Then Comes Seduction

16

“AND one more thing,” Katherine said just as if they were in the middle of a conversation, when in reality they had been traveling all afternoon in virtual silence.

He was lounging at his ease across the corner of the carriage seat beside her, one booted foot propped on the seat opposite, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes closed-looking indolent, but not asleep. Indeed, she suspected that he was watching her, though how he could be doing that with his eyes closed she was not sure-except that he was a man who scorned impossibilities.

He was also a man who had made no move whatsoever all day to woo her love and win his wager. She had got up this morning and steeled herself for a day of blatantly seductive wiles. Instead he had talked pointedly about the weather for a time during the morning, had remarked finally that if he could not coax a smile out of her he might as well get some sleep since he had had precious little last night, had folded his arms, and had closed his eyes.

He looked wondrously attractive, of course, all relaxed, slumberous male, though he was not sleeping. He was taking up more than half the carriage interior. She had to keep her feet and knees tight together and hold her legs rather stiff to avoid brushing his knee when the carriage swayed, as it did almost every moment.

She had ignored him. Though she could draw no real satisfaction from doing so while he pretended to sleep. She wished he would wake up so that he would know himself ignored. Of course, she had stopped herself from laughing over some of his more absurd comments on the weather. She spoke in order to wake him, though that, of course, involved not ignoring him.

He opened his eyes.

“And one more thing,” she said again.

“Another?” he said. “Is this one more thing to add to the one more thing you mentioned a few moments ago? Two more things, in fact?”

She looked reproachfully at him.

“Charlotte is thrilled at our marriage,” she said. “And I do not think it is just because now she has someone to sponsor her come-out next year and no longer has to fear that she will be sent to her aunt. She genuinely loves you and wants you to be happy. She thinks you will be happy with me. She thinks we are in love.”

His eyes half smiled at her. It was really quite disconcerting the way he could do that without moving a muscle in the rest of his face. His eyes, she thought suddenly, could very well be her downfall-if it were possible for her to fall, that was, which it was not.

“That is one thing,” he said. “Is there another?”

“Yes, there is,” she said. “I come from a close-knit family. We all love one another dearly. We rejoice in one another’s joys and grieve with one another’s miseries. It is of great importance to my sisters and brother to see me happily married, to see us in love with each other. Yet at the moment they are full of doubts. They fear that we do not love each other and never will.”

“That is two things,” he said, his voice lazy, as if he really had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Interesting things. Things to give me all the incentive in the world to win my wager and you all the reason you need to capitulate and let me do so.”

“You did not hear me clearly,” she said. “I said that it is important to our families that we love each other-both of us, not me adoring you, and you proceeding with life as usual.”

“You want to make it a double wager, after all, then, Katherine?” he asked her, his smile catching at the corners of his eyes and curving his mouth upward. “You want to make me love you? I may even give you a sporting chance of winning.”

“What I do want,” she said, wishing he would sit up properly so that he would look less… less… Well, less something, “is that we put on a good show for the weeks of the house party. That we convince Charlotte and Meg and Stephen that ours really was a love match-or is, anyway. For we love them as much as they love us. I know you love Charlotte even though you deny being capable of any such emotion. And I owe more to Meg than I can ever say and love her more than I love anyone else in the world. I love Stephen dearly too. He is a good brother. He might have drifted from us in the past few years and concerned himself only with the pleasures life has to offer a wealthy, privileged young man.”

“As I did when I left home?” he asked.

“I will not be distracted,” she said. “Though of course, if the boot fits, then it ought to be worn. But we must agree to make them all as happy as we possibly can while they are at Cedarhurst with us. We can do that by appearing to be happy with each other.”

“And after Miss Huxtable and Merton have returned home?” he asked. “We will keep up the charade for Charlotte, will we? Until she marries or for the rest of our lives if she does not?”

That was the weak point in her plan, of course. Pretending to an affection for each other for two weeks, while the house party was in progress, ought not to be impossibly difficult. But after that?

“We will think of that when the time comes,” she said.

“We will not need to worry our heads over the problem if there is no problem by that time,” he said. “You must work diligently over your half of the wager, Katherine, as I am working diligently over mine.”

He looked sleepy again.

“I do not have half the wager,” she protested.

“Then what is the point of me winning my half?” he asked her. “Why would I want you in love with me if I do not love you in return? Why would you want to love me if I do not love you?”

“I do not want to love you,” she said.

His eyes moved lazily over her and she felt suddenly as naked as she had been last night in the candlelight-something she definitely did not want to think about today.

