An Infamous Marriage (14 page)

But she understood him much better now, which was something. He seemed less a handsome, arrogant man who took what he wanted because he could have it and more a man who still to some degree thought of himself as the awkward youth he’d once been. She got the impression he’d spent most of his twenties in a state of giddy disbelief that women actually found him handsome and enjoyed his company. He’d grown steadier with age, spending months and years instead of nights and weeks with the women in his tale. He seemed to enjoy women for more than just their bodies. He certainly listened to her when she spoke, and he understood her well—better, sometimes, than she’d wanted to be understood. Perhaps he truly did want to make something of their marriage beyond the bare minimums of law and necessity.

She hoped so, since, whether she wished it or not, much of her own happiness depended on him. She had no way out of this marriage, nor, she had to admit, did she even want one. She liked Jack so much. For as severe as she tried to be, she loved to make him smile, craved the full-throated masculine abandon of his laugh. She could spend all day admiring the way his dark curls lay on his head, or his square, strong body. She’d even had a hard time taking her eyes from his bare feet tonight. They were such male feet—big and hairy, with blunt toes and short, squared-off nails.

And, good God, when he touched her! Though she tried to tell herself it meant nothing, that it was only the practiced art of a man with much more experience than she had, it still made her breath come faster to remember him catching her cold foot between his warm hands and the feel of his thigh with its horseman’s muscles under the whispering silk of his banyan.

Soon, she promised herself. Soon.

* * *

Two days later, another letter came from Jack’s friend, Colonel Lang. “They hope to see us for dinner the day after next,” he announced.

Elizabeth set down her pen—she’d been working on the household accounts—and blinked at him. “Oh. Then we must go.” She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she was coming to accept that Jack was right and she’d allowed herself to become too much of a recluse.

He cleared his throat. “I, ah, took the liberty of telling Lang whose daughter you were, to avoid any possibility of putting either of you in an uncomfortable situation. Would you like to hear what he says?”

“I would.” It couldn’t be so dreadful if he was still willing to invite her to dine.

“He says, ‘Please assure Lady Armstrong that I would never hold against her the actions of a parent, which are now well over a decade in the past. I have more than made up anything I lost then, and I would be a sad sort of fellow if I were still dwelling on such a grudge after all this time.’”

“How kind of him,” Elizabeth said. Put that way, it did seem absurd to worry what people would think of her if they knew she had been born an Ellershaw. It
had
been a long time ago, and so many greater scandals had intervened since then. If it was hard for her to forget, it was only because it was
her
past,
her
pain.

“I hadn’t any doubt he’d say something along those lines,” Jack said. “Lang was always a good-natured fellow.”

Elizabeth sniffed. “You said he raged over his lost money at the time.”

“Of course he did. He’s good-natured, not a saint. Which is what should assure you that you need no longer trouble yourself over it. There aren’t many saints, but the world is full of good-natured people.”

“Not entirely,” she said drily. “I don’t think our dear friend Lady Dryden is such a one, and I’ve never understood it. She’s the ranking lady of Selyhaugh, and she has a fine family. What more does she want to be happy?”

She expected Jack to make some kind of sarcastic rejoinder, but instead he looked thoughtful. “For some reason we Armstrongs have always come in for an especial degree of venom from her. She isn’t cruel to everyone. If she was, I don’t think her rank alone would be enough to keep friends for her.”

Elizabeth pondered. Westerby Grange was the second-largest house in the neighborhood, with quite as much land attached to it as the Drydens had, and she thought Jack’s fortune must be not much less than Sir Henry’s. “Perhaps she only seeks to protect her position. If anyone here could rival her, it would’ve been your mother, and now me. I wish I hadn’t listened to her that day.”

“So do I,” Jack said fervently.

She shot him a severe look. “She was kind enough to me, in a distant, patronizing sort of way, when I came to marry Giles. She was shocked and angry when I married you, but she didn’t truly turn against me until I began to set up as a hostess.”

“I think that’s part of it, that she doesn’t want rivals, but I’ve always wondered if there’s a little more to it—if she might know who my sister’s father was.”

