The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(51)

Julien





—

Lucette refused her siblings’ offers to ride with her to Compton Wynyates. But she could not refuse Anabel’s insistence on a detachment of guards to accompany her, so it was with three dozen armed men that Lucette returned to the home of her married life. There was perhaps no prettier aspect in England than the one revealed as she crested the hill and looked down at her home. Red brick, tall chimneys, dormer windows, and decorative castellations—she had not realized how attached she had grown to this spot until now.

An outrider had gone ahead to warn the house, so it was not a surprise to find people waiting as she rode through the arched entry into the courtyard. She would always notice her husband first—most people would, for he was taller than almost anyone she’d ever met and he was far too attractive for his own good. He was already moving when she saw him, and by the time she reined in her horse, Julien stood ready at her side.

“Welcome home, Lucie mine,” he said softly enough that only she could hear. She reached for his waiting hands, and he not so much lifted her down as pulled her into his arms.

The reprieve lasted only a moment, for there were others watching. Most noticeably Felix. Who wasn’t watching so much as glowering. Though the boy did not much resemble his uncle, the forbidding expression he turned on her now was one with which Lucette had grown familiar during the months she fell in love with Julien.

She didn’t think Felix’s glowering betokened the same end.

Julien dropped his hands and allowed Lucette to walk ahead of him to the boy, who now topped her by more than an inch. “Felix, how is it possible that you have grown again in so short a space?” she asked.

His face was blankly polite. “Madame.”

At her side, Julien asked sharply, “Is that how you speak to your aunt?”

In tight and careful English, Felix replied, “Charlotte is my aunt. This is how I speak to the woman who pretended to love my father only to betray him.”

“Felix!” Julien’s hand shot out to grab the boy, but he whirled and left in a not entirely dignified escape.

Lucette stopped Julien when he made to follow. “Let him go. It is for Felix and me to work this out between us.”

For though his face had been expressionless, his eyes had not. They were the eyes of a boy, in some ways still a child, who had lost mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and was stranded now in a foreign country. With the uncle he’d worshipped—before he’d murdered the boy’s father. And with his uncle’s wife, who had once agreed to become Felix’s stepmother.

What a mess Nicolas LeClerc had made, of more lives than his own.

Not that she could claim to be doing much better at the moment. But in her time apart from Julien, Lucette had done a lot of thinking.

As though his mind marched with hers in every thought, Julien said, “And us? Are we to work this out between us?”

“We should withdraw. I do not think it a conversation for the courtyard.”

Julien would likely have retreated to the library or a similar neutral space. But it was Lucette who chose, and she led him straight to their private chambers. She faced him in the small and elegant reception room, very aware of the bed looming behind the doors to her right.

She did not bother to sit. “It has been almost ten months now, Julien.”

“I know it. To the day.”

“So tell me—what happens two months from now?”

His voice tinged with cautious amusement, Julien said, “That feels like a trick question.”

“In two months, with the approval of the physicians we have agreed to heed—or you, at least, have agreed to heed—we resume the fullness of our marriage. Unless,” she asked stingingly, “these months of marital celibacy have inclined you to look elsewhere?”

His face darkened and she was glad of it. Glad to rouse any emotion in him at all, even fury.

“I’ll assume that is a no,” she conceded. “Then you will be eager, no doubt, to have release once more. And then what? What if I once again fall pregnant and once again lose the child? What if the cycle continues on and on? Must we spend the next twenty years in either feast or famine?”

“Better that than to lose you.”

“I have no wish to die, Julien, believe me. But I cannot live like this. Can you? Are you so resigned to long periods of absolute celibacy?”

She read the answer in the tightening of his shoulders and the way his eyes slanted away from hers. “What do you want from me, Lucie? It is your life.”

“Yes, it is my life! So I should have some say in how it is lived. What do I want? I want this! Talk to me—tease me—argue with me—touch me. I will not break.”

“Not from a touch.”

“Are you so afraid of losing control? I trust you, Julien. It need not be all or nothing. Neither of us wants to refer to Nicolas, but surely we have both considered the same thing. I have been a wife long enough now to have a very good idea of what your brother once offered me as a husband.”

Nicolas, who had been not only vicious and twisted and murderous—but who had been castrated just before the birth of his only son.

Of course there would be affection and even—how do I say this delicately?—pleasure. There is more than one way for men and women to experience pleasure. So Nicolas had said when he’d asked Lucette to marry him. And if Lucette had only been able to guess at some of those ways then, she had much clearer ideas now.