Prologue
September, 1819. Crossthwaite.
“Iwant a child.”
Oliver Hartwell froze behind his newspaper. Everything in his body—his heart, his breath, his mind—came to a halt as the print on the page in front of him swooped and swarmed like a murmuration of starlings.
He forced himself to speak. “You do?”
To his own ears, his voice sounded unnatural, strained, distant.
“Will you give me one?” she asked.
He folded his newspaper with even more care than he usually did. Finally, every page was perfectly aligned, every crease was sharp, and he could not delay any longer. He put the newspaper aside and moved his gaze to the fresh face of his young wife sitting opposite him, her embroidery in her lap.
“You’re a girl.”
Henrietta had the most womanly body possible, lush and curved and feminine, but she was still so young. Oliver constantly reminded himself of that in an ineffectual bid to keep his thoughts in check.
She blinked, her pale-blue eyes disappearing for a fraction of a second under her golden lashes. “I am not. I am one-and-twenty.”
She was? “And I am forty-three years of age.”
She took a deep breath. “Forty-three is not too old. You are capable.”
Yes, he was, and she knew it.
Never mind that she had been fully aware he had already sired a son when she married him. Only a week ago, she had caught him in his bedchamber, shamefully hunched over, his cock in one fist and her shift in the other. He had not been able to stop his spend even when he heard her gasp and saw her eyes go wide, her face so white the freckles on her nose stood out in relief, her pink lips forming a shockedO.
In fact, her presence had catapulted him over the edge.
Thank God, at least he had not been grunting out her name as he so often did when he yielded to his basest desires. And he prayed she had not recognized her own undergarment in his hand.
Yes, he was more than capable. And with her? His capacity would be endless. He could give her scores of babies, keep her swollen with child for years on end.
“It’s not seemly,” he said finally.
Her forehead wrinkled in vertical perplexity exactly the way her father’s did. “We are husband and wife. What could be more seemly?”
He could not answer that. Because, of course, she was right. Husband and wife were meant to indulge in amorous congress, to be fruitful and multiply.
What was unseemly was their marriage. That a beautiful, vibrant girl full of promise like Henrietta had been consigned to wed a shell of a man because she had a kind heart and he was a weak, selfish fool.
She leaned forward and patted Oliver’s hand. A thrill ran through him just as it always did whenever she touched him. No matter how chaste the contact. No matter that this wholesome, consoling pat was exactly what she would also give his five-year-old son when he scraped his knee.
“The room can be dark,” she reassured Oliver. “There would be no need for us to see each other.”
Was she modest? She had never struck him as such. She was all exuberant health, not bothered one whit during a game of chase if her skirts hitched up to show a strong ankle, a plump calf. Never bashful when she let herself be caught and she bent over to laugh with Nathaniel and her bodice gaped and showed beads of sweat along the tops of her bountiful breasts, tempting Oliver beyond all reason while he stood under the shade of a tree and watched her gambol with his son.
She sat back. “So, you see, it’s all right. The darkness would let us think of another.”
She could think of the boy he had kept her from marrying. And he could think of . . . whom could he think of? For the two years of their marriage, he had thought of no one but her.
Her.
She looked away from him, towards the fire that made the red-gold curls atop her head glint like flames themselves. “And I hope you would tell me how I could please you.”
Please him? Was there anything about her that didn’t please him?
