Then Comes Seduction

month before their wedding, when she had seen very little of her betrothed and had never been alone with him.

“And so it will,” he said, his eyes suddenly amused. “It will be done, then. But why are we standing here in the ballroom doorway when there is far more to see? The gallery is at the far side of the state rooms, but it is full of ancient family portraits which can be of no interest whatsoever to you. I will show you some of the family apartments you have not yet seen.”

“But I would like to see the gallery,” she said.

“Would you?” He looked surprised.

It was long and high-ceilinged, a companion piece to the ballroom at the other side of the main floor, though narrower. It ran the full width of the house with windows at both ends to provide light. There were marble busts in every second alcove, cushioned benches in the others. The floor gleamed. The walls were hung with portraits. It would be the perfect place for exercise in rainy weather.

Katherine walked from one to the other of the paintings while Jasper explained who the subjects were and what relationship they bore to him. She had not realized how ancient a family the Finleys were. There were portraits reaching back to the fifteenth century.

“You know everything about all these paintings and the history of your family,” she said. “I am surprised-and impressed.”

“Are you?” he said. “But they are exclusively mine, you see. And I spent a great deal of time up here as a boy.”

She wondered if he realized how much he had revealed to her in those few words.

They moved on until they came to the final two portraits.

“My mother,” he said of the first. “And my father.”

His mother, brown-haired and dressed in the fashion of twenty years or more ago, was plump and pretty and placidly smiling as she sat at an embroidery frame, a small dog like a bundle of fur at her feet. Katherine could see no resemblance to either Jasper or Charlotte-or Rachel.

His father, on the other hand, looked very much like Jasper even down to the mockingly raised right eyebrow. He was slender and dark and handsome. And he was about the same age in the portrait as Jasper was now.

“It was painted only a few months before his death,” Jasper said. “A few months before my birth.”

“How did he die?” she asked.

“He broke his neck,” he told her, “jumping a hedge on a wet, muddy day. He was in his cups-a not unusual state with him, apparently.”

“I am sorry,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. “Did you cause him to drink? Or to jump that hedge when apparently there was an open gate not twenty yards away?”

“Sorry for you,” she explained.

“Why?” he said again. “He was no loss to me. I never knew him. Though I resemble him to an uncanny degree-or so I have always been told. In looks and every other imaginable way.”

She turned away from the portrait to look at him. There was, she realized with sudden shock, a world of pain locked up in this mocking, careless, rakish man she had married. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to have insisted that they come in here. Or perhaps it had. He had spoken with unaccustomed bitterness. Was it worth trying to penetrate his defenses?

“Ah, those eyes,” he said, cupping her chin with one hand. “They are what first drew me to you, you know, in those long-ago days when I dared not admire any respectable lady lest her mama snare me in her net and whisk me off to the altar. But I would not have been able to resist your eyes, Katherine, even if you had been surrounded by half a dozen mothers. Do you know how deep, how fathomless, they are, how they draw in the beholder to… Ah. To what? To your soul? To rest there in peace?”

With the pad of his thumb he traced the seam of her lips, sending shivers downward into her breasts and her womb and her inner thighs.

His voice was soft, warm with sincerity. So were his eyes.

He was a very dangerous man indeed.

Not that she must resist loving him. It had occurred to her that if she was bound to him for life she must try to feel a deeper fondness for him than she did. But she would resist dancing to his tune. She would love if and when she chose to love, not when he had tricked her into a mindless infatuation.

“I suppose,” she said, smiling against his thumb, “you took one look at me-or at my eyes-and fell instantly and irrevocably in love with me. And this was before the Vauxhall evening, I take it?”

“Ah, Katherine,” he said, his voice and eyes openly mournful now, “I was not wise enough to fall in love with you then and so prevent the disaster of Vauxhall. What is it about your eyes, though? Is it that they reveal or hint at a person well worth knowing? Someone whose love is well worth courting? Someone who is well worth loving?”

She felt more like crying than thinking of a suitably spirited retort.

“You are going to have to do considerably better than that, you know,” she said. “A Cheltenham tragedy will not do it.”

“Ah. Will it not, cruel heart?”

He removed his hand and grinned at her.

“And you are not your father, Jasper,” she said. “You are yourself.”

For a moment his eyes looked curiously bleak despite the grin. Then he took her hand in his and raised it so that he could kiss the inside of her wrist.

“I am, as you say, myself,” he said. “A fact for which I am remarkably thankful, especially at this moment.”

He raised her hand and set it on his shoulder. He took a half step forward and slid his other arm about her waist, so that they were lightly touching along their full length.

He was, she supposed, going to kiss her. Their wager had not forbidden kisses, had it? But she could not bear to be kissed at this precise moment. Her emotions were feeling rather raw.

“It would be desirable,” she said, “for us to concentrate upon becoming friends before we even think of love.”

“Friends?” He chuckled. “After this month is over, Katherine, I intend to take you to bed every night and all night-and often during the days too. I would find it inordinately embarrassing to take my friend to bed. Con is my friend, and Charlie Field and Hal Blackstone and half a dozen other fellows. All male. I believe you might find me a mite impotent if I got into bed with you and then discovered that I had got in with my friend.”

She could not help laughing.

“Is it easier, then,” she asked him, “to make love to your enemy?”

“Enemy be damned,” he said. “Pardon my language. I would rather make love to my lover, Katherine. To you, since you are my wife and sex is one of the definite advantages of being married, provided one can tolerate one’s wife.”

“And provided she can tolerate her husband,” she said.

“Neither of which provideds poses any problem in this particular marriage,” he said. “Do they?”

He waited for her answer. And there was no witty response to that particular question, was there?

“No,” she said.

He smiled slowly, his eyelids drooping over his eyes, which focused on her lips.

“I do not suppose,” he said, “I can persuade you to forget the one condition of our wager, can I?”

“That it will take you one month to win my love?” she said. “Oh, very well, then. We will make it five weeks if you feel you need more time.”

He threw back his head and laughed, startling her.

“You minx, Katherine,” he said. “I adore you. Do you know that?”