The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (3 page)

At her double entendre, he laughed ruefully and hugged her close. “I should not touch you.”

“I will touch you then.” Sliding her hands beneath his robe, she pushed it from his shoulders to swish to the carpet. The broad expanse of his chest was a beautiful sculpted plane and she sighed in satisfaction to touch him everywhere. His flesh was torrid. His hair crisp. His pectoral muscles firm and his ribs rigid slabs. He was hers to have, if she could persuade him. Could she seduce him?

He closed his eyes and flattened her hands over his diamond hard nipples. “Fee, don’t.”

“I want you, too.” She was an expert at logic, facts, gaining points in arguments with men just as her father and her governess had taught her. Her ability to debate was not an asset she had touted but it had earned her a profession and money. Perhaps now it would help her keep a husband. “Don’t you see? I have for years and years.”

Smiling sadly, he smoothed her hair from her cheeks. “You are charming. So highly colored with rich hair, full red mouth, pretty pink cheeks. You remind me of a garden.” He took her lips in a sweet short kiss. “Fragrant and filled with every imaginable delicacy. Ready to be plucked.”

She swayed against him. His kind declarations were more than she had dared hope for, but he proclaimed them in a tone that told her he meant them as her consolations. Perhaps even substitutions for the endearing words a lover tells his beloved in bed. “I’m yours to pluck.”

He laughed, his eyes flowing over her face with wistful compassion. “I mustn’t.”

“I wish you would. I’m not afraid of the marriage bed. No virgin. No prude.”

“I thought as much.” He traced one hand along her throat, over one breast and around the curve of her waist. His action brought her closer to him, heating her, tempting her to rub herself against him like a well-pleasured cat. The abrasion of her nipples against his chest hair sent lightning streaking through her blood. “I took one look at your dusky beauty last month in Kent and was enchanted. Who could imagine little Felice could be such a witty dinner partner? Or know so much about German music?”

“Or French court scandals?” she teased him, and he nodded, his eyes dancing with wicked intent. Just what she wanted from him.

“You are precisely every lovely thing a man could ask for in a wife.”

The compliment was also a dismissal and she couldn’t allow it. Wouldn’t survive another marriage without affection.
His
affection. She took his hand and placed it on her mound. He startled but did not pull away. He was most definitely lured and she was determined to take advantage of his desire. Cursing the chiffon that separated his skin from her own, she pressed his fingers to her seam.

He slid his fingers between her legs and parted her heavy lips. The chiffon slipped and slid, driving her to new heights of need. His fingers intruded and held, petted and stroked while the fabric grew moist, her folds swelled in need and she clutched his arms for support.

“Fee,” he crooned, his body flowing nearer, his fingers eager and oh so skilled, “you are petal soft and hot.”

The luscious sound of how ready she was for him filled the room. “Wet, too,” she offered.

“Like dew,” he growled and bent to scoop her up into his arms and stride two steps to lay her on the bed. He loomed above her, pulling down the negligee to cup her breasts and rub his lips across her hot skin. “And your nipples are like spun sugar.” She arched as he sucked her into his mouth and laved her like a man starving. He gathered up her hem to slide his two fingers gently, slowly and oh so tantalizingly inside her folds. “You flow so sweetly here. How did I know you would?”

Thrilled at his enchanting words, she moaned and spread her legs wide in invitation.

He sank between her limbs, his thighs searing her own, his cock nestling between her lips. He was almost hers. Almost.

“No, no. I can’t!” He pushed to his knees, the cold air on her body a bracing rush that made her shiver. He stared at her as if seeing her anew. “We will not do this.”

“But—”

“No!” He bounded from the bed, his face flush, his voice strident. “I loved you as a child. I want you to be happy. You must not care for me, nor I you. The best way to ensure that is for us never to share a bed.”

She could barely utter the words that flew through her mind. “You do not wish to consummate this marriage?”

“Better this way to keep my door and my mind locked against you.”

She reeled with sorrow and propped herself up on her elbows. “Not every couple who goes to bed learns to love the other.” She knew that firsthand.

“Love becomes tangled with other emotions. Jealousy, greed, despair are only a few.”

“Joy, rapture, daily delights can come from it too.”

