Amy Lake (17 page)

“Oh.”  Claire drew in a breath, momentarily too stunned to speak. Settlements?  This was even worse! 

“My lord–”

Her husband frowned at her. “‘
Edward
,’” he said. “You are my wife. My name is Edward.”

“Yes, Edward, but–”

“I have proposed the following amounts to be settled on you absolutely. Fitzwilliams agrees that they should be adequate, but if you wish to consult your own lawyers–”  He paused, and handed her several sheets of paper.

Claire stared at them, unable to read a single figure.

“As I have said, this money is yours absolutely. Obviously, an additional amount will be provided for you and your brother in my will. Now as for your quarterly allowance–”

Her husband continued to speak, but Claire didn’t hear a word. Her eyes had managed to focus on the top sheet, the numbers written out in Justin MacKenzies impeccable hand. The figure indicated was too large to be immediately comprehended. Her husband said it was hers? 

“But, Edward, I had not thought–”

The earl interrupted her. “If you feel the settlements inadequate, I am perfectly willing to consider an adjustment.”

“Oh, no!”  Inadequate?  How could he even–?

“When you are satisfied, I will have Fitzwilliams draw up the final papers.”

Claire chewed absently on her lower lip, unaware that Edward found this small habit of hers tolerably erotic. The entire issue of dower money and settlements was worrisome, and she was puzzled that her husband had not mentioned contacting her uncle. And he had spoken so curtly, as if he was angry with her.

“Very well, my lord,” she said slowly.

The earl groaned. “Very well, my Lord Edward Ashley Tremayne, twelfth Earl of Ketrick,” he said with a theatrical sigh. Claire chuckled.

* * * *  

Claire didn’t realize that Edward was even more anxious than she was to be rid of the entire subject of finances. He knew his wife’s character better now than he had the week before their marriage, and he had a healthy respect for her sense of independence. By law, Claire was owed her portion of the family’s estate, and he’d had no right whatsoever to allow her uncle to keep one penny of it.

Assuming a penny of the money was left, of course, which he doubted. Edward bit back a disgusted snort, remembering how Sandrick Rutherford had reacted to the announcement of his niece’s forthcoming marriage. An immature miss, Claire’s uncle had called her. The duplicitous fool.

A fool, yes, but one who’d had control over the de Lancie money. Patience would never be one of Edward’s virtues, and his bargain with Rutherford had seemed, at the time, to be the quickest route to a solution. Claire lost nothing by it; the
apport
absolu
he had fixed on his wife was fifty times the legacy from her parents. Nevertheless, the earl could not convince himself that she would approve this peremptory handling of her affairs. If she found out. . . .

She was chewing her lower lip again. The earl, deciding that there were a number of more pleasant ways to spend the day with his wife than talking about marriage settlements, stood and moved to the side of her chair. She looked up at him, her eyes almost silver in the morning light, and he bent to kiss her.

“My lord,” she murmured against his lips.

Edward took her hand and, looking about for the nearest place for two people to sit together,  pulled her over to the window seat next to his desk. Castle walls being thick, it was an exceptionally deep window seat, rigged out with a  number of comfortable cushions and a velvet curtain that could be drawn to shut out the draught.

“I bet this was the perfect place for boys to play hide and seek,” Claire said. “Were all these cushions always here?  You could almost make a pile with them and disappear underneath.”

“You are exactly right. But there was one problem.”  Edward had spoken without thinking, and now he hesitated. His relationship with his father wasn’t something he had planned to discuss.

“Hmm?” said his wife, looking out the window. It was partially open, and as they were two stories above the water, Edward grabbed her waist and pulled her back.

 “What problem?” she asked.

“Well, if my father caught me, there was the end to it.” 

“Why? I should think he’d have been charmed by the thought of a small boy hiding in his study and forced to be quiet.” 

Edward had no easy reply to that, so instead of answering her, he leaned back against the side wall and drew her against him. She snuggled into his lap, and they sat listening to the faint sound of geese squabbling below.

He wanted to nuzzle her hair, but there were a number of pins holding it in place, so he began to remove them. The loosened curls fell in a slow cascade of raven black, and she shook her head a little, sighing in pleasure.

