Then she realized with dismay that he would have done the same to her. Conjuring a version of her without moles. Without the scar on her left knee, without the dry skin and razor burn and breasts beginning to droop. Or maybe each of them created their dreamside bodies for the other to see, which was equally bad, for surely her unconscious mind wouldn’t faithfully recreate all her imperfections?
“Turn around,” he whispered, and she stared at the striking wallpaper, trembling with mingled desire andanxiety as he undid the buttons down her back. Rydell’s insults about her looks she could shrug off, but there was something truly demoralizing about falling short of an idealized version of yourself.
He peeled off the wedding dress, untied her corset, slid off her slip. She stood before him in only stockings, garters and underpants, shivering.
“You’re cold,” he said, putting his arms around her from behind, kissing her neck. “I should go out and turn up the heat?—”
“No,” she said. “I’m not cold. I …” She struggled to think of how to put it. Then he reached the spot where her neck met her shoulder and the touch of his lips sent shock waves down her spine, pooling between her legs. “OhGod.”
He kissed her there again, setting off more tremors. “Have you pictured this—what this night would be like?”
“Yes. Over and over.”
“What did you imagine?”
She shuddered as he ran a hand lightly down her side, just missing her breast and bottom, the closeness somehow more arousing than if he’d touched her there.
“Did I undress you?” he prompted.
“Yes,” she said.
He walked around and knelt in front of her, looking dissolute with his shirt gaping open and a few strands of silver hair hanging loose from his queue. “Did I tear off your stockings or go slowly?”
“Slowly,” she whispered, feeling as if her heart was beating in every square inch of her body.
“Oh good,” he said, unhooking her left garter. “That’s what I imagined, too.”
His fingers brushed her leg, all the way down to her ankle, as he slid her stocking off. She bit her lip. She was certainly not cold. She was feeling warmer by the second.
“I’m not trying to recreate that dream,” he said as he removed her other stocking—not needing to clarify, because there was only one dream in which she’d started off so fully dressed that she’d had stockings and garters—“butthis…” He kissed her inner thigh, drawing a moan from her throat. “I want to dothisevery day for the rest of my life.”
He slid her underwear down, down. She now had not a scrap of clothing on—nothing to hide behind.
“You’re overdressed,” she said. Her voice quivered. “Let me take care of that for you.”
He took her outstretched hand, lips quirked in an endearing smile, and got to his feet. She removed his coat and shirt first, then unbuttoned his pants with fingers made clumsy by his decision to nibble her ear. When the last of his clothing lay on the floor, she pressed herself to him, largely to feel his body against hers but partly to keep him from staring at her.
His breath hitched in exactly the way it had in dreamside whenever she’d done something especially right. The newness and familiarity of it all was making her lightheaded. This both was and was not the first time they’d stood together in utter nakedness.
“Beatrix,” he said, pulling the pins out of her updo. “Lie on the bed. I want to see you—I want to look and look until I can’t stand it.”
She could handle the comparisons between her real self and her dreamside approximation when they came—it wasn’t as if Peter would be cruel. In fact, he probably wouldn’t say a word, and it wouldn’t change things between them, she had faith in that. But there would be comparisons all the same, and she didn’t want them tonight.
So she said, “I already can’t stand it,” and pulled him into bed with her.
His huff of laughter tickled her ear as they fell onto the pillows. Then she took him in hand and he groaned, the sound reverberating through her. “I defer to your superior plan,” he said, and kissed her, one hand drawing circles on her inner thigh, closer, closer, until she was exactly as worked up as she’d insinuated.
Her hips jerked as he finally touched her there,there, but just as quickly he circled away. He kept doing that—there, gone, there, gone—until she was writhing beside him, trying to stay in contact with his fingers, his tongue in her mouth preventing her from crying out in frustration.
“What do you want, Beatrix Blackwell?” He pulled back just enough to look her in the eye, his own unsteady breathing suggesting that her handiwork was having an effect. “Do you need me to do … this?” He plunged a finger inside her and tightened the circling of his other fingers to exactly the right spot—there, there,there, ohGod?—
And apparently what he’d needed was to watch her and hear her and feel her in that moment of complete abandon, because he followed her over the cliff with a cry that gave her tingling aftershocks.
“Oh,” he said, catching her in a long kiss and settling her in the crook of his arm. “It’s a good thing we’re married. Really, just in time. Otherwise, the next time we were left alone in the other room, I would have ravished you on that disgusting floor.”
She ran her palm up his chest. “I beg to differ.”
“You’d have put a stop to it, madam?”
