Then Comes Seduction

17

“THE housekeeper-Mrs. Siddon,” Katherine said at breakfast the following morning, determined to use names from the start so that she would not forget them, “sent word to my room that she is willing to show me the house this morning if you need to be busy with your steward-Mr. Knowles, I believe?”

“Hang Knowles,” Jasper said. “Or rather, since I cannot think the man guilty of any capital offense, hang the idea of my spending my first morning at home with him and the account ledgers. I would rather spend it with you. I will show you the house myself.”

And they spent the bulk of the morning wandering from room to room while Katherine became aware of just how grand a mansion Cedarhurst Park was-and of how surprisingly knowledgeable he was about it.

She was awed by the state apartments on the ground floor, where he took her first, and their gilded splendor. She gazed at carved friezes and elaborately painted coved ceilings, at heavy velvet draperies and brocaded bed hangings and wooden floors so shiny that she could almost see her face in them when she leaned forward, at elegant, ornate furnishings. She was amazed at the size of each room, particularly the ballroom, which was vast.

“Is it ever used?” she asked as they stepped inside the double doors. “Are there ever enough people to fill it?”

French windows stretched along much of the wall opposite. There was a small balcony beyond them, she could see. The wall on either side of the doors was all mirrors. If one stood in the middle of the room, Katherine thought, one would have the impression of doors and light and openness stretching in both directions.

“Not by London standards,” he said. “Nothing that could be called by that flattering term a great squeeze. But there used to be a Christmas ball to impress all the local gentry for miles around. There was even once a tradition, I have been told, of inviting everyone to Cedarhurst-not just the gentry but everyone-for a summer fete and ball in the gardens and the ballroom.”

“You have been told,” she said. “You do not remember those fetes, then?”

“Oh, goodness me, no,” he said. “We were of far too great a consequence to continue that vulgar tradition. Besides, worse than being vulgar, it was sinful. Evil. The work of the devil.”

Who were we? She did not ask. But she could guess that he spoke of his stepfather.

“And are you of too great a consequence?” she asked him.

“To revive the tradition?” he asked her. “It sounds like a great deal of hard work, Katherine. I am not sure I am up to it.”

“You do not need to be,” she said. “You have a wife now.”

He grimaced.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “That fact caused me a rather restless night, you know. I suppose you slept like the proverbial baby?”

“I slept very well after the long journey, thank you,” she lied. She had actually been terribly aware that it was the second night of her marriage but that her bridegroom was sleeping-or not sleeping-alone just two rooms removed from hers when just the night before…

“As I thought,” he said, “cruel heart.”

And he looked soulfully at her and then grinned.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we could revive it for Charlotte’s birthday and give her a party that will be grander and more memorable than anything she has imagined.”

“The fete?” he said, raising both eyebrows. “The ball? This year? In less than one month’s time?”

“Why not?” she said, suddenly caught up in the excitement of such a wildly impossible scheme. “It would be a wonderful way to involve the whole neighborhood and countryside in a joint celebration of Charlotte’s growing up and our marriage.”

He looked at her and cocked one eyebrow.

“I have an alarming suspicion,” he said, “that I have married an enthusiastic wife. Do tell me I am wrong.”

She laughed.

“I think it would be a splendid idea,” she said. “If you will agree, that is.”

He raised both eyebrows.

“If I agree?” he said. “I am merely the master here, am I not-as I always have been? You are the mistress, Katherine. You will do as you please.”

Oh, she would indeed. But although he had spoken with the sort of lazy irony that was characteristic of him, there was something about the words themselves that caught her attention and made her look more closely at him-you will do as you please rather than you may do as you please.

“You are not merely the master here,” she said. “You are the master. It must be what you wish too.”

“To run three-legged races and egg-and-spoon races all afternoon and taste two dozen fruit tarts and view twice that many embroidered cloths and handkerchiefs before naming a winner and have my ears murdered by the shrieking of children at play?” he said with an elaborate shudder. “And then to trip the light fantastic all evening in a succession of vigorous country dances? Katherine, you know how much I love to dance.”

And yet she had the curious impression that he was pleased, that he wanted the fete to be revived. It was his stepfather who had put an end to a tradition that had been upheld by his father and grandfather and perhaps even generations before that. Now he could restore it.

“We might allow one waltz,” she said. “I might even be persuaded to reserve it for you.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Ah. Well, in that case,” he said, “I capitulate on everything. Organize this fete and ball by all means. I will waltz with you at the latter so that you will not be a wallflower-a dreadful fate for a lady, or so I have heard. You will doubtless call upon me if you need my assistance with anything else.”

