“And there’s no reason for you to remain here if she isn’t.”
“Your syntax is nothing short of spectacular and you don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, if you continue to stand there, thrusting your breasts toward me, I will rip off that gown and then you will be late to meet with the seamstress.”
He left her standing in the middle of her bedchamber, staring at nothing in particular, saying toward the armoire, “He is a strange man.”
If Alexandra fancied Douglas would relent and allow her to be alone with Mrs. Plack, the seamstress from Rye, she was soon to see her grievous error. Sinjun lounged on a chaise longue and Douglas very calmly sat in the wing chair, crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms over his chest and said, “Pray begin, Mrs. Plack.”
She wanted to order both of them out of her bedchamber but she knew from short but powerful experience that when Douglas had made up his mind, he couldn’t be budged. She stood stiff as a stone while Mrs. Plack measured her. She raised her arms, stretched her full height; then she tried to slump just a bit so her breasts would not poke out so much, which made Douglas say sharply, “No, straighten your back!”
She did. Then she was allowed to remain while Douglas perused fashion plates until he found a gown that pleased him. “Except,” he said, stroking his jaw, “remove that flounce at the hemline. It’s too much. Ah, yes, the smooth lines and the raised waist will make her appear taller. Oh, and hoist up the neckline at least an inch.”
“But, my lord, it will make Her Ladyship look provincial! This is the latest fashion from Paris!”
“An inch,” His Lordship said again. “Raise it an inch.”
“May I see?” Alexandra asked sweetly.
“Certainly,” Douglas said and took her arm, drawing her to his side. “Do you agree that this will become you vastly?”
She stared down at the gown and swallowed. It was exquisite. “What color did you have in mind?”
“A soft pomona green with a dark green overskirt.”
“I do not wish to look provincial.”
Mrs. Plack heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. I shall leave the neckline where it is then.”
“No,” said Douglas. “I want her to be admired but I don’t want her to be stared at.”
Alexandra grinned up at him, saying nothing. She looked at his mouth and her eyes darkened. She loved his mouth, the feel of his mouth on her own; she saw his hands clench. She loved the strength of his hands, the frenzy of his mouth and his hands when he touched her, when he turned wild and savage and uncivilized, when she became the most important thing in the world to him.
“Stop it,” he said beneath his breath.
“Hi ho,” Sinjun said, yawning hugely. “I think you have chosen wisely, brother. Now, don’t you think we can go buy Alexandra that mare?”
“You will remain and be measured for your own gown, Sinjun. I’ve selected it and Mother has given her approval. No, don’t try to thank me—”
“I was going to take you to task for being so high-handed! I should like to choose my own gown.”
“No, you’re too young, too green. Don’t argue with me. Alexandra and I will see you later. Thank you, Mrs. Plack. Don’t forget, an inch.”
“You were high-handed, you know,” Alexandra said to her husband as they walked toward the stables.
He brushed a fly from his buckskin thigh. “You need it as does my impertinent sister.” He kept walking, speaking quietly now, not looking at her as he said, “On your return to the Hall, I will take you back to that charming stream. I have decided that it is bedchambers with those big beds that make me lose my rationality and my perspective. Yes, it is the place rather than you that is responsible for turning me into a man with absolutely no finesse or savoir-faire.
“We will go to the stream and I will remain myself. I will take off your clothes, lay you down on your back and touch you and kiss your breasts and fondle you between your legs, and I will smile and talk to you while I caress you. Perhaps we will discuss the situation in Naples, from both Napoleon’s and the Royalists’ points of view. And I will wax brilliant because I am concentrating on my words and not on your body. My control will be uplifting, my experience will be at my brain’s command. Then, when I decide that I wish to continue with you, why, I will do so, and I will go slowly and do all the things to you I haven’t taken the time to do up to now. Well, more time, in any case, and you will scream and bellow until you are hoarse. And you will be very pleased that I am gentleman enough to have figured all this out.”
