James drove into Sophia again and again, reveling in her tight, slick heat as she tightened and pulsed around him. The feel of her fingernails in his back and the sound of her amorous cries brought his own pleasure to the fore. For days and days he had waited for this. Finally, he thrust hard and deep to spill into her and feel at last the trembling, debilitating pleasure of his own release.
He relaxed his weight upon her and waited for his breathing to return to normal, while Sophia lightly stroked his back. Her gentle fingers soothed him. Made him want to hold her closer.
A few minutes later, not wanting to crush her precious, slender body beneath his own, he rolled off her and kissed her cheek.
“Will you stay all night?” she asked, in a quiet, careful voice.
“Yes.”
He pulled her close and held her, and again like the first time he’d made love to her on their wedding night, he began to forget who he was. James fell asleep, but it was a restless sleep, full of the usual dark dreams.
Sophia woke in the middle of the night, and James was gone.
Naked, her bare arms chilly on top of the covers, she sat up. The moon in the window cast a light upon the bed, and she leaned over the side to reach for her nightdress, in a heap on the floor. She pulled it on over her head and sat for a moment, thinking.
He had left her again. She should not be disappointed, for even though he had said he would stay, she somehow knew he would leave.
Yet, it seemed that her head could not always control her emotions. She was coming to realize that giving James the space he wanted was impossible. In her family, whenever something was bothering any one of them, they always talked about it and worked it out and everyone felt better afterward. There was never this silence, this ignoring of emotions, pretending everything was fine. She needed to talk openly to James about their relationship. Her own happiness—and her mental equilibrium—depended upon it. She needed to understand why he did not want to love her, and she would not accept that loving one’s wife was simply not done.
Sophia climbed out of bed and padded across the cold stone floor for her shawl. Shivering, she struck a match to light her candles, wondering when she would find the time to undertake the installation of hot-water heating. Before the snow came, she hoped, because this coal-in-the-fireplace procedure was just plain primitive.
Carrying her candles out into the silent, dark corridor, Sophia walked to James’s room. She knocked lightly, but did not wait for a reply before she pushed the door open. A welcome heat touched her face as she entered.
James sat in front of a roaring fire, staring at the flames, a full glass of brandy in his hand. “I couldn’t sleep,” was all he said.
A spark snapped loudly in the grate.
“Neither could I.” She set down her candles and knelt on her knees in front of him. “I was cold.”
“Come here, then.” He pulled her onto his lap.
Sophia sat for a moment, enjoying the relaxing feel of his chest rising and falling beneath her, his thumb rubbing her shoulder. She wondered anxiously if she should try to be content with this level of intimacy— which was the best she’d had since they arrived here— rather than push him for more. She decided to keep things light, at least to begin with.
“Is it always this cold in October?”
“No, this is unusual. I won’t be surprised if the snow spoils our shooting party.”
“Will we still have it?”
“Yes, the guests come for much more than the game.”
She could smell the brandy on his breath and had to fight the urge to kiss him, for if she started that, they’d never get to talking. Sitting forward, she turned to face him, and moved a lock of his dark hair away from his forehead.
“Can I say something to you?”
His hesitation revealed an unease. “Of course.”
She gently combed her fingers through his hair. “You won’t get angry?”
A hesitation again. “That depends on what you say. ”
She paused, thinking about how she should begin and how she could phrase things to avoid sounding like she was attacking him. She needed to burrow in gently.
“I’ve been thinking about the things you said to me before you went to London, and the way I reacted, and I wanted to apologize for my behavior—for being so angry.”
She took note of his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, and knew she had knocked him a little off kilter.
“You have nothing to apologize for. All of this must be a difficult adjustment for you.”
She gazed at the firelight reflecting in his eyes, and nodded. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult. But I do want you to know that I’m doing my best, James. I want to be a worthy duchess.”
His expression softened, and she knew she had broken through at least one barrier. All the better to reach a deeper one.
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. A quivering of warmth moved through her. “You’ve been more than worthy, Sophia. The tenants adore you.”
“But your mother doesn’t,” she said with a smile, still burrowing…
“Mother is a tough nut to crack. In fact, I’m not even sure if she is a nut. A stone, more like it, but stones do break.” He squinted with humor. “If, for instance, they’re dropped from a high tower.”
Sophia laughed out loud. “Are you saying I should push her out the window?”
“Of course not,” he replied, laughing, too. “Though I shouldn’t joke about such things. It has happened.”
Sophia felt her amusement drain away. “It has? When?”
He shook his head as if to dismiss it. “It was a long time ago.”
“Someone was murdered?”
“No, not murdered. The second duchess of Wentworth took her own life. She threw herself out her window.”
A cold chill moved through Sophia as she remembered what Florence had told her about James’s father drinking himself to death, and his grandfather shooting himself in the head. She couldn’t imagine life being so horrific that a person could lose all hope. But as she thought about that portrait of James’s ancestor in the hall, Sophia began to feel a deep sympathy for the woman.
“She jumped from
my
window?” she asked as an afterthought, curious about the details.
He grimaced. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a long time ago. Things were very different then.”
How different
? she wondered uneasily.
Sophia settled her head on his shoulder again, distracted from all the things she had wanted to say when she’d tiptoed down the hall. The flames in the fireplace leaped and danced as a gust of wind blew down the chimney. James picked up his glass and sipped his brandy.
“Has your mother always been the way she is now?” Sophia asked.
“As long as I can remember.”
“That must have been difficult for you, growing up. What was your father like?”
To Sophia’s dismay, James gently lifted her off his lap and rose from the chair.
“Worse,” he replied.
She felt the coolness of his departure like an icy frost on her skin. He crawled onto the bed and pulled the covers back. His voice was erotically appealing. “Come and lie down with me.”
