Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride (49 page)

There was no reason to believe that he had been suggesting a mere platonic relationship. He was a marquess—
it was still difficult to adjust her mind to that reality—and would want an heir.

She wanted children. Now that she had made the quite unexpected and impulsive decision to marry—so that she would feel safe from the raw emotions that had threatened her with Lionel’s return—she wanted all that marriage could offer her. Except love. Love terrified her. She was deeply thankful that Mr. Wade—Hartley—was just her friend. And soon to be her husband. The man who would initiate her in his own quiet way into the secrets of the marriage bed. Despite her age and her worldly wisdom, she knew only the essential fact of what would happen there.

She wanted it—with him. Without any extreme of emotion. With just—affection. There was affection between them, she believed.

Her “court” surprised her. None as much as Francis, it was true—she had been dreadfully upset over his quite uncharacteristic reaction to her announcement, until she met him at a soirée two evenings later and he was his old self, right down to the notorious lavender coat and to the indolent, teasing manner as he asked her if he had succeeded in squeezing a tear from her eye during the afternoon they had not gone to the park.

“Pray do not disappoint me by telling me that I did not succeed with my superior acting skills, Samantha,” he said. “You deserved a little punishment for your defection, after all. Now whom am I expected to flirt with without running the danger of finding myself caught in parson’s mousetrap?”

She was enormously relieved to learn that it had all been an act. At least, she chose to believe that it had been. She did not like to think that she really had hurt him.

A few of her former beaux quietly disappeared. Some of them expressed disappointment, with varying degrees of intensity. One or two of them were hearty in their congratulations.

All of them believed the worst of her motives for betrothing herself to the Marquess of Carew. She did not care. But she did try to look at him through the eyes of the
ton
, many of whose members either had never seen him before he started to escort her to some evening entertainments or else were virtual strangers to him.

She saw a gentleman of little more than average height and of only average build—though she knew from the one occasion when her body had rested along the length of his that there was strength in his muscles. She saw a man who had no great claim to good looks, though there was nothing ugly about his face. And of course, she saw a man whose right arm was usually held stiffly to his side, the hand, always gloved, curled inward against his hip. And a man whose permanent limp jarred his whole body when he walked.

She could hardly blame people for the conclusions they must have drawn about her motives for marrying him. But she did not care. She could no longer see him as other people saw him unless she deliberately tried—she was not sure that she had ever seen him as others saw him. To her he was Hartley Wade, more recently the
Marquess of Carew, her dear friend. Her savior—the word did not seem too extravagant.

He had saved her from herself.

She saw Lionel twice when she was with Hartley, once at the theater and once at a private concert, but neither time did he approach them, to her great relief. She did not still love him, she had decided. Of course she did not. She had more sense than that. It was just the eternal pull of the human will to what was undeniably attractive and evil.

Hartley had saved her from that. She had settled for friendship and contentment. And Lionel would have no further interest in whatever game he had been playing with her now that she was betrothed to another man.

She was safe.

But she attended a ball with her aunt one evening, two weeks after her betrothal. It was an invitation she had accepted long ago and felt obliged to honor. Besides, she loved to dance, and Hartley had urged her not to stop dancing because of him.

This time Lionel did not keep his distance. He approached her before the opening set began—her court was somewhat thinner about her than it had always been—and signed his name in her card next to the first waltz.

He did not speak for the first few minutes after their set began. He merely danced with her and gazed at her, a half smile on his lips. She could not tell if it was mocking or wistful.

“You did not believe me, did you?” he asked her at last,
his voice low, intimate, although they were surrounded by dancers.

She looked up into his pale blue eyes.

“You did not trust me,” he said. “You thought I would break your heart again, as I did six years ago.”

When he looked and spoke like this, it was difficult not to forget all else except him and the feelings she had once had for him.

“I should not say anything more, should I?” he said. “It would be the honorable thing for me to step back in silence now that you are betrothed to someone else.”

“Yes,” she managed to whisper.

“You knew,” he said, “that I was going to ask you to be my countess. Because I love you. Because I have always loved you.”

Why was he doing it if he was not sincere? What could he hope to gain now? She looked into his eyes and saw nothing but sincerity and sadness.

It would be the honorable thing for me to step back in silence …

Why was he not doing the honorable thing? If he loved her, as he said he did, why was he trying to cause her distress? Francis, after his first outburst when she had taken him totally by surprise, had gone out of his way to release her from the burden of believing that she had hurt him. He had acted honorably, like the gentleman he was—despite a tendency toward dandyism, even foppishness.

But what if Lionel really loved her? What if he had really intended to offer for her? She might have been his
wife. Lionel’s instead of Hartley’s. She felt the now almost familiar stabbing of desire in her womb.

But she would still be better off as Hartley’s wife.

“Someone else asked me,” she said. “And I accepted him. Because I wanted to.”

“Because you love him?” He moved his head a little closer to hers. His eyes dropped to her lips. “Can you say those words, Samantha?
Because I love the Marquess of Carew.”

“My feelings for my betrothed are none of your concern, my lord,” she said.

“And for me?” he said. “Can you tell me in all honesty, Samantha, that you do not love me?”

“The question is impertinent,” she said.

“You cannot, can you?” His eyes pleaded with her.

She clamped her lips together.

The encounter upset her for several days. But she was within two weeks of her wedding. She set her mind on it and the preparations that were being made for it. She longed for it.

Jenny and Gabriel were not coming. Samantha was both disappointed and relieved when she had her cousin’s letter. She hated to think of their not being at her wedding, but she had dreaded, too, that if they came they would encounter Lionel somewhere in London.

