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She’d always managed to escape with her dignity intact. Until today, when he had proved that he was every bit as devastating as she’d always feared. His skilful kisses had not only melted her, it was as if they’d lit a fire in her blood and scrambled her brains. How else to account for the fact she’d ceased trying to find a way out of their predicament and agreed to marry him, instead? Yes, now she looked back over the past hour or so, it seemed to her that every time she’d almost come up with a rational alternative, he’d kissed her again and reduced her to a quivering heap of jelly on his lap.
On his lap!
She shifted on the seat.
‘Trying to keep your face averted from my corrupting presence is clearly giving you a crick in your neck,’ he said provokingly. ‘Why don’t you just turn your head and stare out of the other window? Pretend you cannot see me.’
She didn’t need to see him to be aware that he was sitting right next to her. Even though he didn’t allow a single part of his body to touch any part of hers. He was so…there. So vital and male, and sure of himself. Dominating the whole carriage just by the act of sitting in it.
How did he do that? Dominate whatever place he happened to be, just by breathing in and out?
‘Have you ever been to London? I am not aware that you have done so, but you might have sneaked up to town in secret, on some mission you wished to conceal from me.’
She gritted her teeth. How could he accuse her of being sneaky, when she could not tell a lie to save her life? Everything she thought was always written on her face, or so he kept telling her.
Although—she darted a sideways glance at him under her lids—he’d never discerned the one secret she would die rather than have him discover. Which was the way she felt about him, in spite of herself. The way her heart pounded and her insides melted when he turned that lazy smile of his in her direction. The way her insides knotted with feelings she couldn’t name or even fully understand whenever she’d heard about his latest conquest.
‘You mean you don’t know?’ she said with mock astonishment. ‘I thought you were infallible.’
His face hardened. ‘No. As we have both discovered today, I do not know everything that occurs even within my own sphere of influence. Clare, you still cannot think that I would have stayed away had I known of your father’s death?’
‘Yes, I can think that,’ she retorted. There had been no love lost between the two men she cared about the most and she could easily believe he would prefer not to attend the funeral. ‘But,’ she put in hastily when his lips thinned and his eyes hardened to chips of ice, ‘I do acquit you of deliberately hurting me earlier. I do believe, now, that you just fell into the way you always have of teasing me.’
‘How magnanimous of you,’ he drawled, looking far from pleased.
They fell into an uneasy silence for some considerable time. Such a long time that she began to wonder if he was ever going to speak to her again. How could he think a marriage would work between two people who couldn’t even conduct a civil conversation?
Perhaps, she reflected darkly, he didn’t consider conversation important. His own mother and father never seemed to speak to each other. Whenever they were out in public, it was as if there was a wall of frost separating them. She almost shivered at the memory. Surely he wouldn’t be as cold a husband as his father had been to his mother? Although…they’d still managed to produce him, hadn’t they?
A strange feeling twisted her insides at the thought of conceiving his child. Under such circumstances. Though a pang of yearning swiftly swept it aside. That had been what had silenced her very last objection, the prospect of becoming a mother. To his child. She’d have had to be an idiot to carry on insisting she’d rather spend the rest of her life tending to an unfamiliar and probably cantankerous old lady.
She’d actually seen it. The child. Seen herself rocking it in her arms, holding it to her breast. Imagined what it would feel like to belong to someone. And have someone belong to her in a way she’d never truly known.
‘We are now crossing the section of the Heath,’ he suddenly said, jolting her out of her daydream which now featured not just one baby but three little boys of varying ages, ‘where once a serving girl, armed only with a hammer, fought off a highwayman with such vigour she left him dying in the road.’
