by Mary Balogh
“Yes,” she said. “I do not doubt it.”
He sat down on the chair where she had been sitting asleep when he came into the room earlier. It was unlike him to be bad-tempered with a woman. To accuse and complain. This was a fine way to start a marriage.
He tried again.
“I find that I like you,” he said, “that I enjoy your company and your wit, that I admire your beauty and desire your body. I am even prepared to attempt affection and fidelity. But I cannot offer what you call love because I really do not know what the word means in the context of a relationship between a man and a woman. And I certainly cannot expect you to love me or even to like me particularly well. Not after what you have been forced into and with whom. This whole marriage business is looking to be impossible, in fact.”
Not a great attempt. Worse than before, except that his voice sounded less like a petulant grumble.
“I have just realized something about you,” she said. “It is something I had not even suspected until tonight, and it is a complete surprise. You do not really love yourself, do you? You do not even like yourself particularly well.”
Good Lord! He stared at her transfixed, his fingers drumming on the arm of the chair.
“What poppycock are you speaking now?” he asked her, and irritability was back in a heartbeat.
“And I never expected to hear the word impossible on your lips,” she said. “A workable marriage is impossible? Love is impossible-on both our parts? I thought, Jasper, that it was a matter of supreme pride with you to win a wager.”
“It is kind of you to remind me of the only one I lost,” he said.
“You did not lose it,” she said. “You chose a more courageous and honorable outcome-which you, of course, interpreted as a humiliation. But it is not of that wager I speak.”
He laughed softly.
“The one I made at Lady Parmeter’s ball?” he said. “That was no wager, was it? A wager of one with no takers, no prize for a win, no forfeit for a loss, no time limit?”
“Those facts did not deter you before we were embroiled in scandal,” she said. “You were quite determined to make me fall in love with you. It is why you pursued me so relentlessly after that waltz. And you do have a taker-me. And there is a prize-me. And a forfeit too-the loss of me. And a time limit-the end of the house party.”
He gazed at her, speechless for once. But he felt good humor clawing its way back into his being. Trust Katherine not simply to be tragic.
“I will wager against you,” she said. “I say it cannot be done, that you can never persuade me to love you, that it is indeed impossible. That it would be a waste of your time to try. But you are the man to whom all things are possible, especially those things that seem quite out of reach. Well, I am out of reach. Totally. Make me love you, then.”
Tempting. But there was a problem.
“I would have nothing to offer in return,” he said. “Not anything that would be of value to you, anyway. I am not a romantic, Katherine, and if I ever pretended to be I would simply make an ass of myself.”
“That,” she said, “is something for you to work out for yourself.”
They stared at each other for a long time. The candles began to flicker. They had almost burned themselves out.
He felt a smile nudge at his eyes and tug at his lips. He could never persuade her to love him, could he? It would be a waste of his time to try, would it?
“But one thing,” she said. “If the wager is to become a real one, then we will raise the stakes.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“No love,” she said, “no sex.”
“Forever?” he asked.
“Until after the end of the wager,” she said. “And then we will see.”
A month of celibacy? And a new bride only once tasted? That was raising the stakes sky-high.
But the smile took possession of him. Impossible, was it?
An impossible wager.
They would see about that!
He got to his feet and moved toward her, his right hand extended.
“Agreed,” he said.
And she set her hand in his and they shook on it.
“The couch in the sitting room had better be as comfortable as it looks,” he said.
“Take a pillow,” she advised.
He did so and then turned and walked out of the bedchamber.
The candles flickered one more time and died just as he was closing the door behind him.
The couch had been very comfortable to sit on. But it was too narrow and too short for a bed. He lay wedged against the back, his feet elevated over one arm, his head propped over the other.
It was not a position conducive to sleep even if the wheels of his mind had not been turning at breakneck speed-mostly with the same unwelcome thought.
He was, by God, going to have to offer something in return for her love, which he would, of course, win. And he very much feared that only one thing would do. Devil take it, but he was going to have to fall in love with her. And he might as well tell himself quite firmly now that it was impossible or he would never feel challenged enough to do it.
It was impossible.
There!
Now it would be done. He would fall in love.
Lord, how the devil could he ever have thought this couch comfortable?
… heart of my heart, soul of my soul…
He grimaced.
Devil take it! Were there bricks in this pillow?
He was going to fall in love with her.
His own private wager with himself.
Impossible?
Of course.
But doable?
Of course!
And then he had an inspired idea. He moved off the couch, lay down on the floor with the pillow beneath his head and his coat over his arms, and addressed himself to sleep.
Comfort at last.
His legs were cold.
16
“AND one more thing,” Katherine said just as if they were in the middle of a conversation, when in reality they had been traveling all afternoon in virtual silence.
