by Mary Balogh
“Cass,” he said, coming toward her, his hands reaching out for hers, “alone at last. I love them all, but I thought they would never leave.”
She laughed.
“Your staff would have smirked for a month,” she said, “if everyone had left early and we had retired to bed even before it was dark.”
He chuckled.
“I daresay you are right,” he said. “They will smirk for a month anyway when we do not go down for breakfast before noon.”
“Ah,” she said, “you plan to sleep that late, do you?”
“Who said anything about sleeping?” he asked.
“Ah,” she said.
And she released her hands from his and loosened the sash of his dressing gown. He was naked beneath it. She opened it back and moved against him, feeling his warm, strong nakedness against the fine silk of her nightgown.
“Stephen,” she said, her mouth against his throat, “you have no regrets?”
He slid his fingers through her hair until his hands cupped her face and lifted it toward his.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Unfair,” she said. “I asked first.”
“I believe,” he said, “that life is made up of constant occurrences of decisions to be made. Where do I go now? What shall I eat now? What shall I do now? And every decision, small or large, leads us inexorably in the direction we choose to take our lives, even if unconsciously When we saw each other in Hyde Park and again at Meg’s ball, we faced choices. We had no idea where they would lead us eventually did we? We thought they were leading in one direction, but in reality they were leading here, via numerous other choices and decisions we have made since. I do not regret a single one of them, Cass.”
“Fate has led us here, then?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Fate can only present the choices. We make the decisions. You might have chosen someone else at Meg’s ball. I might have refused to dance with you.”
“Oh, no, you could not have done that,” she said. “I was too good.”
“You were,” he admitted, grinning.
“I might have let you go,” she said, “when I understood that you would carry on with our liaison only on your own terms.”
“Oh, no,” he said, “you could not have done that, Cass. I was too good.”
“But what are you good for now?” she asked him, lowering both her voice and her eyelids. “Only to talk through your wedding night?”
“Well,” he said, “since words do not appear to be satisfying you, I had better try action.”
They smiled at each other until their smiles faded and he kissed her.
She knew his body. She knew his lovemaking. She knew how he felt inside her. She knew the sight of him and the smell of him and the feel of him.
But she knew nothing, she discovered over the next half hour—and through the night that followed. For she had known him in lust and in guilt, and she had felt his pleasure and her own almost-pleasure.
She had not known him in love.
Not before tonight, their wedding night.
Tonight she recognized his body and his lovemaking, but tonight there was so much more. Tonight there was him. And there was her. And four separate times there was them. Or, since even that word suggested a plurality and therefore a duality, there was the entity they became when they soared over the precipice of climaxing passion together to that place beyond that was not a place and was not any state that could be described in words or even remembered quite clearly afterward—until it happened again.
“Cass,” he said sleepily when daylight was already showing its face at the window and a single early bird was already practicing its choral skills from somewhere nearby, “I wish there were a thousand ways to say I love you. Or a million.”
“Why?” she asked him. “Would you now proceed to say them all? I would be asleep long before you had finished.”
He chuckled softly.
“Besides,” she said, “I cannot imagine ever growing tired of hearing just those three words.”
“I love you,” he said, rubbing his nose across hers after propping himself on one elbow.
“I know,” she told him before he rolled onto her and showed her again without words.
“I love you,” she said afterward.
But he only grunted sleepily and was asleep.
Another bird, or perhaps the same one, was singing to someone else too, someone who was already up in that early dawn. He had not spent the night at Warren Hall. Nor had he gone to Finchley Park with the rest of the family. How could he when he and Elliott had scarcely spoken to each other for many years?
Elliott had accused him of stealing from Jonathan, who was easy prey. And Elliott had accused him of debauchery, of having fathered the bastard children of a number of women in the neighborhood.
Elliott, who had once been his closest friend and partner in crime.
Constantine had never denied the accusations.
He never would.
He had spent the night at the home of Phillip Grainger, an old friend of his in the neighborhood.
He stood now in the churchyard outside the little chapel where Stephen had married Lady Paget the day before. There were still rose petals dotted about on the path and grass, hurled at the bride and groom by the children.
He stood at the foot of one of the graves, looking down broodingly at it. His long black cloak and tall hat, worn against the chill of the early morning, gave him an almost sinister appearance.
“Jon,” he said softly, “it seems that the family will go on into another generation. Nobody has admitted anything yet, but I would wager a bundle that Lady Merton is already with child. I think she is decent after all. I know he is, though I used to wish he weren’t. You would like them both.”
A few rose petals, browning around the edges, littered the grave. Con stooped down to remove them, and he brushed one petal off the headstone.
“No,” he said, “you would love them, Jon. You always did love extravagantly and indiscriminately. You even loved me.”
