A Most Unsuitable Groom

“They’ve already bound my breasts,” Mariah heard herself say, and then lowered her head, her cheeks hot. “They won’t even let me try. But if it’s best for William, I suppose I understand.”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Spencer said, sure that Mariah was upset. “You haven’t had an easy time of things. I’m sure your woman is only thinking of your own health, as should you. I don’t remember most of my voyage home. Was yours an easy crossing?”

She shook her head, wishing away these silly tears that kept threatening. “We had storms most of the way. For six long weeks I spent the majority of my time with my head over a bucket, I’m afraid.” She lifted a hand, let it drop onto the coverlet once more. “I know they’re right.” Her face crumpled slightly. “But I’m his mother.”

Spencer felt as useless as a wart on the end of Prinney’s nose and sighed in real relief when the door to the hallway opened and Odette came sailing in, a young woman following behind her.

“Here now,” Odette said, taking in the scene. “Is this what you’re good for, Spencer Becket? Making the girl cry? Take yourself off and be glad I don’t turn you into a toad and step on you.”

“But I—oh, never mind. Who’s this?”

“I’m Sheila, sir,” the small brunette said. “Jacob’s wife.”

“Jacob Whiting? Morgan’s Jacob?” Spencer asked, remembering how Jacob had followed Morgan like a puppy for years, the poor besotted fool.

“Not no more he ain’t, sir,” Sheila said, raising her chin. “I’m weaning my own little Jacob now, and Odette asked for me to nurse the new little one, and that’s what I’m doing. Sir.”

It seemed he was being put in his place every time he opened his mouth, so Spencer merely nodded and quit the room, promising to return later to see his son again, adding to himself: when there weren’t so many damned women around.

Mariah sniffled, still feeling sorry for herself, and watched him go, because asking him to stay would make her appear weak and she had the feeling that, no matter how rosy a picture Spencer had painted of Becket Hall and its inhabitants, she would need to be very strong in order to survive here in this strange place. What was odd was that she was beginning to think that Spencer thought the same thing about himself.

CHAPTER FOUR

FOUR DAYS PASSED with Mariah sleeping almost constantly, regaining strength dissipated by the long journey and the hours of labor. And she was content, except when she was complaining. She could see William. He could be laid on her bed. She could stroke his head, kiss his fingers. But she couldn’t hold him because, Onatah explained, to hold him would be to draw more milk into her breasts.

She saw Spencer twice during that time, as he seemed to be avoiding her chamber, even as he used the separate door from the hallway to the dressing room to see his son. He could hold William and, irrational as she knew her feelings to be, she hated him for that.

On the fifth day, Mariah decided she’d had enough. Remain in bed for ten long days? What nonsense! She had given birth. Surely a natural process for a woman. And she felt fine. Well, as fine as anyone could possibly feel, being deprived of most fluids in order to keep the milk away, her breasts strapped tight to her—not to mention the layers of folded cloth between her legs as she continued to bleed, also something she had been told was perfectly natural.

Onatah and Odette had already come and gone, fussing over her, subjecting her to the indignity of washing her, just as if she couldn’t do such basic things for herself—it was an amazement to her that they let her clean her own teeth! William was back in his cradle, sleeping the sleep of the well fed; Sheila Whiting had gone back to her own baby.

Mariah was alone. Blessedly alone.

She pushed back the covers and swung herself into a sitting position, ignoring the fact that lying prone for five days could tend to make a person slightly dizzy when that person first attempted to stand up. She took a few deep, steadying breaths, then looked down at the floor, which seemed quite far away.

There was a knock at the door moments before it opened. “Damn it!”

“Mariah? Mariah, what are you doing?”

“Shh, Callie,” Mariah called quietly. “Come in here and close the door. Lock it, if necessary. I’m getting up. I’m getting up, I’m getting dressed and I’m going downstairs to see something besides these four very pretty but confining walls before I go stark, staring out of my mind. And it wouldn’t be quietly, I promise you.”

Callie closed the door and padded across the room to stand at the bottom of the bed. Such a petite, pretty child, all golden-brown curls and huge velvet-brown eyes over a small, pert nose and bee-stung mouth. An angel of a child. Except that, as Mariah had learned to her delight over the past days, Cassandra Becket had the heart of a warrior. And all the deviltry of a born mischief-maker.