He set his jaw. “How would you know?”

That hit her like a broadside. She stared at him, memories of years of lonely married life blasting away her hope for this new union.

He shook his head. “Oh, Fee. You were not happy with your first husband.”

“That’s true,” she said with much remorse. But she could not let this pass without a forceful counter argument. She sat straight in bed and considered this man who was her husband but who sought not to be. His eyes were wide, wild, fearful. His dark hair askew, hanging over his worried brow. He was in flight from disaster. How could a man of such intellect be so intimidated by such silliness? He could if he had suffered from it—or thought he had. “Adam, this curse is just so much folderol. There is no proof.”

“My mother died of it. So too did Wes’ and Jack’s. My father’s three marriages all were failures. My first was a living hell. There is no joy in loving Stanhopes.”

“What if I don’t love you?” She didn’t, did she? “What if I just want to be bedded by you?”

He blinked, utterly astonished. “The same. It matters not.”

“It remains I am still your wife.”

“But in name only, Fee.” He grabbed up his robe from the floor and strode for the door. “In name only.”

****

The next morning, he rose from the bed in which he’d tossed and turned the whole night through. Finding the innkeeper, he told the man to take a hot bowl of porridge and a pot of tea up to his wife’s room. Then he bid the man send a runner to the ferryman with the message that they would not sail to Jersey for their honeymoon. Adam bid the bewildered man to go to the livery, too, and hire two carriages to take him and his wife back to London. Felice could ride in her own carriage. Adam would not presume to burden her with his presence after he had abandoned her last night.

Coward.

Aye, he was. He liked his wife. More than liked her, admired her. Wanted her. Wished her to be happy. But if he never became a cabinet minister, how could he affect change? Alone with a few colleagues, he might do a bit of good here and there. But his marks would be few. Without a wife, he could never gain the prime minister’s post. Without Fee, he couldn’t manage. He couldn’t pass laws to change child labor. And repeal taxation. He couldn’t improve the welfare of men in the Army. He doubted he could accomplish any of it. He had to have her with him, by his side. It was what they had agreed to.

So he took the stairs up to her room like an old man burdened with infirmities of body.

When he opened the door, he frowned. Her bed was made, her trunk and valise gone. He grimaced at his foolishness—to have married her for reasons of state and for his unreasonable fear of a curse. He had truly become an older man filled with the insecurities of his poor judgments.

She was gone.

He had hurt her. Sweet, shy Fee. And thus had he taken the first step toward their mutual destruction.

She had taken the second step. She had fled him.

And so the curse was now really upon them both.

The stationers’ bill came first. Well, that Adam could understand. Felice was a celebrated author of epic poetry. He had never asked her how much paper she used, but by Jove from the size of this bill, she must scribble all day on the very best parchment. Without quarrel, he summarily paid the man.

Two weeks later came the bookshops’ invoices. Two of them. For more than twenty pounds each. How quickly did the new Mrs. Stanhope read? Adam tapped his fingers on his desk and idly wondered, too, what she read. No matter. Not his affair. He paid the owners the sums in full.

A month later came a bill from a milliner. The amount was small. Adam wondered what she’d ordered. A hat to wear to tea? A feathery thing for a dinner party?

And where the hell was she living anyway? Not at her own small cottage in Kent. For certain, he knew that. He had charged Reggie to check when his friend went down last week to visit his uncle in Canterbury. The place was boarded up tight as a drum.

No one in Kent hinted where Felice might be. He did not inquire of anyone else in London. Too risky. He’d appear desperate.
Was he?
No, no, absolutely not. But from the invoices, he had to conclude she was in town. Somewhere. With her cousin, Lady Dunwitty? Or her friends, the Baron Jasper Elgin and his wife, Annabelle? Respectable people even though his cousin, the hideous Drayton Howell, had begun that horrible scandal sheet,
The TellTale
.

But a fortnight later, Adam sat in his library and glared at the newest bill. He read the address of the dressmaker and concluded that wherever the hell Felice had taken refuge, she evidently needed quite a few new clothes. A whole damn closet full. He cursed roundly. What in the world was she thinking? Would she brave society by herself?

He did not know. But he worried.

