Treasured Vows (23 page)

She didn’t appear to take offense at his words, as he’d expected her to. Instead she asked, almost gently, “And I suppose you will expect to have a hand in choosing which fashions I wear?”

“I hadn’t considered it, but yes, I do think that is a wise idea.”

“And if I disagree?”

“I am your husband.”

“And I’m your chattel?”

He frowned, not liking the word. “No, nothing quite as dramatic as that.”

Phadra shook her head. “Then how else do you express it? I am to do
what
you order me to do,
when
you order me to do it, and
how
you order me to do it. Is that not correct?”

“Phadra—”

“I’m sorry, Grant, but I don’t think I can live that way. I don’t believe in it. The ladies and I were discussing this today, and we all agree that it’s wrong for women to be treated as though we aren’t partners in a marriage, just as it’s wrong to treat us as if we aren’t full and equal citizens of this country. The laws are wrong.”

“British laws are designed to protect a woman and help a man cherish her.”

“Is ordering me about to suit your mood considered ‘cherishing’?”

“I don’t order you about to suit my mood. I’m acting in our best interests.”

“You don’t know me well enough to know what my best interests are!”

“I know your best interests aren’t chasing around after that vagrant father of yours,” he snapped back, his voice rising. “I know that you would have been better off staying at that girls’ school rather than rolling yourself into debt in London. If you’d stayed where you were supposed to, none of this”—he waved his hand intending to encompass the house and their marriage—“would have happened!”

Phadra pulled back as if he’d struck her.

Grant wanted to call the words back, to deny them—but he stopped himself. He hadn’t spoken anything other than the truth. She had to learn that he was in control of his own house.

He just hated to see the hurt in her large blue eyes.

Phadra crossed her arms against her chest protectively and backed away even farther.

“Phadra, you know we aren’t a love match.” The second he said the words, he knew they were the wrong ones to say. She actually flinched when she heard them. He shut up and shoved his hands back into his pockets. This wasn’t working. “Maybe we are too different,” he muttered.

The silence stretched out painfully between them. She was the first to break it. “All right,” she said softly. She lowered her arms to her side and straightened her shoulders. When she lifted her chin, he knew he was going to be in trouble.

“Perhaps we
are
too different. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.” She bunched her skirts up, giving him an excellent view of her shapely calves, and climbed up onto the bed. “It’s obvious that you won’t be happy until I understand my place.” She slipped the sandals off her dainty feet.

He murmured something unintelligible, his mind suddenly reeling with the vivid memory of her legs wrapped around his hips up in the attic. He took a step toward the bed, his body moving of its own volition.

“Well,” she said in an icy voice that demanded his attention, “henceforth I shall endeavor to stay in my place.” Opening her arms, she fell back onto the feather mattress with a slight whooshing sound, spread open her legs, and stared up at the canopy.

After several long seconds he finally asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m waiting for you,” she said without looking at
him. “Like a good and docile wife. Come and have your way with me.”

Her words shocked him. “Have you gone mad?”

Phadra sat up, her scarfed hair bouncing with the movement. “I’m sorry. Do you not like this position? I can turn over onto my stomach if you’d prefer that position better.” To his horror, she rolled over and spread her arms out to her sides like a martyr waiting to be tied to a cross.

He backed away…even as another part of his body cried
Yes!
at the sight of her delectable little bottom offered up to him. “Why are you doing this?” he ground out.

“Because I can’t settle for a marriage that is nothing more than this, and I don’t think you can, either.”

Oh, yes, I could,
he thought. And if she was paying any attention to his equipment, she’d see that fact. He moved back into the shadows and once again felt himself bump into the door handle. Did she realize how seductive she looked spread out on the bed?

She turned over and sat up, resting her palms on the mattress, the position emphasizing her cleavage. Dear God, he ached with the need to touch her, to take her. But he couldn’t give in—not if he still wanted to be the one in control of this marriage. He placed his hand on the door handle and gripped it as if it were a lifeline.

