A Christmas Promise by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online Page A

hands loosely before her, and watched him leave. She felt frozen to the very core. She no longer belonged with him even for the short time that remained to him. She belonged in this strange, large, cold house with the cold stranger who stood at her side. And they had a guest to entertain. Or he had a guest. She did not know if she was expected to play hostess or to withdraw.
    “What is your wish?” she asked, turning to look at him and noticing again without any leaping of the heart how very handsome he looked.
    “My wish?” He raised his eyebrows. “We will go up to the drawing room, my lady, and you may ring for tea.” He extended his arm to her and she took it after a moment’s hesitation.
    H E HAD DELAYED LONG enough, the Earl of Falloden decided, turning determinedly from the window of his bedchamber, through which he had been staring into darkness. He glanced longingly at his bed, neatly turned down for the night, and he thought even more longingly of Alice’s wide and soft bed and of Alice’s pretty, plump, comfortable body.
    There was no point in delaying longer, he thought. He might as well get the deed done, since he had no choice in the matter. He could be back and in his own bed for the night in no time at all if he would just make up his mind to go through his dressing room into his wife’s and through to her bedchamber.
    His wife! The thought appalled him. If he had thought her cold during their first meeting, there was no word frigid enough to describe her as she had been today. Proud and cold and silent, reveling in her new status, only sorry that he was a necessary adjunct to it. And as unfeeling as marble with her father, who was so obviously desperately ill.
    He set his hand on the knob of the door connecting their dressing rooms, tapped firmly with his free hand, and turned the knob.
    She was not in bed, as he had expected her to be. She was rising from a chair by the fire when he came through from her dressing room. And she stood there straight and proud, looking rather regal, he thought, despite the fact that she was wearing a nightgown and had her hair loose down her back.
    The thought that she was beautiful struck him again, quite dispassionately. Her nightgown, all silk and lace—it must have cost Transome a fortune—accentuated the slender curves of her body. And her hair was thick and shiny and wavy, and lay like fire along her back. He thought again of the incongruity of her hair and her character.
    “So, my lady,” he said, walking toward her across the carpet, “you have become the Countess of Falloden today and gained membership in the
beau monde.
A lifetime’s ambition fulfilled?”
    There was a half smile on her lips, an expression he had not seen there before. “So, my lord,” she said, “you have become debt-free today and rich beyond your wildest dreams. A lifetime’s ambition fulfilled?”
    He stared at her for a moment, taken aback.
“Touché,”
he said softly at last. “It is a happy day for both of us, it seems.”
    “Yes.” The word was clipped, almost triumphant.
    “Except that it is not quite complete yet,” he said. “It is not quite a marriage yet.”
    “No.” Her chin moved up a fraction.
    “We will proceed to put the final seal on our happiness, then,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    Her eyes mocked him.
I have what I want
, they told him.
The rest does not matter.
And righteous indignation was denied him. He had got what he wanted too. Except that he had expected a meek, submissive wife. He felt a surge of anger, and with it the desire to wipe that look from her eyes. The desire to hurt her, to humiliate her. And he was too angry—with himself, perhaps—to be appalled by his desire.
    It might all have been over within a very few minutes. He might have laid her down on the bed, raised her nightgown and his nightshirt, and effected a quick consummation. He might have been back in his room within five minutes, a married man in every sense of the word, free