For she had realized something this morning-well, last night after he had withdrawn to the sitting room, to be more accurate. She had realized that in cutting him off from the physical side of their marriage for a whole month, she had cut herself off too. And she had been rather dismayed to discover that it was not a pleasant prospect. It ought to be. There should be no lust in marriage-only love.

There could be love if she took up half the wager and won-and if he won his half.

How absurd! She felt thoroughly cross.

“I think, Katherine,” he said, “you just told a whopping fib. But perhaps you do not even realize it yet. Of course you want to love me-I am your husband. And of course you want me to love you-you are my wife.”

Oh, she thought suddenly, he was at work already, was he not? The grand wager-winner? And already he was having some effect upon her. There was a sudden ache in the region of her heart-a fact that, once noticed, made her even more cross.

“Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “Or back to pretending to sleep.”

But he took her left hand in his instead.

“We are almost there,” he said.

“Home?” She looked through the window beyond his shoulder, but all she could see was fields on the other side of the hedgerows lining the road.

“Cedarhurst,” he said with slight emphasis.

His fingertips were at the base of her little finger and then sliding lightly along it to the tip. Why was she feeling it in her throat?

“Do you still hate it, then?” she asked him. “Is it not home to you? Where is home, then?”

He moved his fingertips to her third finger, and they closed about her wedding ring and turned it slowly. He had pursed his lips, and his eyelids had drooped over his eyes as he watched their hands.

“If you intend always to ask multiple questions, Katherine,” he said, “you must expect my mind to become more and more addled as our marriage progresses. You will end up with the village idiot for a husband.”

She might have laughed, but she did not do so. She wanted answers. A man who hated the home he had always owned but who had nowhere else to call home was someone alien to her. Her husband, in this case. How very little she knew him. Yet she had married him yesterday and shared the intimacy of the marriage bed with him last night. To her, home had always been at the very center of her existence, whether that was the vicarage while her father had still been alive, or the cottage to which they had gone after, or Warren Hall, where they had moved three years ago.

“No, I do not hate Cedarhurst,” he said. “Yes, it is home if it must be labeled at all. The word home is rather like the word love, is it not? Impossible to define and therefore essentially meaningless?”

“Those words are impossible to define precisely because they are words and can only symbolize concepts that are brimful of meaning,” she said. “They symbolize emotions that are too deep for words. But we have to use words because they are one of the primary ways by which we communicate. And so we have to label something vast and fathomless and beyond value with totally inadequate words like home and love. Just as white encompasses all the colors and all the shades of all colors-as you pointed out to me yesterday.”

He drew her ring off over her knuckle and then pressed it back into place before sliding his fingertips along the finger itself and moving on to the middle finger. A smile played over his lips, though his eyes were still hooded.

And now she was feeling it in her breasts.

“I remember telling you once,” he said, “that you are a woman of great and extraordinary passion, Katherine. One day you will learn to direct that passion toward another person instead of to ideas-toward me, I would have to say, since I certainly could not countenance my wife directing it toward any other man, could I?”

He looked up into her eyes, his smile lazy and just a little lopsided. And now her breathing was suffering.

He looked down at their hands again as his fingertips stroked along her middle finger, causing sensation in her lower abdomen. She firmly ignored it. This was all quite deliberate on his part-to arouse her physically, but very subtly, so that she would fall in love with him. He did not understand at all.

“But to answer your third question,” he said, “there is nowhere else. Nowhere else I call home, I mean. Cedarhurst is it, for better or worse.”

“Like marriage,” she said.

“Like marriage,” he agreed, looking up into her eyes again. “When I spent almost a year at Cedarhurst a while ago, I took the first tentative step toward making it mine.”

“What was that?” she asked him.

“I will show you when we arrive,” he said, his fingertips tracing a path down her forefinger. And her inner thighs were aching.

What was going to happen when he got to her thumb?

It did not happen.

“Ah,” he said suddenly, at the same moment as she became aware of houses appearing beyond the carriage windows.

They were passing through a village. There was a tall church spire a short distance ahead.

He lowered his foot to the floor and straightened up on the seat at last to gaze out. He raised a hand to a few people who stood on the street watching the passing of the carriage. And everyone raised a hand in return, Katherine noticed. A few people smiled too. All looked glad.

An interesting reaction to a landlord who did not spend a great deal of his time here and who even found it difficult to admit that this was home, that he did not actively hate it.

