“That must be extremely vexatious for you,” Alexandra said dryly, when Smarth flushed deeper.
He shifted from one foot to the other, shoved his hands in his pockets, took them out again and looked at her in helpless dismay, his weathered face creased with unhappiness. “You wanted me ter tell you ’bout his grace’s parents, and me ’n’ Gibbons agreed we cain’t deny yer command. Besides, ye’ve a right t’ know.” And in a voice low and uneasy, Smarth related very nearly the same general history that Tony had told her.
“And now you know what it’s been like around here fer all these years,” Smarth finished, “me ’n’ Gibbons is hopin’ you’ll stay here and bring laughter to th’ place, th’ way you did when you was here afore.”
“Real laughter,” Smarth clarified. “Not the kind what comes from the mouth—the kind what comes from the heart like you gived us afore. The master ain’t never heard the sound o’ it at Hawthorne, and it would do him a world a good, specially if you could git him ter join in wit it.”
* * *
Everything Alexandra had learned today revolved in her head like a dizzying kaleidoscope, turning and changing shape, taking on new dimensions throughout the rest of the day and long after Jordan had pulled her to him and fallen asleep.
The sky was already lightening, and still she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, hesitating to take a course of action that could—and undoubtedly would—make her vulnerable to Jordan once again. Until now, she’d made leaving here her goal; and, in line with that, she’d kept her every emotion and every action in careful check.
She turned onto her side and Jordan’s arm encircled her, drawing her back against his chest and the backs of her legs against his own while he buried his face in her hair. His hand lifted, cupping her breast in a sleepy caress and sending a tremor of delight through her entire body.
She wanted him, Alexandra realized with a despondent inner sigh. Despite everything he had been—a libertine, a heartless flirt, and an unwilling husband—she wanted him. In the safe silence of her heart, she was finally willing to admit that to herself now . . . because now she realized that he was more than just a spoiled, shallow aristocrat.
She wanted his love, his trust, and his children. She wanted to make this house ring with laughter for him, and to make Hawthorne seem beautiful to him. She wanted to make the entire world beautiful for him.
Tony, the dowager duchess, and even Melanie had all believed she could make Jordan fall in love with her. She couldn’t give up without trying, she knew that now.
But she didn’t know how she was going to endure it if she failed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
MY LORD?” she whispered at dawn the next morning.
Jordan opened one sleepy eye and beheld his wife looking bright and alert as she sat down on his bed beside his hip. “Good morning,” he murmured, his appreciative gaze shifting to the V of tantalizing flesh exposed by the bodice of her belted silk dressing gown. “What time is it?” he asked, his voice husky with sleep. He glanced toward the windows and realized the sky was not blue, but a weak shade of grey streaked with pale pink.
Unlike Jordan, Alexandra had been awake all night and was therefore not suffering from any foggy remnants of drowsiness. “Six o’clock,” she answered brightly.
“You’re joking!” he uttered. Appalled by the early hour, he promptly closed his eyes and required an explanation for being awakened at dawn: “Is someone ill?”
“No.”
“Dead?”
“No.”
A faint smile tugged at his firm lips and creased the sides of his closed eyes as he mumbled, “Illness or death are the only acceptable reasons for a rational human to be awake this early in the morning. Come back to bed.”
Alexandra chuckled at his lighthearted, sleepy banter, but she shook her head. “No.”
Despite his closed eyes and apparent sleepiness, Jordan had already registered the unusually bright smile on his wife’s face, as well as the fact that her hip was pressing against his thigh. Normally, Alexandra’s smiles were reserved, not relaxed, and she scrupulously avoided touching him whenever possible, unless he was making love to her.
Curiosity over the reason for her very pleasant, but very unusual behavior this morning made him open his eyes and look at her. With her hair tumbling over her shoulders and her skin glowing with health, she looked delicious. She also looked like she had something on her mind. “Well?” he said lightly, restraining the urge to pull her down on top of him. “I am, as you can see, awake.”
