“I never thought to work in a castle,” Elsie told her. “Never!”
Annabel laughed. “I never thought to marry a man who lived in one either. Now, let’s see if we can get this bath to work.”
It did. Hot water gushed from the taps into the smooth marble bath.
“The mermaids are a bit heathen to my mind,” Elsie said with a sniff. “Not but what this is a most godly household, miss. Do you know that they have chapel on Sundays and the servants attend with the family, rather than going to the village?”
Annabel thought about that. “You needn’t if you don’t wish to. I’ll speak to Lord Ardmore.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Elsie said earnestly. “The service is given by a monk, a real one. And though my mum never held with Papists—thought Catholics were a terrible heathen lot, always kissing pictures and the like—he seems quite lovely, rather like my grandfather. Plus, I wouldn’t want to miss the service, miss; it might seem as if I were putting on airs, and that would never go over well with the butler, Mr. Warsop.”
Annabel cautiously put a toe into steaming water, and a second later she was leaning back, bathed in pure bliss.
“That’s right, then,” Elsie said. “If you don’t mind, miss, I’ll just take this dress down to Mrs. Warsop and ask her to have it sponged for me. I wouldn’t like anyone to iron it whom I don’t trust, but sponging is another matter.”
“Don’t hurry,” Annabel said, wiggling her toes so that little ripples spread through the bath.
The door clanked shut behind Elsie, and Annabel lay back and tried to think wise thoughts. Premarital advice. What would Mama have said to her? But since their mother had died when Annabel was only six years old, she found herself unable to imagine that particular brand of advice.
Instead she found herself thinking about Ewan. She was marrying a man who was almost her complete opposite. She prided herself on thinking through situations without allowing a romantic haze to muddle her deliberations, whereas he seemed to embrace the idea of romance. She believed fervently in the power of money; he believed in God and seemed to give love the same importance. Would he come to wish that he had married someone who wanted to go to endless prayer services with him?
Annabel regarded her pink toes. A better woman than she would send the romantic earl into the sunset on his own, castle, wealth, and all. A better woman would recognize that the holy part of him would never be matched in her. In fact, if she really loved Ewan, she would send him off to find a psalm singer like himself.
But along with Annabel’s practicality was a ruthless self-knowledge. She would never give up Ewan. Godless sinner that she was, she wanted his deep, honest nature, his laughing green eyes, the goodness of him, too much. She felt safe around him.
At the same time, she was worried that somehow it might all disappear. It was too perfect: that she, Annabel Essex, who had never been very ladylike or romantic, should end up in love. And in love with a rich man.
But sometimes good things happened. Perhaps it was just her turn. Annabel tried to imagine a white-haired old man looking down at her from a cloud and deciding to toss a windfall in her direction, but she gave up after a moment. The whole idea of religion eluded her.
Elsie came back, gasping and holding her sides. “These stairs, miss! To reach the housekeeper’s room, I have to go down the back stairs, and then down another set on the left, and then up again, and then down once more!”
Annabel stepped out of the bath into a towel warmed before the fire.
“The dress is all ready. Mrs. Warsop offered to do it with her own hands, and a beautiful job she’s done as well. Do you know, she and Mr. Warsop have been married these forty-three years? And he’s been the butler here at the castle since he was twenty-six.”
Elsie kept talking while Annabel’s hair dried, and while she brushed it until it shone. Finally Annabel put on her chemise, and then her corset, the French one that Imogen bought her, that made her breasts look twice as large as they really were. And then the dress: a long sweep of plum-colored, figured sarsenet that hugged her curves and then widened into a long train. The swansdown trim followed her bodice, and the edges of her sleeves. Elsie tied Annabel’s hair into a knot of curls, and finally Annabel looked at herself in the glass. She thought she looked fit for a castle. For an earl. Even . . . perhaps . . . for a man such as Ewan. But she caught herself up trying to coax her face into a pious expression: the kind of look that Ewan’s wife ought to wear. Love was one thing, and playacting quite another.