He paid the dressmaker but demanded from the proprietor a complete listing of every item Mrs. Stanhope had purchased. Two days later, he sat scanning the Frenchwoman’s descriptions of them. Incensed at Fee’s audacity, he shot up from his desk and strode to the window overlooking Berkeley Square. She had purchased day dresses, riding clothes, walking ensembles and four ball gowns. Four! Where the hell was she going?

Without him? Dear god. What had gotten into her?

He’d be damned if he ever asked her.

Three weeks later, the whispers began. The second Mrs. Stanhope had taken the waters at Bath. She called on her elderly uncle and aunt alone. She took tea with the reverend who had once served in her parish in Kent and now lived in a retirement home in Lambeth. The
TellTale
reported that a certain Mrs. S had dined on the fourth with that literary sponsor, the Earl of Hargrave and his wife. If this was
his
Mrs. S., Adam wondered what she discussed. If she spoke of him. Thought of him. Hated him.

Soon after came two more pieces of rough news.

The first came in the form of a second installment of a short story by a self-styled political observer. This pseudonymous Miss Proper published her fiction in the
TellTale
and in this episode, the main character
,
a certain member of Parliament named Alfonse Stanhope had forsaken his wife on the pretext of a family curse. His lady wife, said the hideous tale, considered divorcing her husband. Desertion was her justification.

If this story were true, Adam supposed he could not blame Felice for such an action. But still, bad form to put it about in a scandal sheet.

“I’d confront her,” he told his brother, Jack, one morning as they rode home together from a late night card game at White’s. “But I cannot find her!”

“I heard last night at the gaming tables that Wingate and his wife give a ball in two weeks. Your wife has accepted the invitation. Go yourself, and have it out with her.”

“I will.” He scowled. “I must know what the hell she’s up to.”

Jack chuckled. “She’s doing exactly what you’d expect. She’s making a life for herself without you.”

“She’s inspiring this simpleton Miss Proper to make a mockery of me.”

As Jack’s coachman drew the horses to a stop in front of Adam’s townhouse, he gazed at Adam with pained mirth. “Sending you the bills, too.”

Adam drew his frockcoat about him and grabbed his top hat. “I cannot let her continue.”

“Why not? Actually, Fee has not done anything scandalous.”

“Not yet.” He climbed out of the carriage and faced his brother. “I married her to create the impression of stability and peace. Instead, she appears to be preparing herself to navigate society alone and on my money, as well.”

“What will you do about it then? Stop paying her bills?” Jack pursed his lips, rueful. “You‘ve set that precedent. And she does not appear to need an allowance. Her earnings from her book of poems suffice.”

“I’ll find a way.” Adam checked the expression of his oldest brother. “I made my bed.”
And it’s cold. Empty.
“I’d rather lie in it with her under my own roof than have her gallivanting about alone.”

“My dear brother, she’s not known to be biddable. And you’re not known to be flexible.”

“But I’m a good negotiator. I’ll use all my skills and do the thing that is most politic.”

“What might that be?” Jack snorted. “Haul her home in chains?”

“Seduce her.”

****

Adam loathed balls. They were lavish things meant to force a man to chat and dance with any brainless chit or matronly drone he could not avoid.

For two hours now, he’d grown weary of holding up the walls. If Felice was indeed here, it would not do for him to take the floor with anyone but her. But damnation, if he could find her in this throng.

Grumbling, he shot his cuffs, stiffened his spine and headed for the punch bowl. Dinner had not yet been called, and his stomach was growling. He should have eaten something as his valet had suggested, but he’d been too eager to get here and look for his wife.

“Where the hell are you?” he muttered to himself, wondering if Clarence Wingate and his wife were mistaken about Felice’s acceptance of their invitation. He took a drought of his wine and frowned. What if Felice had taken ill? A headache? The vapors? Ba! Not Felice. Too ferociously healthy. He sipped more of his wine and recalled the way she’d looked at him that night in the inn. Her golden eyes had swum with desire as he put his hands on her delectable body and tasted her nipples. Her plush lips had parted in need as he stroked every inch of her luscious flesh. The memory of how wet and warm she’d been had him tossing back the rest of his wine.