A Wicked Lord at the Wedding (4 page)

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, Sebastien.”

Her hips moved sinuously, inviting him. She felt his erection press between her thighs. The air they breathed erupted into fire. He pushed inside her. Damp heat and discomfort interwove. She wrapped her arms around his waist. He groaned. She stopped caring what she ought to do and let desire, instinct, take its course.

She was happy. And she thought he was, too. He even laughed like he used to, as she drowsed against him, whispering, “‘
Venus victrix
,’” in her ear. “I don’t know how I forgot. My memory sometimes—”

She kissed him before he could finish. “I suppose Herculēs can’t be expected to remember everything and be the bravest soldier in battle.”

He rolled away from her, his smile rueful. “I’m not a soldier anymore.”

She heard a quiet knock at their door during the night. She thought nothing of it. He’d told her to expect he would be officially called to his assignment soon. But on their wedding night?

He was gone before she woke the next morning.

And if the man she had married ever returned, it would not be to an unsophisticated bride.

B
ELGRAVE
S
QUARE
, L
ONDON
J
ULY
1816

For the first three years after their wedding night, after Eleanor settled in London, Sebastien made irregular visits home to his wife. But then he became more involved in his work and another three years passed during which they had no contact at all. When he returned to London this time to stay, he knew it was naïve to hope her feelings for him hadn’t changed. He had disgraced her at their wedding. His behavior during their following years of marriage wasn’t anything to be proud of, either. If he’d been a better man, he might have done her a favor and not shown up at their wedding at all.

In retrospect, he really did appear to have been a bastard.

However, from what he’d gleaned from intelligence sources over the last year, Eleanor had gotten her revenge in an unbelievable way. He might not have visited her, but he’d had contacts in London who kept him aware of how she was.

He stood on the doorstep of his Belgrave town house for a full minute before making his presence known.

Did he knock or simply open the door? He owned the damned house. His wife still lived here. He had been following her alarming activities for several months and had maintained her finances through his London solicitors for the six years of their marriage.

True, he could have written ahead to tell her to expect him. But part of him was afraid she would have bolted if he’d given her warning of his return.

He took off his hat.

Two hot-eel vendors had slowed on the pavement to stare at him. One nudged the other. His dark scowl sent them scurrying down the street.

He reached decisively for the doorknob. The door was locked, a sensible thing when a lady lived alone in a crime-plagued city, he assured himself.

He lifted the heavy brass knocker. After an interminable silence he heard footsteps hurrying to answer the door. He glanced around. Was it his imagination or had the dust-collector slowed his cart to observe him? Was his return such a momentous event that it attracted the notice of strangers?

He half-smiled at the dust-collector, who did not smile back.

The door opened. Relief and disappointment briefly overshadowed his anticipation. His short, balding butler studied him with respectful suspicion
for a moment before masking all expression and bowing to allow him entrance.

“My lord,” the butler said. “I did not realize—”

“Who is it, Walbrook?” a melodious voice inquired from the vestibule to Sebastien’s right.

He stepped around the genuflecting Walbrook, the tidy line of traveling bags in the entry hall. He wasn’t sure if he’d caught Eleanor on her way out or in from some entertainment. But one thing was certain. He understood by the shock on her oval face when she stepped forth that he was the last person on earth she had expected at the door.

He cleared his throat. In truth, he was probably as discombobulated as his wife.
He
had expected more. A shriek of delight. A tearful hug. A wife rushing forward to greet her husband after an inexcusable separation. She was beautiful, elegant, frozen in place. He was not sure what she would have done had he not swept forward and crushed her in a desperate hold. She had little choice but to allow herself to be embraced.

“Eleanor.” He couldn’t help himself. His hands swept down her nape, her back, to the soft curves below. He realized that another servant had joined the chambermaid on the landing. But he was holding his wife, in his own house, and it wasn’t a dream. He closed his eyes for several moments of bliss—half-convinced by her stunned silence that he could step back into the position he had eluded for the last six years. No questions asked. No answers given.

Wasn’t that the English way?

The master is home. The wife is beside herself with joy. Let’s not embarrass ourselves with a display.

All is well now that his lordship is here.

Not exactly.

“I’m home,” he announced unnecessarily, as if her lack of enthusiasm meant she was too overwhelmed by emotion to react.

As it turned out, she
was
overwhelmed. But not with the, “Sebastien, I have wished for this moment so desperately that I cannot speak,” sort of emotion. It was more of the, “Heaven help me. The rotter has actually come back. What am I supposed to do with him?” shock of a woman who considered herself virtually a widow.

His old deerhound had galloped forth to get down on all fours and growl balefully from the bottom of the stairs, as if Sebastien were a ghost. Even Eleanor’s personal maid, Mary Sturges, many years in faithful family service, entered the hall to regard him in chagrin before apparently remembering her place and welcoming him back with wan enthusiasm.

Considering his history, he should not be offended that his wife and small domestic staff did not expect him to stay. To be fair, he’d been in France longer than he had ever been home. He’d barely lived in London at all. The pattern of his house hold had arranged itself around an absent master. But from the instant of his return, he began to perceive that his presence discomforted everyone.

Had he been missed?

Not if one were to judge by his dog.

Nor by anyone else, either, he quickly decided.

