Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

“When I was nineteen,” she said, “I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep—or not deep—that love would have gone. All things happen for a purpose—or so the duke taught me, and I believe him. Perhaps discovering Colin and Dawn together was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Strange, that. She had never consciously thought it before. What if she had not discovered the truth until too late? What would her life be like now? And what if Colin had never loved Dawn? Would she still love him now? Would she be content with her life with him? There was no way of knowing. But she no longer felt the pain of losing him, she realized. She probably had not for a long time. Only the pain of betrayal and rejection. That had lingered.

“Even without the example of Barbara, though,” she said, “I would know that real love exists. I mean that real, once-in-a-lifetime, soul-deep love that happens to a few people but never to most. The duke knew it and told me about it.”

“Dunbarton flaunted a former love before you?” he asked. “If it was former.”

“He was a year into his mourning when I met and married him,” she said. “The worst should have been over and perhaps was. But he never stopped grieving. Never for a moment. It was a love that had endured for more than fifty years, and it was a love that defined his entire life. It enabled him to love me.”

He folded his arms and gazed steadily at her for a while.

“And yet,” he said, “he never married her. And he kept her such a secret that no whisper of her existence ever seems to have reached the ears of the ton.”

“He was the duke’s secretary,” she said, “and remained so all his adult life. And so they were able to be together and live together without anyone remarking upon the fact. They must have been very discreet, though. Even the servants seemed not to know the truth, or else they were so loyal to the duke that they never spoke of what they knew beyond his household. They were loyal. They still are.”

“Dunbarton told you of such things?” he asked her.

“Before we married,” she said, “when he was making clear to me that he had no ulterior motive in marrying me but to take me away and teach me to be a duchess and a proud, independent beauty in the short time remaining to him. He had not been able to take his eyes off me during the wedding, he told me, not because he felt lasciviously toward me but because I looked so like an angel that I surely could not possibly be human. But angels ought not to have their hearts broken by plodding yokels—his words. I was shocked to the roots of my being by his story. I did not even know such a thing existed as what he described. But I believed in his kindness. Perhaps I was foolish—undoubtedly I was. But sometimes it is a good thing to be foolish. He talked freely about the love of his life during our years together. I think it soothed him to be able to do so at last, after so many years of secrecy and silence. And he promised me that one day I would find such a love for myself—though not with someone of my own sex.”

“And you believed him?” he asked.

“I believed in the possibility of it,” she said, “even if not the probability. All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart. But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. He promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?”

She smiled. What a very strange conversation to be having with her lover. She got to her feet and walked around the table.

“But in the meantime,” she said, “I am not waiting around for something that may never happen to me. Taking you as a lover is something I wanted to happen—no, something I decided would happen as soon as my year of mourning was at an end. And for this spring what you have to offer is quite sufficient.”

“You decided even before you returned to London,” he asked her, raising his eyebrows, “that I was to be the one?”

“I did,” she said. “Are you not flattered?”

She undid the sash of his dressing gown, opened it back, and climbed onto the large leather chair with him, straddling him as she did so and bending her head to kiss his lips.

“And so Dunbarton taught you, did he,” he asked, pushing the dressing gown off her shoulders and down her arms, and tossing it to the floor, “always to get what you want?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I have got you.”

She looked directly into his eyes and smiled dazzlingly.

“A puppet on a string,” he said.

“No.” She shook her head. “You had to want it too. And you do. Tell me you do.”

“I cannot just show you?” he asked, and there was a smile lurking in his eyes again.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Vulnerable, Duchess?” He almost whispered against her mouth, causing her to shiver. “I want it. Badly. I want you. Badly.”

And he undid the buttons at his waist, opened back the flap of his pantaloons, grasped her by the hips to lift her above him, and brought her down hard onto him.

Hannah had always found their encounters on his bed almost unbearably pleasurable. This time the almost was missing. She knelt on the chair, her legs on either side of his body, and she rode him as vigorously and heedlessly as he rode her, feeling him hard and deep inside her, hearing the wetness of their coupling, seeing his harsh, dark-complexioned face, as his head rested against the back of the chair, his eyes closed, his hair disheveled.

And when the pain had reached almost to its limit and he should have held her firm and put a stop to it with his own release, it did not end but hurtled onward until it became all the way unbearable—and then fell away suddenly and instantly into such total glory that there were no words even if she had been searching for them.

Only a wordless cry.

And a shivering, shuddering descent against his body and a shoulder to cradle the side of her head and an irresistible urge to sleep.

He held her close until she had almost completed the descent, and then he disengaged from her and lifted her in his arms, somehow managed to wrap his dressing gown about her like a blanket, and carried her through to his bedchamber.

