Page 50 of Contracted as His Countess

Madelyn had bathed, changed into a magnificent heavy silk robe and was looking composed and happy as she sat across the small table from him, toying with a plate of sweetmeats.

They had spoken very little during the meal. Footmen had come in and out, Wystan had hovered, carafe in hand. They had smiled, exchanged commonplaces about the food; Madelyn had firmly rejected a second glass of wine, but under the table their feet met and touched. Madelyn had eased off her shoes, he realised as a bare foot teased down his calf.

‘Stop it, you wicked woman,’ he murmured, leaning forward. ‘Thank you, that will be all,’ he added to Wystan. ‘We will ring when we want you to clear.’

The door closed silently, leaving them alone. ‘You, my lady, should retire to your chamber and sleep now.’

Madelyn looked at him, blushed, then dropped her gaze. ‘We do not make love again tonight?’

‘Tonight you are tired and you will be sore and I want you to rest,’ Jack told her, very conscious that every instinct was telling him to be selfish, to take her back to bed and revel in her all night long.

‘This is not my bedchamber?’

‘No, it is mine. Yours is through there. As I remember it, it is a much more intimate room with a view of the gardens and a larger dressing room.’

‘It was your mother’s?’ She was playing with the end of her braid, twisting the hair around her fingers as though conscious that this was likely to be a sensitive subject for him.

‘No, my grandparents were still living here when she died and this was their suite.’ He glanced around the room they were in. ‘This would have been my father’s after they moved permanently to London.’

‘Is that difficult for you?’ she asked, reaching across the table to touch his hand.

Jack tried to think of the last time that anyone had touched him like that, reached out to give comfort.

I am here with you now, that touch seemed to say. You are not alone any longer.

He told himself that Madelyn was feeling sentimental after their lovemaking, that he should not start feeling the same way about their relationship, but he turned his hand over so that he could curl his fingers into hers.

‘No, I thought that it might be, but there is nothing of him here. He probably spent his nights in the beds of other men’s wives or drunk on the sofa.’ And they had laid any ghosts to rest in that bed just now.

She nodded, her eyelids drooping, and he got up to ring for her maid. The feeling of those long, cool fingers in his seemed to linger.

‘You are half-asleep already. Come, let me show you your chamber and Harper can put you to bed.’ He paused as he opened the door between the two rooms. ‘I am glad you chose me, Madelyn. Do you think you can come to feel the same way?’

‘I already do,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to brush her lips over his.

Jack closed the door before the temptation to follow her into the room proved too great.

* * *

‘Tell me what you are thinking about to make you smile,’ Jack asked three days later as they picked their way through the remains of the formal garden towards the motte of the old castle. The house had been built in what had been the outer bailey of the castle where all the old walls had long since crumbled away. The inner bailey with its jagged sections of battlemented wall had become the gardens and the motte stood alone at its far end.

‘It would make you blush,’ Madelyn said demurely and laughed when his hand closed tightly around hers and he swung her round to face him. ‘I was thinking about last night. And the night before. Oh, and this morning, of course.’

‘Stop it,’ Jack growled. ‘or I’ll pick you up and go straight back to the bedchamber.’ But he kissed her instead and after a moment they began to walk again, Mist, her little Italian greyhound, cavorting at their heels.

I have fallen in love with him, Madelyn thought as she had, with a sense of wonder, ever since the day before when Mist had arrived, scrambling down from Jenny the maid’s lap in an ecstasy of happy wriggling and almost choking on the soft little barks she so rarely produced.

She had watched Jack running his hands over the little dog, checking that she had not suffered from the journey, talking softly to her to reassure Mist, who was inclined to be protective of her mistress and wary of large, strange men. Jack was gentle and empathetic with animals, just as he was with her, she realised. This could not be easy for him, coming to this house where he had been unhappy as a child, dealing with the memories, learning to live with a new wife who had not been his choice.

She loved him now and, perhaps, he was coming to be fond of her, she thought. His lovemaking told her he was rather more than fond, but she cautioned herself against setting too much store by that. Men, she understood, wanted physical relations on a far more basic level than women and set less emotional value on the experience. But even so...

‘Can you make a garden here?’ Jack asked, pulling her out of her thoughts. ‘It is bigger and less sheltered than your plot at Beaupierre.’

‘Yes.’ Madelyn looked around. ‘It will be very different. And a mod

ern garden, I think.’ She stopped to look at the motte. ‘This castle is much older. Did it ever have a keep on top of the mound?’

‘A wooden one, we think. There are no remnants of stonework. Do you want to climb to the top?’

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