The Blacksmith's Wife (23 page)

‘I never left your side.’

‘But you should be in York by now!’ Joanna struggled to sit up. Hal eased himself closer and put a finger to her lips.

‘York doesn’t matter. How could I leave you, even for an instant, until I knew you were safe?’ he asked incredulously.

‘But the guild! It’s all you’ve ever wanted,’ Joanna protested. Guilt racked her, that she had been the cause of his failure. ‘It’s everything you’ve worked for. It’s why...’

Her stomach writhed. ‘It’s why you married me.’

Hal drew his legs up and lay with Joanna on the bed. His chest was firm beneath her, his powerful arms locked tightly around her. She lay back in his embrace, not wanting to be anywhere else.

‘There’s something I want more,’ Hal said. ‘Something I’ve wanted for so long now I can’t even remember when I started wanting it. Needing it.’ He rolled on to his side and put his hand to Joanna’s cheek. ‘Needing
you
. Nothing matters unless you are with me.’

‘You gave up your chance for me?’ Joanna asked.

‘There will be other chances,’ Hal said, shrugging. He smiled suddenly. ‘As for giving it up for you, I’m more confident than ever that I’ll succeed because of you.’

He reached below the bed, pulled out a bundle and laid it across Joanna’s lap. As he unrolled it she was transported back to the dismal inn where they had sat so long ago as angry, grieving strangers.

‘Look,’ Hal instructed softly.

Joanna studied the sword that lay before her. Tears blurred her vision as she recognised herself in the figure.

Hal gazed at her, his eyes burning with desire. ‘I couldn’t let you into the forge. I wanted it to be a surprise. To make you understand how much you mean to me. How you’ve inspired me.’

Joanna started to speak, but the emotions assailing her choked her words so instead she simply ran a finger gently across the pommel.

‘It kills me to know I will only ever be a pale imitation of what you want,’ Hal said quietly.

‘You’re no imitation! How can you think that?’ The suspicions Hal had aired in their fight came back to her in a rush, bringing her voice with them. ‘I don’t want Roger. I haven’t wanted him for so long. What you think I’ve done isn’t true.’

Joanna clutched at Hal’s arm and stared into his eyes, frantically willing him to believe her.

‘I know. Roger told me what he asked you to do and that you refused him.’

‘Is that why you came to find me?’ Joanna asked.

Hal took her hand and raised it to his lips, sending waves of desire surging through Joanna. ‘I didn’t find out until after I brought you home. I came looking for you because I love you.’

Her heart sang at the words she had so longed to hear. ‘Say that again,’ she whispered.

Instead of speaking he dipped his head and kissed her, slowly and fully, leaving her breathless. Joanna closed her eyes, giving herself over completely to the sensation and not opening them until Hal pulled gently away. He took her face between his hands.

‘I’ve been such a fool. Jealous and inattentive. I could hardly censure you if you
had
run to him for companionship. I’ve kept secrets and shut you out. I should have trusted you to understand about Kitty and told you everything from the start.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that Roger knew we were to marry?’ Joanna asked.

‘Because I knew you loved him. I thought hiding his knowledge of our marriage would cause you less pain,’ Hal said. ‘Can you forgive me? I swear to you, there are no more secrets.’

‘Can I trust you?’ Joanna asked.

‘Completely,’ Hal answered. ‘I was scared you would hate me if you found out what I’d been hiding, but nothing I could reveal would be as terrible as losing you.’

She stared deep into his dark eyes, seeing the sincerity in them.

‘Then I forgive you if you will forgive me.’ Joanna said seriously. ‘I’ve kept secrets of my own, but that has to stop, for both of us. No more secrets.’

‘No more,’ he agreed, bending to kiss her.

She laced her fingers through Hal’s and guided their hands to her belly, trembling slightly as she prepared to reveal her remaining secret.

‘I’m carrying your child.’

She eyed him cautiously, terrified that after everything that had happened he would be angry or disappointed but Hal’s smile of joy melted any doubts she had that her child was wanted.

‘I know. I guessed. For a while I believed...’ His cheeks coloured and he looked away. ‘Never mind what I believed.’

He stroked his hand over the flatness of her stomach. ‘I love you,’ he repeated.

He smiled, sending Joanna’s heart racing with desire. ‘I should have told you as soon as I knew, then perhaps half this nonsense might have been avoided. I vow that I’ll speak those words every day I live. I love you, Joanna, and my heart will be yours as long as you want it.’