“It’s to be a private meal for the two of you,” Elsie said. “Mrs. Warsop said as how the earl laughed and said he’d give you a chance to cry off.” She smiled. “As if the whole castle couldn’t see the two of you were as happy as could be, and the earl that impatient to have his wedding!”
Annabel’s hands shook during dinner. Ewan didn’t seem to notice but talked of the castle, and of Rosy, Gregory, his uncle, the crofters, the servants . . . It seemed she had hardly drawn a breath when Mr. Warsop removed the last covers.
Ewan said, “I just want to make absolutely certain that you wish to marry me, Annabel. Back in London, I didn’t mind very much the idea of marrying you because of that blasted article. Now I find that I do.”
“Do what?” Annabel said, gathering her scattered thoughts. It was distracting, being so close to Ewan. She couldn’t help thinking of things that made her blush. Like the coming night.
“I mind marrying you, if you are doing so merely because of that article,” he said, watching her.
“I am not,” she said promptly. “But—” She stopped.
“What is it?” Ewan reached over and took her ungloved hand.
“I am worried that I shouldn’t marry you,” she said, love warring with practicality. “I shouldn’t marry you because at heart, Ewan, I’m a terribly greedy person. I truly wished to marry a rich man. And I don’t think I shall ever feel the way you do about the church. I’m just—I’m afraid that we wouldn’t suit, in the long run.”
He smiled at her in such a way that she felt a prickle of annoyance. Wasn’t he listening to her?
“I really did consider that adultery was a certain part of my future,” she told him fiercely.
“If you had married someone else, God forbid,” Ewan said, “and I met you after the fact, I expect I would be thinking about adultery as well.”
“You are not listening to me,” she told him. “I do not fear for my soul. I would have shot those robbers without blinking, if I’d had an appropriate weapon!”
“Man and wife do not have to be in agreement on all things,” Ewan observed. “And I consider that God’s love brought you to me. You and no other. And I tell you truthfully, Annabel, you’ve ruined me for other women. I either marry you, my little hedonistic pagan, or I marry no one.”
She couldn’t smile because the lump in her throat was too big.
He turned over her hand and brought her palm to his mouth. “Would you wish me to marry someone else?” he asked. “With honesty.”
They had a code between them now, and that was a question, and there was the question of honesty attached . . .
“Never,” she said, her voice husky with tears. “I’d kill the woman who tried to marry you, Ewan. With the first pistol that came to hand.”
He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “I’m to marry a bloodthirsty wench, that’s for certain.”
“You’ll have to guard my soul for me,” she said.
“It would be my honor,” he said, and his voice sounded a little husky too. And then he kissed her, and they rose from their chairs and went to the door.
“No last regrets?” he asked.
“Do you want me to have them? You’ve asked so many times.”
“No!”
The wedding was a matter of a brief half hour. Father Armailhac laughed at the special license when Ewan produced it. “And how am I, a Catholic monk, to use a license issued by an Anglican bishop?” he inquired.
“Nonsense, my lad. I have need of no other authority than that given to me by God and—thankfully—by the Scottish government as well. For you could be married by the blacksmith here,” he said, turning to Annabel, “if you had the inclination.”
“I should prefer you,” she said, smiling at the monk.
“In that case, I shall use the words of the Scottish wedding service, as they are most beautiful,” he said. “They seem to me to echo the best parts of the wedding service as I know it, in the French language. And God means the same thing any way you say it, dears.”
They married in that little chapel, all lit with candles because the evening had come on by that time.
Annabel didn’t listen very closely to the service. She felt as if she were walking through a dream: not an unhappy dream, but . . . Could this be she, Annabel, marrying without her family present? She realized about halfway through the service that had they waited a week or so, she could have been married with Tess, Lucius, Griselda, and Rafe in attendance.
