The Sherbrooke Bride - Catherine Coulter [34]
It was just that this room was so very cold and empty, much more empty than before Douglas had come home.
She snuffed out the candle and climbed into the bed, shivering violently between the cold sheets. She wondered if she would remain in this room for the rest of her years. For the moment, she had lost a goodly portion of her optimism about this marriage. Was Melissande right? Would Douglas ignore her or treat her badly?
She wasn’t even a marriage of convenience, for Douglas Sherbrooke had paid dearly for her. Actually, he had paid dearly for Melissande and he had gotten her instead. And she hadn’t brought him anything at all.
Tony had spent hours telling her about Douglas, reassuring her, reeling off anecdotes at a fine rate. She knew all his questions to her were to judge whether or not she was worthy of his esteemed cousin. At least she’d passed Tony’s tests. He wanted her for a cousin-in-law, he said, and when she said she was already a sister-in-law, he’d gotten that gleam in his eyes that Melissande seemed to adore, and said, “Ah, then I shall have you so deep in my family that you’ll never escape.” Again and again he’d said Douglas didn’t love Melissande, that she was merely a quite beautiful convenience for him, that he didn’t know her at all, and would have been horrified to have found himself married to her, then hastened to add that he, Tony, most certainly did know her, but it didn’t matter because he was him and not Douglas. All quite confusing, really.
So Douglas Sherbrooke didn’t love Melissande. Ha! So now he was wedded to an unbeautiful convenience and he didn’t love her either.
Alexandra burrowed deeper into the sheets, seeing her husband bursting into the bedchamber. She hadn’t seen him for three long years. During the past two days she’d wondered if he’d changed, grown fat, perhaps, or lost his hair or his teeth, and then he’d appeared and she’d only been able to stand there gaping at him, utterly witless. He looked older, she’d thought, staring at him, a hard-faced man with dark hair and eyes even darker and a high-bridged nose that made him look utterly superior, utterly arrogant. As if to ruin the image of centuries of noblesse oblige, nature had added a cleft in the middle of his chin. Ah, but he was beautiful, this man who was now her husband, his body as lean and hard as his expression was severe, the most exquisite man she’d ever imagined.
Oddly enough though, Alexandra hadn’t realized she loved him completely and utterly, with every ounce of feeling within her, until he’d thrown his head back, yowled like a madman, and flung himself at his cousin.
He was the man she wanted. Her natural optimism surfaced a bit. It will be all right, she repeated to herself yet again. She was still awake many hours later when she heard him moving about in the bedchamber next to hers.
And what, she wondered, would happen on the morrow?
CHAPTER
7
“WHAT THE HELL are you doing here?”
It was seven o’clock in the morning, surely too early an hour for him to be here, in this precise spot, in the vast Sherbrooke stable. It was foggy, damp, and cloudy—all in all a dismal morning, a morning to match her mood and his too, evidently. The light was dim inside the stable and none of the half-dozen stable lads were about. The smells were comforting—hay, linseed, leather, and horse. Douglas was wearing buckskins, a dark brown coat, and Hessians that sorely needed polish. He looked tired, unshaved, tousled, and vastly irritated. To an objective person he would perhaps appear an ill-tempered dirty-looking brute. To her jaundiced eye, however, he looked immensely