A Tale of Two Lovers (21 page)

She wasn’t quite sure why, actually. She bit her lip, dismissed the thought, and adopted the boxing position, just as Roxbury had taught her.

“The most important thing is a strong stance,” she said, raising her fists.

Chapter 38

W
hen Brandon occasionally referred to the Writing Girls “taking over” his home, Roxbury never gave much thought to it. Brandon’s home was vast, and there were only four women. Surely, it was an exaggeration.

Upon entering his foyer after a long day away, Roxbury learned that it was not an exaggeration at all. Who knew that four women could make so much noise at such an impossibly high pitch?

Pembleton, the butler, looked close to tears. Behind him stood Mrs. Keane, the housekeeper, with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth and her eyes bright with tears. It was not clear, however, if she was stifling sobs or laughter. Timson leaned against the wall, smirking. Behind them, it seemed the entire household staff was gathered around the closed drawing room doors.

The noise—God above, the noise that four women could make! Roxbury was painfully curious and terrified.

“Julianna, watch out!” someone shrieked. He—and his staff—all winced at the sound of shattering pottery. The Chinese vases. He’d never cared for them but hopefully they were not valuable antiques.

One of the girls yelled, “Use both fists, Sophie!”

Roxbury’s eyes widened. A few of the footmen snickered until given a stern glance. That was a duchess they were laughing at.

Another hollered, “Harder, Annabelle.”

Then even Roxbury could not contain his smirk. Pembleton gave
him
a sharp look for setting a bad example for the staff.

The girls were either boxing—a hilarious and horrifying thought—or . . . he did not dare consider what other activities they might be engaged in. Boxing. It had to be that.

Something
else
shattered. They all winced again. Mrs. Keane sobbed, “Oh, the vases!” A maid standing to his left muttered, under her breath, “Good riddance. I hate dusting the darn things.”

His staff looked imploringly at him—none more so than Pembleton.

“I will take care of this,” Roxbury said, squaring his shoulders and standing up straighter.

Slowly, reluctantly they dispersed. After a deep breath, he pushed open the heavy oak doors.

He saw four women, fighting. They wore their nice day dresses, like proper ladies, but their fists were flying like those of brawling boys. Elegant coiffures had not survived the melee. Julianna, he noticed, looked particularly fetching with her hair tousled and falling in disarray.

Two of the girls practiced throwing punches while Julianna and Sophie held up down pillows; little white feathers clouded the air like a winter snowfall. Mrs. Keane was not going to be laughing when she saw that—or the remnants of a teacup shattered on the floor. So it had not been any of the vases to go, to the disappointment of his maid.

But none of that compared to the fighting girls. Roxbury leaned against the doorframe, folded his arms, grinned, and watched.

They were having a ball. Rocking on their feet, dodging jabs, and ducking punches. There was much laughter, and more shrieks to “watch out” or “hit harder.” He did not want to bring an end to such joy. And, oh, the blackmail possibilities!

It was Sophie who noticed him first. Her eyes widened in shock. Eliza paused in her punches to turn and look. She gave him a cheeky grin.

And Julianna . . .

She looked at him, and then she surveyed the damage to the room, as if seeing it through his eyes. The furniture shoved against the walls, shattered china, the down feathers, the destroyed pillows, the girls in utter disarray. Her lips parted and she mouthed the words “Oh damn,” but then she gave in, lowered the pillow she held, and smiled.

The blonde one, however, was not attending to her surroundings. Her back was to the door and she must have been boxing with her eyes closed—a tactic not recommended. Her fist flew out and landed on Julianna’s cheek.

“Ow!”

“Oh! Oh my gosh!” she exclaimed and all the girls oohed and fluttered around. A thousand apologies followed. Roxbury would have done something, but the girls formed a wall around his wife. There were calls for smelling salts and a doctor and medicine and even a surgeon. He called to one of the maids to hurry for supplies.

Julianna sat down on a chair, with her hand over her cheek. It wasn’t long before she was laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said for the thousandth time.

“It’s fine, Annabelle. It was only an accident.”

“Does it hurt?” Sophie asked.

“Not really. You’ll have to try harder next time, Annabelle,” Julianna replied. But Roxbury saw her wince when she touched the already developing bruise. It was not going to be pretty.

A maid arrived with a cold compress and the Writing Girls parted to let him close to Julianna. He knelt before her and pressed the cold towel to her bruised cheek.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“Of course,” he replied. Other than the cause of her injury being so very unusual, it did feel right to be tending to her. He wanted to take her in his arms. In fact, he wanted to take her upstairs to his bedchamber.

Through it all, Julianna’s gaze never wavered from his. After a moment, he realized they had all fallen silent. Being women, they were probably assigning all kinds of significance to his act of applying a cold compress to his wife’s bruise. He wanted to say it was nothing of significance, simple care and concern. But that wouldn’t have been the complete truth.

Instead, he stood up and surveyed the damage to the drawing room.

“At least you had the good sense to close the curtains,” he remarked. Really, they were the most hideous, god-awful things he had ever seen. Given how many bedroom curtains he had made a point of closing, this was saying something. Lydia certainly had her revenge. “Just imagine if the Man About Town got word of this.”

“Writing Girls engaged in fisticuffs,” Sophie remarked, giggling.

“Writing Girl brawls,” Annabelle said with a chuckle.

“The Brawling Girls,” Julianna shouted, to much laughter.

“
The Weekly
’s wrestling wenches,” Roxbury added, to all the girls’ merriment.

“Skirmish in skirts,” Eliza said, amidst the laughter.

“I imagine Knightly would be proud of your headlines,” Annabelle said. “But how happy would he be with a cartoon of this for the front page?”

