What a Lady Needs for Christmas (33 page)

“That’s very generous of you, but you ought to put our last day of peace and quiet to use here. Tomorrow it’s back to the children and the holiday nonsense and being cheerful guests at a busy house party.”

She hurried off to the privacy screen, leaving Dante with cold coffee, scones that turned to the consistency of hockey pucks when cool, and kippers—which a new husband could ingest only if the tooth powder were particularly effective.

His gaze fell on the correspondence Joan had been reading. She’d left the table in such a rush that the last letter remained open beside her plate.

The sound of water pouring into a porcelain basin came from behind the privacy screen, and then Joan set about brushing her teeth.

Dante picked up the letter, though spying made him ten kinds of a cad. He endured the beating from his conscience because whatever was in the letter might have contributed to his wife’s upset.

Though learning of their relative poverty certainly hadn’t cheered her.

My Dearest Lady Joan,

Time for another cup of tea in the company of a woman I esteem greatly. Shall we say, two of the clock, same location? Likely to be less custom at that hour—a consideration I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Until next we meet, I remain,

Entirely Yours,

Valmonte

Dante set the note down exactly where he’d found it, feeling the need to wash his hands.

And get drunk.

And break something precious, delicate, and pretty into a thousand pieces.

Stronger than all those urges, though—and they were strong indeed—was a need to understand.

Valmonte had brought a female with him to the wedding, a possessive sort of young, well-fed female, who’d clung to his lordship’s skinny arm and barely left his side for the duration of the wedding breakfast.

A fiancée sort of female, and Joan had told Dante in one of their earliest conversations that she’d misstepped with an engaged man. Misstepped
once
, and she’d considered it an overwhelming folly, made possible only by strong drink and misplaced trust in the blighter’s gentlemanly honor.

To hell with that.

“If you’ll take a maid with you,” he called out to his wife, “I can bury myself in calculations and be ready for Hector’s interrogations when we return to Balfour House tomorrow.”

Joan tapped her toothbrush on the side of the basin. One, two, three times—he already knew this habit of hers, along with a dozen others. She emerged in her dressing gown, her unbound hair cascading over one shoulder.

“You are very dedicated,” she said, taking a seat at the vanity and separating her hair into three skeins. “I admire this about you.”

“Don’t admire me.” And how was it, that even as Joan prepared for an assignation, Dante loved the sight of her nimble fingers bringing order to all the fiery chaos of her hair? “I like business. I like the challenge and uncertainty of it. I expect even if we do eventually grow wealthy, I’ll not hire lackeys and managers. Some men need to drive their own curricles rather than ride around warm and dry inside a coach.”

“Some women need to make their own clothing, even though they could well afford to have others see to it.” She wrapped a ribbon around the end of her braid, tied a bow, and arranged her hair in a coronet on her head. Joan wasn’t in any way attempting to be seductive with her toilette; her hairstyle was prim, and yet, the sight of her stirred husbandly urges.

“Would you come back to bed with me if I asked it of you?”

“Yes.” She went on sliding pins into her hair, no hesitation, no blush, nothing to indicate she found the request an imposition. “I like your ambition, Dante. I understand it, even. I can’t imagine letting somebody else tend to my wardrobe. My clothing is part of who I am in a way that might not be entirely healthy. I expect commerce is like that for you.”

“I thrive on it.” But in a sense, he’d thrived on the sheer grueling drudgery of the mines too. “Come to bed with me, Joan.”

They’d never made love by the light of day, and a winter morning didn’t exactly provide a flood of sunshine, but it did require another increment of trust on the part of his wife.

She withdrew a few pins from her hair while Dante wheeled the breakfast trolley to the corridor then locked the door to the sitting room.

“You’re not getting undressed?” Joan asked when he returned. She certainly hadn’t shed any clothing. No matter how intimate they were, Joan remained in her nightgown, a proper, decent English wife.

“You might like me with my clothes on for a change.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “Or I might not.”

