A Wicked Kind of Husband

by Mia Vincy

  “This issue of Lord and Lady Bolderwood,” she said. “We must discuss what happens next.”

  “What happens next is this: I deal with Lord and Lady B. You go back to Warwickshire. Everything goes back to normal.”

  Disappointment flooded her and she smiled on. “But Joshua—”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  “It is my concern.”

  She took a step toward him, and another. But an invisible wall between them stopped her from taking a third.

  “I must go out into society with everyone believing that my husband committed adultery with the wife of my former betrothed.”

  “So don’t go out into society. Go back to Warwickshire. Problem solved.”

  “That will not do,” she said. “We must stand united before society and discredit them in everyone’s eyes. With society and public opinion on our side, they may feel pressure to drop this.”

  “You believe me.”

  “Yes. I do. And a wife stands by her husband.”

  He regarded her for a long moment, then he was moving again, prowling around the small space, poking and prodding things for no apparent reason at all.

  “Others will too,” she went on. “Lord and Lady Hardbury, of course, as well as Lord and Lady Luxborough. My aunt and uncle Lord and Lady Morecambe, and even my grandparents. We can also count on the support of the Duke of Dammerton. Of course, for the legal aspects, you will need a lawyer.”

  “I have a dozen lawyers.”

  “They are commercial lawyers. I suggest Sir Gordon Bell, whom I trust implicitly, as he had a long career as solicitor to many members of the aristocracy and is not without influence. Although I propose that our first step is to confront Lord and Lady Bolderwood ourselves and put an end to this today.”

  He regarded her a moment. “You sound as if you’re planning a battle.”

  “They attacked my family.”

  “No, they attacked me.”

  “And you are my family.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Actually, it does.”

  He threw up his hands. “This has gotten completely out of control. Ours is a marriage in name only, remember.”

  “Last night—”

  “Changed nothing. In name only!”

  His roar was answered by the squawks of seagulls outside, and her own cries rose up inside her. Good heavens, what did this man do to her? He made her moods as wild as his own.

  “Precisely,” she snapped. “I now carry your name, which means my sisters do too and so your name affects my sisters’ future.”

  “Your bloody sisters.”

  “And if you don’t want my sisters to be your problem, then help me get them accepted by society and ultimately married, and the best way for you to do that is to agree to my plan.”

  He banged his forehead lightly against a map of London and then turned and lounged against the wall.

  “You’re talking sense again,” he said. “Can’t stand it when you talk sense.”

  As fast as her fury had come, it was gone, and she worked to keep herself from smiling. He had the most terrible effect on her equilibrium, and she would never understand why she found his beastly manner so charming.

  “So do as I say and stop being obstreperous,” she said.

  “Obstreperous,” he repeated, rolling the syllables around in his mouth. A playful half-smile brightened his face and his dark eyes fixed on hers. “But I like being obstreperous.”

  “And you’re very good at it too,” she managed to say, curiously breathy. “But perhaps, until this matter blows over, you could take a brief hiatus from insulting people and getting into fights and having affairs. I mean…That is…Oh no.”

  She pressed her fingertips to her traitorous lips and willed away the heat sliding up her cheeks. This was the trouble. She lost control of her tongue around him and expressed thoughts she didn’t even know she had. All the restraint she was raised to show, the self-control that was meant to distinguish the rational, refined upper classes from the masses—a single conversation with him and twenty years of training went out the window.

  And that look on his face: She knew that one. The playful, wicked one. The look that set her body clamoring for his touch.

  He pushed off the wall and sauntered toward her.

  She pressed a hand over her eyes, so she couldn’t see him approach, but she could feel his presence, all that energy shooting through her, coiling and pulsing deep within. He came so close that his legs stirred her skirts and the faint spicy scent of him teased her nostrils, and part of her was back in that bed again.

  “You do realize,” he drawled softly, “that when you cover your eyes, I can still see you.”

  “No you can’t.”

  He gently took her hand, his fingers warm and firm through her gloves, and she let him lower her arm. When he released her, she twisted her fingers into her skirts so she would not loop her arms around his neck. How silly her body was, wanting a baby so badly it overlooked the facts that she did not like him and he did not want her.

  “Tell me true, now, Mrs. DeWitt. Are you jealous?”

  Heaven help her, she was. How smug she had been, before, when he was a stranger and she cared nothing for him at all. And he was teasing her again, the fiend, but now she enjoyed it, because now she knew that he was kind under his brash facade, and this teasing was just for her, and that made her feel special.

  “For appearance’s sake, I mean,” she said.

  “So for appearance’s sake, you would have me be a monk.”

  “No need to be a monk.” Her heart performed a little quadrille and she had to swallow before she could speak again. “After all, we are married, and you know your way to my bed.”

  Bloody hell. He had walked right into that one, hadn’t he? No longer could he use bedsport to frighten her away. It seemed she was no longer wary of the marriage bed.

  And for the worst possible reason. It was not him that she wanted.

  “I will do my duty, as your wife,” she added, which words had the merciful effect of a bucket of ice water on his groin. Joshua backed away from her. Kept going until his back hit a wall.

