“I’m supposed to be her guardian. How do I guard her from myself?”

  “I never imagined I could love a woman you loved,” Kingsley confessed. “I know I’m jealous. I’m not proud of it but I am. And when you brought her home, I thought you’d lost your mind. If a man wants to buy himself a Christmas gift, it’s usually a new horse or a silver-tipped walking stick. Not a young girl he wasn’t even planning to bed. And that girl? She was scared witless she would do something wrong and you’d send her back where you found her. She came to me in private and begged me to teach her which spoon to use and how to curtsy and how to address an earl and how to speak French like any well-bred young lady must. She’s common as dirt and so am I. Neither one of us knew what you were doing with us. I still don’t most days.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I’ll never forget when the Earl and Countess of Godwick came for tea. They thought Eleanor had gone to finishing school in Switzerland as she spoke French so well and behaved so gracefully. I was as proud of her that day as any father had ever been of his child in the history of the world.” Kingsley shook his head and met Søren’s eyes. “Just between you and me…you may not even deserve her. You’ve never in your life had to work as hard as she did that year to fit into your world. You certainly won’t deserve her if you don’t tell her the truth. I’m begging you to tell her, not for my sake or whatever imaginary children you’ll have someday, but for her sake, and because I love her, too.”

  Søren kissed him again and Kingsley didn’t know this time if it was a kiss or a yes. For Eleanor’s sake, he hoped it was a yes.

  8

  Eight hours on two trains and then one long carriage ride finally brought Eleanor home to Edenfell.

  The winter sun had long set by the time the carriage turned into the drive, but the lane glowed like morning. Four years ago, after a carriage had run off the drive, Søren had ordered lampposts to be installed. A dozen on each side of the lane were lit and it seemed as if she were being carried to a magic castle in a fairy story.

  Edenfell was a great gray box of a house, an old Georgian manor, square and sturdy and safe. Her happiest days had taken place in this home before Søren had left her. And her loneliest nights after he was gone.

  The carriage pulled up and she saw Søren on the grand main steps waiting with Kingsley at his side. He came down the stairs and did the footman’s job of putting down the step and opening the door for her, helping her out.

  “Welcome home, My Lady,” Søren said, and pressed a cool kiss on her cheek. Kingsley escorted Annette into the house leaving her all alone with Søren.

  On his arm she entered the house and found no one to greet her, but the house itself. The hall glittered with candlelight reflected off the freshly polished brass chandelier. The warmth enveloped her.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “I’ve ordered the official welcome of the lady of the house to wait until tomorrow,” Søren explained. “The staff wasn’t pleased with me, they’re so happy we’re married. I imagined you’d be in no mood for a raucous welcome.”

  She wasn’t and found the silence a relief. “You left early today,” she said.

  “I had preparations to make for your arrival,” he said as he steered her into the drawing room. “You see?”

  Eleanor’s eyes widened. Søren had brought in a Christmas tree—a fine tall spruce with silver baubles and candles on it all aglow. And greenery decorated the hearth and hung from the ceiling.

  “I wanted to give you back the Christmas I took from you when I left so abruptly,” he said.

  He was trying so hard to please her. Did he still not understand?

  “May I show you something?” she asked. “Outside?”

  “Of course,” he said and though he looked puzzled, he followed her from the decorated drawing room, through the garden door out to the snow-filled veranda. Eleanor pulled the hood of her cloak up as Søren slid on his gloves. She led him down a pathway and to the old wood and stone gazebo.

  “Here,” she said as she stood at the railing and looked up at the bright and shining new winter moon. “This is where I would go to be with you after you left. Every night that winter.”

  “Be with me?”

  “I couldn’t cry in front of Claire, or she would start crying, too. I told her once how you smelled like winter and she laughed at me. She said you smelled like shaving soap and nothing else. But you do. The snow collects in here and the night wind, too. I can’t explain but in here is where I would find you. And I would close my eyes and breathe you in again and again until I had filled myself to the brim with you.” She turned to him and found snow dusting his golden hair and his gray eyes glowing silver in the moonlight. “Did you know I wanted you that much that I would stand in the winter in the cold and the snow at night just to catch, for a moment or two, the scent of your skin?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I did. Yet I think…I think you forgot me the moment I was out of your sight.”

  “You think that, do you?”

  “Is it not true?”

  “I will tell you what is true.” He moved to stand closer to her so she could feel the warmth of his body radiating even through his coat and her cloak. “In Paris at Mass, a girl with black hair like yours would attend every day. I would sit two pews behind her so I could stare at her hair and pretend she was you. I kept an orchid in my room because its scent reminded me of your soap and I wanted to smell you whenever I lay in bed. The hart tie pin you gave me? I wore it every day until the clasp broke and even after I kept it with me. Even now,” he said and pulled from inside his breast pocket the small silver stag pin. He slipped it back into his pocket.

  “You gave Claire and me ‘pin money.’ I never had pin money before. I thought you were supposed to use it to buy pins. So I bought that for you. My hart. My heart.” She put her hand over her own heart.