He was lounging at his ease across the corner of the carriage seat beside her, one booted foot propped on the seat opposite, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes closed-looking indolent, but not asleep. Indeed, she suspected that he was watching her, though how he could be doing that with his eyes closed she was not sure-except that he was a man who scorned impossibilities.
He was also a man who had made no move whatsoever all day to woo her love and win his wager. She had got up this morning and steeled herself for a day of blatantly seductive wiles. Instead he had talked pointedly about the weather for a time during the morning, had remarked finally that if he could not coax a smile out of her he might as well get some sleep since he had had precious little last night, had folded his arms, and had closed his eyes.
He looked wondrously attractive, of course, all relaxed, slumberous male, though he was not sleeping. He was taking up more than half the carriage interior. She had to keep her feet and knees tight together and hold her legs rather stiff to avoid brushing his knee when the carriage swayed, as it did almost every moment.
She had ignored him. Though she could draw no real satisfaction from doing so while he pretended to sleep. She wished he would wake up so that he would know himself ignored. Of course, she had stopped herself from laughing over some of his more absurd comments on the weather. She spoke in order to wake him, though that, of course, involved not ignoring him.
He opened his eyes.
“And one more thing,” she said again.
“Another?” he said. “Is this one more thing to add to the one more thing you mentioned a few moments ago? Two more things, in fact?”
She looked reproachfully at him.
“Charlotte is thrilled at our marriage,” she said. “And I do not think it is just because now she has someone to sponsor her come-out next year and no longer has to fear that she will be se
nt to her aunt. She genuinely loves you and wants you to be happy. She thinks you will be happy with me. She thinks we are in love.”
His eyes half smiled at her. It was really quite disconcerting the way he could do that without moving a muscle in the rest of his face. His eyes, she thought suddenly, could very well be her downfall-if it were possible for her to fall, that was, which it was not.
“That is one thing,” he said. “Is there another?”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “I come from a close-knit family. We all love one another dearly. We rejoice in one another’s joys and grieve with one another’s miseries. It is of great importance to my sisters and brother to see me happily married, to see us in love with each other. Yet at the moment they are full of doubts. They fear that we do not love each other and never will.”
“That is two things,” he said, his voice lazy, as if he really had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Interesting things. Things to give me all the incentive in the world to win my wager and you all the reason you need to capitulate and let me do so.”
“You did not hear me clearly,” she said. “I said that it is important to our families that we love each other-both of us, not me adoring you, and you proceeding with life as usual.”
“You want to make it a double wager, after all, then, Katherine?” he asked her, his smile catching at the corners of his eyes and curving his mouth upward. “You want to make me love you? I may even give you a sporting chance of winning.”
“What I do want,” she said, wishing he would sit up properly so that he would look less… less… Well, less something, “is that we put on a good show for the weeks of the house party. That we convince Charlotte and Meg and Stephen that ours really was a love match-or is, anyway. For we love them as much as they love us. I know you love Charlotte even though you deny being capable of any such emotion. And I owe more to Meg than I can ever say and love her more than I love anyone else in the world. I love Stephen dearly too. He is a good brother. He might have drifted from us in the past few years and concerned himself only with the pleasures life has to offer a wealthy, privileged young man.”
“As I did when I left home?” he asked.
“I will not be distracted,” she said. “Though of course, if the boot fits, then it ought to be worn. But we must agree to make them all as happy as we possibly can while they are at Cedarhurst with us. We can do that by appearing to be happy with each other.”
“And after Miss Huxtable and Merton have returned home?” he asked. “We will keep up the charade for Charlotte, will we? Until she marries or for the rest of our lives if she does not?”
That was the weak point in her plan, of course. Pretending to an affection for each other for two weeks, while the house party was in progress, ought not to be impossibly difficult. But after that?
“We will think of that when the time comes,” she said.
“We will not need to worry our heads over the problem if there is no problem by that time,” he said. “You must work diligently over your half of the wager, Katherine, as I am working diligently over mine.”
He looked sleepy again.
“I do not have half the wager,” she protested.
“Then what is the point of me winning my half?” he asked her. “Why would I want you in love with me if I do not love you in return? Why would you want to love me if I do not love you?”
“I do not want to love you,” she said.
His eyes moved lazily over her and she felt suddenly as naked as she had been last night in the candlelight-something she definitely did not want to think about today.
For she had realized something this morning-well, last night after he had withdrawn to the sitting room, to be more accurate. She had realized that in cutting him off from the physical side of their marriage for a whole month, she had cut herself off too. And she had been rather dismayed to discover that it was not a pleasant prospect. It ought to be. There should be no lust in marriage-only love.
There could be love if she took up half the wager and won-and if he won his half.
How absurd! She felt thoroughly cross.
“I think, Katherine,” he said, “you just told a whopping fib. But perhaps you do not even realize it yet. Of course you want to love me-I am your husband. And of course you want me to love you-you are my wife.”
