“Very well.”
He was dressed smartly for dinner in black and white. She could have wished he did not look quite so attractive.
She donned a green silk gown and clasped about her neck the pearls her father had given her as a wedding present.
The only private dining parlor at the inn had been already spoken for by the time they arrived. There were just a few other people in the main dining room, however, and none of them were close enough to make conversation awkward. The food was excellent. At least, Samantha thought it probably was. She did not pay it much attention, truth to tell. She was too busy keeping the conversation going. It kept wanting to die, and they could not seem to hit upon a topic that required more than a question from one of them and a monosyllabic answer from the other.
Oh, what a difference having to share a bedchamber made. They had not had this problem on any previous evening. Not to this degree, anyway.
“If there had only been a private dining parlor available,” he said eventually, “there might have been a chair upon which I could have spent the night.”
“If you were going to dothat,” she said, “we might as well have continued on our way to Chepstow.Iwould have slept on the chair.”
“Rubbish,” he said. “I would never have allowed it.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “I would not have allowed you to dictate to me what I could or could not do.”
“Are we back to bickering?” he asked. “But, really, Samantha, no gentleman would allow a lady to sleep on a chair in a private dining room while he enjoyed the luxury of a bed in a room with a view.”
“Ah,” she said, “the view. I had forgotten that. Undoubtedly, then, on this occasion I would have allowed you to have your way. An academic point, however. We do not have a private dining room and so neither of us is able to make the noble gesture of spending the night on a chair there.”
“We both, in fact,” he said, “get to enjoy the view.”
She smiled and he chuckled, and Samantha gazed at him, arrested for a moment. She had been very fond of her father, but she could not remember ever joking with him or talking nonsense with him—or bickering with him. And though she must surely have laughed with Matthew during their courtship and the first few months of their marriage, she could not recall ever being deliberately silly with him purely for their mutual enjoyment.
It occurred to her that shelikedBen Harper, even if he did make her bristle with indignation on occasion—and turn hot with longing at other times. It occurred to her that she would miss him when he had gone.
“He had amistress,” she said abruptly, and then she gazed at him in some surprise. What on earth had prompted her to say that? She set down her knife and fork, rested her forearms on the table, and leaned toward him. “They already had one child when he met and married me. Another was conceived during the first months of our marriage. I took that to mean that he did not care much for me at all and that I was not much good in the marriage bed.”
She gazed at him, appalled. And she looked around furtively to make sure they were not within earshot of any other diners.
He looked from his knife to his fork and back again before setting them down across his plate and copying her posture. Their faces were not very far apart.
“I suppose,” he said, “you have spent longer than six years imagining that you are sexually inadequate.”
She half expected to see flames flaring up from her cheeks.
“No,” she said. “Why should I allow my spirit to be crushed by someone I did not respect? I lost respect for my husband four months into our marriage. That is a terrible admission to make, is it not, to a virtual stranger?”
“I am hardly a stranger,” he said. “And I am about to become even less of one. We are to spend the night teetering off the opposite edges of the same bed, are we not?”
“Have you ever had a mistress?” she asked him.
“Of long standing?” he said. “No. And never any children. And even if I had a mistress, I would dismiss her before marrying someone else. And no one would replace her. Ever.”
“Was the colonel’s niece very beautiful?” she asked.
He considered. “She was pretty. She was small and dainty, all smiles and dimples and blond curls and ringlets and big blue eyes.”
“Such a woman would surely have been unwilling to follow the drum with you.”
“But she was already doing so with her uncle,” he told her. “She looked like a porcelain doll. In reality she was as tough as nails.”
“Did you mourn her loss?”
“I cannot say I spared her more than a passing thought for at least two years,” he said. “By then I was very thankful we had not married.”
“I daresay she has grown plump,” she said. “Small, pretty blonds often do.”
