My Sweet Folly (51 page)

“How kind of you, sir,” Folie said, giving the man a small curtsy when the toast had been drunk. “How kind of you all to come!” She could hear Robert breathing in a way that she feared would bring on a dead faint if he did not regulate it. She looked up at him. Sure enough, his face was pale, and he was scowling like a demon.

“I daresay I feel a little dizzy with all the stimulation!” She put her hand on his arm. “Please take me into the air for a moment, my dear Mr. Cambourne. Lander, you will see that everyone is served their cake!”

Robert nodded, walking toward the door. The guests stood aside. “The shoes, toss the shoes!” Mrs. Paine cried gaily—and a small rain of slippers and wedding favors followed Folie and Robert into the hall, as if they were leaving a normal wedding breakfast for a normal honeymoon.

Just outside the door, he took a stronger grip of her arm. He drew her quickly toward the breakfast room, pulled her inside, and closed the door. The sounds in his throat were of a man who had just run twenty miles.

He fell into a chair, dragging her down before him onto her knees. Folie looked up, terrified that he was going to have a seizure or a swoon. He put his palms on her cheeks, gasping.

“A...selection...of...” he wheezed. “Cats.” He gulped for air. “Suitable—cats!”

Folie relaxed. She sat on her knees on the braided rug, looking up at him. “Lander started it,” she said.

He was laughing so hard that he did not even make a sound. His whole body trembled as he leaned over her, pressing his mouth against her temple, gulping air against her skin. Folie shook her head, softly chuckling, leaning against him.

As she moved closer, she could feel the nature of his touch change—his hands pressed her face, and then skimmed over her hair. He buried his face hard into her throat. To her confusion she felt wetness on her skin.

“Robert?” she murmured, lifting her hand to his hair.

He shook his head violently. He began to kiss her ear, to score her throat with his teeth. He slid from the chair onto his knees. His hold on her grew rough, imploring. “Folly,” he whispered. “My Folly.”

She turned her face to his. He sought her mouth, kissing her, a hot sugared taste of almonds. His fingers pressed painfully into her arms.

“It will be all right,” he said into her hair, soft and slurred, as if to reassure himself as much as her. “It will be all right.” Then as suddenly as he had begun to kiss her, he pulled back.

He stood up, walking away. While Folie still knelt on the rug, he went to the window.

“Put yourself to rights,” he said. “I suppose we must go back.”

Her cheeks flamed with agitation and chagrin. How quickly he could toss her into a maelstrom! She rose, smoothing down her skirt. To gloss over the moment, she said, “I hope they do not suppose we have been—” She stopped, caught in the middle of an imbecilic sentence. Of course, everyone would suppose they had been doing precisely what they had been doing.

“Never mind,” he said. “We have only to say that you fainted in my arms, and I revived you from certain death with handsome compliments on your coiffure.”

“Oh, they will be perfectly ready to believe that!”

“My dear, I am learning that the world is full of gulls. They seem to wish to believe all sorts of rubbish.”

“Such as Mr. Bellamy and his headache?” she inquired.

“Ah, well,” he said, slanting an appreciative glance down her figure. “Bellamy may not believe I revived you with compliments, I admit. He might be a simpleton, but he’s not a fool.”

TWENTY-ONE

When the guests had gone away, and Robert had vanished like a genie into some magic bottle, Folie and Lander were left to see the house put to rights again. By the time she had reached her bedchamber, Folie was exhausted. She went to bed without the help of a maid—no small task after the ladies had dressed her—unpinning the lace headress and brushing out her hair, scattering flower petals on the floor. She popped one of the buttons on Melinda’s gown while trying to slide out of it, and writhed arduously to loosen her corset strings. But that was better than having Mrs. Paine attend to her, as that lady had merrily threatened to do. Folie put on the worn and comfortable nightgown she had stuffed into her bag in the middle of the night—a thousand years ago, it seemed—and climbed into bed.

Nervous and excited, she sat up against the pillows in the middle of the bed. He might not come soon. He might not come at all. She thought of him in the breakfast room—and left the candle lit.

After a while, she climbed out of bed, trimmed the candle, and got in again. She thought of reading, but her eyes were so tired that she could only look without ambition toward the bookcase. She really did not think that he would come. Charles had not. Not the first night. He had given them time to become better acquainted with one another.

