Page 66 of The Luckiest Lady in London

It was the way a young girl would sit. Her face, of course, appeared open and sweet. Her dressing gown was cream colored, trimmed with bands of small, embroidered daisies. Taken altogether, the wholesome innocence she exuded would have been too much, if it weren’t for the devious gleam in her eyes.

His breath caught. “You look expectant.”

“I’ve never seen you naked,” she said, the way another wife might accuse a husband of offenses such as insobriety or spendthriftness.

He raised a brow. “And you think you will now?”

Her tone was imperious. “I had better.”

That she was fiercely drawn to him was what made his sense of vulnerability bearable.

He had thought so an aeon ago, when his only vulnerability was having made his interest known with his offer to buy her body. He was infinitely more unprotected these days, led about by his needs, master of neither his thoughts nor his actions—a condition made tolerable only because she was just as enslaved by the pleasures of their marriage bed.

He kicked off his shoes. “Don’t I do well enough by you with my clothes on?”

“Very well. I particularly liked the sensation of all that Harris tweed against my thighs. In fact, I demand that when we make love outside, you keep your clothes on—that’s how it was in my dreams, and I am nothing if not a stickler for erotic details.”

He began unbuttoning his shirt. “But I should disrobe when we make love in safe, boring places?”

“Sometimes a lady is in a mood for skin.”

“Are you ever not in a mood for skin?”

“Yes, sometimes I just want your head on a pike,” she answered without blinking an eye.

Her words sent a shiver of fear through him—she did not even know the worst about him. Yet.

He peeled off his shirt and approached the bed. “Then I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

He kissed her below her ear.

She let out a shaky breath. But the next moment, she was pointing at his trousers. “I’ll bet if you’d gone to school, you’d have been able to better remain on task.”

“Well, next time I see my Old Etonian friends, I’ll ask whether they strip more efficiently than I do.”

“I am convinced they do. I will advise my sisters not to accept anyone without a public school ed—”

He let his trousers drop. She fell gratifyingly silent. Then she licked her lips and looked into his eyes. “Good. Now put it to use.”

He did, making love to her with the devotion and fervor of a new convert, building ramparts of pleasure to keep out fears and consequences, and hoping that he was creating something more substantial and permanent than castles in the sky.

* * *

It was two nights later, as her husband tried to elucidate the Newtonian mechanics behind Urbain Le Verrier’s prediction of the position of Neptune, then still undiscovered, that Louisa’s ignorance revealed itself to be as high and thick as the Wall of Jericho.

“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”

He threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “That was probably the best explanation anyone has given on the subject in the past forty years. Do you mean to tell me that you failed to appreciate my brilliance?”

“Utterly.”

“Well, that will not do, will it?”

“You could teach me Newtonian mechanics,” she said tentatively, not at all certain how he would react to such a request.

He shook his head. “That would be like teaching you to do a handstand on a galloping horse, when you don’t even know how to ride.”

Her hopes shriveled.