Slightly Dangerous (19 page)

“Not at all,” she said. “I am a little weary, that is all. But not too weary to dance with you.”

It was hard to imagine feeling more depressed than she was feeling at this precise moment, Christine thought. Her spirits were lodged somewhere in the soles of her slippers. But she smiled anyway.

She informed her mother and Eleanor that she would be accompanying them home, and then she danced with Justin and with Mr. Gerard Hilliers. She smiled determinedly and made merry. It was an enormous relief to find that the Duke of Bewcastle was not in the ballroom.

She thanked Melanie and Bertie at the end of the ball and explained to them that she was leaving with her mother. She had hoped to slip away unnoticed after that, but Melanie spread the word, and the actual leave-taking became a grand public event, the very thing she had hoped to avoid by not waiting until the morning.

She hugged Audrey and shook hands with Sir Lewis Wiseman and wished them well at their wedding next spring and in their future life. She kissed Lady Mowbury’s cheek and promised to write to her. She exchanged farewell greetings with a large crowd of the young people, all of whom were trying to talk at once—with a great deal of laughter thrown in.

Even Hermione and Basil must have decided that it was their duty to take a formal leave of her. Hermione kissed the air near her cheek and Basil bowed stiffly to her. Ignominiously, Christine felt a rush of tears to her eyes, and she startled Hermione—and herself—by hugging her sister-in-law tightly.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry, Hermione. So
very
sorry.”

She had little idea what she was talking about, but Hermione, she noticed before she turned and clambered into the waiting carriage, moved closer to Basil’s side, and he set an arm about her shoulders.

The Duke of Bewcastle, at least, had absented himself from the small crowd gathered on the terrace. Christine felt enormous relief about that as she settled back into the well-upholstered seat, her chest tight with unshed tears. She was very,
very
glad of it.

“That was a fine entertainment,” her mother said, taking her place on the seat opposite with Eleanor. “It was gratifying to see you made so much of, Christine.”

“Well, and so she ought to be, Mama,” Eleanor said. “She is, after all, a Derrick by marriage and related to Lady Renable and Viscount Elrick and Viscount Mowbury. Our Christine is an important lady.” She winked across the carriage at her younger sister.

“It was most courteous of the Earl of Kitredge to ask to be presented to us,” their mother said. “And he actually
danced
with you, Christine. So did the Duke of Bewcastle for a short while, though I must say I thought him a thoroughly disagreeable man.
He
did not come to be introduced.”

“Too cold and haughty for his own good,” Eleanor agreed. “I am
so
delighted that the evening is over and done with. I never could see the attraction of cavorting about a floor with dozens of other people, wearing out one’s legs and one’s conversation when one could be more pleasantly employed at home, reading a good book.”

“And
I
am delighted the two weeks are at an end,” Christine said. “I have missed the children at school and our niece and nephews and all the villagers and the garden. And both of you,” she added.

“And yet,” her mother said, “I always fear that life must seem dull to you, Christine, when you have known something far grander.”

“It is never dull, Mama,” she said, smiling and setting her head back against the cushions. “And it was never grand.”

She closed her eyes and felt suddenly that she was back at the lake, the Duke of Bewcastle bending his head to kiss her before all passion broke loose between them. She had done such a careful job of convincing herself that it had all been just carnal and therefore meaningless, something to be experienced and enjoyed and then shrugged off.

Well, and so it had been!

She opened her eyes to rid herself of the images.

I thought him a thoroughly disagreeable man.

Too cold and haughty for his own good.

Why had those words hurt? She
agreed
with them. But they
had
hurt. They still did. She felt raw with grief, though she could not understand the reason.

He had been inside her. They had shared life’s deepest intimacy. But only physically. There was no other connection between them at all, and never could be. There was nothing in him she could like and admire, and—to be fair—there was nothing in her that he could possibly like or admire either. And so they had been intimate without intimacy.

Her heart felt like a leaden weight in the middle of her chest.

She would never see him again.

Thank heaven.

But
never.

It sounded like an awfully long time.

10

W
ULFRIC WENT HOME TO
L
INDSEY
H
ALL IN
H
AMPSHIRE
. For a whole week he reveled in the huge, silent emptiness of the place. It was home. It was where he belonged. For perhaps the first time in his life he realized that he loved it. He had not wanted it. As a boy, if there had been anything he could have done to change places with Aidan, to make
him
their father’s heir instead of himself, he would have done it.

But when one was born the eldest son of a duke, of course, one was born with an unchangeable destiny. There was no freedom of choice allowed such a child.

As there was none to any child born to a chimney sweep, he supposed.

He had never been much of a one for self-pity. Why should he have been? There were thousands who would give a right arm for even a fraction of the privileges and wealth and power he took largely for granted.

He wandered from room to room in the house, far more than he usually did, and enjoyed the knowledge that there would be no people beyond every door, waiting to converse and be conversed with. He roamed about the large park surrounding the house, both on horseback and on foot, and was thankful that there was no one to suggest a picnic or an expedition by carriage.

Strangely, even though he prized his aloneness, he avoided the one small place on his estate where he always went when he wanted to relax into total solitude. He was too restless to relax.

He spent long hours with his steward, as he had not seen him in person since the Easter break from the House of Lords, and he rode with him about the vast home farm, checking that all was running smoothly according to his directions. He granted audience in the library to a number of his tenants and laborers and other petitioners, something he did conscientiously twice a week whenever he was home. He looked over the estate books and other business papers. He read all the reports that came from stewards on his other properties and dictated the appropriate responses to his secretary.

He wrote to each of his siblings, something he did regularly, at least once a month.