And then she caught Ewan’s secret smile when Father Armailhac asked him to repeat, With my body I thee worship, and thought that she wouldn’t have liked to wait a week. She felt with a deep clarity the importance of the moment when Ewan slid a cold, heavy ring over her finger. And the rightness of the moment when he bent his head and kissed her, one of those clear, tender kisses that they shared over the bolster.
“The Earl and Countess of Ardmore,” Father Armailhac said, turning from them to the assembled household clustered in the pews. Everyone broke into shouts . . . Nana was crying and smearing the heavy rouge she’d put on for the occasion. Gregory was jumping up and down, looking far younger than his eleven years. Rosy was sucking a finger and smiling. Uncle Tobin wasn’t wearing a hunting coat . . .
Annabel clutched her husband’s arm and they walked out into the cool, dark pine forest, lit by torches along the path now. It was strewn with little white flowers and her dress swept through them, leaving a wake in its stead, like the prow of a ship.
Those servants who hadn’t fit into the tiny chapel were waiting for them outside the castle, along with a man moaning on the bagpipes.
“I don’t like bagpipes,” Annabel observed.
“You’re no true Scots,” her new husband retorted. “Wait until my neighbors hear of this. They’ll all be here, with fiddlers and pipers, and the celebration will last for twelve hours. But for now, the night is ours.”
Annabel shook hands with every resident of Ewan’s castle, from Mrs. Warsop down to Tibbon, the shoe-black.
Then Ewan held out his hand.
And she went to him.
Chapter Twenty-one
“I just want to say that this is bound to be a disappointment,” Annabel said. She was as perfumed and curled and polished as Elsie could make her. She was wearing the scrap of French silk that Tess gave her. She was cold—not with fright but with apprehension.
She’d been thinking about it. She didn’t have much idea how to do this, and if everything Ewan said was correct, neither did he. The local women had all told her that consummation needn’t be painful, if she married a man who knew what he was doing. “Marry a tired rake,” Mrs. Cooper had said. “They know everything, and yet they’re worn out and ready to settle down. As long as he doesn’t have the pox.”
The pox was something she didn’t have to worry about. But Ewan clearly would have no idea how to make this whole business less painful. Her thighs tightened at the thought. But what had to be done had to be done.
He walked into the bedchamber as if it were an evening just like any other. She almost expected him to pick up a bolster and place it in the middle of the bed.
“Are you frightened?” he asked.
“Not at all,” she said stoutly. “I just think that we should—we should understand that beginnings are not always the most propitious of all occasions.” She knew that sounded pompous but she couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it.
He looked a little puzzled as he untangled her language. Then, Ewan-like, he went straight to the heart of the matter. “Aye, lass, I’ve heard that it can be painful for a woman. And I’m sorry about that.”
“There are ways to make it not painful,” she said hopefully.
But he was shaking his head. “Old wives’ tales, or so Nana says.”
“You asked her?”
“Of course. Nana knows all there is to know about a woman’s body. She says some women suffer quite a bit, and others don’t even notice and might as well not be virgins at all.”
Annabel nodded, a little jerkily.
“Did you and your sisters ever ride horses astride, the way men do?”
She just stared at him, and he frowned. “Of course you didn’t,” he muttered, “you’re ladies.”
He was standing just before her now, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees. She had a moment’s desperate thought that he meant to pray—pray, how embarrassing!—but thankfully, no. Instead of praying, his hands closed around her slender ankles.
“I’ve been dreaming of this moment,” he said, his voice husky as the darkness itself. “I’ll do my best to make it an occasion we both enjoy, Annabel.”
She was shivering at his touch, already shaking a bit. His hands slid up her ankles, up long smooth legs, and his mouth followed, pressing hot kisses everywhere. Her knees shook. “Could we—shouldn’t we lie down?” she whispered, peering down at him.
But Ewan was deaf to her voice, hearing only the hoarse sound of his own breathing as he tasted her sweet flesh, danced higher, his fingers pushing aside the silk of her nightgown. It fell over his shoulders and then he was in a golden, gleaming tent of silk, with nothing but the cream of Annabel’s legs and an enchanting buttery patch of hair that was begging for his touch . . .
