He’d done it.
He’d married her.
This man, this beautiful, charming, maddening man, was her
husband
now.
His smile slowly faded. Her face must be speaking something strange. Peck her like an auntie, would he? The beautiful dolt.
She stepped toward him, heedless of the servants, of the reverend, of Mrs. Hemple, who doubtless waited to scold her for some mistake. She was a countess now; what was
this
lot going to do if she misbehaved? She took hold of her husband’s broad, warm shoulder—smiled into his blinking surprise—and went up on her tiptoes to plant her mouth squarely on his.
Mine
, she thought. Her hand slid up into his hair. She didn’t want fussy pecks from him; a husband should be bolder. With her free hand, she caught his elbow and tugged him right up against her.
Mine
.
For the space of a heartbeat his surprise held him motionless. And then, with a smothered laugh, he took her by the waist and pulled her into him harder yet, returning in equal measure the kiss she gave him: a deep, hot tangling of tongue and teeth, her breasts crushed into his chest, his knees in her skirts, the heat leaping wildly between them.
When she pulled away, she was breathless and he was grinning. “Right,” he said.
“Right,” she said fiercely.
His hand closed around her arm. He tugged her
around so sharply that she almost lost her balance. “May I present the Countess of Rushden?” he asked the room, which was gaping at her as though she’d stripped to her knickers and done a little dance.
But the room, knowing Lord Rushden had no use for its permission to do anything, understood his question for the order it was. Collecting their jaws from the floor, they bowed and bobbed, while Nell clutched Simon’s large, lovely hand and smiled back at them all. “God bless you,” she said to the company.
God bless the whole bloody world!
Like any girl, Nell had dreamed of a marriage for herself: some shy lad waiting in the rough wood hall of the parish church, a body of guests turning to smile at her in their patched Sunday finest. A dance at the pub afterward. Rollicking fiddle music and tankards of ale. No more than half an hour into this merriment, her groom would urge her to steal away, the two of them slipping out the back door to avoid the hooting of the lads. They’d fall into each other’s arms in the first dark, private room they could find.
But the nobs did it differently. First came a stiff celebration in the morning room, in which the servants toasted their master and new mistress and cheered the news of a half holiday. Then came a formal meal in the dining room, during which Simon seemed distracted and overly polite, as if she were some stranger whom he’d just met at the altar. After dinner, he retired to his study, a thing he’d never done before, leaving Nell to mount the stairs alone.
She wasn’t nervous, not even when she found Sylvie waiting in her bedroom with a costume of scandalous dimensions—a robe and nightgown of white
silk, the neckline cut so low that a girl couldn’t stand too quickly for fear of shaking herself out of it. “Stop blushing,” she told Sylvie as she slipped it on. Aye, this was a costume for tupping, but what of it? Every mother in the world had managed the act.
The maid finally excused herself, leaving Nell alone in the deep, thick silence peculiar to this house. She spent a minute at the mirror looking at herself. Her face had grown a bit rounder in the last weeks; her arms had fleshed out and the yellow tobacco stains had faded from her fingers. Soon her body would show no signs of her former life. She was decked out like a harlot bride, dressed all in white but barely clad.
Growing restless, she walked into the sitting room, took up a book, and curled into an armchair. But the sentences on the page—a bit of fanciful history about the ancient Persians—made no sense, though the English was plain.
She laid down the book and breathed for a while. Her eyes knew where they wanted to go, but she made them watch the fire, burning so merrily in the blue-tiled hearth, in this soft, luxurious room, amid walls molded in gilt, beneath a ceiling painted to resemble a summer sky. She wasn’t worried at all.
The door across the room—the door (Polly had told her in passing) which opened into his lordship’s apartments—remained shut.
She forced herself back to the book. It wasn’t until the muffled chimes of the clock in the hallway struck eleven that a knock finally came at that door.
She’d been waiting but it still struck her as a shock. Her fingers tightened over the book and wouldn’t loosen. No point in being nervous, but her vocal chords didn’t realize that.
The knock came again.
