beyond, but up the doglegged stairs behind the main door. Tate had warned him the house was old; Max narrowly avoided banging his head on the low ceiling as he climbed the stairs.
A broad corridor stretched in front of him, two doors to the left and two to the right. A massive chest sat between the doors on his left, beneath a large portrait of a family from some decades ago. As he took it in, a maid popped out of a disguised door at the far end, an ewer in her hands. She gave a startled gasp and bobbed a quick curtsy at the sight of him. Max nodded once, and she hurried through the door at the near right.
Candlelight shone across the dark planks of the floor in the corridor, glinting off the sconces on the wall. Female voices spilled out, including one Max identified immediately as Bianca’s.
How he knew this with such certainty, he couldn’t say. He’d never heard the maid speak. But somehow he knew it was she, in her bedroom, preparing for bed, and his feet led him there without any decision by his brain to go.
She sat at a dressing table, her back to him as she ran a brush through her hair. The maid was emptying the ewer into the basin in the corner, relating something about a pig in an animated voice.
Max folded his arms and rested his shoulder against the doorjamb. Bianca was smiling as she brushed and plaited her hair, listening to the maid’s silly story. He could see it in the small mirror in front of her. In the light of the lamp on her dressing table, her hair glowed with amber glints. Each stroke of the brush made the long, loose curls bounce.
Another homelike moment. His house. His wife.
She turned toward the maid then, caught sight of him, and promptly burst that thought like an errant bubble of soap. Stiffening in her seat, she gave him a frigid glare. “Did you want something, Mr. St. James?”
“To wish you a good evening, dear wife,” he returned. The maid whirled to stare at him, clutching the ewer in both hands, her mouth hanging open. “You may go,” he told her, stepping aside as she scurried out of the room. He closed the door behind her and faced his bride.
He’d spent the day with Tate in the pottery offices, reviewing the marriage contract and concluding all the business related to it. A piece of his brain, though, had been working away all day at the question of Bianca. Things had not begun well between them, and Max was quite sure he would have to make the first effort if he wanted their relationship to improve. But he also sensed that any appearance of craving her good opinion would only inspire contempt, not the amiable regard he wanted.
Nor, it must be admitted, the physical desire he craved. He wanted her, and he wanted her to want him.
Bianca wound a strip of linen around the end of her braid and tied it. “There was no need to frighten off Jennie.”
“Did I frighten her?” He affected surprise. “If I did, she takes fright very easily. Might as well get it over and done with, I suppose.”
“None of us here know you,” she replied. She rose from her seat and tugged the ties of her dressing gown tighter. “Nor you, us.”
“Ah. Yes. That will change.” He clasped his hands behind his back and strolled toward her. She watched him, her expression calm if a shade condescending. “We are married, after all, until death shall us part.”
“Well.” She smiled sweetly, looking coy and mischievous for a moment. Max’s sangfroid faltered. She was rather . . . bewitching like that. “At least there is an end in sight.”
He laughed. “No, really? I was counting on another forty years or more.”
“And I’ve already begun counting them down,” she replied as if struck by delight at the coincidence. “What do you want?”
He lowered his gaze at that question. “What any husband might want, with his new wife.” Idly he picked up one of the delicate little pots from her dressing table and opened it. “To become closer acquainted.”
She made a sound like a faint snort. “It will take very little effort for that, since we aren’t acquainted at all.”
“And yet, we aren’t entirely strangers, either.” The pot was crafted to look like a ripe plum, deep pinkish-purple with a pert pair of leaves on a stem forming the handle