Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Arabella woke in a delicious wash of warmth.
She had woken several times during the night, and Alasdair was always there, holding her.
She had toyed with the idea of turning and kissing him and undressing him and climbing on top of him.
He might sleep on, like an enchanted prince, and she could have her wicked way with him.
But she thought it might be a great deal more pleasurable if he would participate.
And then his long, deep, even breaths would lull her back to sleep and to her dreams of what he might allow in the morning.
He was still holding her now, just as tightly as before.
She knew he was still asleep.
She lay very still. But in time, his breathing changed.
She dared to make a quarter turn on the bed and lay flat on her back so she could turn her head and see him, still lying on his side. She clutched his hand on her stomach so he could not withdraw it, but he made no move to do so.
And there he was, green eyes, waves of auburn hair, ginger whiskers. She put her other hand on his cheek to feel his stubble. Mmmm.
“Good morning,” she whispered.
“Aye,” he said and smiled and the dimples flashed for just a second before he winced.
“Alasdair, what’s wrong?” She raised her head.
“Nae a thing,” he said. “I just . . .” He slid his arm out from where it had cushioned her head all night. “My arm has gone numb.” He shifted to lie flat and took his hand off her stomach and began to rub his arm. “A little compression of the radial nerve, that’s all.”
She sat up. “I’ll do that. It’s my fault, after all. My big head.” She began to knead his upper arm through the banyan.
“Yer big head.” He put his other hand on her leg. “Filled with so many—ow!—marvelous things.” She had worked her way down to his elbow. “’Twas an honor to be its pillow for a night, Miss Lovelock.”
“Have you noticed I call you Alasdair all the time now?” She rubbed his forearm.
“Aye.”
“Do you think you might call me Arabella? You really cannot go on with Miss Lovelock. You will slip and call me that in front of the others.”
“But shouldnae I call ye Mrs. Andrews then?”
She mashed his hand now in the most unforgiving manner.
“I suppose you should, even though it’s a lie.” But how I wish it weren’t. “Whereas Arabella is not. So, perhaps in private, I could be Arabella? It seems silly that you kiss me and yet you don’t call me Arabella.”
He bit his lip as if he were thinking of something. “Ye may be right, Miss Lovelock.”
“How is your arm now?”
“Better.” He flexed his fingers.
She moved away from him to the other side of the bed and hopped off.
“I am ready for an enormous breakfast,” she said and went to the window and peered through a crack in the curtains. “It’s still snowing. And it’s still cold.”
Then, as if she were a girl of ten, she picked up her long nightdress and ran back to the bed and scrambled in and was under the covers in a flash and curled next to him.
“Let’s stay in bed until the snow melts,” she said and put her hand on the banyan, just as she had held his coat lapel in her cottage in Dunburn.
“I’m sure yer friend’s lady’s maid will be here soon,” he said, “and I should be dressed.”
With a groan, he got up and left the bed.
Arabella sat up. She wanted him to stay in bed with her, of course, but if he would not, she would wait for him to be ready. She had been, and, she told herself, she could continue to be patient.
And now she would see him undress and dress.
Unfortunately, he had his trousers on already, so not all of his secrets would be revealed to her this morning.
He took off the banyan and the nightshirt, and she could see his narrow waist, a smooth back where muscles flexed as he picked up his clothes, his straight shoulders.
But she was greedy.
“Alasdair?” she called out.
He turned and faced her as he tried to find the armholes in his shirt.
“Aye?”
She said nothing, but she sighed in appreciation as she lay back on the pillows.
He was beautiful. Like one of the statues in the museum.
Carved from marble, but with some soft, coppery fuzz across his chest and a little at his navel.
Flat abdomen and a lovely swell of some muscle on the chest and in his shoulders and upper arms. And his skin was a little rosy, maybe from the heat of the bed he had shared with her.
“Miss Lovelock?” He had the shirt on and was tucking it into his trousers.
“I just wanted to see the front half of you.”
The rosiness at the neck hole of his shirt now deepened to a dark flush that rose up his throat and spread across his face. Even to his ears. She wondered where the redness started and how far it spread. The next time she made him blush, she would make sure he had his shirt off. Or everything off.
“Is that flirtation?” he mumbled and sat down to put his stockings on.
“No,” Arabella said. “It’s just wanton lust.”
“Women dinnae have that.”
She thought he must be joking, so she sat up to see his expression. He had no dimples. He was serious.
“What?” she said.
“Well, nae lust.” He got his boots on. “Nae like men. Women inspire lust, they dinnae feel it.”
He was using his doctor’s voice, the one he had used in the carriage when he had told her that she had not been ruined. But now his arrogant surety was not comforting or reassuring. It was infuriating. Arabella felt her temper flare. Immediately.
This was intolerable. How dare he dismiss her, her wants and needs—no, the wants and needs of half the human race!
“Your knowledge of women being so extensive,” she said, clenching her fists by her sides.
He had walked over to a looking glass to tie his cravat. But now he paused, and his shoulders went back. He looked at her.
“I may nae have much practical experience in the matter, Miss Lovelock, but I am a physician. I have read hundreds of treatises and texts on physiology. I have treated hundreds of women as my patients. I assure ye women and men dinnae experience the same need.”
She jumped out of the bed.
“Since I will never be a man,” she said, struggling to keep her voice low and losing the struggle, “and you will never be a woman, neither of us is in a position to say that. And who wrote those medical books and treatises you are speaking of?” She did not wait for his answer.
“Men! Men, that’s who. And why would a patient tell you what she feels, what she desires when she is ill or scared or in pain? ”
His mouth hung open now.