He turned then to look down at her. She looked both amazed and incredulous and her face was hectic with color. He laughed. “You will be able to scream as loudly as you wish. There will be no one around save a few ducks and birds. Yes, I enjoy hearing you cry out in the middle of the day with the sun on your face and me pressing you into the warmth of the earth.”
She poked him in his belly and he just laughed some more. She wanted to tell him that he could be as savage as he wished, but she hesitated, and then he said, “You will enjoy me even more when I return to being an excellent lover.” She wondered how that could possibly be true.
At Branderleigh Farm they found a three-year-old mare of Barb descent whose sire was Pander of Foxhall Stud. She was spirited, soft-mouthed, long in the back, and black as midnight with a white star on her nose. She tried to bite Alexandra on her shoulder, Alexandra jerked away in time, and the mare then butted her chin with her nose. It was love at first sight.
“That’s what I will call her,” Alexandra said, skipping in delight next to Douglas after he had finalized the sale with a Mr. Crimpton. The new mare was tied to the back of the gig.
“Midnight? Blackie?”
“Oh no, that would be trite, and you know how much we must avoid that accusation!”
He handed her up into the gig then walked around to climb up into his seat. He click-clicked the horse forward. “Well?” he asked again some moments later.
“Her name is Colleen.”
“There is no Irish blood in her.”
“I know. She is an original.”
He grinned. He realized he felt marvelous. He clicked the horse faster. He wanted to get to the stream and prove that he was the most controlled of lovers. He marshaled quite logical arguments for Napoleon’s invasion of Naples while he drove. He was scarce aware that she was seated next to him. It was splendid. He was himself again.
He helped her down from the gig, and just that—the mere closing his hands around her waist to lift her down—sent his hands to her breasts and his mouth to hers and he kissed her and touched her, and was gone. He ripped her chemise to shreds. It was hard and fast and when he finally managed to raise himself off Alexandra, his heart still pounding so hard he could hear it, he said numbly, “I truly can’t stand this, truly I can’t. Blessed hell, it is too much for a man to suffer. There, you have even wrung the Sherbrooke curse out of me and I have tried hard not to use profanity in front of you. I’ve failed. Jesus, I’m nothing but a rutting stoat, a stupid man with no sense and fewer brains.”
As for Alexandra, she doubted she would be able to move. He’d taken her quickly, as usual, and he’d been so deep inside her after he’d brought her to pleasure, making her scream as she lurched up, shafts of sunlight splashing through the oak branches onto her face. Her new mare had whinnied in response. Douglas had panted and heaved and said things to her that she guessed were very sexual, but she hadn’t understood all of them. It was odd of her, but she rather wanted to ask him to translate so she could say them to him and understand what she was saying.
“Yes,” he said, “far too much for me to bear.” Then he leaned down and kissed her. She parted her lips for him and it began again. “Damnation!” he howled to the pure sweet air, then kissed her again and he was hard inside her and pushing more and more deeply only to withdraw, to find her with his fingers and his mouth and it went on and on as she spun out of control and yet turned inward, to him, to bu
rrow inside his passion. She didn’t want him to be civilized; she didn’t want him to do anything differently. She wanted him to be a pig.
She told him again that she loved him between kisses on his jaw, his shoulder, his throat, her hands feverish on his chest and downward on his belly. Her fingertips touched his sex and he shuddered.
“No, not again.” He gently pushed her down onto her back. He stared down at her, his eyes hard. “No you don’t,” he said. “Heed me well, Alexandra. A woman says she loves a man because she has to justify her own passion to herself. If she is abandoned, if she finds great pleasure, why then, it must be love, not lust. You, particularly, are young and romantic; it is very important that you try to wrap your bodily pleasures in more inspiring packaging. It is the way your female brain functions, bolstered by all those trashy novels you have doubtless swooned over, but you will get over it if you will just be reasonable.”
“You absurd clod!” Alexandra sent her fist hard into his jaw. He was balanced on his elbow and the surprise of her blow sent him over onto his back.
