Page 22 of Secrets of the Heart

“Who—Oh!” Michael’s face darkened. “I’d bloody well like to meet the scoundrel—frightening you like that.”

Rachel’s eyes widened with surprise. For an instant there had been something in Michael’s eyes that she had never seen there. She wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“I am sure we will not, though,” he went on in something more like his usual calm tone. “He got some money from you, and I imagine that satisfied him. No doubt nothing will happen, but—you know me—I like to be prepared.”

“Yes, I know.” Rachel was well aware that Michael did not like uncertainty or slipshod preparations. Everything he did was done with a meticulous neatness and careful foresight. In many ways he was the opposite of her brother Dev, who tended to act impulsively and emotionally. Or, really, she supposed, it was more that he was the opposite of his father, who had been, by all accounts, a man given over almost completely to his physical appetites.

Even when Michael acted in a way that seemed impulsive, such as coming to Darkwater to escort her the rest of the way to London, or last Christmas, when he had made his way across the snowbound countryside to Castle Cleybourne when she had not made it home, it was not emotion that drove him. Even at those times, he was calm and possessed, thinking clearly and logically. He was simply responding to correct a plan that had somehow gone awry—usually, she admitted wryly, because someone less competent, such as herself, was the person carrying out the plan. He would swoop in and take charge because he considered it his duty.

The journey from Darkwater to London was the longer leg of her trip, and it took them two days to accomplish it. Rachel had made the journey many times, but it went more easily and quickly when Michael was with her. A learned man, he could talk with ease on many topics, and he usually had a ready answer for any question she might ask. He had a lovely voice, she thought, rich and deep, and she enjoyed listening to him.

She wondered what it would have been like if she had not made the mistake of eloping with Anthony. Would they have made this journey together many times? Would he have wanted to be with her, to talk and laugh with her, or to sit in companionable silence rather than to be with her out of sense of duty?

If it had all happened differently, she thought, she would have known him in the intimate way that most wives knew their husbands. Even when they did not like the man or spend much time with him, wives knew their husbands at an elemental level at which Rachel knew she would never know Michael. There would be an ease and comfort between them, a familiarity, rather than the faintly stiff way they sat together now. They might even have been able to communicate with one another by just a glance or a word, as Dev and Miranda did.

She could not quite imagine what it would be like to know a man in that way, to have a man know her. From listening to other married women talk, she had a fair idea of what the basics of the marital act involved; the idea of it no longer shocked her as it had when her mother had first broached the subject before she married Michael. Indeed, there were times when she found herself trying to imagine how it would feel, wondering—well, yes, she might as well admit it to herself, wanting to find out—if she would enjoy it, as many women she knew seemed to.

She recalled one day when she had rounded a corner and accidentally come upon Richard and Jessica locked in a passionate embrace. They had been lost to the world, their lips pressed against each other, their arms wrapped around each other so tightly that it seemed as if they would scarcely be able to breathe. Rachel had stopped, gaping at them, wide eyed, for an astonished moment. Then, the heat of embarrassment sweeping up into her face, she had managed to unstick her feet and turned to move swiftly and silently away. The image had been difficult for her to forget, however.

Rachel wondered now, looking across the carriage at Michael, how it would feel to be crushed in his arms that way, to have his mouth devouring hers. She had been in such turmoil when he had kissed her that once, before their marriage, that she could remember little of the details of the kiss, or the panic that had seized her. If he were to kiss her that way now, how would it feel? She blushed a little, just thinking about it, and quickly turned to look out the window of the carriage. Still, it was a subject that kept returning to her mind again and again during the course of their trip. She thought about it as they rocked along in the carriage, and she thought about it when Michael sometimes rode on his horse outside the carriage and she looked out at him. There was something, she realized, that stirred in her as she watched him astride his mount. He was an excellent horseman, and there was something so physical and commanding about him as he rode that she felt…Well, she was not sure what it was she felt, but it was at once odd and intriguing. It was not the wild leap of love she had felt in her chest whenever she had seen Anthony when she was young and madly in love with him. It was something warmer and lower in her body, not at all giddy, but almost an ache.

And at night, when she lay in her bed in the inn where they had stopped to spend the night, she would think about Michael lying in his bed in the room next to hers. And she would wonder what it would be like to lie beside him in the bed, to sleep with the heat of his body cuddled behind hers. She thought about going to his door and rapping softly. Would he open it to her? Would he take her in his arms?

Rachel told herself it was foolish to even think this way. Michael did not love her or want her. The marriage they had was what he had chosen. If he had wanted anything else, he could easily have said so over the years…or even hinted at it, or made the slightest gesture toward taking her to his bed. But he had not.

She was not sure why she was thinking such things. She normally was not what she would have called a licentious person. She did not even comment on certain men’s attributes, as some women of her acquaintance were apt to—in a veiled and hushed way, of course. Frankly, she usually did not even notice the men or the topics under discussion until someone else pointed them out.

She supposed it was because she had been thinking so much lately about having a child. She wanted a baby to hold and cuddle, to lavish her love and affection on, to feed and rock to sleep, even to comfort when it cried and ease its pain. She yearned to hold its warm little body close to her heart. It seemed the worst of ironies that she, who had so much love to give, should have no one to whom she could give it. Because she had the desire for a child so much on her mind, she must have slipped into thinking about the act that would bring a child into existence.