She pinched herself, a sharp little pain. Stupid to be nervous! “It’s open,” she croaked.
The door swung inward. “Took you long enough,” said St. Maur.
How romantic
. She measured him up. No special outfit for the man, it seemed. He looked half disassembled, his fine neck cloth gone, his charcoal vest hanging open. The open collar of his snow-white shirt exposed the length of his throat and a small glimpse of sparse black chest hair. No jacket.
She glanced beyond him into the darker furnishings of his sitting room, an Oriental carpet of bronze and green, a low chaise longue covered in chestnut velvet. Masculine colors. He had a fire going in there, too.
She looked down to the book. Back up to him. Her body seemed to have forgotten the natural rhythm of breathing. She put aside the book as her mood clarified: she was annoyed. “I was waiting,” she said. “You’re the one who’s late.”
He smiled a little. Put his hands into his pockets and dropped his shoulder against the doorjamb. He looked so utterly at home in this rich house, so casually in possession of its wealth.
A dark feeling swelled through her. He stood only feet away, but there was a subtler distance between them that would never be spanned. No matter how he tried, he would never know the whole of her. Never guess that more than once, she’d knocked a rat away from a loaf of bread before eating it. That she’d gone on her knees in the mud to grab up coins tossed by men and women like him, while they’d laughed from the windows of their fine coaches.
He’d never guess these things because imagination wasn’t enough to compass the distance between his world and Bethnal Green. Nothing could span that distance. Had any bridge existed between the two worlds, one or the other would have burned already.
He said, “My apologies for keeping you waiting, milady”—speaking lightly, playfully.
“That’s all right,” she said hoarsely. She felt herself balanced precariously on the edge of something. At the next step, the step onto new territory, that bridge behind her would collapse.
His head tipped, his temple coming to rest against the door frame. He tested the title against the sight before him: “Lady Rushden,” he murmured.
She wanted to take the step. It scared her and it drew her. They were married now—before God and man, as the saying went. She wanted to stay on his side of the bridge. She wanted to be done with hunger, with cold, with fear. He was as beautiful as the world in which he lived. She wanted to stay with him forever.
She took a bracing breath and rose. Her limbs felt stiff. He need never know what the other side was like. He need never learn of the rats, of the bitter nights and begging. He was hers now and tonight would make it official. Nobody was taking him away from her.
Only he hadn’t moved an inch from the door.
She squared her shoulders and raised her chin. He wouldn’t be backing out now. They would see this through. “May we get on with it?”
He laughed at her. “Goodness. Will it be so bad as all that?”
That laugh lit her temper. To have waited in this chair all night for him, ill with worry—she realized now, in an instant—that he regretted the marriage,
that he was out conferring with lawyers on how to undo it—only to have him
laugh
at her? And all the time she’d waited, like a worried, faithful dog. What right had
he
to keep her waiting?
Every right
.
She caught her breath. Aye, now that they were married, she had no choice in anything, did she? For the rest of her life, whenever the mood struck him, he’d do with her as he liked, would require her to walk through that door in which he lounged right now and bare herself to him.
Or to wait. It would be his choice, not hers.
But
one
choice did remain to her. A small one, but a choice all the same.
She walked toward him. He straightened off the door frame, interested, alert. She focused on the spot where his hair brushed his collar, inky black curls that lay this way and that over the crisp white cloth. Her hand slid through those curls, soft and warm, and felt the heat of his skin as her palm closed over his nape. She pulled his head to hers.
It was the second time today that she’d kissed him, and this time he was ready for her: his hands came around her waist, his lips firm. She stepped into him and forced him back a step. She would be a different kind of wife. She wouldn’t wait on his decision.
She
was deciding.
Simon had been trying to decide on his approach—absurd exercise; he’d put more time into thinking of how to seduce his own wife (his wife, he was married) than he’d ever given to seductions rightfully more complex, of wives whose husbands kept unpredictable schedules, of women with jealous lovers and important
political connections. He’d nearly had her last night on his billiards table but today, it had seemed so important to show restraint. To prove to himself that he could be restrained.
