Robert furrowed his brows. “That wasyou?” he asked in a whisper.
She made a sound of disgust and once again sat up. “Well, who else would it be?”
He shook his head. “Thatwasyou,” he said again. “I always thought I was... I wasdreaming,” he said softly. “Now you’re telling me you were... itwasyou who was seducing me in the middle of the night?”
She scoffed in disbelief. “You thought it was someone else?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know. It was dark, and I thought I was dreaming,” he murmured. “You were quite the seductress,” he accused, a grin lifting the corner of his mouth.
“I didn’t exactly have toseduceyou,” she claimed with a huff. She crossed her arms over her chest. “You were always quite welcoming as I recall.”
“Oh, no doubt,” he murmured.
“Hard as a rock.”
“In my sleep?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Well, I didn’t know you weresleepingthrough it,” she countered defensively.
“Was... was I atop you?” There was only a hint of a tease inhis voice, but Ivy caught it. She let out another sound of disbelief and stared at him before saying, “Sometimes, and sometimes I was.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“Riding St. George,” he whispered. “I always loved it when you did that. Your gorgeous breasts bouncing up and down. Your hair all loose and long, the ends of it brushing over my chest.” He sighed as he settled back onto the mattress.
She angled her head to one side. “So youdoremember?”
Robert inhaled and shook his head. “I wish I’d been wide awake instead of half asleep. No wonder there were days when I woke up so happy,” he said, arching his brow. “The bed linens were all mussed as if I’d been fighting off the ghosts.”
Inhaling sharply, Ivy stared at him. “What did you say?”
He cleared his throat and reached out an arm in an attempt to bring her closer to him. When she finally relaxed and snuggled against his side, her head in the small of his shoulder, he said, “Nothing.”
She lifted her head to stare at him. “Were those the same ghosts you spoke of with Graves?” she asked. “What we talked about earlier?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Did... did he tell you that?”
“I heard it from my new lady’s maid,” she said. “I might have...encouragedher to share what she had heard about your unexpected arrival. ‘The ghosts of the past have driven me from York’,” she added. “Are there other ghosts, Robert?” she asked. “Ones you haven’t told me about?”
He inhaled deeply and let the breath out in awhoosh. “Aren’t they enough?” he asked on a sigh. “I admit, I have been feeling my age these days. Spending too much time wondering if I’ve done right by you. By our children. By my title?—”
“Of course you have,” she insisted. “Robert,” she added in a gentle scold.
“Those first few years after I inherited were so hard,” he murmured.
Ivy lifted her head. “Because?” she prompted.
He winced. “Father’s debts. I felt as if we were mired in a giant gaping morass.”
Although Ivy hadn’t been with him back then—she hadn’t even had her come-out when he inherited—she knew a bit about his early struggles with the earldom. He’d had to sell off a number of unentailed properties to come up with enough blunt to pay off creditors and the vowels left behind. Although he was essentially debt-free at the time of their marriage, there were still a few years when he ran the earldom as if he was still in debt. “And yet you paid them all off,” she said brightly.
“I didn’t think it fair you had to economize as a result, though,” he murmured. “Those first few years.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t mind. As I recall, I didn’t know I was economizing,” she said. “It wasn’t as if it was going to be like that forever.”
“I don’t think I ever told you how much I appreciated your efforts to help when it came to your wardrobe and to buying things for the children and the house.”
“I didn’t mind wearing the same gowns two years in a row,” she said. “But I do wish you had told me before we returned from our wedding trip. So I wouldn’t have had the salon and dining room redone at Gladstone. The cost of the tassels for the drapes and sofa alone was enough to put us back into debt,” she claimed, remembering how stunned she had been when she peeked at the invoice. “The renovations could have waited.”
A grunt sounded from him. “I didn’t want to take that from you. It made you happy to have such a project, and it did improve Gladstone greatly, even if I didn’t actually notice the improvements at first.”
