Page 46 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Dear God. At this juncture, he still wanted to be closer to her.

What was the distance between obsession and love? And how near was he to that disastrous tipping point? Would he wake up tomorrow, look into her eyes, and simply accept his fate?

No.

Why not? asked an insensate part of him. She adores you. The real you.

She does not know the real me, you moron.

A man who wanted nothing had the world at his feet. A man who yearned for something—anything—was doomed to disappointment and heartache.

And he’d had more than enough disappointment and heartache for a lifetime.

He pressed his knuckles into his forehead. He wanted her much too much, but it was not the end of the world. Not yet, in any case. Given time and distance, sexual ardor would cool, both on his part and hers.

Until then, he would stay away from her.

Chapter 10

Louisa was vaguely aware of the thunderstorm that took place at some point in the night. She pulled the bedcover tighter around her person and let the percussion of the rain lull her into a deeper sleep.

She woke up to a sunlit morning. A few seconds of disorientation followed as she stared first at the unfamiliar canopy, and then around to the unfamiliar everything.

It was the morning after her wedding. And she had been most suitably ravished, if she did say so herself. She covered her mouth and giggled.

The man had such a nefarious influence on her. First he turned her into a nymphomaniac—that was the scientific term for a sexually insatiable young lady, wasn’t it?—now he turned her into a giggler.

She had never been a giggler. She had always been the girl who looked to the consequences, the one who minded the budget and gave admonishments when Cecilia or Julia overspent their allowance. The boring one—according to Cecilia, at least—like the middle Bennet sister, except without the mediocre piano playing and the constant sermonizing.

She imagined saying to Cecilia, At least I am really good in bed, and giggled anew.

She stopped only when Betsey, her new maid, entered with a cup of hot cocoa on a tray. Then the two of them giggled together at the sight of all the clothes strewn about the room. Then yet again when she had to put on her dressing robe under the covers, so that she didn’t emerge from her bed stark naked.

As she lowered herself into a hot bath, the place between her legs stung rather potently for a moment. But then she was quite all right.

Ready for more.

She was going to need two of him, she thought to herself, which, of course, led to even more giggling.

When she was properly coiffed and gowned, a footman respectfully showed her the way to the breakfast room. She envisioned her husband looking up over the top of his newspaper with a slight leer on his face. She would, of course, leer right back at him. And provided there was privacy, she would tell him her new theory that he would perhaps prove not quite man enough for her.

He was not there in the breakfast room.

The scoundrel. She would bet that it was intentional. It would be just like the man who’d waited an entire hour to come to her last night to tease her with his absence the next day.

But since this was her first day at Huntington, there was much to occupy her. She spent her morning doing her best to stop her jaw from dropping repeatedly: The estate was beyond anything she had known in scope. There were fifty indoor servants, forty gardeners, thirty men in the stables, and a gamekeeper’s staff that took care of the pheasant population—which was somewhere in the vicinity of forty-five hundred, she was told.

It was a good thing she did not have to lead this army of servants directly, her only experience with staff being regularly pleading with Sally, the Cantwell cookmaid, to not abandon them, and taking on some of Sally’s chores—behind Mrs. Cantwell’s back, of course—to lighten the maid’s load, since they couldn’t afford to pay her more.

Here the much more detailed taxonomy of duties and positions gave rise to a pyramid of authorities. Situated at its very top, Louisa needed only to consult the housekeeper, Mrs. Pratt, the butler, Sturgess, and the chef, Monsieur Boulanger, all of whom seemed frightfully competent in their respective domains.

A tour of the domestic offices dazzled her; the belowstairs operation of a great country estate was a thing of military efficiency. The kitchen in itself was bigger than the house she had lived in with her mother and sisters. The laundry department consisted of a washhouse, a drying room, a mangling room, an ironing room, a folding room, and a laundry maids’ room arranged in a smart sequence so that dirty clothes went in at one end and clean clothes came out at the other. Louisa blushed, realizing that her love-soiled sheets were about to make quite a public trip through the facilities.

Mrs. Pratt, after briskly showing off her storeroom, china closet, and stillroom, took Louisa to see the rest of the great mansion. Louisa had been forewarned that Huntington was open to the public, but still it was rather startling to see tourists craning their necks round and round to take in all the architectural details and fine furnishings of the immaculately kept state apartments, whose ornately draped beds had once received crowned heads. The room she had spent the night in, however, was shielded from curious eyes, being situated in the private family wing.

The long gallery was empty of tourists when she came to it. As she viewed the portraits of her husband’s ancestors, she remembered what he’d said to her the evening before, that sometimes the master of Huntington did look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The thirteen Marquesses of Wrenworth who had preceded him—and a number of viscounts before the family was elevated to a marquessate—were indeed a plain bunch.