I am flooded with affection for it.
Once, it was all I had to feed that hungry churning inside of me that I was not allowed to slake.
I wish I could buy a copy for all the repressed young men in Britain.
The women too.
And then I get a wonderful idea.
I pick up the green volume and the other books that I want to bring home. I purchase them along with a few front-room novels that I have been meaning to read, and before I go, I find the most odious section of the store and its most odious author.
And I slip my little green book right beside it.
Just in case someone needs it.
An antidote, if you will.
I return to the townhouse with only two hours having passed since mydeparture. Thus I find Annabelle, still peaked but nevertheless diligently looking over her ledgers, in her study.
Not wanting to disturb her, I merely inform her that I have returned and will be reading in the drawing room. She nods and when I settle down with one of the volumes (a very interesting book about a love affair between a high-born lady and her father’s valet), I am unsure if I will see her for the rest of the afternoon.
But only a half hour later, she comes to me.
“You were not on the town for very long,” she says, sitting next to me on the sofa. I might fancy her annoyed if it weren’t for a certain softness in her tone.
“I told you,” I murmur, not looking up from my very interesting book, because I have the strange sensation that if I do, she will start like a deer. “I do not like to leave my wife for long. Especially when she is ill from carrying our child.”
She sighs.
“You are very attentive. But I do not want you to grow bored.”
“I am not bored.” I cannot stop myself from looking at her now.
“I know—last night—it was not as it has been with us.”
Of all the things in the world, I do not want her worried aboutthis. But I am at a loss for how to convince her that one night—or a hundred such nights—will not upset me. I know it is passing—and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter to me.
“Annabelle,” I say, trying levity. “I lived twenty-eight years—or, well, let’s subtract fifteen for childhood—thirteen years of my life, my entire adulthood, at war with myself and my desires. I think I can tolerate a few weeks of my wife being indisposed.”
Her face twists at my words. And I know I have failed.
“Being with child lasts longer than a few weeks.”
“Very well,” I say. “If you feel this way throughout the pregnancy, then I can certainly last that long. I do not only love you, Annabelle, for what you have given me in the bedchamber.”
As usual at the wordlove, her body goes rigid.
She fixes me with her soft blue gaze. I know, somehow, that she is listening carefully.
“Do you not love me just for that?”
I close the book. Perhaps Icanmake her understand.
“No. I do not. I know that the bedchamber is where our relationship began. And I love it. I will always love being so close to you. But that is not the only way in which we are close—nor is it the only way that I wish to be close to you.”
Her gaze is on the pillow in front of her, her fingers tracing the pattern of the brocade.
“What other ways?”
