by Mary Balogh
“You have the physique of an athlete, Wren,” he said. “If there were women athletes, they would surely aspire to look like you.”
She looked, startled, into his face, and his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“That does not sound like much of a compliment, does it?” he said. “It was intended as one, though I probably ought not to have spoken aloud. You are magnificent.”
He could not possibly mean it. But he would not lie to her. And if he did, he certainly would not have paid her that particular compliment. She liked it. Oh goodness, she liked it. “And did you notice tonight?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“Did you notice?” she asked again. And she saw understanding dawn as his eyes focused upon the left side of her face.
“In all truth I did not,” he said. “My gentleman’s honor on it, Wren. I did not notice. I do not believe I have noticed all day. Which proves a point, I believe.”
“That you are not much of an observer?” she said. But though she made a joke of it, she felt a great lifting of the spirit. Was it possible that someone could look at her and truly not notice? Her aunt and uncle had always said it was so, of course, but they had known her forever. And she had never been quite sure they had not spoken more from the heart than from a strict adherence to the truth.
She untied the sash at his waist and slid her hands beneath his dressing gown at the shoulders. It was only then she realized he was wearing nothing underneath. She pushed the garment off and watched it slither down his arms and body and bunch about his feet. He kicked it away, his slippers with it.
She looked at him as he had looked at her, the candlelight flickering over his body. And . . . oh goodness. There were no words. She ran her hands lightly over his chest and felt the firmness of muscles there. She slid them up to his shoulders and felt their warm, hard solidity. His legs were long and powerful, a little longer than her own. His hips and waist were slender. And—ah yes, he was aroused and ready, as was she. She was aching with longing—or with something stronger and more physical than mere longing, though she could not find a word for it. She raised her eyes to his face before turning to lie down on the bed.
“Do you want me to snuff the candles?” he asked her.
She hesitated. “No.” She wanted to see as well as feel. She had five senses. Why deliberately eliminate one of them?
When he lay down beside her and turned to her, she did not think she could be any more ready for the consummation. But she could, as she discovered over the next several minutes. And again he was in no hurry. His hands and mouth moved over her, explored her, tasted her, while her own hands, helpless and untutored at first, followed suit, discovering maleness and otherness as well as a beauty that might have brought her close once more to swooning if there had not been more powerful feelings to keep her very much aware and present.
He turned her onto her back at last, came over her, spread her legs wide with his own, and slid his hands beneath her while his weight came down on her, almost robbing her of breath but not of need. And she felt him at the most sensitive part of herself, seeking, circling, settling. He came into her. She inhaled slowly and deeply, feeling the hardness of him opening her, stretching her, hurting her, coming deep and deeper, the sharpness of the pain gone, until she was filled with him and filled with wonder.
At last. Ah, at last! At last.
He held still for a few moments and then took some of his weight on his forearms while he gazed down at her, his eyes heavy with an expression she had not seen there before.
“I am sorry,” he murmured.
For the pain? “I am not,” she said. She would have endured a great deal more of it in order to have this—this joining of her body to a man’s, this knowledge that after all she could be fully a woman and fully a person too.
He lowered his head to the pillow beside her own then and began to withdraw from her. Please don’t, she wanted to say but did not. She was glad a moment later, for he paused at the brink of her and pressed inward again—and then again and again until his movements were firm and swift and rhythmic. And of course. Oh, of course. She was not an utter ignoramus. She had occasionally observed the animal kingdom, and it was not so very different for humans. This was what happened. This was the consummation, the lovemaking, and it would happen again and again in the nights and weeks and years ahead. This was how they would be man and wife. This was how they would get sons and daughters. She concentrated upon experiencing every strange and new sensation, upon listening to the unexpected wetness of it and their labored breathing, upon breathing in the surprisingly enticing smells of sweat and something else unmistakably carnal, upon seeing dark hair mingling with her own and his muscled shoulders just above her own and his rhythmically moving body as he worked in her.
This, she told herself with very deliberate exultation at last, when the ache of need and pleasure flowed in tandem with her blood, was her wedding night. Their wedding night. The first night of their marriage. She was glad she had decided to trust him, not just on the issue of money, but in everything. It would be a good marriage.
After what might have been many long minutes or only a few—time had become meaningless—his movements turned swifter and more urgent until they stopped suddenly when he was deep inside and she felt a gush of liquid heat and knew with only a slight pang of regret that it was over. But only for now. There would be other times. They were married and he was the one who had suggested that they share a room and a bed.
He made a sound of male satisfaction that did not translate into words, relaxed his full weight onto her again, and—if she was not mistaken—fell promptly asleep. The thought amused her and she smiled. He must weigh a ton. But she did not want him to wake up.
