A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau (18 page)

She would go mad if every day between now and Christmas was like today, Helena thought. Unalloyed exuberance and merriment. Families. Happy couples—were there no
un
happy couples in this family or among their friends? Except for Edgar and herself, of course.
And children. Children made her decidedly nervous. She did not like being around them. She did not like them being around her. And yet she was to have one of her own.

She was poking at the fire, trying to coax the coals into a position in which they would burn for a long time, when the door opened abruptly behind her and Edgar walked in, wearing a dressing gown. She stood up and glared, the poker clutched in one hand.

“And what do you think you are doing here?” she asked him, preparing for battle, almost glad that there was to be someone on whom to vent her irritation. It might be their wedding night, but there were going to be no exceptions to the rule. If he wanted to know how loudly and how embarrassingly she could squawk, let him take one step farther into the room.

He took it. And then another.

“Going to bed here,” he said. “Sleeping here. It is my room, Helena. Ours. I slept elsewhere until tonight for form’s sake.”

“Oh, no, it is not ours,” she said. “It is yours or it is mine. If it is yours, I shall go somewhere else. You will not break your promise as easily as that, Edgar.”

“I have no intention of breaking my promise.” His voice and his whole demeanor were maddeningly cool. “The bed is wide enough to accommodate both of us without touching, and I have enough control over my instincts and emotions to keep my hands off you. We will both sleep here. In my family—in my world, I believe—husbands and wives sleep in the same bed. All night, every night.”

“And you have not the courage to fight family tradition,” she said, throwing into her voice all the contempt she could muster.

“I have not the inclination,” he said, removing his dressing gown and tossing it over the back of a chair.
She was relieved to see that he wore a decent nightshirt beneath. “You are quite safe from me, Helena. And you need to sleep. I would guess that you have not been doing enough of it lately.”

“I am looking haggard, I suppose,” she said testily.

“Pale and interesting.” He smiled. “Come to bed. Even with that fire, the room is chilly.”

There was no point in arguing with Edgar when he was cool and reasonable, she was finding. And he was always cool and reasonable. But one day she was going to goad him into a loud, undignified brawl, and then he would find that he had met his match.

She lay on her back, staring up at the canopy, her eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the darkness. He lay on his side facing away from her. He said nothing. He made no move to break his promise. She fumed. How could he expect her to
sleep
?

Was he sleeping? She listened for the sound of his breathing. She would surely hear it if he slept. Yet he was apparently relaxed. He was probably in the process, she thought, of having a good night’s rest just as if he slept alone or with a bundle of rags beside him. How could he
sleep
? How could he humiliate her so?

“Damn you, Edgar,” she said. One of these times she would think of something original to say, but at the moment she was not in the business of originality.

He turned over to face her and propped himself on one elbow. He rested the side of his head on his hand. “My only hope,” he said, “is that you will not be standing beside St. Peter when I appear at the pearly gates.”

“I am not in the mood for silly jokes,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I am nothing better than a puppet, forced to move whenever you jerk on a string. I do not like the feeling.”

“If you feel strings connecting you and me,” he said,
“they are of your own devising, Helena. I will not touch you—even with a string.”

“Damn your damnable control,” she told him. “I will have none of it. Make love to me. It is what we both wish to do. Let us do it, then.” She surged onto her side and put herself against him. She was immediately engulfed by heat and hard muscles and masculinity—and a soaring desire. She rubbed her breasts against his chest and reached for his mouth with her own.

He kissed her back softly and without passion. She drew back her head, breathing hard.

“It is for mutual comfort, Helena,” he said quietly, “and for the procreation of children. Sometimes it is for love. It is not for anger or punishment. We will not punish each other with angry passion. You need to sleep.” He slipped an arm beneath her head and drew her more snugly against him. “Relax and let yourself sleep, then.”