  “And?” he said.

  A mistake to ask the question when he already knew the answer.

  Her unspoken words filled the space between them, expanding like a giant balloon, taking up all the air in the room so there was none left to breathe. He needed her not to say those words. He understood what she wanted; she had given it away last night. He had to burst that balloon, burst it before she let it carry them both away.

  Too late.

  “And we might have children,” she finished.

  Her voice was so soft he almost didn’t hear her, so loud he wanted to tell her not to yell.

  “I can imagine them now, our children,” she added, dreamily. “Running through Sunne Park, bright and energetic. Laughing. They’ll have dark hair, I suppose, and be bright and mischievous. Little boys sliding down the bannister. Little girls running through the rose garden. Or the other way around. I don’t mind.” She laughed shortly, an unnaturally high-pitched sound. “If you saw Sunne Park, you’d know that it’s a marvelous place to be a child.”

  She didn’t know what she was asking. He could tell her—what? That she stood at the start of a path into a wood. There were terrible things in that wood: wolves and monsters and beloved, bright-eyed children. She would skip down the path anyway, picking flowers and singing. Stay out of the wood, he wanted to say. It looks nice, but it isn’t. It’s full of things that will destroy you, like wolves and monsters and beloved, bright-eyed children. But he could scream and yell and she would never listen.

  Naive, optimistic fool that she was. They shared a kiss and a secret and she thought it changed things. Last night changed nothing. So he understood her better now, perceived the edge of worry underlying her smiles, saw that her pigheadedness was actually a breathtakingly fierce protectiveness, that she was trying s
o hard to be good when part of her longed to misbehave. Even knowing that, in the end, changed nothing.

  She was a disruption, and this Bolderwood nonsense was a disruption, but they were small disruptions, and once he got back to his busy life in Birmingham, everything would go on as peacefully as it had before.

  “Why don’t you get a cat?” he said.

  “You already gave me a cat.”

  “Then get a hobby. Something to keep you occupied.”

  “I run the estate and household at Sunne Park.”

  Sunne Park was, reportedly, a marvelous place to be a child. She would go back to that marvelous place and lavish all her affection on a child and never give him a second thought. And he would go back to his life in Birmingham, where he had no need of her at all, because there he had his work, which was all he had had for years now, and all he ever needed.

  “Then you have no time for children too,” he pointed out.

  “Why are you so averse to having children?”

  “Because they’re troublesome.”

  “Then you needn’t trouble yourself with them.”

  Her tone was sharper now. She was braver with him than she had been, or maybe she simply cared less, showing more of the true self that lay behind her polite, restrained facade.

  “I will need your assistance with conception,” she said swiftly, in a flat, tight voice. “The rest I can manage on my own. Our separate lives can continue as they were and your life need not change. You needn’t even learn their names if that’s too much trouble for you.”

  “Their names? So I’m to be your stud, am I? Your stallion.”

  “You can be involved if you want. Or not, as you want. But you…I don’t know what you want.”

  I want to be wanted. I want to know I’ll never again lose what I love. I want Samuel back, and I could have a hundred thousand children and that will never happen.

  “I want everything to go back to normal,” he said.

  He turned and caught his own ghostly reflection in the window. He looked past it to the dock, to the three children. The girl had dark hair and rosy cheeks. The coloring they might expect if they had a daughter.

  Cassandra joined him at the window. He studied her reflection in the glass; how beautiful she was, how warm her skin, how soft her body. It would be so easy, to pull her into his arms, kiss her breathless, touch his tongue to every inch of her, give her everything she wanted and more.

  “What are their names?” she said.

  “The girl is Sarah.” His voice was hoarse so he cleared his throat to continue. “Miss Sampson says she is a mathematics prodigy. The tall boy is John and he writes perfect sentences. The red-headed boy is Martin. He wants to build a machine that can fly.”

  “You would be a good father,” she said.

  He didn’t want to hurt her, but she was hurting him, and she didn’t even know it. She assumed he had no children with Rachel and he never corrected her. If any of the London staff knew, they would never think to mention it, and Newell seemed harmless but he had the discretion of a spy. Joshua could tell her, but then she would become sympathetic and annoying and it wouldn’t change a thing. And the longer he didn’t tell her, the more impossible it was, and anyway, he needed to hold on to the memory. If he brought his memory out into the light, it would crumble into dust and he would lose that too.

  “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “You care about those children.”

  “They’re potential employees. I care about all my employees. A happy employee is a productive employee.”

  “If you say so.”

  It was hopeless. She yearned and she would go on yearning, this brave, honorable, foolish woman who had sacrificed so much for others and asked only this one thing in return. And when she yearned, he yearned too, and it made him want to smash the glass with his fist.

  “I am perfectly content with my life the way it is,” he said.

  “I see.”

  Then, watching her, he saw her perform her trick: She picked up her yearning and loneliness and disappointment and hope, and she packed them away, tied them up tight inside her, and sealed it all with an amiable smile.