She slid her arms around his neck, pressing herself close until there was no space between them. The powerful need for him filled her, obliterating all other sensations, and a rush of desire took her breath away. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, feeling the heat rising from him. Her entire body pulsed with longing.

‘I want it now and forever,’ she breathed. ‘I love you.’

Hal wrapped his arms around Joanna as tightly as hers were around him. His feet twined themselves between hers until their limbs were tangled together.

‘Be my wife properly, Joanna.’

‘What does that entail?’ she asked.

Hal’s lips curled into a grin containing the promise of pleasures to come. Joanna saw her own desire mirrored in his eyes. She pressed herself closer to his body, raw desire pulsing through her. She ran a fingernail down the side of Hal’s neck, delighting in the groan of passion that erupted from him.

‘Why don’t we find out together?’ he breathed.

Joanna smiled coyly.

‘I like that idea.’

She raised her head, tilting her lips to meet Hal’s and preparing to lose herself in the love she knew would be hers as long as ever she wanted it.

* * * * *

If you enjoyed this story, you won’t want to miss these other great reads from Elisabeth Hobbes

A WAGER FOR THE WIDOW
FALLING FOR HER CAPTOR

Keep reading for an excerpt from
PLAYING THE DUKE’S MISTRESS
by Eliza Redgold.

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Playing the Duke's Mistress

by Eliza Redgold

Chapter One

What!
shall I sell my innocence and youth
,

For wealth or titles
,
to perfidious man!

To man
,
who makes his mirth of our undoing!

The base
,
profest betrayer of our sex!

Let me grow old in all misfortunes else
,

Rather than know the sorrows of Calista!

Nicholas Rowe:
The Fair Penitent
(1703)

Covent Garden, London—1852

‘N
o dinners with dukes,’ said Calista firmly as she wriggled out of her costume and stepped into her petticoats, one lacy layer after another. ‘You know my rule.’

‘Please, Calista,’ Mabel entreated from the other side of the painted screen. ‘It’s a private supper party.’

Calista’s fingers trembled as she adjusted the waistband of her top petticoat. She forced herself to keep a steady hand. She’d lost more weight and had to pull it tighter than usual. ‘A private supper is even worse.’

She tossed a light cotton wrapper over her bare shoulders and tied the ruffled edges loosely across her corset. She knew she ought to put on her dress or even a woollen shawl, but her skin was still warm from the glare of the gas footlights.

Mabel’s voice became a whine. ‘I can’t attend if you don’t come with me. It’s at the Coach and Horses, upstairs in one of those dining rooms. I’m longing to see it. Do you intend to keep me apart from Sir Herbert?’

Calista stepped out from behind the screen and sat down at the dressing table, resting her elbows among the pots and jars of creams and powders.

‘Last month you were besotted with a marquis,’ she reminded her friend, who was slouched on the
chaise longue
in a pink silk dressing gown. ‘Now it’s a baronet. It’s actresses like you who give us all a bad name.’

She softened her reproving words with a smile. Mabel had a good nature, even if she did care more for flirtation than learning her lines.

Mabel giggled. ‘A bad name has turned many an actress into a lady or a duchess.’

Calista sighed. Ever since a flurry of actresses had married into the aristocracy, many young women had come to consider the theatre as no more than a marriage market. It made it very difficult for those who aimed to become the best at their craft, as she did. Gentlemen from the audience hung around by the stage door, making advances, which Calista was forced to fend off, sometimes politely, sometimes by calling the doorkeeper to hasten the men away. The members of the aristocracy, she’d discovered, the more time she’d spent in the theatre, were the worst. They seemed to think they had offstage rights to an actress, in some form of
noblesse oblige
. A few so-called gentlemen behaved as if she were no more than a lady of the night. Indeed, some seemed to think actresses and courtesans were one and the same thing.

Calista shuddered inwardly. She’d determined to stick to her rule more firmly than ever before since that awful incident that had occurred a few weeks ago. She’d told no one about it, not even Mabel. It still shook her to think of it, but she had to carry on coming here, carry on performing. She had no choice.

‘I know you have your rule, Cally, but perhaps I’ll be doing you a favour if you come to the supper party,’ Mabel wheedled. ‘It’s true my dearest Herbie is only a baronet, but his cousin is a duke with an enormous fortune. Why, he’s the Duke of Albury!’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

Mabel made a faint moan. ‘He sounds terrifying. Herbie told me to bring along another actress to keep him company tonight. I thought of you immediately. You can cope with anyone.’

