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It was scouted the instant Robert Besford appeared, a worried look on his handsome face. Roxanne thought Caro was blooming, but since he evidently cared a great deal for his wife, Mr Besford’s anxiety was rather touching.
‘Good morning,’ he said with a graceful bow, while his startlingly green eyes ran over his wife as if taking an inventory.
Caro rolled her eyes and tried to look stern, before laughing and shaking her head at him, ‘This is Miss Courland, Rob,’ she admonished.
‘I know. We’ve met before, haven’t we, Miss Courland?’ he replied with a rueful smile of apology for his distracted state.
‘Good morning, Colonel Besford,’ she replied with a smile, for who could resist the Besfords’ evident delight in each other?
‘I’m colonel no longer, not even in my brevet rank as staff officer, now I’ve sold out,’ he told her cheerfully enough.
‘Or so he says,’ Caro added darkly and Roxanne laughed at the look the Honourable Robert turned on his wife.
‘And no order of mine was ever knowingly obeyed by my wife,’ he told Roxanne ruefully and ducked dextrously as a cushion flew past his left ear and thudded harmlessly against the oak panelling.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Caro said, hand over her mouth and her eyes dancing. ‘It’s become a habit,’ she admitted, and Roxanne decided she’d enjoy local society if it offered such lively company, after all.
‘I’ll make sure I take a suit of armour with me to Mulberry House,’ she replied solemnly, and they were all laughing when Charles entered the room.
He was enchanted by this light-hearted and laughing Roxanne Courland. He’d turned her world upside down and behaved like a bad-tempered bear this morning, so no wonder he’d not seen her so until now, but suddenly he knew she’d break his heart if he let her and felt the breath stall in his chest as he saw her as she ought to be, if her family had cherished and adored her, instead of leaving her alone to brave the world. He acquitted Sir Granger of deliberate cruelty, but to raise her as mistress here, when she could only be second-in-command at her brother’s whim, was unthinkingly callous.
Roxanne must at least taste the life of a single young woman of birth and fortune before he wed her, but it’d have to be a mere bite, as this need dragging at him insistently wouldn’t be ignored for long. He imagined her beautifully gowned and coiffured and decided he was about to let himself in for the most tortuous few weeks of his life. Stepping forwards, he watched the mischief leave her darkest brown eyes and her merry smile die. There was time to alter that state of affairs, he reassured himself. Perhaps she’d look favourably on his suit if he made her mistress here again. Highly unlikely she’d wed ever him for himself, now, and wasn’t that just as well?
‘I asked for refreshments to be served here, if you don’t object, Miss Courland?’ he said.
‘I’ve no right to object, Sir Charles,’ she replied.
‘A lady always has rights,’ he argued. She had rights, and obligations—common politeness being one of them.
‘How nice for us,’ she replied stubbornly.
‘It must be,’ he replied, and she glared at him before embarking on a discussion about babies with Caro designed to exclude sane gentlemen, except that his friend Rob seemed to find it as fascinating as they did.
He’d never be that much of a fool about his wife and children, Charles assured himself. He’d be an interested and even a fond father, especially as his own sire had consigned him to his formidable grandmother’s care without a backward look at an early age. Charles’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile as he recalled a day when the father he had yearned for came home at last. Louis Afforde had fainted at the sight of him, coming round to murmur artistically, ‘The boy is too like her—my one, my only, my dear departed love. He offends my eyes and grieves my suffering heart.’
Louis, an aspiring poet, promptly went straight back to London and his current ‘only’ love and left his son with an aversion to romantic love and a gap in his young life where his remaining parent should have been. Packed off to live with his grandparents at the age of six, Charles swore he’d never fall in love, whatever love might be. Eyeing Rob now doting over the wife he’d once professed to hate, he decided he still didn’t know what it was and was quite content with his ignorance. He’d respect and admire his wife—if he desired her as well that was a handsome bonus—but he’d never love her.
Nor would he make a cake of himself over being a husband and father as Rob appeared happy to. His children would have fond but sensible parents, which was just as well considering his grandmother was too old to take on a pack of brats now. He thought the Dowager Countess of Samphire would like Miss Courland as a granddaughter-in-law and he doubted Roxanne would quail at meeting such a brusque and ruthless old lady, and then caught himself out in a dreamy smile with horrified shock.
Roxanne would make a good wife and mother and he’d be faithful and respect her, but he’d not live in her pocket. Something told him it wouldn’t be that simple, but he ignored it because he’d promised her brother he’d marry her if she’d have him, and he wanted her. Having his child would settle her into her new role as his wife, and the thought of it made him march to the window and gaze out at the view while he got himself back under control. The idea of seeing Roxanne sensually awake and fully aware of herself as a woman for the first time sent him into such a stew of urgency that he was unfit for company. It boded ill for his detachment, he admitted to himself as he fought primitive passions, but very well for begetting his brats!
‘Fascinating view, is it?’ Rob asked with a satirical smile as he came to stand by his old friend, too much understanding of Charles’s response to Roxanne Courland in his steady green gaze for comfort.
‘All the more so for being mine,’ he replied softly.
‘Possessiveness, it’s the curse of our sex,’ Rob taunted, and Charles wondered if he wasn’t yet truly forgiven for trying to win Rob’s lady off him, although he’d been as blithely ignorant of who she really was as her husband had been at the time.
He had admired Caro’s refusal to sit back and meekly accept that their arranged marriage was an abomination to her husband, and her ingenious campaign to win him to her bed by foul means when fair ones must fail, since Rob had vowed never to share any room with his wife after their wedding. Rob had danced to the seductive and scandalous new courtesan Cleo Tournier’s tune without a clue that she was his unwanted and despised wife, and Charles decided vengefully that he was glad he’d helped her tame the one-time rake now watching him as if he was a specimen on a pin.
‘You could be right,’ he replied calmly enough.
‘Be careful what you’re at,’ Rob warned him silkily. ‘Miss Courland isn’t up to the games you play and she’s far from unprotected.’
‘She needs no protection from me,’ Charles replied shortly.
‘Have you undergone a sea change then, Charles?’
‘A permanent one,’ he replied, gaze steady on Rob’s challenging one.
‘Good God, I think you really mean it.’
‘I do.’
‘It’ll provide me with an interesting diversion to watch you try to achieve that aim then,’ Rob said with a grin that almost made Charles wish them both twenty years younger, so he could treat him to the appropriate punch on the nose. ‘I don’t think Miss Courland will be easily persuaded you’re not a wild sea-rover any more,’ he warned with unholy delight.
‘I’m beginning to agree with you,’ Charles muttered darkly and stared broodingly at the quirky old garden he’d acquired with his new property.
‘Sometimes the chase is all the more worth winning when it seems nigh impossible,’ Rob said, softening his challenge as he sent a significant glance at his lady, who’d led him a fine dance before letting her husband catch her just as she’d planned all along.
‘I’m planning a change of lifestyle, not abject surrender,’ Charles protested uneasily.
‘And sometimes there’s victory in defeat, although that’s not a concept I expect a grizzled old sea dog to understand.’
‘Since you talk in riddles, no wonder I can’t make head or tail of them.’
‘You’ll see,’ Rob said with an irritatingly superior smile and turned back to the fascinating spectacle of his wife like a compass to the north.
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