She went on, recklessly, loudly. “You think Giles took me against my will? No! I wanted to be touched, to be kissed, to be taken. I wanted ecstasy. He was not the man to give it to me, and he was a liar, but my want was not a lie. The want was real! For days now, I have restrained my own desire for you in order to shield you, to allow you time, to make you feel you were leading. To let you be sure of me. Even though I have waited for you a very long time, Doctor, I made myself wait longer. I did not want to do to you what Giles did to me and force you to go too quickly. But I see now that was a mistake. I should have seduced you, I should have done what I wanted with you! So you would know—”
She was crying through her fury, and she wasn’t sure when the tears had started.
He was aghast. First, he, who had exerted his will a thousand times in the past to stay awake all night to tend a patient in crisis, who had gone days in his boyhood without eating, who had spent his youth in Edinburgh hunched over books sixteen hours a day, had just carried out what he felt was the most self-denying act of his life.
He had left the warm nest where Arabella lay.
Where they had slept together. Where he had couried into her.
Where so much else could have happened, but he had restrained himself.
Then for her to contradict him so vehemently, to talk so freely of having wanted to lose her innocence, to speak of seducing him, and now to be crying?
“Miss Lovelock.” He stepped towards her.
“No!” she screamed. “You cannot even give me that, can you? My own name. Not even that intimacy. You must hold me at arm’s length. You, with your damned stupid ideas about women!”
He had been cursed at by laboring mothers, sworn at by drunken men with bleeding heads, threatened by grief-crazed parents after the unavoidable death of a child, but he had never felt himself as reviled as he did now.
And he could not face that. He could not confront the fury of the tiny figure in the room with him now.
He left his cravat untied and collected his waistcoat and tailcoat and walked out the door of the bedchamber.
Alasdair had no idea where the other wing of rooms was located, and, even if he did, he had no idea which might be his chamber.
He tied his cravat, noticing he had picked up the tartan scarf along with the rest of his clothes.
He got his waistcoat on and the tailcoat over it and was walking down the corridor away from Arabella’s room, trying to button the waistcoat, when he almost bumped into the Marquess of Painswick.
“Dr. Andrews, do watch where you’re going,” the marquess said.
Alasdair bowed. “My apologies, Lord Painswick.”
“You are headed quite the wrong direction for breakfast, Dr. Andrews. Come with me. And after breakfast, I’ll arrange to have my valet shave you.”
“Thank ye, my lord.”
They turned around and walked back down the corridor in the other direction, back towards Arabella’s room, towards the main staircase. Alasdair held the tartan scarf in his hand.
The marquess raised his eyebrows as they passed Arabella’s room.
“Just a few minutes ago, I thought I heard a raised voice from this end of the passage. Was it your wife?”
“Uh, perhaps.” Alasdair pushed back the lock of hair that had fallen in front of his left eye.
“Wives are difficult creatures, aren’t they?” the marquess said as he started down the stairs. “So needing, really. It’s best to find something they like so they can be distracted. Then one can get some peace.”
“I cannae say.”
“Well, you’re newly married, aren’t you?
” The marquess flashed a smile, one that seemed to show entirely too many teeth.
He continued to go down the stairs. “The novelty of having an available, tight quim that is legally obliged to open up for you has not yet lost its charm, I see. In the long run, though, wives turn out to be much more expensive than whores. But for producing heirs, one really has no other choice.”
Alasdair stopped in his tracks and balled his fists by his sides. He thought about using the scarf in his hand to strangle the marquess.
The marquess noticed Alasdair was not beside him and paused his descent and turned and looked back up the stairs at him.
“Dr. Andrews, do not take offense. I speak in generalities, of course. And you should never pay attention to anything anyone says before breakfast. Including your wife.”
When Alasdair did not move and did not answer, the marquess sniffed, turned, and walked down the rest of the stairs. Alasdair stood for a long time, trying to decide whether to go down the stairs or back up to Arabella.
Ultimately, he decided the marquess was a degenerate arsehole, but he had one thing right.
Breakfast might improve the situation, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
He folded the scarf, tucked it between the left side of his waistcoat and his shirt as he had yesterday, and walked down the stairs towards tea and breakfast.
He could not brave Arabella’s rage, even with his tartan armor over his heart. He was a coward, and he knew it.
She flung herself onto the bed and kicked and punched and sobbed. He had seen her as she truly was. A screaming, lustful, undone chit. He would never bed her now, let alone marry her.
And although she felt it was fair to blame her lust on her mother, she could not make her mother culpable of her rage.
She had never seen her mother lose her temper, except the one time.
Those ten seconds when her mother had dragged her out of Giles’ carriage.
Even then, her mother had not shouted or yelled like Arabella had.
It had been Arabella who had screamed herself hoarse in grief and pain and, yes, fury at her betrayal by Giles.
By the time Rebecca’s lady’s maid entered the room along with a chambermaid bearing a breakfast tray, Arabella had dressed herself in her one dress, arranged her hair, made the bed, and was staring out the window at the swirling snow.
“Is there anything else you need, Mrs. Andrews?” the lady’s maid asked after she had poured hot water into the basin.
Arabella stayed facing the window. Her lashes were still wet, and she knew her face was red and swollen.
“No, thank you.”
“My mistress wanted me to tell you she will be very glad to see you today.”
“And I, her.”
“Yes, Mrs. Andrews.” A silence. “Shall I go now?”
“Yes, please.”
So much snow. She put her hand on the window. So cold.
When the snow stopped, she would go south to her sister. She did not know how she would do it, but she was determined she would go alone.
She had seen his face when she had screamed and cursed. His expression had been blank. As if she were a patient in an asylum and he was studying her and her madness.
She knew she had lost him.
And this time it was all her fault.