“Did Clare know your plans for me?” Guy asked. “How are you two even acquainted? Do you take tea together and discuss your betrothed, the man who forced her into a life as a courtesan?”
“You don’t know,” she said with wonder. “Oh Guy, you and your honor.”
He snorted. “You adore my honor. In case you aren’t clear, I’ll never marry you. This—” He waved an arm at the daybed. “This means nothing. I owe you nothing.”
Arabella shook her head. He would never understand, he who swam in power like a fish in water. She had chosen him deliberately, used him ruthlessly: the one man certain not to be cruel, the one man whose discretion was assured, because if this became public, they would have to marry, and he was the one man certain to never marry her.
“I suppose no one has told you the truth about Clare Ivory.” She fumbled for coins to buy his servant’s silence. “But then, no one ever tells you things you don’t want to hear. Sculthorpe did not seduce and ruin Miss Ivory. They had a contract. She sold her virginity to him for three hundred pounds. She chose to be a courtesan.”
He sat up slowly. “Impossible. As my wife, she’d have received a lot more than three hundred pounds.”
“Oh, Guy. You lack sense at times, but one could never accuse you of lacking a heart.”
His eyes were shadowed and unreadable. Her own heart whispered again, begged her to stop fighting, to negotiate a truce. Once more, tears began to choke her. How he would taunt her if he knew!
He must never know. This ended here. From now on, they would be Lord Hardbury and Lady Sculthorpe, haunted by a lifetime of petty squabbles and an hour of furious sex. He would always know her secret, and she would always hate him for that. It was preferable that he despised her, for anything was better than his pity.
“What did you truly hope to achieve tonight?” he asked. “Your first time…”
“Was quite satisfactory.”
And then, because that didn’t feel like enough, she turned a shilling in her fingers and flipped it to him. He caught it one-handed.
“For services rendered,” she said, and swept out before he could reply.
Then she used every last shred of discipline to get herself home, without anyone seeing her, without shedding a single tear.
Chapter 7
The best thing about the approaching wedding was that Arabella always had something to blame.
Shadows under her eyes? Wedding. Fidgeting the entire two-day journey from London to Warwickshire? Wedding. Snappy and short-tempered? Why, blame the wedding.
And if her body tingled and throbbed with the memory of Guy’s touch, if her heart keened for what it had lost, if Mama had to recall her attention several times, because she was staring at the passing scenery and seeing nothing but Guy’s anger and scorn? Just blame the blasted wedding.
Her first measure of peace came when they arrived at their parish of Longhope Abbey, as the road turned at the ancient, twisted oak and there— Perched on a hill, golden in the afternoon sun, were the famous ruins of the abbey, run centuries earlier by the Abbess Avicia, who had ruled over this part of Mercia like a queen. How Arabella longed to ride up there, give her horse its head while the wind whipped her face and the beauty of her home soothed her.
Surely that would dispel these emotions roiling inside her, unfamiliar, unwelcome, uncontrolled. It was as though she had always believed herself to be a mountain, only to discover she was instead a volcano, full of fire and molten rock that she had not known existed until Guy’s stirring touch. Now, ugly, messy emotions were pouring out of her like so much hot, stinking mud, and it took all her willpower to keep them tamped down.
By the time they climbed out of the carriage, it was all Arabella could do not to run for the stables, now that she was home.
Not for long. Soon, this would not be her home anymore.
As they entered the front door of Vindale Court—hardly cozy, this massive pile of white arches and spires, but then, neither was she—Ramsay welcomed them.
“Your father wishes to see you,” Ramsay added in his glum manner, as if bearing bad news. Glumness was his way of achieving the solemnity fit for a butler. At heart he was as boisterous as ever—everyone had overheard him flirting with Mrs. Ramsay when they thought no one was listening—but that was beneath his dignity now.
There, another sharp pang of wretched emotion: When Arabella married Sculthorpe, she would leave Ramsay and all the staff, who tended to stay for years out of devoted loyalty to Mama. Ramsay had been a boisterous footman when Arabella was a child. She had a memory of him pulling her and Oliver in a little yellow wagon. The twins had been tucked side by side, holding hands, grinning at each other, cheering while Ramsay spun them around the yard.
She had no idea, now, why a footman had been pulling the children in a wagon. Perhaps the memory wasn’t even real. She wasn’t sure how many, if any, of her memories of Oliver were real.
Still in her carriage dress, she went to Papa’s study, where Queenie announced her arrival in the usual way, by flapping her huge green wings and crying “What a day! What a day!”
Papa hauled himself out of his armchair and took the few steps to the parrot’s perch. Pleasingly, he had regained weight while she and Mama were in London, though his coat was still loose on his tall frame. He soothed Queenie and ignored Arabella, though she could feel all the other eyes on her. Forty-seven other eyes, belonging to the twenty-four stuffed birds that perched throughout the room, an unforgiving jury that heard and judged her many failings. She knew them all: the green woodpecker, the cockatoo, the jay of Bengal. The falcon on the center table had only one eye. She called it Pirate. They got along quite well.
Forty-nine eyes, if she counted the portrait of Oliver dominating one wall, that perpetual eight-year-old angel with his rosy cheeks and fine dark curls.
What is it this time? she silently asked the little boy, who smirked at her. Smug little worm. If you’d lived long enough, you would have disappointed him too.
Finally, Papa deigned to acknowledge her, studying her with eyes so like her own.
“Congratulations. You have managed to stay engaged to Lord Sculthorpe for more than one day. I should have let him have you back in the spring. But oh no, you insisted on waiting for Guy Roth. You misjudged that one, my girl.” Papa lifted one thin hand; Queenie rubbed her beak against his finger and made that little purring sound in her throat. “But you’ve done well this time. With that illness last winter, I truly feared I would die without a grandson. I’m nicely recovered now, but I refuse to let you waste more time.” He shot her a sharp look. “I daresay marrying you off would have been easier had you grown up to be sweet and demure.”
Arabella clasped her hands. “I am exceedingly sweet and demure. And if anyone says otherwise, I shall strike them with my crop.”
“You and your jokes.” Papa shook his head wearily. “This betrothal to Sculthorpe had better not be a joke.”
The door opened and shut with a swish of skirts and air of fragrant calm. Papa continued as though Mama had not arrived.
“Sculthorpe arrives here tomorrow, I understand, and will stay until the betrothal ball. The sooner you marry, the sooner you’ll have sons. Your second boy will come here to live with us.”