“You’ve met my father,” he said dismissively. Harriet, for all the talking she’d done in her life, knew a little something about listening. Most people, if you gave them long enough, would fill a silence. So she waited, urging herself to breathe normally. She hoped he’d give her this. She was rewarded for her patience when he let out a deep breath and continued.
“My mother, well, she wasn’t meant to be a mother. She was much younger than my father, and they hated each other from the beginning. But she gave him an heir—my brother John—and then he couldn’t complain so much when she went on her long sojourns across the continent. Then she returned after a suspiciously long trip to Sardinia with a child who had suspiciously black hair and dark eyes,” he described wryly, almost bitterly. Harriet tried to think of what to say.
“Is she—” Harriet had no idea how to ask her question delicately.
“Alive? Yes, actually. At least, as of a few years ago. She was in Calais then.”
“You don’t see her, then?”
“I’ve only seen her once since she brought me back to England. I was a few years old, and she had run out of money, so she had to return. The duke took one look at us and decided he wouldn’t house us both. And a son, even a base-born bastard son, was worth more than a wife who would fuck everyone except him.” Harriet knew somehow not to ask more. “So, there I was with a father who loathed me and an infallible older brother, my perfect foil.”
“Was he cruel to you?”
“My father?”
“Your brother.”
“Much worse. He was marvelous to me. He didn’t care for my father’s favor, which quickly turned into my father’s poorly concealed contempt when he discovered that John liked reading and poetry more than fencing and riding. My father tried to beat it into him for many years. Literally. John just took it. Then he’d quote some poetic verse or a bit of philosophy about suffering to me. I had no idea what the hell he was ever on about.” Alexander spoke of his brother with so much love and admiration it made Harriet’s heart feel heavy.
“Did your father beat you too?” she asked, sorry that fathers were allowed to be like this.
“Occasionally, though he mostly ignored me. Until John got sick.” Alexander said the sentence so matter-of-factly that Harriet could feel how sad it made him.
“Why … why don’t you see him?Doyou see him? Is he here in London?” Something about the situation aroused anxiety in her. What had happened to the golden son?
“He’s in Chelmsford. The air’s supposed to be better there for his lungs. I don’t see him as often as I should.”
“Why not?” Harriet expected him to offer up something about how busy he was with his business affairs or to bristle at the question.
Instead, he grew quiet for a bit, before speaking again in a near-whisper. “I … I have his life.”
Harriet waited again, but her trick didn’t work this time. “What do you mean by that?”
Alexander groaned, and she could tell her luck had run out. “Let’s talk about something else!” he ordered, wending his arms around her waist. He spoke softly into her ear. “I’ve seduced my way into a gorgeous woman’s bed in the middle of the day. How often does that happen to a man?” Alexander brushed the hair off her neck and began once again licking and then nipping at the delicate flesh there. As diversions went, this was quite effective in its simplicity, though Harriet wondered if it was always how he avoided unpleasant conversations. Her worry disappeared quickly as she felt his cock harden and press into her back.
“To you? I imagine quite frequently,” she teased, joining him in the abandonment of heavier topics.
“Too true,” he said, pulling back from her, as if he were finished.
“Alexander!”
“Although Lord strike me down if I ever fail to take advantage of such circumstances.” He returned his attentions to her, for the second—or perhaps third?—time that day. Would she ever get tired of this? Wouldhe?
Alexander woke that night with a start, alone in his own bed. He hadn’t known how to ask Harriet to join him only to sleep—or why he wanted her to so desperately. He’d been with her all day, all afternoon, and well into the evening and still he felt almost desperate for her company.
All the better, though, that she hadn’t been next to him for the nightmare he’d had, his first in years. They started when John wassent away to Eton and then got worse when he was sent away himself to a lesser school three years later. The other boys took a break from teasing him about his parentage to tease him for missing his mother; he refrained from correcting them that it was John he missed. Perhaps telling Harriet about his brother had shaken something loose in him.
He itched to have a groom ready his horse, to flee to John, to see him and apologize for his absence and tell him about Harriet. He wanted to ask his older brother what he should do and why it felt like therewassomething to do, when he’d so carefully arranged from the beginning for this to be a marriage in name only. He and Harriet both knew the rules, and they were—for the most part—following them. If one was incredibly strict about what counted as consummation.
Why then, when she’d sat in his lap, had he felt as if he needed to confess something to her? As if he was pushing a terrible, fetid secret down in his chest that might spill forth at any moment?
He wanted to ask his brother what was happening to him. Why was he planning surprises for his bluestocking wife, why did he no longer think of other women, why did the thought of Harriet’s smiles drive him to distraction and the thought of kippers make him laugh?
Alexander could imagine how John would answer. He’d be silent at first, deep in thought, and then he’d walk over to a specific book in his expansive library, open to a dog-eared page, and point to a verse, which to John encapsulated everything about the scenario. Alexander never felt he fully comprehended John’s poems, even with great effort. But there was a certain comfort in the assurance that someone outthere had felt this way before. At least, he assumed that’s what John’s aim was in sharing them.
But riding an hour outside of London at midnight to wake a sick man was foolish for all kinds of reasons. And for what? To brag to the man that he was living the life meant for him? To tell him that he had everything John could possibly hope for—and would never get—and that still he was mucking it up anyway? That he had a lovely wife, whose company he enjoyed above anyone else’s, who wanted simply to be friends?
And it was entirely his fault. Because he didn’t intend to be a real husband. He couldn’t.