“Odette won’t like this, you not obeying her orders. Everyone obeys Odette, you know, and is afraid to take a step wrong around her,” Callie pointed out and then grinned. “Should I get your clothing for you?”

“Would you?” Mariah asked, sliding off the mattress until her bare feet connected with the carpet. “Everything has been washed and pressed, thank God, not that there’s much I didn’t strain at the seams these past months.” She looked down at her belly beneath the voluminous white night rail. “Oh, would you look at me? Do you think there’s another babe still to come out? I still look as round as a dinner plate.”

Callie giggled. “Oh, you should have seen Morgan after the twins were born. Ethan called her his pumpkin, which earned him a shoe tossed at his head. Do you ride? Morgan was back on her horse before anyone could say differently and she swears it helped. I’ve always been a little plump, although it’s finally going away—Odette said it was baby fat. But I know how you feel. Not that I’d want to be all bones like Elly, but no one wants to have someone else shaking their head and tsk-tsking, just because you’ve reached for a second muffin.”

While Callie was chattering she was also opening drawers and cupboard doors, pulling out undergarments, hose, a yellow and white sprigged muslin gown that had been one of Mariah’s father’s favorites—and one of the few personal possessions she had insisted on dragging through the woods after the battle—and a pair of black kid slippers that, alas, had seen better days.

“Would you like anything else?” Callie asked. “I can turn my head, but it would probably be easier if I just helped you, don’t you think? I helped Morgan the day she sneaked out of bed. I think she lasted one more day than you, though.”

“Thank you.” Mariah believed she may have left her modesty somewhere, because she couldn’t seem to muster much at the moment, and began stripping out of her night rail, allowing it to drop to her feet, so that she stood there in her cloth-wrapped bosom, pantaloons that held the cloths between her legs in place, and not much else. “There are a multitude of indignities associated with giving birth, Callie,” she told her seriously, “beginning with the moment a woman you once thought to be perfectly rational kneels on the bed between your spread legs and shouts excitedly, ‘I can see the head! Push! Push!’”

Callie giggled again. “Morgan says she wouldn’t have cared if the whole world had been standing there watching while her bottom was bare, just as long as someone for God’s sake got that baby out of her. Of course, she had two babies in there. Morgan does nothing in half measures.”

“She won’t mind that I’ve been using her chamber?” Mariah asked as she began unwrapping the cloth binding her breasts and then sighed in blessed relief once it was gone, feeling as if she was now taking her first full breath in days. She cupped her bare breasts in her hands, rather marveling at a new heaviness, gained during the pregnancy, that hadn’t seemed to have abandoned her. “Oh, that feels so much better. Would you please hand me my shift?”

“Mariah, I thought I’d see how you—oh, bloody hell.”

Mariah looked toward the door to the dressing room, to see Spencer standing there, looking at her as if…well, she really didn’t want to consider what he might be thinking.

She grabbed at the shift Callie was holding and pressed it against her breasts. “Some people knock and then ask permission before entering a woman’s bedchamber, sir,” she said, hoping the tremor she heard in her voice wasn’t apparent to him. She wouldn’t even think of the way her nipples seemed to have tightened the moment she realized he had seen her bare breasts. She had never suckled William, but that night, that wild and insane night, Spencer Becket had fastened his fever-hot mouth to her as she’d given herself over to the moment—and the man.

Spencer was looking at the floor as if there might be something of great interest lying there. “Some people, madam, were supposed to remain in bed, resting. What in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Spence,” Callie said, rolling her eyes at Mariah. “She’s getting dressed. What did you think she was doing? Go away.”

As quickly as it had come, Spencer’s embarrassment left him. “No,” he said, raising his eyes to look at Mariah. “You leave, Callie. Now.”

“But, Spence, she’s not even dressed. I can’t, oh, for pity’s sake, don’t glower at me like that.” She looked apologetically at Mariah. “Ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she promised. Then she stomped past Spencer, glaring at him, and left the room.

Mariah turned her back to the man. “Are you always such a bully?” she asked, fumbling with the shift, trying to cover herself better even as she knew her back was bare to her waist.

