“I will sleep in there,” she announced. “And there I will sleep every night henceforth. I will not spend Christmas with your mistress. Bad enough I must know of her.”
“My ex-mistress,” he said through clenched teeth. “My one time, a long-time-ago mistress, and I wish no one had ever told you about her. She is entirely respectable now.”
“Unlike your other ex-mistresses?” she asked sweetly.
“I was not aware you wanted a husband straight from a monastery.”
“I wanted one with a bit of discretion. I think it is the outside of enough that you still wish to share your holidays with her. And God knows what else.”
“Only the holiday,” he said with outsized patience. “She has not been anything but a friend to me for over a decade. So why are you distressed? A decade ago you were too young for my attentions,” he added with a faint, amused smile.
“I wonder if I am not still too young for you now,” she said, just to erase that supercilious smile, “or at least not jaded enough to appreciate your dissolute ways.”
“You did not think so last night.”
She flushed. “I did not know you were planning to run to your mistress for the holidays then.”
“I am not running to her,” he said in bored tones. “We will take the traveling coach and arrive in slow and splendid style. Come, what is your real objection?”
“My real objection?” she asked, incredulous. “Apart from the fact that I wanted to be with my family, aside from the fact that I never said yes to your plan? Or that I wonder how you can want to take your new wife to celebrate Christmas, of all holidays, with a woman you used to make love to? Or that I am aghast at the thought that you can wish to sit at a holiday table beside two women you have bedded? Do you want to compare how we each responded to your touch, your kisses? I find that . . . loathsome.”
He sat frozen. Before he could answer, she went on, unsuccessfully trying to keep her voice from breaking. “I don’t understand you or that set of your friends, my lord. I thought you’d be done with such when we married. But to go to a house party with such people! From what I hear, half of them will spend half their nights in the wrong beds; the other half will spend the next day making jokes about it. That is not my idea of Christmas.”
“Well,” he said in a hard, cold voice, “there you are. You obviously don’t understand, and clearly pay undiscriminating attention to foolish gossip as well. We are not going to an orgy. They are just my friends. That is all I am to Marianna Fanshawe now. And no, I do not compare—the very idea is repellent. I would never have thought of doing so. Ten years is an eternity.” He added, very much on his highest ropes, “The thought of such comparisons or activities is absurd. I am looking forward to intelligent conversation with old friends, and thought you might like to get to know some of the kingdom’s finest minds.”
“And bodies?” she asked sweetly.
“I would not have married you if I wished to share you,” he said icily. Seeing her hesitate, he added, “I thought you’d enjoy it. Yet here you are, acting like an outraged virgin invited to a Roman revel. At least I considered your feelings. I wonder if you considered mine at all? You think passing the holidays in a merry round of sticky sweets and stickier infants, discussing the childhood colics of all your assorted nieces and nephews, as well as rehashing all the childhood pranks of your brothers and sisters, would be ‘great fun,’ as you described it, for me?”
She sucked in a harsh breath. “I tell you what,” she said, holding her head even higher so the tears wouldn’t slide down her cheeks to betray her. “You go to her for Christmas, and make merry, or whatever else you want to make with her. And I will go home.”
“This is your home,” he said, but she slammed the dressing-room door behind her, and he wasn’t sure she heard him.
He was sure he was cold, though, through and through, body and soul. She’d taken more than the coverlet with her.
He looked down at his toes. They looked very foolish sticking up, big, and bare, and doubtless turning blue. He probably looked like a fool altogether, he thought bitterly, lying on a big empty bed in nothing but a thin dressing gown on this cold December night. He’d been planning to surprise her the moment she got into bed by shucking out of his dressing gown and taking her in his arms so they could set fire to the night. She’d turned the tables on him, carrying on like a fishwife cheated of a penny. His soft-spoken shy bride? He never knew she could screech like a murdered cat.