Chapter Fourteen
“You can surrender, you know.”
“I am not going to surrender.”
“I am just saying…” opined Rose, smiling in that seductive yet mesmerizing way of hers. “You could.”
Samuel looked down at the board between them. Then he looked up at his opponent, her gown alluring and her smile far too knowing.
He looked down at the board again quickly before he was tempted to do something he absolutely should not.
“Surrender,” whispered Rose with a tinkling laugh.
Samuel refused to notice just how his body stiffened as she’d said that word. It was impossible, yes, but he should at least make the effort. After all, they had played chess before. It wasn’t as though he did not know the rules.
The rules that were somehow eluding him, however, were the rules that they had agreed all that time ago in Brighton. God, that seemed a lifetime ago.
A year and a day.
Ten thousand pounds at separation. An annuity of a thousand pounds.
No intercourse.
Three little rules that had seemed obvious and fair and right and now felt like a prison within which he had encaged himself.
What the devil was he supposed to do as he sat here on the hearthrug of his drawing room, laughing with a woman as she once again beat him at chess, a woman who made his heart sing and his body fizzle and everything in his mind go blank.
“Samuel?”
After all, Samuel thought feverishly as he tried to spot a way to extricate himself—from the check, not the woman—we are married, aren’t we? It could hardly be a crime to find his own wife attractive.
Though perhaps not the wife you hired…
“Samuel, if you are not going to make a move,” Rose said sharply, “I shall have to discipline you.”
Samuel froze. Then he looked up, hardly daring to believe what she had said. “Pardon?”
“I absolutely shall,” she said sweetly. “Come on. Rescue your king.”
His shoulders sagged. Right, the chess game.
That was what she was referring to. Not some bedroom scene of her having him on his knees, not the inexplicable sexual tension between them, not the knowledge that there was something here, something more.
Certainly not the fact that affections had arisen much against their agreement and Samuel was starting to dream of the dratted woman.
Most explicitly.
Rose sighed, leaned forward—displaying an unsettling but most welcome amount of bosom—and tipped over Samuel’s king.
“Whoa there!” Samuel protested, almost before he could stop himself.
“You were mated!”
His throat closed up.
Even Rose appeared to have noticed that she had spoken scandalously, for her cheeks were a delicate shade of pink that deepened as she said, “You know what I mean. You’d been stuck there for almost ten minutes. I say that means you have to surrender.”
She had folded her hands together, elbows on the table, and thrust her chest out, clearly delighted at having beaten him once again at the game Samuel had once believed he was more than passable at, and he…
He could not help but grin in return. “Fine. You win this one—but I demand a rematch!”
Rose was already repopulating the board, her delicate fingers moving swiftly in a twisting arc. “Naturally. I am more than willing to beat you three times in a row.”
“‘Beat’ me? That first time you cheated—”
“‘Cheated’? It’s hardly my fault that you forgot your bishop was there!”
Why, Samuel wondered darkly as they bickered happily, does this feel so…so right?
He had played chess with plenty of people before.
Friends, enemies, his own brother, who was a mixture of the two.
He had bickered before, plenty of times, mostly with his sisters but sometimes with his brother, the lout.
He had sat on the hearthrug and drunk wine before with a few university friends. None of these things were new.
But they were now. Sat here, lounging against an armchair as Rose bit her lip, pondering her first move of their new game, Samuel could see that everything shared with Rose became new.
Fresh. Joyful.
It was like discovering that you had been ignorant of a melody all your life, and now music was playing and you could hear the tune of your own soul. The song you had been singing, unbeknownst to you.
And someone else had joined in.
“Who taught you to play chess?” Samuel asked lightly, eating the last of his cheese from the board his footman had left out for them many hours ago.
Rose answered, it appeared, without thought. “My father.”
The words had only just left her mouth when red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her gaze darted outward, evident discomfort in her expression.
Samuel was careful to keep things light. Her father? Interesting. “Was he very good?”
“No.”
He had expected more detail; Rose had never been particularly shy on any topic, regaling him with theater mishaps and descriptions of her European travels, some of her stories most amusing.
What he had not expected was a mere ‘no.’
“‘No’?”
Rose’s eyes had dropped to the chess board. “He was not good at chess, and he was not a good man.”
