Chapter 7
Louisa’s life changed from the moment Lord Wrenworth declared to a roomful of breathless ladies that Miss Cantwell had consented to become his wife.
Within the crisp, freshly ironed pages of the next day’s Times, she found the engagement announced with all due pride and gravity.
An hour later, an enormous bouquet of pink-tinged white orchids arrived at the house, courtesy of her husband-to-be.
At noon, more evidence of his regard, a magnificent diamond ring, made its dramatic appearance, sending Lady Balfour into a swoon of ecstasy.
“What did I tell you, Louisa? What did I tell you?”
Notes of congratulations snowed upon the house, along with invitations to every event taking place from then to the end of the Season.
Louisa spent two entire days answering the well-wishers.
When she went on calls with Lady Balfour, amidst many an envious and sometimes incredulous look, much fuss was made of her.
The luckiest lady in London.
Louisa herself was no less staggered than any of her well-wishers.
She giggled when she was alone. She gaped at her ring whenever she caught sight of it.
Sometimes, as she lay in bed at night, she pummeled her mattress with both hands and feet, as gleeful and irrepressible as a child about to go on her first holiday.
But other times, her dumbfoundedness took a more sober turn.
Clearly his proposal took place, but with each passing day it made less sense.
A mistress was a temporary feature in a man’s life, a passing fancy to be discarded or replaced anytime he so chose.
A wife, on the other hand, was a permanent installation, almost as irrevocable as a mother.
What could possibly have induced him to make such a decision? She had a healthy regard for herself, but even if she esteemed herself ten times as much, she still couldn’t comprehend what it was about her that had proved irresistible to a man who could have had any woman.
The tentative explanation she cobbled together was a discomfiting one.
He enjoyed wielding power over her—almost from the very beginning, he had intentionally set out to disrupt and destabilize.
She’d had to fight back for every inch of footing she could command, so that she was not entirely at his mercy.
It was possible that even with her resistance, he’d come to the conclusion that he would never hold greater sway over a woman. Or perhaps it was precisely her resistance that he relished, that in spite of it he could still prevail over her as much as he did.
She often thought back to the moment their engagement first became reality, that flash of euphoric happiness that he liked and wanted her enough to pledge his name and all the privilege that came with it.
But the fact remained that she could trust him no more now that he was her fiancé than when he had been merely a devious and amoral would-be lover.
When they were married, she would not try to deny his dominance in the bridal bower—in that particular arena he would probably always render her breathless and helpless.
But that was the only weakness she would ever admit, lust of the body.
Her mind would remain her own. And her demented and slightly shameful love she would carry as a secret to her grave.
It was the only path through the dangerous and, someday, very possibly heartbreaking terrain of her marriage.
* * *
Louisa’s epic success brought her family to London.
Their departure from home was delayed two days by Frederica’s continued refusal to leave her room. Frantic telegrams arrived for Louisa, who cabled back, Tell Frederica Lord Wrenworth has the means and the connections to make her skin marble smooth again.
Whether anything in the world could accomplish what she promised was immaterial. At twenty-seven Frederica was still a head-turningly beautiful woman—her problem had far less to do with dermatology than with perception.
“Your task, when they arrive, is to make her feel as lovely as the first star in the sky,” she told Lord Wrenworth.
It was the first time they had seen each other since the day of their engagement—she’d been quite buried by the work that came with mounting a wedding, in three weeks, of the magnitude and splendor required by his station in life.
“What?” he mock-exclaimed. “I am out a twenty-room house plus eight hundred pounds a year. And I have to play the swain to the sister-in-law, too?”
He looked both commanding and delicious standing by the window of Lady Balfour’s drawing room, bathed in the light of the afternoon.
She was proud one moment, covetous the next, and then fearful the moment after that.
It would always be like this, wouldn’t it, being the wife of a man she loved but couldn’t trust, whose true motives were as murky as the bottom of the sea?
“It will save you—well, me, actually—money on milk baths and exotic emollients later.”
“And why would I want to save you money?” He rounded to the side of her padded chair and looked down at her. “Wouldn’t I prefer it if you had to spend it all and come begging for more?”