She looked curiously at him as they left the village behind and turned onto what she guessed was the driveway to Cedarhurst. It was broad and tree-lined, though she could see lawns stretching away to either side beyond the trees and water glistening far off to the left.

And then she saw the house up ahead, a grand, solid, square gray stone edifice. The front seemed all windows, the longest on the ground level, slightly smaller ones on the floor above, and smaller ones yet on the top floor below the roof with its stone balustrade decorated with stone statues. There was a massive columned portico in the center of the front facade with wide marble steps leading up beneath it to the front doors.

Below the steps were two wide terraces, one below the other, and below them there was a huge and magnificent square garden sunken below ground level and surrounded by low walls over which spilled banks of yellow and red wallflowers in glorious profusion. The garden itself, Katherine could see as the carriage made its way past it on the left-hand side, was arranged in perfect parterres with graveled walks, low box hedges, beds of flowers and herbs, statues-and a stone sundial at the center.

She said not a word because he did not. He sat beside her, looking out, and he had changed completely. She sensed a tension in him.

But this was home. Not just his, but hers too. She was Baroness Montford of Cedarhurst Park. The reality of it had still not quite sunk in despite yesterday, despite last night, despite now.

And yet she felt a tugging at her heart while seeing her new home for the first time-something she could not remember feeling on her arrival at Warren Hall more than three years ago. A sense that her life, all her future hopes lay here. And the house was beautiful. The sunken garden was so lovely that it brought the ache of tears to her throat.

Of course, she was seeing it all at its best. The sun was shining. There was not a cloud in the sky. And it was summertime.

“Ah,” he said, breaking a lengthy silence, and he sounded more himself again. “You see how one’s every actions have repercussions, Katherine? I thought it wise to send word to the housekeeper that I would be bringing a new baroness home with me today as well as a houseful of birthday guests within the next two weeks. And the servants have contrived a way of catching an early glimpse of you without having to peep from forbidden windows or about forbidden screens or doorways.”

The upper terrace had come into full view. The carriage was about to turn onto it. In neat rows, looking more like clothed statues than real people, Cedarhurst’s large staff was lined up on the steps, the menservants on one side all in crisp black, the maidservants on the other side, also in black, with white mobcaps and white aprons that fluttered in the breeze.

“A welcoming reception,” Jasper said, sounding half exasperated, half amused. “I hope you are up to it.”

Katherine remembered that the same thing had happened at Warren Hall when she and her sisters arrived there with Stephen. They had all enjoyed it enormously. Stephen had stopped to have a word with everyone.

“Of course I am up to it,” she said, nevertheless feeling her stomach flutter rather uncomfortably. “I am your wife, am I not? The new mistress of Cedarhurst?”

Unbidden, there was a stirring of excitement at the realization that that was precisely who she was.

“My love.” He was still holding her hand in one of his, she realized as the carriage drew level with the house steps and one of the men, presumably the butler, stepped forward to open the door and set down the steps. “I never did reply to your and one other thing, did I? I agree to your every demand. How could I not when I became your lifelong slave yesterday-entirely from inclination, I must add. And what could be more to my inclination today and every day for the foreseeable future than displaying to my servants, my family and yours, and my friends and yours that I adore you?”

She turned a look of reproach on him, but his head was bent over her hand as he raised it to his lips, the picture of the devoted and besotted bridegroom while every servant from the butler on down to the boot-boy gawked through the open door at them.

She laughed instead.

Trust him to make a joke of it all.

And to look impossibly handsome and-ah, yes-romantic as he did so. She probably imagined the sigh that passed through the ranks of the maids, but it would not be surprising if she had not.

He would give her a tour of the house later, Jasper decided, perhaps tomorrow. She had shown no eagerness to see everything at once. She had shown no eagerness at all, in fact. Not about the house or park, anyway. She had said nothing as they approached and he had sat tensely beside her.

What had he expected? Enthusiasm for the home that had been forced upon her?

And did it matter to him what she thought?

Did Cedarhurst matter to him?

He had brought her up to the drawing room after they had inspected the servants. They had walked up the house steps on one side and then back down them on the other-greeting first the maids and then the menservants.

She had smiled warmly at each of them in turn, repeated their names when his housekeeper or his butler presented them to her, and had a word with each.

So had he, actually. It had rather surprised him to see so many old faces-not necessarily old in years, but old in service at Cedarhurst. Did they like working here? Were they well paid? But had he not given the order to raise their wages after the death of his mother’s second husband? And again after his mother’s death?