He received courtesy visits from some of his neighbors and returned most of them. Viscount Ravensberg and his lady and their children had just returned from a journey north that had taken them through Leicestershire. They had stayed for a week at Grandmaison with Rannulf and Judith and were able to bring Wulfric direct news of them.

He began to think that what remained of the summer might prove tediously long and planned visits to some of his other estates.

He read a great deal. Or, at least, he sat in his library a great deal, a book open in one hand, while he stared through it and brooded.

There were a score of women he already knew and doubtless scores more he did not who would jump at the chance of being his mistress. It was not a conceited thought. He did
not
think he was the answer to every woman’s prayers. But he did know that he was a powerful and influential and enormously wealthy man, and he did not doubt that most such women were well aware that he had been generous with Rose.

If he were to choose one of them and set her up as his mistress, he would probably settle contentedly with her. His life would soon return to normal.

He missed Rose with a gnawing ache.

He kept his thoughts firmly away from the one woman with whom he had already tried to replace her.

She had rejected him. Just as Marianne Bonner had done when he had offered matrimony. Mrs. Derrick had rejected him when she had assumed he was offering the same thing again—even though she had just given herself to him.

A little rejection, he supposed, was good for the soul.

But his soul felt bruised, even crushed.

He planned visits to some of his other estates—but neglected to give the necessary orders that would have set the preparations in motion.

It was unlike him to procrastinate, to feel lethargic, to brood.

To feel lonely.

He did not think of Christine Derrick. But sometimes—or most of the time if he were to be quite truthful with himself—he discovered that bright, laughing blue eyes and tangled dark curls and sun-bronzed skin and a freckle-dusted nose could slip past thought and lodge themselves in unwelcome images in the brain and in a heavy feeling about the heart.

Soon he would visit some of his other estates. All he needed was something to keep him busy.

Soon he would be back to normal.

L
OOKING BACK ON
her fortnight at Schofield Park one week after the house party was over, it seemed to Christine that it might all have happened a year ago or a lifetime ago. Her life had resumed its usual semiplacid course and she was happy again.

Well, perhaps not exactly
happy
. But she was contented at least. Although she had been happy with both Oscar and his world for a few years, it was a world that had ultimately let her down and made her desperately miserable. Seeing Hermione and Basil again had not been a good experience. And being in company with people of
ton
again had reminded her of how easy it was to be scorned, sneered at, disapproved of. Not that it had happened much during her marriage, and not that it had happened much at Schofield. But the thing was that it
never
happened during her day-to-day life at Hyacinth Cottage and in the village beyond it. There she could relax and be herself and everyone seemed to like her for it. She had no enemies in the neighborhood, only friends.

And yet those years of her marriage and those years spent with the
ton
—and now the fortnight spent at Schofield Park—had left her restless and less satisfied with her life at home than she had been before. She felt like someone caught between two worlds and not quite belonging in either. She resented the feeling.

She
chose
to belong in her village. She enjoyed life here. There was always something to do. She liked teaching at the village school, even though she did it for only three hours a week. The schoolmaster had complained to her one day that he hated teaching geography, she had replied that it had always been her very favorite subject when
she
was a pupil, and the arrangement had been made. Even as a child she had visited the sick and elderly with her mother or with the old vicar’s wife. It had become a habit, though never a dreary one. She still did it. She
liked
the elderly, and she had endless stories and smiles and cheerful conversation to share with both them and the sick—as well as two ears willing to listen and two hands willing to help out.

There were social visits to pay and receive, a few teas and dinners to attend, one assembly at the village inn. There were female friends with whom to share some confidences, gentlemen who would become her suitors if she wished.

She did not wish, even though perhaps it was a pity she did not. All she had ever really wanted was a home of her own and a husband and children to love. But she had lost the one—even before his death, if the truth were known—and never had the other. And her dreams had changed—or perhaps they had simply died.

There were her nephews and niece at the rectory, and Melanie’s children at Schofield Park, though she did not visit the latter so often when Melanie and Bertie were in residence. She loved children. She quite passionately
adored
them. It had been the great disappointment of her marriage that she had never conceived.

There was Melanie to call upon and a long coze to enjoy together over the success of the house party. Melanie insisted that all the gentlemen had fallen in love with Christine and that the Earl of Kitredge had looked quite forlorn when he discovered that she had left Schofield after the ball instead of waiting until the following morning. In Melanie’s opinion Christine could have been a countess before the summer was out if she had been so inclined.

“But I know,” she had said with a sigh. “You have been unwilling to look at any man since poor Oscar died. He
was
a dear, was he not? And so very, very handsome. But
one
day, Christine, you will be able to let go of him and fall for someone else. I thought at one point that he might be the Duke of Bewcastle. You won that very naughty wager I heard about—
and
you were waltzing with him at the ball. But, splendid as he is, you know, and elated as I was to have him as a guest at my party, I certainly would not wish him upon my dearest friend. It is true, is it not, that he lowers the temperature of any room he walks into? Even so, I think he was the tiniest bit sweet on you, Christine.”

Christine chose to laugh merrily as if a great joke had been made, and after a moment Melanie joined her.

“Well, perhaps not,” she said. “I doubt there is any sweetness in him or any normal human sensibilities. I wonder if even the Prince of Wales cowers under his steely glance.”

The Duke of Bewcastle was the one factor in Christine’s life—in the past tense of her life—on which she chose neither to think nor to brood. There was pain in that direction, and she chose not to explore the pain.

She had plenty with which to occupy herself in the days following her return from Schofield, then—plenty to keep her busy and feed her natural ebullience of spirit. She was almost happy. Or, if not that, then she was definitely contented—provided she kept her thoughts carefully censored.