How to Master Your Marquis (42 page)

Stefanie took him by the shoulders and rolled him over, sending berries flying across the bed.

“Bother the bloody raspberries,” she said, and she lowered herself downward on her husband’s magnificent body.

L
ater, as they lounged on the bed, feeding each other a picnic supper delivered by a rather put-upon waiter, Stefanie set aside a torn-off piece of baguette and draped herself over her husband’s chest.

He picked up the bread and gave it back to her. “You must keep up your strength,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.

“Be serious a moment.” She touched his chin. “I know we agreed not to discuss anything until after our little holiday . . .”

“Quite right. Far too serious for such a lighthearted occasion.”

“But since we seem to have such trouble even leaving this bed . . .”

“Nonsense. Quite untrue. I walked off to retrieve the room service tray not half an hour ago.”

She picked up a pillow and hit him with it, and then she nestled herself against him.

“But we should speak of it, you know. There’s something I should tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“The night of the murder. The duke came in and spoke to me, and I told him . . . I don’t remember exactly what I said, I was so angry. But I told him something of what your stepmother had done. And I think . . . I know that’s why he did it. To avenge you.”

“Or to punish her, for her infidelity.”

She raised herself up. “You don’t sound surprised.”

He was staring at the ceiling. “I suppose I put two and two together. Perhaps I knew the truth all along, like Charlotte, and I refused to accept it. That my father would murder her, that he would very nearly allow me to hang for the crime. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever understand my father. He was always a selfish brute. A coward, who never had the courage to face his own shortcomings. I don’t think I had a single loving word from him, and yet I suppose he loved me, in his way. He just loved himself more.” He paused. “But in the end, you know, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t let me hang for it. I suppose that’s something.”

“You’ll be a much better father.”

“God, I hope so. With you by my side, showing me the way.”

She smiled and caressed his cheek. “We’ll have to decide where we’re going to live. Whether you can bear to keep the house in Belgrave Square, after all that’s happened there . . .”

“We can live wherever you want, my love.” He reached up and took her hair between his fingers. “You’re like the sun, eclipsing all the old memories.”

She might have had to blink, once or twice, before she could answer him. When she did, her voice might have held a touch of rasp. “I just want you to know that I don’t mind. I don’t need the splendor, if you don’t want it. Belgrave Square or a flat above the boathouse, I don’t care. I’ll be happy wherever we are.”

His thumb reached out to caress her cheek. “I know you will, sprite. One of countless reasons why I love you. But you read Mr. Wright’s telegram of this morning. The splendid success of the sale of Southam Terrace houses. We shall soon have quite enough capital for a new start entirely. Just in time, for a chap with a growing family to care for.”

“Mmm.” She slid to his side and laid her arm across his muscular chest. “Which brings me to another thing.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask . . .” She swallowed. “Jamie, I know you have an important position, you’re one of the foremost men in England now, and our child . . . our children . . .”

He was caressing her bare arm, up and down. “Go on, love. Tell me what you want.”

“I know our children will be English, that their inheritance and destiny lie there, but I want . . . I would like . . . for this child at least, our first . . .”

He waited patiently.

“Would you mind terribly if I wanted to have the baby in Germany? With my sisters near? I know the future duke should rightfully come into this world in the state ducal bed and all that, but . . .”

He laughed out loud. “Is that all? For God’s sake, Stefanie. We can have the baby wherever you like, so long as there are at least a dozen doctors available at a moment’s notice. All I want, all I care about, pray for . . .” His voice grew soft. He moved on his side and took her in his arms. “Stefanie, when a man comes within a whisker of losing everything, when he’s prepared himself to die, he learns what’s vital. And all I want is a safe delivery, a healthy wife and baby. You, our child. You’re everything in this world. You’re all that matters. If you want to climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro and deliver the infant there, I’ll carry the palanquin myself.”

“Ooh, that sounds lovely! What a splendid idea! Think of the view!”

“Except that there are no doctors on Mount Kilimanjaro, so I expect we shall have to stay rather unimaginatively at sea level.” He shrugged regretfully and lowered his mouth to hers.

A knock rattled the door.

The Duke of Southam, who was already engaged in kissing his wife senseless, lifted his head and called out, “Another time!”

Stefanie looped her hands around his head and dragged him back.

Knock knock knock.
More insistent this time.

“I said, another time!” he called.

Knock knock knock
. “A telegram, Your Grace! It is marked urgent!”

“Not nearly as urgent as making love to my wife,” he muttered, nibbling his way to her ear.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. “Your Grace!”

He lifted his head and sighed. “I suppose I’d better get that.”

Stefanie sat up and watched him while he stalked across the room at his lion’s pace, muscles flexing in the blue twilight that crept through the curtains. His beauty washed over her again, the powerful curve of his shoulder, the clean line of his jaw, the golden glint of his hair.

He was hers.

She placed her hands on her round middle and caressed her own skin in dreamy circles. “Well?” she said. “What is it?”

He looked up from the telegram. “It seems, my dear, you’re about to get your wish.”

“What wish?”

He returned to the bed and sat on the edge. “We’ve been summoned to Holstein Castle by the end of the week, by no less an authority than your own uncle, the Duke of Olympia.”

Stefanie snatched the telegram from his fingers and scanned it. “He doesn’t say why.”

