“You don’t make sense either,” I said. “To me. You know.”
“Yes, I know. You have made that plain.”
“And you have concealed your feelings from me, because you fear me.”
“N-no, not…” She looked down at the floor.
“We have neither of us trusted the other,” I breathed.
“Fitzwilliam,” she whispered. “I am sorry.”
“I am going to bed,” I said. “We shall have to sort all this out, I suppose, and it will take quite some time.”
But then I did not move. I stayed there and looked at her, and she looked at me.
“You could come to my bed,” she said finally.
“I could,” I said. “You wouldn’t welcome me, though, after everything I’ve done.”
“That would make no sense for me to do so, to invite you in now.”
“No, it would not.”
“But we have just finished speaking about how little sense this all makes between us,” she said.
“So we have,” I said, lurching forward.
She moved out of the doorway to allow me to enter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Her maid came bustling in the next morning, saw me, turned red in the face and then backed out of the room, apologies tumbling from her mouth.
I sat up, rubbing at my face. I had barely slept any time at all, actually. I would have thought when I settled here with her that we should do nothing but sleep, but I knew not quite what possessed me when it came to this woman, to my wife, to my Elizabeth.
It was as she had said once, I felt drunk on her.
At any rate, she was pulling the blankets over her lovely bare shoulder as she turned on her side in her bed and looked up at me.
I stretched. I felt like death, truly. I needed more sleep, but it was unlikely I’d be able to go back to sleep now that the sun was up.
She reached up to rub my arm. “I want you to know, Fitzwilliam,” she said, yawning a little, “that I do not forgive you.”
“Mmm,” I said, also yawning. “I suppose you would not.”
“I would not,” she agreed. “You definitely cannot simply come into my bedchamber and do that with me and think it would solve anything.”
“Indeed, I was not exactly thinking when we did that.”
She stopped touching me. “You do not still think that I—”
“No,” I said. I looked down at her. “But I do not know why you are this way about it.”
“It?”
“The marital bed,” I said. “I have heard that wives can be… reticent, and you are always sort of the opposite.”
She shrugged under the blankets. “I don’t know that it’s ‘it’ so much as it you. And I do not know what it is about you, either. I am enamored of you, certainly, but I think what I chiefly enjoy so much is the way you want me.” She gave me a little smile. “But what we do together feels nice, of course.”