He did not come often to Warren Hall these days. It was a little painful, if the truth were known. But sometimes he yearned for Jon. Even for this, all that was left of his brother—the slight mound of a grave and a headstone that had already darkened and mossed slightly with age.
Jon would have been twenty-four now.
“I’ll be on my way,” Con said. “Until next time, then, Jon. Rest in peace.”
And he turned and strode away without looking back.
THE world had been reduced to a cocoon of pain and a few blessed moments of respite in which her breath might be caught but no real rest could be grabbed.
It had been a long and hard labor, but Margaret had not stopped assuring her for hours on end that this was the very reason the birthing of a baby was called labor.
“Men know nothing,” she had said after Stephen had come for one of his frequent visits but had put up no great resistance to being shooed out again. “They cannot even bear to watch pain.”
Perhaps, Cassandra had thought from deep within her cocoon, pain was difficult to watch when one had caused it but could do nothing either to stop it or to share it. But she did not spare many thoughts to such sympathies. She spared more to the conviction that she would not allow Stephen near her ever again.
Please, please, please, please, please, she thought as she drew breath against another onslaught of pain that tightened her abdomen unbearably and ripped through her womb.
Please what?
Stop the pain?
Let this baby be born?
Let it be born alive?
And healthy?
Please, please.
The seven months of her marriage had been almost unbelievably happy ones.
They had also been filled with terror.
Her terror.
And Stephen’s, always masked with a brisk cheerfulness.
“She is doing well.” The calm voice of the physician, who
was a man and knew nothing.
“She is at the point of exhaustion.” Margaret’s voice.
“She is almost there.” The physician.
And then a deep breath and a—
Please, please.
An unbearable urge to push. And a pushing and a pushing until a voice urged her to stop, to conserve her energy until there was another contraction. And then—
Oh, please, please.
A frantic, unending pushing until all the breath was gone from her body and the world was pain and pushing—
And a gushing that suddenly released all the unbearable pressure and gave her a moment to breathe and—
A baby’s cry.
Oh.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“You have a son, my lady,” the physician said. “And he appears to have ten toes and ten fingers and a nose and two eyes and a mouth that is going to give you notice for some time to come whenever he is hungry.”
And Margaret was dashing from the room to tell Stephen, who nevertheless was not allowed inside the room until she had returned to wash the baby and bundle him inside a warm blanket and set him in his mother’s arms while she cleaned both Cassandra and the bed and then stood back to smile at mother and child with flushed satisfaction.
Margaret and the physician left the room while Cassandra gazed in wonder at the red, ugly, beautiful face of her son.
Her son.
Where was Stephen?
And then he was there, white-faced, with dark circles beneath his eyes as if he had been in hard labor for many hours. As in a way he probably had, poor thing. He was approaching the bed as though he was afraid to come closer, his eyes on hers. As though he was also afraid to look at the blanket-bound bundle.
“Cass,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I am tired enough to sleep for a month.” She smiled at him. “Meet our son.”
And he leaned closer, his eyes wide with wonder, and gazed downward.
“Could anyone be more beautiful?” he asked after a few awed moments.
He was looking with a father’s eyes—as she was with a mother’s. Both Margaret and the physician had assured her before they left that the slight distortion of the baby’s head would right itself within a few hours, a day or two at most.
“No,” she said. “No one could.”
“He is crying,” he said. “Ought you to do something, Cass?”
“I think,” she said, “he wants his papa to hold him.”
Or his mother to offer a breast.
“Dare I?” He looked terrified.
But she lifted the bundle, which seemed to weigh nothing at all, and Stephen took their son from her, and he stopped crying immediately.
“Well,” she said, “so much for what he owes his mama.”
But Stephen was laughing softly, and Cassandra, relaxed and exhausted against her pillows, gazed up at him. At them.
Her two men.
Her two loves.
And perhaps, after a good long rest—a good long rest—she would allow Stephen to touch her again after all.
Perhaps she would.
Well, of course she would.
He was looking down at her, his eyes so full of love that they almost glowed.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, my love.”
She had a child, she thought as she gazed back at him, too exhausted to do anything more than allow her lips to curve upward at the corners.
She had a living child.
And a life filled with love.
And hope.
She had Stephen.
What more could she possibly ask for?
She had her own private angel, after all.
If Seducing an Angel stole your
heart, get ready to be entranced
by the next book
in Mary Balogh’s series featuring the
extraordinary Huxtable family.
A Secret Affair
CONSTANTINE’S STORY
Available from Delacorte in hardcover
Turn the page for a sneak peek inside… .
A Secret Affair
“Good evening, Duchess,” Mr. Huxtable said, strolling closer to her as her court opened up a path for him. “It is rather crowded in here, is it not? I see it is less so in the music room. Shall we stroll in there for a while?”
“That sounds pleasant,” she said, handing her empty glass to a gentleman on her right and slipping her hand through Mr. Huxtable’s arm.
