The Delicate Matter of Lady Blayne (13 page)

“I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I used to refuse it. Often I just wouldn’t want to cope with the effects, so I would wait until they left me and toss the dose out the window.” Her expression grew contrite. “But I have become more aware, more sensitive of how my impetuous actions have hurt and worried Frances. I have tried to be a good patient. Yet they don’t trust me, they often force the dose on me. Dr. Meeker showed them how to-to—” She grimaced. “It isn’t very pleasant and I won’t elaborate.”

Anger roiled through him. But also a touch of hurt for what she’d had to endure whilst under his supposed protection.

She raised her brows and pursed her lips in a sheepish look. “Well, now you know another naughty thing about me. I am not a good patient.” She sighed. “Lady Carson seemed concerned about what it would take to break my dependence on the laudanum. That it would cause me certain hardships.”

“Yes. I too, am concerned about that. But I am prepared to do whatever I must to help you though it.”

“How kind you are, James.” Sadness entered her eyes. “You always have been.”

Relief broke over James; the tension he’d been holding in his neck over the past few hours loosened. He hadn’t known how to broach the subject with her of what they must face in the next few weeks.

“I look forward to stopping the opiates,” she said.

“We’ll start easing the dose as soon as we get to Brownwood Place. For now, are you ready to leave for the inn?”

“Could we get some dinner first?” She touched his arm. Such light familiarity, as though they were longtime friends.

The unconscious gesture warmed him. Did she consider him a friend? Even after the way he had once disrespected her by trying to seduce her? Had he been so wrong to assume that she had likely held a grudge over that? The warmth spread through him further. He smiled and nodded. “We can do anything you like. What would you fancy for dinner?”

“Beef ragout.” She smiled tentatively. “And plum pudding.”

“Now who is becoming very English?”

Her smile broadened. Dimples popped into her cheeks on either side of her wide, lush mouth. Her lips were very red.

He caught his breath.

Her present beauty was enchanting, distracting. A deliciously maddening temptation. Yet her dimples were a potent reminder of the girl he’d once known. Sunny’s dimples. Her broad, cheerful smiles.

It slammed into him with a torrent of mixed emotions, all tearing at him at once. Devastating him.

“I fear I have developed a taste for plum pudding,” she said.

The same self-protective instincts that had seen him through all the years of battles, all the attack plans made on the spur of the moment, told him not to pry into the matter of who had given her a taste for English foods. Some secrets between a man and a woman were best left untold.

She lowered her hand from his arm and he wished she had not. But she was still smiling. “Would you prefer that I settled you at the inn and brought the meal back with me?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I should like some air.” She pressed her hand to her collarbone and took another furtive glance around. She turned back to him and studied him for a moment. Speculatively. “And perhaps on the way to dinner we could visit a couple of shops.”

He frowned. “But do you really wish to be out amongst people like that?”

Her brow furrowed. “As long they do not know who I am and—” she hugged herself and rubbed her upper arms—“they are not watching my every move for some kind of misstep, well, I should love to be out amid people. I have been isolated for so long.”

****

To James’ surprise, the first shop Sunny asked to visit was a confectionery. She purchased a large box of expensive sweetmeats. Expensive with some rare ingredients, delicacies.

The shopkeeper tied the heart-shaped box and handed it to James. It was the kind of item he might purchase a mistress after he had neglected her. He had never much paid attention to such items, as most often he had delegated the task of purchasing and arranging for their delivery to his valet. He would have ordered something basic. Red roses and plain walnut and date sweetmeats.

But Sunny, with her grin broadening, flashing those charming dimples, had ordered Turkish apricots, coconut, rare nutmeats, dried berries that came from distant lands.

They didn’t even have some of the things she wanted in stock. She accepted this with the same smiling grace. The clerk had flushed with pleasure, just to be serving her.

Wouldn’t any man be pleased to be the object of that dazzling smile?

Now James studied the box, wrapped in pale pink velvet and secured with a bright red ribbon tied into a big bow. He had to admit, such frivolous indulgence added a cheerful touch to an evening that might have been a bit awkward, a bit dark.

He ought to have bought her something like this himself.

The thought accused him.

But since when had he spent so much of his time wondering how he might make a lady’s evening more cheerful? Without an ulterior motive, that is.

Since when had he ever been so selfless in his thoughts?

And since when did Sunny enjoy sweetmeats? He recalled her eating the cakes this afternoon, her lips speckled with sugar and how she had licked it away with relish.

So many changes in Sunny.

He could scarce keep up with all of them.

As a young man, he had fallen in love with her because of all the little details about her. Now, all those things had changed.

How should he feel about her now? Was the softness he felt toward her born simply of longing to have that girl he once knew returned to him?

He let his gaze drift to her generous curves.

He did have some definite feelings about the new Sunny. He’d been half-hard during the entire carriage ride here, and now his flesh threatened to stir to life again.

One thought kept tormenting him.

She’d had an
affaire
with a servant. She had wanted that man badly enough to risk scandal and even ruin to have him.

Had she given herself to this man fully?

The question tormented James endlessly, eating into his gut with burning fire.

Perhaps she had.

Perhaps after so many years wed to an invalid, she had just wanted sex that badly. It must have taken quite a bit of cunning and sneaking around to accomplish the meetings.

