Page 52 of Tamed By a Passionate Lady
Adaline.
An image of his wife lurched into his mind so vividly that he gasped. It was almost like a waking dream. Almost as if she were in the room, standing right in front of him. Her tall, proud figure, her swan-like neck, her glossy black hair, and velvet brown eyes.
He loved her. He truly loved her.
It was true. His heart started to race, just thinking about her. She was everything that he had ever wanted in a woman. He could never love another. How could he be feeling the way that he did about her now, if that love wasn’t real?
And who had he been, that he could have treated her in such a way?
His face burning with shame, he wheeled himself to the drinks cabinet, pouring himself another whiskey. He had already had quite enough, but this was an unusual occasion. He was still in shock, and needed something to calm him down before he faced his wife and the others in the dining room.
He sipped the drink reflectively, feeling the anger slowly drain out of him. He shouldn’t have reacted the way that he did towards Reuben. He simply had no idea if his friend was embellishing the truth or not, but it had angered him to hear him say those things about Adaline. For him to say that he had not behaved like a gentleman towards his obviously loving wife.
He took a deep breath. Perhaps Reuben was right. It was himself, that he should be angry at. The man that he had been. A man who had never recovered from the loss of a great love, holing himself up in the country, then marrying a woman he did not love simply out of a vague sense of duty and convenience. A man who had played with a fine woman’s life, as he would with a toy.
He simply did not recognise that man. He did not know, who that man was. And he was utterly ashamed of himself, for Adaline’s sake, as well as his own.
How had it all gone so wrong?
He gripped the handles of the wheelchair, frowning deeply. He had no memory of the past five years at all, and only sketchy memories of the year prior to that. The time he had fallen in love with Lydia Hayward was lost to him, but he assumed it must have been in that year, when his father had died, and he had made the decision to sell his inheritance and come to Lancashire.
The last thing that he truly remembered about his life was in Liverpool. Going to the Athenaeum, going to work at the family’s offices on the docks. He had been filled with a sense of purpose. He had enjoyed his life in the city, and had no desire to be anywhere else, or do anything else. But obviously, things had changed drastically as soon as he had met the woman in the portrait.
He gazed at it, lying on the floor. What had happened between them? What had gone wrong? He simply had no idea.
Had they quarrelled, and he had lost her? Had her family forbidden the match? Or had she never loved him, or fallen out of love with him, deciding to move on with her life? Reuben had not told him what had happened between them.
It was a great, gaping mystery, like a hole in the centre of his life that he had no hope of ever filling.
He drained the last of the whiskey, putting the glass back on the cabinet. Just as he did so, the dinner gong sounded. It was time to face everybody.
A part of him didn’t want to do it. A part of him wanted to retreat, to nurse this new knowledge, away from everyone. To try to remember what had happened, where it had all gone so wrong. How he had become the man that he had, a man that he did not like the sound of at all. That perhaps if he did that, he might be able to repair it now.
But then, he took a deep breath. He might not remember the man he had been in the past, but he knew the man who he was now. A man who was in love with his wife. A man who wanted to have a full and satisfying relationship with her. And at the end of the day, that was all that mattered.
The James Townshend of old was lost to him, and by the sounds of it, it was a blessing that he did not remember the man who he had turned into previously. He did not think that he would be very proud of that man. He didn’t think that he would like him at all, if he met him.
He took another deep, ragged breath, wheeling himself to the door. It was dinner time, and his wife would be waiting for him. And he had no desire to let her down.
Chapter 19
James took a deep breath as Mrs. Bolt wheeled him down the long hallway, towards the bedchamber. He had been changed for bed, and was wearing his nightshirt, so that he would not have to change in front of Adaline.
He had instinctively done this ever since he had requested that he join her again in the marital chamber. He had known that he had to take things slowly with her; he had not wanted to alarm her. At the time, he had thought that she was merely shy because of his accident. But now, he knew the situation was far more complex than he had ever imagined.
His thoughts drifted back to the dinner, after Reuben’s revelations about who he had been, and who the lady in the portrait was. What that lady had meant to him, and how she had affected his whole life. A lady who was merely oil strokes on a canvas, a pretty picture. He had no memory of the flesh and blood woman who had obviously turned his life upside down.
Adaline had been waiting for him in the dining room. He was surprised to see that neither Reuben nor Isabel were present. Apparently, his friend had made excuses that he was tired, and not hungry. Isabel was not feeling well after her excursion to the village that day, and was in her chambers with a dinner tray. He was alone with his wife.
He had tried to act normally towards her, but it had been more difficult than he had imagined. The memory of the quarrel with Reuben haunted him; the knowledge of the man that he had been, and what his true relationship with his wife was. They had eaten in silence for most of the meal, a strange tension in the air. He knew that Adaline was worried about him, asking if he was feeling well from time to time. Her dark eyes were clouded with concern.
They were almost to the bedchamber. Mrs. Bolt knocked on the door, as was her habit, waiting for Adaline’s permission to enter. He knew now that the reason she was always ready and waiting, safely in her nightgown, was that she was scared of what might happen if she was not. That she did not wish to alarm him by assuming an intimacy that had obviously never existed between them.
He heard her soft voice behind the door. Mrs. Bolt opened it, wheeling him into the room.
His heart lurched, as it always did, at the first sight of her in her white nightgown. The sheer beauty of her, her long dark hair loose, falling down her back. Her ample bosom, straining beneath the thin material of the gown. He could just make out the smallness of her waist, and her full hips. His wife was a curvaceous woman. A real woman.
He felt a sharp, fierce stab of desire, flaring up from his loins. How was it possible that he had once been immune to her? None of it made any sense to him, knowing her now. It seemed impossible that the man he had once been had not worshipped her, as she deserved.