She stared at his lips. He had not kissed her, ever.
She would like him to, but she refused to ask.
She even held back from reaching out and touching the hand he braced on the back of the chair.
It was one thing to try to undermine his mastery of the situation with unwholesome speech and action, quite another to betray heartfelt desires that only further strengthened his hand.
“I couldn’t spend eight hundred pounds a year if I tried.”
“Don’t let anyone hear you speak like that. My reputation will never recover if it is known that I married a woman who can make do with eight hundred pounds a year. Besides, what will I have to complain about at my club if my wife isn’t suitably spendthrift?”
My wife. A wife could be the object of unabashed adoration or simply another nuisance in a man’s life. Where would she fall along that continuum? And would his, if not black, then at least darkish grey heart ever be hers?
She folded her hands together primly. “Does no one complain about their wives being too insatiable in bed?”
His gaze swept her entire person. Her skin tingled. He wanted to do wicked things to her—it was the reaction she had hoped to provoke—but he touched her nowhere, not even the fabric of her enormous sleeves.
He took a seat opposite hers, his long legs taking up most of the space between them. “Are you planning on being an overly enthusiastic wife?”
The way he studied her both absorbed and unsettled her. “Would you like me to be?”
“I am much more interested in the wife you cannot help being,” he said, the firm last word on the subject.
He wanted to strip her bare in every way. Her naked body was only the beginning. From there, her undisguised thoughts. At last, her unhidden heart.
She took a sip of her tea, her fingers tight around the handle of the cup. “So…will you promise to shamelessly flatter Frederica?”
* * *
Two days later, as Lord Wrenworth strolled into Lady Balfour’s drawing room to meet Louisa’s family, there was a reverent collective intake of breath, as if the Cantwell women were a group of mortals who had accidentally stumbled into the presence of Apollo himself.
Louisa, too, felt as if she were seeing him again for the very first time, her eyes blurring with the potency of his physical perfection.
You, sir, are a scoundrel.
As if he’d heard her thought, he glanced her way. Their gazes held, a pair of miscreants recognizing each other in a roomful of upstanding people.
It lasted only a moment, but the sweetness of that secret communion lingered: a joy that was also an ache in her heart. They were two of a kind—she wished she wouldn’t need to always guard herself from him.
“May I present his lordship the Marquess of Wrenworth?” said Lady Balfour, still giddy from having pulled off the most spectacular match—or mismatch, as Louisa sometimes thought of it—in years. “Sir, my dear cousin Mrs. Cantwell, Miss Julia, Miss Matilda, Miss Cecilia, and Miss Cantwell.”
Frederica, addressed as Miss Cantwell, as she was the eldest, kept her head lowered.
Lord Wrenworth approached her chair. She still sat with her head down.
Much to the surprise of everyone present, he lowered himself to one knee, so as to be level with her. Flustered, she turned her entire body to one side. He studied the angle she presented him, then calmly rounded to her other side.
Lady Balfour and Mrs. Cantwell both glanced toward Louisa, who could only shake her head to show that she had no idea what he was doing.
He straightened. “I understand you have been mourning the loss of your beauty for years, Miss Cantwell. What I do not understand is why your family has allowed such an act of rampant narcissism.”
Frederica looked up in shock.
“The only imperfections I see are a few shallow pockmarks on your right cheek. I would never have permitted any sister of mine to brood over such minor blemishes for the better part of a decade.
“Had you come for a London Season, you would not have dislodged Mrs. Townsend from her perch as the most beautiful woman in London. You might not even have disturbed Miss Bessler’s place third on that list. But make no mistake, you would have been mentioned in the same breath as those women.
Instead, you have wasted your youth grieving for a gross misfortune that never took place: You are perhaps five percent less lovely than you would have been without the pockmarks, not fifty percent.
“Miss Louisa asked me to compliment you, but I shall not, not when you can go out and garner hundreds of them on your own with minimum effort. And if you will not, then there is nothing anyone can do for you—the matter is not with your face, but your head.”
Without waiting for a response, he moved on. “My dear Miss Matilda, did you have a pleasant trip?”
* * *