Mistress at Midnight (25 page)

Thank goodness she was not back there, moving like a ghost around the few rooms left to her use, always frightened and never certain.

This relationship could not be like before, with Charles. She could not endure another loveless and distant marriage in which both parties had dealt with each other in hatred
and mistrust. This one had to be different, better, real.

Shaking her head, she chastised herself for such fantasy. It was duty and obligation that had brought each of them to this pass. Fluffy oversized cushions on the bed behind beckoned and a carafe of wine and two glasses sat on a cabinet nearby.

There would be expectations placed on the head of the title, and one of them resulting from a marriage even as hasty and ill-conceived as this one would be children. Heirs to trace the name of Hawkhurst down through the centuries and link them to the ancestors who had already been. Antiquity lived in a castle like Atherton and no one person’s needs were bigger than the narrative of history. Especially not hers.

With Charles she had withdrawn from any intimacy as soon as she realised what sort of man he was. But here…here a different truth lingered.

‘You sell yourself too short, my lady. A wife with a blameless slate would not suit me at all. Oh, granted, once I thought so, but now…’

The compliment made her cheeks redden and she knew the blush of it was showing
on her face. She hoped he might step forwards and show her exactly what it meant to be his wife. The dampness between her legs throbbed, the lust of want so familiar she felt dizzy from it.

She wanted him, wanted him in the same way they had wanted each other in London, breathless and burning, wrapped in each other’s arms until the morning. As Hawk poured two glasses of the red wine, she tried to take stock of everything.

‘To us,’ he said, handing her a goblet, careful not to touch her as he moved back and drank. His eyes did not stray from her own.

Drink took the edge from panic and she needed it to. her nipples hardened in a movement that sent small clenches of need to her core as he touched her arm.

‘Does it hurt?’

Shaking her head, she smiled. ‘Mrs Simpson found a bandage this morning and she dressed it. The ointment took away any pain.’

He placed her left hand in his. ‘I will find you a ring that fits as soon as I can. My mother had many and…’

His words petered out as she placed her lips on his fingers, one by one.

‘I love you, Stephen.’

There was nothing else to say to a man who had never given up on her, even when he thought her a traitor.

He shook his head at her proclamation and tried to move back, but she would not let him. ‘Ahhh, sweetheart, you don’t know who I am inside,’ he said, his free hand above his heart as if shielding some dark thing that he did not wish her to see. ‘And if you did…’

‘Then I would love you more.’ She could not allow his distance to break honesty into pieces. He could not love her back in the way that she wanted, he could not say the words that she could barely hold back each and every time she was with him.

I love you
.

I love you with every breath and every heartbeat
.

‘It is the imperfections that make people interesting, Stephen, those things that are hidden from everybody else.’

‘I have killed people, Aurelia, many people.’

‘In the name of a country trying to keep its citizens safe. England should thank you for it.’

‘If only it were so simple.’ Yearning lay in his voice.

‘Sometimes it is, my love,’ she returned. ‘Sometimes to forget for a moment is simple.’ Her fingers began to unbutton his jacket and she was pleased as he allowed her to slip it off. His neckcloth, waistcoat and shirt followed. He breathed in quickly as he traced the line of bandage across her left arm and helped her out of Lillian’s gown.

‘If you had not survived it…’ His thumb crossed her left breast, drawing a name. His name. Hawk. She read it in the quiet touch of skin.

Her husband. Joined by God and by law. Contentment gave way to alarm, though, as his fingers passed over raised skin at her nape and he pushed her hair aside.

‘What happened here?’ It was not the mark a lady should have had, she knew this, the quick slice of Charles’s knife a warning to comply.

‘I married your cousin on a whim and he soon regretted it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘He was my husband and I had promised before God to obey him. If I had given him his marriage rights perhaps none of what happened would have happened. John’s daughter might have had her baby and would still have been alive.’

