Читать книгу The Viscount's Runaway Wife - Laura Martin - Страница 15

Chapter Five

‘Blue is certainly your colour,’ the dressmaker’s assistant twittered as she held a swathe of material up to Lucy’s cheek.

‘I’m not sure. I don’t want anything too ostentatious,’ Lucy said.

Out of the corner of his eye Oliver observed the proceedings. Before today he’d never witnessed what happened when a woman wanted to order a new dress. He’d had vague ideas about a quick perusal of material, perhaps picking a style out of a book, and thought that was probably all there was to it. How wrong he’d been.

So far the dressmaker and her assistant had been occupying their drawing room for the past half an hour and they were still discussing colours. It was going to be a long afternoon. Still, he reasoned, at least he’d had the sense to make an appointment for the dressmaker to visit the house rather than finding himself trapped for hours on end in a stuffy shop on Bond Street. He’d done it so they would have less chance of bumping into some gossiping acquaintance, but now he could see the merit of home appointments for so many other reasons.

‘What do you think?’ Lucy asked, breaking into his thoughts.

He blinked a couple of times, surprised to be addressed by his wife. Despite her thawing to him these last couple of days, she still seemed determined to keep her life and his as separate as possible.

‘That colour,’ he said, pointing to an abandoned swathe of silk draped carefully over the arm of a chair.

‘The coral?’

‘It suits you,’ he said with a shrug.

‘It does bring out the honey shades in your hair,’ the dressmaker said.

‘And such a warm colour,’ the assistant added.

Oliver knew nothing about honey shades or the warmth of a colour, he just knew that when Lucy held up the coral silk against her skin something tightened inside of him.

‘I like it,’ she said, giving him a small smile.

Pretending to return to the papers in front of him, Oliver had to suppress the confusion blooming inside him. There was something rather enchanting about his wife; he’d felt it when they’d first married. It had been purely arranged as a marriage of convenience. He’d needed a wife to give him an heir and look after his interests at home while he was off fighting on the Peninsula. The details of Lucy’s home life had always been a little vague, but he was under the impression she was so keen for marriage to get away from an overbearing family. Given the reasons behind the marriage, he’d never expected to actually start feeling affection for his wife alongside the physical attraction that had bloomed immediately.

That affection and attraction were trying to rear their heads once again and this time it was entirely unwelcome. He couldn’t forgive her for how she’d left him, how she’d taken David away from him before he’d even had a chance to look into his son’s face. He didn’t want to desire his wife—he didn’t even want to feel that same affection he’d hoped for in the early days of their marriage. Yet here it was, trying to muscle its way in.

Turning a page to keep up the pretence of working, he regarded his wife for a little longer. As a debutante, Lucy had never been thought of as the diamond of the Season. She’d been out in society for a year before he’d proposed to her with no other suitors, but in his eyes she was beautiful. Slender and lithe from a year of living a simple life, she still had curves in all the places he liked. More than that, though, was how her face lit up when she smiled, how her brow furrowed when she was worried. He loved how expressive her face was, how you could tell so much from a single glance.

‘Off the shoulder, do you think?’ the dressmaker asked.

For a moment Oliver didn’t realise all eyes were turned to him. Carefully he put down his papers and rose, walking over to the three women.

The dressmaker was holding up two sample dresses, one with a tight bodice and low-cut front, the puffy sleeves sitting well off the shoulders. It was a design to draw attention, a dress that exposed a fair amount of skin.

‘I’m not sure...’ Lucy said and Oliver could see the hesitation in her eyes. Although the dress was lovely, and would no doubt make Lucy look beautiful, it wasn’t her style. It was too ostentatious, too scandalous for a woman who was used to wearing a brown woollen sack.

‘The other one,’ he said.

The second design was still tight in the bodice area, but not so low cut, leaving more to the imagination.

‘Good choice, sir.’

As the dressmaker and her assistant stepped away to find their tape measures, Oliver stayed positioned just in front of Lucy. He wanted to reach out, to run a finger over her cheek, feel the softness of her skin, the moistness of her lips. They had barely touched since their reunion, just gloved hand on jacket as he offered her his arm, and already Oliver was yearning for more.

‘Time to take your measurements,’ the dressmaker said, bustling in between him and his wife.

Reluctantly Oliver moved away. He knew this was his cue to depart and leave the women alone to do the more personal aspect of the fitting, but for a moment he lingered, watching his wife hold out her arms obediently as the tape measure was looped around her back. All the time he’d searched for her he’d told himself it was to find out what had happened to their son and to get his wife back for social occasions and the running of his household. Never had he allowed himself to believe there might be a deeper reason for desiring their reunion.

* * *

‘Parker,’ Oliver called, waiting as his young butler promptly turned and faced him. Despite it being four years since Oliver had been his superior officer in the army, the young man still almost saluted. Oliver saw his arm twitch at his side as he struggled to suppress the movement.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Meet me in the dining room.’

The butler grinned, nodding swiftly and hurrying off to prepare the room.

Oliver followed behind. With Lucy still being pushed and prodded by the dressmaker, he was feeling restless and the only solution was to use up some energy.

As Oliver reached the dining room, he saw Parker had recruited two footmen and between them they were moving the dining table and chairs to one side. A couple of the more expensive pieces of furniture had been moved out of the way and an antique vase placed on a high shelf.

Within minutes the centre of the room was clear of any obstacles, a long, wide space big enough for the coming physical workout.

