The Sherbrooke Bride - Catherine Coulter [33]
“Are you palpitating?”
“No, don’t be silly. What does that mean?”
Alexandra only shook her head. Nastiness toward the bone of contention between the two men was unworthy. “He told me to go to bed,” she said, forcing all emotion from her voice.
“You knew this would happen, Alex. I warned you; I warned Father, but he talked you into going along with him. I warned Tony. All of you knew that Douglas wanted me desperately, not you. How could he ever want you or any other lady once he’d seen me? He doesn’t even remember you, does he?”
Alexandra shook her head.
“It isn’t that I mind you being a countess, Alex, though you certainly won’t be happy being one. If your husband hates you, if he can’t bear to look at you, if he leaves the room when you enter, how then can you be happy? No, I’m the one who should be a duchess or a countess, but here I am only a viscountess. But it is what I chose, isn’t it? I chose Tony and he had no choice once I’d chosen him. Poor Alex! Poor Douglas! Are you certain Douglas isn’t trying to kill Tony again?”
“Hollis will control both of them.”
“A butler giving the orders,” Melissande said. “I wouldn’t stand for it were I mistress here. It is beyond strange.”
“Yes,” Alexandra said as she passed by her sister. She said over her shoulder, very quietly, “He wants you, of course, you’re quite right about that. He probably will always want you.”
Melissande smiled. “I told Tony the earl wouldn’t forgive him. I told him, yet he chose to disbelieve me. I have found that men do not always accept the truth even when it is presented to them with sincerity and candor. They always believe they can rearrange things to suit themselves.” Melissande paused a moment, then marred her lovely forehead with a deep frown. “I begin to think now that perhaps I made a mistake. Tony isn’t the man I married. He wants to order me about, to treat me like a possession. He even told me he wasn’t the gentleman Douglas was. He actually wanted to take liberties with my person in a carriage, Alex, in broad daylight, and not an hour from Claybourn Hall! Can you believe that? I couldn’t allow such a monstrous sort of man-behavior. Perhaps Douglas isn’t so indelicate, so uncaring, about a lady’s sensibilities. Yes, I probably made a mistake. Why, do you know that he threatened to—” Melissande closed her mouth over further illuminations.
Alex stared in dismay at her sister. Melissande was now regretting marrying Tony? But how could that be? Tony certainly teased her, mocking her, but Melissande appeared to find this to her liking. Oh Lord. There were already too many untold ingredients in the pot. “Then why did you attack Douglas?”
“Because you had attacked Tony,” Melissande said matter-of-factly. “It seemed the thing to do. Before Tony went downstairs to speak again with Douglas, he hugged me and told me next he would send me a dragon to slay. It pleased him that I acted the hoyden, that I yelled and nearly pulled out Douglas’s hair. It is all very strange. He is quite unaccountable. Men are quite unaccountable.”
Alexandra could only stare at her sister. “Tony will make things right with Douglas. The two of them are very close. Hollis said so.”
Melissande shrugged. “I think Tony should suffer for what he did.”
“But you did it right along with him!”
“Tony is a man; it is his responsibility.”
“That’s drivel,” Alexandra said, and left her sister at the top of the stairs, peeking over the railing. She walked quickly down the long eastern corridor whose walls were lined with portraits of past Sherbrookes, many of whose faces and costumes sorely needed restoration. She went into the adjoining bedchamber and stood in the middle of the room, shivering. The bed was much smaller and shorter than the one in the master bedchamber. Alexandra supposed that since she was small and short, it didn’t matter.
She remembered when Hollis had shown her through the master suite and she’d stood there and just stared at that huge bed, realizing for the first time that husbands and wives sometimes