“I don’t want to.”
She turned over onto her stomach and felt his strong, warm hand begin to stroke her back in circles. It would be arousing if she weren’t so sleepy now.
“You know, Phee. I’ve been thinking. And I think I know what our problem is. Not your problem. Our problem.”
“Mmmpf?”
“You’re too generous, and I’m too selfish. Let’s switch places for a while.”
He probably said something more after that, but she fell asleep.
Thirty-Two
Long after her eyes had closed and she had burrowed her face into the pillow and her deep breathing had told him she was asleep, George continued to rub Phoebe’s back. It was his chance to touch her, and he was going to take it. With his hand, he memorized her spine, her shoulder blades, the softness of her lower back just before it curved into her bottom. He arranged her long hair carefully to one side so her neck was exposed and every four strokes of her back, he allowed one of his fingers to brush the skin of her nape and the very soft and fine hairs that gathered there in swirls.
Just before he got off the bed to go back to his own bedchamber and get ready for the day, he leaned over and deeply inhaled the warm scent of her neck.
He was married to her, but he didn’t have her. Maybe he never would. And maybe the idea of having another person wasn’t right even though that was what he had always thought marriage was. What he had seen with his own mother and father, but with his mother being the owning and demanding one, the one who had ruled and ruined the household with her extravagance and her volatile moods that he sometimes saw reflected in Alice’s behavior.
He shuddered.
Phoebe wanted to have herself. Wasn’t that what she had been telling him? He must make sure she got that chance.
He got off the bed carefully, and she didn’t stir.
He caught Dawson before she went into Phoebe’s bedchamber. “Let her sleep.”
“Yes, my lord.”
In the days that followed, he would come into her bedchamber in the wee hours when he could hear her vomiting. He would hold her hair, and he would rub her back until she went back to sleep. He would visit her in the evening, and at her invitation, he would sit and she would ask him about his day. He would also ask her about what she had been doing, what she had been thinking.
She would shrug.
It was almost as if she had been doing nothing, thinking nothing.
At times, he saw a glimmer of the Phoebe he knew. A smile, a joke. But it would fade quickly and he would find himself sitting in his mother’s bedchamber, talking to a guarded stranger.
The sixth day after their wedding, he came out of the dining room after luncheon and was surprised to find her waiting for him.
“You could have joined me, Phoebe.”
“I-I thought the smells might be too much. The fish.”
Tell Mrs. Gregory no more fish. “Did you eat anything today?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What?”
“Toast. Broth. But I’m feeling much better, and I have had far too much sleep.”
“What do you say to some biscuits and tea later?”
She nodded.
“Or how about now?”
She smiled. “Yes, please.”
