In the Wake of the Wind (10 page)

Aiden’s smile faded as he absorbed this extraordinary statement. “My dear girl,” he said slowly, “are you telling me that you honestly don’t know what your position is?”

“Yes,
I know perfectly well. I’m married to you, and now you can hate me for being penniless on top of everything else. And if you think I care,” she added belligerently, “I don’t. I’m perfectly accustomed to being poor, which you apparently are as well. So now we are poor together, and I hope you’re satisfied, because I’m miserable!”

Aiden frowned, realizing that she really didn’t know about her money, which only confused him more.
“Serafina
… tell me something. Why did you agree to marry me?”

“I’m beginning to wonder that exact thing.
I
thought I loved you. I thought you loved me.” She untwisted his handkerchief and blew her nose again.

“But how in God’s name could you think we loved each other when we’d never even met?” he asked incredulously. “I know when we spoke yesterday that you said you loved the man you were going to marry, but love is something that can’t exist unless two people actually know each other. It doesn’t happen as a result of an agreement between families, not when the two immediate parties have never had any contact.”

Serafina
rubbed her forehead hard, looking equally confused on that point. “I—I suppose the idea had been in my head for so long that I simply assumed it was true,” she said. “I couldn’t conceive of two people marrying unless they did love each other, so I made up my mind that we did.”

“I see,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, not seeing at all. “Well, that’s an interesting concept, to say the least. You—you were very much alone in Wales, weren’t you?”

“Well, I had my auntie, and Tinkerby of course.”

“Ah, yes, the inestimable Tinkerby. But did you have no one else? No friends, no other relatives who visited?”

Serafina
shrugged. “No. I don’t believe I have any relatives other than Aunt Elspeth and …” She hesitated, obviously not wanting to speak of her cousin.

“Yes, I know,” he supplied for her, beginning to understand what might be behind her reluctance, given what her cousin had said about her. “You’re referring to Edmund Segrave and his mother, and I also know that you haven’t had any dealings with them since your father died. So my point is that you lived an isolated life.”

“Well, yes,” she said, “but I didn’t really mind, because I always knew that eventually you would summon me. You were only three years late.”

Aiden slowly shook his head.
“Serafina,
I’m sorry. Please don’t interpret this the wrong way, but the truth is that I didn’t know you existed until eleven days ago.”

“What?”
Serafina
exclaimed sharply. “You can’t—but it’s not possible … Oh,
Aiden,”
she said, looking appalled, “did your poor father’s memory fail him on even this point?”

“You could say that,” he replied with an ironic twitch of his mouth. “But his memory was jogged a few weeks ago. And then I returned home and he informed me that I was to marry a woman I’d never even heard of, that it had all been arranged. I told you the reasons for that yesterday.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning heavily. “So you agreed, even though you held me in the lowest regard.”

Aiden ran his hands over his face, then heaved a sigh, trying to negotiate his way through this tangled web of misunderstandings. “Never mind that for a moment. Suppose we really hadn’t met, at least not until this morning? Suppose I’d never made any of my ill-advised statements or given you that even more ill-advised kiss? Would you have come to me with a different attitude?”

“Perhaps,” she said, looking not entirely sure herself. “But it would only have taken me a little more time to realize what a heartless cad you are, so in the end we would have been in the same position. I don’t see what real difference it makes.”

Aiden just nodded, although her words cut him to the quick. “So you think I’m a heartless cad?” he said after a long moment.

“What else can I think of you?” she said desperately. “You told me exactly what you thought of the woman you were affianced to, and yet you were prepared to go ahead with the wedding. You kissed someone you’d never met before when you were going to be married to someone else in the morning.”

Aiden grabbed her hands. “You little idiot, I was speaking of a woman whom I believed
had
coerced me. And I didn’t just kiss any woman, I kissed you!”

“The point,”
Serafina
said, pulling away from him for the third time that day, “is that you ought not to have been kissing anyone at all, not on the eve of your wedding. I find that despicable behavior. And you certainly shouldn’t have been kissing me, knowing I was going to be married to someone I thought I loved.”

Aiden
raked his hands through his hair. “Listen to me,” he roared in frustration. “I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you, no more, no less than that. And if a man ever regretted a kiss more, I’d like to find him and commiserate with him. But you can’t possibly be foolish enough to hold that against me for all time?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “You kissed me out of lust, not love. You said so yourself, that love had nothing to do with it, that you don’t even believe in love.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Why don’t we just put the kiss down to a momentary loss of sanity?” he said, desperately wishing he had never given in to the impulse. “I was there, you were there, and kissing you felt like the thing to do.”

Serafina
regarded him smugly. ‘You see, you’ve just made my point—you’re an unfeeling rogue. I suppose you still plan to get your heir on me and go off to establish your string of mistresses?”

Aiden groaned and rested his forehead on his fist. “No,” he said, eventually looking up at her. “No. I was only speaking out of bitterness when I said that, although to be perfectly honest, if you’d turned out to be what I expected, that’s probably exactly what I would have done.”

“Precisely,” she said. “Which makes you immoral on top of everything else. I’m sorry, but I cannot help but despise you.”

He pulled up a handful of grass and stared down at it as if he’d never seen the stuff before. “And why shouldn’t you? You have every right,” he said, a bite in his voice. ‘You obviously came to this marriage completely innocent—and ignorant, for that matter. And yet I’ve done nothing but malign you, even though it was unintentional, and bully you, and topple all your dreams.” He dropped his hand onto his knee and curled it into a fist, hating himself. “I made you cry, damn it.”

