“I wouldn’t mind seeing a picture of my father too,” George muttered diffidently. “Not that I care, but... I’ve never seen him.”
Emm smiled, relieved and delighted with their reaction.“All the ancestral portraits are safe and will be hung with the others in the portrait gallery,” she assured them. “I haven’t yet had time to have a proper look at them myself.” And now that Lily had mentioned it, she wanted to see that portrait of her husband as a boy.
A sudden silence fell as her husband entered the great hall. He surveyed the room silently. Emm waited breathlessly for his reaction.
“I see you’ve begun,” he said, then gave a brusque nod and headed upstairs, leaving Emm not knowing what to think. What did he mean by “begun”? Begun to take over the house? Begun to ruin his home? Begun to interfere? There was no way of knowing.
She turned to the girls, who were regarding her with slight consternation. “Men are hopeless about interior arrangements,” she said lightly. “Either they don’t notice or they hate any kind of change. Now, let me show you to your bedchambers.”
The girls didn’t move. “Is he planning to dump us here?” Rose asked bluntly.
Emm gave her a surprised look. “Dump you? What do you mean?”
“He said, back in Bath, that we could go to London, make our come-out in the spring. We thought when the carriage came, that we were going to London. But here we are. So he’s planning to immure us in the country, isn’t he, so we can’t make any scandals?”
“No, of course not,” Emm told her, though in truth she had only the sketchiest idea of her husband’s plans. “The only reason he married me was so that you could all make your come-outs next season—”
“Theonlyreason?” Lily interrupted, her face a picture of dismay. “But I thought—”
“No, not the only reason, of course.” Emm hastily covered her blunder with a smile. Lily obviously wanted to believe she’d married for love, and Emm was not going to disillusion her. “I didn’t mean it like that. We married for all the usual reasons, of course—but your brother did make it very clear that he wanted me to assist with your come-outs, which ofcourse I am more than delighted to do. As for your being immured in the countryside, there is no such plan. Besides, scandals can happen as easily in the country as in the town, believe me. Now, upstairs to wash before dinner.” She linked her arm through George’s. “Rose and Lily have their old bedchambers, though I’ve made a few changes, now that they’re grown up, but let me show you your room, George.”
The girl hesitated. “Can Finn come too?”
“Of course, he’s part of the family too.”
Rose didn’t move. “You promise we’re not going to be stuck here?”
“I promise,” Emm said.
***
He came to Emm’s bed again that night and made love to her with the same focused intensity, bringing her to the edge of climax again and again, before driving into her, hard and fast, powerful and passionate, until with a loud groan, he took them both over the crest of ecstasy.
Normally Emm drifted straight off to sleep, but tonight she lay sated, dreamy, but wakeful. Her husband slept beside her, his big body curled around her possessively.
He was an enigma, this man she’d married. During the day he seemed so distant and unapproachable, every inch the brusque stranger she’d married, but at night... oh, at night, he took her to a state she’d never dreamed was possible.
She’d come to crave his attentions, the embrace of his strong hard body, the feeling of total possession, of utter abandonment.
Only a few days before she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to sleep with a relative stranger, to reveal her nakedness to him, to have him handle and invade her body.
Now she couldn’t imagine life without it, without him, this odd, spiky, difficult-to-know man. She needed time, time to get to know him better, time for him to know her, not just her body. Time to make a real marriage of this arrangement.
But he would be returning to his position abroad in a few weeks.
She woke not long after dawn, feeling him slide out of bed. She blinked sleepily as he wrapped his dressing gown around him. “Going riding again?” Bars of sunlight came through the gaps in the curtains.
“Yes, go back to sleep. I won’t be home until very late.”
“Take the girls with you.”
“I can’t. I’m not going for a recreational ride. This is business.”
She sat up, drawing the bedclothes around her against the morning chill. “Take them anyway. This is their home. I’m sure they’d like to renew their acquaintance with—and in George’s case, meet—the people of the estate.”
“It’s not that kind of business.”
“You can’t put it off, not even for just a day?”
