“Gabby, open your eyes.”
She kept them tightly shut, ignoring him, moving her hips and silently pleading for that delicious pressure.
“Open your eyes!” Quill was panting, his voice a growl in the back of his throat.
Finally she did. She opened her eyes to find her husband propped on his elbows over her, hair fallen over eyes black with desire. Gabby opened her mouth and swallowed. Then she instinctively pushed against him—not against fingers, but against Quill himself.
“Please.” Her voice cracked and broke in a pant.
Quill smiled a devil’s carnal smile, and Gabby didn’t care. She wanted more of him—more pressure, touch, entry.
He came to her then, came like a thief in the daytime, like a devil in the sunlight. With light shining on his face and shoulders, and their eyes open, he came into her with a surge that made design and function rationally, logically clear.
It hurt.
It hurt a lot. It must hurt for Quill too, because his face looked tormented. She would have protested, but she was pinned by his weight, by the carnal presence of him inside her. And then, as she opened her mouth, he moved, just a trifle.
He kissed her forehead, kissed her cheeks. Only when he reached her mouth did he thrust himself forward again. Gabby gasped at the flash of pain. But an elusive tingle of pleasure answered. She reached toward his mouth, found a sweet meeting that caused a trembling rise in her body. He thrust, and this time…no pain. Instead, a bolt of liquid pleasure ran through her depths, and a long shiver clutched her body.
Quill stopped yet again and made himself count silently to ten. Her body was so small; she had to grow used to him. But in the pause between seven and eight, Gabby moved in an inexperienced, awkward lunge and gasped his name in a broken pant that said nothing of pain and everything of pleasure. Quill bent his head and took her mouth, a fierce and welcome intrusion. And then he pulled back and shoved toward her center, hard, fast, over and over.
Gabby, quite given over to indecent pleasure, found an exquisite, rising ache that grew as she arched toward him and met his strokes. Her breath was a sob in her chest. Her body was dancing with liquid fire.
And so the devil’s daughter, as her father was like to call her, found wings of her own.
Now her eyes were closed because eyesight was not needed, not with the potency of the body connected to hers, not with every nerve crying with sharp joy. Not when she was flinging herself against him, trying with ever increasing skill to match his rhythm.
And then Quill gripped her hips, pulled her up, and gasped, “Now, Gabby!” and without hesitation, Gabby followed her father’s first commandment: Obey thy husband, above all else. Her body arched hard, and dimly she heard cries from her own lips and an answering growl from Quill.
A torrent of pleasure answered with its own lovely music the question of indecency and sinfulness.
When it was finished, Quill slumped on top of his wife. She didn’t seem to mind his weight, he thought. Her skin was glowing with a thin sheen. He rubbed his lips against her forehead and tasted salt.
Gabby opened dazed, gleaming eyes. “I know what you were trying to say before.” Her voice was an intimate breath against his cheek.
He twined his fingers through hers and waited.
“With my body, I thee worship,” she whispered. The words rose from her heart like a prayer that washed away her father’s sermons and bitter words. “It’s all in the marriage ceremony, isn’t it?” she asked, wonderingly.
He clutched her hand. He was still deep inside her and it was hard to shape words.
“You haven’t got a headache, have you, Quill?”
“No.” But he didn’t want to let go of the moment. If he fell asleep, he knew, the headache would come. Already he could see faint purple flashes at the edge of his vision, a warning that pain would follow.
He rocked forward, experimentally.
Her eyes widened and her body involuntarily shivered.
He moved again, a deep, lazy seduction.
“Oh,” Gabby sighed.
“Indeed,” Quill murmured.
QUILL WOKE IN THE EARLY MORNING, opened his eyes, and shut them instantly. Light was unbearable in the grips of a migraine. Throbbing pain answered every beat of his heart and hammered at his temples. Experience told him that wrenching nausea was on its way.
He turned his head, and the pain burst down into his neck and shoulders. But there was Gabby. She was curled on her side, tangled, tousled, velvety curls shading her face. He could just see the voluptuous curve of her bottom lip.