When he still didn’t speak, she shifted position again, sitting back on her heels in the position of a supplicant. “Grant, if you are going to insist that I live only to follow your command, to be little better than a servant, then I’d rather be locked up again in
Miss Agatha’s, where at least I was free to think my own mind.”

“And is that the only way? On your terms?” His voice sounded harsh.

She blinked as if slightly hurt by his tone. Then she lifted her chin. “Yes.” The expression in her eyes softened as she added, “I can’t live my life as little more than a marionette.”

The words hung in the air between them. Grant heard the almost desperate plea underlying them, but he couldn’t shake the voice he heard in his mind, which was telling him that if he gave in now, he’d never be in control again. A man didn’t let a woman run his life.

Only those weren’t his words he was hearing; they were his father’s words. He could hear his father saying them, emphasizing them, as they made the rounds of brothels and supper clubs, his arm around Grant’s shoulders.

The sudden revelation shattered everything he’d ever believed about himself.

Grant turned the door handle and let himself out of the room. She called out to him. When he was halfway to the staircase, he heard her crying. He kept walking.

Downstairs, the guests were long gone, and most of the remnants of the party had been cleared away. A single candle burned in the hallway on a table. Picking up the candle, he walked purposefully into the dining room to the small liquor cabinet in the corner, set the candle on top of the cabinet, and took out a decanter of whiskey he kept for guests and one glass. Pulling the stopper out, he poured the whiskey into the glass. His hand shook as he
poured, causing the mouth of the decanter to clink against the rim of the glass, and in a burst of violent rage he threw the decanter with all his strength at the far wall.

The crystal bottle smashed into thousands of pieces. “I am not my father,” he said, enunciating each word clearly, distinctly.

The sound of footsteps made him turn with alarm to the door. A second later Anne appeared. A shawl was wrapped around her nightdress, and she was holding a candle. “Grant? Are you all right?”

He didn’t want company. “I’m fine, Anne. Go back to bed.”

She didn’t move but stood in the doorway. He had no doubt that she’d heard the crash and could smell the peatlike scent of the whiskey in the air. She stepped into the dining room. “I thought you would be with Phadra.”

He heard her unspoken question. “We’re not a love match,” he explained quietly.

Anne raised her eyebrows and sat down at the table, setting her candle in front of her.

Grant frowned. “I have no desire to discuss this.”

Anne shrugged, as if his wishes were unimportant. “I like her.”

“Why is it women are always so free with their advice?” he asked angrily. “Why can’t you ever accept what a man says and leave it at that? Which reminds me, Anne, were you really smoking this evening?”

Anne waved a hand at him. “You aren’t my husband, so don’t adopt that tone with me. And please give me credit for some good sense. I didn’t smoke. I was only teasing Jane.” A slow smile spread across her face. “Of course, I seriously thought about doing
it. Every once in a while it’s fun to try the forbidden. Makes me feel like less of a matron.”

“Matron? You’re only thirty-one.”

“And you are thirty and more than ripe for marriage. What I want to know is, why you are down here and not up sharing the marriage bed with your wife?”

He shoved his fists in his pockets and moved around the table away from her. “I didn’t realize you were capable of being this direct, Anne,” he said irritably.

“Bearing four children does that to a woman, Grant. Now, what is the matter?”

He pulled a hand out of his pocket and combed his fingers through his hair before admitting, “We don’t suit each other.”

“I found myself thinking today that you two are very much alike.”

“Have both you and Jane gone daft? She told me Phadra was perfect for me. I don’t understand why two of the people closest to me can’t see that we are complete opposites.”

Anne leaned across the table. Her gray eyes, so much like his, caught the candlelight. “I find her much like you. She’s good, kind, intelligent, generous—”

“Generous enough to waste hundreds of pounds entertaining!”

“She did it to help you,” Jane’s voice chimed in. She walked into the room, rubbing her back. “And you’d do the same if you thought it would help us. One of the reasons Anne and I are sleeping on the parlor sofas tonight is because you gave us the furniture from the bedrooms upstairs to help us set up our
households, and would have given us the parlor furniture too if we’d let you. Believe me, Grant, not every brother is as generous as you.”