“Good,” she said, hiding her uncertainty behind a vivacious smile, “because there’s something special I’d like to do this morning.”
“At this hour?” Jordan teased. “What is there to do, save to sneak out to the road, pounce on an unwary traveler, and steal his purse. Only thieves and servants are about now.”
“We don’t have to leave for a while yet.” Alexandra hedged as her courage began to ebb, and she braced for his refusal. “And if you’ll recall, you did say you wanted to make yourself agreeable to me—”
“What is it you’d like to do?” Jordan asked with a sigh, mentally considering the usual things women tried to get men to do with them.
“Guess.”
“You want me to take you shopping for a new bonnet in the village?” he ventured unenthusiastically.
She shook her head, sending her hair tumbling over her left shoulder and breast.
“You want to ride out early to see the sun rise over the hills so you can sketch the view?”
“I can’t draw a straight line,” Alexandra confessed. Drawing a shaky breath, she summoned all her courage and announced, “I want to go fishing!”
“Fishing?” Jordan repeated, gaping at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses. “You want me to to go fishing at this hour of the morning?” Before she could answer, he shoved his head deeper into the pillows and firmly closed his eyes, apparently rejecting the idea—but there was a smile in his voice as he said, “Not unless there wasn’t a scrap of food to eat and we were both prostrate from starvation.”
Encouraged by his tone, if not his words, she cajoled, “You wouldn’t have to spend your time teaching me the proper technique—I already know how to fish.”
He opened one eye, his voice amused. “What makes you think I do?”
“If you don’t know how, I’ll show you.”
“Thank you, but I can manage on my own,” he said with asperity, studying her intently.
“Good,” Alexandra said, so relieved she was almost babbling. “So can 1.1 can do everything for myself, including put my own worm on my own hook—”
His lips quirked in a smile. “Excellent, then you can bait my hook. I refuse to awaken helpless worms at this ungodly hour and then compound the crime by torturing them.”
His humor was so contagious that a gurgle of laughter escaped Alexandra as she stood up and tightened the belt on her rosesilk dressing robe. “I’ll take care of all the arrangements,” she said happily and headed for her bedchamber.
Leaning back against the pillows, Jordan admired the unconsciously seductive sway of her hips as she walked away, while he fought down the urge to summon her back to his bed and spend the next hour in the delightful—and laudable—occupation of siring his heir. He did not want to go fishing. Nor did he understand why she did, but he was certain there was a reason for it, and he was curious to discover what it was.
Alexandra had indeed taken “care of all the arrangements,” he realized when they wended their way on horseback down the opposite side of the high ridge that blocked the house from view of a wide, rushing stream.
Tying their horses to a pair of trees at the base of the ridge, he walked beside her down to the grassy banks of the stream, where a bright blue blanket had been spread out beneath a giant oak tree. “What’s all that?” he asked, indicating the two large baskets and one small one beside the blanket.
“Breakfast,” Alexandra replied, shooting hi
m a laughing glance. “And dinner, too, from the looks of it. Evidently, cook doesn’t have much faith in your ability to catch our meal.”
“In any case, I haven’t more than an hour to spend trying:”
Alexandra paused in the act of picking up a fishing pole, her face confused and disappointed. “An hour?”
“I have a dozen things to do today,” Jordan replied. Crouching down, he selected a pole from the ones brought out earlier by the servants and tested its flexibility by bending it between his hands. “I’m a very busy man, Alexandra,” he added absently, by way of explanation.
“You’re also a very wealthy man,” she answered, affecting an offhand attitude as she tested her own pole. “So why must you work so hard all the time?”
He thought for a moment and chuckled. “So I can remain a very wealthy man.”
“If being wealthy costs you the right to relax and enjoy life, then the price of wealth is altogether too high,” she said, pivoting on her heels and looking at him.
His brow furrowed in thought, Jordan tried to recall the philosopher who authored that quotation, and couldn’t. “Who said that?”
She gave him a plucky smile. “I did.”