Hawkhurst shook his head. ‘A man who would slice the skin of the neck of his wife is an unbalanced and dangerous one, Aurelia. You were wise to stay clear of him and there is no shame in protecting yourself.’

She smiled at that. ‘As you protected your brother?’

Shock ran through him. ‘Who told you?’

‘Lillian did. She said the scar on your thigh was from your effort to save your brother when he was caught in the crossfire of war.’

‘It was a fumbled effort. He died in my arms.’

Lord, he could give out advice, but he could not receive it. The irony of that made him smile and when she began again to talk he made himself listen.

‘Both of us have been scarred by death then, it seems, and have paid the price. Perhaps you were right when you said that it is time for the guilt to end, you with your brother and me with Charles.’

Her fingers strayed and she held the small bud of his nipple between them, causing Hawk to simply stop breathing.

Would there ever come a time when he did not want to possess her? Laving his tongue at her throat, he left a mark, reddened by passion, and took her to the marriage bed.

It was night when he woke, the moon full through the windows, its pale shadows lighting the limbs of Lady Aurelia Hawkhurst. Hawkhurst repeated the name to himself, liking the way it tripped from his tongue into the silence, midnight long since passed.

Her head was on his chest and her arms were thrown out across him, the ring he had placed there easily seen in the moonlight on her fingers. Further off the breeze rattled the leaves on the giant oaks that marched along the driveway.

Atherton and Aurelia. The rightness of it made him smile and he lay still just in case she might wake and see all that she meant to him.

Why did he not tell her? Why did he not give her back the words she had given to him all across the long and lovely day?

Treasure.

‘It can be simple,’ she had said. But he knew that it never was.

Chapter Seventeen

H
awkhurst was gone when she awoke next, the sun streaming into the room.

Mrs Simpson came in with a quick knock, her face wreathed in smiles and a basin of steaming hot water in her hands.

‘I’m to help you wash, my lady, and then dress.’

Aurelia felt a wash of embarrassment rise up across her face. The bed was in a state and, quickly drawing up the blanket from the base, she tried to hide some of the wreckage.

‘A successful wedding night needs to show some…shambles,’ the sensible and eminently practical Mrs Simpson declared. ‘In my experience if it does not then there is not much hope for a future happiness.’

‘You are married?’

‘For thirty-five years, my lady, and to a man I love as much now as I did when I married him.’

Such chatter calmed Aurelia. ‘Does Lord Hawkhurst come to Atherton often?’ she asked.

‘Not so often. When he was a child he lived here with his parents, but they passed on with a sickness and he has not returned for great lengths of time since.’

The information was horrifying. She imagined the hurt and the loneliness of a young Stephen, his world fallen to pieces.

‘This is why Lord Hawkhurst is a rolling stone, I’d be thinking, though a good marriage might change that.’

‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘But come, my lady, your new husband is waiting for you in the downstairs breakfast room.’

Stephen stood by the window in the blue salon and looked out across the long green lawns. Once he had played here with his brother, laughing and shouting as they ran and fished and climbed. His parents had stayed at Atherton for most of the year, wanting
the quiet and the beauty of the place, but it had been the same isolation that had eventually killed them—too far for any doctor to come with a bag of tricks and a cure.

They had been buried together in the small family graveyard and Daniel and he had been brought up from school to observe the solemn and joyless process.

He wiped his hair away from his eyes. Now he was back with a woman who was nothing like the bride he had thought to take, and where did that leave him? Smitten and ensnared in the promise of all that she was, that was where.

To wake up this morning with her lying beside him and watch the trust and peace on her face had been a revelation. He was no longer just beholden to himself and he hated this power she held over him, no will of his own save the need to empty his lust inside her like a green boy in the first flush of adolescence. He abhorred the thought, too, that if anything ever happened to her he might not survive it. Would not survive it.

It had been the same with his parents all those years ago when the news of their deaths had left him breathless and crouched
against the side of a cold brick building struggling for the air that he could not take.

