The Sherbrooke Bride - Catherine Coulter [65]
“No you won’t. I have thirty pounds with me. I have saved that amount over the past four years.”
“Thirty pounds! Ha! That would replace a chamber pot or two, not a carpet of value.”
“Perhaps it can be cleaned.”
Douglas looked over at the ruined carpet, its exquisite pattern black as soot. “Yes, and perhaps one of Napoleon’s ministers will throw a cake in his face.”
“Anything is possible.”
“You’re too young to realize that idiots continue to survive in this world. Go back to sleep. You are absurdly confident and it is annoying.”
So much for making her a happy woman, Douglas thought as he marched back into his bedchamber. How could she act so spitefully? What the devil was the matter with her? He’d been the perfect gentleman, the devil, he’d probably saved her life with the fine care he’d given her and what was his reward? She hated him. She told him to leave her alone. She destroyed one of his grandmother’s favorite carpets.
Douglas fell asleep with the acrid taste of anger on his tongue.
It was Friday morning. Alexandra ordered Tess to dress her after she’d bathed. She still felt a bit weak, but nothing she couldn’t deal with. It was time for her to leave. She was buoyed by righteous resolve and she prayed it would last until she was gone from Northcliffe Hall.
He’d rejected her. He’d treated her as if she were naught but a bothersome gnat, a sexless encumbrance.
She’d destroyed his grandmother’s lovely rug.
He’d laughed at her thirty pounds. He had no idea how difficult it had been to accumulate that thirty pounds, penny by penny, hoarding it.
Not only had he rejected her when she’d been fool enough to attempt the disastrous seduction, he’d only cared for her because there’d been no choice.
It was a litany in her mind. It was something she would never forget. She stoked anger and resentment because it was better than the annihilating pain of his disinterest in her, his distaste of her.
She had failed, utterly, to win him over, to show him that she could suit him nicely, that she could and would love him until the day she passed from this earth. What had he meant about giving her an allowance? She quashed that inquiry; he’d not meant anything.
He still wanted Melissande. Everyone knew that he still wanted his cousin’s wife. He still spoke of butchering Tony on the field of honor though nothing had come of it yet. Alexandra had heard the servants gossiping about it. Ah, and how they speculated and wondered.
Douglas hadn’t come near her again after their one skirmish at dawn. She was glad of it. Her sister had visited twice, both times standing a good ten feet away from her and looking delicately pale in her concern. Alexandra had remembered Tony’s kiss during her sister’s second visit, and said, “You appear to like having Tony kiss you.”
To her surprise, Melissande lowered her head and mumbled, “He is most outrageous sometimes. I cannot always control him. It is difficult to know what to do.”
Control, ha! Melissande had met her match. “But you seem to like it.”
“You don’t know, Alex! You can’t imagine what he does to me—to my person!”
“Tell me then.”
“So, the earl hasn’t bedded you. Tony rather hoped that he had. It would make it all so very legal then and we could leave and go to London.”
“No, it wouldn’t make it legal at all. Douglas said he could do just as he pleased to me, and our marriage could still be annulled.”
“But if you got pregnant—”
“Douglas said that he can easily prevent that.”
“Oh,” said Melissande, who was now frowning ferociously. “But Tony insisted that—” She broke off, and her glorious eyes were narrowed slits, diminishing her beauty but making her all the more enticing for it.
“But what does Tony do to you?”
Melissande waved an impatient hand. “It isn’t proper that I tell you what goes on. Tony is a madman and he insists upon ordering me about and then he does things that he really shouldn’t do but the way