Page 26 of What the Lady Wants
To see that Bastian, Matthew Welby and poor Tom Wainfleet were in much the same predicament as he was very little comfort. It was ironic, he thought as he squired one shy and silent damsel, that of the four gentlemen presumed so eligible none truly was, since Bastian and Matthew presumably dreamed of a world where they might be dancing openly with each other,he would cheerfully consign this whole assembly to perdition for an hour alone with Isabella, and Tom Wainfleet was plainly suffering the torments of the damned, being forced to make some kind of stilted conversation with one young woman after another.
But they were all three of them better off than he was since nobody in their own party was genuinely trying to manipulate any of them into close contact with any particular young lady among so many. Whereas he soon began to suspect that amongst the crowd of damsels, his mother had one special candidate in mind as a bride for him: his distant cousin, Miss Peters. He found himself dancing with her twice, which occurred with no other lady, and which honour he had certainly not sought, and to set the seal on his suspicions, he discovered that she was, by some mysterious process entirely outside his control, his supper partner. When he realised this, he shot his dear mama a less than loving glance, which she met with a smile so implausibly innocent that it confirmed his belief that she had organised the whole thing.
He didn’t like any part of this. If he had been on the lookout for a wife in a rational, dispassionate sort of a way – but did any man with warm blood in his veins ever do this? – he might have considered Susannah Peters. She was attractive, he supposed, if one cared for slim, dark women, which he didn’t particularly. She was intelligent enough. She was a very distant sort of a cousin on his father’s side. She appeared to find him excessively amusing these days, though he wasn’t quite sure what he was saying that was so damn funny. But she wasn’t Isabella.
The assembly ended at last, and back they went to their carriage. Tom Wainfleet seemed to have been stunned into silence by his experiences, Leo didn’t feel much like talking himself, and Isabella was very quiet too. His mother carried the conversation, with a constant flow of comments about theparticulars of the evening in which Susannah Peters featured quite prominently. It was his own fault, he supposed; if he had not wanted her to matchmake, he should have thought to speak with her about it in advance. But then he’d have had to lie to her, to say he had no thoughts of marriage just yet, which he didn’t feel happy doing, and if he were honest feared he wouldn’t be able to pull off. She was his mother. She knew him too well, or ought to.
The journey seemed longer returning than arriving, and it was a weary quartet – with the exception of Mrs Winterton, who appeared to have the boundless energy of a child who’d eaten too many sugared plums – that climbed down from the carriage at Castle Irlam just after midnight and entered the building with their companions from the other coaches. They stood together in the entrance hallway for a moment, shivering a little on the chilly stone-flagged floor, wishing each other goodnight, and Leo looked at Isabella in silent enquiry. Despite the stresses of the evening, he wanted – needed – to be in her arms. For a second he thought she meant to refuse him with a silent plea of tiredness, and then she gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. She wasn’t smiling and her face was pale, but he chided himself that it was foolish to be apprehensive. She had agreed to receive him, that was the main thing. There remained the constant need for discretion, and she, unlike Susannah Peters and her chattering friends, was not free to make sheep’s eyes at him without fear of consequences.
The drowsy party climbed the stairs and parted to their separate chambers. Later, Leo would deeply regret his unspoken invitation, her acceptance and the events thus set in motion, but now he was conscious only of the familiar excitement and intense arousal that the anticipation of touching Isabella, kissing her, making love to her, always evoked in him. He undressed eagerly – he had no valet and needed none – and watched as theminute hand crept agonisingly slowly round his chamber clock until enough time had passed. Her maid would have left her long since and the Castle had fallen utterly quiet and still; at last, it was time.
28
NUMBER FIVE, NUMBER SEVEN AND NUMBER NINETEEN
Isabella had almost shaken her head when she had seen Leo’s lifted eyebrow, the significance of which was quite plain to her, though, she hoped, to nobody else. She wasn’t feeling particularly amorous that evening, and although there might be ladies who would be titillated by the idea of a man spending the evening paying public court to other women then coming in secret to her bed, she didn’t seem to be one of them. She wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t refused him when she easily could have done so. It wasn’t as though he expected her to give herself to him, on this or any other occasion; it had been a question, not a demand. He never demanded anything of her. She knew that if she declared to him that number nineteen, the next item on her list, consisted of him reading her a chapter of a novel by Mr Scott or Madame D’Arblay, he would ask her,Which chapter is your pleasure, ma’am?
