Married to a Stranger (7 page)

Sophia gathered up her skirts and almost ran from the little pavilion. She could feel Callum’s presence close behind her, ominously quiet. ‘Callum, I am sorry, I had no idea it was not wise to be alone with him. We were talking and it was so stuffy inside and … And it was just harmless flirtation.’

‘Will told you quite clearly that he was a rake.’ Callum took her by the arm and marched her back towards a side door.

‘Yesterday in the carriage? I am sorry, but I lost concentration and missed that.’ It sounded a ridiculous excuse, even though it was true. Callum’s eyebrows lifted in what she was certain was disbelief. Sophia dug in her heels and they stopped. ‘I have said I am sorry. I had no intention of flirting with him—or any other man, come to that—if you had not just abandoned me like that.’

‘I had hardly abandoned you; you were in the middle of my family. Plenty of company, I would have thought. And what possessed you to go to that summer house in the dark with him?’ Callum sounded every bit as sanctimoniously disapproving as her mother, she thought.

‘Because I am not used to rakes,’ she snapped. ‘Or to flirtation.’

‘And there I was thinking I was marrying a woman with a degree of
savoir-faire
and not a green girl,’ he said, just as tartly.

‘You know perfectly well that I have not had a great deal of experience in society. And, until you, not much with men, either!’

He narrowed his eyes. Sophia tried an olive branch. ‘You were most effective back there.’ It had been impressive, that controlled, skilled violence, and she realised with a pang of shame that she had found it arousing. She wanted to kiss Callum. No, she wanted him to kiss her, to take her in his arms with the same masculine energy he had fought with. She wanted to be swept away by him again. Or perhaps she just wanted him to show her some emotion other than possessiveness.

‘It was neater than breaking his nose,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ll send for the carriage to take you home. He’ll be gone tomorrow.’

‘It was pleasant to be flirted with,’ Sophia said. He stopped and turned to her in the light from the lantern over the door. ‘Until he kissed me, of course. I would prefer it if you flirted with me,’ she added.

‘You want me to flirt?’ He sounded puzzled by the concept.

‘I would like to be courted, not taken for granted. And I assume you do know how to flirt,’ she said and saw him become as still as a heron poised above a pool, his eyes, glinting in the reflected light, as focused. He looked tired, she thought. There were shadows under his eyes, fine lines at the corners she had not noticed before.

‘Is that wise?’

Was that sarcasm?
‘I want to forget Mr Masterton. It is you I am betrothed to and this is rather a pleasant evening.’ She wanted to add
I would never have flirted with him if you had been paying me any attention,
but that would sound peevish.

‘I can’t say I want to flirt with you just so you can forget your indiscretions,’ Callum remarked. ‘But if you insist … Wait there just one moment.’

Sophia stood and glared at the door as it swung to behind him. No one, it seemed, could accuse Mr Callum Chatterton of impulsive romantic gestures, or of being carried away by passion or even, she decided, of chivalrous behaviour. He had felled Masterton because he was dallying with his betrothed, not because he wanted to rescue a lady in distress or because he wished to be kissing her himself. She had thought, from what one read in sensation novels, or heard in whispers from one’s friends, that violent action in defence of a lady would produce almost unconquerable passion in the male breast.

‘Here.’ Callum came out onto the terrace and offered her a champagne flute. ‘Will’s best vintage should banish any lingering thoughts of Donald. And I certainly don’t want to taste him on your lips.’

‘Thank you.’ Sophia took it and tossed back the entire glass. ‘What a practical solution, Mr Chatterton. No one could suspect you of hot-blooded passion, could they?’ The shadowed garden seemed to be swaying slightly.

‘I am sorry to be a disappointment to you, Sophia. Perhaps you are forgetting the afternoon at Long Welling?’

‘You mean your outrageous kisses? Those were simply designed to overwhelm me, sweep me into agreeing. I am talking about courtship, about getting to know each other.’

‘Damn it, Sophia, it was not like that.’ Callum emptied his own glass and set it down on the low wall that edged a formal knot garden. The scent of thyme and rosemary drifted up on the evening breeze.

‘No? If you told me you were swept away on a tide of romantic desire I would, naturally, have to believe you.’

‘It is a little late to rake over these coals, is it not? You have agreed to marry me, the die is cast.’ Callum leaned against the door frame, the picture of careless masculinity confronted with irritating feminine nagging. He had not answered her question, of course. ‘I told you not to expect a love match. If you want me to pretend this is a romance, then I must disappoint you.’

