“Ah, but I do not want it to be unreal,” she said, looking up at him.
She wanted him. She had said that. In a few days’ time she would be his wife. He suddenly wondered how sweet making love to her would be. He would find out soon enough, he supposed.
He bent his head and kissed her, and she turned on her chair and raised her hands to his shoulders. Her mouth was soft and warm and sweet as it had been in the summerhouse, but this time she kissed him back, pushing her lips tentatively against his own and slightly parting her lips. A novice’s kiss. He felt instant desire. He wondered howpassionatecoupling with her would be. Ladies were said not to favor passion. Caroline had been the exception to that rule, though he was not surepassionwas quite the word to describe her preferences.
But he must not think of his first wife when he was about to wed a second.
She kept her hands on his shoulders after he had lifted his head from hers, and gazed into his eyes. He had not noticed fully before just how blue hers were.
“Take the carriage,” she said. “It is too far to ride. You have not done a great deal of riding in your life, have you? You were not born in the saddle.”
As gentlemen were? “It is that obvious, is it?” he said.
“No,” she told him. “It was an educated guess. But your answer was a full confession.” She smiled.
Not many people had smiled at him in the course of his life, he thought. It was rather a startling realization.
“I will take the carriage,” he promised, “if Harry has no objection. Shall we go and find him?”
“Yes.” She slid her hands from his shoulders and got to her feet, a little slip of a thing. Well, not so little, perhaps. She was of medium height, even a bit above it. But she was slender and delicate and...
And he wanted her too.
•••
Abigail did not change her mind. She did not panic or fall into the trap of questioning herself. She went quietly about her business, which consisted mainly of going through the linen cupboards with Mrs. Sullivan, a tedious but necessary job of sorting out which sheets were in perfectly good condition, which needed some mending, and which were fit for nothing more than to be cut up into cleaning rags. It was the perfect time to do it—rain fell outside almost from the moment she watched the carriage make its way down the drive, bearing Lieutenant Colonel Bennington—Gil—off to London. She hoped the roads were not so muddy that they would make travel hazardous.
She spent some time too at her needlework, more often than not her embroidery, which required the most concentration and artistry since she did not use a pattern but devised her own design as she went along. Beauty was usually at her feet, a disconsolate lump despite the fuss both Abigail and Harry made of her.
“She misses Gil,” Harry said on the second evening, tickling the dog with the tip of his shoe.
“Yes, poor thing,” his sister agreed.
“Doyou, Ab?” Harry asked. “Miss him, I mean? I have been feeling a bit guilty, I must admit. Did I push you into something you would not have done unless I had? Did I rush you, since there does seem to be a bit of a hurry for him to get married? Did I do the wrong thing? I wish actually I had kept my mouth shut.”
“Well, it is too late now,” she said, reaching out to turn the candelabra on the table beside her so that the candlelight would shine more directly onto her embroidery. “But when have you known me to do anything, Harry, just because you told me to do it? Or because you tried to goad me into doing it?”
He thought for a few moments. “Never?” he suggested.
“Right first time,” she said.
“You have no regrets, then?” he asked.
She sighed. “If I did,” she said, “I would call the whole thing off, you know. No one is attempting to coerce me, least of all Gil.”
“Well, that is a relief to know,” he said. “I had a hard time sleeping last night. And you need not say it served me right. I know it.”
“If I regret anything,” she told him, “it is that there will be no one at our wedding except you. No family, I mean. They will not evenknow. Not even Mama and Camille. I suppose I could have written to them both and sworn them to secrecy. But then we would have had to wait for them to come, and there would be no one to come for Gil. And we would have to tell them the full truth about him and about my reason for marrying him in such a hurry. And they would try to talk me out of it.”
“Do you think they would?” he asked.
“He grew up as the poorest of the poor, Harry,” she said.“His mother raised him alone. She took in other people’s washing in order to scrape together a living. He was reviled and bullied by other children and, I daresay, by adults too. He lied about his age in order to enlist with a recruiting sergeant. He became an officer only because his father, who had hadnothingto do with Gil all his life, decided at last to do something magnanimous for his son. And now Gil’s daughter has been taken by her grandparents, who argue that he is unfit to have her because he physically abused his wife and threatened violence to the grandmother and her servants. How doyouthink Mama and Camille would react? Not to mention Grandmama—bothgrandmamas—and Aunt Matilda and Alexander and Avery and all the rest of them?”
“I suppose if I did not know him already,” Harry said, “I would be wanting to plant him a facer for so much aslookingat you, Ab. And I would have you locked up in your room and fed bread and water for looking back.”
“So,” she said, “it is altogether wiser to wait and present them with a fait accompli.”
He grimaced. “I do not envy you.”
