The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace 4)

Through sore eyes Caroline could see that no one was looking censorious as the manager ushered them through to a small room with a chaise longue and assured them a doctor would be with them directly. Her hoydonish prank had not been observed.

‘No one saw me,’ she said the moment the door was closed.

‘What did you do to your foot?’ Gabriel was stripping off her stocking, ignoring her words.

‘I stubbed my toe on the steps.’

‘It is beginning to bruise. It might be broken.’ He looked up. ‘Your eyes are red.’ It sounded like an accusation.

‘They were watering with the pain. I rubbed them too hard, that is all. Gabriel—’ The knock on the door silenced her.

‘Lady Edenbridge? My lord. I am Dr Foster, I was with one of my patients using the warm baths, so I am most conveniently on hand, am I not? Now, ma’am, what seems to be the trouble?’

‘The trouble seems to be a severely stubbed toe and possibly a broken bone,’ Gabriel said. He set an upright chair by the head of the chaise and took Caroline’s hand in his.

It should have been an affectionate gesture but, glancing up at his set jaw, Caroline wondered if it was simply to prevent her babbling out any more indiscretions. She was glad of it for support when the doctor, keeping up a constant flow of inane chatter presumably intended to soothe her, manipulated the toe, announced that it was not broken and bandaged it.

Gabriel thanked him punctiliously, handed him his card and invited him to send in his account to the London address. He walked out with him and came back with the information that he had a sedan chair for her. ‘Should I carry you to it? There is a throng of interested ladies outside.’

‘Then I see no reason to give them any more opportunity to gawp at you displaying your muscles,’ Caroline snapped. She had no wish to find herself carried, to lie back and revel in the romantic thrill of being carried by her strong husband. Not now, with him so angry at her.

Chapter Nineteen

Gabriel escorted her back to the house on the Steine, striding beside the chair in total silence. He gave her his arm to hobble into the hall and up the stairs and instructed Harriet curtly to look after her mistress.

‘Where are you going, my lord?’ Caroline enquired as he turned to the door.

‘Out.’

‘Harriet, please leave us.’ She waited until the maid had gone, then got up from the chair where Gabriel had deposited her. ‘You are not running away from me until you tell me what you are so angry about. And do not tell me it was because I approached the men’s part of the beach. No one saw me and they would have had a hard time recognising me if they had.’

‘Madam, I do not require your permission to come and go in my own house.’ But he stayed where he was.

Caroline drew in a silent breath of relief for that small mercy at least. ‘You were never a common soldier. You were never a criminal. And if you have a desire for pain along with your sexual pleasure, then you are hiding the fact exceedingly well. Therefore those scars on your back were put there by your father when you were under his control. And that means he was a vicious man who should have been ashamed of himself. It does not explain why you feel you have to hide them from me.’

‘Marriage does not mean I have to confide every detail of my past to my wife.’

‘Detail? You call receiving savage whippings a detail, Gabriel?’

‘I call it the past and I have avoided this because I knew it would end up with you becoming ridiculously over-emotional about it.’

‘I am not over-emotional,’ she snapped.

‘Then what are you crying about?’

‘You, you idiot.’ She threw up her hands in frustration, wising she could pace up and down the room, or thump the man to get some reaction from him. ‘The boy you were, because those scars are not recent. And you now, because it is plain they still hurt as much as they ever did.’

‘My father was subject to uncontrollable rages and the conviction that his word was law. He demanded perfection. That made him demanding and difficult to live with. You can no doubt understand that from your own experience. I did not want to remind you of what you had suffered, that is all.’ As though realising that his very rigidity betrayed his feelings Gabriel moved away from the door with his habitual relaxed prowl. Anyone who did not know him well—anyone who does not love him—would have seen nothing amiss.

‘My father is a deeply selfish man with a number of eccentricities who loses his temper when he is thwarted. He lashed out at me and that was very wrong of him.’ She paused while she got her breathing back under control. ‘But he had never done it before and, although I know he has chastised Lucas and Anthony, just as every schoolboy in the country must have been punished, it was never the kind of systematic whipping that produces scars like those. And you were the eldest. What on earth did he do to your three younger brothers?’ She thought of Ben, big and bluff, George, scholarly and ambitious, and Louis. Earnest, studious Louis.

‘Very little. He rarely found them at fault,’ Gabriel said with his mocking smile. ‘I was the flawed one, the wicked, provoking one.’ When she opened her mouth to protest he said, ‘You wanted to know where I was going? To Edenvale. You may come, too, if you wish, provided I am not subjected to any more maudlin tears about the past.’

‘You can be quite hateful when you choose, Gabriel Stone.’ And it was a deliberate choice to be so, she was certain of that. He wanted to push her away. Or perhaps the word was needed.

‘Are you only just discovering that, my dear?’ He paused at the door, as cool as she was heated. ‘You had best change if you are coming with me, I have hired a curricle.’

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