Something Wonderful (Sequels 2)

The quote from Ingersoll caught Jordan entirely off guard, reminding him poignantly of the enchanting, curly-haired girl who could quote from Buddha or John the Baptist, depending upon the occasion. Unfortunately, it only made him angrier now, because she was no longer that girl. Instead, she had become a scheming little opportunist. If she truly wanted to marry Tony because she loved him, she would have said so by now, he knew. Since she hadn't, she obviously wanted to remain the Duchess of Hawthorne.

And therein lay her problem, Jordan thought cynically: She could not convincingly throw herself into his arms and weep for joy when he had just witnessed her near-marriage to another man, but neither could she risk letting him walk out of this house without taking the first of many predictable steps toward reconciliation—not if she wanted to continue moving in Society with the full prestige and honor of her rank. To maintain that, the ton would need to see that she was in the good graces of the current duke.

She had become ambitious in the last fifteen months, he realized with blazing contempt. And beautiful. Arrestingly so at close range, with her glossy mahogany hair spilling over her shoulders and back in masses of waves and curls, contrasting vividly with her glowing alabaster skin, brilliant aqua eyes, and soft, rosy lips. In comparison with the pale blondes he remembered, who were usually the Acclaimed Beauties, Alexandra was incredibly more alluring.

He stared hard at her, convinced she was a scheming opportunist, yet despite all the evidence, he could not find a trace of guile in those flashing eyes of hers or her angry, upturned face. Furious with his inner reluctance to see her for what she had become, he turned on his heel and walked toward the door.

Alexandra watched him leave, buffeted by a myriad of conflicting emotions, including fury, relief, and alarm. He paused in the doorway and she tensed automatically.

"I will move in here tomorrow. In the meantime, let me leave you with some instructions: You are not to accompany Tony anywhere!"

His tone promised terrible consequences should she choose to ignore his order, and although she couldn't imagine what form those reprisals might take, or why she should want to walk out and face a furor of gossip, Alexandra was momentarily quelled by the threat in his voice. "You will, in fact, not leave this house. Have I made myself perfectly clear?"

With a magnificent gesture of unconcern that completely belied her alarm, she shrugged lightly and said, "I speak three languages fluently, your grace. One of them is English."

"Are you patronizing me?" he asked in a silken, threatening voice.

Alexandra's courage warred with common sense, but neither of them won. Afraid to advance and unwilling to retreat, she tried to hold her ground by daring to say in the tone of an adult addressing a cranky, unreasonable child: "I have no wish to discuss that or anything else with you when you are in such an unreasonable mood."

"Alexandra," he said in an awful voice, "if you're wondering how far you can push me, you've just reached your limit. In my present 'unreasonable mood,' nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to close this door and spend the next ten minutes making certain you can't sit down for a week. Do you take my meaning?"

The threat of being spanked like a child stripped away Alexandra's hard-won confidence and made her feel as gauche and helpless as she had a year ago in his presence. She put her chin up and said nothing, but bright flags of humiliated color stained her cheeks, and tears of frustration stung her eyes.

He stared at her in silence and then, satisfied that she was adequately chastened, Jordan defied all the rules of courtesy and walked off without so much as a nod to her.

Two years ago, she had been ignorant of the rules of etiquette to which polite ladies and gentlemen always conformed; she had not realized then that Jordan was insulting her when he never bothered to bow to her, or to kiss her hand, or treat her solicitously. For that matter, he had never deigned to permit her to call him by his given name. Now, as she stood alone in the middle of the drawing room, she was acutely, furiously aware of all those bygone slights, as well as the new ones he had heaped upon her today.

She waited until she heard the front door close, and then she walked woodenly out of the salon and up the stairs to her room. Anguish and disbelief poured through her as she dismissed her maid and mindlessly stripped off her wedding gown. He was back! And he was worse than she remembered, worse than she'd imagined—more arrogant, more dictatorial, completely heartless. And she was married to him. Married! her heart screamed.

This morning, everything had seemed so simple and predictable. She had arisen and dressed to be married; she had gone to the church. Now, three hours later, she was married to the wrong man.

Fiercely struggling against her tears, she sat down on the settee and wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to block out the images, but it was no use. They paraded across her mind, tormenting her with vivid scenes of the mindlessly infatuated, besotted girl she had been… She saw herself looking up at Jordan in the garden at Rosemeade. "I think you are as beautiful as Michelangelo's David!" she had blurted. "I love you." And when he had made love to her, she had nearly swooned in his arms, and babbled to him about how strong and wise and nauseatingly wonderful he was!

"Dear God," Alex moaned aloud as another forgotten memory pranced across her mind: she had actually told Jordan—London's most infamous libertine—that he obviously wasn't well-acquainted with many women. No wonder he had grinned!

Hot tears of humiliation dripped from her eyes, but she brushed them angrily aside, refusing to cry one more time for that—that monster. She had already wept buckets of tears over him, she thought furiously.

Tony's words of a few weeks ago came back to hack at her lacerated emotions: "Jordan married you because he pitied you, but he had neither the DESIRE nor the INTENT to live with you as his wife. He intended to pack you off to Devon when you returned from your wedding trip, and then he meant to continue where he left off with his mistress… He was with his mistress AFTER you were married to him… He told her your marriage was one of INconvenience…"

There was a soft knock at the door, but Alexandra was so immersed in misery she didn't hear anything until Melanie had walked into the bedchamber and closed the door. "Alex?"

Startled, Alexandra turned her head and looked round. Melanie took one look at her friend's anguished, tear-streaked face, and rushed to her side.

"Dear God!" Melanie whispered in horror, kneeling in front of Alexandra and pulling out her handkerchief, almost babbling in her agitated alarm. "Why are you crying? Has he done something to you? Did he rage at you or—or strike you?"