Jenny herself was very disappointed. But Gabriel was always unwilling for her to travel during the early—and the late—months of her pregnancies, she explained. He was always terrified that she would miscarry and ruin
her own health as well as losing their child. But he was disappointed, too.

“He says he is vastly impressed by your good sense, Sam,” Jenny wrote. “And by that he does not mean your sense in marrying a man even wealthier than himself, I hasten to add. He means your sense in choosing a man of Lord Carew’s kindness and good nature.

“I would choose stronger words myself. How naughty of you to have met him at Highmoor before you left for London and not to have told us. For shame! And I was so chagrined when he arrived home apparently the day after you left. I had great matchmaking hopes for the two of you, though I would never admit as much to Gabriel. He would crow with triumph and never let me forget it.

“Sam, how very
romantic
. I sigh with vicarious bliss. Clandestine meetings in Highmoor Park, the heartrending separation, and the heartsick lover going after you to claim your hand. And they were married and lived happily ever after—sigh! You see what being in an ‘interesting condition’ does to me? Oh, I
wish
we could be there at your wedding. I like him enormously, Sam, and of course I
love
you. And we are to be neighbors. I become delirious.”

She had continued with strict instructions for Samantha to use her newfound influence—“all new husbands wrap very comfortably about one’s little finger, Sam”—to persuade Lord Carew to bring her home immediately following the wedding night.

“And do not—I repeat,
do not
—listen with more than
half an ear to the lecture Aunt Aggy will give you the night before your wedding,” she had written in conclusion. “She will have you quaking in your slippers, Sam, with admonitions about duty and pain and discomfort and enduring for a mere few minutes each night and all the advantages accruing from marriage that quite offset such an unpalatable duty. Performing that particular duty is beautiful and wonderful and utterly pleasurable, Sam—I speak from personal experience, though I blush even as I write—when one loves the man concerned. So enjoy, my dear, your wedding night and every night following it—my blush deepens.”

Even Jenny did not know their real reason for marrying. But it did not matter. Love had worked for her and Gabriel. But happy love was a rare commodity. Samantha was happier to settle for something else.

She waited for her wedding day with longing and a thinly veiled impatience. Once she was married, everything would finally be settled in her life. She could proceed to live contentedly ever after.

Sometimes it felt as if the day would never come.

S
T. GEORGE’S, HANOVER SQUARE—THE FASHIONABLE church in which to wed. The first day of June—the fashionable time to marry. The weather was kind. More than kind—there was not a cloud in the sky, and the morning was hot without being oppressively so. The church was filled with modishly dressed members of the
ton
.

If he had ever had a dream of the beginning of wedded bliss, the Marquess of Carew thought as he waited rather nervously at the front of the church with an unusually solemn Duke of Bridgwater, then this was it. There was a great deal to be said for the quiet intimacy of a private ceremony, with only family and very close friends in attendance, but it was not what he wanted for himself.

He wanted the whole world to see their happiness. He wanted the whole world to know what a lucky fellow he was. He had never dreamed of winning for himself such a sweet and beautiful bride, and one, moreover, who had chosen him entirely for himself. He had never expected to find a bride who would love him. And although he had dreamed of loving a woman, he had never really expected to feel that love so powerfully and to have it returned.

To be marrying the woman he loved and the woman who loved him, especially when she happened to be the most beautiful woman in all England—oh, yes, it was an occasion to be celebrated with his peers and hers.

Brides were always late. There were some who would say that it was ill-bred for them to arrive early, or even on time. It showed an overeagerness, something a lady must never show for anyone or anything.

Samantha was on time. If he had been able to smile at that particular moment, the marquess would have smiled. If she was overeager, then his happiness could only be more complete. But he could not smile. At first he was so nervous that he was afraid when he got to his feet his legs would not hold him up. And then he saw her.

He was aware only that she was so beautiful his breath caught in his throat. He did not really see the delicate pink muslin high-waisted dress, as simply and elegantly styled as most of her clothes, or the flowers woven into her blond curls, or the simple posy of flowers she carried in one hand. He did not notice Viscount Nordal, on whose arm she walked down the aisle of the church toward him.

He saw only Samantha. His bride.

She was looking pale and rather frightened. She looked neither to left nor to right at the gathered congregation, though everyone, perhaps without exception, was looking at her. She was looking—at him. And he recognized the slight curving of her lips as an attempt at
a smile. He smiled back, though he was not sure that his face responded to his will. He hoped she would know from his eyes that he was smiling at her, encouraging her, welcoming her.

And then they were there beside him and he knew, almost as if he had not yet realized it, that this was their wedding day, that in a matter of minutes they would be married. Irrevocably. For life. Lady Brill, he noticed, was already sniveling in the front pew.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered …”

The familiar words. The familiar ceremony. So very familiar. And yet new and wonderful. Because this time the words were being spoken and the ceremony was being performed for them—for him and his own dearly beloved.

Such a very short ceremony, he thought, promising to love and to cherish and to keep her through all the vicissitudes of life, listening to her promise to love, honor, and obey him—though he would never, ever demand obedience of his love against her will. So short and yet so momentous.

In those few minutes and with very few words, two lives were being changed forever. Two lives were being interwoven, being made one. Man and wife. One body, one soul.

Bridge’s hand, as he passed him the ring, was slightly unsteady, he noticed. His own was no longer so. He slid the ring onto her finger. The visual symbol of the endlessness of their union and their love.

“With this ring I thee wed …”

And with my body I thee worship
, he said with his heart and his eyes as well as with his lips. My
beloved
.

And it was over. Almost before his mind had begun to comprehend that this was it, the most important event of his life. It was over.

“—I now pronounce you man and wife together …”

She was still pale. Her eyes, luminous and trusting, gazed into his.