Something Wonderful Read online

  The ploy was both obvious and futile. “In that case, we’ll both skip supper and go straight to bed,” Jordan countered patiently, but implacably.

  “I assumed you would at least grant me a night’s rest after our journey!”

  “No welshing on your bet, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t call me that, my lord,” she warned.

  “Jordan,” he corrected.

  “Here they come,” Gibbons chortled to Smarth, peering excitedly around the shoulder of the gamekeeper who was blocking their view. “I can’t wait to see Miss Alexandra’s face, now the master is back,” he said, echoing the thoughts of most of Hawthorne’s staff, who were aware of her heartwrenching devotion to Jordan when she believed him dead.

  “She’ll be happy as a songbird,” agreed Mrs. Brimley, the housekeeper, craning her neck.

  “She’ll be glowin’ with happiness, shinin’ like a—” Gibbons broke off, stunned, as Alexandra swept past them with an expression on her face that could best be described as thoroughly irate. “Well, I’ll be . . .” he breathed, turning his bewildered face first to Smarth and then to Mrs. Brimley.

  * * *

  Alexandra ate in uneasy silence across the candlelit table from Jordan. “The wine doesn’t suit you?” he asked.

  Alexandra startled at the sound of his deep voice and her spoon clattered against the fragile Sèvres china bowl. “I—I don’t care for port, your grace.”

  “Jordan,” he reminded her.

  Alexandra swallowed, unable to force his name past her lips. She glanced at the plump red strawberries in her bowl and set her spoon down, her stomach churning with tension over what she knew would be happening to her an hour from now.

  “You’ve scarcely eaten a bite,” Jordan observed, his deep voice husky.

  Suffocated by what she regarded as his deliberate, unprecedented efforts to charm and disarm her, Alexandra shook her head. “I’m not very hungry.”

  “In that case,” he said, laying his napkin aside, “shall we retire, my dear?” A footman stepped forward to pull his chair back, and Alexandra snatched up her fork. “I believe I could eat some of the pheasant,” she said hastily.

  Jordan politely placed his napkin back in his lap, but she could have sworn his eyes gleamed with laughter.

  Stalling for time, Alexandra made a positive production of dissecting the succulent slice of pheasant she was given into precise, bite-sized rectangles and of chewing each small rectangle until it was nearly liquefied. When the last geometric shape disappeared from her plate and she put down her fork, Jordan quirked a questioning brow at her, asking if she was finished.

  Alexandra’s panicked gaze flew to the nearest footman. “I—I would enjoy some of cook’s delicious asparagus now,” she desperately announced, and this time there was no denying the smile that quirked Jordan’s lips. She followed the asparagus with a small helping of peas in cream sauce, pork stuffed with apples, lobster in a pastry shell, and then blueberries.

  When she asked for the blueberries, Jordan didn’t bother trying to hide his amusement. Lounging back in his chair, he watched her valiant struggle to swallow every last blueberry, a smile playing about his sensual mouth.

  Carefully avoiding his eyes, Alexandra managed to finish the blueberries, but when she was done, her stomach was churning in protest against so much food.

  “Something more to fortify you, my sweet?” Jordan suggested helpfully. “Some chocolate cake?”

  The mention of dessert made her shudder and she hastily shook her head.

  “Beef in wine sauce?”

  Alexandra swallowed and whispered, “No, thank you.”

  “A litter, perhaps?” he offered, grinning wickedly, “to carry you upstairs?”

  Before she could answer, he purposefully laid his napkin aside and rose, coming around the table to help her up. “If you continue to eat like that,” he remarked teasingly as they walked up the long, curving staircase, “you’ll soon be too fat to climb these stairs. I shall have to install a winch and cargo net to lift you up and over the balcony.”

  Under different circumstances, Alexandra would have laughed at his joke, but tonight tension and acute selfconsciousness had strangled her sense of humor. She realized he was trying to put her at ease but she could hardly be grateful when it was his fault she was so uneasy in the first place. Moreover, she couldn’t understand how he could be so unembarrassed about what they were about to do. Then she recollected his reputation as a womanizer and realized that he could hardly be embarrassed or uneasy about something he’d done hundreds of times with dozens of women!

  An hour later, Jordan opened the connecting door between their suites of rooms and walked into hers, then stopped short, staring in angry disbelief at the bed. The curtains were pulled back and the pale blue satin coverlet was turned back invitingly, displaying cream silk sheets, but Alexandra was not between them.

  He swung around, fully prepared to have every nook and cranny of Hawthorne searched tonight, and then he saw her—standing at the opposite side of the immense room, staring out the mullioned windows into the darkness, her arms wrapped around her as if she were cold. Or afraid. Relief replaced his anger as he approached her, his footsteps muffled by the thick Aubusson carpet, his eyes roving appreciatively over the enticing vision she created. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders in molten waves, and her skin above the low bodice of her white satin gown gleamed in the candlelight.

  She swung around when he came up behind her and she saw his reflection in the window glass. Jordan stretched his hand out, gently running it down her shining hair, and anger flashed in her eyes but she did not pull away. Her hair felt like satin in his hand. “So,” he said, voicing his thoughts aloud and smiling into her angry eyes, “my little sparrow turned into a beautiful swan.”

  “Empty compliments from—”

  “With teeth,” Jordan amended, grinning.

  Before she could react, he leaned down and swept her up into his arms.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded as he strode past her bed.

  “To my bed,” he whispered, nuzzling her neck. “It’s bigger.” A bank of candles burned on the mantel at the far end of the room, casting a mellow glow into the shadows. Jordan stepped up onto the huge dais that supported his bed and slowly lowered Alexandra to the floor, enjoying the exquisite sensation of her legs sliding down his. But when he lifted his head and looked into her eyes, something in those huge blue orbs—or perhaps it was the rapid shallow breaths she was taking—finally made him realize that Alexandra was not angry. She was frightened.

  “Alexandra?” he asked gently, feeling her tremble when he ran his hands up her arms beneath the satin-and-lace sleeves of her dressing gown. “You’re trembling. Are you afraid?”

  Unable to force a word out, Alexandra gazed up at the tall, daunting, virile man who was about to do all manner of intimate things to her naked body. She nodded.

  With a tender smile, Jordan gently smoothed her hair back off her pale cheek. “It won’t hurt you this time, I promise.”

  “It isn’t that!” Alexandra burst out as his hands slid down to the ribbon at her breasts. She clamped her hands over his fingers, her voice strained and rushed as she tried to plead for time. “You don’t understand! I don’t even know you.”

  “You ‘know’ me in the most biblical sense of the word, my sweet,” Jordan teased huskily.

  “But—but it’s been so long . . .”

  Lifting his head, Jordan looked searchingly into her eyes. “Has it?” he asked softly, while an amazing tide of relief swept through him. Based on the accounts of her behavior during the last three months and on his own knowledge of the relaxed morals of the married women in his set, he had been afraid to let himself hope she had known no other men and adamantly unwilling to face the fact that she might well have done so. But there was no mistaking the embarrassed innocence in her eyes as she nodded, and his heart warmed with the certainty that his intoxicatingly lovely wife wa