Page 16 of A Tale of Two Dukes

Emily Muncaster had been a wedding guest along with her new husband, naturally, but Viola had had little opportunity to speak with her amongst the clamour of the Constantine family.

They’d snatched a moment together on the morning of the ceremony, no more than that, and Viola had been glad to see her best friend looking well and happy, though her pretty face was presently clouded with anxiety.

‘Are you quite sure you want to go through with this madness?’ Emily had hissed urgently when none of Viola’s sisters was close enough to hear.

‘I am. I am committed. And there is no need to be so concerned for me.’

‘I am more concerned even than I was before, when I read that appalling letter. Perhaps you are not aware that sometimes, you look at Lord Ventris as if you hate him, Viola!’

‘Only sometimes?’ she said lightly.

‘And the rest of the time…’ The former governess’s cheeks were flaming.

She was a married woman herself now; perhaps she understood better, even if she didn’t want to say so.

‘And as for him, I can’t tell what he’s thinking at all, apart from the fact that he never takes his eyes off you for a second. ’

Viola embraced her friend. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said inadequately in her ear. And then, ‘I’ll write to you, I promise, when we leave here. We must not lose touch, ever. I will want to hear all your news, whether important or trivial.’

Emily’s new home was close enough that she’d not been obliged to stay overnight, but Winterflood House was still full of Constantines in the days after the wedding – Viola’s mother, all five of her sisters, Sabrina’s and Allegra’s husbands, and those of their children who were not away at school.

The older ones, including Ned and Robin, hadn’t been fetched here; it wasn’t the custom, and Viola had judged that it would be unsettling and awkward for her sons, and for herself.

They had never known her attention to be divided, and for a short while at least, it must be.

Their younger cousins would be running riot in the grounds even now, terrifying every animal for miles and making a nuisance of themselves in the stables and anywhere else they happened to be.

The adults would be celebrating her marriage and their family reunion in the traditionally noisy, argumentative Constantine manner.

There would be fallings-out and reconciliations.

Drama. Old scores would be settled and new ones brooded over.

Sabrina was calm and so was Laurence; the rest of them were anything but, and enjoyed nothing more than a good argument.

It was not an atmosphere conducive to a honeymoon of any kind, and so Viola had left her mother to act as hostess to the mayhem and decamped with her new husband and a few servants to the Dower House in the grounds.

She’d always thought it would be her home on the distant day that Ned married, and perhaps it still would be – the future was so uncertain.

But it was quiet and private, which was what they needed.

Despite her fine words to her mother that memories of Edward would be everywhere and so it didn’t matter in the least, it had seemed sensible to start their married life together in a place that held no recollections of the late Duke at all, for her or for Ventris, who was after all his cousin.

She had to rack her brains to remember her first husband ever setting foot in the Dower House.

Maybe once, when he had first taken her around the estate, more than twelve years ago?

She’d been so intimidated by all the grandeur he showed her that she couldn’t remember any of those first days very clearly, and didn’t want to.

But this house was small and perfect, a Queen Anne jewel set in a lovely formal garden, and it had always been kept well maintained, as all of Winterflood was.

She had a great fondness for it – it was on a human scale, unlike the big house.

It was very strange to wake with a man in her bed.

Edward had always come to her, stayed a while to do what he had to, and then left, murmuring that he was sure she would sleep better undisturbed.

When she had been in a delicate condition and after the boys were born, he had not visited her at all, so her bed had been cold for many years longer than she had been a widow.

As a young girl just married, though, she’d lain alone in her rumpled sheets after his departure and wondered if it was merely awkwardness that drove him away, or if he so desperately missed the wife he’d loved that he simply could not bear to see her take Elizabeth’s place.

But then, she had not known, because she’d never dared to ask, if her opulent, silk-hung bedchamber in the main house had once been Elizabeth’s, and before that had been Julia’s.

One woman divorced and vanished, presumably abroad; the other dead and greatly missed.

Edward had married Elizabeth around the time of her own birth; either of those women would have been easily old enough to be her own mother.

People on the estate occasionally talked about Duchess Elizabeth, with respect and affection, and God knows Edward had spoken of her constantly, but no one ever dared to mention disgraced Julia.

Julia – there were no portraits of her anywhere, and her name had been so thoroughly crossed out in the family Bible, presumably by Edward, that it could no longer be read.

Viola didn’t even know if she was alive or dead, thirty years after she’d run from Winterflood and Edward with her lover.

It gave her a sense of women’s lives as impermanent and fleeting, leaving little trace, of no significance at all if they didn’t produce heirs, if they otherwise failed to behave as they should, and she didn’t like it.

Her own fate could so easily have been similar; Winterflood could have been Tarquin Armstrong’s, and she’d have been forgotten, or remembered only as another woman who had proved sadly unsatisfactory when it mattered most.

But it did no good to think like that. She’d not wanted to be alone any longer, and she was not.

Here was Ventris in her bed, and he was certainly real enough.

He took up a deal of space – he sprawled, utterly relaxed, at her side.