“Probably, yes,” he said, reaching around her to take hold of the shift. He should have left the field, retreated, but not yet. Definitely not yet. “Here, let me help you.”

“No,” she protested, knowing that the bundled shift was all that covered her breasts. But he wasn’t listening to her or at least he wasn’t obeying her.

She couldn’t struggle or else his hand might slip. The shift might slip.

“Mariah, you just gave birth,” Spencer told her, his breath warm against her bare shoulder. “I’m not a monster.”

She closed her eyes, nodded. And let go of the shift.

“Ah, that’s better. Raise your arms, Mariah.”

She’d rather die. She felt so vulnerable. “Just…just drop it over my head, please. I can manage from there. And turn your back!”

Spencer smiled, then realized he was probably fortunate Mariah couldn’t see that smile. “Would turning my back come before or after I lower the shift over your head? After all, my aim might be off, and I’d end up dressing the bedpost.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! You’re perfectly useless, aren’t you? I’ll do it myself.” Keeping her right arm pressed across her bare breasts, she turned on him, grabbed the shift from his hands and then turned her back to him once more, struggling with her free hand to find the head-hole of the damned, uncooperative shift.

He didn’t know why he did what he did, even as he knew he was being, as so many told him, so often, impossible. Because what he did was perch himself on the side of the mattress, right next to Mariah, fold his arms and say with a grin, “Have at it, my dear. I’ll just watch.”

“I could cheerfully hate you,” Mariah told him honestly, then gave up all modesty in order to turn the shift about with both hands, locate the head-hole and finally drop the damnable thing over her head, shoving her arms into the armholes. And tug. Tug again. “It doesn’t fit. Did you open the buttons?”

Spencer looked at her, her head poking up from the bodice that seemed stuck halfway over her lush, full breasts. Even her arms were stuck. “I believe I’ve seen scarecrows in the field that look much as you do now, madam. But you’re correct. I do think I neglected to open all of the buttons. Would you like me to do that now?”

“No,” Mariah groused, knowing she must look exactly like a scarecrow, damn him. She was hot, she was frustrated, her hair was tumbling into her eyes, and if he didn’t help her she’d be stuck in this ignoble position until Callie came back into the room. “What I’d like is for you to go straight to hell, Spencer Becket.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, in any event,” Spencer said, pushing away from the bed and stepping behind her to open the last half dozen buttons on the shift, then giving the material a yank, settling the straps on her shoulders. “There, you’re decent now.”

“Not in my mind, I’m not,” Mariah told him honestly. “In my mind, I’m committing murder upon your person, in several unlovely and definitely painful ways. But as long as you’re here, now you may button me again. Please.”

“Ah. Please. How can I possibly refuse?”

Mariah stood still, fuming as he began buttoning the shift, from bottom to top. His fingers kept brushing against the skin of her back and for some reason that incidental contact—please let it be incidental—served to tighten her nipples, so that she felt her breasts to be actually straining against the material.

Which was nothing compared to the way her insides reacted when, finished with the buttons, he put his hands on her shoulders, then bent to lightly brush his lips against her nape. “Thank you, again, Mariah, for William.”

She whirled around to push him away, completely forgetting that she was still standing within the puddle of her night rail, and ended by crashing against his chest, her hands on his shoulders to support herself.

“My God,” Spencer said, his senses swimming as he looked at her; that swirl of living fire that was her hair, those bewitching green eyes. “How in bloody hell could I have forgotten you?”

“I…I don’t know. As you said, I took advantage of you,” Mariah said, closing her eyes as his hands slipped down to cup her waist. “Don’t…don’t do that.”

“We’re to be married,” he reminded her, his concentration centering on her full, slightly parted lips.

“And?” Mariah asked, arching one brow at him. “You sound as if you’re purchasing a horse. Pay the price, and I’m yours to…to do anything with?”

Spencer removed his hands, held them up at his sides in mock surrender. “Clearly we don’t know each other very well yet, do we? Will you feel better if I tell you that I don’t believe marriage makes you my possession?”