‘I know that! But now I have to live with you for the rest of my life—and you have to live with me and I thought some closeness … On Sunday I thought …’ Her voice trailed away in the face of his lack of reaction. ‘Oh, never mind. I should not be out here, not even with you. Let me past, if you please.’

‘No.’ He stood upright and put a hand under her elbow. ‘Come along.’ He walked her along the terrace, around the edge of the house, across the end of the carriage drive and into the stable yard. ‘The carriage to take Miss Langley home,’ he said to the groom who came running at the sound of their footsteps.

‘I cannot just walk away—I should say goodbye to the guests,’ Sophia protested. ‘And to your brother.’

‘I will tell them you have a headache,’ Callum said, bundling her into the carriage as it came to a stop. He climbed in after her and slammed the door. The groom had set a taper to the internal lantern and she searched his face for some clue to his feelings.

‘Both of us? That was your excuse for disappearing earlier, was it not?’

‘They will assume we are having a mutual headache,’ Callum said as he settled himself on the seat next to her.

‘A mutual—? You mean they will assume we are alone somewhere making love?’ Sophia demanded on a wave of indignation.

‘Probably. We had better make it so, don’t you think?’

Chapter Seven

C
allum turned and pulled her into his arms. ‘We both taste pleasantly of champagne, I imagine.’

Sophia felt her body sway towards him. She could hardly complain about him not courting her and then object when he wanted to kiss her. The blinds were down. No one would be able to see.

Callum’s mouth was firm and cool on hers and tasted, as he had predicted, of champagne. It also tasted of him, which was disturbing. She was coming to know that taste, to want it. But he did not repeat the all-consuming, passionate kisses that had so overwhelmed her before, but brushed her lips lightly with his in a whisper of a caress. Then he began to untie the ribbons that held up her long evening gloves and rolled the right-hand one down, almost to her wrist. He bent his head and touched his lips to the inside of her elbow, his tongue tracing the tendons, delving into the warm softness and then trailing down to her wrist where the pulse was pattering, faster it seemed than even her heartbeat.

‘Callum,’ she whispered as he began to pull off the glove, finger by finger. ‘Callum?’ The thin silk slid off and he raised her hand to his mouth.

‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ he asked, her hand so close to his lips that the breath warmed her knuckles.

‘Yes. No—I do not know! Callum, I wanted you to
want
to flirt with me. But I should not have asked. Now I do not know whether you want it or if you are simply obliging me.’

‘I am always ready to oblige you,’ he said with a catch in his voice that might have been a rueful chuckle. ‘I rather think I have forgotten how, though.’

‘I doubt it.’ It was her turn to be rueful now.

‘No, I mean it.’ In the silence she could not see his face, but their interlinked fingers gave her some hope that he would not close himself off from her again. ‘At the risk of shocking you, Sophia, I could make love to you, bed you, very easily. That is instinct and technique. But I seem to have lost the ability to make love lightly, to tease. To flirt, if you want to call it that.’

‘You appeared to be making a good job of it just now,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ Callum said drily. ‘The truth is, I want to be married to you. I want you in my bed, I want you in my home. I want—I need—this state of limbo to be over. I do not want to be flirting with my betrothed.’

She could understand that; she felt much the same way, she supposed. Get this over with and they could settle down to their new life with the uncertainties out of the way. The undercurrent of bitterness in his voice warned her to be careful. She dare not say the wrong thing.

‘Callum—’ The carriage swayed as it rounded the corner into the lane and jerked violently as one wheel hit the pothole that had grown steadily deeper all winter. Callum caught her hard against him and then sat her safely back on the seat. ‘Callum, do you really have a headache? You look as though you have not been sleeping.’ She stroked her fingertip beneath his eye and he flinched. ‘Sorry.’

‘I have a headache. I have suffered with them since the wreck, but I am getting them under control now. You need not fear you are marrying a man who will turn invalid on you.’

‘I do not fear that,’ Sophia said quietly. ‘And you should not feel having headaches is a weakness, they will go with time.’ He said nothing about his lack of sleep and she did not want to probe too deeply. He was doubtless very busy, that was all.

By the time the carriage stopped in front of the Langleys’ garden gate Sophia had her glove safely secured and her voice calm. ‘Thank you, Callum,’ she said as he helped her down and opened the gate. ‘No, please do not trouble yourself,’ she added as he would have walked her up the path to the door. ‘I am safe enough now. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ Cal said and watched his affianced bride disappear through her front door without a backward glance. ‘That went well,’ he snarled under his breath as he got back into the carriage and stuffed his cold hands into his pockets. Damn this country, was he never going to get warm?