Calista picked up a pot of
crème celeste
, her favourite cold cream. It could remove the thickest powder and paint. She wanted to help Mabel. Beneath her friend’s brazen exterior, Mabel’s heart had been bruised more than once. Still she hesitated. ‘Can’t you ask someone from the chorus?’

‘I could,’ Mabel said doubtfully, ‘but you’re the leading lady. Herbie said the duke is frightfully intelligent and to pick someone who would keep him entertained.’

‘I have no desire to entertain a duke,’ Calista said crisply. ‘He can pay to see my performance, like everyone else.’

‘Please,’ Mabel begged, her blonde curls falling over her dressing gown and her big blue eyes widening in the fashion that had brought her so many admirers. ‘I’m scared to face the duke without you. You’ll know the right things to say. Do come to supper, Cally. Herbie is the man for me. I know it!’

‘I’m sorry, Mabel—’ Calista started. With her finger hovering above the pot, about to daub in the cold cream, she stopped halfway.

The rouge on her cheeks would come away, like her costume, like the part she played. It was always the same after the tumult of applause at the end of a play when the curtain went down. When she curtsied to the audience there was a moment when she came back, when she stopped playing a role and became her own self again. It was the strangest sensation, as though she was dropped back into her body from the flies above the stage. If that feeling ever disappeared she would give up acting, she’d vowed. It was a kind of vainglory to seek applause for Calista Fairmont. The claps and shouts were for the character she created on the stage, the other person she inhabited the moment she stepped out of the wings.

Tonight, she’d played Rosalind in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
. From the first until the final act she became the daughter of a duke, forced to pretend to be a boy and hide in the woods of Arden. It was a role that suited her well, the theatre critics agreed, not merely for her more-than-average height and slim figure, but because of her portrayal of Rosalind’s intelligence and wit. She’d made the role her own.

Yet recently, coming back to herself at the end of the play had felt like a jolt. Tonight in particular she’d experienced a horrid sense of deflation as she had come off stage to become once more Miss Calista Fairmont, with all her troubles. It was as if a dark cloud had edged across the painted backdrop of a perfect blue sky.

In the looking glass, she studied her reflection and saw her fingers now clenching the pot of cold cream. Her hair had been pinned up while she’d played the part of a boy. Laying down the pot, one by one she released the hairpins.

Her black locks rippled over her shoulders, but the curls were limper than they ought to have been. They shone with less gloss than before. Once they had glinted as blue-black as damson plums, or so her father had declared. Columbine had asked if they tasted like plums, too, and their father had picked the girl up in his arms and laughed, declaring that surely his daughters were sweeter than any fruit, his Calista and his Columbine.

Columbine. Her young sister had caught a chill recently and it had given her a high fever. All day she had been red-cheeked, as she had continued to cough and wheeze.

Calista stared again at her own scarlet cheeks. At least the rouge disguised her pallor, and beneath her eyes the dark circles of fatigue were hidden by the layers of powder. If only she could sleep better. Lately all she could do was toss and turn all night. One worry would turn her one way. Then when she flung herself over, yet another would grip her.

Somehow, she must carry on. It might be better to try to keep her spirits high. A supper party would be a diversion from the constant cares that gnawed at her, and Columbine would be asleep at home; her sister and Martha didn’t wait up for her, not any more. In happier days there had been supper by the fire, a chance to talk and to share the play’s successes and failures. But now she walked alone.

Alone.

Her breath squeezed through her lungs. Fear had entered into her body, ever since...

No. She refused to think about it.

She put her hand to her chest and tried to breathe. This choking grasping of air must be what Columbine experienced when she had one of her terrifying attacks. Perhaps it would be good to be with company tonight and she could go part of the way home with Mabel after the supper party.

It might be safer to walk a different way.

There was no reason to hurry home. It was best to let her sister sleep peacefully, even if she could not do the same any more, and she was hungry, too. She might be the leading lady of the Prince’s Theatre and earn wages that were higher than those she had got for playing bit parts, only speaking a line or two, but the pounds weren’t stretching nearly far enough. The cost of warm lodgings, food, the doctor’s bills...all now had to be covered by her income alone. She often pretended to have eaten supper before going home, in order to save the price of a meal. No wonder that beneath the rouge her cheeks were hollowed and fitting her slim body into a boyish costume was easier than ever.

Another long walk alone followed by a restless night full of worry suddenly seemed more than she could bear. Doing Mabel a good turn might take her mind off her cares.

Calista laid down her hairbrush. ‘All right.’