Mariah stepped out of the tangle of night rail and walked to where her robe hung over the back of a chair. “Yet you said I could leave, but William would stay. I think we should see this marriage for what it is, don’t you? It will be for William. As for anything else?” She slipped her arms into the robe and turned to face him, the material of the robe held tight over her breasts. “I should wish to be recovered from William’s birth before we even discuss the idea of marriage again.”

At the moment, Spencer believed he would agree to anything. His palms still burned from where they had made contact with Mariah’s soft skin, so pale beneath his tanned hands, and the mere thought of her creamy breasts, how she had seemed to be holding, weighing them in her cupped palms—as if offering them to him, or at least that’s how he’d always remember that sight—would probably haunt his nights. “You want time, Mariah. I understand that. How long?”

She shrugged, wondering how much time she could reasonably ask for without daring his refusal. “A month? Two?”

He nodded. “A compromise, then. Six weeks, Mariah. But we will be married.”

“For the child,” she reiterated.

“For whatever reasons may occur to us. The gutting me like a deer, Mariah, will remain negotiable,” he replied, and then turned his head as Callie knocked lightly on the door and then reentered the room. “Callie, help Mariah finish dressing, please.”

“You say that as if that wasn’t what I was doing when you first stumbled in here and sent me out of the room,” his sister reminded him. “Or have you forgotten that?”

Spencer rolled his eyes. “No wonder Court calls you his unholy terror,” he said before bowing to Mariah. “Don’t overtax yourself, madam. Good day.”

“I’ll be very careful, sir,” Mariah shot back at him. “Just as you will be careful to knock next time you come to visit, and then wait for my permission to enter my chamber.”

The door had slammed on Spencer’s back before the last words left Mariah’s mouth.

She looked at the closed door for a few moments and then at Callie. She raised her eyebrows.

Callie raised her own eyebrows.

The corners of their mouths twitched as their eyes danced.

And then the two of them laughed out loud.

“Did you see his face when he first came barging in here?” Callie said, wiping at her eyes as their laughter subsided. “I thought he was going to swallow his own tongue.”

“Well,” Mariah said, removing the robe, “I was standing there, holding on to myself, just as brazen as you please. Oh, Lord, Callie, what am I laughing at? He dressed me! I’m so embarrassed. Mortified. Quickly, help me on with my gown before I’m tempted to crawl back under the covers, never to show myself again. As it is, I’ll never be able to look at the man again.”

“I don’t know. He certainly was looking at you,” Callie said, helping Mariah into her gown. “Turn around and let me button this, if I can see the buttons through my tears. Mariah, I’m so glad you’re here. With Morgan gone, we’re so stodgy and boring these days. But I think that’s about to change.”

Mariah slipped into her shoes and walked across the large room to the dressing table where Onatah had laid out her brushes. She sat down in front of the three-piece mirror and fairly goggled at herself. Look at her hair! She looked like a wild woman. Why hadn’t Spencer run screaming from the room, convinced he’d been compromised into wedding a witch?

She picked up a brush and began attacking the mass of hair that fell well past her shoulders, waving so wildly that it was almost as if only half of her face could peek through to the world. Which might not be too terrible, if she didn’t want to look at Spencer. “It’s all so thick and heavy and a terrible nuisance. I should have Onatah just cut it all off,” she said as Callie picked up another brush and began working on the left side of Mariah’s head.

“Cut this beautiful hair? Are you mad? I’ve never seen hair this color. It’s so alive. It’s like…like a candle flame. I heard Spencer the other night when he thought I wasn’t listening. He was telling Rian that he remembered your hair. ‘Like fire in the sunlight,’he said. It’s not like Spence to be poetical.”

“It’s not?” Mariah asked, daring to open the drawers in the dressing table, then borrowing a dark green ribbon she discovered in one of them. She was so curious to learn more about the man who was to become her husband. “What is it like Spencer to be?”

“Angry,” Callie said, taking the ribbon and tying back Mariah’s hair in a thick tail at her nape. “He’s always angry. Papa says he’s got the passions of a hot-blooded man and chafes at the confines of Becket Hall, of how we live. There! Doesn’t that look pretty? Are you ready to go downstairs now, before Spencer finds Odette and tattles and you’re slapped back into bed?”

“Certainly,” Mariah said, rising to her feet and brushing down the front of her gown. “I’d like to go outside, if that’s possible. Breathe some sea air. The world should smell good after three days of storms.”