He had remembered with some surprise as he greeted them all that he had liked most of these people when he lived here-even loved a few of them. They had fed him in the kitchens and washed and bandaged his scrapes and sometimes washed him and his clothes and polished his shoes before his mother’s second husband could see the mud or lake water on them. They had even mended rents in his clothes. They had listened to his stories, some of them extremely tall tales. The gardeners and grooms had sometimes disciplined him themselves rather than complain at the house about his transgressions, sometimes setting him to work with a brush or hoe, occasionally even giving him a swift walloping when he really deserved it. Sometimes they had lied for him, claiming not to know where he was rather than have any of his favorite haunts and hiding places discovered.

It was strange how one could forget huge chunks of one’s life. Those haunts…

The tea tray and a plate of cakes had followed them into the drawing room. Katherine poured their tea but did not take any of the cakes.

“I do hope,” she said, “I will remember at least some of their names and that I will learn them all soon. There are so many of them.”

“There is no need,” he said. “They will not expect it of you.”

And yet, he thought, he knew almost all the servants by name without ever having made a determined effort to do so. And he believed he might remember the names of those who were new-but only because there were not many of them and most of them bore a family resemblance to former or current servants.

“But I expect it of myself,” she said. “Servants are people.”

He was always amused rather than irritated by her occasional lapses into primness-a product of her upbringing in a country vicarage, he suspected.

After going back down the steps outside the house while talking with the menservants, she had stood on the terrace, looking up at them all and laughing. The breeze had been wafting the brim of her hat, and the sunlight had caught the gold highlights in her hair. And she had addressed them all with similar words to the ones she had just spoken to him.

“Please forgive me,” she had said, “if I do not remember all your names the next time I see you. But if I still cannot remember one month from now, then I will neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness.”

There had been a ripple of laughter, and Jasper’s guess was that his whole large staff had fallen instantly in love with the new baroness.

He had been rather charmed himself.

She did not sit down in the drawing room. She walked over to one of the long windows and stood looking out, sipping her tea as she did so.

He went to stand a little way behind her.

“I think,” she said, “that is the loveliest garden I have ever seen.”

She was looking down at the parterres.

He closed his eyes briefly, and some of the tension that had been tightening his shoulders and neck since they had turned onto Cedarhurst property eased out of him.

“Is it?” he said.

For a moment he thought she had nothing else to say about it, that she had just been making a polite observation couched in rather lavish praise.

“It is so perfectly constructed,” she said, “with such geometrical precision. Is it exactly square? Do you know? It must be.”

“Down to the last quarter of an inch,” he said.

She laughed softly, thinking that he joked.

“Something so very man-made ought not to be beautiful too, ought it?” she said. “Such a ruthless taming of nature? But it is. Perhaps it says much about human-kind’s place in the world. We can impose order and precision upon nature, but we cannot destroy any of its loveliness or enthusiasm.”

“Enthusiasm?” he said.

“Look at the banks of wallflowers spilling down over the walls,” she said. “They are exuberant even though they have been confined to the perimeter of the garden. They give notice that they can be tamed but not destroyed, that they are in no way less powerful than the men who put them there and who see to it that they remain there without encroaching upon the parterres.”

He laughed softly, and she turned her head to look at him.

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Laugh at me. I do not mind.”

“The rest of the park,” he said, “has been laid out according to the theories of Capability Brown and his ilk. There are rolling, tree-dotted lawns and a lake, and a wilderness walk winding through the trees on the far side of it and up through the wooded hills behind the house. All carefully constructed to look artfully natural or naturally artful-I am not sure which is more appropriate. The object, of course, is to make the park look like a piece of wild, unspoiled nature when in reality it is no such thing. The lawns came almost to the very doors until a few years ago.”

“Just a few years?” She turned her head to look back outside.

“The terraces are newly constructed,” he said. “So is the parterre garden. Last year it looked better than the year before, and this year it looks better than last year.”

She was looking at him again, and this time he felt that all her attention was on him.

“Is this that first tentative step you spoke of in the carriage earlier?” she said. “The first step to making Cedarhurst your own?”

“It is one very tiny step, is it not?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “And it took so much energy that I doubt I will ever take another.”

“This is your work,” she said.

“I did not heft a shovel,” he said. “At least, I did, but my contribution to the actual manual labor was minuscule, Katherine. I might have damaged my manicure.”

“And I suppose,” she said, “the design was yours too.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I lay no claim to artistic vision-or mathematical genius for that matter.”

Though he had insisted that the square be exact, even down to the final quarter of an inch.