Oliver stretched, pulling each arm to one side, and then opened the large display cabinet at one end of the room. He removed two fencing foils, long and sleek, giving them both an experimental swish.

Parker, the butler, shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, revealing a few more scars on his forearms to match the vertical slash down one cheek.

‘I hope you’ve been practising, Parker,’ Oliver said as he handed the foil to the butler.

‘Never fear, sir, one of these days you’ll beat me.’

The younger man was always respectful and deferential in his work as butler, but there was a subtle shift when the jackets came off and foils came out. It was as though they were back in the training camp, still superior officer and soldier, but a comradeship flourished that was peculiar to the army.

‘I’ll go easy on you, Parker,’ Oliver said, getting into position.

They fought, foil clashing against foil with satisfying clinks, moving backwards and forward with lunges and parries. As they clashed Oliver felt some of the tension that had been building inside him the last few days dissipate as it always did with physical combat.

They were fairly evenly matched, with points being traded backwards and forwards as the minutes ticked by. Oliver didn’t really care who won. For him it was more about the thrill of the fight, the wonderful way he felt liberated as his body lunged and defended.

‘What on earth...?’ a small voice said from the doorway as the foils clashed.

Oliver spun around to see Lucy’s shocked face in the doorway.

‘Forgive us,’ he said with a bow. ‘Just a little light exercise.’

‘Shall I put the room right, sir?’ Parker asked, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Lucy murmured, backing away, but Oliver had already tossed his foil to the butler and was following Lucy from the room.

He caught up with her on the stairs.

‘That’s a very peculiar use of the dining room,’ she said. He could tell she was itching to ask for an explanation, but held back from fear of getting overly involved or invested in his life.

‘Sometimes I find I need to work out a little energy,’ Oliver said, offering her his arm.

‘And your butler can fence?’

‘He can fight,’ Oliver corrected. ‘He was my sergeant for a while on the Peninsula.’

‘And now he’s your butler.’

‘And now he’s my butler.’

Lucy looked at him with curiosity and he wondered if she might ask more. He knew she was interested in people, but so far she had kept her enquiries into his life to a minimum, as if asking about it risked pulling her deeper into it.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘Giving him a job. I know many soldiers struggle to find employment after returning from the war.’

It was an awful thing to see when walking the streets of London. Former soldiers who had once fought bravely for their country, abandoned by the very people they’d served. Many of the returning soldiers found their families had moved on and their jobs filled, leaving them without a true place in the world. It was a hundred times worse for those who had been injured, losing an arm or a leg or an eye, unable to find even the most menial of jobs to provide them with food and shelter, and having to resort to begging on the street.

‘He’s a good man—loyal. I never have to worry about my silverware disappearing with Parker running the household.’

Parker was a good man, one of the best, but with his facial scars he would have been turned away by any of the grand households who wanted their footmen and butlers to be aesthetically pleasing, sometimes even more than they wanted them to be efficient at their jobs.

When it became clear she wasn’t going to ask any more he turned the subject back to her dress fitting.

‘Will the dress be ready in time for the ball in two days?’

‘Mrs Farrar assures me it will be ready even if she has to stay up all night.’

‘Good. I don’t want anything to upset our plans.’ He saw her stiffen at the idea of the ball but couldn’t stop himself from adding, ‘It is very important we reintroduce you to society as my wife.’

‘We wouldn’t want the gossips speculating about whom you might have holed up in here,’ Lucy murmured.

‘This isn’t a joke, Lucy.’

‘I know. It’s my life.’

‘Our life. As husband and wife.’

‘But my freedom.’

‘Freedom?’ he asked, letting out a cold laugh. ‘I thought you’d grown up in the year we were apart, Lucy. No one is free, we all have responsibilities, all have to do things we don’t want to.’

‘You get to choose how your life ends up,’ Lucy said, turning to face him, lifting her chin so she was looking him straight in the eye. ‘And how mine does.’

‘There you are wrong. No matter what I feel, we’re still married—I’m just as trapped by that as you.’

Her eyes searched his face, as if trying to work out his true feelings.

‘You have the power to at least apply for a divorce—only men can do that. You have the power to set me free from this marriage, let me go back to my old life.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Lucy. We’re married and married couples live together and they socialise together. I’m not asking you to chop off a limb or scale a mountain. All I want is for you to fulfil your part of our wedding vows.’

They stared at each other in silence for over a minute before Lucy turned on her heel and stalked away. Oliver waited until he was alone in his study before he sagged. That exchange had not gone as he’d hoped. Every time he clashed with Lucy he wished it ended differently, but she was so distant, so difficult to engage and he could feel the simmering anger beneath his own words. How could she treat him like this when it had been she who’d run away? She who had taken their son? She didn’t have the right to remain aloof and angry. Admittedly she’d built a life for herself in the year they’d been separated, but that was none of his concern. He wanted her back here as his wife and if he could, he’d wipe out all trace of the world she’d been living in, but realistically he knew that wasn’t an option.

He wondered if she would ever thaw, if she would ever look at him with anything more than distant coolness. Surprisingly he wanted that, even though he doubted he could ever return the feelings. Perhaps they were destined to live their lives as many married couples did, putting on a front for society events and then barely speaking at home. It was what he’d imagined, when he’d first found her, but every so often he wondered if that would be enough or if one day, when his vexation had burnt itself out, whether he would want more than a cold and unfeeling marriage.