She thought she would want to die of humiliation if it had not been for one thing. He was fully aroused. She could feel the hardness of his erection against her abdomen. It was not that she had failed to make him want her, then. It was just that he wanted a submissive wife, who would give him comfort rather than passion. Never! She had only passion to give.

“Go to sleep,” he murmured against her ear.

“I thought you were ruthless, Edgar,” she said into his shoulder. “I expected an overbearing tyrant. I expected that you would take advantage of the smallest opportunity to get past that promise and master me. I should have known the truth when you would not quarrel with me. You think to master me in this way, do you not?”

“Go to sleep, Helena,” he said, his voice sounding weary. “We are not engaged in battle but in a marriage. Go to sleep.” He kissed her temple.

She closed her eyes and was quiet for a while. If he knew her as she really was, he would not wish to share
a bed with her, she thought. Once he got to know her, he would leave her alone fast enough. She would be alone again. She was alone now. But he was seducing her senses with this holding and cuddling and these murmured words. He was giving her the illusion of comfort.

“Comfort,” she said. “It is for comfort, you say. Do you think I do not need comfort, Edgar? Do you think it? Do you? Do you think I am made of iron?”

He sighed and dipped his head to take her mouth. His was open this time and warm and responsive. “No,” he said. “I do not think that.”

“Make love to me, then,” she said. “Let us do it for comfort, Edgar.” She was being abject. She was almost crying and her voice revealed the fact. But she would think of that later. She would despise herself—and hate him—later. At this moment she was desperate for comfort and she would not remember that there was no comfort. That there could not be any. Ever.

He lifted her nightgown and his nightshirt before turning her onto her back, coming on top of her with the whole of his weight, and pushing her legs wide apart with his knees. She would have expected to hate being immobilized by his weight. But it was deliriously arousing. There was no foreplay. She would have expected to wish for it, to need it. But she wanted only to be penetrated, to be stretched, to be filled, to be ridden hard and deep.

He was a man of such control, her husband. He was hot and damp with need. He was rigid with desire. But he worked her slowly, withdrawing almost completely before thrusting firmly and deeply inward again. If there had been foreplay, she would have been in a frenzy of passion by the time he entered her, clamping about him with inner muscles to draw him to climax and to reach desperately for her own fleeting moment of happiness.

But there had been no foreplay. Incredibly, she felt herself gradually relaxing, lying still and open beneath him, taking exquisite enjoyment from the rhythmic strokes with which he loved her. She had no idea how many minutes passed—but it seemed like a long, long time—before she heard herself moaning and realized that enjoyment had turned to a pleasurable ache and that he was going to take her over the edge to peace and happiness without any active participation on her part. For a moment she considered fighting such passivity, but the ache, the certainty that he was going to take her through it and past it to the other side was too seductive to be denied.

She sighed and shivered beneath him as he made it happen and then with dreamy lethargy observed while he completed his own journey toward comfort. It was a moment of happiness blissfully extended into several moments—a gift she accepted with quiet gratitude. The moments would pass, but for now they were hers to hold in her body and her soul. They were like the peace that was supposed to come with Christmas. And for these moments—they would pass—she loved him utterly. She adored him.

He moved off her and drew her against him again. They were both warm and sweaty. She breathed in the smell of him.

“Comforted?” he asked softly.

“Mmm,” she said.

“Sleep now, then,” he told her.

“Mmm.” Had she been just a little wider awake, perhaps she would have fought him since the suggestion had been issued as a command. But she slid into instant obedience.

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
and life could not be said to be following any normal pattern, nevertheless Helena began to have some inkling of how her life had changed. Permanently changed.

No longer would she travel almost constantly. The realization did not upset her enormously. Traveling could be far more uncomfortable and tedious than those who only longed to do it could ever realize. More disturbing was the understanding of why she had traveled and why she had never arrived at any ultimate destination. She had traveled for escape. It was true that she had derived great pleasure from her experiences, but never as much as she had hoped for. She knew finally, as she supposed she had known all along, that she could never in this life—and perhaps beyond this life, too—leave behind the thing she most wished to escape. She could never escape from herself. Wherever she went, she took herself with her. Yes, she had known it before. She had known that she lived in her own particular hell.