“Oh, I will,” she assured him, smiling. “Are we going to call upon your… upon our neighbors soon?”

“We?” He grimaced.

“Of course,” she said. “You must introduce me. It is surely expected, though I suppose some people will think it more appropriate to come here to pay their respects to us. That is what happened after Stephen went to Warren Hall. Let us forestall them and go call on them. It will give you a chance to show everyone how much you love me, how much we love each other. It will help us to begin our life here on the right footing.”

She had woken this morning full of energy and full of hope, though hope for exactly what she did not know. Perhaps their marriage need not be the dreadful thing she had imagined during the month before their wedding, when she had seen very little of her betrothed and had never been alone with him.

“And so it will,” he said, his eyes suddenly amused. “It will be done, then. But why are we standing here in the ballroom doorway when there is far more to see? The gallery is at the far side of the state rooms, but it is full of ancient family portraits which can be of no interest whatsoever to you. I will show you some of the family apartments you have not yet seen.”

“But I would like to see the gallery,” she said.

“Would you?” He looked surprised.

It was long and high-ceilinged, a companion piece to the ballroom at the other side of the main floor, though narrower. It ran the full width of the house with windows at both ends to provide light. There were marble busts in every second alcove, cushioned benches in the others. The floor gleamed. The walls were hung with portraits. It would be the perfect place for exercise in rainy weather.

Katherine walked from one to the other of the paintings while Jasper explained who the subjects were and what relationship they bore to him. She had not realized how ancient a family the Finleys were. There were portraits reaching back to the fifteenth century.

“You know everything about all these paintings and the history of your family,” she said. “I am surprised-and impressed.”

“Are you?” he said. “But they are exclusively mine, you see. And I spent a great deal of time up here as a boy.”

She wondered if he realized how much he had revealed to her in those few words.

They moved on until they came to the final two portraits.

“My mother,” he said of the first. “And my father.”

His mother, brown-haired and dressed in the fashion of twenty years or more ago, was plump and pretty and placidly smiling as she sat at an embroidery frame, a small dog like a bundle of fur at her feet. Katherine could see no resemblance to either Jasper or Charlotte-or Rachel.

His father, on the other hand, looked very much like Jasper even down to the mockingly raised right eyebrow. He was slender and dark and handsome. And he was about the same age in the portrait as Jasper was now.

“It was painted only a few months before his death,” Jasper said. “A few months before my birth.”

“How did he die?” she asked.

“He broke his neck,” he told her, “jumping a hedge on a wet, muddy day. He was in his cups-a not unusual state with him, apparently.”

“I am sorry,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. “Did you cause him to drink? Or to jump that hedge when apparently there was an open gate not twenty yards away?”

“Sorry for you,” she explained.

“Why?” he said again. “He was no loss to me. I never knew him. Though I resemble him to an uncanny degree-or so I have always been told. In looks and every other imaginable way.”

She turned away from the portrait to look at him. There was, she realized with sudden shock, a world of pain locked up in this mocking, careless, rakish man she had married. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to have insisted that they come in here. Or perhaps it had. He had spoken with unaccustomed bitterness. Was it worth trying to penetrate his defenses?

“Ah, those eyes,” he said, cupping her chin with one hand. “They are what first drew me to you, you know, in those long-ago days when I dared not admire any respectable lady lest her mama snare me in her net and whisk me off to the altar. But I would not have been able to resist your eyes, Katherine, even if you had been surrounded by half a dozen mothers. Do you know how deep, how fathomless, they are, how they draw in the beholder to… Ah. To what? To your soul? To rest there in peace?”

With the pad of his thumb he traced the seam of her lips, sending shivers downward into her breasts and her womb and her inner thighs.

His voice was soft, warm with sincerity. So were his eyes.

He was a very dangerous man indeed.

Not that she must resist loving him. It had occurred to her that if she was bound to him for life she must try to feel a deeper fondness for him than she did. But she would resist dancing to his tune. She would love if and when she chose to love, not when he had tricked her into a mindless infatuation.

“I suppose,” she said, smiling against his thumb, “you took one look at me-or at my eyes-and fell instantly and irrevocably in love with me. And this was before the Vauxhall evening, I take it?”

“Ah, Katherine,” he said, his voice and eyes openly mournful now, “I was not wise enough to fall in love with you then and so prevent the disaster of Vauxhall. What is it about your eyes, though? Is it that they reveal or hint at a person well worth knowing? Someone whose love is well worth courting? Someone who is well worth loving?”

