Married to a Stranger (Danger and Desire 3)

Callum’s parting kiss was lingering too, so much so that Sophia was in a considerable flutter by the time he left for Leadenhall Street. She tried to concentrate on sketching some of the flowers he had brought her, but she found she was drifting into happy daydreams. Was he coming to care for her? Might he, one day, come to love her?

*

Cal found he was in no danger of becoming so absorbed in his work that he did not leave in time. In fact, he was hard put to concentrate and kept drifting off into thoughts of Sophia.

He had a nagging suspicion that he had always placed rather too high a value on controlling his feelings, controlling everything around him, in the past. He was overdue an emotional storm, he supposed, and falling for Sophia had hit him so hard that he had no idea how to deal with it. How do you tell your wife you love her? Propose to a woman and if she turns you down, you can walk away and lick your wounds, get over it in privacy. Reveal your innermost vulnerability in marriage and then find she does not share your feelings—that would be hell.

He had entered this marriage confident that he could provide for his wife, his future family, and give them position and security. And he had suffered no doubts that he could make Sophia happy in bed. But he had not given a thought to love and now he knew that all his confidence, all his certainties, were nothing in the face of this emotion. He wanted the one thing he knew he could not demand: her love.

The ride home through the crowded streets gave him something else to think about, but when he walked into the house, looked in the drawing room and found his flowers all over the room and her drawings with them, he was shaken and disarmed all over again.

Charmed, he tucked a sprig of something he could not identify into his buttonhole and subsided on to the sofa to study the drawings.

‘Mr Chatterton has arrived, ma’am,’ Hawksley said. ‘Shall I send tea to the drawing room?’

With a murmured word of thanks Sophia ran downstairs. Callum looked up from the sheaf of flower drawings in his hand and smiled and her pulse stuttered. ‘These are very good,’ he said. ‘Very accomplished. You have made art, not simply a good representation of nature.’

‘I—thank you.’

‘Your work should be displayed,’ Callum said, his eyes still on the images. ‘Printed.’

‘Thank you,’ she said again, feeling slightly dizzy. Callum thought her work should be printed? She had been trying to summon up the courage to tell him what she had done and it seemed he would have approved in any case. But what he would not approve, she feared, was that she had done it without discussing it first. Admitting to that was going to take courage and the right moment, and just now, with the intimacy they seemed to be achieving so new and so fragile, she could not risk shattering it. Not yet.

Hawksley brought in the tea tray and she began to pour. ‘Tell me who to expect to meet at Mrs Hickson’s party,’ she said. ‘I am so looking forward to it.’

Three hours later Sophia recalled those words and winced. Mrs Hickson, it appeared, did not approve of Callum’s marriage to ‘some country nobody without even youth to commend her.’ Neither did her friends.

Sophia slid deeper into the cover of a display of potted palms and listened as one of Mrs Hickson’s cronies passed on this judgment to another matron.

‘It was deeply regrettable that young men so close to the earldom should have gone into trade in the first place,’ Mrs Dunbar opined.

‘Quite, although the East India Company is somewhat different—it has great influence and he will doubtless emerge a very rich man.’

‘The earl is betrothed, most suitably, to Lady Julia Gray, so there is probably no risk that the inheritance might go in that direction, my dear Lady Piercebridge. That is one mercy.’

‘Oh, quite. Not that I have anything against Callum Chatterton myself. And he does not mix with cits. The house is perfectly au fait.’

‘Such a pity your hopes that he would attach himself to your Daphne did not succeed. So very suitable for him; this gangling nobody can only pull him down.’

‘And I can see no excuse for it. He cannot even plead the momentary insanity of a love match, I believe. Georgia Hickson said he seems to have done it out of a sense of duty because she was betrothed to poor dear Daniel.’

Sophia got out of the other side of the palms, the jabs from their sharp fronds a perfect counterpoint to the unpleasant pecks from the sharp beaks of the gossips.

They thought she would pull Callum down, that she was unsuitable as the match for the heir presumptive to an earldom. Did he share those thoughts? Had he put them to one side because of his duty to Daniel’s betrothed?

‘There you are. I thought you had run off to flirt with one of my handsome young cousins.’

Sophia looked up to find Callum smiling down at her. No, he was not that good an actor, surely? If he had thought like that about her at first, she was certain he no longer did. ‘Are there any?’ she asked. ‘If there are gentlemen as handsome as my husband here I must have missed them.’

‘Now you are flirting,’ he said and his smile warmed and held promises of all kinds of things that almost banished the sting of what she had just overheard.

Almost. ‘Only with my husband.’

‘I would like to lurk here all evening to do just that, but duty calls. Can you bear some more introductions? Great-Uncle Sylvester has just arrived. He’s as mad as a trunk full of Barbary apes, but he’s an entertaining old devil.’

‘Yes, of course. An eccentric great-uncle sounds delightful.’

And so Sylvester proved to be. And she liked the younger set she was introduced to and perhaps, if she had not overheard Mesdames Dunbar and Piercebridge she w