She would live at Mobley Abbey much of the time from now on. Edgar explained to her that his ties with his father had always been close ones and would undoubtedly remain so. For the rest of the time she would live in Bristol, in a home she had not yet seen. It was a
large home, Edgar had told her. From the sketchy descriptions he had given of it in answer to her questions, she guessed that it was also an elegant home.

She was Mrs. Downes. Her title had never meant a great deal to her. She would have shed it if she could after her first husband’s death. It was a reminder of a part of her life she would forget if she could. But there had been a certain dash to being Lady Stapleton, wealthy, independent widow. She had carefully cultivated that image of herself. There was something very solidly respectable about being Mrs. Edgar Downes.

She was part of a family. Not just some cousins in Scotland and an aunt whom she treated as much as a friend as a relative, but a real family, who prided themselves on their familial closeness.

Cora had hugged her hard immediately after the wedding and cried over her and insisted that they be on a first-name basis now that they were sisters. And so must her husband and Helena, she had commanded. They really had been given no choice in the matter. Lord Francis had laughed and Helena had thought how attractive laugh lines in the corners of a man’s eyes could be.

“Shall we bow to tyranny?” he had asked her, bowing over her hand. “I say we should. I must be plain Francis to you from this moment on, if you please.”

What choice had Helena had but to reply graciously in kind?

Her father-in-law, that genial older version of Edgar—genial, yes, but Helena had the strange feeling that she would not wish to be the person to cross his will in any matter of importance—was all that was paternal. One would almost have sworn that he was delighted by his son’s choice of a bride. He rose from the table when she entered the breakfast parlor the morning after her wedding, mortifyingly late, and reached out both hands for hers. He had kept a chair empty beside him.

“Good morning, Daughter,” he said, taking both her hands in his, wringing them painfully hard, and drawing her close enough to plant a hearty kiss on her cheek.

Again, what choice did she have? She could not reply to such a greeting with a mere curt good morning. She could not call him Mr. Downes.

“Good morning, Papa,” she said and took the chair beside him. The combination of calling him that and of realizing that this was the morning after her wedding night and the eyes of all the family and house guests and of Edgar himself, seated farther down the table, were on her caused her to disgrace herself utterly. She blushed. Everyone in the room knew why she and Edgar had married—and yet on the morning after her wedding night she
blushed
. How terribly gauche!

She felt trapped. Trapped into something she could not escape simply by packing her bags and planning her itinerary to wherever her fancy led her. This was to be her life, perhaps forever. And last night she had given up the one illusion of freedom and power she had still possessed. She had lacked his control, and so she had given up the greater good for—for what? Not for passion. There had been surprisingly little of that. Not even for pleasure. There had been pleasure—quite intense pleasure, in fact—but it was not for that she had begged. She had begged for comfort. And he had comforted her.

The memory frightened her. It suggested that she had needed him. Worse, it suggested that he could satisfy her need. She had been so satisfied that she had slept the night through without once waking, even when he had left the bed. But she needed no one! She refused to need anyone. Least of all Edgar. She would be swallowed up whole by him. And then, because she did not enjoy the sensation of being swallowed whole, she would find ways to fight back, to fight free. And she would destroy him. He did not deserve the misery of a shrewish wife.

She conversed brightly at the breakfast table, telling her father-in-law and her aunt, who sat at his other side, about Christmases she had spent in Vienna and Paris and Rome. Soon her audience consisted of most of the people at the table.

“And this year,” Mr. Downes said, patting her hand on the table, “you will enjoy a good old-fashioned English Christmas, Daughter. There is nothing to compare to it, I daresay, though I have never been to those other places to judge for myself. I have never had a hankering for foreign parts.”