“It’s the middle of the night.”
“No, it’s not. It’s just gone eleven.”
She looked at her mantel-clock. He was right.
“It’s my bedchamber, George.”
His gaze flickered away from her. “It looks different than the last time I was here.”
Phoebe looked around her own room. Of course, the room was different. Her favorite dolls, the ones she could not bear to let stay in the nursery when she was a girl because they might miss her at night, were long gone. Her small bed was a large one. Her dressing table was littered with face powders as well as all the pins and brushes and unguents that helped control her hair. This was a woman’s room, not a little girl’s.
“From.”
“What?” His eyes came back to her and rested just below her face.On my breasts.
“Different from, not different than.” He had taught her that.
“Yes. Well, you’ve been in my bedchamber now, so I thought I should see yours again.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “All right.”
“And I thought . . .” He went into the pocket of his tailcoat and took out a handkerchief and wiped his perspiring head. “If you’re not too tired, you might have another lesson.”
She had a moment of confusion, imagining chess and thinking she needed to go get a chessboard and pieces before she understood what kind of lesson he meant. She felt her nipples tighten under her nightdress. Now she wished she had put on a dressing gown. But did sheneedanother lesson?
“We’ve kissed and had coitus,” she said. “I’ve used my hand and my mouth on you. What else is there for me to know?”
He seemed baffled by her question. “There . . . there is a great deal more.”
“Like what?”
“Well. Well . . .”
She tilted her head. “I wouldn’t think I needed to know anything too advanced. Just what a husband and wife might do. Right?”
“Right. Yes. Of course.”
“I shouldn’t have been nervous. It was silly of me to think I needed a leg up and I had to know everything before I got married.” Thornwick’s words came back to her. “Very unfeminine. Grasping and competitive. Stupid.”
“No, you’re not stupid, Phee. Never say that about yourself. And what’s wrong with wanting to be good at something? Or a bit of friendly competition? May I take off my coat? It’s so hot.”
“Yes.”
He took off his tailcoat and put it on the back of her dressing table chair and then crossed to her and sat on the edge of the bed next to her in his shirt and waistcoat. There was that wonderful George smell. The pulsing ache between her legs started up. She pressed her thighs together and moved on the bed away from him a little.
“But I should have remembered animals have coitus, too, George, and I’ve seen them out in the country plenty of times. The stallion with the mares. If animals do it, how difficult can it be?”
She looked at him. His dark eyes. There was something in them.
He repeated what she said. “The stallion. And the mares.”
His hand covered hers on the counterpane between them. She looked down. His big hand. The skin brown from his time outdoors at his barony last month. The dusting of dark hair on the back of the knuckles of his fingers and a little bit creeping out of the cuff of his shirt. The square ends of his fingers with their perfectly trimmed nails. She had spent many hours watching this hand move pieces on the chessboard. She loved this hand.
She raised her face. He was still staring at her. Now she knew what was in his eyes because it was what she felt, too.
Desire. He wanted her.
“What about the stallion and the mares, George?”