“Of course not.” Her husband slid his arms around her, lifted her effortlessly from the bed, and carried her to the chaise longue by the window.

He opened the curtains and allowed the Parisian dusk to spill across her skin.

“But just in case,” he said, lowering himself between her legs, “I’m going to bring my revolver, a bottle of brandy, and a pair of very fast horses.”

NOTE

A
s a child, I was dragged—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—to evenings at the Seattle Opera, so inevitably operatic shenanigans make their way into my books. I’m afraid the entire Princesses in Disguise trilogy may have originated in the plight of the captured princess Aida. The love triangle connecting her, the warrior Radames, and the fiercely jealous Amneris in an imaginary long-ago Egypt inspired the dynamics between Stefanie, the Marquess of Hatherfield, and Lady Charlotte in Victorian London . . . in this case, thank goodness, with a much happier ending.

As I discovered, words sung beautifully in Italian often wind up translating poorly on a written English page. Still, I couldn’t resist throwing in Radames’s expressive declaration of love:
Ergerti un trono vicino al sol
(“Build you a throne next to the sun”). I think Hatherfield says it well, don’t you?

Turn the page for a preview of Juliana Gray’s next book

How to School Your Scoundrel

Coming in June 2014 from Berkley Sensation

ONE

London

November 1889

T
he Earl of Somerton leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers into an imaginary cathedral before his nose, and considered the white-faced man standing at the extreme edge of the antique Kilim rug before the desk.

Standing, of course. One never made one’s underlings too comfortable.

He allowed the silence to take on a life of its own, a third presence in the room, a roiling thundercloud of anticipation.

The man shifted his weight from one large, booted foot to the other. A droplet of sweat trickled its lazy way along the thick vertical scar at the side of his face.

“Are you warm, Mr. Norton? I confess, I find the room a trifle chilly, but you’re welcome to open a window if you like.”

“No, thank you, sir.” Norton’s voice tilted queasily.

“A glass of sherry, perhaps? To calm the nerves?”

“The nerves, sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Norton. The nerves.” Somerton smiled.
“Your
nerves, to be precise, for I can’t imagine that any man could walk into this study to report a failure so colossal as yours, without feeling just the slightest bit” —he sharpened his voice to a dagger point— “nervous.”

The Adam’s apple jumped and fell in Mr. Norton’s throat. “Sir.”

“Sir . . .
yes
? As in:
Sir, you are correct, I am shaking in my incompetent boots
? Or perhaps you mean:
Sir, no, I am quite improbably ignorant of the fatal consequences of failure in this particular matter
.” Another smile. “Enlighten me, if you will, Mr. Norton.”

“Sir. Yes. I am . . . I am most abjectly sorry that I . . . that in the course of . . .”

“That you allowed my wife—a woman, unschooled in the technical aspects of subterfuge—my
wife,
Mr. Norton, the Countess of Somerton—to somehow elude your diligent surveillance last night?” He leaned forward and placed his steepled fingers on the desk before him. “To escape you, Mr. Norton?”

Norton snatched his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his temples. His narrow and unremarkable face—so useful in his choice of profession—shone along every surface, like a plank of wood left out in the rain. “Sir, I . . . I . . . I most humbly suggest that Lady Somerton is . . . she has more wits in her possession than . . .”

Somerton’s fist crashed into the blotter. “She is my
wife,
Mr. Norton. And she slipped through your grasp.”

“Sir, in all the weeks I’ve kept watch on Lady Somerton, she’s traveled nowhere more suspicious than the home of her cousin, Lady Morley . . .”

“Who is undoubtedly complicit in her affairs.”

“Oh, but sir . . .”

“And she has followed
me,
on occasion, has she not?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Which means she has neither the good sense nor the propriety of a common shopwife.”

Norton’s massive jaw worked and worked. His gaze fell to the rug. “Sir, I feel . . .”

“You
feel?”
Somerton barked. “You
feel,
Mr. Norton? Allow me to observe that your
feelings
have nothing to do with the matter at hand. My wife, the Countess of Somerton, is engaged in an adulterous liaison with another man. It is my belief that she has carried on this sordid correspondence throughout the entire duration of our marriage. Your object—the task, the sole task for which I hired you, Mr. Norton, as the best man in London for clandestine work—your task was to obtain proof of this affair and bring it to me. You are not paid to have
feelings
on the matter.”

“Sir, I . . .”

“Look at me, Mr. Norton.”

Erasmus Norton, the most stealthy and deadly assassin inside these British Isles, known to have killed at least one mark with a single silent tap to the skull, lifted his dark eyes carefully upward until he met Somerton’s gaze. For an instant, a flutter of pity brushed the inside wall of the earl’s thick chest.

And then, like the butterfly snatched by the net, it was gone.

“Believe me, Mr. Norton,” said Somerton, in his silkiest voice. “I understand your little predicament. She is a beautiful woman, isn’t she? Beautiful and full of grace. You wouldn’t think, as you watched her smile in that gentle little way of hers, as you watched her float about her daily business, that she would be capable of dishonoring a pet mouse, let alone her husband. I can see how you’ve fallen under her spell. I can hardly blame you. I fell myself, didn’t I, in the most catastrophic manner possible. I married her.” The word
married
came out in a growl.