“We’ll have to pose for a cartoonist!” Sophie leapt up to strike a pose, and in the process she knocked over one of the Chinese vases on the mantel.

“Oh dear,” she said woefully. “I hope that wasn’t a priceless family heirloom.”

“I as well,” Roxbury replied. Given that it had been selected by his former mistress Lydia Smythe, who had no idea about things like priceless objects and valuable heirlooms, he didn’t think they were of any worth whatsoever.

“You’re just trying to rush the redecorating!” Julianna exclaimed.

Sophie shrugged with a little grin, and pushed the shards of broken pottery aside with her foot.

“Redecorating?” he echoed, looking from Writing Girl to Writing Girl.

“I will not be redecorating,” Julianna affirmed.

“Pity, that,” Roxbury, Annabelle, Sophie, and Eliza all said at once. That set off another round of laughter.

“Would you ladies like to join us for supper this evening?” Roxbury asked. Rule:
Win over a lady’s friends.

“Oh how lovely! Thank you, but I promised Brandon . . .” Sophie said, beginning to gather her things.

“I have a column to write,” Eliza explained. Simon noticed that Julianna winced at that.

“I must help my sister-in-law,” Annabelle said with such a sad sigh that Simon did not get a very good opinion of her relative.

Julianna escorted them to the foyer to say goodbye, leaving him alone in the devastated drawing room. His staff was going to suffer apoplexies in droves when they saw it.

If anyone had told him that marriage would involve coming home to a skirmish in skirts with four brawling girls, he might have considered it sooner. Married life was definitely not as boring as he feared it would be.

A moment later, Julianna burst into the drawing room. “We have received an invitation! It’s for Lady Mowbry’s ball tomorrow night. I can wear my new cerulean blue satin and I can borrow Sophie’s sapphires . . .”

It did not escape his notice that she lovingly traced the script, or how she clearly enjoyed the feeling of crisp vellum under her fingertips. If she slept with the invitation under her pillow tonight, he would not be surprised.

But he suspected that he would have a bruise to match hers when he said they could not attend. There would be no sapphires and satins of any color, or waltzes with the ton looking on.

“Oh Roxbury, do you know what this means?” she sighed. “We are no longer complete and utter social outcasts. Our reputations are on the mend and soon, darling, we shall be able to pretend this whole thing never happened.”

Just imagining that happy day brought a bright smile to her face, but it hit him like a jab to the gut. She was eager to move out and move on when he was bent on seducing her. He was already losing her—and he didn’t even have her.

These past few days he savored the novel sensation of someone waiting for him at home. It changed things. Where he might have lingered away from home, he did not. When he might have stopped at the club, he did not. All he could think was to return to
her
.

It wasn’t something he’d ever experienced with another woman. Naturally, he had anticipated a midnight visit or a quick, illicit afternoon call. But he never experienced an urgent need to be under the same roof as a woman.

“Darling . . .” he said gently, and she looked up curiously. He would have to tell her they were stuck together for yet another evening.

Roxbury guided her to the mirror above the mantel, where he stood behind her. He watched as she looked at him with a mixture of annoyance and wonder. Then her lips parted in horror as she noticed the big, purple bruise on her cheekbone.

At first, he noticed the way she bit her lip. And then he noticed her lovely green eyes were bright with tears. She was desperately trying not to cry.

Though he hated when women cried, Roxbury took some comfort in that Julianna probably loathed it just as much. There was one thing to do: he turned her toward him, enclosed her in his arms, and allowed her to nestle against his chest and bury her face in the crook of his shoulder and wet his shirt with her tears.

He felt rather than saw her sobs. She twined her arms around him and rested her cheek on his shoulder. Julianna Somerset Roxbury, infamous author of “Fashionable Intelligence,” crying in his arms, in his horribly decorated drawing room. What had the world come to? A month ago, a week ago even, he would have scoffed had someone suggested the notion.

For better or for worse, Roxbury was fairly experienced with weeping women. All the ended affairs, or rumors about him with other women . . . these things tended to make a woman cry and they tended to make him deal with it.

This time, it was different.

“I never cry,” she sobbed. He murmured his agreement, and stroked her lower back with his palm and just listened. “Not even when Somerset died. Or when Sophie left. Or when Knightly fired me. Or even when we married.”

“Why are you crying now?” he asked.

“I want my life back. I want to get out of this house. I want to write and go to parties and buy my own dresses. I want to live in my own home and be my own mistress.”

At least, that’s what he thought she said. Between the sniffles and sobs, with her face now buried in his cravat, everything was a bit muffled and barely audible.

What he did understand made him burst out laughing.

She stood back, affronted.

“What is so humorous about this? I pour my heart out to you and you laugh? You are utterly heartless, Roxbury,” she said, with her mouth forming into a perfect, kissable pout.

“So many women have schemed, plotted, and begged to become my wife, or mistress, or to reside here. They wanted me to buy them dresses and take them to parties. Of all the women in the world, I end up with the one who doesn’t want any of that.”

“Women can be idiots when it comes to rich, handsome, and charming men. Marriage. Dresses,” she scoffed. “As if any of that matters.”

It didn’t matter at all, and she knew it. The pace of his heart quickened, because he’d never been with a woman who cared so little for those things. What could he provide her, then? Love, or something like it—but would that be enough?

To ponder that was to venture into uncharted emotional depths and he wasn’t equipped for such an expedition at the moment.

Instead, he said with the classic Roxbury grin, “So you think I’m handsome and charming?”

“Occasionally,” Julianna admitted. She took a few steps and collapsed onto the settee. He followed and sat beside her. “But it doesn’t count for anything. Somerset was handsome and charming and a horrible husband.”

“How so?” Though he would never admit it aloud, Roxbury was tremendously curious. What had gone so wrong with her first marriage?