Jordan shook his head in silent amazement at her quick mind as he put a worm on his hook, then walked over to the bank. Sitting down beside a huge fallen tree with its branches stretching out over the water, he cast his line in.
“That’s not the best place to catch the big ones,” his wife advised him with an air of vast superiority as she came up behind him. “Would you hold my pole for me, please?”
“I thought you said you could do everything for yourself,” he teased, noticing she’d taken off her riding boots and stockings. Before he could guess what she was about, Alexandra hitched up her skirts, displaying a pair of slim calves, trim ankles, and small bare feet, then she scampered up onto the wide trunk of the fallen tree with the agile grace of a gazelle. “Thank you,” she said, reaching for her pole.
He handed it to her, expecting her to sit down where she stood, but to his alarmed surprise, she walked out along a thick branch hanging above the rushing water, balancing like an acrobat. “Come back here!” Jordan said sharply, raising his voice in alarm. “You could fall in.”
“I swim like a fish,” she informed him, grinning over her shoulder, and then she sat down—a barefoot duchess with her shapely legs dangling over the water and sunlight shining in her hair. “I’ve been fishing since I was a girl,” she said conversationally as she cast her line into the stream.
Jordan nodded. “Penrose taught you.” He had taught her well, Jordan thought with an inward smile, for true to her boast, she’d reached into the basket of worms the servants had brought out to the stream and had deftly put a worm on the end of her hook.
Evidently their thoughts were running in the same direction, because a moment later she smiled down at him from her high perch and remarked, “I’m happy to see you aren’t truly squeamish about worms.”
“I was never squeamish,” he protested with an expression of earnest gravity on his upturned face. “It’s only that I hate to hear the sound worms make when you stick them the first time. Normally we kill things before we use them for bait. That’s more humane, don’t you agree?”
“There is no sound!” Alexandra denied heatedly, but he looked so certain that her own conviction wavered a bit.
“Only people with extraordinary hearing can detect it, but it’s there,” Jordan argued, straightfaced.
“Penrose told me it doesn’t hurt them,” she said uneasily.
“Penrose is deaf as a post. He can’t hear them scream.”
An indescribable expression of queasy apprehension crossed Alexandra’s face as she looked at the pole in her hand. Swiftly turning his face away to hide his laughter, Jordan gazed off to his right, but he couldn’t stop his shoulders from shaking with mirth, and Alexandra finally spotted the telltale movement. A moment later, a fistful of twigs and leaves hit him on the left shoulder. “Beast!” she said cheerfully from above.
“My dear, foolish wife,” he replied, grinning impenitently as he reached up and calmly brushed leaves and twigs off his sleeve, “were I perched precariously over the water on the limb of a tree, as you are, I’d take great care to treat me with more respect.” To illustrate, he reached up with his free hand and gently nudged the stout limb she was perched upon.
His disrespectful wife lifted her graceful brows. “My dear, foolish husband,” she softly replied, sending a momentary shaft of unexpected pleasure through Jordan, “if you unseat me, you’ll be making a terrible mistake and setting yourself up for a wetting in the process.”
“Me?” he said, enjoying their banter. “Why?”
“Because,” she quietly and earnestly replied, “I can’t swim.”
Jordan paled and surged to his feet. “Don’t, for God’s sake,” he ordered sharply, “move one inch. I don’t know how deep the water is below you, but it’s deep enough to drown in and it’s murky enough to prevent me from seeing you below the surface. Stay where you are until I get there.”
With the lithe agility of an athlete, he bounded onto the tree trunk and began walking toward her, moving out along the branch until she was within arm’s reach. “Alexandra,” he said, speaking in a calm, reassuring voice, “if I come any closer, my weight may break this branch or bend it enough to throw you into the water.”
He edged another few inches closer to her and bent at the waist, extending his hand toward her. “Don’t be afraid. Just reach out and clasp my hand.”