Her friend, who had slumped miserably on the
chaise longue
, stopped twirling a long golden ringlet in her hand and sat up eagerly. ‘What?’

‘I’ll come and have supper with the Duke of Albury, but I can’t promise to entertain him.’

‘You’ll come?’ A waft of rose enveloped Calista as Mabel leapt up and hugged her. ‘Oh, I’m so grateful, Cally, and my Herbie will be, too. You won’t regret it!’

Calista sighed as she put the lid back on the unused cold cream. Already she suspected she would.

* * *

Darius Carlyle, the Duke of Albury, stretched out his long legs and waited for the actresses to enter the private dining room of the Coach and Horses Inn. The small wood-panelled room, where the oak was scratched and rubbed worn in some places, was safely upstairs, away from the crowd at the tables and bar, yet noise drifted up through an open, lead-paned window from the street below. The fog had crept in earlier in the evening, but it barely muffled the sounds of raucous voices and laughter that rang out all night in this part of London.

Inwardly he groaned. He could be in his comfortable club right now, or at home in his bed in his Mayfair town house, the thick curtains drawn. Why had he allowed himself to get caught up in his younger cousin’s affairs yet again? It wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to rescue Herbert from some kind of scrape. Darius had been rescuing him ever since their childhood, when they had attended the same boarding school, and it seemed he was still forced to do so. Herbert was a fool, but he was a Carlyle. As head of the Carlyle family it was up to Darius to sort things out, as usual. No Carlyle would get into this particular mess ever again.

Actresses. His cousin could always pick them. They were like showy birds, fine feathered, their cheap clothes brightly coloured, with too much paint on their faces.

And they always had claws.

Now one of them had got her talons into Herbert and it didn’t sound as if she was going to let go.

She would be made to let go, if he had anything to do with it.

He picked up his whisky glass and tossed back the remnants. He’d use the supper party as an opportunity to assess how far the situation had gone. It would be better to be cruel than to be kind and nip the affair in the bud. He was fonder of his cousin than he cared to admit, always had been. But it was his duty to ensure the Carlyle name wasn’t dragged once more through the mud of scandal. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it had to be done, and Darius never shirked his duty.

Herbert fancied himself in love, but he hadn’t yet made the mistake of proposing to the girl—not that it would make any difference if he had. Proposing marriage to an actress could always be hushed up as long as there was enough money thrown about to muffle the gossip. Actresses could always be bought off. He knew that much.

Darius drummed his fingers on the table. The only question was how much money it would take. Tonight he would find out how greedy and ambitious the actress who’d hooked Herbert was.

Tonight he would put an end to Herbert’s infatuation.

The Carlyle curse must be broken.

The door of the private dining room opened. In came the actresses, two of them, followed by Herbert.

Darius’s lip curled.

The woman with whom Herbert was currently besotted entered the wood-panelled room first. He’d caught a glimpse of her with his cousin before. She wore a purple feather in her improbably golden hair and a low-cut dress that displayed her ample bosom to full effect.

Beaming with pride, Herbert stepped forward. Beneath his sandy hair he’d never lost the plump round face of his childhood. He looked like an excited schoolboy holding an iced bun. ‘Darius, may I introduce Miss Mabel Coop.’

‘Your Grace,’ she said in an accent that made him wince. She swept low into a curtsy, displaying even more of her deep cleavage.

Herbert’s eyes popped.

‘Charmed.’ For a moment Darius wondered if his cousin had gone mad. Could any man willingly contemplate a lifetime of listening to that voice?

He turned to the other, taller woman who had entered the room.

Darius frowned. The young woman’s face was simply covered in paint. Her cheeks were a bright red and she wore thick powder over what appeared to be a fresh complexion. Why did actresses get themselves up in such a fashion? He loathed such artifice.

However, her garments were less showy than her friend’s. She wore a grey woollen cape and beneath it a dress of dark blue that only revealed the upper part of her
décolletage
. She was thin, too thin for his taste, although her collarbones, he noted, were particularly delicate.

His eyes returned to her face. To his surprise she met his gaze with deep-blue eyes fringed with dark lashes. Her expression held a hint of humour, as though she was aware of his rapid assessment.

Unexpectedly he experienced a flare of physical attraction. He suppressed it instantly.

‘I’m Miss Fairmont,’ she said after a moment, when it appeared Herbert was unable to wrest his attention from the charms of Miss Coop for long enough to perform introductions. Her voice was low and husky, with no discernible accent.