He had to get into another room. He couldn’t let her see him like this. Stifling a groan, Quill reached out an arm, felt blindly for the bell cord, and pulled it. When the door opened, he barked, “Help me out of here,” without opening his eyes.
Five minutes later, he was resting as comfortably as possible, having made it halfway into his own chamber before losing the supper that he and Gabby had shared late the previous night.
He lay still as a board, a wet cloth over his eyes, enduring boiling nausea and a pounding brow. Bitterness crashed over him, leaving an acid taste in his mouth that coupled with the sour persistence of vomit. He wanted—needed—to be back in that bed next to Gabby.
He would have kissed her awake and taught her the sleepy pleasures of morning intimacy. He’d have helped her with her morning ablutions, washed each lush curve himself. Unless they started practicing celibacy, Quill thought, he would never be able to see Gabby wake in the morning. It was hard to take. Unfair. But grinding his teeth made hot agony surge to his temples. With the skill of long practice, he forced himself to relax and lie still. After unpleasant experimentation, he had found that indulging in any form of movement prompted a migraine to linger for a week.
With nothing to do but weather the attack, he quickly lost track of time. He moved only to lean over the side of the bed and spew into a basin. Every hour or so Willis entered the room and changed his head cloth.
So he had no idea when it was that Gabby tiptoed into the room. The moment he realized who had entered, his body stiffened. Willis had no right to allow Quill’s wife in the room. He refused to vomit in her presence.
It was no use. That instinctive stiffening led to a sickening lurch in his innards, and without even speaking to his wife, Quill leaned over the side of the bed and hoped to God that he wasn’t splashing bile on her gown. He didn’t open his eyes. There was no need to see the disgusted revulsion on her face. He could imagine it with no difficulty.
Quill lay back, silently cursing himself. What had he been thinking when he married? Bitter experience had hewed knowledge of his inadequacies. What type of knave cursed his wife with a lame excuse for a man? Only a reprobate would take a woman to wife because he lusted after her, would take her to wife with no thought for her happiness or future.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he managed to say in a harsh whisper.
“I came to see you.” Gabby sounded unmoved by his hostile greeting. A chair close to the bed scraped the wooden floor, and a corresponding stab of pain lit up the inside of Quill’s skull.
She apparently noticed his intake of breath. “I’m sorry, Quill,” she said. “May I remain for a few minutes, if I make no further noise?”
Quill was struggling with a sense of surprise. His sense of smell became unbearably acute when in the grips of a migraine. Smells—all smells—made him nauseated. But not Gabby’s. She had just had a bath; he could tell that. Jasmine was floating on the air, jasmine and the silky, innocent scent of Gabby herself.
“Your mother, Lady Sylvia, and Peter just left for Southampton. Your mother sent her love.” Gabby was almost whispering. “I could tell you a story,” she added in a rush.
She was embarrassed. Quill would have bet a small fortune that his wife was twisting her hands together and that a rosy tinge was creeping up her cheek.
“I’m not much good at nursing,” she was saying. “But Kasi is oft
en sick, and I used to distract him by telling him stories.”
Quill let his silence be a yes.
“I thought you might like to hear a tale of India,” she said. “This is a story that my ayah told me, and then I told it to Kasi, and in the process it has changed, because that is the nature of stories.
“The story begins where it ends: in a great palace on the outskirts of Barahampore. On one side of the palace flowed the dark and winding river called the Bohogritee, and on the other was a market for singing birds. The palace was constructed of great arched pillars of marble, decorated all over with pictures of the birds that were for sale outside its gates. Over each of the arches, bands of musicians played on their various instruments, morning and evening, imitating the sweet music of the birds.”
Quill had always thought that Gabby’s voice was sensual, with its husky, uneven timbre. Now he realized that it was an instrument that she used like a harp.