  He recognized the trick in her. He could see how well she did it.

  Perhaps because he did it so well himself.

  “And Lord and Lady Bolderwood?” she said. “Shall we call on them now?”

  “It’s a stupid idea.”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  She smiled brightly, too brightly. “We’d better get you dressed,” she said. “Let me help you with your cravat.”

  Joshua wasn’t sure how it happened, but he found himself half-sitting on the desk, with Cassandra standing between his legs, coming at him with the length of fine muslin in those competent hands.

  “How do you even know how to tie a cravat?” he asked.

  “I know all sorts of things.”

  Her moss-green daywear covered her as fully as her nightwear did, with fabric to her throat and her wrists. But she had a very cunning dressmaker, for the black stripes on her front drew his eyes to the swell of her bosom, and her pelisse seemed to be fastened by a single cord under her bust, which ended in two fat, tempting tassels that teased him with the thought that it needed only one tug for the whole lot to fall away.

  His hands found the edge of the desk and he curled his fingers around it.

  “This is a bad idea,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Her arms wide, she pushed the midpoint of the neckcloth against his throat, and then encircled his neck to cross the ends behind him and then drape them back over his front. She had to lean close to do it, with her stripes and her tassels and her scent and her hair, and she really didn’t see why this was a bad idea?

  “You might use the cravat to throttle me,” he said.

  “Not inconceivable.” She crossed the cloth again at his throat, and her expression lightened. “I confess that half the time I cannot decide whether to kiss you or throttle you.”

  “What about the other half the time?”

  “The other half I only want to throttle you.”

  His mouth started to form some stupid quip about kissing being better than throttling, but he stopped himself in time, and she went back to wrapping the cloth around his neck. Back and forth, swaying in, swaying out, brisk and competent, as if she had no idea. She called him wicked, but she was pure evil.

  Then, sweet mercy, she was done with the layering, was tying the final knot, and still seemed unaware of her effect on him.

  One would think he had no effect on her at all.

  She pressed a warm hand to his cheek. “You shaved your scruff,” she half-whispered.

  “Damn stuff itches.”

  He could turn his head and plant a kiss on her palm. He could lean in and plant a kiss on her lips. She would let him, of course. She wanted a baby. She wanted to be dutiful. She gave no sign she wanted him. It shouldn’t matter.

  Yet perhaps she would genuinely enjoy it, if he kissed her now, without brandy. What if he nipped her earlobe? Would that make her moan, or squeal, or gasp? And what if he kissed her breasts? Or buried his face between her thighs?

  “You do realize,” he said slowly, “that we are in my office, in my warehouse, with my employees all around and docks crawling with sailors outside?”

  As if to back him up, there came the pounding of little footsteps down the corridor. Small white fingers hooked around the doorframe, and then all of Martin swung around the corner and careened into the room.

  “Mr. DeWitt! Mr. DeWitt!” Martin cried, then skidded to a halt at the sight of them, eyes wide. A tuft of red hair sat up at the crown of his head. “Are you two kissing?”

  Cassandra leaped away, seized her bonnet, and used the window as a mirror to tie it. Joshua forced his tormented body upright, scooped up his coat, and thrust his arms into the sleeves.

  “What is it, Martin? We’re about to h
ead out.”

  “I was watching the seagulls, and they always take off into the wind. I am sure that holds a lesson in how to fly!”

  “Well done, lad.” He grabbed his hat off the globe, twirled it around one finger. Cassandra was pulling on her gloves, her eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them. “You can tell me about it next time. Now, make sure you’ve done all your work for Miss Sampson.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The boy darted off again. Joshua headed after him. He was already through the doorway when he remembered that he should let her go first, but if he started turning all polite, then she’d think she was reforming him, and the woman already had enough dangerous ideas.

  Chapter 12

  “This is the stupidest idea since Napoleon visited Russia in winter,” Joshua grumbled as Cassandra joined him on the footpath outside Lord Bolderwood’s house. She had visited here before, years ago, when the world thought this house might one day be hers.

  She smoothed her skirts, straightened her bonnet, and packed up the last of her unruly emotions. They had made the carriage ride to Mayfair in silence, Joshua with his hat tipped over his eyes, while Cassandra gazed out the window and listed a thousand random things to quell all memory of what had passed.

  “You should have helped me down from the carriage,” she said, taking a shamefully petty pleasure in nagging.

  He twisted around to frown at the carriage, and then at her. “You cannot manage by yourself?”

  “The groom assisted me, but it should have been you.”

  “What for? Your legs seem to work properly.”

  “I’d like to see you jumping up and down from carriages while dressed in skirts and stays.”

  He blinked at her. “Mrs. DeWitt! Did you refer to your underwear in public? I am shocked!”

  “You are nothing of the sort.”

  Despite everything, she could not help but be amused, her mood shifting with her enjoyment of his playful theatrics. She supposed he was enjoying himself too, for he extended his elbow in an exaggeratedly gallant gesture.

  “Stop gossiping about your corset,” he said. “Let’s go give ’em a jolly good click in the muns.”