She hesitated. “Yes,” she said.
“And so you put me in the wrong,” he told her. “I force you to lie for me.”
“Can we just leave it at that?” she asked him. “Not quarrel anymore?”
“Is that what we have been doing?” he said. But he heldup a hand before she could answer. “Yes, it is, and I am entirely to blame. I am sorry, Abby. I should have realized... I ought to have understood.”
“Understood what it would mean suddenly to find yourself married into an aristocratic family?” she asked. “Even though I am only an illegitimate member?”
“It did not strike me quite so forcefully with my first marriage,” he said. “I was not made to feel welcome from the start, and there was never any question of my meeting any member of the general’s family or of Lady Pascoe’s. Give me time. And yes, we will leave it at that for now. Let us go down to the dining room and think of some other topic of conversation to pursue during dinner.”
“Agreed.” She smiled at him and took his arm.
They talked about India. At least,hedid while she listened with great interest and asked questions. And she talked about growing up at Hinsford, amusing him with stories about some of the people he had met during the weeks he had spent there.
They sat for a long while over their tea after they had finished eating and were the last of all the hotel guests to leave the dining room. Even so they went to bed early, exhausted after a day of travel and the emotional stress of the visit to her mother and the quarrel that had followed.
Not too exhausted, however, to make love before they slept. And how wonderful it was, Abigail thought as she drifted off to sleep, cradled in one of his arms, her head half on his shoulder, half on his bare chest, to be married at long last. And to be married to Gil. He was very different as a lover from anything she had expected. Not that her expectations had been very detailed, since she had no experience whatsoever by which to set them. But she had expected something far more... brisk. And forceful.
He was a gentle lover. And he took his time about making her feel somehow cherished, both before he entered her and after. He loved slowly and thoroughly and, she supposed, expertly. She was still a little sore from last night, but when he had asked about it as he was coming into her tonight, she had denied it. For the soreness had felt almost lovely. Ah, it was a good thing she did not have to put her feelings into words. They would make no sense. Herfeelingsmade all the sense in the world.
She did not want to be in love with him. Theirs had never been billed as a love match. It was a practical arrangement between two people who had come to like and respect each other and who had both admitted an attraction to each other.
It would be foolish to fall in love.
•••
Gil tipped his head to the side to rest his damaged cheek against the top of Abigail’s head. Her hair was warm. Her naked body, like his own, was still damp from lovemaking. She was lovely to make love with. It felt so very good to have a woman of his own, a wife, a friend. A lover.
She was also one ofthem. To reason that they were equals because both were the by-blows of aristocratic fathers would have been an absurdity. Her mother was not a blacksmith’s daughter. Neither had she been turned off by her family to raise her children in desperate poverty in a hovel, despised by everyone and his dog.
But a sense of victimhood was an ugly thing to nurture. He had shared it with a thousand other recruits in the ranks but had shaken it off, to be replaced by a determined self-respect when he rose first to the rank of corporal, then to that of sergeant. It had come sneaking back on him after hehad been commissioned as an ensign, and then thrust off again during the years following as he doggedly taught himself to speak and behave as a gentleman even if he could never be one or be quite treated as one. His hard-won pride in himself had been severely shaken throughout the whole Caroline saga. He supposed now it had never fully recovered since. And today it had been very nearly shattered.
Both Dorchester and his wife, Abigail’s mother, had invited them to stay there—for dinner, for the night, for as long as they intended to remain in London. Fortunately for him, Abby had been adamant about coming back to the hotel instead. He still did not know what he would have done if she had been eager to stay.
He would have suffocated. At the very least. Even though he had shared their company and that of other Westcotts for a whole week not long ago.
Abby’s head had shifted. She had tipped it back so that she could see into his face. In the flickering light of the candles they had left burning on the dressing table she looked flushed and tousled and lovely. He kissed her softly on the mouth and felt a renewed stirring in his loins.
“You cannot sleep?” she asked him.
“Perhaps I am simply lying here enjoying the aftermath of a bedding with my wife,” he said.
She smiled slowly, but she was clearly not convinced. “You are not relaxed,” she said.
He had thought he was. Lovemaking did that to a man. But perhaps only in body. His mind had been churning with thoughts and emotions that had somehow got trapped up there with them. Negative, self-pitying emotions. Her family had been the model of good manners—and would continue to be, he would guess, provided he did well by Abby, as he fully intended to.
Hehatedhis victim persona. Like an addiction, it could never seem to be conquered once and for all. It always found a way back in.
“Perhaps,” he said, “that is because I am not yet finished. You have married a greedy man, Abby.”
But she was still unconvinced.
“Gil,” she said, “my family is important to me, and I will always want to be close to them. But if ever I had to choose between them and you, I would choose you without any hesitation. When I married you in the village church, I meant every word I spoke. I married you body, mind, and spirit.”
“I would never, ever ask you to choose,” he told her. “And I am of the firm belief that no one in your family would ask it of you either.”
She smiled her slow, lovely smile again. It was starting to do strange things to his stomach.