For once she didn’t argue, Jordan noted with relief. Instead she reached up with her left hand and tightly grasped the limb above her head for balance, then she extended her right hand to his, catching his wrist in a strong grasp, at the same time Jordan’s fingers closed tightly around her wrist. “Now get your legs beneath you and stand up. Use my wrist for leverage.”
“I’d rather not,” she replied. His amazed gaze narrowed sharply on her laughing face, while she tightened her grasp on his wrist and threateningly said, “I’d rather swim, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t try it,” Jordan warned darkly, unable to free his wrist. In his awkward position, bent at the waist and his arm imprisoned, he was completely at the mercy of her whim and they both knew it.
“If you can’t swim, I’ll rescue you,” she sweetly volunteered.
“Alexandra,” he threatened in a soft, ominous tone, “if you toss me into that freezing water, you’d better swim for your life in the opposite direction.”
He meant it and she knew it. “Yes, my lord,” she meekly replied and obediently released his wrist.
Jordan straightened slowly and stood looking down at her with an expression of exasperation and amusement. “You are the most outrageous—” He broke off, unable to control his grin.
“Thank you,” she replied brightly. “Predictability is so very dull, don’t you agree?” she called after him as he turned and walked along the branch, then jumped down to the grass.
“How would I know?” he replied with grim amusement as he stretched out on the grassy bank and picked up his pole. “I haven’t had a predictable hour since I set eyes on you.”
The next three hours passed as if they were but a few minutes, and by the end of it, Jordan had confirmed she was not only an excellent fisherman, but a thoroughly delightful, witty, and intelligent companion as well.
“Look!” she called suddenly and unnecessarily as Jordan’s pole bent nearly in half, almost jerking him to his feet as he fought to hold it. “You have a bite—!”
After five minutes of the most deft maneuvering and skillful fighting on Jordan’s part, his line abruptly went slack. His disrespectful young wife, standing upon her tree limb, from whence she had observed his unsuccessful struggle for supremacy while calling out advice and encouragement, groaned and threw up her hands in disgust. “You lost the fish!”
“That was not a fish,” Jordan retorted, looking up at he
r. “That was a whale with large teeth.”
“Only because it got away,” she retorted, laughing.
Her laughter was as infectious as her enthusiasm, and Jordan couldn’t stop himself from grinning even though he tried to sound stern. “Kindly stop belittling my whale and let’s open those baskets. I’m starved.”
Standing back, he watched in admiration as she scampered down from the fallen limb. When she tried to hand him her pole and climb down herself, he caught her by the waist and lowered her to the ground, but she stiffened when her body brushed against his, and he abruptly let her go.
The pleasure he had taken in their morning faded somewhat at her reaction to his touch. Sitting down across from her on the blanket, he leaned his back against a tree and studied her in impassive silence, watching her unpack the baskets of food while he tried to guess her motive for instigating this outing. Obviously, she’d not wanted it to be a “romantic interlude.”
“It’s been a lovely morning,” Alexandra said, pausing to watch the sunlight dance on the water’s surface in front of them.
Drawing one knee up against his chest, Jordan draped his arm across it and said flatly, “Now that we’ve finished, suppose you tell me what this is all about.”
Alexandra tore her gaze from the water and looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why did you want to spend the morning like this?”
She’d expected him to wonder, she had not expected him to flatly demand an answer, and she wasn’t at all prepared with one. With a shrug, she said uneasily, “I thought I’d show you the sort of life I truly like to lead.”
Cynicism twisted his lips. “And now that you’ve shown me that you’re not completely the refined, elegant young woman you’ve appeared to be, I’m supposed to develop a disgust for you and let you go back to Morsham, is that it?”
That was so far from the truth that Alexandra burst out laughing. “I’d never have conceived such a convoluted plan in a hundred years,” she said, looking nonetheless impressed at the ingenuity of it. “I’m afraid I’m not quite that inventive.” For a split second, Alexandra could have sworn she saw relief flicker in his hooded grey eyes, and she was suddenly determined to recover the companionable, easy mood they’d enjoyed while fishing together. “You don’t believe me, do you?”