Then Comes Seduction

“As I did when I left home?” he asked.

“I will not be distracted,” she said. “Though of course, if the boot fits, then it ought to be worn. But we must agree to make them all as happy as we possibly can while they are at Cedarhurst with us. We can do that by appearing to be happy with each other.”

“And after Miss Huxtable and Merton have returned home?” he asked. “We will keep up the charade for Charlotte, will we? Until she marries or for the rest of our lives if she does not?”

That was the weak point in her plan, of course. Pretending to an affection for each other for two weeks, while the house party was in progress, ought not to be impossibly difficult. But after that?

“We will think of that when the time comes,” she said.

“We will not need to worry our heads over the problem if there is no problem by that time,” he said. “You must work diligently over your half of the wager, Katherine, as I am working diligently over mine.”

He looked sleepy again.

“I do not have half the wager,” she protested.

“Then what is the point of me wi

“I do not want to love you,” she said.

His eyes moved lazily over her and she felt suddenly as naked as she had been last night in the candlelight-something she definitely did not want to think about today.

For she had realized something this morning-well, last night after he had withdrawn to the sitting room, to be more accurate. She had realized that in cutting him off from the physical side of their marriage for a whole month, she had cut herself off too. And she had been rather dismayed to discover that it was not a pleasant prospect. It ought to be. There should be no lust in marriage-only love.

There could be love if she took up half the wager and won-and if he won his half.

How absurd! She felt thoroughly cross.

“I think, Katherine,” he said, “you just told a whopping fib. But perhaps you do not even realize it yet. Of course you want to love me-I am your husband. And of course you want me to love you-you are my wife.”

Oh, she thought suddenly, he was at work already, was he not? The grand wager-wi

“Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “Or back to pretending to sleep.”

But he took her left hand in his instead.

“We are almost there,” he said.

“Home?” She looked through the window beyond his shoulder, but all she could see was fields on the other side of the hedgerows lining the road.

“Cedarhurst,” he said with slight emphasis.

His fingertips were at the base of her little finger and then sliding lightly along it to the tip. Why was she feeling it in her throat?

“Do you still hate it, then?” she asked him. “Is it not home to you? Where is home, then?”

He moved his fingertips to her third finger, and they closed about her wedding ring and turned it slowly. He had pursed his lips, and his eyelids had drooped over his eyes as he watched their hands.

“If you intend always to ask multiple questions, Katherine,” he said, “you must expect my mind to become more and more addled as our marriage progresses. You will end up with the village idiot for a husband.”

She might have laughed, but she did not do so. She wanted answers. A man who hated the home he had always owned but who had nowhere else to call home was someone alien to her. Her husband, in this case. How very little she knew him. Yet she had married him yesterday and shared the intimacy of the marriage bed with him last night. To her, home had always been at the very center of her existence, whether that was the vicarage while her father had still been alive, or the cottage to which they had gone after, or Warren Hall, where they had moved three years ago.

“No, I do not hate Cedarhurst,” he said. “Yes, it is home if it must be labeled at all. The word home is rather like the word love, is it not? Impossible to define and therefore essentially meaningless?”

“Those words are impossible to define precisely because they are words and can only symbolize concepts that are brimful of meaning,” she said. “They symbolize emotions that are too deep for words. But we have to use words because they are one of the primary ways by which we communicate. And so we have to label something vast and fathomless and beyond value with totally inadequate words like home and love. Just as white encompasses all the colors and all the shades of all colors-as you pointed out to me yesterday.”

He drew her ring off over her knuckle and then pressed it back into place before sliding his fingertips along the finger itself and moving on to the middle finger. A smile played over his lips, though his eyes were still hooded.

And now she was feeling it in her breasts.

“I remember telling you once,” he said, “that you are a woman of great and extraordinary passion, Katherine. One day you will learn to direct that passion toward another person instead of to ideas-toward me, I would have to say, since I certainly could not countenance my wife directing it toward any other man, could I?”

He looked up into her eyes, his smile lazy and just a little lopsided. And now her breathing was suffering.

He looked down at their hands again as his fingertips stroked along her middle finger, causing sensation in her lower abdomen. She firmly ignored it. This was all quite deliberate on his part-to arouse her physically, but very subtly, so that she would fall in love with him. He did not understand at all.

“But to answer your third question,” he said, “there is nowhere else. Nowhere else I call home, I mean. Cedarhurst is it, for better or worse.”

“Like marriage,” she said.

“Like marriage,” he agreed, looking up into her eyes again. “When I spent almost a year at Cedarhurst a while ago, I took the first tentative step toward making it mine.”

“What was that?” she asked him.

“I will show you when we arrive,” he said, his fingertips tracing a path down her forefinger. And her i

What was going to happen when he got to her thumb?

It did not happen.

“Ah,” he said suddenly, at the same moment as she became aware of houses appearing beyond the carriage windows.

They were passing through a village. There was a tall church spire a short distance ahead.

He lowered his foot to the floor and straightened up on the seat at last to gaze out. He raised a hand to a few people who stood on the street watching the passing of the carriage. And everyone raised a hand in return, Katherine noticed. A few people smiled too. All looked glad.

An interesting reaction to a landlord who did not spend a great deal of his time here and who even found it difficult to admit that this was home, that he did not actively hate it.

She looked curiously at him as they left the village behind and turned onto what she guessed was the driveway to Cedarhurst. It was broad and tree-lined, though she could see lawns stretching away to either side beyond the trees and water glistening far off to the left.

And then she saw the house up ahead, a grand, solid, square gray stone edifice. The front seemed all windows, the longest on the ground level, slightly smaller ones on the floor above, and smaller ones yet on the top floor below the roof with its stone balustrade decorated with stone statues. There was a massive columned portico in the center of the front facade with wide marble steps leading up beneath it to the front doors.