Ah. Right.
“We don’t have to talk about him,” Samuel said hastily.
“Good,” said his wife sharply. “Because he deserves neither the notice nor the time.”
Right. Though he noticed she spoke of him in the present tense, despite hinting vaguely that he might have passed on before.
Before he could say anything, Rose had looked up and there was a strange sort of hunted look in her eye. “You must think me an unfeeling daughter.”
“No,” Samuel said honestly. “I think you sound like a daughter who has endured a great deal of pain.”
It was perhaps not the right thing to say—a touch direct, and far more intimate terms than they had ever spoken before. But though his body thrummed with concern that he had been too candid, Rose seemed to relax.
“He… My father. He did not understand—he did not believe acting was a suitable profession for…for me.” The red splotches had gone and in their wake was a paleness, an uncertainty in her eye.
Samuel could not help but feel curious. After all, he knew almost nothing of Rose’s past; she had been most circumspect with the details of her life before she had begun to travel on the Continent.
It were as though she had sprung up, fully formed, an actress ready to take on the world with absolutely no past.
But everyone had a past.
“And your mother agreed with him?”
Rose snorted. “My mother does everything my father dictates—or at least, she did.”
Sympathy rose in Samuel. “She died?”
“Perhaps.” The woman opposite him shrugged in a manner that was far too nonchalant and studied to be genuine. “I have not heard from them these last eight years.”
The very idea of being out of contact with one’s family for any length of time greater than a week was startling to Samuel. Why, he had once not seen his mother for ten days, and she had instructed her butler to gain the assistance of the Peelers to batter down his door and ensure his wellbeing.
And that, according to some of his cousins, was an underreaction.
“You are shocked.”
“I am—it is not the way my family does things, no,” Samuel said honestly. She deserved honesty. “But every family is different.”
“My family… My parents, I mean, were very unforgiving. They had no wish for me to be on the stage, and so they cut me off. Or at least, they were about to.”
There was something in the way that she spoke, that tilt of her head as she examined the chess board, the careful studied calm with which she spoke.
Samuel gaped. “You ran away.”
“I ran toward,” she corrected, with a little fire in her voice. “I knew what I wanted, and when I want something, I claim it. I don’t wait around for someone to give me permission.”
Now that, he could well believe.
Dear God, it was astounding: the woman had left home and hearth and everything she knew, so desperate was she to gain her heart’s desire. Samuel could not recall doing anything so dramatic, anything so violent to his own life.
To leave all stability behind…
Well, that was his assumption, of course. Poor Miss Rosemary Morgan may have left her parents in poverty and built altogether a better life for herself.
“And so you became an actress.”
“And so,” Rose said with a smile, “I left England behind, traveled the world, earned a pretty penny as an actress to near-universal critical acclaim, returned to England, lost my place at the Grand Theatre, married a marquess…and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Samuel said, unable to help himself returning her grin. “A marchioness, sitting on a hearthrug, playing chess and drinking wine.”
“It’s not such a bad life. So tell me,” said Rose, leaning back to take a sip of her wine after moving a pawn forward. “You think you are good at chess?”
Samuel gave a laugh as he matched her pawn. “You know, I did. Apparently, I have been mistaken all these years—unfortunate, isn’t it?”
“Oh, you shouldn’t blame yourself. When we had rehearsals dragging on in Rome, those who weren’t in the scene would play chess,” his wife said with a shrug that merely emphasized that delightful curve of her breast above her waist. “I’m rather an expert.”
“You are?” he challenged.
It was the wrong thing to say. If he knew Rose, and Samuel was starting to wonder if he simultaneously knew her the best and worst of all people in the world, it was that she did not appreciate being challenged.
A mischievous expression curled her lips. “I am. Why don’t we make this interesting and find out?”
That was when Samuel should have known to desist. There was no winning in a situation like this, and yet his loins were doing the thinking now.
She was flirting! With him!
She was, wasn’t she?
“‘Interesting’?” he repeated, slowly moving his knight over his pawns and hoping to goodness she hadn’t spotted what he was attempting on the board. “You don’t think getting beaten by me will be interesting?”
Her laughter was literal music to his ears. When had he become so…so sentimental?