‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ he asked, her hand so close to his lips that the breath warmed her knuckles.
‘Yes. No—I do not know! Callum, I wanted you to want to flirt with me. But I should not have asked. Now I do not know whether you want it or if you are simply obliging me.’
‘I am always ready to oblige you,’ he said with a catch in his voice that might have been a rueful chuckle. ‘I rather think I have forgotten how, though.’
‘I doubt it.’ It was her turn to be rueful now.
‘No, I mean it.’ In the silence she could not see his face, but their interlinked fingers gave her some hope that he would not close himself off from her again. ‘At the risk of shocking you, Sophia, I could make love to you, bed you, very easily. That is instinct and technique. But I seem to have lost the ability to make love lightly, to tease. To flirt, if you want to call it that.’
‘You appeared to be making a good job of it just now,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ Callum said drily. ‘The truth is, I want to be married to you. I want you in my bed, I want you in my home. I want—I need—this state of limbo to be over. I do not want to be flirting with my betrothed.’
She could understand that; she felt much the same way, she supposed. Get this over with and they could settle down to their new life with the uncertainties out of the way. The undercurrent of bitterness in his voice warned her to be careful. She dare not say the wrong thing.
‘Callum—’ The carriage swayed as it rounded the corner into the lane and jerked violently as one wheel hit the pothole that had grown steadily deeper all winter. Callum caught her hard against him and then sat her safely back on the seat. ‘Callum, do you really have a headache? You look as though you have not been sleeping.’ She stroked her fingertip beneath his eye and he flinched. ‘Sorry.’
‘I have a headache. I have suffered with them since the wreck, but I am getting them under control now. You need not fear you are marrying a man
who will turn invalid on you.’
‘I do not fear that,’ Sophia said quietly. ‘And you should not feel having headaches is a weakness, they will go with time.’ He said nothing about his lack of sleep and she did not want to probe too deeply. He was doubtless very busy, that was all.
By the time the carriage stopped in front of the Langleys’ garden gate Sophia had her glove safely secured and her voice calm. ‘Thank you, Callum,’ she said as he helped her down and opened the gate. ‘No, please do not trouble yourself,’ she added as he would have walked her up the path to the door. ‘I am safe enough now. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight,’ Cal said and watched his affianced bride disappear through her front door without a backward glance. ‘That went well,’ he snarled under his breath as he got back into the carriage and stuffed his cold hands into his pockets. Damn this country, was he never going to get warm?
He had not invented the pain that had built inexorably in his head during dinner to the point where his eyes had lost focus. The migraine headaches had attacked him relentlessly in the first few months after the shipwreck, but he had thought they had almost run their course. Perhaps they would not while the nightmares disturbed his sleep with such regularity.
The evening air on the terrace had been cool enough to revive him a little and the sight of Sophia vanishing into the gazebo with Donald Masterton had cleared his sight, even as it had fuelled his temper.
The pleasure of fighting Masterton was visceral, dark, elemental. It made him realise how therapeutic violent and uncivilised behaviour might be. He wanted to pound Masterton into a pulp and he wanted to drag Sophia into the nearest bedchamber and possess her to the point of mutual exhaustion.
Which was impossible. He could not behave like that to her. But he did not want the mild kisses that were acceptable for a betrothed couple, the sort of kiss they had exchanged in the carriage just now. He needed mindless passion, to lose himself utterly in a woman. Any woman, provided she was an abstraction and not a person he had to feel for, to love. It was too dangerous to love. The ladybirds he entertained provided sexual release, but you could not treat a wife in that way.
Sophia was confused and he did not blame her. It would be easier, surely, when they were wed? He would care for her, protect her. It was strangely comforting to imagine domesticity, a wife at home when he returned, a hostess at his table.
He would look after her materially, better than Dan could have done. He would, he hoped, get her with child soon and provide for his family too. He would try, very hard, not to hurt her, although he was not too certain how successful he would be in that. He suspected she wanted affection and he would do his best—she was easy to like. Despite her denials she might even expect to be loved, though she did not love him. But that was impossible because to love you had to lay open your soul and your mind for the other person and he did not think he could, not again. He had not even had to think about loving his twin. If either of them had been asked about their feelings they would have been embarrassed, very British and repressed about admitting such an emotion. How they felt had not depended on words, it had simply been the natural state of being.
But a woman needed the words. And Sophia deserved the truth, not hollow, comfortable lies.
Two days after being kissed by Donald Masterton in the gazebo Sophia sat next to her husband in the post chaise and tried to think about almost anything other than the fact she was now, irretrievably, married. That morning’s service had been very quiet, very private. After an early luncheon they had set out for London and her new home. She had never felt so alone.
‘This is positively luxurious. I have never travelled by post chaise before,’ she said with determined brightness.
‘It doesn’t make you queasy, then?’ Callum must have noticed that she was clutching tight to the leather loop that hung beside her. Better that he should think she found the action uneasy than that she was gripping it tight out of nerves.
‘Not unless I stare at one fixed spot,’ she said as the chaise swung round a tight bend. It threw her against his shoulder and he put out a hand to steady her, withdrawing it the moment she was upright again. ‘Thank you.’ Alone again.
Another mile passed in silence, then Callum said, ‘You do not have to wear half-mourning, you know. I had no idea you would feel you must wear grey to your own wedding.’
‘Not wear mourning?’ She had thought he would expect it, insist upon it. ‘I cannot leave it off; people would be shocked, they would think I did not care about Daniel.’
‘When of course you do,’ he said flatly. ‘And you can leave it off. It won’t bring Daniel back, it’s depressing and it doesn’t—’ He broke off, the sentence unfinished.
‘Suit me? No, it does not,’ she agreed, perfectly aware that black and greys and mauve made her skin sallow and washed the colour out of her eyes. Callum noticed, of course. At that first traumatic meeting in March, when he had broken the news to her, he could hardly have been in any fit state to notice whether she wore sackcloth or full court dress. Since he had come back she had been wearing half-mourning whenever he had seen her.
Perhaps he thought that leaving it off would make a significant difference to her looks. If that was the case, then her husband was due a disappointment. She had catalogued her appearance in all honesty, that night when she had received Daniel’s letter; she was not plain, but neither was she a beauty. Perhaps she could try for interesting, but she doubted it.