He had not invented the pain that had built inexorably in his head during dinner to the point where his eyes had lost focus. The migraine headaches had attacked him relentlessly in the first few months after the shipwreck, but he had thought they had almost run their course. Perhaps they would not while the nightmares disturbed his sleep with such regularity.

The evening air on the terrace had been cool enough to revive him a little and the sight of Sophia vanishing into the gazebo with Donald Masterton had cleared his sight, even as it had fuelled his temper.

The pleasure of fighting Masterton was visceral, dark, elemental. It made him realise how therapeutic violent and uncivilised behaviour might be. He wanted to pound Masterton into a pulp and he wanted to drag Sophia into the nearest bedchamber and possess her to the point of mutual exhaustion.

Which was impossible. He could not behave like that to her. But he did not want the mild kisses that were acceptable for a betrothed couple, the sort of kiss they had exchanged in the carriage just now. He needed mindless passion, to lose himself utterly in a woman. Any woman, provided she was an abstraction and not a person he had to feel for, to love. It was too dangerous to love. The ladybirds he entertained provided sexual release, but you could not treat a wife in that way.

Sophia was confused and he did not blame her. It would be easier, surely, when they were wed? He would care for her, protect her. It was strangely comforting to imagine domesticity, a wife at home when he returned, a hostess at his table.

He would look after her materially, better than Dan could have done. He would, he hoped, get her with child soon and provide for his family too. He would try, very hard, not to hurt her, although he was not too certain how successful he would be in that. He suspected she wanted affection and he would do his best—she was easy to like. Despite her denials she might even expect to be loved, though she did not love him. But that was impossible because to love you had to lay open your soul and your mind for the other person and he did not think he could, not again. He had not even had to think about loving his twin. If either of them had been asked about their feelings they would have been embarrassed, very British and repressed about admitting such an emotion. How they felt had not depended on words, it had simply been the natural state of being.

But a woman needed the words. And Sophia deserved the truth, not hollow, comfortable lies.

Two days after being kissed by Donald Masterton in the gazebo Sophia sat next to her husband in the post chaise and tried to think about almost anything other than the fact she was now, irretrievably, married. That morning’s service had been very quiet, very private. After an early luncheon they had set out for London and her new home. She had never felt so alone.

‘This is positively luxurious. I have never travelled by post chaise before,’ she said with determined brightness.

‘It doesn’t make you queasy, then?’ Callum must have noticed that she was clutching tight to the leather loop that hung beside her. Better that he should think she found the action uneasy than that she was gripping it tight out of nerves.

‘Not unless I stare at one fixed spot,’ she said as the chaise swung round a tight bend. It threw her against his shoulder and he put out a hand to steady her, withdrawing it the moment she was upright again. ‘Thank you.’ Alone again.

Another mile passed in silence, then Callum said, ‘You do not have to wear half-mourning, you know. I had no idea you would feel you must wear grey to your own wedding.’

‘Not wear mourning?’ She had thought he would expect it, insist upon it. ‘I cannot leave it off; people would be shocked, they would think I did not care about Daniel.’

‘When of course you do,’ he said flatly. ‘And you can leave it off. It won’t bring Daniel back, it’s depressing and it doesn’t—’ He broke off, the sentence unfinished.

‘Suit me? No, it does not,’ she agreed, perfectly aware that black and greys and mauve made her skin sallow and washed the colour out of her eyes. Callum noticed, of course. At that first traumatic meeting in March, when he had broken the news to her, he could hardly have been in any fit state to notice whether she wore sackcloth or full court dress. Since he had come back she had been wearing half-mourning whenever he had seen her.

Perhaps he thought that leaving it off would make a significant difference to her looks. If that was the case, then her husband was due a disappointment. She had catalogued her appearance in all honesty, that night when she had received Daniel’s letter; she was not plain, but neither was she a beauty. Perhaps she could try for
interesting
, but she doubted it.

‘Other than my mourning, I only have whites and pale pastels,’ she said. ‘Those would be quite unsuitable.’

‘And not right for a married woman in any case,’ he agreed. ‘You must shop as soon as possible.’ He shifted in his seat to look at her. ‘Clear jewel colours,’ he said. ‘Deep blue, amber, ruby. Even violet.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, surprised to find Callum not only taking an interest in such things, but being so perceptive about what would suit her. ‘You have a very good eye for colour.’

