The Sherbrooke Bride by Catherine Coulter Page B

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?”
    â€œBecause 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.”
    â€œBut you did it right along with him!”
    â€œTony is a man; it is his responsibility.”
    â€œThat’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 slept together if they wished to have children, that this was the bed where a child would be conceived. She didn’t understand the process, but the thought of not wearing her clothing in front of a man made her brain clog and close down. Hollis, bless his astute soul, had said calmly, “I believe it wise to allow some time for His Lordship to accustom himself. You must be recognized as a wife, my lady, before you can be recognized as the Sherbrooke bride.”
    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, forDouglas 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