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“We need more union, more validation. I didn’t get enough time with these beauties,” her husband murmured.

“I feel as if our bodies united,” she said thoughtfully.

“We’re married now. No escape.” He got up and came back with a wet cloth. “Are you sore from all the bodily uniting, Torie?”

She glanced down, and then came up on her elbows. “Is this you?” She swiped a finger through the pearly liquid running down her thigh and stuck it in her mouth.

Her husband dropped the cloth and bent over, groaning as if he had taken a blow to the stomach. “You,” he said. And then nothing else.

So Torie took the wet cloth and wiped away the evidence herself.

Chapter 26

When Torie woke up again, hours later, her husband was nowhere to be seen. Would he go to the House of Lords the day after his wedding?

She rolled over and looked up at a ceiling painted with fat cupids, analyzing the painter’s use of perspective before deciding that yes, her husband had almost certainly gone to Lords.

What Dom was fighting for wasn’t bibble-babble. He’d explained it to her. Still, she wished he had stayed home for the day. After three “bouts,” as he called them, she felt sore and a bit fragile, as if she had overused muscles that hadn’t existed before she married.

But she had to get up, so she pulled the bell cord and let Emily’s familiar energy swirl around the room and get her into a hot tub of water. Her lady’s maid was feeling particularly dramatic due to being in a new household. Mr. Flitwick apparently ran his household like a king governs his court.

“We stand until he seats himself,” Emily explained, shaking her head—not negatively, but in surprise.

Torie sank a little deeper into the hot water. “The maid who brought our tea was very well trained.”

Emily giggled. “Betsy came back down and said that she’d never seen the viscount looking so dazed. He’s that in love.”

“I thought she didn’t even glance at the bed!”

Emily scoffed at that. “That’s what eyelashes are for, aren’t they? Before Betsy was in service with Lord Kelbourne, she served a countess who had a stream of men coming in and out of her bed at all hours. This house is so much better. For one thing, she’s in the bedchamber next to mine. Not one of us has to share a room!”

“Marvelous,” Torie said.

“She’s infatuated.” Emily lowered her voice. “You’ll never guess who.”

“I only met the grooms and footmen briefly yesterday.”

“Mr. Flitwick himself!” Emily said, giggling madly. “He has to be thirty years older than she, and married in the bargain.”

“Surely he’s not—”

“Of course not,” Emily said. “Never. Not him. Right proper he is. Fair, too. One of the footmen dropped a tray of madeleines coming into the wedding reception yesterday. His shoe caught on that uneven board outside the drawing room, the one that’s sprung a nail.”

Torie groaned. “Father kept saying he would summon a carpenter.”

“The sweets were ruined, but Mr. Flitwick didn’t say a cross word. He just sent the lad back here, to Kelbourne House, because his knee breeches were scuffed. No one can have even the smallest smut or stain on their livery. It isn’t allowed.” Emily smirked. “He mentioned that I was perfectly attired.”

As a lady’s maid, Emily didn’t have to wear a snowy apron or livery; just now she was wearing a violet morning gown to which she’d added a black neck bow in recognition of the household’s half mourning.

“I always said you should be a viscountess’s maid,” Torie said, floating in the warm water and wishing she could stay there all day. If not in bed, then bath.

“Well, you didn’t marry him for the title!” Emily said with another spate of giggles. “What would the viscountess like to wear today?”

“Six weeks of half mourning remain,” Torie reminded her.

“I suggest the white satin morning gown. It has that trim of black chenille.”

Torie nodded, standing up and accepting a length of toweling. “I’ll paint this morning.”