Page 81 of To Pleasure a Prince
“—would have supported her claims. He wasn’t about to have it known that his mistress was so awful a woman.” He gritted his teeth. “When it came to her treatment of me, he always condoned her behavior.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Nothing. My point is that if I had told the truth about her, she would have engineered greater lies about me.” His shame returned full force. “And it was easy enough for her to make me out to be a monster. I’d just thrown a royal prince from my home. Besides, at twenty-two, I was as inept, surly, and disinclined to suffer fools as I am now. I was already well on my way to making myself the bane of good society. I’d been getting into fights for years over the names the schoolboys called me.” The bile in his gut rose to choke him. “And Father.”
“The prince?”
“The viscount,” he bit out.
“But the princeisyour natural father, isn’t he? I heard that the viscount returned from a six-month trip to Italy to find your mother newly enceinte.”
He scowled. “Yes, the eternal mortification of my life is that everyone knows I am really a bastard. My mother could not wait until she bore the requisite heir and a spare, oh no. Her husband merely turns his back, and all it takes to have her in the young prince’s bed is a few compliments and a gift or two.”
“Turns his back? For six months? How long had they been married?”
“Two years.”
“And he abandoned her for so long?”
“He did not abandon her,” Marcus snapped. “He wanted to please her by redoing Castlemaine so that it was fitting for a woman of her rank and beauty.” His mother had been from a very old family, one that had spent its later years digging itself into a deep financial hole. A hole the viscount had filled with his own wealth. “So he went to Italy to select marble and see the villas, that sort of thing.”
“For six months? Without his wife?”
When she eyed him askance, he realized for the first time how odd that sounded. “She could have gone with him.” He scrambled for a defense of Father that made sense. “But she preferred to be in England. In London.”
“I don’t know any woman who’d enjoy having her husband gone for six months, no matter what he meant to do to their castle.”
“So you think she was justified in her affair,” he said in a cold voice.
“Of course not.” Her eyes burned into his. “But ifmyhusband found my company so onerous that he preferred traveling about Italy to being with me, I would hound him until I learned why. I’d let no man get away with ignoringme.”
Oddly enough, that soothed him. “I don’t imagine you would.” He brushed a kiss to her forehead. “And I don’t mean to test that assertion, either.”
A grudging smile touched her lips. “You’d better not.”
He kissed her, the kiss rapidly turning searing. After several scorching kisses that led only to frustrating caresses through the thick fabric of her formidable gown, he was just on the verge of tearing the damned thing off her when the carriage shuddered abruptly to a halt, making them break apart.
He looked out, astonished to find that they’d already reached their destination. A slow grin curved up his lips. “We’re here, dearling.”
Chapter Seventeen
Instruct your charge always to be honest with her husband. It will ease her married life considerably.
—Miss Cicely Tremaine,The Ideal Chaperone
Regina scrambled off Marcus’s lap and peered out the window, but all she could see on her side of the coach was a copse of oak and beech. “Where is here?” she asked, growing more curious by the moment.
He threaded his fingers through hers. “My estate. Just not the main house.”
She shot him a bemused look as she straightened her gown, then touched her hand to her mussed hair. “We’re spending our honeymoon in a hunting cabin on your estate?”
“Not exactly. Come see.”
A groom had already scurried to open the carriage door. As they disembarked she looked around, unable to believe her eyes. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought Marcus had spirited them right out of England only to drop them in the midst of India or Turkey. An onion dome rose into the sky, flanked by two eastern-looking minarets. The whole was embellished with golden fretwork and curvy windows and columns carved in the shape of palm trees.
“Lord, this is quite a hunting cabin,” she exclaimed.
He chuckled. “My father had eclectic tastes in architecture. After a trip to India, he decided to build a miniature Oriental palace to go with his castle. We call it Illyria.”