Something he had said to her the night before he left for London repeated in her mind:
You don’t know me
.
It was true. She didn’t know her husband. She knew nothing.
The desire she usually felt when he looked at her the way he was looking at her now eluded her. It was a need to understand him that was overcoming her.
“Was he cruel to you?” she asked bluntly.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
The seductive look in his eye vanished with the sudden realization that she wanted to talk. “Yes, viciously cruel. I’d presumed you would have heard the gossip about him in one of the London drawing rooms, or at least from the Countess of Lansdowne. You were staying with her, after all, and you’d heard just about everything else.”
Sophia remembered something Florence had said: “Who knows what secrets live in that vast country castle of his? I would wager quite a few.”
Sophia wished she had pressed her for more information about that. “No, I didn’t know. Only what you told me that day in the park.”
His chest heaved with a sigh. Was it annoyance? Or defeat?
“Well, now you do. Why not come to bed?”
“Was he cruel to your mother, too?”
James let his hand drop onto the covers. “He was cruel to her; she was cruel to him. Everybody was cruel to everybody. But my father’s dead now, and I think I’ve managed to exorcise this house of at least some of its demons.”
“What kind of demons?”
“The kind that spoil my sleep. Are you going to keep torturing me like this? The least you could do is lean back while we’re talking, so I can’t see down your dressing gown.”
She realized she was indeed leaning forward. Her gown was unbuttoned at the neck, and James could surely see everything. She pressed her hand to her chest with a sudden sense of modesty. “I’m sorry,” she said ridiculously.
He shook his head at her and spoke with a seductive smile. “Don’t apologize.”
He rose from the bed and approached, then pulled her hand away from the gown so it fell loose around her breasts. He reached a hand inside and touched her.
Sophia gazed up at him standing before her in the firelight, wearing only his black silk robe, his hands warm as he fondled her nipple. She remembered the man he had been on their honeymoon. That man had not been real. The real James had been wearing a mask and she had been completely unaware of that fact.
Now, at least she knew.
She also knew that the mask was tilting, just a little—for she understood something about his family and the events that had shaped him. Perhaps it was possible that a bond could grow between them, that the man she had fallen in love with did exist somewhere beneath this cool shell of indifference.
“Did he beat you?” she asked, surprising even herself with her persistent interrogation, but she wanted to know as much as possible.
“Yes. He had a temper. He beat my mother and my nurses and governesses, who all took it out on me.” James pulled her to her feet, and she wondered how he could speak so casually about all of this.
“What about Lily?” she asked, trying to fight the ache in her heart at the horror of what he was telling her.
“Probably. Though I was gone by that time.”
“Gone where?”
“To school. Then abroad in the summers.”
She took his face in her hands. “Not all families are like that, James.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, meeting her gaze. “But for us, it’s been a contagious disease that has been passed down for generations, and it needs to be snuffed out.”
“Snuffed out?”
“Yes.” He took her by the hand, led her to the bed, pulled her nightdress off over her head so she stood naked before him. He took her face into his own hands and leaned down to kiss her lips, whispering at the last moment, “By me.”
He did not appear to be emotional about it—he seemed only to be calculating and determined as he spoke those words and eased her down onto the soft coverlets. Sophia wondered fleetingly how he intended to go about such a thing, then gave up her thoughts for a more tangible, pleasurable pursuit. She promised herself she would learn more about it later.
James—having spent a lifetime pushing his emotions away—felt their violent assault like a cannon going off inside his brain. He was embarrassingly distracted while he kissed and fondled his wife, and he had no choice but to acknowledge the reason why.
She had deliberately opened a wound.
He shouldn’t have said so much, he thought, feeling the silky warmth of her skin beneath him, smelling the sweet scent of her arousal as he dropped kisses along her flat belly. His beautiful American wife had come here to nudge her way into his life, and he had permitted it. He had answered all her questions, and now he felt exposed.
Strangely, he still felt like he was in heaven when he entered her—despite the trembling, emotional vulnerability that was sliding like a snake around his heart.
He brought her to a climax shortly before he allowed himself to give in to his own, but none of their lovemaking was as simple as he would have liked. Yes, he found pleasure in her body, but at the same time there was an odd urge to leap into a deeper relationship with her—like he used to leap off the stable roof into the haystack below when he was a boy. What a joy it was—to sail through the air and land softly in the dry, crackly hay, even though there was fear, the second before he jumped.
Would I land softly with Sophia
? he wondered, as he drew himself out of her with a sigh and rolled onto his back.
James thought of his father. He’d become a monster because he couldn’t be with the woman he loved, and because the woman he married was cold, distant, and cruel. Similarly, James’s grandfather had lost his head when his wife had run away with her lover. The jealousy had driven him to unthinkable acts of madness, and he’d ordered their deaths. Of course, no one had ever been able to prove that they had been shot by anyone other than highwaymen. There were only whispers…
Sophia was neither cruel nor cold nor distant. Nor had she ever given him any reason to think he could not trust her to be faithful. She seemed to want love. With him. At least, that’s what she’d said.
With a happy little moan, Sophia snuggled closer to him, and he held her tightly in his arms and kissed her forehead. He would sleep the rest of the night with her, he decided.
He wondered if his father, in all his obsessiveness, had ever felt a tender yearning like this.
Tender yearning.
James felt a tremor of bewilderment deep inside his chest,
Is this love, or the beginnings of it
? he wondered. For tender was how, in his purely logical mind, he’d always imagined real love would be. For those who were capable of it.
That night, Marion sat at her desk by candlelight, laying an exquisite opal-and-diamond necklace into a box and wrapping the box in tissue paper. She wept quietly, so as not to wake her maid, lamenting the fact that the necklace was a family heirloom, and sending it to Paris was going to break her heart. She would never see the necklace again, but what choice did she have?