He’d kept himself away from his apartments (mindful, constantly and despite himself, of the door that joined his sitting room to hers) through the postdinner brandy, through an hour or more of staring sightlessly at piano scores sent to him by somebodies or others in search of a patron; and then, having advanced up the stairs, somehow (he didn’t recall his passage) he’d found himself in his sitting room waiting for the strike of the clock. Hanging on the silence, waiting for the chimes to puncture it, like a trembling child on Christmas morning, congratulating himself for this fine show of self-control: eleven o’clock, a fine hour to bed one’s wife. A very respectable specimen of restraint, those three hours he’d passed in chaste absentia.
But now his efforts looked less noble than ludicrous. Seduction? He was being seduced. She came at him like a storm, her mouth hungry and hot, her small hands gripping tightly as an animal creature’s, her body writhing up against him.
He was willing, delighted … puzzled, for a fleeting moment. Very fleeting.
He cupped her by the elbows and drew her into his rooms, away from that chair where she’d been cuddled up with Herodotus—God save him, he’d taken a guttersnipe bluestocking to wife; what were the odds of that? Guided her into the safety of his less scholarly confines, where behind him a fire crackled and every preparation—champagne, wine, a pot of chocolate, she liked chocolate—had been laid to woo her. Only she did not require wooing. Of course she
didn’t. Whom had he imagined he’d married? She’d kissed him today in front of his entire staff; it had been all he could do not to push her against the wall at that moment, before everyone.
No restraint now. He wanted to devour her. He turned her around, slouching a little to prevent their separation; she was not short, but he was tall—too tall, perhaps. He had vague intentions of steering her through the next door, into the bedroom; these small questions of height could be neatly resolved once they both were horizontal.
But then her hands found his shirt and gave it a yank, and the ripping sound—a button flew off, the tab broken—seemed to startle her. She froze. All at once, he was holding a block of wood.
He pulled back, torn between a snort and a laugh when he beheld her expression: rounded eyes, rounded pink lips. She was shocked by herself.
“Only a button,” he murmured, reaching out to hook a finger around her little ear, her hair falling in wisps over his knuckles.
She blinked. A delicate blush spread through her cheeks. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“I can afford a new button.”
She bit her lip, chastened, childlike in her guilt, in the confession that followed: “I think I ripped your trousers, too.”
He laughed, delighted by this. “I have others.” In fact, he felt grateful for the interruption, for the way it had slowed them. There were wonders here to attend to. Her skin was warm and resilient, her cheek soft beneath his stroking fingers. He watched his knuckles chart the side of her throat, knocking away the robe. The gown beneath it was sleeveless, light: a gown for a bridal night.
He traced the smooth curve of her shoulder. “Bend your arm,” he murmured.
She blinked at him, puzzled and wary, but obeyed: her hand rose to grip his elbow. So finely muscled, her limbs: he rubbed his thumb along the small bulge of her bicep, then bent down to take it in his teeth, as he’d longed to do from the moment he’d seen it bared. Her inhalation was soft but distinct. Her muscle contracted further as she tensed.
He flicked his tongue along her skin, then pressed a kiss there. Whoever had decided that muscles were not beautiful on a woman had been a fool, ignorant of the variations in nature’s genius. He felt down to the sharp point of her elbow. Amazing how his palm covered her so completely, cupped her so wholly. Her presence was so outsized that one easily forgot how narrow, how finely fashioned were her bones. How fragile in the flesh she was.
It came to him that she was trembling, her breath coming faster. He straightened. Her flush was deepening, her lips parted.
He watched those lips as he slid his hand down to her waist, then around to the curve of her lower back. What peculiar pleasure there was in charting someone’s, no, this woman’s angles and curves and planes, she who’d resisted him so stridently now watching open-eyed, breathless, as he made himself free with her body. It had been sweet to touch her before, but now her consent was wholly his, and her willingness worked its own power on him, lending even the brush of his skin against hers a carnal complexity:
she
was going to be his. There was no question any longer where these touches would lead.