“Only if the Channel didn’t spit up something terrible from the bottom,” Callie told her, grinning. “We’ll use the front stairs. Odette never uses them, even though Papa told her she could. But he gave that up as a bad job years ago. Odette does what Odette does. She’s a mamba, you know. A real voodoo priestess. She’s taught me a lot, but says that I’m not a chosen one, so she won’t teach me more. Maybe she’ll teach you. She likes your hair, you see. Says it’s a sign from the good loa. Magical living flame. I wish I had magical living flame hair. Mine is just brown. So depressingly ordinary, and there’s so very much of it. If only it wouldn’t curl so, like a baby’s hair. I detest ringlets….”

Mariah let Callie chatter on as they walked and she examined her surroundings, as she’d been otherwise occupied the first time she’d entered the very large, impressive foyer of this huge house. Squire Franklin’s manor house had been the grandest dwelling she’d seen at home, and she’d lived in her share of small, cramped quarters, following her father to North America.

But Squire Franklin’s prideful possession paled in comparison to Becket Hall. Most anything would, she imagined. In fact, at least half of the Squire’s domicile would probably have fit comfortably in the foyer of Becket Hall.

They passed Edyth in the hallway, and Mariah asked if she would please sit with William for an hour. The woman’s smile was all the answer she’d needed to assure herself that the infant would be in good hands.

Odette had been kind enough to explain how Becket Hall was run, and the whole arrangement seemed very democratic. Almost American in the way everyone was free to do what he or she did best, and with responsibility placed on each person’s shoulders by that person him- or herself. Odette had also told her of the years of slavery in Haiti before the slaves had risen in their own version of the French Revolution and Ainsley Becket’s abhorrence for anything that even vaguely resembled forcing anyone to do anything.

Mariah would have thought that everyone would just lie about, doing nothing, yet Becket Hall was pristine, beautifully organized. And the maids, if they had to be given a title, sang as they worked.

Callie descended the wide, curving staircase slowly, looking back at Mariah every few steps, as if she might faint and topple on her, but then they were crossing the wide foyer and Callie’s slim shoulders seemed to relax.

“Papa is in his study most days at this time, reading all of the London newspapers that he has shipped to him, and everyone else is out and about somewhere—and Spence is probably hiding his head somewhere in shame. Do you want to see the drawing room first?”

“You seem to be enjoying your brother’s discomfort,” Mariah pointed out, smiling.

“Oh, yes, definitely. It’s lovely to not be the one Odette will be giving the hairy eyeball for this once. That’s what Rian calls the way Odette looks at us—the hairy eyeball. I have no idea what that means. Well, here’s the drawing room. You probably didn’t notice much of anything the night you arrived here.”

The furniture in the main drawing room was massive, much of it, Mariah believed, Spanish—she’d once seen a book of drawings on such things. The ceilings soared, the windows rose from the floor to nearly touch those high ceilings and the fabrics that covered those windows and the multitude of furniture in the drawing room were of sumptuous silks and vibrant brocades. She strained to take in the fine artwork hanging on pale, stuccoed walls and to count all the many vases of exotic flowers and acres of fine Turkish carpets spread out over gleaming wooden floors the color of dried cherries.

“All these flowers,” she said, cupping one perfect pink bloom in her palm.

Callie nodded. “We have a conservatory and Papa is always adding new flowers and plants he has shipped here. But it’s Jacko who cares for them. I’ll show it to you later, if Jacko says it’s all right. He’s very possessive of his babies. Not that he calls the flowers his babies, but that’s what Rian says.”

“Then I’ll wait for his permission,” Mariah said, continuing her examination of the large room.

None of the four immense crystal chandeliers, each hanging from a different coffered area of the ornate ceiling, had been lit, as all the draperies had been thrown back so that only sheer ivory silk panels with fleur-de-lis woven into them covered the windows that poured with sunlight.

One enormous glass-fronted cabinet placed between two of the windows displayed a collection of jade that was probably worth a king’s ransom. The far wall—it was very far away in this large room—actually had a highly ornamental black metal grille hanging on it, the entire piece nearly the size of a barn door. And yet it didn’t overpower the other furnishings. Little could.