“Truly?” Elizabeth sat in surprised silence for a moment, digesting this. It would certainly explain a great deal. “Only, I don’t see how we could ever know if she did. We certainly cannot ask her.”

“Oh, no. And I have no evidence but my own suspicions, built around the fact Mother never spoke of him, nor listened long if anyone else did. If I’m right, it was Lady Dryden’s brother.”

Elizabeth blinked. Yes, that would explain
everything.
“Then why didn’t your mother marry him? He would have been of suitable rank.”

“Because he was already married by that time,” Jack said darkly.

She gasped.

“Don’t look like that! From how Mother told the story—the more I think of it, now that I’m older and understand more of such things, she may have been raped, or at least coerced or bullied into it.” He balled his hand into a fist, as if wishing to avenge a wrong almost half a century distant.

Elizabeth hunched her shoulders. “I wasn’t judging your mother. I was judging
him.
”

“But we’ll never really know. All the more so now that the
gentleman
in question is dead.”

“It would explain a great deal about Lady Dryden, if she knew or suspected such a thing. Your poor mother. I think it’s marvelous, though, that she was able to build a happy life with your father.”

“So do I.” He smiled at her, with a sweetness she’d never before seen in his expression. “It gives me hope that great happiness can spring from an inauspicious beginning.”

She couldn’t help smiling back.

* * *

Two days later she wore her second-best dress to dinner with the Langs. Jack surveyed her with approval when she met him at the bottom of the stairs. “You look beautiful.”

“I, beautiful?” She had a mirror. She knew she looked like a woman past her first youth, with straight light brown hair and light brown eyes, and that there was nothing at all remarkable about her in any way. Her blue dress was simple and suitable, but Jack must have seen far more fashionable and revealing gowns on his assorted lovers and mistresses.

“Stop refusing every compliment I try to give you.” He smiled, but there was an edge to his voice.

“I’m sorry. I just cannot grow accustomed—I know I’m hardly spectacular to look upon.”

“Did I say spectacular? No, I said beautiful. And you are. Your eyes, your smile, the way you hold your head when you’re challenging me—all beautiful.”

She bit her lip, then lifted her chin. “Then I must be sure to keep challenging you, mustn’t I?”

He caught her hand to his lips. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She took a deep breath to control her shivering response to his touch.

The drive to Alnwick took a little less than an hour, with the elder Purvis son serving as coachman for the evening. Elizabeth and Jack could have talked about anything in the closed carriage, but they began in mutual dismay over the state of the road, which was dreadful.

“Something ought to be done,” Jack muttered after they hit a particularly deep rut. “I’ll find out who’s in charge of this section and give him a piece of my mind, at the least.”

“I daresay he’d call that useless unless it came accompanied by a far larger piece of your money,” Elizabeth said drily.

“Oh, indubitably.” Jack shook his head and rubbed at his bad leg.

“Does it hurt again?”

“I put too much pressure on the wrong muscle, trying not to fall off the seat just then.”

“I could rub it,” she said daringly.

His eyebrows climbed. “Oh, could you?”

“It’s not as though you could seduce me in a carriage.”

“Oh, but I
could.
” His dark eyes gleamed with mischievous sparks. “However, not in this carriage, with young Ben Purvis driving, and most definitely not on this road. Too much chance of doing ourselves an injury if we hit one of these ruts at precisely the wrong time.”

She couldn’t help but giggle. Nor could she understand just
how
one—no, how two—could go about engaging in marital congress in a carriage, but she had no intentions of asking. He’d either mock her ignorance or be roused to further mischief. “Just so,” she agreed. “But I would like to know how to help you.”

She wanted to touch him, too, in a situation like this where it was safe. So she carefully twisted from her solitary possession of the forward-facing seat to join him on the opposite one. He blinked in surprise but made room for her.

She rested a tentative hand on his right leg, on the very outside of his thigh, just above his knee. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.

He favored her with a steady, thoughtful look, then covered her hand with his and drew it upward and inward—though not so near to his groin that she had cause to suspect him of toying with her. “Here,” he said, “and then down along here.” He traced a line down almost to his knee.