She felt more like crying than thinking of a suitably spirited retort.

“You are going to have to do considerably better than that, you know,” she said. “A Cheltenham tragedy will not do it.”

“Ah. Will it not, cruel heart?”

He removed his hand and grinned at her.

“And you are not your father, Jasper,” she said. “You are yourself.”

For a moment his eyes looked curiously bleak despite the grin. Then he took her hand in his and raised it so that he could kiss the inside of her wrist.

“I am, as you say, myself,” he said. “A fact for which I am remarkably thankful, especially at this moment.”

He raised her hand and set it on his shoulder. He took a half step forward and slid his other arm about her waist, so that they were lightly touching along their full length.

He was, she supposed, going to kiss her. Their wager had not forbidden kisses, had it? But she could not bear to be kissed at this precise moment. Her emotions were feeling rather raw.

“It would be desirable,” she said, “for us to concentrate upon becoming friends before we even think of love.”

“Friends?” He chuckled. “After this month is over, Katherine, I intend to take you to bed every night and all night-and often during the days too. I would find it inordinately embarrassing to take my friend to bed. Con is my friend, and Charlie Field and Hal Blackstone and half a dozen other fellows. All male. I believe you might find me a mite impotent if I got into bed with you and then discovered that I had got in with my friend.”

She could not help laughing.

“Is it easier, then,” she asked him, “to make love to your enemy?”

“Enemy be damned,” he said. “Pardon my language. I would rather make love to my lover, Katherine. To you, since you are my wife and sex is one of the definite advantages of being married, provided one can tolerate one’s wife.”

“And provided she can tolerate her husband,” she said.

“Neither of which provideds poses any problem in this particular marriage,” he said. “Do they?”

He waited for her answer. And there was no witty response to that particular question, was there?

“No,” she said.

He smiled slowly, his eyelids drooping over his eyes, which focused on her lips.

“I do not suppose,” he said, “I can persuade you to forget the one condition of our wager, can I?”

“That it will take you one month to win my love?” she said. “Oh, very well, then. We will make it five weeks if you feel you need more time.”

He threw back his head and laughed, startling her.

“You minx, Katherine,” he said. “I adore you. Do you know that?”

“You would have to define the word adore,” she said. He leaned forward again and kissed her-on the tip of her nose.

“The wager will remain as it is, then,” he said. “We will make up for lost time when the month is over. But we are wasting a lovely day standing here. Come and sit in the parterre garden. You have not even smelled it yet-all those herbs.”

And he took her hand in his and laced their fingers together before leaving the gallery with her and descending the stairs and stepping out onto the upper terrace.

Just like lovers.

Or newlyweds.

With nothing to care about but their absorption in each other.

They spent an hour or more in the garden, first strolling along the graveled walks, examining the statues, admiring the flowers, and the neatly clipped hedges, smelling the herbs, reading the time by the sundial, and then sitting on one of the seats that were half hidden against the banks of wallflowers.

They breathed in the mingled scents of sage, mint, lavender, and myriad flowers, and Katherine closed her eyes and sighed with what sounded very like contentment.

Jasper had never really understood what had drawn him to that old painting in the attic to the extent that he had almost instantly determined to restore the parterres as they had been a century ago, with adaptations of his own. If he had thought of it at all, he would have given a negative reason-the artificiality of such a garden beyond the front doors and directly below the drawing room windows would have horrified his mother’s second husband and therefore must be recreated. Perhaps his decision to make it a sunken garden and therefore very difficult to remove and obliterate at any future date had been a final act of defiance to the hated memory.

But a positive had come out of that negative motive. The garden was both beautiful and peaceful, though he had never thought of that latter fact until Katherine had used the word.

Strange that, when the garden was in full view of the house and of any carriage approaching it.

“Is solitude necessary for peace?” he asked her.

She opened her eyes.

“Perhaps not,” she said, “if one is in harmony with one’s surroundings and any companion with whom one shares them.”

“But not someone who talks a great deal?” he said.

She smiled.

“Is this,” he asked her when she said nothing, “another case of wearing the boot if it fits?”

“No,” she said. “I am feeling perfectly at peace even when you talk. I love it here.”

“Do you?” he asked her. “Here in the garden? Or here at Cedarhurst?”

“Both,” she said.

“And with present company?” he asked her.

“You remind me,” she said, still smiling, “of a little boy seeking approval.”

Good Lord!

“Whereas in reality,” he said, “I am a big, bad boy wondering if he dares steal a kiss-if kissing is permitted, that is. Is it?”