Folie was not certain about Robert’s delicacy of feeling in that regard. She was by no means averse to his love-making. She had a trick in her mind when she thought of it—when those strange, enflamed moments at Dingley Hall came to her—she did not examine them in detail, though she knew perfectly well that she could if she wished—but rather hastily transferred her attention to some other topic, leaving herself a little breathless, as if she had a cryptic incantation for pleasure that she never quite dared to use.

What she did know was that Charles had never been that way with her. Probably he had with the first Mrs. Hamilton, but his ardor had died with his first wife. In an odd way, Folie felt very much a virgin, sitting in the big bed with her hair down around her shoulders. She had been a wife. But she had never been a bride.

She hoped that Robert would come to her. She did not want delicacy of feeling, or consideration, or respect, not from Robert. Somehow it was crucial that he come tonight, this first night—if he did not, she would never be certain how to approach him or act with him. If he did not, she would not know if she was a real wife or not.

And she would have to bury her veiled and secret hope forever. He had spoken of trust. She had spoken of friendship. She supposed that they liked one another reasonably well. But she had kept a flame that burned beyond all of those things in her heart. It had flickered and waned, half-forgotten—but it had never wholly died. She might be plain Mrs. Charles Hamilton, of Toot-above-the-Batch, Herefordshire, a genteel widow in the eyes of the world—but someone, once, had seen her for a princess. And since then, she had never in all her life known passion for any man but Robert Cambourne.

If he did not return it, Folie thought, she could not bear for him to know that it still endured in her heart. If he wanted her as she wanted him, then he would come tonight; he must come tonight, because any delicacy of feeling would be like the wings of a moth beating against a fire—burned away in a moment.

But he did not come. Folie sat watching the door until the candle burned so low that her eyes hurt.

At last she ceased attempting to keep them open. She could not quite give up. She had never been one to give up. She tried to stay awake even with her eyes shut...but finally dejection sank her deep into the bed and distant dreams.

Robert lay on his back, wide awake. Since moving into Cambourne House, he had avoided sleeping in the bedchamber Folie had used—he had not needed to ask anyone which one it was; he simply knew it, emptied of her belongings or not.

She had taken possession of it again now, of course. She was sleeping directly below him. He wanted to get up and pace, but he thought that the floor would creak and give him away.

He turned over, punching his pillow. God damn him, that he had drunk a hundred cups of coffee and then let himself kiss her—if he ever got to sleep again in his lifetime he would be lucky.

It was his wedding night. Not that it signified anything. The one thing he would not do was put himself again in the position of beggar. The last thing he would do was let her know that she held any power over him.

He sat up suddenly, hearing Phillippa somewhere, laughing at him. But there was only silence in the room when he listened. The sound was a carriage or a wagon rolling past, the resonant turn of the axle echoing in the street like a low chuckle.

Robert lay back on the pillow, his arms behind his head. No—it would be the other way around this time. This time he would be the one who enticed and withheld, who promised and never gave, who kept the secret cards.

He hoped she was lying awake. Tossing and turning. Bewildered and hurt. Robert turned over, throwing his pillow onto the floor. Why the devil had he kissed her?

But then he thought, of course that was the way to seduce her. Kiss her and caress her and make everything a promise.

She had seemed to like it well enough. He had a confused memory of lying with her at Solinger—or was it at Dingley’s? Memory or reality—everything from that time was jumbled in his mind, so that he could not know if her heated response was truth or mere fancy. But that kiss on the floor in the breakfast room today—that he remembered. She had reached up her hand and touched his hair.

Well, he would make her want him.

Phillippa had wanted him at first. At least—looking back, he was not certain that she ever had in truth. But first she had given him a deep drink of her, enough to make him want to drown. He’d had a consummate teacher when it came to arousing and then frustrating desire. If he had learned his lessons well, then he would go to Folie now and begin to weave her bondage, using her own will against her.

Robert sat up on the edge of the bed. He lay down again. From where he was, he could see the black shape of his closed door.

With an irritated grunt, he reached down and retrieved the pillow, dropping it over his face. He counted as far as forty-seven before he threw it off again.

He stood up at last. He had nothing on—in the heat of Delhi, living among natives at the palace at Shajahanabad, he had grown accustomed to sleeping without nightclothes or a cap, and now they seemed to choke him. He found his shirt, a shapeless pile of white linen tossed over a chair, and pulled it over him.

Quietly he let himself out of the room, on a cold mission to seduce his wife.

Folie had a pleasing dream. She walked through the Indian bazaars in her blue shawl, among incense burners and elephants adorned with pearls and gold, but she was not alone this time. One elephant moved its great, slow ears and turned to lead her. “This way,” someone murmured. “This is the way home.”