Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

“Well,” she said, partly dismayed, partly amused.

And, as if she had spoken the magic word, the door swung open. She swept inside and Constantine shut the door behind her. She turned to face him and could see that he was dangling a large key from one finger.

“Tyrant!” she said.

“Minx!”

They both laughed, and she closed the distance between them, threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him hard. His arms came about her waist like vises, and he kissed her back—harder.

Her toes were barely brushing the floor when they were finished. Or finished with the preliminaries, anyway.

“You made a tactical error,” she said. “If you wished to take a firm stand with me, you ought not to have opened the door.”

“And if you had wanted to take a firm stand with me,” he said, “you would not have got out of the carriage to creep up the steps and try the door handle.”

“I did not creep,” she protested. “I swept.”

“It still showed how desperate you were to get at me,” he said.

“And why exactly,” she asked, “were you skulking behind the door, the key at the ready? Because you did not want me to get at you? And why did you open the door?”

“I took pity on you,” he said.

“Ha!”

And even her toes left the floor as they kissed again.

“I have some questions to ask you,” she said when she could. “I tried writing them all down, but I could not find a sheet of paper long enough.”

“Hmm,” he said, setting her feet on the floor. “Ask away, then, Duchess.”

His dark eyes had turned slightly wary.

“Not yet,” she said. “They will wait until after.”

“After?” He raised his eyebrows.

“After you have made love to me,” she said. “After I have made love to you. After we have made love to each other.”

“Three times?” he said. “What am I going to look like tomorrow, Duchess? I need my rest.”

“You will look far more rugged and appealing without it,” she said.

He set the key down on the hall table and offered his hand. She set hers in it, and his fingers closed about her own as he led her in the direction of the staircase.

And oh, dear, she thought, she was still feeling happy. She ought to be glad about that. She had looked forward to this spring affair with such eager anticipation all through the winter. And physically speaking, it was more than living up to her expectations.

Why was she not glad, then? Because of the bickering and the teasing and the laughter? Because she had the strange, uneasy feeling that they had somehow crossed a barrier today from being simply lovers to being entangled in some sort of relationship?

Because she was feeling happy?

Could she not be happy and glad about it?

But she would think later, she decided as she stepped inside his dimly lit bedchamber and he closed the door behind them.

Sometimes there were far better things to do than thinking.

THEY MADE LOVE with fierce energy the first time, with slow languor the second—if it was possible to be languorous while making love. Either way they were both exhausted by the time they were finished.

Hannah curled onto her side, facing away from him, and he curled around her from behind and slid one arm beneath her head while he wrapped the other about her. She snuggled back against him and raised his hand so that she could rest her cheek against the back of it.

And she slept.

Constantine did not. An uneasy conscience was the perfect recipe for insomnia.

Were other people like him, he wondered. Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regular intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone’s life filled with a confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other—good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

As a boy he had hated Jon, his youngest brother—the very person he loved most in the world. He had hated Jon because he was sunny-natured and warmhearted and guileless despite the difficulties of his life, because he was overweight and ungainly and had facial features that made him look more Asian than English, and because he had a brain that worked slowly—and because he was going to die young. Constantine had hated him because he could not put things right for him—and because Jon had what Con had never wanted anyway. The heirdom.

How could he hate so fiercely and love with such deep agony all at the same time? He had left home as soon as he was old enough and sowed some pretty wild oats, most of them with Elliott. Constantine had not cared about the way life had treated him or about the people he had left behind. Why should he? But he had known that Jon pined for him, and he had hated him more than ever and had gone back home because he loved him more than life itself and knew he would not have him for long.

Was everyone’s life such a mass of contradictions? Surely not. There would be no sanity left in the world.

When their father died and Jon became Earl of Merton at the age of thirteen, Constantine had effectively run the estate and his other affairs for him even though their father, in his questionable wisdom, had appointed his brother-in-law, Elliott’s father, as Jon’s guardian. And then he had died two years later and Elliott had inherited the guardianship. And so Elliott, Constantine’s best friend, had become his prime adversary. For he had chosen to take his position seriously and had muscled in where his father had been content to let Con take charge.

And the great enmity had begun—the bitter estrangement that had lasted ever since. For Elliott had refused simply to trust his cousin to run the estate efficiently and to do what was best for Jon. He had intruded, and it had not taken him long to discover that a fortune in jewels was missing, though none of them was technically part of the entail. And he had jumped to all the obvious conclusions, and the accusations had flown.

Constantine had invited him to go to hell.

He had not simply explained, taken Elliott into his confidence. Oh, no, that would have been far too easy. Besides, Elliott had not simply asked, invited his closest friend to explain. He had known, or thought he knew. And he had called Con a thief, the worst kind of thief, one who would steal from his mentally handicapped brother who loved him dearly and trusted him implicitly and knew no better.

And, truth be told, Constantine had resented Elliott even before the discovery and accusation, for his cousin, newly elevated to the title of Viscount Lyngate by the death of his father, was a cruel reminder that Con had not become Earl of Merton on the death of his father, though they were both eldest sons.

However it was, he had told Elliott to go to hell.

Unlike the other times during their youth when they had quarreled, they had not been able simply to put up their fists and fight it out before grinning at each other and admitting that that had been fun—even as they mopped at bloody noses and pressed fingers gingerly to swelling eyes.

It had not been that sort of quarrel. It had not been fixable.

Instead of turning to fisticuffs, Constantine had set out to make Elliott’s life hell—whenever he came to Warren Hall, anyway. And he came often. Constantine had used Jon to play games with Elliott, games that had annoyed and frustrated and even humiliated him, games Jon had thought enormous fun, games that had widened the rift between the cousins. Sometimes, for example, Constantine would have Jon hide when Elliott came, and precious time would have to be spent hunting for him. Con would usually stand by, watching, one shoulder resting against a doorframe, smiling with contempt.

Quarrels always brought out the worst in people. In him, anyway.

Even now he could not feel as sorry as perhaps he ought for the childishness of his behavior. For Elliott, who had known him all his life, had actually believed—and still did—that he was capable of robbing his own brother because Jon was easily exploited. It had hurt, that sudden loss of trust. It still would if he had not converted pain into hatred.

But he was in many ways as bad as Elliott. He did not even try to deny that fact now as he held Hannah’s warm, relaxed body against his and stared at the wall on the far side of his bed. Instead of sitting down with him and discussing the guardianship, as two men—two friends—in their twenties ought to have been able to do, he had been cold and distant and sarcastic, even before the jewels had been missed. And Elliott had been cold and distant and autocratic.

It had been pretty childish, really. On both their parts. Perhaps they would have got over it if it had not been for the infernal jewels. But they were indisputably missing, so he and Elliott never had got over it.

They were equally to blame.

Which fact did not make Constantine hate Elliott the less.

He buried his nose in Hannah’s hair. It was soft and warm and fragrant—just as she was. He thought of kissing her awake to distract his mind, but she was sleeping peacefully.

He had upset her last night. She had still been upset earlier today.

And he had upset the totally innocent Miss Leavensworth.

Just as he had upset Vanessa soon after she married Elliott.