  “Your heart. I carry it against my own.”

  Before she could speak, he took her face in his gloved hands and kissed her roughly and deeply. This was no tender kiss, not loving either, but possessive and aching and desperate. She had no choice but to open her mouth to the kiss and receive it. His mouth pressed hers open, his tongue touched hers and she moaned. Without thinking, she found herself twining her arms around his neck and pushing her breasts against his chest. He gently but insistently pressed her back against the gazebo railing. Her fingers found the nape of his neck and clung to it.

  “You make me ache inside,” she whispered into his ear.

  “You can’t say something like that to me,” he said, “and not prove it.”

  Before she could demand what he meant, he kissed her again and pulled her hard against him. He opened his heavy coat and wrapped her inside it and it was like stepping into a warm room.

  And once she was warm against him, he began to lift her skirts.

  “Søren,” she gasped against his lips but he pressed his tongue into her mouth to silence her. He brought her skirt and petticoats all the way to her hips. In the shelter of his coat she barely felt the cold. What she did feel was his hand, still incased in his supple calfskin glove, sliding along her upper thigh and then between her legs. He wouldn’t, would he? Here? And with his gloves on?

  He would. He did. He pushed his finger through her folds once and then twice, a third time while she moaned against his mouth. When he found her entrance, the tender hole, he stroked it and Eleanor gasped and thought she might faint.

  “You do not hold the patent on frustrated desire, Little One. Even if you did invent it, I perfected it in the three years we’ve been apart. The three longest years of my life,” he said and slid his finger up and into her. Eleanor shuddered as he entered her, and she pushed her hips into the palm of his hand.

  “Again,” he ordered and she pushed into his hand again. Pleasure rippled through her stomach and hips. Then again. She couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted to.

  “I can feel your heat even through my glove,” he said into her ear. She was too lost to speak. She had to grip the railing behind her to stay standing as he worked her on his hand. When he started to push a second finger inside her, she had to raise her leg and place her foot on the stone bench to open herself to him. “God,” he breathed as he went deeper into her.

  He gathered her wetness with his fingers and brought it to the knot at the apex of her thighs. He slicked it over her and kneaded it until it throbbed against his finger. Then without warning he entered her again. His gloved fingers felt thick inside her. She could feel the seams of the leather stitching grazing all her tender places. Inside her passage, he spread his fingers apart, opening her and her inner muscles contracted in protest and pleasure.

  “I imagined this,” he said and his breath turned to steam. “Touching you inside until you came apart in my arms. I had to leave a piano recital once because they played Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ and I couldn’t stop picturing your thighs straddling me at the piano bench.”

  “You always played it for me,” she said.

  “Which is why I can’t hear it without thinking of you.” He thrust into her with his fingers, again, and then again. He thrust with his hand as he had last night when he took her. Though she knew this time he would not stop until she had reached her peak. She breathed hard as he stroked her so intimately, not at all gently but firmly, vigorously, obscenely. “Release for me, Eleanor.”

  Even if she wanted to disobey him, his searching stroking fingers would not let her. He moved in and out of her wetness, sliding across that throbbing knot again with his gloves as he entered her. Her hips pushed into his touch and soon the most intimate and delicious flutters began. There was no stopping it now and she came, crying out and shuddering. The pleasure went on and on as he stroked and caressed her.

  “Tell me again,” he said as he held her cupped in the palm of his large strong hand, “that I forgot you.”

  She reached between their bodies, took him by the wrist and pulled his fingers from her. She pushed her skirts down and smoothed them, stepped back and away, her hands pressed into her lower stomach where the muscles still fluttered.

  “Tell me why you left me—three years ago and last night.”

  “Eleanor, please—”

  “I thought once it would be enough if you desired me even half as much as I desired you,” she said and all her pleasure turned to sadness. “But it isn’t enough. Legally I am your property and cannot deny you your rights as a husband, but I ask you to never touch me again until we can have a true marriage. And it can be no true marriage without the truth.”

  She pulled her hood up and returned to the house. She was cold now and shivering, and not because it was winter.

  9

  Eleanor found Annette waiting in her new room—the mistress of Edenfell’s chamber. As Annette helped her out of her clothes and into her best blue nightgown and robe, Eleanor examined her new bedroom. Blue and ivory walls, ivory wainscoting, a large brick fireplace and over it, a portrait of Søren’s great-grandmother, a handsome woman who had been the first Lady Stearns when her husband was given a barony as a reward for some vital service to the Crown.

  The canopy bed was dark blue with oak posts and piled high with soft down pillows and a blue silk coverlet. A camelback love seat covered in striped blue and ivory fabric sat under the curtained windows. All this was hers now. All this beauty. All this wealth. The house. The land that stretched for a thousand acres or more. The trees. The gardens. The stables and the horses.

  She would have traded it all for the truth from Søren.

  Exhausted from the day’s travels and last night’s trials, she dismissed Annette and sank into the armchair by the fire with a book she had no intention of reading.

  Just then she heard a soft knock on her door. Not the main door but the connecting door between her room and the master’s suite. Before she could answer, Søren entered.

