Page 67 of The Viscount and the Vixen
Chapter16
Portia leaned forward from her comfy pillows, snagged a grape from the tray that rested near her knees, and popped the dark red fruit into her mouth.
Lounging at the foot of the bed where a short time ago he’d taken her with such unbridled enthusiasm, her husband sipped his burgundy wine. His gaze drifted to her chest. Perhaps because she hadn’t pulled her dressing gown as tightly around her as she might have and she’d left a good bit of flesh visible. She didn’t know why she took such delight in teasing him with flashes of skin.
“Be sure to send word to your London seamstress that you’re in need of another blue gown,” he said.
She shook her head. “I have enough gowns.”
His jaw tautened for a heartbeat before relaxing, and she knew he was taking exception to her frugality, that he was insulted by the notion that he couldn’t properly provide for her. “Not in that shade of blue. It’s my favorite as it brings out the red in your hair.”
She laughed lightly. “As though I need anything to bring out the red in my hair. The devil’s doing, my father often said.” When his eyes narrowed, she wished she’d bit back the words—better yet bitten off her tongue.
“Why would he say that?” Locksley asked.
Sighing, she popped another grape into her mouth, chewed slowly. She didn’t think the tray of fruit, cheeses, and sliced meats had originally been prepared for supper but she suspected Mrs.Dorset had decided simpler fare was required for dinner in a bedchamber. Portia swallowed. “Because neither my father nor my mother has red hair. Hers is a dark brown, his blond. Although I always thought his mustache hinted at red when the sun hit it just right, but he never acknowledged that.”
“Did he accuse your mother of being unfaithful?”
“No, he merely thought I had more of the devil in me than I should.” And on occasion believed he could beat it out of her. But she didn’t want to travel down that path, and as Locksley had asked a personal question—
“How long has it been since the mines produced tin?”
He reached for the bottle of wine on the tray and poured more into his glass. “Close to two years.”
“That’s the reason you stopped traveling.”
He took a sip, nodded. “It seemed prudent. The mines were still producing but their output was dwindling. In all his years of hiding away here, my father never neglected the estates, but the steward expressed concerns that the marquess wasn’t taking the diminishing income seriously.” He lifted a shoulder, dropped it back down. “I realized it was time I stepped up to the task. I discovered I liked the challenge of it, especially as everything wasn’t moving along swimmingly well. I think I might find it boring if there was nothing to worry over.”
She suspected he would. A man who scaled mountains certainly wouldn’t be content to merely stroll over even ground.
“Then about six months after I took over, the mines stopped producing altogether,” he added.
“And you began to work in them,” she stated.
“I thought I might have more luck finding what the miners had missed. Not to mention that it drove me to distraction to be sitting about waiting for word that a new source of ore had been struck.”
“The lords I’ve known wouldn’t have cared. They’d have continued to play and let their fathers worry over it.”
“Then I suspect they’ll find their estates in ruination when they inherit. Things are changing for the aristocracy. I don’t think we can blithely go on without recognizing that we are on the cusp of becoming obsolete.”
“There will always be an aristocracy.”
“But our role is diminishing. Or at the very least our carefree lifestyle must change. We can’t continue to be pampered without realizing it comes at a cost.”
He placed a slice of ham and some cheese on a cracker and ate it as though to signal the end to the conversation. But she wasn’t yet ready to let it go. “I can’t imagine you were ever pampered.”
“Not here, not really. We had so few servants. I like doing for myself. One of my first evenings at a gentleman’s club—I was in the drawing room, sitting near the fire, enjoying a bit of brandy. An older gentleman, an earl, was sitting nearby. He called a footman over because the fire needed stirring and a log added. And I thought, ‘If you’re chilled then get up off your bloody ass and stir the fire yourself.’ Here we never called a servant into a room to take care of something we could take care of ourselves. It was both enlightening and disturbing once we began moving about in London.”
Adjusting a pillow behind her back, she settled against it. “You must have ground your back teeth that first afternoon when I said I would call in a footman to move the chair for me.”
He studied her intently, so thoroughly that she felt a need to squirm, and it was all she could do to hold still. “You lied that afternoon, Portia. You wouldn’t call in a footman. You’d move it yourself. Why did you wish us to think otherwise, to see you as a snobbish haughty woman?”
“Like your earl who wouldn’t stir his own embers, every aristocratic woman I’ve met comes across as quite helpless. I thought the same behavior would be expected of me.”
“What else did you lie about?”
So much. With a low fire crackling on the hearth, her body sated by pleasure and food, her husband speaking with her as though she were his equal, she almost told him everything—but what good would come of it now? The pleasantness between them would shatter, utterly and completely, never to return. Of that she was certain.