“You stupid boor! You mindless rutting stoat!”
“Well, the last of it is true, I already laid claim to that.”
“Go to the devil!”
She was up and jerking on her clothing, panting and heaving, so furious with him that she was trembling.
“Alexandra, be reasonable. Stop it.”
She didn’t. If anything she jerked so hard a button went flying.
He came up on his elbows, lying stretched out, naked and sweating and feeling very relaxed. He was even grinning at her. “Alexandra, why become so distraught at the simple truth? Love is a poet’s nonsensical plaything and if he can bend one silly word to rhyme with another, why all the better. It is as insubstantial as a dream, as meaningless as the rain that flows through your fingers. Don’t use it as a crutch or as an excuse to enjoy me and yourself, you don’t need it. You and I do well together in bed. You respond fully to me, even though I seem to have this rutting-stoat disease with you. Don’t feel you have to cover it up with romantic nonsense.”
She was dressed now, though her stockings and boots were still on the ground. Her hands on her hips, she said very slowly, very calmly, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew that you don’t feel at all the same way about me and I was afraid it would give you power over me. I was quite wrong. You care so little for me that power doesn’t even come into it. I didn’t realize you would mock my words and my feelings, that you would make sport at what I feel. Your cynicism is pathetic, Douglas. If it makes you feel any better, if it makes you feel as if your beliefs are justified, well, I don’t love you at this moment. I should like to cosh you with a hammer at this moment. I would like to kick you on your backside. Instead, I think I will punish you in another way.” She picked up his boots and his trousers and ran with them toward the stream. She stopped and threw them as hard and as far as she could.
Douglas bounded up to grab for his clothes, but he was too late. “Blessed hell!” He jumped into the stream to grab his boots and trousers and Alexandra untied the horse, bounded into the gig, and was off in the next moment. His shirt and jacket lay beside her on the plank seat.
She heard him yelling at her and just click-clicked the horse faster. He couldn’t catch her, not in his bare feet, and he could whistle to the horses all he wanted, they wouldn’t pay him any heed. Alexandra smiled. The cynical bounder. Retribution tasted very sweet.
Thirty minutes later, Douglas passed the yew bush that flew his shirt like a white flag of surrender. He’d wondered where his shirt had gone to. She’d taken it, damn her eyes. He was hot, sweating, and wished he had her neck between his hands, just for an instant, just long enough for him to squeeze and make her face turn blue.
Damned twit. Lust, good full-powered bone-deep lust, and like every other female in the history of the world, she had to make it into something more grand, more elevated than it really was. Doubtless if he encouraged her, she would begin to wax eloquent about a spiritual joining, a mating of their very souls. It wasn’t to be borne.
His shirt stuck to his sweaty back. The afternoon sun was grueling. Another quarter of a mile and he spotted his coat flying from the lower branch of a maple tree.
When he finally stomped up the wide front steps of Northcliffe Hall, he was ready to kill.
Hollis greeted him, looking as bland as a bowl of broth. “Ah, Your Lordship is back from your nature walk. Her Ladyship told us how you lauded the lovely tulip trees that were bowed so gracefully over the stream; she said you strained your neck to see to the top of the poplar trees alongside the trails. She said you were humming with the lovely song thrushes and smelling the lilac flowers. She said you then wished to commune with the fishes and thus swam in the stream. She said how very kind you were to allow her to continue back here since she had the headache. You look a bit hot, my lord. Should you like a lemonade, perhaps?”
Douglas knew that Hollis was lying and he knew that Hollis knew that he knew. Why did everyone insist upon protecting her? What about him? He’d been the one to have to leap into the stream and pull his boots from bottom silt. He’d been the one to trudge three miles back to the Hall. Lemonade?
“Where is Her Ladyship?”
“Why, she is communing with the nature that’s confined here at Northcliffe, my lord. She is in the gardens.”
“I thought you said she had a bloody headache.”
