She bit her lip painfully hard to prevent the laugh creeping up her chest. “Yes,” she said, her voice strangled from suppressed laughter. “If his is bigger, then his is the one we’ll use, isn’t it?”
“Why would you ever think that?” His face twisted in alarm, eyes growing wider by the second. “Y-you want to—Y-you want Felix’s?”
Her laughter promptly faded. At the hurt filling his wide eyes and the despondency thick in his tone. She hurried toward him, dropping to her knees in front of him. “No! No, no, no, Fitz. I was talking abouttrees,Fitz. But I picked up fairly early that you had taken my words to mean something else entirely. I was merely jesting, teasing.” Her words tumbled over one another. “I beg your pardon. I meant it in good fun, but I think I pushed the jest a tad too far.”
Lord, she was bungling this. Georgiana saw how he and his siblings teased each other. She had just wanted to join in. She was out of her element—the one where there was banter and merriment and love.
He frowned, staring down at the hatchet he was turning over in his hands. “Trees…” He nodded and glanced up at her, then let out a long exhale before a sheepish smile slightly curved his lips. “I misunderstood—not unusual for me. Though, my blunders are not usually that bad.”
She smiled softly, her heart melting a little at the sight of her bashful husband. “I’m happy you made the blunder. You should have seen the look of horror on your face when I—” She broke out in a fit of giggles.
Fitz huffed out a laughing breath, a lop-sided grin breaking out across his face, his gaze tracing over her. “I will admit I was a mite alarmed when you said you wanted to coat it in cooking oil.”
Her giggles turned into full-blown, belly-racking laughs. “I knew that one”—she sucked in a breath—“was a stretch with a tree”—another gasp—“but I just had to.”
She waved a hand in front of her face.Get a hold of yourself, Georgiana.Before her husband determined she was dicked in the nob. Which she probably was.
She gathered a bit of powdery snow with her gloved fingers, fluffing it. She had spent more of her time with her own thoughts or talking to her dog than actual people. Georgiana wasn’t entirely certain what was considered normal. Though she knew laughing like this—and most definitely jests about penises—were not permissible in a ballroom. But were they with one’s husband?
Georgiana glanced at Fitz from beneath her lashes and stilled. Her husband no longer smiled, the lop-sided grin from before gone, the twinkle in his amber eyes doused.
She squirmed, her skin prickling. He stared at her like she was an oddity—or maybe a curiosity. She finally had her husband’s undivided attention, and she wasn’t entirely sure she could handle the intensity of it, the weight of it almost too tangible to bear.
“What?” she whispered. “Is something amiss?”
“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing at all.” He shook his head, his gaze clearing, breaking the heady spell. His lips tilted up. “Shall we get back to it?”
Back to the sex grunts? God help her.
“Let’s.”
14
Fitz
Fitzstrodeintotheentry, Georgiana at his side, toward where his brother and sister waited for them, still bundled in their overcoats, gloves, and scarves.
Felicity arched an overconfident brow. “Here to congratulate us?”
“Not a chance, sister,” Fitz said. “I’m confident once the servants are done measuring, that haughty grin will be wiped right off your face. My wife was set on choosing the biggest one she could find.”
“Then why on earth did she choose you?” Felix threw back.
Felicity chortled. “Now, now, Fifi”—Felicity patted Felix’s arm—“you know what they say; it’s not the size that matters, but how you use it.”
Whaaaat?Felix and Fitz spun to their sister in unison, Fitz’s eyebrows vanishing somewhere in the two-story ceiling above him.
“Where on earth did you—”
“How would you-you-you—”
They sputtered together, staring aghast at their little sister. Which only had her doubling over in laughter. Small giggles floated to Fitz from his side. Georgiana’s eyes, crinkled at the corners, danced with delight, her hand covering her mouth in a failed attempt to stifle her laughter.
His shock at his sister’s exclamation faded, and a smile pulled at his lips. His wife was beautiful—no, that was too tame a word. There was something about her tinkling laughter, her twinkling green eyes, the way her rosy cheeks bunched as she smiled. She was joy, unabashed, untainted by the world they lived in. She was a glimmering, freshly fallen snow before the mud and muck of conveyances and everyday life disturbed it. And he would be content to sit in his study with his Italian translations, staring at such a scene for the rest of his days.
An odd warmth settled low in his stomach. He pressed his gloved hand there, as though that would settle the somewhat fizzy sensation. Perhaps what he’d had for breakfast hadn’t agreed with him. But the longer he stared at her, at those large, genuine forest-of-green eyes, the worse it became. He prayed she truly was genuine. It wouldn’t be the first time Fitz had been made a fool.
God, when she had jested about Felix earlier, when Fitz had thought she was implying she would rather bed his brother. It was like he was eighteen all over again. Every part of him had gone cold, like he’d shucked off all of his layers and buried himself in the snow he had been sitting in. Everything disappeared, and all he could see were soft brown eyes, matching glossy brown curls, furtive glances, secret smiles. Little did he know, the secret wasn’t for him. The secret was he was just a pawn in a grasping young woman’s attempt to get to his brother. He rubbed at the tightness in his chest, at the wound the dagger Miss Eloise Browning had thrown had left, a wound that hadn’t ever fully healed.