  He’d removed his gray jacket. He looked quite dashing in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves and his usually perfect hair rakishly disheveled. He stood at the fireplace, arms crossed over his chest, not three steps away from her. She pretended she didn’t see him and stared through him into the fire.

  “You wish to know the truth,” he said. “I will tell it to you though you might not like what you hear.”

  “Anything is superior to not knowing.”

  “Very well. But do not say you were not warned.” He paused and took a breath. “Are you familiar with a certain novel by a man named John Polidori called The Vampyre?”

  “Of course,” she said. If it was lurid and strange and sensual, she’d not only read it, she’d read it twice. “Why?”

  “The reason I left you last night and three years ago is because…I am a vampire, Eleanor. And when I come too close to beautiful young maidens, I’m overwhelmed with an insatiable need to drink their blood. That is why I left you and keep leaving you—to save you from my bloodlust.”

  She stared at him. His face was utterly serious and solemn. His tone was truthful and his eyes earnest.

  “Are you truly?” she breathed.

  “No.”

  Eleanor threw the Complete Works of Shakespeare at him. Luckily, as it was an expensive and rare volume, he caught it and set it neatly on the mantel.

  “How could you?” she asked. “How could you leave and then mock me like that?”

  “Because I am a cruel and wicked man. And also because if I prepare you for the absolute worst, then perhaps you’ll take the truth a little better.”

  “I don’t wish to hear it anymore.”

  “Nonetheless, you will. Come into my bedroom.”

  “I don’t enter the bedrooms of vampires or men who pretend to be vampires.”

  “Generally, a good rule of thumb. But tonight, you will come into my bedroom.”

  “I shan’t and that’s the end of it.”

  “Eleanor, I am your husband, your lord and master, pater familias of this family and you are required by the Church and the Crown to obey my every will, whim, and command, no matter how immoral or arbitrary. You are my property, and you will no more tell me no when I give you an order than a chair will refuse to let me sit in it.”

  “What will you do to me if I go to your bedroom with you?” she demanded. “Throw me on the bed again, use me and abandon me?”

  “I will sit you on my lap and make you look at French pornography with me.”

  “Oh,” she said, blinking. “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  Eleanor rose to her feet and said primly, “You only had to ask.”

  The master’s suite was far larger than the mistress’s and as dark and masculine as her bedroom was light, airy, and feminine. While her room held only a dainty little writing desk, his bedroom contained a large desk in an alcove surrounded on three sides by windows that looked down on the lake. The room was brightly-lit—every candle blazing, the fire hot and high, and not one but two oil lamps burning on the large desk.

  He sat in the red velvet-covered desk chair and pulled her down onto his lap. She tried to ignore the bed behind them—the grand four-post bed with the silk covers the color of red wine and the fire burning in the brick fireplace.

  “Kingsley was kind enough to lend me his collection,” Søren said as he opened a large leather folio. It felt delicious to sit on his lap, one arm around her waist holding her against him as he turned the pages of the folio.

  “I have a question for you,” he began. “The night you invited me to your bedroom, three years ago. What did you want to happen that night?”

  The question took Eleanor aback. Of all the things to ask…

  “The obvious, I think. That you would take me to bed with you.”

  “What precisely were you picturing would happen? Was it this?” He turned to a photograph in the folio—a naked woman with voluptuous breasts lay draped over a divan, a swarthy naked man braced over her, his large cock entering her body. Her face was a mask of pleasure—real or feigned for the photographer, Eleanor couldn’t say. But her heart raced madly at the sight of it. She’d never seen photographs like this before. Drawings of naked women, or paintings, yes, but photographs? Of people engaged in the sex act?

  “I…Oh my Lord.” She laughed, shocked and delighted.

  “Or this?” Søren turned to another photograph. In this one, the woman was on her hands and knees, the man behind her, cock entering from the back. Eleanor could only stare and squirm on Søren’s lap.

  “Or perhaps this?” Søren turned another page and there was the woman seated on top of the man, his hands on her naked hips and his organ entering her from below. “Well?”

  “I suppose,” she said. Her toes curled up in her slippers. “Any of them would do. I…I knew how it works, of course.”

  Her face was burning hot and her stomach was terribly tight and fluttering.

  “What did you dream would happen with us?” Søren asked again. “Don’t be shy. We’re married now, and these are things I need to know, just as there are things you need to know about my desires.”

  “I stayed up,” she said, “reading. I wanted you to see the light on under my door so you would know I was awake. I…” This was so hard to speak about. She was so good at saying outrageous things when she wanted to shock people, but when she was alone with Søren and he was asking her to tell him her private thoughts, she found herself flustered and tongue-tied.

  “Go on.” He pressed a soft kiss on her neck under her ear.

  “I thought you would come into my room and…and you would kiss me again and we would undress and get into bed. And we would touch each other. After that it’s all a bit…hazy. As I said, I knew how it worked, in theory. But in practice…I hoped you would tell me what to do once we were in bed, that you would instruct me so I could please you.”