like a flower turning to the sun, and gave a lethargic umm of pleasure.
She was happy, he realized, at least in this moment. It was an amazing if simple thing to muse upon. He doubted if he had ever made any woman happy. Merely satisfied, which was not the same thing, he now realized. Oh, the emotion would not last; happiness was ever fleeting. But at least for now—yes, in this moment—he did not feel as if he had ruined her life. Perhaps he could avoid doing so. He did not want her to love him, or grow attached to him. Did he? Surely he was not so selfish. Perhaps, if he could avoid acting the cad, she would someday have fond memories of their time together.
On that thought, Rothewell set his lips to the turn of her shoulder, tucked the bedcovers up higher, then rolled onto his back. He stared up at the frieze of acanthus leaves which ran around his ceiling. He had been wrong to leave her yesterday, and he was not fool enough to think himself forgiven. He had distracted her with pleasure, no more.
The truth was, Camille had a right to ask questions. He could refuse most of them, yes—with a modicum of diplomacy. Instead, he had snapped at her. Diplomacy was not his strong suit. In Barbados, he needed only to please Xanthia, who always overlooked his harshness and never punished him with the past. Well, save for once. The time he had quarreled so openly with Martinique over marrying her husband. Then—in private—Xanthia had thrown his cruel words in his face like a vial of boiling acid.
Rothewell thanked God his niece was gone and out of his hands—for her sake. He had done the girl no good whatsoever, and a great deal of harm. And oftentimes, he had known it even as he had done it. He had been a bastard, unable to stop himself—much as he had been with Camille yesterday.
If he could not look past his own wounds in order to care for a child—a child Luke had loved and entrusted to his care—what manner of ill did that bode for his new wife?
He stirred, a little restless, and propped one arm behind his head. It was odd, but in the past few months, thinking of Martinique no longer meant thinking of her mother in the same breath. It did not mean an instant resurrection of that memory of Annemarie wrapped in his brother’s bedsheets the morning after her wedding, looking past him with regret in her eyes. Or the vision of Annemarie wrapped in the shroud in which they had carried her, dead, from the cane fields.
He shifted restlessly on the bed. Annemarie was his past. This woman—this vibrant, beautiful woman who perhaps resembled Annemarie but was in reality nothing like her—was his future, so far as he had one. They were going to make a child together. A child who would, he hoped, be a better, happier person on this earth than he had ever been. Perhaps that’s what all this was about. Perhaps he was trying to expiate his sins.
Just then, there was a faint scratching at the connecting door. Rothewell slipped from the covers and opened it a crack. A shadowy form streaked past his ankles and bounded onto the bed. A faint sense of relief struck him, but he crushed it.
“Aye, you’d best enjoy it,” he whispered to the dog. “It’s back to Tweedale at cockcrow, old boy.”
The dog just snorted, and flopped down across Camille’s ankles. Rothewell slid back into bed and tucked himself close to her. But just as he settled into the perfect position, his stomach growled loudly. Camille, whom he had believed asleep, turned to look at him solemnly.
“Sounds like I swallowed a bad-tempered alley cat, doesn’t it?” he said, rolling toward her. He nibbled lightly at her neck.
“Oui, and you are talking to the dog, too,” she said. “Chin-Chin is not leaving, you know.”
“You think not, eh?” he answered. “Don’t get attached to him.”
When Camille spoke again, her tone was grave. “When did you last have a proper meal, s’il vous plaît?”
He stroked one hand down the length of her arm, considered it. “I cannot perfectly recall,” he admitted.
For a long, expectant moment, she said nothing. Then she sighed, and said, “I wish to ask you something.”
Rothewell bit back his instinctive refusal. Perhaps he was getting old. “Very well.”
“I shall ask just this once.” She was still lying on her side, staring into the banked coals of the hearth. She did not crane her head back to look at him again—deliberately, he sensed. “If you cannot—or will not—answer, I shan’t nag,” she went on. “Indeed, I shan’t even ask again.”
“I find brevity an admirable quality in a wife,” he said.
He watched over her shoulder as she toyed with a bit of fringe on the counterpane, wrapping it round and round her finger, then releasing it. For a moment, he thought she had changed her mind. When she did speak, it was abrupt. “You are sick, n’est-ce pas?”
When he did not respond, Camille turned her head on the pillow to look at him, her eyes wide and searching.
For an instant, he held her gaze. Then, unable to bear it, he looked away.
She exhaled slowly. “How bad?”
