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“You’re hardly his type, dearest.” Araminta’s laugh was light. “Sir Aubrey is a man of discerning tastes. His wife was the most celebrated debutante of her season.”
“No man marries only for beauty…not if he can see the character is flawed.” Hetty sent a baleful look at her sister. “No intelligent man, that is.”
“I really don’t know where you get these deep thoughts from, Hetty.” Araminta lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, a beatific smile upon her face. “However, you’ve missed the point. Sir Aubrey needs a wife who can pull strings for him. A wife who is adept at playing by society’s rules and seizing the advantage.” She trailed her hand over the damask counterpane, adding, “I am exactly the type of beauty Sir Aubrey favors. Dark, vibrant and—to use his own words—irresistible.”
“When did he say such a thing?” Hetty muttered.
“When he asked me to stand up with him twice at Lady Milton’s ball last night. Cousin Stephen was, as you can imagine, terribly censorious.”
Feeling sick, Hetty rose from the stool and began to pace. Was this before or after Hetty had frolicked with him in his bedchamber? She needed air. Knowing the nocturnal hours Sir Aubrey kept, it was quite plausible that no sooner had he seen Hetty off in her carriage than he had sought a spot more entertainment and returned to Lady Milton’s ballroom. To dance with Araminta.
“You still can’t marry him,” she said. “Not if he’s under investigation for some terrible crime we don’t quite know the details of.”
“Being a Spencean? Lord Debenham says his wife accused him in a letter. Conveniently it’s now gone missing and besides, Lord Debenham was Sir Aubrey’s wife’s lover, so one wonders how credible her claims are.”
With a gusty sigh, Araminta sat up. “Well, this all happened an absolute age ago. I’m just concerned with the here and now, Hetty. This is my second season. My first ended under a shadow when that silly boy took his own life after I said I wouldn’t marry him after all.” For a moment she adopted the look of the grieving betrothed. “Sir Aubrey’s wife ended her foolish life the same way. He and I have a great deal in common. I need a husband before Christmas and I’ve decided Sir Aubrey is the perfect candidate.”
Hetty swallowed past the lump in her throat as she imagined a lifetime of having to witness her sister’s and Sir Aubrey’s mutual delight in one another. “So you really are not concerned about the rumors that surround Sir Aubrey?”
“If they don’t affect his pocketbook and he’s not about to dangle at the end of a noose and so dishonor his family, then no.” Araminta performed a twirl before the looking glass then, patting her perfectly coiffured hair, announced, “And now I think I shall promenade in Hyde Park for it is at this time I’m most likely to encounter the eminently desirable Sir Aubrey. Would you like to accompany me, Hetty?”
“No!” Of course she’d spoken with far too much feeling so she quickly added, “I can’t imagine why you’d want me to come.”
“Why, my dear, I love it when you accompany me.” Araminta put her head next to Hetty’s and simpered at their reflection. “Every clever and beautiful girl likes to have someone by her side to show her in sharp relief.”
When she briefly touched Hetty’s light-brown hair before wrapping a finger ‘round one of her own dark curls, Hetty knew she wasn’t referring to their coloring.
Also, that her observation was acute. Araminta, the beauty, would always throw her sister into the shade.
Hetty drew herself up but w
ith not a glimmer of a facial muscle did she reveal herself. Only deep in her heart did she determine that she would triumph when it came to finding her own happiness.
* * * * *
Aubrey could sense when he was being watched. At balls and routs he was used to the interested feminine glances sent his way. When he’d been a young man trying hard to satisfy a beautiful, demanding and ultimately unsatisfied wife, he’d become aware of the masculine competition also.
Margaret had not loved him when they’d pledged their troth but that had seemed inconsequential at the time. She was young and unformed; eminently desirable, and he desired her. It had not crossed his mind that her feelings would enter into the equation, so crass had he been. His parents, as usual, had indulged him, sanctioning the match, even if Margaret was not as well connected or dowered as others their son might have chosen.
The occasional rumor that drifted his way that Margaret was in love with her cousin troubled him little during the early days of their union. The contract had been signed to the mutual satisfaction, so it seemed, of all parties. Margaret Larkin, a solicitor’s daughter, had risen in the world, it was generally acknowledged, by marrying the local squire’s son. A man possessed of exceeding good looks, high intelligence and dogged purpose when he set his mind to something. Furthermore, only a sickly cousin stood in the way of him inheriting a great estate.
Despite Margaret’s lackluster responses toward him in the early days of their marriage, it was not long before Sir Aubrey had the satisfaction of reducing his young wife to a quivering jelly during lovemaking, her sighs and gasps quite definitely not those of the reluctant participant. The fact that he’d apparently won her over made the union all the more satisfying.
A year into their marriage, Margaret suffered a miscarriage and Sir Aubrey thought to console his wife with the bolstering truth that it only proved she was healthy and able to bear more children.
Margaret, however, did not see it that way. She retreated, inventing excuses not to share a bed with him, then later bolting her bedchamber door so he could no longer enter with sweet, ultimately futile attempts to entice her back into his embrace.
It was an irony that his success was indirectly the cause of her cousin’s return.
In the years since he’d left England, impecunious George Carruthers had channeled his frustrated romantic ambitions toward the pursuit of money and made his fortune in the East India Company. Fate had continued to be kind to him, removing two cousins who stood in the way of him inheriting a title and estate. Now as Lord Debenham he returned, his first stop on English soil to visit the cousin who’d been pressured by her parents to reject him five years earlier.
The only condition upon which Sir Aubrey was prepared to accept Debenham’s presence, however, was that Margaret honor her conjugal duties. Her agreement had evoked mixed feelings. Did she desire her cousin’s company so much she was prepared to sleep with her husband to have it?
With a sigh of relief, Sir Aubrey had farewelled Debenham to London after one month, and the only contact during the next two years were reports of his meteoric rise within the Tory party ranks.
In the interim an infant son was born, then mourned, and the mutual passion that had briefly flared between Sir Aubrey and his wife finally sputtered. Yet his feelings remained intense.
To his surprise, Sir Aubrey had grown ever more attached to his wife. Routine and familiarity were not the stuff of excitement for him but he’d eschewed London revels to enjoy her restrained company and to nurture her return to health. He loved the flush that pleasure brought to her cheeks and like a lovelorn fool, he fed this with surprise offerings of flowers, silks and unusual foods he brought back from his local travels. He continued to exert his considerable capacity for charm and restraint in the hopes of lessening her pain but Margaret was in the grip of a terrible malaise.