Did a woman intent on meeting her lover agree so easily to intimacies with her new husband? Did she all but ask for her husband to come naked to the bed? And why meet in a damned tea shop if Valmonte was Joan’s lover?

Dante took a place standing before her, their knees nearly touching. “Undress me, then.” A taunt more than an offer, and Joan picked up on the ambiguity of it.

“If you like.”

She unbelted his dressing gown, pushed it off his shoulders, and laid it across the foot of the bed. “You have nice clothing. I noticed that about you when we met on the train.”

“Not when we met in the ballrooms?”

Next she unbuttoned his waistcoat, an unpretentious affair in a dark plaid associated with his mother’s clan.

“Everybody puts on finery for a social evening. Is the silk lining for warmth?”

She ran her fingers over the pale green fabric, as if she could learn things by touch that the fabric wouldn’t confide to anybody else.

“I like the feel of it.”

He liked the feel of her fingers undoing his cuffs, too, but he did not like the sense that he was trying to prove something by taking her to bed. Old feelings, of despair mingled with arousal, rose up from his first marriage.

She peeled him out of his shirt, which meant only his plain black kilt remained, and Joan made short work of that.

He stood naked before her, half-aroused, wishing he’d never started this encounter. Men in love were fools, but they were supposed to be happy fools when anticipating the consummation of their passions.

“You don’t mind that I see you naked,” she said, wrapping cool fingers around his shaft.

Rowena would never have been so bold—poor lass. “I’ll cover up if the sight offends you.”

“I like looking at you,” Joan said, scooting back on the bed. “You are what the local ladies would call a braw, bonnie lad.”

Her Scottish accent was flawless, and her legs… Her long, pale legs, flashing at him from beneath her hems, drew his focus from questions of motivation and fidelity to the matter at hand.

“Someday, Joan Hartwell, I’d like to see you as God made you,” he said, following her onto the bed. “Someday, I would love for you to flaunt your wares for me.”

But only for him.

He prowled on all fours across the bed, until she was beneath him on her back.

“I’m skinny,” she said, scooting her dressing gown and nightgown up to her hips with about as much seductiveness as if she were piling up the dirty laundry. “I haven’t much bosom. A woman who creates dresses becomes aware of these things.”

Was that why she agreed to meet with Valmonte? Because the attentions of a wealthy, titled young man made her feel less insecure?

“You’re daft,” he said, kissing her temple. “Does a woman’s bosom run her husband’s household, so he comes home to peace and tranquillity every night? Does her bosom protect her children from all harm, and teach them their letters? Does her bosom scold a man who thinks to take on winter without his scarf and gloves? Can her bosom squeeze his hand softly at that exact moment when he feels most alone in the world?”

She kissed him, probably to shut him up, and she was smiling. “Help me get my dressing gown off.”

A concession, perhaps. Dante obliged, and in the pale light, Joan wearing only a silk nightgown was luscious.

“You would tell me if I were imposing?” Dante asked as he arranged himself once more over his wife. Would she tell him if she loved another?

Would she tell him if his lovemaking were a disappointment?

“Making love with my husband could never be an imposition.”

How certain she sounded.

“Then do me a favor,” he said, nuzzling at her shoulder. “If you take a notion to wrap your legs around me, indulge yourself.” She had discovered this maneuver the previous night, and the leverage it had given her had rendered Dante’s efforts to hold back, to wait for her, hopeless.

Again.
In any other circumstance, he would account himself a man blessed with abundant self-restraint. In Joan’s arms, he had yet to demonstrate that quality to his own satisfaction, let alone hers.

He made love to her, plied her with as much tenderness and patience as passion and marital devotion could inspire, until he faced the choice of spending or losing his erection. He pushed himself through a weak, halfhearted finish, and again thought of many such encounters with his first wife.

“Did I do something wrong?” Joan asked when Dante’s breathing had returned to normal. Her question held train cars full of uncertainty, while her touch on Dante’s hair was the embodiment of tenderness.

He waited to hear how his genteel lady wife would comment on his most recent poor showing, but she said nothing more. He slipped from her body and rose from the bed, sad, disgusted with himself, and not a little afraid for his new marriage.

