Carys stopped dead just inside the doorway. The walls of this room were darker, a more masculine, forest-green version of the suite next door. But whereas the other bedrooms had been devoid of furniture, this room was dominated by a beautiful four-poster bed that had been placed right in the center of the floor.
It wasn’t one of the dark, heavily carved oak ones usually found in English homes, nor one of the overdecorated gilt monstrosities, encrusted with carved putti and scalloped shells. Four slim wooden pillars rose to support a square canopy designed to look like a classical Roman pediment. The painted style was neither overtly masculine nor feminine, just elegant and austere.
So perfectly Tristan.
There were no curtains, just a swathe of cream silk gathered in pleats on the underside of the canopy. A mattress, clearly new from the pristine white of the ticking, had been placed on the frame.
“Ah, it’s here,” Tristan said, pleasure in his voice. “I ordered this directly from a workshop in Siena.”
His big body was close behind her in the doorway. His woodsy scent teased her nose, and something hot and wicked twisted her belly.
This would be Tristan’s bedroom. He would sleep there, in that bed.
He’d probably be naked.
He probably wouldn’t be alone.
A shaft of something that was almost pain pierced her chest. Green: the color of envy.
“I need some air.”
She dashed for the door on her right, which thankfully opened back onto the corridor. Tristan’s boot heels clicked a rapid tattoo behind her as she hurried down the stairs.
“Carys, wait!”
An open door led to the back of the house. She stepped through it and took the few precious moments before Tristan arrived to gather her wits. By the time he joined her at the edge of the terrace she’d regained her composure.
“Are you all right?”
She sent him a breezy smile and ignored the reckless, angry ferment simmering inside her. “Oh, yes. I was just feeling a little wheezy, that’s all. It must have been the sawdust.” She feigned a delicate cough. “I’m fine now.”
She’d rather be burned at the stake than admit that the unexpected sight of his bedroom had almost undone her. She really could have done without that knowledge. It was bad enough fantasizing about him in bed at night using only her imagination. Now she’d be able to picture the exact setting.
With somebody else in his arms.
Ugh.
Tristan, thankfully, seemed to take her assurance at face value. He turned back to the house and gazed up at it.
“So, what do you think, now you’ve seen the inside?”
I think you should repaper your master suite and never tell me the color.
No, she couldn’t say that. Still, the thought of him making love to another woman in that bed made her want to punish him, just a little.
“Honestly? It’s beautiful, but a little … cold.” His brows lowered, but she forged on. “It needs life. Personality.”
“I’ll admit it’s a bit empty right now,” he said stiffly, “but it won’t be when it’s full of furniture. You’re just unused to a building that doesn’t incorporate seventeen different building styles in one wing.”
His scathing description of Trellech Court almost made her laugh, but she wasn’t ready to forgive him just yet.
He turned and gestured at the half-finished gardens before them. Hundreds of shrubs and box trees, still in their pots, had been placed on the grass in an intricate pattern of scrolls and lines in the style of a formal French parterre.
“I’m still planning the gardens. Those will be formal beds, and beyond that there will be a maze, and an avenue of oak trees. I have hundreds of acorns—the Italians used them to pack around the paintings and sculptures for transportation. Might as well use them.” He gestured to his left, where mounds of fresh earth lay piled on either side of several deep trenches. “And those are the foundations for the orangery.”
Carys suppressed another pang of envy; she’d always wanted an orangery. And oaks were some of the slowest-growing of all trees; they would take years to come to maturity. Tristan was designing his future here, investing in the long term. What would it be like to look out over this same view in ten or twenty years, to see his children playing beneath the shade of those oak trees?
She’d never know.
She shook her head to dispel the depressing thought. “It’s too ordered. Where’s the spontaneity?”
He planted his fists on his hips and there was no mistaking the frown that darkened his features. She bit back a smile, delighted that she was needling him. He’d discomposed her by showing her his bedroom. It was only fair that she return the favor.
“I suppose you’d have it all gothic ruins and wild disorder,” he said. “You’d prefer a tangle of brambles and wildflowers to a swathe of beautiful parkland.”
“There’s nothing wrong with parkland, I just think you need a bit of disorder to counter all these classical straight lines. It’s too perfect. Too symmetrical.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Otherwise it’ll be dull and formulaic.”
“Dull?!”
She’d definitely hit a nerve. He glared at her. “It is restrained. Elegant. The very antithesis of all that rococo lunacy with its curlicues and trills and arabesques.”
She sent him a serene smile, just to raise his blood pressure. “I quite like the frivolity of rococo design. It has flair. Drama. It’s like the peacock of the architectural world.”
He snorted, but she was determined to make him concede. “Nature never uses such strict patterns. The countryside is full of beautiful wild places, and none of them conform to any particular order.”
He scowled, and she pressed her point.
“You need a balance between the formal and the informal. There’s beauty in both, but what makes it work is the contrast. The ordered parts set off the wild parts. They bring out the best in each other. They need each other to shine.”
Carys paused, struck by the fact that she could be talking about the two of them, rather than about the gardens. She turned and gazed out over the hillside.
Tristan gazed at Carys’s profile and wished, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he could read her thoughts.
It was only as they’d toured the house that he’d realized how impatient he was to hear her opinion of everything, how desperate he was for her to approve. His heart had been in his throat as she’d gazed around each of the rooms, and he’d found himself analyzing her every expression, searching for a frown of distaste or a glimmer of delight.
As he’d watched her take in the green walls of the mistress’s suite an idea so shocking came to him that he felt as though he’d been punched in the chest.
He’d never envisaged Lavinia Purser here with him.
But he’d imagined Carys a thousand times, in every single room.
Each time he’d made a decision, some distant part of his brain had wondered: Would Carys like this? He’d chosen green for those walls because the color was the most beautiful against her red hair. Because he’d once teased her so much when they were younger, taunting her that her bedroom was probably “a disgusting, girly shade of pink,” that she’d been goaded into telling him the real color.
And ever since he’d been old enough to fantasize about making love to her, he’d had the clearest image of all that glorious, fiery hair of hers spread out around her head against a blanket of that celadon green. Every time she wore a dress that color it drove him mad. She’d worn one to his sister’s wedding, and he’d spent the entire service thinking about dragging her into the vestry and kissing her senseless.
A hot flush warmed his body as he forced himself to face an uncomfortable possibility. Had he secretly—almost unconsciously—built this house for her? For them?
Ridiculous.