Freddy frowned. “I do know from Duncan, who has it from the Duke of Whitley, that Searle must have suffered a great deal when he was imprisoned. Perhaps that is the reason for his lordship’s flux of moods.”
Leonora had told herself as much. “How do you propose I express my interest to his lordship? Is not that task relegated to him? I had thought…if he wished…that is to say, I believed he would kiss me if he wished it.”
“Your marriage was abrupt,” her friend pointed out, frowning. “Perhaps Searle wishes to give you time to acclimate yourself to the notion of having a husband.”
“Perhaps.” But she was unconvinced. His aloofness had been concerning. At times, he seemed alight with intensity, as when his hands had been upon her. But he seemed equally capable of icing over, becoming detached.
He was a fortress she could not breach.
Impenetrable.
“What troubles you, dear heart?” Freddy asked then, clearly sensing Leonora’s internal struggles.
“I fear I have made a great mistake,” she admitted, suppressing a sob of despair. “I had hoped he would… I do not know—soften toward me. But each day, he has been polite yet removed, not even attempting to kiss me or to do anything more. It is almost as if he has given up on me already.”
Freddy’s lips thinned into a fine line of irritation. “First, you deserve nothing less than a husband who acknowledges you are the center of his day, the very driving force. Second, I saw the manner in which Searle touched you the evening he compromised you. I saw his expression. It was not the countenance of a man who is not helplessly, hopelessly attracted to you. Rather, it was the opposite.”
Of course, Freddy would think so. She had always been her champion.
“I do not know what to do,” she admitted, a new sense of helplessness, mingling with despair, darkening her mood like a stain blotting an ivory skirt. “I want children, Freddy. I want our children to take their first steps together.”
Her friend’s expression turned determined. “Then the answer is simple, my dear. He is your husband, for fair or foul, and nothing shall change that now. If you want a babe of your own—and I know how much your heart aches for it—you must seduce your husband. I am afraid you have no other choice.”
*
“Bloody hell,” Morgangrowled, scowling down at the muck he had made of his ledgers.
Concentration was proving more difficult than ever before. Initially, upon his return from the Continent and war, he had been unable to perform the smallest tasks without suffering from a crippling anxiety. He had hidden within the safe, familiar confines of Linley House, plotting his revenge against Rayne. He had slept in the bed of his youth because it had felt like where he belonged. Moving to the marquess’s apartments had required time and adjustments and ample amounts of spirits, but he had managed.
The problem, however, was not his time at war or his days of imprisonment, nor was it his presence at Linley House, nor his usurping of the marquisate from his brother George—who would have been a far better man for the task than Morgan could ever hope to be. No, indeed. The problem, this time, lay elsewhere.
His wife.
The Marchioness of Searle was rotting his brain. That was what she was doing, and there was no other, more precise means of describing the perplexing trap in which he now found himself. The mere thought of her name was enough to make him burn. Four syllables, just as many vowels, and how it could encompass such flowering beauty in its mere utterance, he would never know.
Leonora.
Leonora of the flaxen hair, flashing blue eyes, delectable pink lips, prick-hardening curves, and the endless chorus ofno. For one whole sennight—seven days, and he had counted them more than once because they seemed more like an eternity—his new wife had kept him at bay. She had yet to even allow him a kiss since he had left her on their wedding day, a departure which had been not just for his sake but hers as well.
Her bearing was eternally rigid, her expression whenever he was in her presence akin to a woman facing a phalanx of enemy soldiers about to pillage and plunder her home. As a result, he had spent most of his waking hours out of her presence. He returned in the evenings, hoping she might be awake, only to find her chamber enshrouded in darkness each time, echoing the silence of her refusal to allow him into her bed.
Though he was using her for his vengeance, he had no wish to take her by force. Therefore, he had bided his time. At first, he had been content to allow her to remain aloof. He feared he no longer had the skills of seduction within him, and he little knew how to be gentle in lovemaking after spending the last few years mired within savagery and battles to the death.
Part of him had been afraid he would hurt her, that the raging lust coursing through him whenever he saw her would somehow tear her apart. He had never bedded a virgin before, and it had been a long time since he had fucked anything other than his hand. The trulls following the army were not the game of chance he preferred to play, as he wanted to remain free of the pox.
And so, it had been years since he had made love to a woman. Since he had touched soft, silken skin, since he had kissed his way up the inside of a well-curved thigh. It had been so long, he groaned now, just thinking about Leonora, about her flesh smelling of sweet sunshine and spring flowers, of how warm and pliant her skin had been. He thought about wrapping his fist in the glorious cloud of her golden hair, holding her head still for the onslaught of his kiss.
It would have to happen soon, and not just because he hungered for her the same way he desired his next breath, his next meal, his next drink of water. Which he most assuredly did. But because his time was waning. He had a plan to set into motion, and that plan could not move forward until he had Leonora in his bed.
He expected the Earl of Rayne to reappear on England’s shores, like the pestilence he was, any day now. That meant Morgan’s time to consummate his marriage and set in place the makings of his ultimate revenge were long overdue. He needed to make Leonora his in every way.
He dipped his pen in the ink well, drawing off the excess from the tip before crossing out the mathematical errors he had made. He wondered if he was the problem, if his mind was the problem, and not just his distraction. All along, he had been the second son, the spare heir his father and mother had created before never speaking to each other without an intermediary again, duty to the title duly completed.
His father and George had both perished in the time Morgan had been away at war, his mother long before the both of them. Which meant, freshly returned from battle and imprisonment, he was the second son who had never imagined he would one day take up the reins of the Marquess of Searle, scrambling to find his footing on a deuced slippery slope. And now, though he wished he could be concerned with his estates as he ought, what he wanted more than anything was the Earl of Rayne facing him on the field of honor.
The victory would be hollow, and he already knew it. But the victory would be his, perhaps one manner in which he could reclaim what had been taken from him.
A light tap at the door disrupted his troubled musings, and he returned his pen to the ink well. “Enter.”