And yet that wasn’t what she intended to require of him. Tired and out of humour as she was, the prospect of him coming to her chamber still ignited a treacherous little spark of desire inside her. She knew that when he lowered the latch and turnedto face her, she would find a way to tell him what she needed from him. She always did.
It was the best part of an hour later when he came to her. He leaned back against the panelled door and said, ‘I thought you might not wish to see me tonight. You must be tired, and it is very late. Are you sure…?’
‘I have no cause to be tired,’ she said, hearing the sharpness in her voice and instantly regretting it. ‘I did not dance so very much.’
‘I saw, and was so sorry,’ he replied, crossing the room and sitting down beside her on the bed. He took her hand and held it loosely in his. ‘You must know I would have danced every set with you if it had been possible. Of course it was not possible, but I would have hoped for two, and was bitterly disappointed when I could not take you in my arms again.’
‘You could have asked me,’ she said, hating the weakness in her voice.
‘I could,’ he conceded. ‘My mother disposed of my person this evening according to her wishes and those of her friends, not mine, but that is a poor excuse, I am aware. My indulgence of her led me into a disregard of you, which was the last thing I wanted. Can you forgive me?’
‘You don’t owe me anything,’ she said. ‘There is certainly nothing to forgive; the idea is absurd. No doubt it was best that you did not single me out for any particular attention in so public a place. It would have raised speculation which must be unwelcome to both of us.’
He did not seem to be satisfied with this. Some demon of perversity prodded her on to add, before he could say anything else, ‘On the contrary, I was glad to see you enjoying yourself.’ This was a flat lie and Isabella was aware that it was as she said it.
‘I wasn’t enjoying myself.’
‘You appeared to be.’ She could feel a quarrel brewing, like the rumble of a distant storm, and knew that it would be entirely of her making. All at once she could not bear it – how many more nights would they have together? And she was wasting one. She said with a little break in her voice, ‘I’m sorry. Let’s not pull caps. Make love to me, Bear, and then we will part, and sleep, and tomorrow I will not be so out of reason cross with all the world.’
‘I think you have some reason to be cross, with me if not with all the world. But you know I can deny you nothing. Is it to be number nineteen?’ Clearly he’d been keeping count.
‘It is.’
Perhaps it was unfortunate, what number nineteen was, she was later to think. There had been times in their past encounters when a sort of animalistic urgency had seized them both, and then the idea of him bending her over the bed and taking her from behind – at her command, always at her command – would have thrilled them both, left them breathless and sweaty and afterwards languorously sated. He pleasured her with his mouth and his fingers before he took her, with the intense concentration he always lavished on her, and she came; she came again when he held her tightly between his roughened hands and thrust into her with his own intense compulsion that always seemed to draw an equal response from her. Her body, at least, was satisfied. Their union was powerful, primal, but it left her shaken, a little tearful.
But tonight somehow this did not feel quite right; she could not see his face nor he hers, and it was too impersonal. Perhaps that was it: he could have been anybody, she could have been anybody, which after the events at the assembly was ill-timed. She wasn’t sure why it should matter, but it did.
Maybe it shook him too, she could not know, maybe it made him incautious, but as they lay entwined afterwards, bodies touching, minds lost in their separate unknowable thoughts, hesaid, ‘You didn’t like to see me tonight, dancing with Susannah, then taking her in to supper.’
‘I told you, I was happy to see you enjoying yourself. With Susannah.’
‘And I told you, I wasn’t. She’s a cousin of sorts, and even if she hadn’t been, I couldn’t have spurned her publicly. She’s less than nothing to me, but she doesn’t deserve that. The fault was my mother’s, not hers, and most of all mine for not finding a way to stop it.’
She said grudgingly, ‘I don’t actually know how you could have stopped it. I too have a mother, as I think you said to me once. It’s very hard to say no to them when they are determined on something. I know this all too well.’
He kissed the top of her head. ‘Thank you for understanding.’ But his voice still showed constraint, he plainly had more to say, and a moment later he said it. ‘It almost seemed to me, earlier and just now, that you were unhappy.’
She stiffened in instinctive rejection of the thought. ‘Why should I be unhappy?’
‘Perhaps you might think it in poor taste, that I avoided you all evening, if you thought I did, while all the while I knew, or hoped, that I would end up here, in your bed.’ His voice was low and full of emotion she did not want to be forced to identify.