It was a very solid arm she had taken, Hannah realized. And it was all clad in black, except for the crisp white cuff that showed at his wrist. His hand was dark-skinned and long-fingered and well manicured, though there was nothing soft about it. Quite the contrary. It looked as if it had done its fair share of work in its time. It was lightly dusted with dark hair. His shoulder was a few inches above the level of her own. He wore a cologne that wrapped itself very enticingly about her senses. She could not identify it.
The music room was indeed still half empty. Entertainments of this nature never did begin on time, of course. They began to stroll slowly about the perimeter of the room.
“And so,” he said, looking down at her, “I am to be consoled for my disappointments, am I, Duchess, by being granted the seat next to yours this evening?”
“Were you disappointed?” she asked.
“Amused,” he said.
She turned her head and looked into his very dark eyes. They were quite impossible to read.
“Amused, Mr. Huxtable?” She raised her eyebrows.
“It is amusing,” he said, “to watch a puppeteer manipulate the strings in order to make the puppet dance only to discover that the strings are not attached.”
Ah. Someone who knew the game and refused to play by its rules—her rules, that was. She liked him the better for it.
“But is it not intriguing,” she said, “when the puppet dances anyway? And proves that he is not a puppet after all, but that he does love to dance?”
“But you see, Duchess,” he said, “he does not like dancing with the chorus. It makes him feel quite … ordinary. Indeed, he quite refuses to be an insignificant part of any such group.”
Ah. He was setting out his terms, was he?
“But it can be arranged,” she said, “that he dance a solo part, Mr. Huxtable. Or perhaps a pas de deux. Very definitely a pas de deux, in fact. And if he proves to be a superior partner, as I am confident he will, then he may be offered the security of exclusive rights to the part for the whole of a Season. There will be no need for any chorus at all. It may be dispensed with.”
They turned to walk along the front of the room, between the shallow dais where the orchestra’s instruments lay and the front row of gilt, velvet-seated chairs.
“He is to be on trial, then, at the start?” he said. “At a sort of audition?”
“I am not sure that will be necessary,” she said. “I have not seen him dance, but I am convinced he performs superlatively well.”
“You are too kind and too trusting, Duchess,” he said. “He is perhaps more cautious. If he is to dance a pas de deux, after all, he must be given an equal chance to try out his prospective partner, to discover if she is as skilled a dancer as he, to discover whether she will suit his style for a whole Season and not very quickly become tedious.”
Hannah opened her fan with her free hand and fluttered it before her face. The music room was still not crowded, but it already felt stuffy and overhot.
“Tedious, Mr. Huxtable,” she said, “is a word not in her vocabulary.”
“Ah,” he said, “but it is in his.”
Hannah might have been offended or outraged or both. Instead, she was feeling very pleased indeed. The word tedious figured largely in her vocabulary—which meant she had just told yet another lie. Barbara would be upset with her if she could hear. Though it was very fortunate indeed that she could hear no part of this conversation. She would expire from shock. Most gentle men of Hannah
’s acquaintance were tedious. They really ought not to set her on a pedestal and worship her. Pedestals could be lonely, barren places, and worship was just plain ridiculous when one was very mortal indeed.
They had turned to walk up the far side of the room.
“Ah,” she said, looking ahead, “there are the Duke and Duchess of Moreland. Shall we go and speak with them?”
The duke was Mr. Huxtable’s cousin, the one who looked like him. They might easily have passed for brothers, in fact.
“It seems,” he murmured as she drew him in their direction, “that we shall.”
The duke and duchess were very polite to her, very chilly to him. Hannah seemed to recall hearing that there was some sort of estrangement between the cousins. But she caught herself in time before censuring them mentally for quarreling when they were family. That would be rather like the pot calling the kettle black, would it not?
She had been right in her earlier assessment. The duke was the more handsome of the two men. His features were more classically perfect, and there was the surprise of his blue eyes when one expected dark. But Mr. Huxtable was, nevertheless, the more attractive of the two—to her, anyway, which was just as well given the fact that the duke was a married man.
“Mr. Huxtable and I are going to be seated now,” Hannah said before the encounter could become too strained. “I am tired after having been on my feet for so long.”
And they all nodded and smiled at one another, and Mr. Huxtable took her to sit in the middle of the fourth row back from the dais.
“It is not a promising sign,” he said, “when a dancer’s feet ache after she has been on them for a mere hour or so.”
“But who,” she said, closing her fan and resting it on his sleeve for a moment, “is talking about dancing? Why have you quarreled with the Duke of Moreland?”
“At the risk of sounding quite ill-mannered, Duchess,” he said, “I am compelled to inform you that it is none of your business.”
She sighed.
“Oh, but it is,” she said. “Or will be. I will absolutely insist upon knowing everything there is to know about you.”