Page 30 of The Marquis, the Minx, and the Mistletoe
"They weren't?" gasped his wife in mock surprise, pressing her hands to her cheeks. "But Alex, surely you know this was a marriage born of pity. If I had known there was no permanent damage done ..."
"Oh, I know," he confirmed, catching her chin and dropping a firm kiss on her lips to silence her as the others laughed, "and it's too late for you to take it back, I'm afraid."
"Suffice to say," Gideon put in, "that Reggie knows exactly none of those stories."
"He will," Sheldon said with certainty. "Probably sooner than you want him to, the way he chats to anyone who wanders near enough. I imagine a few hours in the township would give him a full ancestry, complete with salacious detail."
"Oh, Gideon, the township," Rose sighed, dropping her head back to look up at her husband. "We promised to go and assist with setting up the parish’s winter market tomorrow. I had entirely forgotten."
"I'm going as well," Heloise said. "We should share the carriage and I shall meet you and assist after my business at the clinic. Alex, you ought to come too, or you know Mother will take note of your absence."
"I like the parish market," Glory said before her husband could open his mouth to argue. "Perhaps in helping set up, we will get an opportunity to buy anything particularly good before the township as a whole gets the chance."
"It is a Christmas tradition," Lady Somers said to Tia, who had been watching with a faint smile and alert interest as the family had bantered amongst themselves. "You are welcome to come with us, but I assure you it will be more worthwhile in a day or so, when the market is open and functioning."
"I think I will stay behind," she said sweetly. "It will perhaps give me a chance to familiarize myself with the estate if I am to participate in the hunt for stars as an equal competitor."
She did not, Sheldon noted, volunteer that she had already planned to tour the manor with himself as her guide.
The absence of the Somers clan would certainly make such a prospect far more interesting, at least as far as he was concerned. His mind was already abuzz with all the places he might take her, and the private little corners in which he might convince her to let him taste her again.
"Bywater!" Alex repeated, louder than before, startling Sheldon from his reverie. "Are you coming tomorrow or not?"
"Oh. No, I think not," he answered, clearing his throat gruffly. "I've important matters to attend tomorrow."
None of the Somers family seemed to find this answer amiss, and resumed their recollections and sniping in the glow of the firelight.
It was only Tia who had reacted to this statement with full understanding, and in the dark, he met her eyes across the room, and held her gaze for as long as he could stand, before she returned to the safe haven of her cup of cider, a secret smile playing on her cranberry-red lips.
Chapter 15
Tia awoke to the smell of crisp bacon and cinnamon-dusted oats being wheeled into her room on a dining cart. She did not stir, hoping instead that the food would be left to enjoy at her leisure and the fire re-stoked so that she might take her time rising on this frosty December morning. The smell of cinnamon in the tea made her give a dreamy smile, anticipating the warmth and taste of it on her tongue.
The wind had begun to howl some hours ago. Tia noted with appreciation that whomever had built this place, some generations ago, must have taken great care in their craftsmanship. The beams and bricks of this room allowed no recess for its fixtures to go rattling about, no matter how surly and persistent the weather without became.
In fact, if it weren't for the sounds of the trees creaking and the agitated horses voicing their discontent from below her window, Tia might have remained oblivious to the wind, waking only once the sun created its prisms through the crystals of ice that crawled over the windows in this room, showering her bedspread with slats of pink and blue and yellow and green.
She had slept very, very soundly. She attributed the depth of her slumber primarily to the quantity of cider she'd consumed last night. She had indulged deeply, the core of warmth spreading through her middle as she drank, each sip bringing her a little closer to imagining she was a member of the Somers family. It was hard to avoid wishing for such a thing as she watched them interact by firelight. What must it be like to belong to a family like this one? What must it be like to have a marriage like each of the Somers siblings had managed to create?
Despite all the years she had spent next to Glory, who had always been rightfully hailed as the most beautiful of Mrs. Arlington's pupils, last night was the first time she had ever envied her. Watching her rib and laugh with her husband, snuggled into his lap, exchanging barbs and kisses as easily as breathing had been akin to witnessing a fairy tale come to life for Tia.
Is that what she had fled on the morning of her would-be wedding? Is that what she had forsaken in her fear?
She rolled her face into the downy embrace of her pillow, attempting to conjure up the features of the man she had been set to wed. She willed into being an image of herself, curled into the lap of a husband, warm and safe and cherished, and she realized that she could not remember the baron's face at all. She could not even recall the color of his eyes.
As though it were an entity all its own, her mind filled in the blankness of the man in this tableau with one whose features she knew all too well, taunting her with how badly she wanted him. She knew she was being unreasonable, imagining such intimacy with a certain marquis.
Yes, he seemed all too willing to hold her in any way she liked, but that was all. There was more to what she had witnessed between those couples last night than the spark of physical passion, though that spark was indeed delicious and all-consuming.
Inevitable, he had said. And secretly, she agreed.
If she hadn't drifted so immediately and heavily into slumber last night, she had no doubt that she would have wandered out into the halls again, hoping to find him in that little reading nook, his features cast into rugged shadow by the night as he waited for her. If she was ruined already, then what harm could indulging in such a thing really do? Though, one had to imagine that when a man of a certain standing entered into such an illicit understanding with a lady, the lady in question was rather more experienced and pleasing to tryst with than Tia herself could claim to be.
In truth, she was woefully unprepared for the marital bed, and her mother had balked at giving her any information whatsoever, even on the night before her imminent nuptials. Perhaps that, too, was why she had run.
If Nana were still alive, she could have asked her anything at all. Why hadn't she, before it was too late? Why had she assumed that Nana would always be in her cottage, with warm tea and fresh bread on the table, a smile on her face, and an ear for Tia's worries, forever and ever?
Women like Nana were meant to be invincible, weren't they? Resilient. Not susceptible to such common dangers as mortality, and certainly not in the path of such mundane evils as pneumonia.