“Come,” he said, “I will show you something-if you have finished your tea, that is.”

She drained off the last mouthful and crossed the room to set her cup and saucer on the tray-to save a servant from having to retrieve it from the window ledge, he supposed. Another relic of the vicarage, where presumably there were no servants, or very few?

He led her from the room and into the east wing of the house, where their apartments were-the two east-facing bedchambers, large and square, the dressing rooms on the far side of each, and the private sitting room between.

He ought perhaps to have taken her to her own bedchamber first since she had not even seen it yet. Or at least to the sitting room, where she could be comfortable and quiet during the morning hours whenever she wished. But he took her straight into his own bedchamber.

He had had it completely redecorated and refurnished after his mother’s death-though it had not been used for years before that. He would have gutted the room with fire if he could, but actually the changes he had made had obliterated the presence of his mother’s second husband. Everything was dark blue and gray and silver now.

“This is my room,” he said. “Not yours too, you will be relieved to know. And there is a whole spacious sitting room between us and probably a lock on your bedchamber door to keep out the wolf.”

“You have made a wager with me,” she said. “I will trust to your honor. Even if there is a key, I will not turn it.”

“Something,” he said, “you may live to regret.”

It was going to be devilishly difficult living up to that condition of celibacy she had added to the wager last night and he had agreed to in a moment of madness-just because it had added another element of the seemingly impossible to the challenge.

“This is what I brought you here to see,” he said, indicating the large painting that hung over the mantel in its gilded, old-fashioned frame.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she moved closer to it.

“In a fit of desperate boredom a few years ago,” he said, “after it had rained steadily for days on end, I made a foray into the attic storage rooms and discovered this, its face to the wall. It is a view from the house a century or more ago. Before the parterres were destroyed in the name of modernity and the artfully natural look. I fell in love.”

She whisked around, her eyes alight with merriment.

“Did you, indeed?” she said.

He shrugged.

“As you so eloquently explained earlier,” he said, “many words merely symbolize what cannot be expressed verbally. Cliches do the same thing when one is too lazy even to try to find original words. I knew immediately when I looked at this painting that if I were ever going to live at Cedarhurst, this is what I must look out upon from the drawing room or from the front steps of the house. And so I gave the necessary orders. Sometimes it is a great advantage to have both power and wealth.”

She was looking at the painting again.

“But here,” she said, “there is only one terrace with the parterres below it. And they are not sunken. They are not surrounded by a wall and banks of flowers.”

“For very pride’s sake,” he said, “I could not just make a slavish copy. I had to add something of my own.”

“Or something of yourself,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Adding a lower terrace and sinking the garden below ground level are brilliant adaptations.”

“Are they?” he said. He felt absurdly pleased. “How kind you are, Katherine.”

She clucked her tongue and turned to face him again.

“I thought so from the sound of your voice,” she said. “You have retreated behind your usual disguise to deceive me into thinking that you do not care. This garden was not just one small, tentative step, was it? It was a bold stride to assert your personhood.”

He grinned at her-though he actually felt as far from being amused as he had ever felt. He felt rather exposed, actually. And slightly foolish. Perhaps he ought not to have brought her here.

“There must be a wonderful feeling of seclusion and peace in that garden,” she said.

“It is my hope,” he said, “that you will find both there in the coming years, Katherine. Though I hope too that your desire for seclusion will not always exclude me.” He raised his eyebrows.

She gazed at him without speaking for a few moments.

“I realize,” she said, “that I dug a deep hole for myself last night when I made that wager with you. For the next month I will not know when you speak sincerely or when you speak merely to win the wager.”

He almost fell in love with her then. Her eyes looked sad.

He smiled slowly, deliberately drooping his eyelids again just because he knew it would annoy her and make her forget to be sad.

“That,” he said, possessing himself of her right hand, “is the challenge of the game, Katherine. The fun of the game, if you will. And there is a third alternative, you know. Perhaps I speak from both sincerity and a determination to win my bet.”

“Hmm,” she said, a quirk to her lips.

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. Then he folded her fingers one at a time over the spot he had kissed.

“Keep it safe,” he said. “It is a small token from someone who adores you.”

She laughed softly.

“You are a rogue,” she said. “You really are.”

“Come,” he said. “I will show you your own apartments.”

She liked the parterre gardens. No, she loved them. And she got the point of them. Beauty and peace. He had never assigned those actual words to what he had done to his home, but they were perfect.

That was exactly what he had tried to impose upon a place that had always belonged to him yet had never been quite his.