He sat up.
She set down the candle and blew it out. He threw the covers aside and she climbed in. He drew the covers up around them both.
She nestled beside him and closed her eyes. Already it felt better. “I thought that if we were not alone, each of us, it might be easier to sleep.”
His arm slid around her and he pulled her closer. He kissed her temple. “Much easier.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eric became impatient to return to town. This journey had produced far more than he expected, most of it good. His life was in London, however, and with November the bite of winter could be felt in Scotland’s winds.
At least he no longer had to worry that some farmer would tell Davina about the fire, and about Jeannette. One had, and he did not regret it in hindsight. Speaking of it, finally, had freed him from much of the memory. He wondered if Davina would say it had all been a good thing, though. She seemed different in subtle ways. She was still full of bright lights, but one of them had dimmed.
“When you said there were no rules, what did you mean exactly?” She asked the question abruptly, interrupting his lesson on driving the phaeton. She had asked to learn and they set out in the morning to start. It was not the best kind of carriage for a woman to learn on, but she had insisted that she saw women in the parks holding the reins of such conveyances, and assumed she could manage it too.
He did not need to ask what she referred to. He supposed if she had said,I had a sexual liaison with a handsome man, and we were wild and had no rules, he might query her about it too. Though as a man, he might not have to because he could imagine the particulars. He doubted she could.
Which meant it was time to be vague. Or avoid the subject entirely.
“Move the carriage forward very slowly. Do not become distracted,” he instructed.
“I won’t. I can listen to you and do this as well, so feel free to answer my question. Unless it would embarrass you.”
“Embarrass? Not at all. It might with another woman, one who had not explained to me despite her utter lack of experience that women could have orgasms.”
“So, what did you mean?”
“You are pulling left too much.”
She corrected that, then gave him a meaningful glace.
He sighed. No way out. “In these matters, some things are typical and done by everyone.”
“Such as what we do.”
“To be honest, not everything we do is typical.”
“So you have lured me into more exotic love play. I think I know what may not be typical. Go on.”
“Then there are even less typical things. The human mind has been very creative over the millennia and a long list of pleasures has been amassed.” It almost sounded like a normal conversation. “Think of it as circles going out from a center. Typical is in the center. Things become increasingly less typical the farther away from the center.”
“Not all the same, you mean. Some not typical is still not too exotic. Out at circle seven, it is shocking.”
“Something like that.”
She decided to try turning the carriage, even without his permission. She managed it fairly well so he could not interrupt the odd conversation with a scold. “Go a little faster, but stop well before you get to the paddock fence,” he tried instead.
“Did you use whips on each other?”
She stunned him. “Whips? Where did you hear about that?”
“My father and I visited a woman who was always ill. Only she really wasn’t. When my father said as much, she asked him to lie about it. It seemed her husband used a whip on her, for his own pleasure.”
“Your father allowed you to hear such things?”
“It just came out, and I was there when it did.”
“That was bad of her husband. If the pleasure is not mutual, it should not be done.”