Rothewell looked at the ceiling and struggled for an answer. “I’ve lived a hard life, Camille,” he finally said. “And it hasn’t killed me yet.”
His words hung in the air for a long moment. “You are sick,” she said again. This time it was not a question.
Rothewell threw back the covers and rose from the bed, the dog following him. There was nothing more to be said. “It will be daylight soon, Camille,” he answered. “I will leave you to your rest.”
He gathered his clothes from the floor in silence and made his way through the gloom to the door. But she was hurt, he knew. Already, damn it, he was doing what he had vowed not to do. And for the first time since that fateful day in Harley Street, he suddenly wanted to cry. To mourn the missed opportunities and rage at the cruelties of fate. He wanted to weep for the young man he had once been, and for the lovely young woman who deserved something so much better.
She sat up, and spoke again as his hand touched the knob. “Rothewell,” she said quietly, “you will remember what I said?”
He turned and studied her through the candlelight. “About what, Camille?”
“About asking again.” Her voice dropped to a tremulous whisper. “I shan’t, I tell you. I shan’t. I will not beg you—not for anything. Ever. Not even for this—what we do in bed together—no matter how much pleasure you give me. Do you understand?”
And as he stood there naked, his hand on the door, his heart half-breaking, he understood. She was forcing him to make a choice—the choice, perhaps, between true intimacy and raw pleasure. But he wasn’t sure he had ever known true intimacy—not even with Luke or with Xanthia—and his decision was already made. He would not burden her. He would not cast a shadow over her hope, when her hope was to conceive their child.
Camille was still staring at him, her eyes wide in the gloom. Stiffly, he nodded and drew open the door.
Chapter Ten
In which Chin-Chin goes to The City
The following days in Berkeley Square took on a strange, almost otherworldly rhythm. Camille lived them mechanically, torn and a little heartsick.
To the bewilderment of his staff, Rothewell began to spend a greater part of each day at home, where he would shut himself up in his study with his brandy, his books, and the little spaniel, a creature he nonetheless disavowed at every turn. Occasionally, however, Camille would pass the closed door and hear Rothewell talking, and she knew, strangely, that it was the dog to whom he spoke. She began to feel a little twinge of envy.
At times Rothewell also looked decidedly unwell, but if he suffered violent spells of illness—which Camille suspected he did—then he hid it from her. Neither of them mentioned her parting words on the night of their argument; it was as if a silent truce had been drawn between them.
In hindsight, Camille realized she had been foolish to interfere. From the very first, Rothewell had asked nothing of her, save that she be faithful, and if possible, amiable. He had made it plain that his life would never really include her.
“You would be well advised not to depend upon me,” he had said. “You must build a life for yourself.” And she had agreed to that. Indeed, it was what she had wanted. So why did his words cut her so deeply now?
As was his habit, Rothewell scarcely slept, but he came to Camille’s bed most nights, often in the hours just before dawn, when he returned home from an evening spent doing God only knew what. She no longer questioned him about it, and otherwise saw little of him. Camille tried to tell herself it scarcely mattered. Despite the lovemaking and the occasional shared meal, there was a carefully cultivated distance between them. And though it hurt, Camille did not attempt to eliminate that distance. Her husband had put it there quite deliberately—and, after all, she tried to convince herself, intimacy was not what she required. In fact, it was what she had sworn to avoid.
But her efforts to save her heart, she feared, were in vain, and slowly, Camille was beginning to face a second bleak truth. His broad shoulders and overt masculinity aside, her husband was ill. Even in the short weeks she had known him, his face had thinned.
And then there were the other signs, the signs Camille knew too well from her mother’s long illness. The restlessness. The hollow eyes. The inappetence and bad temper. Rothewell was drinking—and perhaps grieving—himself to death.
She told herself she would not do it. She would not dance attendance on another person who was bent on slowly killing themselves. And yet, she could not leave him—because, she told herself—she wanted a child. But the reality was becoming far more complicated than that.
Camille tried not to think about it. Tried not to think of him. Of his whispered words and heated touch. Of how she lay restless and eager in her bed each night, awaiting the moment when he would come to her. And so the days passed quietly and all too slowly in Rothewell’s bland, empty house. It was a lonely existence, but Camille was accustomed to solitude.
The solitude was briefly severed one afternoon when Rothewell escorted Camille into the City to meet her grandfather’s solicitors, so that she might give them the evidence of her marriage. It was a meeting she had dreaded since discovering her grandfather’s letter hidden amongst her mother’s things. But the visit had been easier with Rothewell’s stern, forbidding presence at her side.