“The prince who lived in the palace,” she continued, “was the greatest songbird of them all, the most skilled musician in all India. His name was Mamarah Daula, and there was no instrument that he could not take to hand and play so exquisitely that the very stones wept to hear him. People thronged from the corners of India to hear his music, and thus he lived in a style of unrivaled elegance and beauty. The very earth poured out her treasures to deck his household. He wore shoes of bright crimson velvet, embroidered with silver, and he never traveled without an escort of twenty or thirty servants. Mamarah Daula was a very fortunate man. He was also extraordinarily foolish.”
Quill sank into a hazy silence, nothing akin to the angry, lonely torpor that usually accompanied his migraine attacks. The prince’s exploits kept him fascinated for an hour or so, after which he slept deeply rather than drifting in and out of a painful waking state as was normal.
Gabby returned later in the evening and held his hand as she told him of Daula’s thirtieth birthday. It seemed that Sakambhari, the tree goddess, resolved to give Daula a musical instrument that would create the most beautiful music in the world. But Sakambhari warned him that if he used it for a vain or prideful purpose, it would give him extraordinary pain in his head.
The corner of Quill’s mouth twitched. Gabby waxed lyrical about the lovely music that Daula created with his new instrument.
Finally he opened his mouth. His voice was gravelly and brittle, but he ignored it. “Tell me his instrument was a pipe, Gabby.”
If Quill’s eyes hadn’t been covered by a wet cloth, he would have seen his wife’s dimples. “It might have been,” she agreed. “Indian musicians create beautiful music with their…pipes.”
By the next morning the pain was decreasing and Quill didn’t vomit once in Gabby’s presence. Unfortunately, Mamarah Daula was unable to control his pride, and his glorious pipe dealt him one brutal headache after another.
In retrospect, Quill’s attack lasted precisely the same duration as those that had come before it. But its severity was lessened. Quill didn’t fool himself about why. He took Gabby’s comfort, her sweet fragrance and sweeter voice, the wisp of a silly story that she held out for his enjoyment—he took them and knew that he was undeserving. In the black middle of the night he stared at the wall, his stomach contracted not from nausea but from self-loathing. Gabby, lovely Gabby, deserved a man whose body had the same provocative beauty as hers, a man who would—but thinking of that man caused a harsh clenching of his muscles. He’d kill such a man before he let him near Gabby’s intoxicating body. Her flesh was his.
By morning, Quill had achieved the Herculean task of putting his gaping, bewildering guilt to the side. He justified it thus: Ladies did not truly like sexual congress. Everyone knew that. Gabby was undoubtedly shocked by his migraine, but she would learn to relish days of freedom, without the presence of her crippled husband to question her movements. In the end it would be best for her.
He shakily rose from the bed, and he and Gabby made their way back to London. After a few hours Gabby fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Quill knew why she was tired. Willis was not the only person who had changed his head cloths in the middle of the night. Gabby had come to him as well. He ruthlessly squashed an errant swell of guilt.
Having long ago dismissed the idea of marriage and love, he had wasted no time thinking about the condition. He did recall idly judging that a dependent wife would be quite tiresome.
But of course he was the one in danger of dependency. It was frightening, how much he craved the presence of his talkative, sweet-smelling wife. It gave him a queer twinge in the area of his heart when she whispered “I love you” against his chest, even though he knew perfectly well that the words were romantic fribbles and naught else.
In fact, he almost could have whispered something frivolous himself as he watched Gabby sleeping, as airy curls started to slip from her coronet of braids and tumble free.
Almost.
THEY ARRIVED IN LONDON in ample time for dinner. Quill climbed from the coach and turned to help Gabby. Behind him was a flurry of movement. He turned around, Gabby’s hand warm on his sleeve, to find that the upper servants had formed a neat line on either side of the marble steps leading to the house, with Codswallop magisterially poised at the top.
The butler descended the steps. “Welcome to the household, Viscount Dewland,” he intoned. He bowed. “Lady Dewland.”
Quill gaped, startled by the unexpected display. Of course—it was his house now. They were his servants.
