still caught at the sight. “Lady Bury told Ned Ellison that his wife looked charming dancing with Peter Grantham and hadn’t they been dancing to the same waltz at the Cowpers’ only two nights ago?”
Melanie looked up, one slipper dangling by the ribbons from her fingers. “Oh, dear. That would seem glaringly obvious on any stage. Though if Ellison doesn’t know his wife’s sleeping with Peter Grantham, he’s the last person in London not to be in on the secret.”
Charles moved to the satinwood table that held his great-grandmother’s Irish crystal decanter and glasses. “Poor bastard. One of those mad fools besotted with his own wife.” He shot her a glance. “Not that I’d know anything about that.”
She returned the glance, a glint in her eyes. “Of course not.”
He took the stopper from the decanter. Ellison’s gaze, as he watched his wife circle the floor with her lover, had stirred images of a past Charles would just as soon forget. He paused, the heavy cut-glass stopper in his hand, an uncomfortable weight in his memory.
Melanie flexed her foot. “I rather think his adoration may be the problem. Too much can be smothering. Literally. Think of Othello.”
Charles jerked himself out of the past. “Ellison doesn’t strike me as the violent sort.” He poured an inch of whisky into two glasses.
“He’s a quiet brooder.” She dropped her slippers to the floor and got to her feet. “They’re the ones who snap.”
Seven years of marriage and her perceptiveness about people could still surprise him. He set down the decanter and replaced the stopper. “Am I the sort who’d snap?”
She turned from lighting the tapers on her dressing table, laughter in her eyes. “Controlled, dispassionate Charles Fraser? Oh, no, darling. Anyone who’s been to bed with you knows you aren’t nearly as cold as you let on.”
He walked over to her, carrying the glasses of whisky. “So I’m the perfect sort of husband to betray?”
“Not quite.” Her gaze was appraising, but her lips trembled with humor. “You’re much too intelligent, dearest. You’d be damnably difficult to deceive.”
He put one of the glasses into her hand. “Sounds as though you’ve considered it.”
She leaned against the dressing table and took a meditative sip of whisky. “Well, I might.” Her eyes, a color between blue agate and the green of Iona marble, gleamed in her pale face. “Except that it would be quite impossible to find anyone who’s your equal, my love.”
He regarded her, aware of a smile playing about his mouth. “Good answer.”
“Yes, I rather thought it was.”
He lifted one hand and ran his fingers down the familiar line of her throat. The puffed gossamer that was an excuse for a sleeve slipped from her shoulder. His fingers molded to her skin. The scent of her perfume filled his senses, roses and vanilla and some other fragrance that still remained elusive after all these years.
A lump of coal fell from the grate and hissed against the fender. He swore, shrugged his shoulders, and went to pick up the poker.
“You warned me about it,” Melanie said from the dressing table. “The night you proposed.”
He pushed the coal into the grate. “Warned you about what?”
“That—in your words—you weren’t a demonstrative man. That you’d thought you’d never marry, your parents had set a miserable example, and you weren’t sure how good you’d be at it.”
He looked at her over his shoulder. “I didn’t really say that.”
“You did.” She curled up, catlike, on her dressing table chair. “You pointed out all the potential pitfalls with scrupulous care. It might have been a white paper you’d drawn up for the ambassador on the advantages and disadvantages of a treaty. You didn’t even try to kiss me.”
“I should think not. That might have risked biasing your judgment. One way or the other.” He returned the poker to its stand. “Of course, if I had, perhaps you’d have given me an answer straightaway, instead of going off to think about it for the most uncomfortable three days I have ever spent.”
“Charles, given what you’ve been through in your life, that has to be hyperbole.”
He kept his gaze on her face. “Not necessarily.”
She unfastened her pearl earrings without breaking eye contact. “Terrified I’d accept?”
“Mel, the most terrifying thing I can imagine is life without you.”
Melanie looked at him a moment longer, her eyes dark. Then she gave one of her wonderful smiles. The smile she’d given him after their first, awkward kiss in a drafty embassy corridor, with a military band blaring in the street outside. The smile he’d opened his eyes upon when he’d recovered consciousness after a gunshot wound to find her sitting beside his camp bed, three months into their strangely begun marriage.
Charles returned the smile, then looked away, because sometimes, even now, what they had together was so miraculous it scared him. He stared into the leaping flames in the grate. Thinking about their betrothal made him think about their son and the scene that had been enacted earlier tonight. “Were we too hard on Colin, do you think? I hate to ring a peal over him to no purpose.”
“Is that what your father would have done?” Melanie said.
His fingers curled round the glass. The Fraser crest, etched into the crystal, bit into his skin. “Hardly. Father wouldn’t have come to the nursery at all, unless Edgar or I were spilling our lifeblood onto the carpet. And even then he’d have taken care the blood didn’t seep onto his boots. More likely he’d have summoned me to his study when the dust had settled and told me if I must murder my brother could I have the decency to do it outside on the lawn.”
“And you’d have much preferred it if he’d beaten you?”
He swirled the whisky in his glass. “At least that would have implied he had a passing interest in whether we lived or died.”
An emotion he couldn’t have defined flickered like a shadow across Melanie’s face. She unclasped the pendant he’d commissioned from a Lisbon jeweler for their first anniversary. The candlelight gleamed against the rose gold of the Celtic knotwork and the green gold of the Spanish poppy at the center. “It’s never easy to be betrayed, least of all by those one should be able to trust the most.”
“Even at my most maudlin, I can hardly claim either of my parents betrayed me. Unless you consider lack of affection a betrayal.”
“The worst betrayal of all. Your father was certainly guilty of it.”
Charles took a sip of whisky, savoring the smoky bite of the liquor. He was seized by a sudden longing for their estate in Scotland—clean air and open space and cool, peaty streams. The house he loved, though he could hardly claim to love the man from whom he had inherited it.
“Always assuming that he was my father,” Charles said. It was something he had questioned more and more in the two and a half years since the death of Kenneth Fraser, the man he had grown up calling Father.
“He claimed you as his son,” Melanie said. “He owed you his love. Just as you love Colin.”
Charles looked into her eyes. She returned his gaze steadily. After a long moment, he said, “I’m not sure Kenneth Fraser was capable of loving anyone.”
“That’s no excuse. Damn the man, if he hadn’t got himself killed I could cheerfully strangle him.”
Charles smiled in spite of himself. “Bloodthirsty tonight, aren’t you?” He hadn’t meant to mention his mother, but he found himself saying, “As for Mother, whatever her faults I wouldn’t claim she didn’t love her children.”
“No. But one could say suicide is the worst betrayal of all.”
Charles’s fingers tightened on the whisky glass. For a moment, he thought it would shatter in his hand. The image of his parents’ faces pierced years of denial: the cool, ironic arch of his father’s brows, the cutting line of his mouth; the hectic flush of his mother’s cheeks, the brilliant, quixotic torment of her eyes. It almost seemed that he could reach out and demand the answers they had never given him. Answers that shouldn’t matter, but that did, far more than he would admit, even to Melanie.
The images of his parents gave way to the careless, handsome features of his brother, from whom he was estranged for reasons he himself did not fully understand. And then he thought fleetingly of a honey-haired woman, whom he had failed and who had left him, as surely as his mother had.
He looked at his wife. A crooked smile came to his lips, because that seemed the only possible response to what could not be changed. “Put that way, you could say you’re practically the only person I’ve trusted who hasn’t betrayed me, one way or another.”