She sat down in the chair next to her older sister. “Phadra thought that if she did a good job with the party, it would help your fortunes with the bank. She only wanted to please you, Grant.”

He faced them across the table. “Well, it didn’t help, did it?”

“Only because you decided to throw an earl out of your house by the seat of the pants,” Anne observed dryly. “None of us expected the party to grow so big or so wild. And certainly no one thought that Lofton would attack Phadra.”

Grant hated being reminded of his own part in the disaster. But when he’d entered this very room and seen Phadra holding off the bastard—“I don’t want to argue about it, Anne. This is between myself and Phadra.”

“Well, there is something I do want to talk about, brother of mine, and it is between us,” Anne said.

“What is that?” he asked curtly.

“I heard what you said when I came into the room.”

Grant went very still.

She pinned him with her gaze. “Father’s dead, Grant. He’s gone. You can’t fight him. He’s not here.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Yes, you do. Oh, I’ll be the first to admit that Papa left a reputation that may last forever, but when he was sober, he could also be a caring, loving man. We did have some good times. Not all the memories are bad, Grant.”

“The ones I have are.”

“But you’ve never told us about them,” Jane said. “I mean, I know you and Papa used to go places together whenever you came home from school, and then it seemed that something terrible happened and Papa died in that duel, and now you rarely mention his name or let us say it.” She paused. “I remember how scared I was, but you were there, Grant, and you kept telling me that everything would be all right.” Her eyes filled with unshed tears. “And you were right. It did turn out fine, although I miss both Mama and Papa.” She smiled up at him, her expression sad. “I love you, Grant, but I wish you had told us. Then maybe you wouldn’t be so angry.”

“I’m not angry,” he denied, knowing even as he said the words that he lied.

“No, not now,” Jane quickly agreed with him. “Because now you have Phadra.”

Her answer surprised him. Jane went on, “This afternoon I was talking to Phadra about Papa and the picnics we used to have. Remember how much fun they were? And I gained the impression that she knew something about you and Papa. Something you haven’t told us.”

His sister’s innocent observation made him suddenly feel naked.

Anne, who had been silently watching both of them, echoed Jane’s question. “Does she know, Grant?”

At that moment someone pounded the brass knocker on the front door. Relieved to remove himself from his sisters’ too-astute observations, he left the dining room and answered the door himself instead of waiting for Wallace.

On his doorstep stood a liveried servant. With a
flourish he handed Grant a letter. “His lordship bids me to return with an answer.”

Grant broke the seal on the letter and stepped toward the candle Anne held up for him. The letter was from Lofton. He demanded satisfaction and expected to meet Grant in the park at dawn. He gave Grant the choice of weapon.

Leaving the servant standing on his step, Grant went back to his study. In bold pen strokes, he wrote a reply agreeing to the meeting. His choice of weapon was swords. His expression grim, he also penned another quick note to Duroy asking him to serve as his second. He rang for Wallace.

“I don’t understand dueling,” Anne said.

Grant looked up to find her standing by the edge of his desk, her arm wrapped protectively around a white-faced Jane. “Most women don’t,” he answered, thinking of Phadra specifically.

“You’re going to go through with it?” Anne asked.

“I have no choice.”

Anne pressed her lips together and then spoke her thoughts out loud. “You’re a fool, Grant.”

“Go to bed, Anne.” To his surprise, she did just that, taking an obviously upset Jane with her.

After Wallace and Lofton’s servant left, Grant sat for a long time in his study alone. The ticking of a clock on the mantel measured the passage of time, but in his mind Grant lived in the past. For the first time he allowed himself to remember.

Scenes played in his mind, scenes of moments he’d thought he’d erased from his memory, never to be retrieved again. His father had taught him the finer points of swordplay and had encouraged his love for the sport.

And his father’s laughter. Grant surprised himself that he could vividly recall the sound of that laughter. He fell asleep with the sound of it echoing in his mind.