“I fancy she cured that.”
“Just so,” Douglas said. The thought of her sitting at her ease on a chaise longue, cool and sweat-free, would have sent him into a rage. Douglas drew himself up. He shook his head at himself. All of this, it was ridiculous.
A month ago he’d been a free man.
Two weeks ago and he’d thought himself married to the most beautiful woman in England.
And now he was shackled to a twit he’d never seen before and who tortured him. She also turned him into a wild man. She tortured him very well.
In the east gardens, Tony leaned negligently against the skinny trunk of a larch, his eyes on his sister-in-law. She was filthy, sweat darkening her hair, her hands were black with dirt. She was murdering a weed, her movements jerky, and she was muttering to herself.
“I think things march along just fine,” he said.
Alexandra paused and raised her face to Tony’s. “Nothing is marching anywhere, Tony. He doesn’t like me, truly.”
“You mistake the matter, my dear. He’s accepted you as his wife. Too, I’ve seen him look at you. I’ve seen him look violent with need and replete with pleasure.”
“He hates that. Until today, he blamed me for his loss of control whenever he touched me. Just two hours ago, he decided to blame the bedchambers and the beds. He planned to discuss philosophy or war or something whilst he loved me.” She sighed. “When that failed, he . . . well, now he is probably intent on finding me and wringing my neck.”
“What you did to him was splendid, Alex. I wish I could have seen him dash naked into the stream to save his pants and boots. As I recall there are many rocks to trip the naked foot.”
“I know it isn’t proper to speak like this, Tony, but I have no one else. I was a fool. I told him that I loved him. I couldn’t help it, it just came out of my mouth. He told me that all I feel, that all he feels is just lust. He said that love is nonsense and that the notion of a spiritual joining makes him physically ill.”
“He really said that?”
“Not exactly. I am simply making the words fit his feelings more precisely. Actually what he said was worse—more insulting, more cynical.”
“But now he is your husband and I swear to you, Alex, where a man finds pleasure, other pleasures usually follow, if the man and woman are at all reasonable. You love Douglas. Half the battle is won. More than half, for he goes crazy whenever he touches you. You will see. The soirée is tomorrow night. Melissande and I will leave the next day. You won’t have to worry about my lovely witch any longer. Be
sides, I do believe that Douglas is already beginning to wonder how he would have dealt with her.”
“I can’t believe she allows you to call her Mellie.”
“I dislike the name immensely. Mellie, bah! It sounds like an overweight girl with spots on her face. However, it is important that she bend to me completely. If I wish to call her pug, why then, she must accept it since it comes from me, her husband, her master.”
Alexandra could but stare at him. “You are terrifying, Tony.”
He grinned down at her. “No, not really. As much as I love your sister, I will not allow her to have the upper hand. Ah, I believe I see your errant husband striding this way. Normally a man will pause—just a moment, you understand—to look at the Greek statues, but not Douglas. He looks fit to kill. This should be interesting. Should you like me to draw him off?”
“No, he would challenge you to a duel or assault you right here.” She shook her head. “Then I should have to attack you again, Tony.”
“Very true. Ah, we are saved. Here is Melissande, carrying her watercolors. Now she is pausing to look at the statues and not with an eye to painting them either, I vow. She and Douglas are now met up and speaking. He must control his bile. He must be charming, no matter he wants to kill you. Yes, he appears to have stopped gnashing his teeth. You know, Alex, I have an idea, a thoroughly reprehensible idea.”
She looked at him and understood and quickly said, “Oh no, Tony. It wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t—”
Douglas and Melissande came around a thick yew bush to see Tony on his knees in front of Alexandra, his arms around her, kissing her hair.
Douglas froze.
Melissande jerked back as if she’d been struck. She threw her watercolors to the ground, and yelling like a banshee, ran to the couple, grabbed Tony’s hair and yanked with all her might. He fell onto his back, grinned up at her, only Melissande wasn’t looking at him, but at her sister.