Margaret clearly claimed no such infirmity. Already flushed and smiling, she fairly sparkled when Viscount Luttrell bowed elegantly before her.
The Thornwood drawing room looked like a different room from the one with which she was long familiar, Christina thought over the next hour as she watched the dancing and conversed with those who did not participate. She had always thought it a gloomy, oppressive room, too large for family gatherings, though they had dutifully sat in it every afternoon and evening of her married life rather than in a smaller, cozier salon. Now it looked bright and cheerful and almost too small for the impromptu dance with which they were amusing themselves.
The tea tray arrived far too early for the liking of the young people, who protested that it could not possibly be almost time for bed yet. The earl assured them that they were welcome to stay up all night if they wished and if they could persuade his aunt to continue playing that long. But Lady Gaynor reminded her daughters, and in the process everyone else, that there were still three days to go before Christmas, not to mention the days of Christmas itself. They must not recklessly use up all their energies on the very first evening.
“Oh, yes,” Susan Gaynor agreed, though with obvious reluctance. “And I look positivelyhaggedif I do not have a good night’s sleep.”
“I do not believe you could look hagged,” her partner, Mr. Radway, said gallantly, “if you tried from now until doomsday, Miss Susan.”
But Lady Hannah had been summoned from the pianoforte to drink her tea, and it was generally agreed that it had been a long, busy day and that it was time to retire for the night.
“Perhaps tomorrow evening,” Christina said as she bade everyone good night, “we will have dancing again.”
But her own day was not yet quite at an end, she discovered as she was about to leave the drawing room, the last of the ladies to do so. The earl had moved close to her and laid a hand on her arm.
“I will have a word with you in the library before you retire, my lady,” he said quietly in her ear. “There is a fire in there and candles burning. Wait for me there, please. I will not be long.”
There was nothing in his voice to indicate the purpose of such a meeting. It was very likely that some plans needed to be discussed for the morrow. But her stomach muscles knotted and she felt breathless. Suddenly and quite unreasonably she was terrified. It had not been a request, after all. It had been a command.
“Very well, my lord,” she replied coolly.
Several of the gentlemen settled in the drawing room for a last drink and some male conversation before bed. Fifteen minutes passed before the earl could decently leave them and go to the library. He half expected when he arrived there that Christina would be gone. But she was not. She was standing close to the fire, facing the door. She took a few steps toward him when he entered the room and closed the door behind him.
She looked quite stunningly beautiful in that emerald green gown, was his first foolish thought. His next was even more foolish. If things had been different, he might have been coming to her now in her boudoir, ten years of marriage behind them. That slender, shapely body and the very essence of her might have been as familiar to him now as his own person. He repressed the wayward thoughts and strode across the room until he was within arm’s length of her.
“No cards at Thornwood,”he said softly, quoting her.“There will be no gambling beneath my roof.”
He raised his right arm to gesture to the chair behind her, intending to instruct her to be seated. But both her hands shot up, palms out, to shield her face, which she turned sharply to one side. He froze, his arm still upraised. She lowered her own arms slowly and looked warily at him.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said.
He continued to stare at her for several moments. “My God, Christina,” he said at last, “did you believe I meant you violence?”
She merely stared back at him and shook her head almost imperceptibly.
He had been feeling angry for most of the evening— angry at what she had said, angry that she would not dance, though he had not asked her himself, angry that her shimmering satin gown and the elegant figure inside it had made it impossible for him to concentrate his attention on anyone else, angry that she had sat talking with the older guests just as if she were a staid dowager and not a young and lovely woman. And angry that she had sat out the first set with Luttrell, clearly eating up his flatteries and giving as good as she had got—as if she were anything but a staid dowager. She had looked smiling and young and carefree—as she had never looked for him, except when they had waltzed. He had come to the library with a biting speech to deliver. But it seemed to have disintegrated in his mind. Did she thinkthatbadly of him that she feared he might strike her? How dared she!
“Sit down,” he told her curtly. “Would you like to ring for more tea?”
“No,” she said, seating herself with her usual uncompromising straight-backed posture. “No, thank you, my lord.”
He sat opposite her instead of remaining on his feet, looming over her, as he had intended.
“Gilbert would not allow card playing?” he asked her.
“Gambling” she said. “He would not allow gambling. Neither would I.” Her chin lifted a notch.
“Or dancing,” he said quietly, “or any sort of socializing during which guests might have been in danger of enjoying themselves. And he was a nip-farthing. Life here must have been intolerably dull.”
“I daresay you would have found it so,” she said, looking at him with the hard expression she seemed to reserve for him.
“And you did not?” He frowned. “You were happy with such a life? Have you changed so much, then, Christina, from the girl I remember whose eyes and whole aspect always glowed with an eagerness to taste life to the full?”
“No,” my lord,” she said, “I have not changed except to have grown older, wiser, more mature. I still value what I have always valued—safety, security, dependability.”
He gazed at her, unable again to see the girl in the cold, beautiful, disciplined face of the woman. “And those things,” he said, “I was unable to give you? Because added to them there would have been a sense of adventure? I was not wealthy, heaven knows, but I could have supported you.”
“I believe we have already agreed, my lord,” she said, the scorn back in her face, “that we both had a fortunate escape when I married Gilbert.”