Oh, she thought suddenly, he was at work already, was he not? The grand wager-winner? And already he was having some effect upon her. There was a sudden ache in the region of her heart-a fact that, once noticed, made her even more cross.
“Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “Or back to pretending to sleep.”
But he took her left hand in his instead.
“We are almost there,” he said.
“Home?” She looked through the window beyond his shoulder, but all she could see was fields on the other side of the hedgerows lining the road.
“Cedarhurst,” he said with slight emphasis.
His fingertips were at the base of her little finger and then sliding lightly along it to the tip. Why was she feeling it in her throat?
“Do you still hate it, then?” she asked him. “Is it not home to you? Where is home, then?”
He moved his fingertips to her third finger, and they closed about her wedding ring and turned it slowly. He had pursed his lips, and his eyelids had drooped over his eyes as he watched their hands.
“If you intend always to ask multiple questions, Katherine,” he said, “you must expect my mind to become more and more addled as our marriage progresses. You will end up with the village idiot for a husband.”
She might have laughed, but she did not do so. She wanted answers. A man who hated the home he had always owned but who had nowhere else to call home was someone alien to her. Her husband, in this case. How very little she knew him. Yet she had married him yesterday and shared the intimacy of the marriage bed with him last night. To her, home had always been at the very center of her existence, whether that was the vicarage while her father had still been alive, or the cottage to which they had gone after, or Warren Hall, where they had moved three years ago.
“No, I do not hate Cedarhurst,” he said. “Yes, it is home if it must be labeled at all. The word home is rather like the word love, is it not? Impossible to define and therefore essentially meaningless?”
“Those words are impossible to define precisely because they are words and can only symbolize concepts that are brimful of meaning,” she said. “They symbolize emotions that are too deep for words. But we have to use words because they are one of the primary ways by which we communicate. And so we have to label something vast and fathomless and beyond value with totally inadequate words like home and love. Just as white encompasses all the colors and all the shades of all colors-as you pointed out to me yesterday.”
He drew her ring off over her knuckle and then pressed it back into place before sliding his fingertips along the finger itself and moving on to the middle finger. A smile played over his lips, though his eyes were still hooded.
And now she was feeling it in her breasts.
“I remember telling you once,” he said, “that you are a woman of great and extraordinary passion, Katherine. One day you will learn to direct that passion toward another person instead of to ideas-toward me, I would have to say, since I certainly could not countenance my wife directing it toward any other man, could I?”
He looked up into her eyes, his smile lazy and just a little lopsided. And now her breathing was suffering.
He looked down at their hands again as his fingertips stroked along her middle finger, causing sensation in her lower abdomen. She firmly ignored it. This was all quite deliberate on his part-to arouse her physically, but very subtly, so that she would fall in love with him. He did not understand at all.
“But to answer your third question,” he said, “there is nowhere else. Nowhere else I call home, I mean. Cedarhurst is it, for better or worse.”
“Like marriage,” she said.
>
“Like marriage,” he agreed, looking up into her eyes again. “When I spent almost a year at Cedarhurst a while ago, I took the first tentative step toward making it mine.”
“What was that?” she asked him.
“I will show you when we arrive,” he said, his fingertips tracing a path down her forefinger. And her inner thighs were aching.
What was going to happen when he got to her thumb?
It did not happen.
“Ah,” he said suddenly, at the same moment as she became aware of houses appearing beyond the carriage windows.
They were passing through a village. There was a tall church spire a short distance ahead.
He lowered his foot to the floor and straightened up on the seat at last to gaze out. He raised a hand to a few people who stood on the street watching the passing of the carriage. And everyone raised a hand in return, Katherine noticed. A few people smiled too. All looked glad.
An interesting reaction to a landlord who did not spend a great deal of his time here and who even found it difficult to admit that this was home, that he did not actively hate it.
She looked curiously at him as they left the village behind and turned onto what she guessed was the driveway to Cedarhurst. It was broad and tree-lined, though she could see lawns stretching away to either side beyond the trees and water glistening far off to the left.
And then she saw the house up ahead, a grand, solid, square gray stone edifice. The front seemed all windows, the longest on the ground level, slightly smaller ones on the floor above, and smaller ones yet on the top floor below the roof with its stone balustrade decorated with stone statues. There was a massive columned portico in the center of the front facade with wide marble steps leading up beneath it to the front doors.
Below the steps were two wide terraces, one below the other, and below them there was a huge and magnificent square garden sunken below ground level and surrounded by low walls over which spilled banks of yellow and red wallflowers in glorious profusion. The garden itself, Katherine could see as the carriage made its way past it on the left-hand side, was arranged in perfect parterres with graveled walks, low box hedges, beds of flowers and herbs, statues-and a stone sundial at the center.