The Sherbrooke Bride (Sherbrooke Brides 1)

“A butler giving the orders,” Melissande said. “I wouldn’t stand for it were I mistress here. It is beyond strange.”

“Yes,” Alexandra said as she passed by her sister. She said over her shoulder, very quietly, “He wants you, of course, you’re quite right about that. He probably will always want you.”

Melissande smiled. “I told Tony the earl wouldn’t forgive him. I told him, yet he chose to disbelieve me. I have found that men do not always accept the truth even when it is presented to them with sincerity and candor. They always believe they can rearrange things to suit themselves.” Melissande paused a moment, then marred her lovely forehead with a deep frown. “I begin to think now that perhaps I made a mistake. Tony isn’t the man I married. He wants to order me about, to treat me like a possession. He even told me he wasn’t the gentleman Douglas was. He actually wanted to take liberties with my person in a carriage, Alex, in broad daylight, and not an hour from Claybourn Hall! Can you believe that? I couldn’t allow such a monstrous sort of man-behavior. Perhaps Douglas isn’t so indelicate, so uncaring, about a lady’s sensibilities. Yes, I probably made a mistake. Why, do you know that he threatened to—” Melissande closed her mouth over further illuminations.

Alex stared in dismay at her sister. Melissande was now regretting marrying Tony? But how could that be? Tony certainly teased her, mocking her, but Melissande appeared to find this to her liking. Oh Lord. There were already too many untold ingredients in the pot. “Then why did you attack Douglas?”

“Because you had attacked Tony,” Melissande said matter-of-factly. “It seemed the thing to do. Before Tony went downstairs to speak again with Douglas, he hugged me and told me next he would send me a dragon to slay. It pleased him that I acted the hoyden, that I yelled and nearly pulled out Douglas’s hair. It is all very strange. He is quite unaccountable. Men are quite unaccountable.”

Alexandra could only stare at her sister. “Tony will make things right with Douglas. The two of them are very close. Hollis said so.”

Melissande shrugged. “I think Tony should suffer for what he did.”

“But you did it right along with him!”

“Tony is a man; it is his responsibility.”

“That’s drivel,” Alexandra said, and left her sister at the top of the stairs, peeking over the railing. She walked quickly down the long eastern corridor whose walls were lined with portraits of past Sherbrookes, many of whose faces and costumes sorely needed restoration. She went into the adjoining bedchamber and stood in the middle of the room, shivering. The bed was much smaller and shorter than the one in the master bedchamber. Alexandra supposed that since she was small and short, it didn’t matter.

She remembered when Hollis had shown her through the master suite and she’d stood there and just stared at that huge bed, realizing for the first time that husbands and wives sometimes slept together if they wished to have children, that this was the bed where a child would be conceived. She didn’t understand the process, but the thought of not wearing her clothing in front of a man made her brain clog and close down. Hollis, bless his astute soul, had said calmly, “I believe it wise to allow some time for His Lordship to accustom himself. You must be recognized as a wife, my lady, before you can be recognized as the Sherbrooke bride.”

It was just that this room was so very cold and empty, much more empty than before Douglas had come home.

She snuffed out the candle and climbed into the bed, shivering violently between the cold sheets. She wondered if she would remain in this room for the rest of her years. For the moment, she had lost a goodly portion of her optimism about this marriage. Was Melissande right? Would Douglas ignore her or treat her badly?

She wasn’t even a marriage of convenience, for Douglas Sherbrooke had paid dearly for her. Actually, he had paid dearly for Melissande and he had gotten her instead. And she hadn’t brought him anything at all.

Tony had spent hours telling her about Douglas, reassuring her, reeling off anecdotes at a fine rate. She knew all his questions to her were to judge whether or not she was worthy of his esteemed cousin. At least she’d passed Tony’s tests. He wanted her for a cousin-in-law, he said, and when she said she was already a sister-in-law, he’d gotten that gleam in his eyes that Melissande seemed to adore, and said, “Ah, then I shall have you so deep in my family that you’ll never escape.” Again and again he’d said Douglas didn’t love Melissande, that she was merely a quite beautiful convenience for him, that he didn’t know her at all, and would have been horrified to have found himself married to her, then hastened to add that he, Tony, most certainly did know her, but it didn’t matter because he was him and not Douglas. All quite confusing, really.

So Douglas Sherbrooke didn’t love Melissande. Ha! So now he was wedded to an unbeautiful convenience and he didn’t love her either.

Alexandra burrowed deeper into the sheets, seeing her husband bursting into the bedchamber. She hadn’t seen him for three long years. During the past two days she’d wondered if he’d changed, grown fat, perhaps, or lost his hair or his teeth, and then he’d appeared and she’d only been able to stand there gaping at him, utterly witless. He looked older, she’d thought, staring at him, a hard-faced man with dark hair and eyes even darker and a high-bridged nose that made him look utterly superior, utterly arrogant. As if to ruin the image of centuries of noblesse oblige, nature had added a cleft in the middle of his chin. Ah, but he was beautiful, this man who was now her husband, his body as lean and hard as his expression was severe, the most exquisite man she’d ever imagined.

Oddly enough though, Alexandra hadn’t realized she loved him completely and utterly, with every ounce of feeling within her, until he’d thrown his head back, yowled like a madman, and flung himself at his cousin.

He was the man she wanted. Her natural optimism surfaced a bit. It will be all right, she repeated to herself yet again. She was still awake many hours later when she heard him moving about in the bedchamber next to hers.

And what, she wondered, would happen on the morrow?

CHAPTER

7

“WHAT THE HELL are you doing here?”

It was seven o’clock in the morning, surely too early an hour for him to be here, in this precise spot, in the vast Sherbrooke stable. It was foggy, damp, and cloudy—all in all a dismal morning, a morning to match her mood and his too, evidently. The light was dim inside the stable and none of the half-dozen stable lads were about. The smells were comforting—hay, linseed, leather, and horse. Douglas was wearing buckskins, a dark brown coat, and Hessians that sorely needed polish. He looked tired, unshaved, tousled, and vastly irritated. To an objective person he would perhaps appear an ill-tempered dirty-looking brute. To her jaundiced eye, however, he looked immensely wonderful.

“I was going to ride, my lord.”

“Oh? Perhaps my vision has become suddenly deficient for I don’t believe I’ve seen any unknown horses in my stables. Where is this horse you were going to ride? I assume it is a horse. Even though I am apparently the ass in this drama, you cannot ride me.”

Alex was silent a moment, then said calmly enough, “Mr. McCallum has given me Fanny to ride since I’ve been here.”

“Fanny belongs to my sister.”

“I know. She is a spirited mare with a sweet mouth and nice manners. I know how to ride, my lord, truly. You don’t have to worry that I cannot handle her properly. Or would you prefer that I ride another horse?”

He was frowning ferociously at her. “So you brought no horse of your own?”