• • •
Alexander was not sleeping. He had just allowed himself the self-indulgence of total relaxation after his exertions even though he was aware that he must have been crushing her. It had been a long time. Too long. And now he had settled for less than his dream. But that was a disloyal thought, and he moved off to her side and pulled the bedcovers up about them. He felt too lazy to get out of bed to snuff the candles. Her face was turned toward him, shadowed by the flickering candlelight, her dark hair in disarray about her head and over her shoulder and one breast. It made her look much younger and more obviously feminine than usual.
He wondered if he had made the right decision in persuading her to make his bedchamber and his bed her own too. It seemed, strangely, like more of a commitment than simply marrying her had been this morning. It was a loss of privacy, of somewhere to retreat that was entirely his own. But he could no longer think that way and would not. He had made the decision when he offered her marriage. No half measures. No harking back to a dream that could never now be fulfilled. But then most dreams were like that. That was why they were called by that name.
He must get used to having her here in his bed, partly because he did have needs—as did she—but more because he had duties to his title and position over and above the financial ones. Cousin Eugenia, the dowager countess, had stated it baldly not so long ago. There was a great dearth of heirs in the Westcott family. He was it, in fact, yet he was not even the heir. He was the incumbent. If he were to die before producing at least one son, the family tree would have to be climbed to the very topmost branches in order to discover another more fruitful branch, or else the title would have to pass into abeyance. It was his duty to beget several sons and, he hoped, some daughters. He liked the idea of daughters. Yet his wife was almost thirty. They could not delay.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked.
“I did not mind,” she said, though she did not deny it. But no, she would not. She had wanted to be married. She wanted children too. If she had ever dreamed of romantic, passionate love, she too had made the decision to settle for a quieter substitute. It was not necessarily a bad thing. It was not
without hope.
“I do not believe it will happen again,” he said. “The pain, I mean.”
“No.”
“Was I very heavy?” he asked.
“Alexander,” she said. “I was well pleased. I thought all men above a certain age were experienced enough not to feel such anxieties.”
Good God! He was very glad of the dim, flickering light. He was quite possibly blushing. He had not been a virgin tonight. He had had one very satisfactory lover ten years ago when he was at Oxford. She had been a tavern keeper—not one of the barmaids, but the owner herself, a widow twenty years his senior and buxom and hearty and affectionate and very, very skilled in bed. Not that he had had anyone with whom to compare her, it was true, but he had not doubted at the time and did not doubt now that she had been the very best teacher any young man could possibly wish for. They had parted on the best of terms after he graduated, and there had been very few women since then. For one thing, he had been busy at Riddings Park. For another—well, finding women of easy virtue, an unkind euphemism for women who were forced to sell their bodies in order to eat, had always seemed distasteful to him.
“You see,” he said, “it has always seemed a bit sordid to engage in casual liaisons.”
“So I have rescued you from a life of near celibacy, have I?” she asked him.
This was a strange conversation. “You have indeed,” he said. “Wren, thank you for marrying me . . . without a marriage contract. Thank you for trusting me.” According to the law, everything that had been hers, including her very person, was now his. And if that was a disturbing thought even to him, what must it be to her?
She did not say anything for a while but merely gazed at him. “I learned trust at the age of ten,” she said. “It was a bit like jumping out of an upstairs window while someone stood below, holding no more than a pillow while the house burned down behind me. I put my faith in the person who saved me and learned that trust and knowing whom to trust are among the most important qualities anyone can cultivate. Without trust there is . . . nothing. A contract would have made me feel that perhaps I ought to have a little bit of doubt, and I chose not to entertain that fear.”
He gazed at her for a long while, wondering if she intended to continue, to tell him what it was in her life that had been like a house burning down behind her. But she did not say any more.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “we will be visiting a lawyer within the next few days, Wren. I will not have you totally dependent upon my trustworthiness. Besides, some things need to be in writing and properly certified. I could die at any moment.”
“Oh, please do not,” she said.
“I shall try not to.” He smiled at her and raised one hand to push her hair back over her shoulder. She had small breasts, but they were firm and nicely shaped. He moved his hand about the one he had exposed, cupped it from beneath in his palm, and set his thumb over her nipple, which hardened as he stroked it lightly. “Are you very sore?”
She thought a moment and shook her head.
“Will you think me very greedy?” he asked, feathering light kisses over her forehead, her temple, her cheek, her mouth.
“No,” she said.
She was wet and hot when he entered her this time and closed inner muscles about him while she raised her knees and set her feet flat on the bed. He moved swiftly in her, his eyes closed, the bulk of his weight on his forearms again, feeling greedy despite her denial, and came to a quick climax. He brought her with him this time when he moved off her, not withdrawing from her, keeping his arms about her, and he felt the soft warmth of her body as he settled the covers about them once more, and knew that she was relaxing into sleep, her head nestled on his shoulder.