He was lying face down, his dark head buried in a pillow, and the sheet and coverlets had slipped down to expose his strong arms, the broad expanse of his back, and a tantalising glimpse of his taut buttocks.

She might have helped a little. Pulled the fabric down an inch or two, and then more.

Made a frame for the picture. When he wasn’t awake and annoying her, when she wasn’t confused and uncertain and anticipating hurt – or even when she was – he was undeniably a sight worth looking at.

He was also unnaturally aware of his surroundings, despite the fact that she had thought he was sleeping soundly. He said lazily now, his voice muffled but perfectly audible, ‘I’m a little cold, madam, but if you’re enjoying the view, I don’t want to deprive you of it.’

She sighed loudly. ‘I like you so much better when you’re not talking. But it never lasts.’

He made another of those uncannily swift movements and rolled over onto his back. But he didn’t pull up the sheets, and neither did she. This view now was different, but just as good. Better, even.

‘There was a time when you appreciated me for my enthralling conversation. But we don’t have to talk,’ he said.

‘Thank God for that.’ She’d been lying on her side as she looked at him, and his grey eyes were warmly appreciative as they ran over the full curves of her body once more.

‘I can’t get enough of you,’ he said lazily. ‘Wife.’

‘That’s because you’re determined always to be talking about it instead of doing.’ Again, she was being unjust, attempting deliberately to provoke him.

‘You see, talking is but a poor substitute for kissing, and I can’t do that,’ he said, ‘but very well. Not another word.’ He moved again, this time to roll her unresisting onto her other side and bring his body close to hers, behind her, skin to skin along the full length of their frames, his chest to her back.

It seemed to her that despite his teasing words, he wasn’t cold at all.

They’d woken like this, his arms about her and his aroused member lying snugly between her thighs.

She was pleasantly sore still from last night, another sensation that had been familiar once and now was strange.

It would have been seductively easy to let the early-morning scene develop in the obvious manner, but she’d wriggled away into her own space instead, not liking the idea that he might choose to slip into her when he was half-asleep and she couldn’t be entirely confident he remembered who she was.

Not given his reputation. He might have murmured a name; for that matter, so might she.

She feared she’d have said his, and she had no desire at all to know what he might have whispered in drowsy satiation.

Best not. But he’d seen her now, they’d spoken, so she had not the least objection. On the contrary.

Viola had come to realise, perhaps because this unexpected second marriage had shaken up her ordered, uneventful life of widowhood and made her reflect on what she wanted for herself, that she had previously spent an excessive amount of time making things easy for people.

The boys, of course – that was motherhood, and inevitable.

Nobody wanted a mother who was all over prickles, like a hedgehog – she should know, she had one exactly like that and it had often been an uncomfortable experience.

But often, with her mother and Edward above all others, she had smoothed things over, she had smiled and agreed when perhaps she should not have done.

She had forgiven things that were unforgiveable because she had never wanted life to be difficult and awkward, and almost always avoided confrontation.

She’d resolved not to be like that with Ventris.

She was older now, she’d tasted independence, and she would be bloody-minded if she felt like it.

She anticipated feeling like it quite often.

There was an intoxicating pleasure in not censoring what she thought and said for a change.

But not everything had to be difficult. It wasn’t a goal in itself, or shouldn’t be.

Richard was kissing her neck, lifting her long hair and burying his face in it, and all the while his fingers stroked her breasts again, doing the things he’d learned she liked.

She was taut and heavy in his cupped hands, and his erection was making itself felt to good effect.

She snuggled back against him and let him lie between her lips, against her entrance.

His right hand moved down across her belly, caressing its soft swell, tangling in her curls.

She remembered Sabrina’s saucy comment – she didn’t have to look at him – and chuckled.

‘Since I’m not supposed to be talking, I won’t ask,’ he murmured in her ear, and nipped at her sensitive lobe, then drew it into his mouth and sucked on it.

And then he was inside her, where she needed him to be, and there was no space for rational thought or for any sort of reply.

She lost herself in pure sensation – their bodies moving in harmony, his hands and mouth on her, his ragged breathing, his knowledge – whether from instinct or experience – of how to please her.

He held her hips tight when he spent himself inside her, and she pushed back against him and arched her back and maybe, this time, she cried aloud. But not his name, never that.

Afterwards, he handed her a pillow without speaking, and she repeated the ungainly exercise that supposedly would give her a better chance of conceiving.

She wasn’t quite sure if she was doing it for herself or for him, and perhaps it didn’t matter.

It would not help either of them if they – she would not say or even think she , for that was wrong – failed.

They’d still be tied together, as her mother had warned her.

He was quiet now, for once, and his face was shuttered.

He pulled the covers over her, which was not easy in her current position, and eventually, he said, his voice more serious than she had heard it in the last hectic weeks, ‘I’m probably going to regret raising this, but I think it is time we talked about the past. Our past. We have grown very adept at avoiding it, I as well as you, but we cannot continue forever like this, ignoring everything that lies between us as though none of it had happened.

The happiness, brief as it was, and the enduring pain of it. Everything.’