‘I used to try to paint in watercolour,’ he admitted. ‘Not very well!’

‘But no more?’ He shook his head and she sensed it was not a good topic to pursue just now. ‘Where should I shop?’

‘I have no idea,’ Callum said. ‘London is a mystery that I am beginning to explore as I would an Indian jungle. I asked Will where to go for a tailor and hatter and bootmaker, and I am learning my way around masculine St James’s, but it did not occur to me to ask about ladies’ clothes. Aunt Clarissa will help, but she’s not back in town for at least a month—her middle daughter is about to be confined with her first child.’ He frowned at her, obviously taking in for the first time just how provincial she was.

‘Never mind,’ Sophia said, seized with a determination that she was not going to be a nuisance to him. Men were not interested in shopping, she understood. ‘I am sure the lady’s maid the butler has engaged for me will know.’

‘A good idea.’

‘What is his name? The butler?’

‘Hawksley. Had I not told you?’

She shook her head. ‘Perhaps if I know the details of the house, it would help … I mean, I should be thinking about the housekeeping.’

‘I told you none of this? I am sorry, Sophia.’

‘You were preoccupied,’ she said after a moment. ‘Callum, I do want to make you a good wife, to make sure that things in your homes are as well run and comfortable as possible for you.’

‘And you are not helped by a husband who does not brief you with the information you require?’ he observed with more perception than she had hoped for. ‘I am not used to having a wife—you must tell me when there is something you need.’

Some affection? More than a tenth of your attention?
‘I will,’ she promised. ‘The house?’

‘A drawing room and a dining room at street level, with the kitchens and domestic offices in the basement,’ he said. ‘I must admit I did not look at those. On the first floor there is the room I use as a study, a room you could have as a sitting room and a bedchamber. Above that, the main bedroom with a dressing room and a third chamber. The servants’ rooms are in the attic.’

‘That all sounds positively cosy.’ For a moment Sophia toyed with a vision of domestic bliss. ‘You will be busy in your study, I will be in my sitting room deciding menus or curled up with the latest novel. Then we will meet to exchange the news of the day in the dining room over a perfectly prepared dinner, or entertain modishly in the drawing room. Is that how it is done?’

‘Absolutely. That seems to be the domestic model. And after dinner we will retire upstairs.’

At this point her desire to speculate aloud faltered. Would Callum expect them to share a bedchamber?

‘Which bed do you …? I mean, which would …?’ She could feel the colour heating her cheeks.

‘I thought you would prefer the main bedchamber because of the dressing room,’ Callum said as easily as if they were discussing the front hall. ‘I can use the one on the first floor. It will be convenient for when I am working late; I would not wish to disturb you.’

‘How considerate.’ Sophia heard the edge in the words even as she said them.

Callum looked at her: a long, steady scrutiny from those enigmatic hazel eyes. He looked out of the window. ‘I am not always an easy sleeper.’

Sophia cast around for another topic. ‘We have not discussed housekeeping, or my dress allowance.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Sophia said. ‘I do not know the house, I do not know London prices, I have no idea how adequately equipped it is or how much entertaining you wish to do.’

‘Then I suggest we wait until we see what a normal pattern of expenditure is and extrapolate from that.’

‘I am not one of your counting-house clerks, Mr Chatterton.
Extrapolate
indeed!’

‘If you can think of a better method, Mrs Chatterton, then please, let us employ it.’ There was a long silence while he watched her face and then Callum remarked, ‘You may not be one of the clerks, Sophia, but I would wager a significant sum that you are counting.’

‘In French, backwards,’ she agreed. His lips twitched, just a fraction, but the laughter he was suppressing was plain to see in his eyes. It was shocking in the lean, dark, controlled face. Shocking and irresistible. She smiled back. ‘You are teasing me again.’

‘I did not intend to. Really, there is no need to worry about such things yet.’ Almost imperceptibly Callum relaxed into the corner and it was only as he did so that Sophia realised that he had been wound as tight as a spring, as tense as she was, if not more so. However many things there were in this marriage to worry about, for her it was the answer to a problem. For him it meant a profound change in his way of life, undertaken out of duty.

‘I might be a spendthrift and squander all your money,’ she warned him, keeping her tone light, but with serious intent.

‘You would have to work quite hard at it and, in my estimation, you are too prudent for that.’