Following him, Elizabeth could feel the outline of a muscle, and as she looked closely at his legs, more closely than she ever had before, she could see the right leg didn’t quite match the left. The muscles on the right seemed more bunched, somehow, stiffer.

“I’ve watched you do this,” she said. She rubbed the heel of her hand down the length of the muscle, then came back and repeated the maneuver, but with her thumb. Good God, no wonder he was in pain. She’d rubbed and prodded her own shoulders often enough when they’d felt stiff after a day’s work with horses or sorting through the attic, but they’d never felt like this, locked into place beneath the smooth buff-colored fabric of his pantaloons. “Does this help?”

“Mm, press a little harder. Don’t worry about hurting me. It needs to hurt, to make the muscle unclench.”

She nodded and tried again, applying as much force as she could from the awkward angle.
This would be far more easily done in bed,
the treasonous and overeager portion of her mind pointed out.
Not yet,
she told it.

“Ow! Yes, like that.” He let out a slow breath, and she felt the muscle begin to loosen under her repeated ministrations.

After a moment, she couldn’t help but noticing that even as one part of his anatomy relaxed, another was stiffening. She cleared her throat and jerked her hand away.

“Elizabeth.” He caught her hand in his own. “I know you think I’m only trying to flatter you when I pay you compliments, but
that—
” he glanced down at his groin, “—doesn’t lie. I couldn’t, ah, force such a reaction to your touch if I didn’t want you. That is, find you desirable.”

She liked the unedited version better. After all, in her secret heart she wanted
him.
But she forced a lightness to her tone. “I’ve never heard
that
is particularly discerning in its tastes.”

He colored a little, then laughed. “No, not discerning, but completely honest. The discernment must come from here.” He tapped the side of his forehead. His face grew serious again, and he said, in a softer, lower voice, “And from now on I mean to exercise all my discernment in your favor.”

She wanted to kiss him, she wanted with a sort of naughtiness she hadn’t suspected she possessed to pull her hand out of his so she could touch him,
there,
rub the stiffness in instead of out. But not yet, and not now, in a bouncing carriage on the way to a dinner, of all things. So she took a deep breath and tried to find logic or, at least, a way to maintain an argument. “You can’t tell me men never manage to, ah,
perform,
with women they don’t find especially desirable. Half the arranged marriages in the world would have failed to produce heirs, if that were the case.”

He freed her hand, leaning back in the seat with a rueful chuckle. “You do like to win, don’t you?”

“Doesn’t everyone? And I’m right, aren’t I?”

He smiled crookedly down at her. “I couldn’t say from personal experience, since my only arranged marriage is to a woman I’m finding more especially desirable every day. But I suppose what those gentlemen must do is go to their wives in the dark, the better to ignore the lady they must bed and conjure up their performance by imagining someone else entirely.”

“Oh.” She wished her face didn’t feel so hot, or that at least she could get her breathing to slow down to its normal rhythm.

“With you,” he continued, “I want daylight, or at least candles burning. So I can see you, and know you see me.”

“Oh,” she said again, and turned her head to look outside the window. She couldn’t seem to summon any better eloquence than that, just then.

“I’ll wait as long as you need—but I hope it isn’t too much longer. Because I want you. By God, Elizabeth, I want you so much.”

She darted him a quick glance. “I think...it won’t be too much longer.” She watched him just long enough to see his eyes light with a kind of hungry joy before turning her attention back to the safer, calmer scenes outside the carriage window.

Fortunately another quarter hour passed before they reached Alnwick, long enough for Elizabeth to feel her normal, clear-headed self again, and for Jack’s male anatomy to resume its usual proportions. She checked, with what she hoped was a discreet glance, as he handed her out of the carriage. He winked at her, but said nothing as they climbed the steps to the Langs’ home.

No matter how forgiving Colonel Lang had sounded in his letter, Elizabeth hadn’t been able to help worrying over how he had suffered for her father’s crimes. So she was relieved by every sign of prosperity she saw around her. It was a rented house, she knew—Colonel Lang had mentioned in his letter that he and his bride had found a place within easy drive of her parents’ estate to live while they looked at their leisure for a more settled home. But it was a good house, as large as Westerby Grange but newer built, and they had a butler to open the door and bow their guests in.