He let his hands shape her round bottom, pulled her sleek body against him and then . . . Ewan didn’t know anything about the art of seducing virgins, of taking virginity, of introducing a woman to the pleasures of the bed. But he knew one kind of kiss they had both enjoyed, and one thing at which he appeared to be quite capable. He let one hand slide between her rounded thighs and pushed them apart slightly, then began to kiss his way up her creamy thigh.
Annabel’s legs were trembling at his caress, and their situation struck him as rather uncomfortable, so he eased her down to the carpet, pushing her nightgown to her waist.
Her legs fell apart, and left her open to his sweet torment. And slowly the pounding in his ears receded, and he could hear her frantic little breaths, the silken sound of her gasps, and frantic twist of her body up against his mouth. Without ever losing his touch on her, he pulled her nightgown over her head. Granted, it had a wide neckline, but that was quite adroit of him. A touch of pride surfaced in his mind.
Her whole body was before him now, one slim leg flung to the side. She had both hands over her eyes, as if merely shutting them wasn’t enough for the embarrassment of lying on the floor without clothing . . . He thought fleetingly of moving to the bed, but instead he stood up and wrenched off his own clothing.
The moment he stopped touching her, her body went rigid. He could see her breasts rising and falling with little pants but she said nothing. And she didn’t take her hands from her eyes.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, coming on his knees next to her.
She didn’t say anything so he caught her hips between his hands and eased her rigid legs back open. Then he started kissing her stomach, kissing his way down to that buttery patch of hair again, down—
“You needn’t do that,” she said, her voice stifled by her hands, which covered her whole face.
“I want to,” he said simply. And then, two seconds later, her moans were flying into the night air again. One hand even fell from her eyes, and her legs slid restlessly up to form a perfect cradle for his body. Soon, he promised her silently, soon. Tremors were wracking her now, and she was whimpering, crying, coming to him—and then she flew free, hands over her head, her body a
rched into the air . . . and falling back down, gentle as thistledown.
It took everything he had to stay in control. She was sweet, swollen, ready for him . . . He said, “Annabel, could you open your eyes now?” And then: “Please?”
So she did, dewy, smoky blue peering at him. He nudged against her, and her eyes grew wider.
“Don’t shut me out, sweetheart,” he breathed. “I want to see you . . . if only this time. This first time.”
A shaky smile curved her lips. “I—”
Annabel caught back her words, shut her eyes tight, remembered and opened them—because he was there, he was sliding inside her, and there was no pain—
“Ewan!” she cried, “Ewan, my sisters and I”—her breath caught on a moan—“we sometimes rode without saddles and—” She arched and he came to her, all the way.
“Thank God,” he said, as if it were wrenched out of him, and then: “Does this hurt?”
And it didn’t.
And none of it did. Not even when he started taunting her, pulling back and smiling down at her as she tried to pull him down to her, then choosing his moment and thrusting home. Not when she decided to taunt him, and dimly remembering Tess’s advice, let her hands slide to his hard buttocks and linger there . . .
He groaned and then took her mouth, hard and purposeful, the wild kind of kiss that meant something quite different now. Annabel tasted the moment her husband lost control. He plunged deeper and deeper, his breath coming in gasps. At first she just enjoyed looking at him, but then a feeling started growing and growing, a kind of molten desire that spread from their joining through her whole body, and she found herself arching to meet him, her fingers clenching on his muscled shoulders.
“Annabel,” he said, in a growl that was half a moan. “Oh God!”
And she didn’t think he was referring to a deity now. The feeling was growing and growing, and finally Annabel just let herself slide into the chaos of it, into the sweat and rhythmic madness of it . . .
Until she cried out against his shoulder and he thankfully let his jaw unclench and drove home, home to her, to his still center, to his wife.