Beside him Gabby inclined her head in greeting. “Codswallop, how kind of you to welcome us on this sad occasion,” she said in her clear voice. All the servants looked approving.
Quill shook himself and escorted her to the steps. “Good evening to all of you,” he said. “This is my wife, the Viscountess Dewland.”
Mrs. Farsalter approached, hands tucked under her apron. “I would be pleased to show you the household accounts whenever you would wish, my lady.” She held out a large ring of keys. “The dowager viscountess always gave me these when she left the house. They rightly belong to you now, my lady.”
“My goodness,” Gabby said. “Mrs. Farsalter, shall we meet tomorrow morning after breakfast? I am quite convinced that your housekeeping skills are so far above mine that I shall have no suggestions to make, but I will be very pleased to help you as much as I am able.”
Mrs. Farsalter beamed. “I’ll serve a light repast in an hour or so, shall I, my lady?”
Quill turned to Gabby and held out his arm. Her fingers rested on his sleeve as he led her into the hallway—my hallway, he thought numbly. “Would you like to rest before dinner?”
“Thank you. I am not tired, but I would like to bathe.”
There was a slight bustle as Codswallop dispatched a footman to fetch hot water.
Gabby began to climb the stairs, Quill just behind her. When she reached the second floor, she moved toward her old chamber, but Quill gently held her back.
“They will have moved your clothing into the viscountess’s chamber, Gabby.”
She bit her lip. “Your poor mama …”
“It’s the way of things,” Quill said. “She will have the very finest guest bedchamber whenever she wishes to visit. But the master chambers are ours now.”
He bent his head and kissed her, a brief, sensual promise. “What is the point of having an adjoining door if one cannot watch one’s wife dressing—or undressing?”
Gabby jumped backward so quickly that she knocked his hand off her arm. “It matters nothing if that door is shut,” she said firmly. Gabby had given a great deal of thought to the future during the days she waited for Quill’s migraine to recede. Only a bedlamite would consider engaging in behavior that caused her husband pain. And if he thought she was going to be party to instigating another such attack as racked his body for three days, he would have to think again.
But there was no point in arguing in the open hallway. Gabby mustered her dignity and moved toward the viscountess’s chambers.
Her husband dogged her heels. She entered, and he closed the door behind them.
Gabby sighed. “Don’t you think it would be better to have this discussion after we have washed and eaten a meal?” She drifted across the room, pretending to inspect the gilt chairs positioned before the fireplace.
“I believe that we should discuss it now,” Quill replied.
She turned around, her fingers trailing over the polished surface of a rosewood writing desk. “Obviously we cannot indulge in the kind of behavior that caused your migraine.”
“I see nothing obvious about it.” Quill’s voice sounded tight, almost angry.
“I should think it is unquestionable. Something about …” She paused and chose her words carefully. “Something about connubial relations gives you a migraine headache. Therefore, we shall not repeat the experience until a cure is found.”
“For God’s sake,” Quill shot back. “Do you think that I didn’t attempt to find a cure?”
“We shall have to try harder,” she replied stubbornly. “I know you, Quill. You could hardly bring yourself to speak to me about it. There are likely hundreds of doctors both here and abroad with a cure for your malady.”
Quill crossed his arms and leaned against the mantelpiece. “The leading expert on migraine headaches is an Austrian named Heberden. I had him brought over to England to consult with my doctors. Heberden remarked that bleeding was detrimental.”
He smiled grimly. “I already knew that, having had leeches attached to every part of my head in the previous year. Heberden’s prime remedy is a concoction of Peruvian bark; that, too, was inefficacious. I might add, Gabby, that Heberden seemed somewhat startled by the number of cures I had already undertaken, which included taking valerian, myrrh, musk, camphor, opium, hemlock—even sneezing powders. And there was the fraudulent doctor in Bath who covered me with fomentations made of hemlock and balsam. I smelled like a pine forest for days.”
Gabby bit her lip. “Did Dr. Heberden have any ideas other than the bark?”