“Oh, I’m sorry to say it, but that feels so good,” said Claire. “I’m not sure why women agree to inflict such misery on their poor scalps.”

“Because,” said Edward, who had pulled a handful of hair aside to kiss her neck, “it looks so wonderful coming down.”

“Mmm,” she said, and smiled up at him. “Did your mother complain about hairpins, too?”

Edward took a deep breath. Such an innocuous question, really, and it was embarrassing  that he had told her so little about his parents. Still–

“I hardly knew my mother,” he told Claire. “She spent very little time at Wrensmoor after I was born–I don’t suppose she was here for more than a month or two a year. She died when I was seven.”

“Oh Edward, I’m sorry,” Claire began.

“Shh,” he told her, putting a finger to her lips. “It’s all right. I felt it, of course, but Frederick and my father suffered much more. In a way, I don’t think my father ever recovered from her death. Strange, really–they spent so little time together when she was alive.”

“Perhaps if the love is deep enough, proximity is not required.”

Edward nodded. “Perhaps.”

Why had he told her so much?  His childhood had been idyllic in its own way–a castle, a river, the cook sneaking him treats, the groomsmen allowing him run of the stables–but his mother had never been a part of it. And his father–

More than a decade after his death, the old earl’s attitude toward his younger son could still cause pain. Frederick had been the golden-haired boy, happy, charming, thoughtless Frederick.  Perhaps it would have been better if Edward hadn’t adored his older brother as well. His father clearly considered his second son a disappointment by comparison, and for years Edward had tended to agree with him.

The river murmured, the geese quieted, and they drowsed in the warm sun, although–with Claire nestling close–the earl could not truly sleep. Tremayne House has no window seats, Edward was thinking, and he made a mental note to summon the carpenters when he returned to London.

Claire won’t be coming to town, said a niggling inner voice. Would you put in a window seat for your new mistress?

“Edward?”

“Hmm?” 

“Do you know yet when you will return to town?” his wife asked, a bit muzzily, as if she had been reading his thoughts in her sleep.

“No . . . ” he said. “I have no plans as yet.”  Speaking the words, he realized they were the truth. He had no thoughts as yet of leaving Wrensmoor. It must be the first time in years he hadn’t itched to return to London from the day he arrived in the country.

That’s hardly a mystery, he reminded himself. Not with Claire here, and no need to wait weeks before he could take a woman into his bed. He wondered how he had managed in the past, when it seemed that he could no longer endure even half a day without bedding his wife. If the past week was an indication of the current strength of his . . . requirements, once in London he would need to find a mistress very quickly indeed.

Claire twisted in his lap and grinned at him mischievously. “My lord,” she said,  “It occurs to me that hide-and-seek is for children. Might I ask how you employed this window seat as a young man?”

“I believe it was vacant, madame wife,” he replied. “I bedded most of
my
young ladies in the hayloft.”

She giggled, and Edward could resist no longer. He began to caress her, and they shared a long, heated kiss until Claire broke away, panting for breath.

“Oh, Edward, do you think–”

He pushed her down into the cushions, consumed by the intensity of his need. She tried to squirm away, and he realized she was fretting that someone might walk into the study. He reached over for the curtain and pulled it closed with a quick jerk. Claire was still struggling to get up.

“But, my lord, anyone could hear–”  

“I don’t care,” he said, unbuttoning his trousers. He ran a hand along the smooth length of her calves, and she sank back down into the cushions.

“Claire,” he said over and over as they made love. “Claire.”

Chapter Ten

“Come to bed, my love.”

These words were repeated each night as Edward lay back in a mound of pillows, smiling his lazy, toe-curling smile and watching Claire brush out her hair in front of the glass. The words thrilled her, but at the same time they made her uneasy. ‘The incident in the window seat,’ as Claire had come to think of it, marked the beginning of weeks of contentment and passion between her and her husband. Even so, she was not really his “love” at all.