He kissed her before setting her down.

“Tell me it was as good for you as I think it was,” he said.

“You need compliments?” she asked him sleepily. “It was good. Oh, Constantine, it was good.”

He chuckled.

She curled up on the bed and was already well on her way back to sleep before he joined her there and covered them both with the blankets.

Jewels, she thought just before she fell over the barrier into sleep.

The crown jewels she had joked about his stealing for Barbara.

Her own jewels, sold for funds with which to finance the dearest wish of her heart.

His half-stolen jewel converted to cash with which he had gambled and won Ainsley Park.

Whose jewel had it been? Jonathan’s?

To have been sold for what? For the home for unmarried mothers and their children that had been Jonathan’s idea?

Had Jonathan and Constantine between them been up to the same thing as she had? Not just with the one jewel, but perhaps with more?

Was there that degree of similarity between her and Constantine?

All things happen for a purpose, the duke had told her, and she had come to believe for herself.

There are no coincidences, he had also said more than once. She had never quite believed that.

Love would find her one day when she was not looking, he had told her.

She did not expect it. She was afraid to expect it.

But her mind could not cope with so many apparent non sequiturs tumbling about in it.

She slept just as Constantine’s arms came about her and drew her close.

HANNAH WAS FULLY AWARE that the ton had long ago come to the conclusion that the Duchess of Dunbarton’s newest lover was Mr. Constantine Huxtable. They would have thought it even if it were not true, as they had thought it of the many men, mostly her friends or the duke’s, who had gone before him. She was aware too that it was expected she would tire of him within a week or two and cast him off in favor of someone else.

Her reputation did not bother her. Indeed, she had almost deliberately cultivated it during the years of her marriage. It was part of the cocoon inside which she hid and nurtured her real self.

She did not believe that on the whole the ton was actively hostile to her, even the ladies. She was invited everywhere, and her own invitations were almost always accepted. She was taken into any conversational group to which she chose to attach herself at the various entertainments she attended.

It was with some surprise, then, that she greeted the refusal of her invitation to join her brief house party at Copeland Manor first by the Earl and Countess of Merton, then by Lord and Lady Montford, and last by the Earl and Countess of Sheringford. The only members of that family who did not refuse were the Duke and Duchess of Moreland, and that perhaps had something to do with the fact that they had not been invited.

Never believe in a coincidence, the duke had always said. Hannah would have had to be an imbecile to believe this was a coincidence.

Constantine had confessed to a fondness for his second cousins. They seemed fond of him. That was why she had invited them, though in retrospect it probably had not been a great idea, even if they had accepted. Or perhaps especially if they had accepted. He was not courting her, after all. They were lovers.

It must be that fact that had caused them all to refuse. She could almost picture them all putting their heads together and deciding that the invitation was in bad taste. Or that she was in bad taste. Perhaps they were afraid she would corrupt Constantine. Or hurt him. Or make a fool of him.

Probably that last point.

Hannah had been taught—and had taught herself—not to care what anyone thought of her. Except the duke, of course. He had frowned at her perhaps two or three times in all the ten years of their marriage, though he had never raised his voice against her, and each time she had felt that the world had surely come to an end. And except the servants at Dunbarton House and their other establishments in the country. Servants always knew one for who or what one really was, and it mattered to Hannah that they like her. She believed they did.

And now—annoyingly—she discovered that she did not like being shunned by three families that had meant nothing whatsoever to her until she had taken their second cousin as her lover.

Why she did not like it she did not know, except that they had inconvenienced her and she was going to have to invite other people to take their place.

“The third refusal,” she said, holding aloft the note from the Countess of Sheringford at the breakfast table. “And now none of them is coming to Copeland, Babs. It makes me feel a little as though I must have leprosy. Is it because I always wear white, do you suppose? Do I look sickly?”

Barbara looked up with blank eyes from her own letter. It was a long one—it must be from the Reverend Newcombe.

“No one is coming?” she said. “But I thought you had already had several acceptances, Hannah.”

“No one from Constantine’s family,” Hannah explained. “His father’s side of the family, anyway. They are the ones to whom he appears to be closest. But they have all refused.”

“That is a pity,” Barbara said. “Will you invite other people instead? There is still time, is there not?”

“Do they believe it would be distasteful to come to Copeland because Constantine and I are lovers?” Hannah asked, frowning at the offending piece of paper in her hand. “I was always rumored to have lovers, even when it was not true, but no one ever shunned me. Even when I was still married.”

Barbara set her letter down, resigned to the interruption.

“You are upset?” she asked.

“I am never upset,” Hannah said. Then she set down her own letter and smiled ruefully at her friend. “Well, a little, I suppose. I had looked forward to having them there.”