“Why do you ask?”

She propped herself up on her elbows, her nightgown leaving everything below mid thigh in plain view. “I did something wrong. You don’t deny it.”

He moved behind the privacy screen, wet a cloth, wrung it out, and brought it to her, then returned to the only corner of the room where she couldn’t see him, and tended to his own ablutions.

“I’m preoccupied,” he said. “I’ve started looking at how much I should borrow to make some repairs to the mills.” He wasn’t even tempted to peek as a silence suggested Joan was making use of the cloth he’d given her.

“You were thinking of figures while we…while you—”

Mrs. Hartwell, who had an assignation to keep in less than four hours, was growing upset.

“What were you thinking of?” Dante asked, tossing a wet rag with undue force at the washbasin, glad his wife could not see that fit of pique. “Were you cutting out a new dress, selecting a book for your sister?”

“Dante?”

He came out of hiding to find his wife kneeling on the bed, her braid untidy, her expression guarded.

“I’m sorry.” He sat on the bed beside her, feeling as if he’d just completed a double shift digging at the bottom of a hot, airless shaft. “A man likes to acquit himself well when attempting to satisfy his wife’s passions.”

Needed to, in fact, with increasing desperation.

She had the hem of her nightgown between her fingers, rubbing it back and forth, the way Charlie stroked the satin edging of a blanket for comfort. Joan’s expression said she did not in any fashion comprehend his point.

Which, unaccountably, reassured him. What sort of wanton wife doesn’t understand when her husband apologizes for failing to satisfy her?

“You satisfy my passions,” she said, sounding hopelessly uncertain. “If I had a larger bosom, or more shapely hips, I might satisfy yours better.”

He tackled her, had her flat on her back beneath him, her legs loosely encircling his hips.

“We have been married barely a week. One day, my dear, you shall strut about our bedroom in the altogether, and you will enjoy it. You will enjoy driving me daft with those long, strong legs of yours, with your elegant shoulders, and your lovely bosom. You will not even notice how such a display torments and delights your husband. That’s how comfortable I hope you’ll be in your own skin.”

“You haven’t seen my bosom.”

“Nor your delightful bum, nor a bit of red hair not quite the same shade as what’s on your head.
Not
yet.
”

That gave her something to puzzle over, as if Dante had begun speaking in a foreign language, and Joan was able to catch just enough to make a faulty translation. He helped her off the bed, kissed her soundly on the mouth, and smacked her gently on her backside.

Joan remained quiet as they both dressed, and as Dante laced her up in anticipation of her shopping expedition. He bit back another offer to accompany her, bit back a thousand questions, and stifled an incongruous reprise of the erection that had become so unreliable not twenty minutes earlier.

“I’ll be glad to get back to the Highlands.” Joan sat before her vanity in a fetching ensemble of brown wool with red piping. She positioned a silly, elegant confection with pheasant feathers on her head, then tilted it to the right, studying the effect in the mirror.

“Your family will be relieved to see you’ve endured the first week of marriage without mishap.” Though Dante and his wife had just had a mishap, and were perhaps headed for something worse than a mishap.

“My sisters will interrogate me.” The angle of the hat went from attractive to perfect. Smart, elegant, and fun without sacrificing an ounce of sophistication.

“About—ah, about the wedding night. What will you tell them?”

Joan rose, a magnificent testament to exquisite style. She appropriated a matching parasol from the wardrobe and graced her husband with a sweet smile. “I shall tell them being married to you suits me wonderfully, in every regard.”

She tidied up the correspondence on the table, tucking most of it away in a valise of some sort. Valmonte’s damned note, she casually balled up and pitched into the fire.

Dante escorted her to the lobby, where one of the hotel maids waited to accompany her ladyship to the shops. When he’d kissed his wife farewell, he returned to their rooms alone and lay down on the bed, the better to wallow in his wife’s scent.

Of course Joan had destroyed Valmonte’s note. The remaining question was whether Valmonte would destroy Dante’s marriage.