Yes, he had settled for less than the dream. But so, probably, did almost every other man and woman who married. There could not be very many who were at leisure to search for love, and even fewer who found it. His mind touched upon Anna and Netherby and even upon Camille and Joel Cunningham, but he was not going to start making comparisons. He did not know anyway, did he? One surely never did know anyone else’s marriage as it really was. No one would know his except the two of them. They would make of it what they chose. It was actually a good thought with which to begin a marriage.
He slept.
Sixteen
“I should perhaps have thought of taking you on a wedding journey,” Alexander said the next morning, holding both of Wren’s hands. “To Scotland. Or the Lakes. Or Wales.”
“We,” she said. “We ought to have thought of it. But I do not want a wedding trip. Do you?”
“No,” he said. “But it feels wrong to have been sitting here composing a letter early in the morning following our wedding and now to be going off to the House of Lords and leaving you alone.”
They had been jointly composing a letter to the steward at Brambledean with instructions on what they wished him to do immediately. Wren supposed it was a bit odd to be thus employed, but why not? Working together like this made her feel as much married as what they had done in their bed last night. And she liked the feeling of being married.
“I never mind being alone,” she told him. “Besides, I have work of my own to do too. There have been reports and queries from the glassworks in the past few days and I need to respond to them without further delay, as I always do. One of them has detailed sketches of a new design for my approval. I am not sure after one quick glance that I do approve. I need to give the matter far more concentrated attention.”
She must write a few other letters too, one to her housekeeper at Withington, another to the house in Staffordshire, a third to Philip Croft, her business manager, about the change in her name and status.
“What you are really telling me,” he said, raising one of her hands to his lips, “is that you cannot wait for me to leave for my work so that you can get to yours.” His eyes were smiling.
“Ah,” she said, “the gentleman begins to learn.”
He laughed outright. “You can probably expect a quiet day,” he said.
“Yes.” But she did feel a pang of regret a few minutes later as she watched him leave the house. She would have liked to prolong the sense of togetherness just a little longer.
A quiet day. It seemed ages since she had spent a day alone. She would enjoy this one with the thought that her husband would be coming home later. And that must be one of the loveliest words in the English language—husband.
Her day alone started well. She wrote the letters first and then studied the sketches from the glassworks. She still could not make up her mind about the multicolored curlicues that would be cut into the glass on a new batch of drinking glasses if she gave her approval. They would look dazzlingly gorgeous, but would they also be elegant? It was the final measure by which she judged all designs and the one slight difference between her and her uncle. Both of them had liked vivid beauty and both had liked elegance, but while Uncle Reggie had tended to put more emphasis upon the former, she had leaned toward the latter. Usually, of course, the distinction between the two, as now, was such a fine one that a decision was not easy to make.
Half the morning had gone by in total absorption in her work before she made the simple discovery that if the yellow curlicues were omitted—or, better yet, changed to a different color—the whole effect was transformed. Total elegance. But even as she thought it and smiled, the butler appeared with a silver salver piled with the morning’s post and, behind him, a maid carried in a tray of coffee and oatmeal biscuits.
“For me?” Wren asked the butler. From whom could she possibly be expecting all these letters?
“Yes, my lady,” he said with an inclination of the head. “And I took the liberty of setting the morning paper on the tray too.” He and the maid left the room.
Wren picked up the pile of letters and looked quickly through them. Most surely must be for Alexander or for his mother
or Elizabeth. But all were addressed either to the Countess of Riverdale or to both the earl and countess. And almost none of them had been franked, she noticed. They must all have been hand-delivered. She picked up the paper, which had been opened to the page of society news before being folded neatly. The announcement of her wedding was there as well as a gossip column about who had attended. In the column Wren had been identified as the fabulously wealthy Heyden glassware heiress. Oh goodness.
The letters were all invitations—to a wide variety of ton entertainments over the coming days and weeks, from balls to routs to a picnic to a Venetian breakfast to a musical evening. Oh goodness again. This was the stuff of her worst fears. It was the reason she had withdrawn her offer to Alexander on Easter Sunday. But he had promised . . . Well, she would simply hold him to it. She had gone as far as she intended to go in sociability and further than she had originally intended. She had met most of his family. She had gone walking a few times in Hyde Park—once without a veil. As much as she enjoyed his family, she had been exhausted by those efforts. She craved her privacy now in a visceral way. She would not further expose herself.
She was going to have to reply to all these invitations, she supposed, though she would wait and show them to Alexander first. She sat down, her tranquillity severely ruffled, to drink her coffee. She had taken only two bites out of one of the biscuits, however, when the door opened again to admit Cousin Viola—all the family had urged her yesterday to call them by their given names. So much for her quiet day, Wren thought as she got to her feet. But she could wish some of the others had returned first. She felt extremely awkward this morning greeting the lady who just over a year ago had held the title that was now hers and lived in this house with her children.