An intensely sexual, artful Sunny, planning and plotting to see her lover. There was a part deep inside him that found the whole matter perversely arousing.

On the tide of that thought, came another, more shocking—she had risked ruining the entire Blayne family with her impetuous madness! The knowing was like the edge of a knife’s blade.

He had been so blithely unaware of how close she had come to casting all his political ambitions into the dustbin. He ought not to have neglected the situation—to have neglected her. Yes, he should have wed her. As her husband and lord, he could have kept her hot little desires satisfied, he could have controlled and watched over her behavior himself.

Lust pulsed through his blood, boiling, heated insanity.

However, there was more to a wife for a nobleman than his sexual domination of her. If sexual domination were even proper and fit between a gentleman and a lady. That was likely something better kept between a man and his mistresses.

None of his thoughts about her were honorable. And he had sworn that he would treat Sunny with honor this time.

He would keep that promise. He would treat her like a lady if it killed him.

She placed a white and red striped bag on the counter and then turned and beamed at James a smile that was all dazzling white teeth and rose-colored lips. “Pay the man, darling.”

Her voice held something akin to a courtesan’s teasing note. It sent a further thrill of lust into his cock.

It also unnerved him. It was further proof of her new sexual sophistication.

Yet her green eyes sparkled and their beauty wiped the thoughts from his mind, and he caught his breath from something that felt deeper than the lust beginning to swell in his loins.

He couldn’t have said the amount the shopkeeper asked for. He reached into his pocket and spilled out a handful of coins, then put his hand on Sunny’s arm and led her from the shop.

Once on the street, she stopped and he stopped in response.

She gave him another one of those spectacular smiles. All sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks. The sounds of carriages rattling by and the din of people’s voices and the need to be aware of appearances all faded away.

Only her smile and her loveliness filled his awareness.

He stood there, gawking at his cousin’s widow on a public street.

Though it was unlikely anyone on this side of town, amid the merchants and shopkeepers, would recognize them.

She reached up and placed her hand to his mouth. “Here, have one.”

He opened his mouth to ask what she was trying to give him and when he did, she popped the candy piece in.

The bitter-sweet taste of licorice exploded on his tongue. Surprise overtook him. An equally bittersweet sensation.

“See—” she raised her brows “—I didn’t forget.”

It was his favorite candy and he had eaten a fair share of it, whilst recovering from a bout of scarlet fever that her mother had nursed him through. The same fever that had interrupted his clandestine courting of her and thoroughly ruined his shore leave.

During the ensuing years, James had forgotten how much he’d once enjoyed candy.

How odd that she would be the one to remind him of it. She who had never liked sweets.

The taste of the candy filled him with pleasure, warmth—something deeper than mere taste sensation. It gave him a sense of being connected to a previous version of himself. The young man he’d been whilst in love with her.

Someone who dared take joy in life.

But that younger version of himself was also someone capable of such deep emotion, such self-indulgent heartache over the loss of Sunny, capable of wallowing in self-pity. All of that had nearly cost him his career, his rank, his chance at a command of his own.

Yes, he’d taken himself in hand and forced himself to become a completely rational man. A man driven by reason and reason alone.

He’d been a serious-minded young man before the heartbreak had undone him.

He’d been shocked, dismayed to the pit of his being, to discover in himself such a potential for irrationality and emotional extravagance. He hadn’t wanted to admit it. But he had been forced to see himself as something weaker than he’d previously believed himself to be.

But through his ordeal of weakness, he had transformed himself into something harder and sterner than that. It had served him well all these years.

He had no wish to go backwards.

“Will you take another?” she asked, holding a piece up to him, still smiling and still reminding him of the old, cheerful Sunny.

Pain tugged at his heart. But so did her seductive, sensual smile. And it wasn’t a sexual seduction, not this time. He wanted another piece. His mouth watered for the licorice.

He wanted to hold on to the sense of sharing this childlike, innocent yet sensual pleasure with her.

He had forgotten how much he loved licorice.

But she never had.

Did that mean she had thought of him? That she had held onto and cherished certain memories of their time together, when she had cheered him out of his misery and made him fall utterly in love with her?

Was it possible?

His heart panged with the longing to believe.

Inwardly, he frowned at himself.

These were damned dangerous waters.

Since he’d seen her again, he’d been indulging his emotions, putting himself in danger of becoming soft. He’d even been drunk once.

She didn’t love him.

She never had.

And she was wholly unsuitable for his current life. How many times must he remind himself of that immutable point?

“Where do you wish to go next?” he asked.

She put the piece of candy into her own mouth and her expression turned thoughtful.

He tried not to notice the sensual way her mouth moved as she sucked on the candy. “To a milliner’s. I think I need a new hat.”

“Of course you do,” he said distractedly, for his thoughts had drifted, focused on how luscious it would be to kiss her, long and lingeringly, and to taste the licorice on her tongue.

“Oh yes, I definitely do need a new hat. But what color?” She clapped her gloved hands together. “Oh, pale blue with a bright yellow ribbon.”

He was glad that she simply said yellow rather than jonquil. She’d always been a practical, unpretentious young woman. At least that had not changed. “You do look well in yellow.”

She’d been wearing a simple day-dress of yellow muslin, with a wide pale-blue sash, the first day he’d ever seen her.