The mild English midsummer had arrived, and warm sun washed over the Kentish hills. She and Edward rode every day in the cool of the morning, roaming wide with Achilles and Athene. Claire learned a lot about the countryside from her husband. It was clear that he delighted in his estate and took his responsibilities to the people living there seriously. Wrensmoor Park was a far larger place than Claire ever could have imagined. She gathered up names and bits of local history and was heartened–but not really surprised–to learn that the earl was held in considerable respect by his tenants. The land was rich and husbanded well. The hops fields–she had smelled them from the carriage that first day–were expected to yield a good crop that year, and Edward checked on their progress every few days.

“Jimmy!” he would call out, as they rode up to the oast house. “Come on out, ye scurvy dog!”  It was apparently an old joke between the two men. Jimmy Wyndhall would emerge with a fistful of hops vine, and the two men would confer over–well, whatever one conferred over with hops.

Once Claire took a few of the queer little pine-cone shaped flowers and crushed them between her fingers. “Bitter,” she said, inhaling the pungent aroma.

The foreman’s face was badly scarred, the mark of a sword cut running from forehead to chin.  He gave Claire one of his crooked smiles. “Aye, milady.  Bitter it is, bitter it should be.”

“I take it this is an advantage for the brewing of ale?”

“Aye, milady, right necessary. The Englishman wants ’is beer,” said Jimmy with a satisfied grin,  “and ’tis our job to give ’im the bitter hops for it.”

The amiable, albeit ferocious-looking, Jimmy Wyndhall was a favorite of Claire’s, but she also took particular delight in the children of the estate. Apparently her husband was known for his own interest in the children, and Claire wondered at this, since he seemed to have spent little time at Wrensmoor during the past few years. The young ones crowded around the earl at every cottage where he stopped, and he knew virtually all of them by name. She cherished the memory of one late-afternoon visit, when Edward, babe in arms and another child riding on his broad shoulders, had been led by an insistent nine-year-old to see the tree fort “what we builded all by ourselfs.”  Her husband had expressed his admiration for the youngsters’ construction skills and promised to allow them to attach the Ketrick coat of arms to the tree.

“For,” as he told the child, “I am thy liege lord, and thee must be ever on the lookout from this noble tree for those who would ere plunder our castle.”

This speech produced paroxysms of delight in its hearers, and Claire suspected other tree forts would soon be scattered throughout the estate.

* * * *

 Husband and wife often spent evenings together in the library. They had quickly discovered a shared love of ancient history, and Edward was astonished to find that Claire’s ability to read classical languages was nearly equivalent to his own. It became a game for one of them to pick out an obscure passage and read it aloud in Greek or Latin. The listener was then required, on penalty of a kiss–Edward’s idea–to both translate the excerpt and identify its author.

The earl succeeded at this diversion rather less often than Claire believed he ought to.

“‘Dariou kai Parysatidos gignontai duo,’” she read one evening. “‘Presbyteros men Artaxerxes, veoteros de Kyrus.’”

Her husband frowned in a parody of concentration. He shook his head. “I don’t seem to recall that particular passage,” he said.

“Ha!” said Claire, and she flounced over to sit on his lap. “Deceitful knave, I have caught you 
la main dans le sac
.”

“Red-handed?”  He grinned at her and tried to take his kiss, but she batted him away.

“Indeed, and well you should be ashamed. For that, my dear sir, is the first line of Xenophon’s
Anabasis
–‘Darius and Parysatis had two sons born to them–’”

“My memory seems to have failed me–”

“–and therefore, a line which you know perfectly well, as does every other schoolboy in England.”

“Hmm,” replied Edward, unrepentant. His caresses grew warmer, and Xenophon dropped from Claire’s hand to the floor. She had a lace fichu tucked into the neckline of her gown; Edward’s removing it was the work of a moment, and he tugged at the fabric of her bodice until he had exposed almost the whole of her bosom.

“You will tear my gown, and Madame Gaultier will be terribly upset,” Claire told him.

“I will buy you any number of gowns,” he growled,  “but this one is coming off.”

His fingers were entwined in her hair. Pulling her head back, Edward pressed a searing line of kisses from the angle of her jawbone to her breasts, and she felt that strange, demanding excitement build, the heat that seeped into her bones and made her light-headed. She could deny him nothing.