Eloise pushed him away, blindly heading to the anteroom outside the ballroom. George followed her as she walked into a salon off the hallway. Tears were streaming down her face. George’s heart twisted; he’d never seen his wife cry like this.

He took her hands. “What is it, dear heart?”

Eloise sobbed again. “You don’t understand…. She’s all I’ve got!”

George stilled, and for a heartbeat there was no sound in the room but that of his wife’s weeping. Then he pulled her slim body into his arms, tucking her head against his chest.

“You’ve got me, Eloise.”

When his wife, still weeping, simply shook her head, he said it again. “You have me, Eloise. You always had me.”

But it wasn’t until Eloise raised her head and looked at him, eyes drenched with tears, that she understood what he was saying.

When she opened her mouth to reply, George’s mouth closed on hers, stopping any protest. He kissed her into silence, and then said, his voice husky with passionate longing, “Take me back, Eloise. Please, take me back.”

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Sophie awoke in a daze. She had been sleeping, deep in bottomless exhaustion, when something gently threw her against—against what? Her bed was rocking slightly, accompanied by the roll and slap of waves. Her nose was buried in fine sheets that smelled of lemon, but the perfume was overlaid with the keen scent of salt-laden air.

She turned over and opened her eyes. High above her were the arched carvings of Patrick’s bed. The bed was set into one end of the most luxurious sea cabin she had ever seen, or rather ever imagined, given that she’d never been inside a boat before the preceding evening. Patrick had bought the bed in India. From the outside, it looked like a box, with a curved top and one open side marked by pillars ringed with carved flowers. The innumerable small carved flowers had been painted crimson; they spiraled up the pillars and rioted exuberantly on the curved roof of the bed. For a moment or two Sophie traced their intricate byways. A marriage bed, she remembered drowsily.

Then she forgot all about the flowers. There, next to her, was a muscled brown arm. Because in a marriage bed one consummates a marriage, and to consummate a marriage, one needs a husband, and … there he was. Sophie choked back a giggle. Patrick was lying on his stomach, his face turned away from her. All she could see of his head was a silky mop of silver-streaked black curls. He didn’t seem to be wearing any clothing. Sophie colored, suddenly finding that she wasn’t wearing a nightdress either.

Images of the night before poured from the recesses of her memory, bringing with them a strange glowing heat that settled in her stomach and the backs of her knees.