“In full view of the house?” she said. “And any servants who happen to be peeping out at us? It is said that servants know their employers better than anyone else, that there is no hiding anything of significance from them. How long will it be before they know us and our marriage as well as we do? Even as long as a month?”

She had not answered his question about kissing.

He was feeling remarkably contented, considering the fact that he had got married just two days ago under the worst possible circumstances and agreed on his wedding night to a whole month of celibacy.

It felt surprisingly good to be home.

With Katherine.

Despite what he had said in the gallery about friendship with women, he had the odd feeling that he could become comfortable with Katherine’s companionship.

Comfortable?

Companionship?

Peace was shattered in a sudden surge of panic.

Good Lord and devil take it, he was a married man.

And if that realization was not terrifying enough, there was the added conviction-it suddenly occurred to him and took him completely by surprise-that he did not really approve of adultery. One reason he had hated that viper of a second husband of his mother’s with such intensity was that for all his piety and righteousness he had kept a mistress not twenty miles away and had visited her regularly twice a week from the time of his marriage until his death.

Oh, yes, Katherine had spoken a greater truth than she realized just a moment ago. Servants did indeed know all there was to know about their masters-or, in this case, about their master’s stepfather and self-appointed guardian.

No, dash it all, he did not believe in adultery.

Comfort and companionship would be something, he supposed. But there was going to have to be more. There was going to have to be. He was definitely not cut out for either celibacy or a companionable, decorous exercise of his marital rights once a week or so.

“This,” she said, indicating the parterres, “was what you described as your first tentative step to making Cedarhurst your own. And it was a magnificent step. What will your second be, Jasper? And your third?”

“Must there be a second and third?” he asked with a sigh. “Have I not exerted myself enough for one lifetime?”

“Is everything about the house and the park perfect, then?” she asked him. “Are you content to live with everything as it is for the rest of your life?”

“Well,” he said, “since moving into the east wing-and exerting myself to refurbish my bedchamber, I would have you know-I have been dissatisfied with the sight of the long stretch of lawn below my window. There is nothing to look at but grass and trees in the distance. But I can hardly have parterres put there too.”

“Probably not,” she agreed. “I had the same thought, though, when I looked out of my window this morning. There ought to be flowers down there so that they can be smelled from the bedchambers. And seen, of course. A rose garden, perhaps, though I would prefer to keep a rose garden small rather than have it fill that whole space-a rose arbor rather than a full garden.”

“With an apple orchard beyond it,” he said. “There is no orchard in the park. I always rather like seeing trees planted in straight rows like soldiers.”

“And blooming in the spring,” she said, turning a glowing face his way. “Oh, there is nothing more magical.”

“And heavy with fruit in the late summer,” he said. “To be plucked at will.”

She jumped to her feet and reached out a hand to him. “Let us go and look,” she said. “Let us go and see if it will be possible to have both. Though I am sure it will.”

He looked up at her and her outstretched hand and felt something in his soul shift. Perhaps it was nothing more than an easing of guilt. Maybe marriage would suit her after all, even with a man she would not have chosen in a million years if she could have made a free choice. And even without someone who could be heart of her heart and soul of her soul. As soon as the month was over, he was going to start working on giving her babies. She would surely be a wonderful mother-one who would enjoy her children. Had she not taught young children at that village in which she had grown up?

And before the month was over he was going to be able to look her in the eye without even having to make use of what she called his mask and tell her that he loved her. Even if he did not know quite what he meant by the words, he was going to say them. And mean them too as far as he was able.

He stood up and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together.

“Very well, then,” he said with a sigh. “But you are not envisioning me with a shovel in my hands, digging holes for the apple trees, are you, Katherine?”

Ah, he loved to see her laugh.

“No, of course not,” she said. “I picture you wielding an axe and a saw, making and erecting trellises and arches for my rose arbor.”

“Good Lord,” he said. “And yours, is it?”

“And remember,” she said, “that you will be taking yet another step toward full independence at the end of the month. You will be hosting a revival of the Cedarhurst fete and ball.”

“I am going to be running a three-legged race, am I?” he said, looking at her sidelong.

“Definitely,” she said.

“With you as a partner?”

“Must I?” she asked him.

“You must,” he assured her.

“Oh, very well, then.”

“And I am going to be judging embroidered angels and flowers, am I?” he asked.

“I will do that,” she told him. “You may taste the fruit tarts.”

“Hmm,” he said. “And waltz with you during the evening?”

“Yes,” she said.

They strolled along the terrace in the direction of the east side of the house just like a contentedly married couple.

A mildly panic-provoking thought.