If Aurelia left him…He shook his head and put away the thought, but the possibility of pregnancy loomed large and he knew the percentages of healthy women who never made it through labour. Everything was dangerous when a person wriggled through the careful guard of indifference and slid into the heart. It was why he had even considered offering for Elizabeth Berkeley because he knew that there was a part of him that she could never have touched.

Unlike Aurelia.

He swallowed and thought of his mother. Catherine would have liked his new wife, for they had the same sort of independence and cleverness. His father would have liked her, too, with her wide-ranging knowledge of politics and opinions.

A noise at the door made him turn and there she was before him, a shawl that he recognised as one of his mother’s tucked around her shoulders, the softer shade of pink setting off the fiery colour of her hair. She wore it just as his mother had, tucked up in a loose knot at her nape.

The circles of life spun in ways that were
fathomless and incomprehensible and perhaps after all it was just as simple as Aurelia had said it was. Signalling to the waiting footman to begin serving breakfast, he helped his bride into a seat at the table.

He was dressed in country clothes this morning, the fabric in his jacket and his trousers fine tweed and beautifully tailored. On her part Aurelia could barely meet his glance as she pondered over their hours in a bedchamber filled with delight. Today in the company of servants tending to them and the formality of a lordly seat overshadowing everything, a sort of hesitant uncertainty hovered.

She could not believe that this distant lord was the very same man who had kissed her into oblivion and given of his body so freely.

‘I would like to show you Atherton today on horseback, if you feel up to it.’

Just the thought of a jaunt outside raised her spirits. ‘My arm is a lot better and even if it tires I am well able to manage onehanded.’

‘Good. Mrs Simpson will find one of my mother’s riding habits for you to wear. It will be of the old style, of course, but I think you
would be much The same size. Would eleven o’clock suit you?’

‘That sounds lovely.’ The toast was dry in her mouth as she bit into it. So formal and stilted. She wished he would look at her as he had in the moonlight, passion in his eyes as need for her filled him. Today it was as if she could have been anyone.

‘The people who work on Atherton would no doubt enjoy a word or two with their new mistress if you would not be averse to stopping.’

‘Indeed I would not be averse to such a thing.’

His eyes creased at her answer, puzzlement lurking, and because of it she smiled. Quick wariness took his glance away and he made much of buttering his toast before lifting up a jug of freshly squeezed and sweetened lemon juice to fill a fluted glass—the business of an ordinary breakfast underpinned by a night of high passion and lust.

If she had been braver, she would have reached out and placed her hand over his and asked him If they might again repair to their bedroom to speak in a language that needed no words at all. If she had known that his feelings for her were as strong as the ones
she held for him, she would have done just that, but she had no such certainty. And so she stayed quiet, the heavy tick of a clock in the corner eating up the minutes of silence between them.

Finally he seemed to have had enough.

‘Alexander Shavvon will be here tomorrow. He is the head of the British Service and I am hoping he will allow an end to all that has been uncovered in the Park Street warehouse.’

Such a change in topic befuddled her. One moment lost in the hazy glow of sexual innuendo and the next thrown into a social discourse that could change her future for the better or for the worse.

‘Will I meet him?’

‘Of course. I am relying on your charms to sway him completely. When he sees you as my wife he will withdraw the claims Kerslake so definitely insists upon and give you full pardon.’

‘And if these charms do not work?’

‘They will, Aurelia. Believe me, they will.’

At that he stood, scrunching the linen napkin from his lap and throwing it down upon the table. ‘Eleven o’clock at the stables. Have
Mrs Simpson ask a lad to show you where they are.’

Then he was gone, striding off down the wide corridors of Atherton, the lord of the manor and the prince of his domain. The room seemed so much emptier without him in it.

Atherton was as beautiful as she thought it would be, the wide open spaces of green leading down to small copses of oak and elm and beech. Medlands had been a large holding, but this ranged as far as the eye could see as Hawkhurst property.