“That what?”
“Well, you have a tendency to simplysaythings, I suppose, and I should help you to…” I cleared my throat. “At the end of it there, when you said that there was nothing scandalous about walking—”
“There is not!” She drew herself up. “And, honestly, I had the patience of a saint to only say that, and not to have said anything else, and to have waited so long to have said it at all. And you, you simply sat there and let her say all those things to me.”
“I stopped her,” I said. “Eventually.”
She sighed, shaking her head. “What am I saying? It’s quite clear that social situations are not exactly your forte.”
“Well, they aren’t really yours either,” I muttered.
She barked out a laugh. “Right. Of course.”
I broke the pieces of scone into even smaller pieces, annoyed with myself. “I did not mean it that way.”
“What way did you mean it?”
“We are both… we are… we have a tendency, you and I, to try to cut to the heart of matters, I suppose, and we appreciate it about each other, but I don’t think society, in general, appreciates that. It’s sort of like the polite lying bit. I am not good at it either, really, but you have to try to pretend, to do what they ask of you, or else…”
“Yes,” she said. “That is what you think. That you must do what is asked of you. You made that quite plain before we got married. And I knew this, and I said yes anyway because you looked at me with those stupidly dark eyes of yours, and said that you wanted me, and my insides rearranged themselves and then… this… now…”
I broke apart the scones even more. They were nothing but crumbs.
She fiddled with her collar. “Take me back to bed?”
My lips parted and I stopped breaking up the scones. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
She lifted a shoulder and bit down on her lower lip. I gazed at that, at her teeth sinking into that lip of hers. I groaned.
I got up, strode across the room, and locked the door to the sitting room.
When I got back to her, I pushed her collar over her shoulder, baring it. I put my mouth to her skin.
I had the modiste come in the very next day, and that was gratifying. Elizabeth’s eyes got so big when she saw all the bolts of fabric, and when I told the woman how many dresses I wanted made for her, she was agog.
Later, that night, when I held her in my arms, she whispered, running her hands over my chest, that she’d never had so many dresses at once, that she didn’t even know what to do with so many dresses.
I knew it was not an overindulgence. It was just the amount of dresses that a woman needed, at least a woman who would be associating with the circles that I was associating with. I actually was worried that I had not asked for enough dresses. I had only paid scant attention to such things hitherto, but I had been involved in the expense for Georgiana, so I had some knowledge of it, at least I thought.
But I found myself wishing to just buy her as many dresses as possible. I liked making her react that way. I liked her shy gratefulness, her breathless disbelief that she was being treated thus. If I could make her smile like that, I could die happy from the way it made me feel.
I was in love with her.
I said it, often, and she said it, too.
We said it when we were in each other’s arms, at night, and we had been spending each and every night together since we’d been married. We said it at breakfast, and we said it when wewere reading together in the afternoons, and we said it when I helped her because her ankle was paining her too much to put weight on it, and we said it at tea.
In many ways, it was all idyllic between us.
I had never been this happy in my life.
I had never even imagined such happiness. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful or that she fit nicely against me in the darkness or any of that. I could not quite say what it was. I wished to say we had some kind of beautiful marriage of wits or something, like the two leads in a play bantering back and forth, but the truth was that we rarely talked of anything too taxing, and that most of what passed between us was tinged, currently, with this warmth that bled out from our love for each other.
Maybe itwasall because of whatever was happening in bed.
I had very little experience with all of that, in truth, and I had certainly never had a woman in my bed like this, every night, a woman who smiled at me and bit down on her lower lip and tilted up her chin to be kissed, who melted into me and breathed, “Fitzwilliam,” against my jaw, who clutched me and who was so beautiful and so soft and so small and so very, very sweet.
Maybe, when that is happening, you are inclined to feel love for someone. And maybe, that was all it was.
