Melanie’s eyes turned unexpectedly luminous. “Darling—” She put out a hand, then let it fall to her side. “Thank you. That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me. Though it’s rather a large burden to place on any one person.”
“Never mind, I’m sure you’re equal to the task.” He held her gaze for a moment, then shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. “Sorry. I must have had more to drink than I realized. Usually I have to be three sheets to the wind before I give way to self-pity.”
“Dearest, if you can’t indulge in self-pity in front of your wife, when can you?”
“Even the most patient of wives must have her limits.” Charles flung himself into his favorite wing chair, the moss-green velvet he steadily resisted reupholstering. Even now, even with Melanie, talking about his parents cut through too many defenses, until it nicked at feelings he preferred to keep buried.
Melanie turned back to her dressing table, as though she were quite unaware of the undercurrents in the room. He rested his head against the worn velvet of the chair and watched as she went through the familiar ritual of taking down her hair. Amazing how many pins it took to create that elaborate arrangement of curls and loops. The walnut-brown strands fell one by one about her shoulders. The metal pins clattered as she returned them to their porcelain box. Her face was reflected three ways in the trio of looking-glass panels. The fine bones and ivory skin of her French father, the vivid hair and eyes and brows of her Spanish mother. Melanie’s parents hadn’t been beastly and she had loved them and they’d both been killed before her eyes. What she had gone through then had been worse than anything he or his brother and sister had endured.
He saw her for a moment as he had first seen her in Spain, in the Cantabrian Mountains, her face smeared with dirt and blood, her eyes bright with a reckless will to live. In a dank, moldering alley, aiming a pistol at a fleeing man with one arm and cradling their one-year-old son with the other. In a makeshift hospital, face blue- shadowed with exhaustion, hands steady as she stitched up a wound. He wondered, not for the first time, where he’d be if they hadn’t met. Dead, more than likely, one way or another. Certainly alone.
The brush swept rhythmically through her hair. The firelight flickered over the gray and cream wall hangings, the French blue upholstery, the theatrical prints on the walls. Airy, soothing, yet whimsical. Melanie’s touch was everywhere in the room. He felt it lap away the painful memories, as surely as a soothing caress.
He loved the Perthshire house, but he had never thought he would live here, in the house that had been the center of his parents’ lives, the house he had only visited rarely, the house in which he had never felt at home. After his father’s death, his first impulse had been to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Melanie, he knew, had fully expected him to do so. But he’d caught the wistful look in her eye at the beautifully proportioned rooms, the Robert Adam ceilings, the graceful plasterwork and moldings. He’d realized how wonderful it would be for the children to have to walk only a few paces from the house to the square garden. He’d thought of the rare luxury of a house that looked out on the leafy expanse of a square rather than the narrow width of a street. There were few spots in London as lovely as Berkeley Square.
And so they’d moved into his parents’ house, and Melanie had engaged painters and plasterers and knocked out walls and hung wallpaper and laid tile until it was no longer his parents’ house but their own.
“Speaking of being undiplomatic,” Melanie said, “don’t you think your talents might have been better employed than spending the entire evening hiding out in the library with Henry Brougham and David Mallinson?”
“On the contrary.” He tugged his cravat loose and unwound the confining folds of muslin, unstarched in defiance of fashion, from about his throat. “We rehashed the slavery issue and the abolition of rotten boroughs. By the time we broached the second bottle of port we were quite impressed with our own eloquence.”
“You see them practically every day.”
“They were two of the only people at the reception who had anything remotely interesting to say. Present company excluded, of course, but I see you even more frequently.”
She made a face at him in the mirror. “Charles Fraser, for a politician, your social skills are positively atrocious.”
“Why do you think I need a wife?”
She pretended to throw her rouge pot at him. He ducked. “Speaking of infidelity,” he said, “what was Antonio de Carevalo whispering in your ear after supper?”
“Darling.” She set the rouge pot back on the dressing table. “I didn’t think you were paying attention.”
He stretched his legs out in front of him. “My dear wife. I would hardly have been any use in military intelligence if I wasn’t able to observe without being seen to do so.”
She cast a glance at him over her shoulder. “Carevalo whispered a variety of suggestions, most of which seemed to have been cribbed from bawdier bits of Lope de Vega. I’ll say this for him, his flirtation is as good- natured as it is crude.”
“Did he say anything about his reasons for coming to England?”
“He said a great deal about the Elgin Marbles and the female form, quite as if he’d come to England expressly to view them.” She propped her arm on the back of the chair and rested her chin in her hand. “Do you suppose he really thinks anyone doesn’t know he’s here to muster support for an uprising in Spain?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Carevalo’s a shrewd politician.” Charles looked into his glass, watching the crystal and the pale gold liquid catch the light of the fire. “I must have been asked a dozen times tonight if I thought Spain was going to erupt into revolution.”
Melanie pushed her hair back from her face. “What did you answer?”
“That I couldn’t say, but that if I were Spanish I wouldn’t be overjoyed to have spent six years fighting the French only to be stuck with the same corrupt monarchy I’d had before Napoleon invaded.”
She got to her feet. “Talk about being undiplomatic, darling.”
He let his shoulders sink deeper into the chair. “I’m not a diplomat anymore, I’m a politician. An opposition politician. I’m supposed to raise people’s hackles.”
“And you do it superbly, love.” She crossed the room and dropped into his lap with a swish of her skirt. “Strings. They’re beginning to pinch. I must have had too many lobster patties. Therese’s chef has a heavy hand with the cream.”
The light fabric of her gown was gathered into dozens of pleats at the back, where the bodice was closed by impossibly tiny silk strings. He pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck and went to work on the strings. She gave a contented sigh. “Mmm…You have witchcraft in your fingers, Charles.”
He loosened the last string. The bodice slithered down over her shoulders. He brushed aside the champagne-colored silk, turned her in his arms, smiled into her eyes, and put his mouth to hers.
Her arms came round him at once. Her body curved into his own. The passion was familiar. The urgency took him by surprise. He lifted his head and looked at her with the faintest of questions.
Her eyes were like rain-streaked glass. “Charles.” There was a slight catch in her voice.
He took her face between his hands. “Soul’s idol?”
She regarded him for a moment, her brows drawn together. Then she smiled in an awkward sort of apology. “Nothing.” She touched her fingers to his lips. “Just—I love you.”
He stroked her cheek. “That’s hardly nothing, at least not to me. Will it sound hopelessly redundant if I say I love you, too?”
She leaned her cheek against his hand. “Amazing how easily those words come to your lips, considering how much trouble you once had saying them.”
“You’ve changed me in a number of ways,
“Save your impassioned speeches for Parliament, dearest.” She smiled again, but there were still demons lurking in her eyes. The same demons that made her wake trembling, her nightdress plastered to her skin, from nightmares she never fully described.
He didn’t question the nightmares and he didn’t question what had brought on her change of mood now. They had an unspoken rule not to press each other for confidences. They both had too many ghosts in their pasts. Instead he brushed his lips against her temple, the tip of her nose, the corner of her mouth. Gentle, feather-light kisses such as he’d given her on their wedding night, when for all her vitality he’d felt as though he held something made of spun glass in his arms, something that had been shattered once and was barely mended.
She twisted her head so his kisses fell on her lips. He stood, cradling her in his arms. She curled against him and wrapped her arm round his neck. Her laughter vibrated through the silk of his waistcoat and the linen of his