She touched her tongue to her upper lip. “Well … to be fair, you can’t help it that I was foolish enough to hold on to an impossible dream,” she said after a long pause, raising her eyes to his, the green softer now. “And I suppose you can’t help it that you don’t love me.”

“But
Serafina,”
he said reasonably, “how can you expect me to love you? I don’t even know you, for God’s sake.” He took her hand and held it lightly in his own, and this time, to his relief, she let him keep it. “And yet I swear to you, when you showed up in that chapel today, I was overjoyed, because at least I knew I
liked
you, which is a damned sight better that loathing the ground you walked on.”

“You like me?” she said with a surge of surprise. “How can you possibly like me? As you just said, you don’t even know me.”

“All right. Let’s just say that I like what I do know about you,” he said with a little smile. “I know that you’re honest, anyway.”

“But I haven’t been the least bit nice to you. I didn’t even want to marry you.”

Aiden laughed shortly. “You have been a little hellion, I’ll admit. But I deserved every minute of your scorn—well … most of it,” he amended. “Look,
Serafina,
why can’t we put all of this behind us? After all, we’re married now, and that can’t be undone. Don’t you think we should try to make the best of things?”

“What do you mean?” she said, renewed suspicion narrowing her eyes.

“Just that,” he said, treading very carefully. “I’d like to be your friend, if you think that’s possible.”

Serafina’s mouth dropped open.
“My
friend?”
she said in disbelief. “How can you want to be my friend when you already know what I think of you?”

“Ah, well,” he said softly, rhythmically stroking the palm of her hand with his thumb. “That’s something I’ll have to try to change, isn’t it?” He looked directly into her eyes. “But you have to be willing to let me prove to you that I’m not what you presume I am. Is that too much to ask?”

“I don’t know how you think you can change my mind,” she said with strong confusion, looking down at his hand.

“Oh,
I can think of a number of ways without straining myself too hard,” he said, his thumb making another sensuous circle, his fingers closing on hers.

“I should have known,” she said, angrily disengaging her hand from his. “Now that I’ve had a little experience with seduction I know exactly what you’re about. You’re trying to make love to me, aren’t you?” she demanded, wiping her palm on her dress.

Aiden smiled lazily. “Not just at this moment,” he said. “I thought I’d save that for later.”

Serafina
blanched, then jumped to her feet, and he silently cursed himself for having spoken so directly. He belatedly remembered what she’d said, that she thought she would go to her marriage bed with her Prince Charming, and even though the practicalities of the matter escaped her, she’d been enthusiastic. Until now.

He wanted to kick himself.

“I can’t,” she said baldly. “I—I mean, you can’t. We can’t.”

“We can’t?” he said, wondering how in hell he was going to recoup the situation. “Why not?”

“Because … because it would make me cry again.” She looked away, her mouth trembling.

“Tell me,
Serafina,
do you think you’d cry because you assume you won’t enjoy it, or because you truly can’t bear the sight of me?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“B-Both,” she stammered. “And because I know that you wouldn’t come to me in love.”

“Oh, so we’re back to this damned love thing, are we?” he said, caught in his own trap but unwilling to fill her head with a lot of romantic nonsense, as tempting as it was. “Well, I’m not going to lie to you, since I can’t tell you that I love you—you already know how I feel on the subject. But I will promise you that I’ll come to you in tenderness and with the desire to please you. Is that not enough?”

“No,” she said tenaciously. “It’s not. And you shouldn’t think it is either, although you’re so unprincipled that it obviously doesn’t matter to you what I feel.”

Aiden, hurt that she could think him so callous, stood to face her, his height forcing her to look up at him. “You’re wrong, you know,” he said tightly. “I care very much about how you feel. You do realize that many marriages have been made from less than this, that most men would insist on taking the rights legally due them?” He rubbed a hand over his eyes.

“Is that what you’re asking of me?” she inquired, meeting his gaze directly. “You want me to be your friend, to change my opinion that you’re a typical high-born cad who takes whatever he feels is his due at the expense of the woman he means to seduce, and yet in the same breath you ask me to capitulate to you as if I had no feelings of my own?”

“Is letting me make love to you really such an appalling prospect?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Serafina
nodded adamantly. “Yes. It is.” She regarded him warily as if he were a snake in the grass, poised to bite.

“All right,” he said, praying he wasn’t consigning himself to a living hell, but knowing he’d be a fool to push the situation any further if he ever wanted to win her over. “If you feel that strongly, then I won’t ask it of you.”

She stared at him. “Are you saying you don’t intend to sleep with me?”

“I’m saying that I won’t make love to you unless you wish it, but I did hope you wouldn’t be adverse to sharing my bed,” Aiden answered quietly.

“Oh. But I don’t want to share your bed,” she said, fiddling with her dress. “Not at all.”

Aiden turned away from her, clasping his hands behind his back, his head bowed as he thought his way through her latest blockade of defenses. He turned around again. “What, may I ask, do you propose instead?” he asked, a brilliant idea dawning on him.

Serafina,
stymied by the question, frowned. “I hadn’t thought that far,” she replied.

“Apparently not. What do you think our respective families, never mind the servants, are going to make of an arrangement whereby you sleep in one room and I sleep in another night after night, year after year? Don’t you think it’s going to give them all cause for speculation?”

“I—I hadn’t thought of that either,”
Serafina
said, one hand creeping to her mouth.

“Then do think about it,” he said, knowing perfectly well that he was manipulating her in a thoroughly disgraceful manner, but unable to help himself. He longed desperately to have her sweet, slim body pressed against his, hoped that maybe he could change her mind about lovemaking with a well-placed arm, a seemingly artless kiss.