“Sebastien,” Eleanor said with a stilted smile, still not moving. “I had no idea you were back in England.”

“I should have written.”

Her eyes darkened in mordant agreement. “Well, yes.”

“I didn’t think—” He released her, aware suddenly they had a small audience of servants and that she was dressed in a light traveling mantle.

He motioned to the bags on the floor. “Are you going away?” he asked with a frown.

Suddenly he wondered whether she
had
known he was coming home. Maybe he’d caught her trying to escape. That he would not permit. She had to at least give him a chance to redeem himself.

She leaned her head back. The faintest blush tinged her pale cheekbones. “Yes, I—”

He kissed her then.

He didn’t want to hear she was leaving. Or that he might be too late. His arms locked around her waist, unbending her an inch at a time until she was forced to yield or make an unseemly fuss. Her mouth tasted as cool as English rain, but the flicker of surprise in her eyes reassured him she had not forgotten the passion they had once known.

Too brief. He savored the faint pressure of gloved fingertips above his wrist, the warm surrender of a woman’s body against an unfair strength.

He let her go before she could draw another
breath. Her hand dropped from his wrist. Then she laughed as if embarrassed by either his kiss, or her own indefinable response.

“I’m going away for a fortnight,” she said after an awkward pause.

“To?”

“Brighton. With the duchess and her boys,” she explained, recovering from their embrace with enviable aplomb. “She thinks a brief spell of sea air will be good for them.”

“It won’t be good for me,” he said without thinking.

“I beg your pardon.”

He laughed. He didn’t care what the servants thought. He wasn’t asking the staff to bear his children or share his life. “What I meant,” he said, “is that you’re leaving just as I’ve come home. And I am disappointed.”

She shook her head. He waited for her to invite him to accompany her. Instead, she said, “Well, you understand why I can’t disappoint the duchess. Are you planning to stay here while I’m gone?”

“No.” He glanced around the hall at the servants who stood waiting like a row of wooden soldiers. “I have other arrangements.” And at her clearly relieved nod, he felt compelled to add, “For now.”

She shot him a look. “Then I suppose I will see you—”

“When you come back from Brighton,” he said firmly. “You aren’t leaving now?”

She stared past him to the door. “Mr. Loveridge should be here at any minute.”

“Who?” he asked sharply.

“The duchess’s secretary,” she replied.

“Oh, yes. Loveridge. I’ve heard the name.”

An uncertain silence spun out between them. A few minutes later he watched as she was whisked away in the Duchess of Wellington’s comfortable traveling carriage.

What irony. Three years ago she had stood on this exact spot and watched him go away for the last time, offering an explanation for his departure as hollow as hers now sounded. She had known little about his work, only that he’d been discharged from his Peninsular company five years prior at the Duke of Wellington’s personal request.

She and his London house hold staff believed that he served in some covert intelligence capacity.

He’d chosen not to elaborate on this flattering misperception.

In darker reality, after Sebastien had been wounded in Spain, incapacitated in spirit longer than body, he’d been handed the ignominious honor of hatching insurgent plots at strategic French ports. While the soldiers in his regiment had gone on to glory at Waterloo, Sebastien had been relegated to the taverns of Le Havre or Honfleur, intercepting messages between barmaids and lusty patrons that only occasionally bore significance.

His superiors thought they’d enacted a kind deception. He was no longer fit for the battlefield. He
might easily hold a rifle and shoot it. He just hadn’t recovered enough to reliably make out who he was firing at, a considerable liability for a frontline infantry officer. He could, however, commit necessary evils and leave no trace.

He delivered payments and caught war criminals. He offered bribes.

Sometimes he started riots. He discovered he still harbored the Boscastle talent for hell-raising. Every so often he would make a double agent permanently disappear, and not always in a pleasant manner.

The price he’d paid to regain his pride was not anything he intended to reveal to Eleanor.

She was disillusioned enough by the way he’d treated her without giving her more reason to mistrust him.

Still, who would have guessed that his neglected wife would have sought a secret life of her own? That he would return, not to the light-hearted English girl who had whispered on her wedding day that she couldn’t survive without him, but to an adventuress who had not only survived in his absence but who had thrived?

A wife who had become a private agent in subterfuge to the Duchess of Wellington?

He had come back with every intention of becoming the husband Eleanor thought she had married. But clearly his beloved had filled the void he had left with mischief of her own.

What a crafty revenge.

He’d wanted her to miss him. To forgive and
become his wife again. Instead, they had become competitors.

He stood on the steps until the ducal carriage swept her from his view. How the deuce could he impress her now? Should he run after her like a besotted fool and demand she return?

He glanced around. An assembly of street vendors stood on the corner gawking at him.

“Go away,” he said grumpily, turning to the house.

His courtship of Eleanor had been take-no-prisoners passionate, an officer who had fallen in love with a surgeon’s daughter in Spain and chased her between battles with merciless determination.

But he’d been a nitwit to assume that having won her once, she would belong to him forever.

He had expected he would have to start all over again. To prove he would not disappear from her life this time.

He had been looking forward to wooing his own wife.

But what he had not anticipated, and what became startlingly evident in the following three months, was that he not only had to prove himself a better husband, he also had to prove to Eleanor which of them was the better man.

L
ONDON
O
CTOBER
1816