To his credit, Rothewell took pains to give every impression theirs was a marriage of respect, if nothing more. He allowed her to speak for herself, whilst he remained standing in the background, leaning on his gold-knobbed walking stick and staring out the window.
When at last the senior solicitor finished his business, his brow was furrowed. “Well, thank you for coming in, Lady Rothewell,” he said. “Our felicitations on your marriage. My lord, we will arrange a draw of fifty thousand on the late earl’s estate when the banks open tomorrow.”
Rothewell turned from the window. “For the dowry, do you mean?” He lifted a forestalling hand. “I have no need of it. You may hold it in trust for my wife, or if she prefers, for any children of the marriage.”
Camille managed not to gape. “We shall discuss it,” she said swiftly, “and let you know.”
The solicitor’s look of confusion deepened. “Then we shall await your decision.” He rose as if to show them out, then hesitated. “You understand, do you not, that the balance of your grandfather’s estate remains in trust pending—we hope—the birth of your first child?”
“We understand,” said Camille, rising to her feet.
Still the man hesitated. “I must confess, my lady, to a deep curiosity,” he said. “Why did your mother not answer this letter twenty years ago, when it was still possible you might have been reconciled with your grandfather?”
The question stung. Remembering Lord Nash’s advice, Camille stood and looked down her nose at him. “What need had I of a reconciliation, monsieur?” she asked. “One cannot reconcile with a man one has never met.”
The solicitor was immediately flustered. “I beg your pardon,” he answered. “What I meant to say was…well, why did…” He was clearly searching for a tactful phrase.
“Why did my mother hide his letter from me?” Camille supplied. “Because, I daresay, there was one thing she feared more than poverty. She feared dying alone. A human frailty, n’est-ce pas?”
“I see,” said the solicitor somberly. “Perhaps you are right.”
Camille managed a distant smile. “My grandfather would never have taken her back,” she said. “Maman knew that. Why would she give her only child a reason—and the means—to abandon her?”
The solicitor did not argue but instead merely thanked her again for coming.
Rothewell came away from the window, offered his arm, and saw her safely back down the stairs. Together, they left the solicitors bowing obsequiously in their wake, and for the first time, Camille felt the full import of being an earl’s granddaughter and a baron’s wife.
Rothewell, however, looked preoccupied as he helped her into his coach. He followed her in, and Chin-Chin immediately leapt into his lap. The dog had insisted upon following them from the house, whining until Rothewell simply picked him up and took him along.
“You did not need to do that, Rothewell,” said Camille as the carriage rocked into motion.
“What, the
money?” he said, scratching the dog’s ear. He fished in his coat pocket, and extracted something, which he fed the dog.
“Oui, because already you paid Valigny half, so by rights, half of it should be—”
Rothewell cut her off. “I did as I pleased, Camille,” he interjected. “I usually do, you’ll recall.”
Camille hesitated, and he pinned her with a pointed stare. “As you wish,” she answered. “And stop feeding the dog, s’il vous plaît. You are making him fat.”
After a few moments had passed, he spoke again. “What, precisely, did that old letter say, Camille?” he asked, his long fingers absently stroking the dog’s silky fur.
Camille looked at him, surprised he cared. “It was just the ramblings of a bitter man.”
“This is the letter you never showed Valigny?”
“I dared not,” she said quietly. “I learnt young that one must never fully trust Valigny. Why? Do you wish to see it?”
Rothewell looked out the window. “I rather think I should like to,” he murmured.
“Bien sûr, I shall find it.”
She watched the shadows move and shift across his stern profile as they turned into Cheapside. A quiet fell over the carriage, broken only by the rhythmic clop-clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the rumble of the carriage wheels as they lumbered back toward St. Paul’s. His hand never stilled, rhythmically stroking the dog. It was as if he sought solace from the creature, solace, perhaps, which he should have received from his wife. Fleetingly, she closed her eyes and wondered if she was an utter failure.
After a time, he spoke again, still without looking at her. “I am sorry, Camille, that Valigny is your father,” he said softly.
“As am I,” she answered. “Maman—she loved me, in her way. That I never doubted. But Valigny? Non. Never. I was but an annoyance to him.”
Some inscrutable emotion sketched across his face. “You deserve something better, Camille. Something better than”—here, he lifted his hand in a vague, dismissive gesture—“any of this.”
It was her turn to stare blindly through the window. “Perhaps I do not,” she said quietly. “I am just the bastard child of a selfish man. The world does not look kindly upon such as I.”