That thought made her feel a little better, less prurient. It was the desire for a baby that drove her, not just some base animal instinct. She wondered what Michael would say, how he would react if she went to him and explained how much she longed for a child. Would he tell her that he, too, wanted one and take her to his bed? Surely, she thought, he would not be so cruel as to spurn her, to turn her away, saying that he did not need an heir that badly.

She thought more than once of doing so, both during the ride or after they reached London. But she could never quite bring herself to face even the embarrassment of asking him to make love to her, let alone the even more humiliating prospect that he might turn her down.

Rachel had thought that Michael would stay a week or two in London with her; it would be fun, she thought, to have her husband as an escort instead of going with her friend Lady Sylvia Montgomery or with Michael’s friend Peregrine Overhill, who often acted as her escort. But to her dismay, Michael told her the day they arrived that he would be heading back to Westhampton the following day.

“Tomorrow!” Rachel protested. “So soon? But you haven’t had a chance to rest. Surely you could stay in London a day or two. Go to your club, see some of your friends, like Perry, or—or what about that man at the museum who you get along with so well? And we should call on Araminta.”

Michael made a face and said in a teasing voice. “You just want to have company to call on my sister.”

“Well, it does make it easier when there are two to share her disapproval,” Rachel admitted.

Michael’s older sister, Araminta, was a woman of stern habits and equally stern demeanor, and she had never approved of Rachel as a wife for Michael. She had warned her brother not to marry into the Aincourt family, considering them too profligate in their spending and for generations too wild and flighty in their characters, despite Rachel’s father’s bent toward religion. When Michael had returned to the family estate in the north after a year of marriage, Araminta had considered it a vindication of her warning. She had actually once told Rachel that it was clear Michael had regretted his choice of her as a wife.

“I am sorry, my dear,” Michael said. “But I really cannot afford to spend any more time away from the farm. I am starting a new experiment with legumes this year, and Jenks cannot be counted on to keep the standards scientific. They will be planting before long, and I must be there to oversee it.”

Michael felt a pang of regret at the disappointment on Rachel’s face. He would very much have liked to stay with her, to squire her to parties and dance with her until the small hours of the morning. It was, as always, a combination of heaven and hell to be around Rachel all the time—to enjoy the pleasure of looking at her, listening to her, simply being close to her, yet at the same time to suffer through the longing that being with her always invoked in him, to ache for her, knowing that he could not have her, that any move on his part to kiss her or touch her would break the friendly companionship between them. He usually stayed with her until the pain of it grew too great, until the desire in him reached the point where he thought that he must have her or die, and then he would tear himself away from her.

This time, however, he could not afford that luxury. Escorting Rachel safely had not been his only reason for coming to London. He must see his Bow Street ally, Cooper, to make sure he had hired a man to take up a watch on Rachel to keep her safe, and to pick Cooper’s brain on the matter of this enemy who thought he knew more than he did. In order to make sure that Rachel was not in danger, he needed to solve this difficult case quickly. It would entail not only talking to Cooper and his friend Sir Robert, but also making use of his disguises to work his way into the underbelly of London and find out what he could among the thieves, prostitutes and other criminals who made their home there. He could scarcely adopt those disguises here, around Rachel, nor could he be chasing down clues if he was spending his time taking her to parties and plays and such.

So the next morning he bade Rachel farewell, raising her hand to his lips for a formal kiss, then turned and quickly walked away. Outside, a groom waited with his horse. He mounted, not turning back to look at the house and therefore not seeing Rachel standing at the window in the front drawing room, watching him. Giving a nod to the groom, he rode off down the street. Two blocks down, out of sight of the house, he turned and headed for a different section of London and the house of another woman.

Rachel wandered back upstairs to her sitting room after Michael left, feeling at loose ends and faintly sad. She knew that she ought to visit Michael’s sister Araminta. Etiquette required it, since she had just returned to Town after a long absence and Araminta was Michael’s closest kin. By the same token, she ought to visit her own mother, who was happily enjoying life in London, free from the isolation of Darkwater as well as the constraints of a lack of money. Neither one of the women, she suspected, really cared whether they saw Rachel, but they would doubtless be affronted at the slight if she did not come by.

But she frankly did not feel like going to see them. Instead she sank down on a reclining sofa and gave herself over to the same thoughts that had been plaguing her for the past few days. It seemed peculiar to her that Michael had had to leave for home so quickly. Was he that anxious to get away from her? There had been something about his face yesterday when he was explaining why he had to go so quickly, something—Well, perhaps not exactly uneasy, but not precisely comfortable, either. It reminded her a little of the way he had looked when she had questioned him about the man who had stopped her carriage. She told herself that it was absurd to think that Michael was not telling her the truth. Michael was the epitome of honesty.

She stood up, disliking herself for sitting there thinking such thoughts. She would go to visit her friend Sylvia, she thought, and her spirits immediately brightened. Lady Sylvia Montgomery was one of the glittering lights of London Society. Short and plumply voluptuous, she was possessed of a silvery, infectious laugh and an entertaining, neverending supply of gossip. She was adored by her husband, Sir Ian, twenty years older than she and constantly amazed at his good fortune in landing such a wife. And she was exactly the sort of friend who could pull anyone out of despondency.

Rachel rang for her maid. An hour later, dressed in a fetching sea-green dress and matching pelisse, she set off for Lady Montgomery’s house.